A Half Century Of Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes’

Do you suffer mild anxiety attacks about rereading American literary classics? Especially Swedish affirmative-action Nobel laureates in literature? Pearl Buck and Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck? Why, even Hemingway?
 
The last time I taught A Farewell to Arms—1982—I was embarrassed by its sentimental ending. All that whining in the rain. So the first flurry of publicity about the Golden Jubilee of The Grapes of Wrath found me sitting on my hands. Even the belated news that the original scheme of a photo essay—only now seeing the light of prints—redoubled my suspicions.
 
But a brilliant Soundprint that bracketed the celebration with really nutritious audio from Okies who had made the trek and thrived in California—as well as those who stayed and survived (some of the abused and abandoned cotton land was now growing blue grass for race horses)—broke down my skepticism.
 
(Soundprint, by the way—the latest brain child of All Things Considered inventor Bill Siemering—is consistently superlative, and you can replay the best to your ear’s content for $10 a pop from WJSU-FM, the Johns Hopkins University public radio outlet in Baltimore).
 
Parts of the book were surprising, 40 years after my first reading. The sexual candor, for a start. Pa Joad doubts that Casey was meant to be a cleric because he had too long a pecker for a preacher. And Steinbeck’s aversion to the mechanization of farming that was driving his Okies onto Route 66 he expressed by visualizing the seeding machines as “penes” raping the land.
 
There’s quite a bit about sacred hanky panky outside the revival tents, suggesting that the Swaggart / Bakker syndrome was well established in the pre-television era. And the hots that afflict Tom’s kid brother Al are a leit-motif that adds to Ma Joad’s anxiety about the family falling apart.
 
This is still the most touching part of the novel for me. From the tough decision Tom has to make to risk parole violation by leaving the state of Oklahoma down to Rose of Sharon’s painful stillbirth, it’s Ma’s fate to worry and fuss about every threat to the family’s persistence through a dirty laundry list of afflictions economic and psychological. I think this Earth Mother is Steinbeck’s greatest achievement.
 
But there are other aspects of Steinbeck’s epic that strike me a mite pokey. Turtles who march imperturbably through the dust toward some kind of enduring life look a bit worse for their too obvious symbolism.
 
And what I can only describe as Farm Security Administration prose poetry (the kind you’ll remember from the soundtrack of Pare Lorentz’s The River or Auden’s  track for Night Mail) is there to pump up the dignity and timelessness of the Joads’ diaspora.
 
It makes me restless, the way the overpraised prose of James Agee’s Let Us Know Praise Famous Men detracts from the cool clarity of Walker Evans’ photos.
 
I’m not as willing as I once was to suspend my disbelief about the utopian government-sponsored migrant’s camp. It reminds me of Social Realist paintings: happy tractor drivers and smiling milk maids.
 
The Good Samaritanism that preached at the nightly rendezvous alongside Route 66 seems a tad utopian as well. It’s not that it’s easier to believe in depravity, but that Steinbeck approaches the tract when he contrasts the evil with the good.
 
Not that I regret having been put to the re-read test by Soundprint. It’s still a good read and an indispensable part of the downside of the American Dream.
 
I couldn’t help wondering if there isn’t some Mexican migrant worker right now gestating the deplorable conditions of the undocumented aliens who’ve replaced the Joads in the Trail of Tears, that unseen side of Agribiz: the high human cost of those cornucopian bins at our local supermarkets.
 
Our Nostalgia Industry being as productive as it is these days, I noted that the Joads’ journey was bracketed bicoastally in 1939 by two of the most unprescient crystal ball gazings in our country’s entire history—GM’s Futurama in Flushing Meadow on the one hand and Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay on the other.
 
You’ve no doubt noted that 1939 was also the apogee year of Hollywood as our Dream Factory. But maybe it passed you by that it was also the year that the Little League was founded in Williamsport and that baseball opened its Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
 
Lots and lots of things distracted the bulk of us from the contemporary misery of the Joads. History is like that.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, October 25, 1989