If only a couple of million overcomfortable people can be brought to read it, John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” may actually effect something like a revolution in their minds and hearts. It sounds like a crazy notion, I know, but I feel this book may just possibly do for our time what “Les Misérables” did for its, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for its, “The Jungle” for its. “The Grapes of Wrath” is the kind of art that’s poured out of a crucible in which are mingled pity and indignation. It seems advisable to stress this point. A lot of readers and critics are going to abandon themselves to orgies of ohing and ahing over Steinbeck’s impressive literary qualities, happy to blink at the simple fact that fundamentally his book is a social novel exposing social injustice and calling, though never explicitly, for social redress. It’s going to be a great and deserved best-seller; it’ll be read and praised by everyone; it will almost certainly win the Pulitzer Prize; it will be filmed and dramatized and radio-acted—but, gentle reader, amid all the excitement let’s try to keep in mind what “The Grapes of Wrath” is about: to wit, the slow murder of half a million innocent and worthy American citizens.
I don’t know and in truth I don’t much care whether it’s the “work of genius” the publishers sincerely believe it to be. What sticks with me is that here is a book, non-political, non-dogmatic, which dramatizes so that you can’t forget it the terrible facts of a wholesale injustice committed by society. Here is a book about a people of old American stock, not Reds or rebels of any kind. They are dispossessed of their land, their pitiful little homes are destroyed, they are lured to California by false hopes. When they get there, after incredible hardships, they are exploited, reduced to peonage, then to virtual slavery. If they protest, they are beaten, tortured, or their skulls are smashed in. Even if they do not protest, they are hounded, intimidated, and finally starved into defeat. The industrial and political groups that do these things know quite well what they do. Hence they cannot be forgiven.
Along Highway 66, ribboning from the Mississippi to Bakersfield, California, these disinherited, in their rickety jalopies, have been for the last five years streaming into the Far West. Driven off their farms by the drought, dust, or the juggernaut of the tractor, the small farmers and sharecroppers of half a dozen states, but mainly Oklahoma and Arkansas, have been staking their salvation on the possibility of work in California.
Steinbeck creates a family—the Joads of Oklahoma—and makes them typify a whole culture on the move. At the same time he gives us this migrant culture itself, in all its pathetic hopefulness, its self-reliance, the growing sense of unity it imparts to its people.
If ever The Great American Novel is written, it may very possibly be composed along the lines here laid out by Steinbeck. No one since the advent of Sinclair Lewis has had so exact a feeling for what is uniquely American. This feeling Steinbeck shows not only in his portrayal of the Joads themselves, in his careful notation of their folk speech, folk myths, folk obscenities, but in a thousand minor touches that add up to something major: the description of the used-car market, of the minds of truck drivers and hash-house waitresses, of Highway 66, of the butchering and salting down of the pigs. It is this large interest in the whole lives of his Oklahoma farmers that makes “The Grapes of Wrath” more than a novel of propaganda, even though its social message is what will stick with any sensitive reader.
The book has faults. It is too detailed, particularly in the latter half. Casy, the ex-preacher, is half real, half “poetic” in the worst sense of the word. Occasionally the folk note is forced a little. And, finally, the ending (a young girl who has only a day or two before given birth to a dead child offers the milk of her breasts to a starving man) is the tawdriest kind of fake symbolism. Just occasionally Steinbeck’s dramatic imagination overleaps itself and you get a piece of pure, or impure, theatre like these last pages. One should also add that his political thinking is a little mystical. The sense of unity that his migrants gradually acquire is not necessarily, as he implies, of a progressive character. It is based on an emotion that can just as easily be discharged into the channels of reaction. In other words, are not these simple, tormented Okies good Fascist meat, if the proper misleaders are found for them?
It is unlikely, however, that such misgivings will occur to you in the reading of the book. Its power and importance do not lie in its political insight but in its intense humanity, its grasp of the spirit of an entire people traversing a wilderness, its kindliness, its humor, and its bitter indignation. “The Grapes of Wrath” is the American novel of the season, probably the year, possibly the decade.
George R. Leighton’s “Five Cities” grew out of almost four years’ work and a correspondence with over four hundred persons. Technically, it’s not a biography. Yet one hardly knows what else to call it. Using a sound biographical technique, Mr. Leighton records the birth, youth, maturity, and variant stages of decay of five American cities: Shenandoah, Louisville, Birmingham, Omaha, and Seattle. These cities are in a sense organisms, as London, Paris, and New York, being agglomerations, are not; and Mr. Leighton, without falling victim to the pathetic fallacy, treats them as organisms, not as case studies. The net effect is that of a five-part biography tracing the life and hard times of the American geographical and industrial frontier.
This is the picture Mr. Leighton draws. Shenandoah, Louisville, Birmingham, Omaha, Seattle. A hard-coal town, a railroad-and-brokerage town, a steel town, a railroad-cattle-and-farm-centre town, a lumber town. Five nerve plexuses of American energy; all overexploited during the era of free competition, all with exciting pasts to look back upon, all with uncertain or even bleak futures to look forward to. Each one, sooner or later, a battleground on which huge combinations of capital meet the wavering rebellion of workers, farmers, and the hard-pressed lower middle class.
In Shenandoah the Molly Maguires are crushed by Pinkerton spies, and the great anthracite strike of 1902 results in a victory for neither side, and the busy, smoky, hill-encircled anthracite town decays into its present half-life. In Louisville—today a pleasant place to visit, with pleasant people in it, but heavy with the atmosphere of a backwater—three captains of enterprise, two of them using the Louisville & Nashville Railroad as their tool, successively take control of the city’s life, until its vitality also ebbs. Gradually it is abandoned to absentee landlords and resigned to becoming, in Mr. Leighton’s phrase, “an American museum piece.” Here is Birmingham—the “City of Perpetual Promise,” with coal, iron, and limestone lying together as if stratified by a benevolent Providence; a Southern town without Southern traditions, apparently intended for great things; now an outpost of United States Steel, its industrial future still insecure, its homicide, venereal, and literacy statistics nothing to crow about. Take Omaha, the sweetheart of the Union Pacific, once so proud and busy and flashing. Now, with the decline of farm prices, with the topsoil of the Middle West finding its last resting place in the Gulf of Mexico, with the railroads desperately facing an insoluble set of problems, Omaha, too, whistles to keep its courage up. (These conclusions are all Mr. Leighton’s; anyone who finds his pessimism unwarranted ought to step right up and write another book.)
Only Seattle, though its lusty pioneer days are definitely over, seems to retain a certain principle of life, owing perhaps to the mental temper, cheerful, resolute, and highly experimental, of its citizens. There’s something about Seattle, Mr. Leighton makes you feel, that’s bigger than the lumber holdings of the Weyerhaeusers, bigger than the railroads which feed it. In the Northwest, perhaps, the frontier spirit, changed in form, still has creative power, whereas, if we are to trust Mr. Leighton, it has become, through no fault of its own, rather pallid in the Middle West.
“Five Cities” is a first-rate book from a dozen points of view, but I must not forget to mention that the finest thing in it is six pages of prologue, not apparently related to Mr. Leighton’s specific subject matter. These few pages, in which a dying ninety-four-year-old frontier woman has her last say about her country and yours, quite literally made me catch my breath. ♦
