The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [9]
His achievement is especially noteworthy because he never thought of himself as a naturally gifted artistic genius and rarely believed he had ever “arrived” as a writer. If it is no longer possible to believe naively in the romantic myth of artistic genius, with its heightened capabilities of transcendence and sovereignty, neither is it possible to accept unhesitatingly the contemporary poststructuralist posture—that a writer is a bloodless cipher, utterly determined by unconscious forces of language, race, gender, and class. Better to think of Steinbeck as walking the line between those positions. He was a self-willed writer who prized the shaping power of imagination (however tenuous and imperfect that proved to be), yet he also realized how indebted he was to a welter of historical particulars, contextual determinants, and other people. “I, as a novelist,” he declared in a letter, “am a product not only of my own time but of all the flags and tatters, the myth and prejudice, the faith and the filth that preceded me. . . . A novelist is a kind of flypaper to which everything adheres. His job then is to try to reassemble life into some kind of order.”
Steinbeck augmented his ability with hard work and repeated practice. Where his characters use tools to elevate work to a dignified level, Steinbeck turned to his “comfortable and comforting” pen, an instrument that became an “extension” of the best part of himself: “Work is the only good thing,” he claimed on July 6, 1938, in Working Days. For Steinbeck, who had a pronounced nesting desire, writing was a kind of textual habitation, a way of building a home in the architectural spaces of his imagination. (This creative and interior level of engagement is the elusive, unacknowledged fifth layer of Steinbeck’s novel.) There was something positively totemic about his daily work routine and the ritual protocols he performed at the scene of his writing. Steinbeck often sequestered himself in the eight-by-eight-foot workroom of Arroya del Ajo (Garlic Gulch), the house he and Carol built in 1936 on Greenwood Lane in Los Gatos: “Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and a little book case. I like to sleep in the room I work in,” he told George Albee. Although Steinbeck insisted on effacing his own presence in The Grapes of Wrath, the fact remains that it is a very personal book, rooted in his own compulsion. The “plodding” pace of Steinbeck’s writing schedule informed the slow, “crawling” movement of the Joads’ journey, while the harried beat of his own life gave the proper “feel” and tone to his beleaguered characters. Their unsavory weaknesses and vanities, their struggles for survival, their unsuspecting heroism are Steinbeck’s as well. If The Grapes of Wrath praises the honorableness of labor and ratifies the obsessive quest for a home, it is because the author himself felt these acts were deeply ingrained psychic components.
If The Grapes of Wrath’s communal vision began in the fire of Steinbeck’s own labor, the flames were fanned by numerous people, especially Carol Steinbeck and Tom Collins. Carol Henning Steinbeck (1906-1983), his outgoing first wife, was more politically radical than John (she registered as a Communist on the voting roles of Santa Clara County in 1938 to 1939, though partly as an experiment to test local reaction) , and she actively supported northern California’s fugitive agricultural labor movement. (According to definitive biographer Jackson J. Benson, Steinbeck