The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [16]
As a consequence, Steinbeck backed out of the magazine assignment and a collaborative photo/text book project with Bristol. (Years later, Bristol acted as though Steinbeck had betrayed him, but it isn’t entirely clear how well Bristol understood the amount of work Steinbeck had already put into his own migrant research, or the differing views of documentary representation the two men held.) Suddenly, Steinbeck realized that the issue was not as simple as portraying the “naive directness” of the migrants’ desire for land. Indeed, he was beginning to boil with frustration and impotence. Apparently neither “The Oklahomans” nor the proposed magazine article could adequately redress the injustices he had recently witnessed. “When I wrote The Grapes of Wrath,” he declared in a 1952 Voice of America radio interview, “I was filled . . . with certain angers . . . at people who were doing injustices to other people.” (Six years later he told a British interviewer, “Anger is a symbol of thought and evaluation and reaction: without it what have we got? . . . I think anger is the healthiest thing in the world.”)
As a novelist, Steinbeck often experienced a delayed reaction to piercing events. Perhaps as early as February—but certainly no later than early April (“New book goes very fast but I am afraid it is pretty lousy. I don’t care much,” he said to Otis on April 26, 1938)—through approximately mid-May 1938, Steinbeck worked at the third stage of his effort and produced “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” With this abortive—but necessary— sidetrack venture, Steinbeck’s migrant subject matter took its most drastic turn, inspired by an ugly event in Salinas, California, his hometown. Earlier, in September 1936, Steinbeck had encountered (whether directly or through newspaper and hearsay accounts is uncertain) the vicious clash between workers and growers in a lettuce strike: “There are riots in Salinas and killings in the street of that dear little town where I was born,” he told novelist George Albee. The strike was smashed with “fascist” terrorism, and recollections of the workers’ defeat festered in Steinbeck for more than a year. “I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions,” he said in a 1937 statement for the League of American Writers booklet Writers Take Sides (1938).
Perhaps as early as the first week of February 1938—and no later than the first week of April—galvanized by reports of the worsening conditions in Visalia and Nipomo, he felt the need to do something direct in retaliation. John Steinbeck never became what committed activists would consider fully radicalized. His writings stemmed more from his own feelings and humane sensibility than from the persuasiveness of the Left’s economic and social ideas, but by putting his pen to the service of his cause, he was as close to being a firebrand as he ever would. He launched into “L’Affaire,” a vituperative satire aimed at attacking the leading citizens of Salinas, who put together a cabal of organizers called “the committee of seven” to foment the ignorant army of vigilantes (assembled from the common populace of Salinas—clerks, service-station operators, shopkeepers). “L’Affaire” was a “vulgar” tract of seventy thousand words but shortly after mid-May 1938, Steinbeck wrote to Otis and Covici (who had already announced the publication of “L’Affaire”) to inform them that he would not be delivering the manuscript they expected:
This is going to be a hard letter to write. . . . This book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed.