Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  The book also has the fascination of privacy invaded. Steinbeck said he had often been tempted to destroy it, yet he sent it to his editor at the Viking Press, Pat Covici, obviously aware of its worth. He requested first that it not be published in his lifetime and also that it be made available to his sons, so they might “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.”

  The fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Grapes of Wrath itself includes a strong and moving introduction by Studs Terkel, who makes the case for the novel’s relevance to the lives of Chicano farm workers in California today and to Midwestern farmers who, in recent years, have lost their farms to the banks.

  The novel is also, it seems to me, a vivid fifty-year-old parallel to the American homeless: a story of people at the bottom of the world, bereft and drifting outcasts in a hostile society. Here is Ma Joad, the greatest of all the characters in Steinbeck’s densely populated story, talking to another Joad family member, Uncle John:

  “We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on—changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”

  “How can you tell?” Uncle John demanded. “What’s to keep ever’thing from stoppin’; all the folks from jus’ gittin’ tired an’ layin’ down?” …

  “Hard to say,” she said. “Ever’thing we do—seems to me is aimed right at goin’ on.… Even gettin’ hungry—even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is tougher. Jus’ try to live the day, jus’ the day.”

  I can’t go on, I’ll go on. It’s Samuel Beckett’s theme before Samuel Beckett. It’s the Joads’ as well as it is that of thousands now sleeping on heating grates and in cardboard boxes all over America, who somehow survive subzero temperatures and move on to the next ordeal—modern migrants in a nation that has created an urban class abysmally more hopeless than the fruit-picking peon class to which the Joads belonged. That peon class, one soulless corporate farmer said (and Steinbeck noted this), was necessary to the survival of California agriculture.

  Mr. DeMott cites Steinbeck’s witnessing of such people in a flood at Visalia, California, in March 1938, an event so heartbreaking to Steinbeck that the objective reporting he had planned to do for Life magazine seemed inadequate. And so he was driven to give it the greater power of his fiction.

  Of the sight of thousands flooded out of their shelters and starving to death, Steinbeck wrote: “The water is a foot deep in the tents and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because ‘the problem is so great that we can’t do anything about it.’ So they do nothing.” And he later said: “They starved to death. They dropped dead.”

  We now see that the flood that swamps the Joad family at the end of the novel was in Steinbeck’s mind from the outset. And no more vividly pitiful scene has ever been written in American fiction.

  The book went through four stages of creation, the first, following on Steinbeck’s intense focus on the desperation of the migrants, being seven articles in The San Francisco News, originally published between October 5 and 12, 1936, and republished last year in paperback as The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath. This is a straightaway documentary: flat narration of dismally depressing detail on the lives of the migrants, coupled to Steinbeck’s informed and sensitive plea for change.

  By the end of 1937 he was at work on The Oklahomans, what he termed a “rather long novel” and which he abandoned, perhaps at an early stage, and probably destroyed, since it has never been found. From February to May 1938, he wrote what Mr. DeMott calls a “vituperative satire” with the ungainly title of L’Affaire Lettuceberg, attacking a cabal of power figures who organize terrorist vigilantes to destroy a migrant workers’ strike. Steinbeck finished Lettuceberg, decided it was a “bad book” that focused on the wrong end of the problem, junked it and immediately began writing The Grapes of Wrath.

  Briefly put, this novel is the odyssey of the Joads of Oklahoma, who after a great drought lose the family farm. The landless Joads set out in a dilapidated truck, across the desert, to find work picking fruit in the promised land of California, a pipe dream that turns into a nightmare.

  The story opens with Tom Joad returning home from prison, where he did time for killing a man who knifed him at a dance; and Tom becomes the catalyst for much of the story’s action and movement. He is its intellectual center and, with Ma Joad, carries the principal weight of the book.

  Lesser Joads move on and off center stage: Pa, who loses his authority in the family to the wiser and more decisive Ma; Uncle John,’ summed up in a brilliant paragraph by Steinbeck, but who remains a Johnny-one-note character thereafter; Rose of Sharon, pregnant child bride (who becomes the centerpiece of the unforgettably poignant final scene), and her worthless groom; brother Al, who loves to fool with cars and women; Noah, a simple cipher in the family; Winfield and Ruthie, the children growing wild without a home; Grampa and Granma, the comic elders who fail to survive the family’s transplanting; the former preacher Casy, a staunchly moral, honest and godless man; and an assortment of secondary figures like Muley Graves, who loses his farm but won’t leave, and lives on, with fugitive, gun-toting hostility toward banks and sheriffs. “I like Muley,” Steinbeck wrote in his diary. “He is a fine hater.”

  When published, the novel became the top best-seller of 1939 (430,000 copies sold) and also one of the top ten best-sellers of 1940. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and to date has sold close to four and a half million copies in the United States, and it still sells 100,000 paperback copies annually. And it has sold more than fourteen million copies worldwide.

  All well and good for the publisher, but does the book stand up?

  It does indeed.

  It stands tall.

  I read and relished much of the Steinbeck shelf in the 1940s and 1950s and yet wasn’t impelled to go back to him the way I go back always to Faulkner and Hemingway, the two writers Steinbeck claimed to admire most. Reading this book, you can see the influence of other peers of his generation: Thomas Wolfe, in the spasms of overblown rhetoric and impersonalized overview of the national life; and John Dos Passos, in the interchapters Steinbeck called “generals,” which is to say, general American subject matter that exists outside of, but parallel to, the continuing story of the Joads.

  In the generals Steinbeck writes of the dust bowl as phenomenon; the tractor—which plowed the land mechanically and knocked down farm homes—as enemy; the Far Western states as state of mind; the roadside lunchroom; thieving used-car salesmen and much more. These generals get in the way of the story in the same way that the lore of whaling gets in the way of the story of Ahab and Moby Dick. But just as it was Melville’s obsession to present the totality of whaling, so was it Steinbeck’s obsession with the migrants’ plight that led him to excess.

  Here’s how he saw it at the time: “Better make this scene three pages instead of two. Because there can never be too much of background”; the book “will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have”; “Afraid of repetitiousness. Must watch that.”

  But he didn’t.

  He repeated in the generals what he had embodied in the story, an obvious mistrust of minimalism. Even some of the Joad chapters go on past their effectiveness.

  Throughout, the Joads personify Steinbeck’s ideas of what is and what should be, but he exceeds the dramatic limit at times and force-feeds the dialogue, as when Muley Graves bemoans the takeover of land and farm by the banks: “’Cause what’d they take when they tractored the folks off the lan’? What’d they get so their ‘margin a profit’ was safe?” Maybe Muley always talked about margins of profit, but I doubt it; and so for a moment he lost credibility. But only for a moment. Otherwise I bought him. Whole hog. Whole Muley.

  Even Tom Joad’s now classic farewell speech, when he’s on the run after killing a vigilante, is loaded with Steinbeck’s idealism: “Where
ver they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there” and more. Steinbeck’s rage pushed Tom beyond seemly boundaries.

  Then again, how valuable, really, is the seemly? This novel stood the critics of its day on their ear (with a few exceptions). They saw it had flaws, but they gave it their huzzahs anyway. One wrongheaded critic for Newsweek, Burton Rascoe, who endures as a naysayer in Steinbeck lore, found it not well organized and added witlessly: “I can’t quite see what the book is about, except that there are ‘no frontiers left and no place to go.’” Two weeks later he was back, now a full-throated philistine: “Some of my colleagues in criticism have gone into such jitterbug ecstasies over [the book] that I feel I should be more specific.” And he then denigrated the novel: “silly propaganda, superficial observation, careless infidelity to the proper use of idiom, tasteless pornographical and scatological talk … a bad book by a man whose work I have so greatly admired.”

  But hindsighted Rascoe-love doesn’t take him off the hook. He marches at the head of those anti-Steinbeck vigilantes about whom the novelist Jim Harrison said: “Where’s their ‘Grapes of Wrath’? They didn’t even write ‘The Grapes of Goofy.’”

  Six months after his great novel was published, John Steinbeck wrote in his diary: “That part of my life that made the ‘Grapes’ is over.… I have to go to new sources and find new roots.” He changed the subject matter and the style of his writing, and also broke with his wife, Carol (a radical who had typed and edited the Grapes manuscript, had also chosen its title, a phrase from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and to whom Steinbeck dedicated the book).

  Steinbeck’s second marriage didn’t work for long and ended in divorce. Much of his later writing didn’t work well either, though there was Cannery Row and East of Eden (which he undertook after rediscovering this diary of The Grapes). Then in 1961 he published The Winter of Our Discontent, and the Swedish Academy the following year awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. At a press conference the day the prize was announced, a reporter asked Steinbeck if he deserved it. With characteristic self-deprecation he replied: “That’s an interesting question. Frankly, no.”

  Anders Osterling, the secretary of the academy, said the award was based on Discontent, adding that it marked a return after more than two decades to the “towering standard” Steinbeck had set with The Grapes of Wrath. As reported in The New York Times, Osterling described the author as an “independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad.”

  Not everybody would agree that The Winter of Our Discontent and The Grapes of Wrath are of equal weight. I am one who would not. But I look back at that long list of John Steinbeck’s achievements—Of Mice and Men, The Long Valley, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, East of Eden and The Grapes—and then I look around and try to find other American writers whose work has meant as much to me, and I count them on one hand. Maybe one and a half.

  John Steinbeck had the power. And if at times he lacked the language and the magic that go with mythic literary achievement and status, he had in their place a mighty conscience and a mighty heart. And just about fifty-one years ago this time, that man sat down and put pencil to paper; and in five miraculous months he wrote a mighty, mighty book.

  1989

  Malcolm Muggeridge’s Wasted Life

  Malcolm Muggeridge, the career curmudgeon, has started to reveal how he got that way in this first of a three-volume autobiography. Here he writes of his first thirty years and the elements in them he was later to reject: liberal journalism, the intellectual Left of Britain, his agnostic, Marxist upbringing, the pernicious and fatuous nature of colonial rule and of Soviet Russia.

  A life of vitriolic rebellion against fools and assassins, through the written word, began in hero-worship of the writer, any writer. “To compare a writer with some famous soldier or administrator or scientist or politician or actor was, in my estimation, quite ludicrous. There was no basis for comparison; any more than between, say, Francis of Assisi and Dr. Spock.”

  Muggeridge is probably best known as onetime editor of Punch, but he had set his sights much higher than magazine editing. He wrote plays, had one produced, also wrote fiction. He succeeded in neither realm but did produce “a Niagara of words” for newspapers and magazines and adds with poignancy: “I confess they signify to me a lost life.”

  He offers a disclaimer to bitterness over literary failure. No regrets for masterpieces unwritten or genius unfulfilled, he says. Why not? Because he was born into a civilization already dying, maybe dead. Art and literature have definitely expired. The contemporary genius is technological and the arts are in the hands of charlatans and drunks. Hemingway hit the mark only when he blew his brains out. Maugham was a pederast celebrating the lost bourgeoisie in the century of the common man. Shaw, when he criticized Muggeridge’s only produced play, misunderstood it, just as he misunderstood Shakespeare, Caesar and everything else. Eliot was the death rattle in the throat of a dying civilization.

  Muggeridge is another Miniver Cheevy: “At the beginning of a civilization, the role of the artist is priestly; at the end, harlequinade. From St. Augustine to St. Ezra Pound, from Plainsong to the Rolling Stones, from El Greco to Picasso, from Chartres to the Empire State Building, from Benvenuto Cellini to Henry Miller, from Pascal’s Pensées to Robinson’s Honest to God. A Gadarene descent down which we must all slide, finishing up in the same slough.”

  Muggeridge’s corner of the slough turned out first to be teaching English to blank-minded Indians and Egyptians in colonial schools, later working among pusillanimous, queasy liberals on The Manchester Guardian and at length fulfilling his early leftist dream of living in Russia. The last section forms the richest segment of this sassy book.

  Serving as The Guardian’s man in Moscow removed Muggeridge’s leftist verve. When his editor refused to print his exclusive exposé of the Russian famine, which was to kill millions, Muggeridge separated himself from moderate men as well. He left Russia, equating it with Germany under Hitler, and seems not to have changed his views much since then. He ridicules transient pundits like Shaw, who came to Moscow during the famine and reported no one going hungry, and H. G. Wells, who won a rare confrontation with Stalin and then tried to interest him in the P.E.N. Club. He is very tough on other Moscow newsmen of that era, among them Louis Fischer, Maurice Hindus and especially Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s man, “… a little browbeaten boy looking up admiringly at a big bully,” whose dispatches, Muggeridge claims, were often “evidently nonsensically untrue” but whose exalted status helped shape FDR’s Russian policy. Muggeridge blames The New York Times for having “spared no expense or effort to ensure that capitalism will not survive.”

  Acidulous portraits of Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Winston Churchill (“something malign and disagreeable, as it seemed to me, behind the image-mask of high living, low thinking and general amiability”) and many more spice Muggeridge’s summaries of his own and the century’s early years. He is not all acid. He loves his wife, loves love, covets humility but says it probably will elude him, admires a few, a very few, friends along the way, says he cherishes life and wishes no man ill.

  He is particularly fond of Jesus and says the New Testament was “the key to how to live” for him. He is now a repentant carnalist, admits cultural fraud (carrying books for show) and treachery to employers and lovers; frequently he wears his memoir like sackcloth.

  He talks of his belief in immortality and of being not far from the beyond (he’s seventy). So this repentance begins to sound like a confessional soliloquy just before the curtain. His rage against almost all he once accepted smacks of facile rebellion and professional grouching.

  But we can’t accuse the complex Muggeridge of being cowardly, expedient or facile, not after a life dense with the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; at least not yet. He makes a serious effort to
balance the book with marginal positive thinking, but obviously he’s far more at home gutting somebody with his edgy syntax and letting them bleed all over his paragraphs.

  Writers as heroes? A few helped him learn, but they’re dead, and now he doesn’t even value this long, triadic memoir he’s writing. Despite his disclaimer, the impression thus far in the Muggeridge story is that the protagonist failed to create himself as an artist, settled for journalism, an inferior alternative, and has been taking it out on everybody else ever since.

  1973

  Frank Sullivan:

  Serious Only About Humor

  How sad. It’s no longer a funny world. At least it’s no longer a world in which there are writers who believe that being funny is the only thing worth doing.

  Such as Robert Benchley, for instance, writing: “While rummaging through my bureau one day I came across some old snow.” Or P. G. Wodehouse ending a chapter with this: “‘Bah!’ said Mr. Waddington. It was not much of a last word, but, such as it was, he had it.”

  Both lines are cited by Frank Sullivan, Saratoga’s first citizen, in a letter he wrote in 1959 explaining to a friend that on reading the Wodehouse line he laughed so hard that he woke up somebody who was sleeping in the house. The letter is from a new book, Frank Sullivan Through the Looking Glass, and has any number of lines guaranteed to make you laugh your bedmate into wakefulness, such as the time Aunt Sarah Gallup caught a two-and-a-half-ton salmon at Niagara Falls just to dry the salmon eggs to use as croquet balls. Or the fairy godmother who turned a wicked king into a past participle. Or Sullivan’s discovery of a man in Syracuse who had a pet boa constrictor named Julius Squeezer.