Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

suffering is too great for me to cash in on it.” (JS-MO, 3/?/38) It is this great compassion which accounts for the difference
in tone between In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath.
But this compassion, this honest indignation, did not carry Steinbeck into propagandism or blind him to his
responsibilities as a novelist. “The subject is so large that it scares me,” he wrote. “And I am not going to rush it. It
must be worked out with care.” (JS-MO, 1/?/37) By June of 1938 he finished a sixty-thousand-word novel called L’Affaire
Lettuceberg. To his agents and publishers, who were expecting the book and had announced it variously as Oklahoma and
Lettuceberg, he sent the following joint letter:
This is going to be a hard letter to write. I feel badly about it. You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get
rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I’m not telling as much of the
truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire.… I know that a great many people
would think they liked this book. I, myself, have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the
argument, but I don’t like the book. And I would be doing Pat a greater injury in letting him print it than I would by destroying
it. Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive
has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause
hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people
ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly. And that I won’t admit — yet.… (JS-MO, 6/?/38)
Such a letter makes ridiculous any insinuation that Steinbeck’s “social protest” was literary opportunism. It is
Steinbeck’s corollary to Hemingway’s ideal of writing “truly,” without “tricks,” and without “cheating.”
Steinbeck continued to work on his big novel all that summer, and by autumn it was in its final stages. “I am desperately
tired,” he wrote, “but I want to finish. And mean. I feel as though shrapnel were bursting about my head. I only hope
the book is some good. Can’t tell yet at all. And I can’t tell whether it is balanced. It is a slow plodding book but I don’t
think that it is dull.” 5 On September 16, 1938, he sent Pascal Covici the book’s title – The Grapes of Wrath – saying,
“I like the soft with the hard and the marching content and the American revolutionary content.” Three months later
he suggested to Covici that the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed somewhere in the book, possibly as end pages.
(Steinbeck to Pascal Covici [hereafter pc], 12/22/38)
The completion of The Grapes of Wrath late in 1938 left Steinbeck exhausted. He was confined to bed for some weeks
and forbidden on doctor’s orders to read or write. But he conscientiously saw the book through the press. As in the
publication of In Dubious Battle, there arose the problem of printable language. Steinbeck’s stand was again firm. He
warned the publishers that no words must be changed; even “shit-heels” must remain. (js-pc, 1/15/39) Also, he refused
to have included in the book a page reproduced in his own handwriting. He insisted on keeping his personality out of
it. The book was to stand on its own merits, even if it meant a loss in sales. He didn’t want “that kind” of reader anyway.
(js-pc, 2/23/39) In April, 1939, The Viking Press brought out The Grapes of Wrath.
The Grapes of Wrath did not have a chance of being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. From the very beginning
it was taken as substantial fact and its merits debated as a document rather than a novel. This was to be expected in a
decade which had produced such motion pictures as Pare Lorentz’ The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains; such
books as Dorothea Lange’s and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, Archibald MacLeish’s
Land of the Free, Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, and the WPA collection of
case histories called These Are Our Lives, to cite only a few. The line between social documentation and fiction has never
been so hazy, and this lack of a definite line resulted in works like Land of the Free, which neither an illustrated text nor
a book of pictures with captions, but a form in itself. Often what was intended as social documentation and reportage
had a literary value achieved only rarely in proletarian fiction – Ruth McKenney’s Industrial Valley being an example.
Even aside from the fact that The Grapes of Wrath came in such a period, Steinbeck’s novel had the vulnerability of all
social fiction – it was subject to attack on its facts. It is not within the scope of this study to present an exhaustive
analysis either of the attack made on his facts and their defense or of the sociological and political consequences of the
book, but a small sampling of the relevant literature may indicate the nature of that social-political-economic
controversy which eclipsed The Grapes of Wrath as a novel.
appendix a
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