STEINBECK SPENT MOST OF 1950 clearing his desk of work. He wanted nothing to interfere with the composition of “The Salinas Valley.” Steinbeck and Kazan continued to meet periodically, making changes and adjustments in the filmscript that was now called Viva Zapata! In addition to the motion picture work, Steinbeck was making notes and drafting scenes for a theatrical adaptation of Cannery Row, as well as working with Rodgers and Hammerstein on the dramatic version of Burning Bright. He and Elaine spent part of the summer in the country, joined by Steinbeck’s sons. Steinbeck remained worried about the boys, convinced that Gwyn was not only neglecting their emotional development, but also failing to prepare them well for school. He engaged a tutor to help Thom and John brush up on their studies.
By fall he and Elaine were back in New York. Steinbeck’s time was occupied with the final preparations for the premiere of Burning Bright. He felt certain that the play would be a large success and was equally confident about the prose version which Viking would publish as a short novel. In neither case were his expectations fulfilled. The prose version failed to sell to magazines or book clubs. Its reviews echoed what had become a familiar chorus from critics examining Steinbeck’s work. Reviewers felt that Steinbeck had abandoned the social consciousness that had made The Grapes of Wrath and his other books of the 1930s so powerful and was now producing only self-indulgent popular stories for large audiences.
On stage, Burning Bright was an even larger failure. The play of which Steinbeck had been so proud in manuscript, failed to come to life before audiences. Steinbeck worked frantically during the Boston previews of Burning Bright, spending long hours with Rodgers and Hammerstein in an attempt to tighten the script and increase its effectiveness. The hard work did little good. The play premiered in New York in mid-October and received a thorough critical attack. No one had a good word to say for Burning Bright, and the show closed after barely two weeks. Steinbeck, furious at the critics for missing the point of the experimental, symbolic play, wrote an article that appeared in The Saturday Review, a literary magazine that was deliberately aimed at a large, popular audience. Steinbeck called his article “Critics, Critics, Burning Bright” and in the piece denounced the narrowness of most critics’ minds. He stated proudly that he had never written the same work twice, nor even used the same form twice. Each of his novels was an experiment, and each was in turn attacked by reviewers for failing to repeat the successes of previous work. Steinbeck ended the piece with a gleeful promise to continue experimenting, to continue stretching himself and the forms in which he worked as far as his talent would let him.
Steinbeck did not spend a great deal of time lingering over the failure of Burning Bright. He had gotten a book out of the work and knew that the book would have time to find the audience that the play did not. Besides, he was about to be married for the third time and found himself so happy and preoccupied with the prospect of setting up housekeeping with Elaine that he did not have time to become too depressed. Early in the winter he purchased a town house on East Seventy-second Street, not too many blocks from the Seventy-eighth Street brownstone where Gwyn lived with the boys. Elaine’s divorce from Zachary Scott became final on the first of December. Three days after Christmas, Steinbeck and Elaine were married in a quiet ceremony at the home of Harold Guinzburg, the president of Viking. The Steinbecks began their marriage and the New Year with a honeymoon trip to the Caribbean. When they returned to New York, Elaine further endeared herself to Steinbeck by insisting that his workroom be the first priority among the many aspects of the house requiring renovation.
In February, Steinbeck settled into his new workroom to begin writing “The Salinas Valley.” For a few days he circled around the opening of the book, mulling over the things he wanted to say and the story he wanted to tell. As he circled around the beginning of his story, Steinbeck arrived at a procedure that helped clarify his thoughts and provided momentum for each morning’s work. Pat Covici had given him a large ledger filled with lined paper. Steinbeck began work each morning by writing a letter to Covici, using the page on the left-hand side of the ledger. The right-hand pages were reserved for the manuscript of the novel itself He opened himself completely to Covici in his letters, revealing his insecurities and concerns, as well as his excitement over the big new novel. He felt in some ways that “The Salinas Valley” might be the last novel he would write; certainly he intended to put into the book everything he knew and believed about himself and about the people of whom he wrote. By the middle of February he had begun the novel itself, starting the book with a long reminiscence of the Salinas Valley as he had known it as a boy. The story would revolve around two families, the imaginary Trasks and Steinbeck’s own ancestors the Hamiltons. Steinbeck himself would be very much present in the novel, coming onto the page in the first person to comment upon the book’s characters and incidents. Soon he was moving forward at the rate of fifteen hundred words a day, putting in five to six hours at his desk.
Originally Steinbeck considered casting parts of the novel in the form of letters to his sons, and although he abandoned that plan, the novel was very much about fatherhood. In telling the story of Adam Trask and his sons Caleb and Aron, Steinbeck felt that he was working through some of the problems he was experiencing with his own sons. His letters to Covici were filled with comments about the problems the boys were having in adjusting to the disciplinary requirements of school, as well as with reflection upon the guilt he felt at not being present at times when his sons needed him most. He wanted to put into his novel all of the advice and wisdom that he could, in hopes perhaps that Thom and John might find in the book the lessons that they were not receiving.
Steinbeck gave the novel a sense of history and also imbued it with the special perspective about the human race that his years of amateur scientific and philosophical study had given him. He returned in the novel to previous themes and ideas, refining them now in the light of new experience. Although the novel is set in the late nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth, Steinbeck wrote from the vantage point of 1951, aware of the devastation that World War II had wrought and bothered by the materialism and consumerism that seemed the great result of that war. The battle against the Nazis, it struck Steinbeck, liberated Americans only to become consumers of shiny automobiles and appliances, their love of mass-produced things overpowering the individuality that made life worth living in the first place. At the beginning of the novel’s thirteenth chapter, Steinbeck made his fears overt:
“There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves, but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
“At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of man.”
As his story grew through the spring, Steinbeck was drawn more to the Trask family than to the Hamiltons. He altered his novelistic strategy a bit, making the Hamiltons—whose story was his own history—as counterpoint to the story of Adam and Charles Trask, and of Cathy Ames, the woman who bore Cal and Aron, and who became a prostitute. Cathy’s character was supremely evil, and even as he wrote the first draft of the novel, Steinbeck suspected that Cathy would become the focus of critical attacks. He had little doubt that his purposes in creating Cathy would be misunderstood; yet he hedged his bets anyway with an explanation of her nature:
“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.
“And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul? . . .
“It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth.”
By elaborating such thoughts so clearly in the novel, Steinbeck knew that he was inviting critical wrath. In one of his letters he wrote Covici of his suspicion that “The Salinas Valley” would be considered an old-fashioned, dated novel, filled with old-fashioned moral concerns. Yet Steinbeck was secure in the knowledge that his approach to the story was as experimental—as new—as anything he had ever written. Once more he was breaking fresh literary ground for himself, assembling a novel that was unlike any book he knew. The formlessness of the novel—as the novel grew, its various characters and their individual stories sprawled off in all directions, with Steinbeck allowing digressions to run for thousands of words—appealed to him. He wanted to create life on the page, not a dead but perfect literary artifact. The lives of individuals and families were rarely well shaped; neither would Steinbeck’s novel be shaped and pruned carefully. It would grow and assume its own form, as though it were an organism itself.
Steinbeck was one-fourth of the way through the book by early May. The deeper he pressed into the story of the Trask family, the more clearly he saw the nature of the pages that lay ahead of him. He was telling a story that was biblical in nature. After Cathy abandoned Adam Trask to pursue her life as a whore, Adam attempted to build a life undisturbed by evil. Adam cut himself off as well from all that was good. The Eden that Adam hoped to create was no Eden at all, but a dead, stultifying life, the price for which was tragically borne by his sons Cal and Aron. Steinbeck was retelling the biblical story of Cain and Abel, using that story as a metaphor for the suffering that humans cause one another. It was a universal theme. At the same time, aware that he was writing a very personal book, Steinbeck changed the title of the novel from “The Salinas Valley” to “My Valley.” But in June, after reading a portion of the manuscript, Elaine provided an even more appropriate title. She quoted Genesis 4:16: “And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” Steinbeck called his novel East of Eden.
Later in the month he moved for the summer with Elaine and the boys to a rented house on Nantucket Island, near the Massachusetts coast. Afternoons were reserved for recreations such as picnics with his sons, but mornings remained the province of the novel. Steinbeck continued to pile up manuscript, working Monday through Friday on the book and taking weekends off for reflection and recuperation. The work was exhausting and at the same time invigorating. He kept careful track of the words he had written, of the number of typewritten pages that were transcribed from his manuscript, even of the number of pencils he used up as he wrote East of Eden. At one point he estimated that the novel would require twelve dozen pencils to complete. By the middle of July Steinbeck had written more than 135,000 words, yet estimated that another 100,000 words remained to be written. When he was not working or relaxing with the boys, Steinbeck spent his time gardening or carving wood. His most ambitious woodcarving project was the making of a lined box in which the East of Eden manuscript would reside. The box would be a present for Pat Covici. On the lid of the box Steinbeck carved the novel’s title and the Hebrew characters for the word timshel, which figured strongly in the second half of the novel.
Timshel ws traditionally translated as “Thou should,” a command from God. Steinbeck, always the revisionist, always aware that “should” was a teleological word, translated timshel to mean “Thou may.” The new translation, he felt, distilled the importance of free will and individual action. His characters, by the command timshel, might have made their lives better and freed themselves from their self-imposed tragic ends. That they did not was, of course, the tragic point that Steinbeck sought to make with East of Eden. As he began the final long section of the novel, he turned once more to monologue, telling his readers what the story was about:
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
Back in New York in the fall, the boys returned to their mother, and Steinbeck settled into the rhythms of the final section of East of Eden. He had to restrain himself to keep from writing more than fifteen hundred words a day. Steinbeck did not want the pleasure he had found in this novel to end. None of his work had ever given him such a sense of fulfillment, nor did any of his other books so completely fulfill the ambitions he’d held for them. East of Eden as he planned it would end in 1918. In October, nearing the end of the novel, Steinbeck informed Covici that the next project would be a second volume about Cal Trask, which would carry the story from the years after World War I up to the present day. It would be a book as grand and large as East of Eden itself By planning a sequel, Steinbeck was able to overcome his fear that the end of the Trask story would be also the end of his career as a novelist. His spirits buoyed by the knowledge that he was not yet done with the largest adventure of his writing life, Steinbeck held himself to his schedule and in early November completed the first draft of East of Eden.
There remained a great deal of work to be done. The typewritten manuscript was nearly one thousand pages long, well over a quarter of a million words. Elizabeth Otis and Pat Covici each had some reservations about East of Eden’s discursiveness, and each requested major cuts in the manuscript. Steinbeck argued with them, making his own points about the novel’s unusual construction, but he finally spent four months going over the book line by line. He rearranged some of the material he had written and excised some sections altogether. This work pleased him far less than had the joyous labor of writing the novel itself. There seemed to be little creativity in the editorial work, only an unreasonable fastidiousness and attention to form. Steinbeck even found himself cutting the long, heartfelt dedication he had written to Pat Covici. When he finished the editorial revision in February, he was more than ready to take some time off from writing fiction. He and Elaine left for Europe shortly before the first of April.
They remained overseas through the end of summer, traveling to Spain, France, Italy, and England. The only writing Steinbeck accomplished was a series of travel articles for Collier’s magazine. He and Elaine also visited Ireland, seeking out the original residence of Steinbeck’s ancestors, the Hamiltons, of whom he had so recently written. While Steinbeck traveled, Covici kept him up to date about the progress of East of Eden from manuscript to finished book. The editor reported that he had never experienced anything quite like the Viking sales department’s reaction to the new novel. All of the sales personnel were convinced that the novel was not only a masterpiece but that the book would set sales records across the United States. East of Eden promised to be Viking’s largest seller since The Grapes of Wrath more than a decade earlier. Covici scheduled a first printing of more than a hundred thousand copies. The excitement surrounding the publication of John Steinbeck’s magnum opus continued to mount through the early months of summer. When the novel appeared, it climbed steadily to the top of all best-seller lists.
As usual, Steinbeck’s predictions of a poor critical reception were borne out. East of Eden, reviewers pointed out in supercilious tones, was hardly a novel at all. The book was not so much constructed as it was stuffed together, a mad mixture of disparate elements that never coalesced. Steinbeck had heard it all before and tried as best he could to ignore the criticism. He was gratified by the public’s embrace of East of Eden, taking what comfort he could in the knowledge that the readers who understood his intentions lived as he did, in the real world. Critics lived only in the books that they read and to which their curious and precious profession forced them to feel superior.
When he returned to New York at the end of the summer, Steinbeck applied himself not to a new book, or even to magazine articles, but to politics. He became involved in the presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson, who was running on the Democratic ticket against Dwight Eisenhower on the Republican ticket. Steinbeck was pleased to have the opportunity to contribute his energy to a candidate who was both intelligent and articulate, two qualities not frequently in evidence among those who seek public office. Eisenhower was the great hero of World War II, and his appeal was in many ways patriotic and nationalistic, his image reminding Americans of the united front the nation had raised against the Axis. Steinbeck and many others felt that Stevenson sought to appeal to voters as individuals, presenting arguments and ideas that reached out to voters’ intellects rather than to their emotions. Steinbeck wrote an introduction to a published selection of Stevenson’s speeches and worked to help coordinate fund-raising events. He was disappointed when Stevenson was defeated in November.
With the 1952 election out of the way, Steinbeck made plans to take Elaine to the Virgin Islands for a January vacation. The year had been a profitable one for Steinbeck. East of Eden continued to dominate the best-seller lists despite the critical reception. And Viva Zapata! had been one of the year’s more successful motion pictures. Kazan’s film starred Marlon Brando as Zapata, and both director and actor did a wonderful job of translating Steinbeck’s script onto the screen. Kazan was delighted with East of Eden and even before its official publication date had begun seeking financing for a film based on the novel.
After the Caribbean vacation, Steinbeck settled once more into the Manhattan town house and at last picked up his pencil and embarked upon a major piece of writing. He did not, as he had once hoped, undertake the second volume of the Trask family story. Rather, he returned to the musical version of Cannery Row, which had been put aside as he worked on East of Eden. After several weeks of struggling to make Cannery Row’s characters and scenes conform to the requirements of musical comedy, as well as creating new characters and scenes where the pace of the play demanded them, Steinbeck gave up in frustration. The new scenes were more enjoyable than adapting the old ones, and they sparked Steinbeck’s interest in fiction. After taking his sons to Nantucket for spring recess, Steinbeck began casting the new material about Doc and the citizens of Cannery Row as a novel, which he called “Bear Flag.” Steinbeck admitted to his agents that he knew such work was an indulgence, but he felt that he had earned the relaxation the familiar material offered. Perhaps more important, “Bear Flag” provided Steinbeck with the chance once more to spend part of each day in the company of Ed Ricketts, at least in the form of the character Doc. Steinbeck knew that when he finished “Bear Flag,” he would be finished with Ricketts and a part of his life forever.
In 1953 Steinbeck did not rent a country home until September, after the summer was over. He and Elaine found a pleasant house in the Long Island community of Sag Harbor. Steinbeck worked well in Sag Harbor, completing “Bear Flag” before October and the onset of cold weather. He and Elaine moved back to Manhattan for the remainder of the year and began 1954 with the Caribbean vacation that had become for them an annual tradition. Sag Harbor remained on their minds, and they gave some thought to purchasing a permanent home there.
With “Bear Flag” in the hands of Viking and also Rodgers and Hammerstein, who would handle the musical adaptation, Steinbeck was once more ready for a trip to Europe. This would be Steinbeck’s most extended European trip yet. Steinbeck was giving some thought to a project about a modern Don Quixote, and he and Elaine spent the first part of their trip in Spain, trying to view the country as Cervantes had. After Spain they moved to a large house in Paris. Steinbeck learned that Rodgers and Hammerstein were lobbying for a change in the title of the musical about Doc and Cannery Row, their preference being “Sweet Thursday.” Steinbeck approved the title change, and Viking published the book early in the summer of 1954. Once again Steinbeck made a strong showing on the best-seller lists, and once more the critics awarded him a poor reception. Steinbeck was accused of exploiting material from his own past, a symptom, some critics felt, of his failure of imaginative vision.
Whatever the state of his vision, Steinbeck did little imaginative writing during his season in Europe. The only real work he did was a series of articles for the French literary publication Figaro Littéraire. The pieces were brief and impressionistic accounts of Steinbeck’s observations of French life. Although Steinbeck made notes for larger projects, he got started on none of them. There were many pleasant distractions. He was more respected as an artist by the French than by Americans, and Steinbeck enjoyed the lionization he received as a result of his work. His sons and Elaine’s daughter, Waverly, joined the Steinbecks for the summer. Steinbeck as always marveled at how much the boys had grown. Encouraging their independence and self-reliance, Steinbeck sent Thom and John, who were ten and eight, off on expeditions through Paris, and as far as Italy. Together, father and sons went for long walks, fished in the Seine, or took drives in the handsome Jaguar that Steinbeck had purchased as a treat for himself. They studied French history together, and Steinbeck worked to help Thom overcome his difficulties with reading.
The long, happy summer came to a close, and the children returned to the United States. Steinbeck and Elaine spent the fall touring France, Italy, and Greece. They sailed home in December, reaching New York in time for Christmas. The city continued to please Steinbeck, but he and Elaine also began looking for a house in the country, where they could escape from Manhattan’s distractions. They found the house they wanted in Sag Harbor, the Long Island community where they had vacationed previously. Steinbeck’s new house stood on a two-acre tract that looked out over the water. The house was solidly built, but Steinbeck immediately began working on it, using his craftsmanship to make many small and large improvements. He was pleased to be located once more with a view of a harbor and made plans to purchase his own boat. He was also making plans for new work. Although he knew that his critics—not to mention his publishers—would be pleased if he returned to books like The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck had no intention of repeating himself “Sweet Thursday” had been an enjoyable indulgence, nothing more. Now he wanted to strip away everything he had learned about writing in his fifty-three years and start all over. There were experiments he wanted to make.