Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

And when there was a pause in the recorded music, there was still a sort of rhythm: the incessant bup-bup-bup of the
washing machine. Always, there was the beat, as though it were the beat of a throbbing heart, caught and held by these
uprooted people whom he had come to know so well. “I grew to love and admire the people who are so much stronger
and braver and purer than I am.” 1
In the musical architecture of the book are point and counterpoint. Each chapter, recounting the adventures of the
individual family, the Joads, is followed by a brief contrapuntal sequence: the tribe, the thousands of Okie families on
the move. The one, the many, all heading in the same direction The singular flows into the plural, the “I” into the “We.”
It is an organic whole.
Organic was Wright’s favorite word. The work had to flow naturally, whether it were a building or a book. Everything
was of one piece, as the fingers on a hand, the limbs on a tree. It was not accidental that Wright’s Imperial Hotel
withstood the Tokyo earthquake of 1924. It was not accidental that The Grapes of Wrath has withstood another
earthquake.
Preacher Casy’s vision, as revealed to Tom Joad, was presaged by earlier variations on the theme. During the journey to
California, twenty or so Okie families rested at a near a spring:
In the evening a strange thing happened; the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss
of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into
the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through
the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning. (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Seventeen)
And, finally, at saga’s end, comes the heart-stopping incident in the barn. Outside, are the torrential rains and floods.
Inside, Rose of Sharon, having lost her baby, offers her mother’s milk to the starving stranger. It is much like an olden
Childe ballad – the stunning last verse. And yet so natural.
There were doubts expressed by friends who had read the manuscript. Why a stranger? Steinbeck knew why intuitively.
The impulse was right, organically so. It fit like – well, the fingers on a hand, the limbs on a tree.
This book is more than a novel about an epic journey in an overcrowded, heavy-laden old Dodge jalopy across Highway
66, across hot desert sands, on toward Canaanland, the land of milk and honey; and further on toward disillusion and
revelation. It is an anthem in praise of human community. And thus survival.
This anniversary edition is more than a golden anniversary celebration of an enduring book. It is as contemporary as the
1988 drought, astonishingly so.
During my Minnesota farmland trip in 1987, my companion points toward a barren field that appears endless. There
are vast spaces that offer the odd appearance of crowds of bald-heads. The color – the pallor – is a sickly, sandy gray.
“All those acres,” she says, “not a tree, not a blade of grass. Nothin’ to stop the wind from blowin’ across. When you lose
the farm, they bulldoze the grove down. Our land is very vulnerable. It’s now dry and wide open to Mother Nature to do
with as she pleases. There’s six inches of topsoil left. It used to be six feet. Multiply this – these white tops – by hundreds
of thousands of acres, all of a sudden, with a dry spell and drought and a wind, you’ve got a dust storm. Will it happen
again? People are beginning to talk about it.” Simultaneously, we mumble: “The Grapes of Wrath.” The drought of 1988
has underscored our mutual apprehension of the year before and the aching relevance of Steinbeck’s book.
When asked, “What is the best novel you read in 1988?”, the reply comes easy: The Grapes of Wrath. The third time
around merely adds to its dimension. Dorothy Parker, at the time of its publication in 1939, called it “the greatest
American novel I have ever read.” She’ll get no argument in these quarters.
The eighties, we have been informed, are distinguished by a mean-spiritness that has trickled down from high places,
by an ethic of every man for himself, by a disdain for those up against it. It reveals itself even in our idiomatic language:
Victims are defined as “losers.” The word, with its new meaning, has become as common-and as popular – as “bottom
line.” Since there is obviously no room for “losers” at the top, there is no bottom for them either. The Joads would
indubitably have fallen into that dark recess; as millions of our dispossessed fall today.
appendix c
60