The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [19]
His experience at Visalia created The Grapes of Wrath’s compelling justification, provided its haunting spiritual urgency, and rooted it in the deepest wellsprings of democratic fellow-feeling. Steinbeck’s deep participation at Visalia empowered his transformation of Tom Joad. Tom’s acceptance of the crucified preacher’s gospel of social action, tempered by Ma’s ministrations, occurs just as the deluge is about to begin in chapter 28:
“Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.”
In the same way that rain floods the novel’s concluding chapters, so the memory of Steinbeck’s cataclysmic experience, his compensation for the futility and impotency of Visalia, pervades the ending of the book and charges its ominous emotional climate, relieved only by Rose of Sharon’s gratuitous act of sharing her breast with a starving stranger. “It must be an accident, it must be a stranger, and it must be quick,” Steinbeck instructed Covici. “To build this stranger into the structure of the book would be to warp the whole meaning of the book.” This final tableau scene—subversively erotic, mysteriously prophetic, tantalizingly indeterminate—refuses to fade from view; before the apocalypse occurs, before everything is lost in nothingness, Steinbeck suggests, all gestures must pass from self to world, from communication to communion.
Furthermore, in one of those unexplainable transactional moments, Steinbeck believed that his fictive alter ego not only floats above The Grapes of Wrath’s “last pages . . . like a spirit,” but he imagined that Joad actually entered the novelist’s work space, the private chamber of his room: “ ‘Tom! Tom! Tom!’ I know. It wasn’t him. Yes, I think I can go on now. In fact, I feel stronger. Much stronger. Funny where the energy comes from. Now to work, only now it isn’t work any more,” he wrote in Working Days on October 20. With that breakthrough, at once a visitation and a benediction, Steinbeck arrived at the intersection of novel and journal, that luminous point, that fifth layer of involvement, where the life of the writer and the creator of life merge. He entered the architecture of his own novel and lived in its fictive space, where, like Tom Joad, Steinbeck discovered that it was no longer necessary to lead people toward a distant new Eden or illusory Promised Land; rather, the most heroic action was simply to learn to be present in the here and now, and to inhabit the “wherever” as fully and at once as possible.
Steinbeck needed only a few more days to finish his novel. Around noon on Wednesday, October 26, 1938, Steinbeck, “so dizzy” he could “hardly see the page,” completed the last 775 words of the novel; at the bottom of the manuscript page, Steinbeck, whose writing was normally minuscule, scrawled in letters an inch and a half high, “END#”. Having brought the weight of his whole life to bear on the new book should have been cause for wild celebrating, but Steinbeck felt only exhaustion and some numb satisfaction. In The Grapes of Wrath the multiple streams of subjective experience, current history, ameliorism, graphic realism, environmentalism, biblical themes, literary traditions, and symbolic forms gather to create the “truly American book” Steinbeck had planned. “Finished this