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Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/steinbeckreview.16.2.v

1754-6087

Barbara A. Heavilin, Scott Pugh,

American and British Literature Analysis

John Steinbeck structured East of Eden around contrasts—between good and evil, between wet years and dry years in the Salinas Valley, between dark and light. In Journal of a Novel, written in tandem with East of Eden, he comments, “The writers of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and God knows it is destroyed often enough. But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not…. The great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Bhudda [sic], Christ, Paul, and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial…. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage” (115). Here he defines light as a “beacon thing,” where certain people—like Sam Hamilton, like Lee—hold torches to guide the faltering. Who is leading us today? And where?The likes of Steve Bannon hold up flares that would take us to the underworld. Early in the Trump administration, Bannon, formerly an executive with alt-right Breitbart News Network, served as the President's chief strategist. Although Bannon is no longer in this position, his chilling words remain as an under-the-radar mantra for this administration. In an interview with Hollywood Reporter's Michael Wolff, Bannon strutted his manifesto onto the national stage, paving the way for fake news, alternative facts, oppression of the media, and diminishment of the First Amendment and the American people's rights to know the truth. Proudly taking on the mantle of an evil bard, Bannon distorts all those values we hold most dear, as Wolff reports: “Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer—albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they”—I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster—“get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing.” In contrast to this evil bard, Bannon, and his Twittering companion, Trump, John Steinbeck still stands as the voice and conscience of the best of America. Cautiously optimistic, his nonfiction America and Americans as well as his fiction stand as both a dirge bemoaning the death of America's ethical moorings and a hopeful paean to the enduring goodness of the American people. His voice comes as a jeremiad, always, cautioning us and also offering us a hand, a light, a beacon.The awareness of America's perilous state, as we teeter between dark and light, is today evident to many. And yet our nation is pulled—like Cal Trask—between better instincts and dark desires. A March 6, 2019, four-page letter from the Democratic National Committee is urgent, opening with “This is a time unlike any other in American history” and continuing, Climate reports say we have just 10 years before we reach the point of no return for our planet's health. The Affordable Care Act is being systematically sabotaged while people desperately set up GoFundMe pages to pay for lifesaving care. Kids are being held in cages and are sick and dying at our borders. Active shooter drills are a routine part of our children's school day. Hate crimes are on the rise. Workers' rights are being trampled. Voter and civil rights are under attack. In the midst of dark moral and ethical chaos, with John Steinbeck, we might opine, “I want to go … to the other side of home where the lights are given” (357)—a place where the environment is protected, the sick and mentally ill cared for, children cherished and nurtured, violence eschewed, and civil rights guaranteed and protected under the Constitution. Steinbeck's dedication in his last work of fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent, embodies a paradigm for his fellow Americans: To Beth, my sister,whose light burns clear Such was his hope for us all—that our light burn clear. And he himself was always a giver of light and truth—his voice still heard, speaking to vital human issues, bringing awareness and urging his fellow Americans to choose a higher way. Carl Sandburg once noted, “Anything John Steinbeck says about this country—about us as a nation—is worth careful reading and study. His record of love for this country and service for it is such that what he says is important” (qtd. in Benson 880). What Steinbeck says about his country runs the gamut of human experience—“from the tidepool to the stars,” he cared about it all. That he was an early environmentalist is now a critical commonplace. That he was a compassionate humanitarian is well documented. That he was an impassioned patriot who loved his country dearly is a matter of long record. And in midst of the darkness of our own times, he still gives us light, guidance, hope.A few years ago, when banks were failing, Michael Moore urged all Americans to reread The Grapes of Wrath in troubled times. As the times worsen, we turn to the book for reasons other than economic solace: The Grapes of Wrath studies the dark and light of our environmental crisis. In accord with the mystic tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi, who admonished, “Tread softly; the rocks, too, are thy brothers,” Steinbeck establishes the land as character in Grapes, depicting the exploitation, suffering, and death of the earth. Because of drought and erosion, the land lies sick and dying not only from aridity, but also from abuse and misuse. With no regard for well-established principles of conservation, plows have crossed and recrossed land that already lies injured, and the “scarred earth” cannot absorb rain. The sun is relentless in its fiery heat; the land crusts over like a festering boil; and the dying earth pales, as the sun's penetrating rays strike like a weapon repeatedly, relentlessly. This scene is one of the bleakest in environmental literature.From a family-owned homestead to a bank-owned farm on which the former owners are tenants to an agribusiness, the narrator traces the evolution of land abuse. Grandfathers killed and drove out Indians, fathers borrowed money from the bank and exhausted the land with cotton, and banks cashed in on unpaid mortgages. All have contributed to environmental catastrophe: monocropping cotton, the primary money crop, has depleted the soil; ignoring the land's contours and plowing in straight rows, tractors have left erosion in their wake. Images of environmental rape and rapine abound in this novel—blood-sucking leeches, monsters breathing and eating profits, the raped earth suffering under steel plows and iron seeders. Like today's developers, who first cut down everything on a plot of land and then scrape off the topsoil to sell before they begin building, these owners plan to exhaust the land completely before selling it as real estate to Easterners.In America and Americans, Steinbeck further worried over the chemical poisoning of our air and land: Our rivers are poisoned by reckless dumping of sewage and toxic industrial wastes, the air of our cities is filthy and dangerous to breathe from the belching of uncontrolled products from combustion of coal, coke, oil, and gasoline. Our towns are girdled with wreckage and the debris from our toys—our automobiles and our packaged pleasures…. All these evils can and must be overcome if America and Americans are to survive. (127) Today Steinbeck's fears have come to pass as we continue to spew poisons into the atmosphere. Darkness is good, Steve Bannon boasts, and on its website Alabama Power, one of the nation's largest polluters, boasts of its pristine environmental policies, casting a fallacious shadow over the truth: Alabama is a beautiful place, with extraordinary natural resources. Protecting those resources while providing reliable, affordable electricity for our customers, is at the heart of our company's mission. We work to minimize our environmental impact, preserve the environment and strengthen the communities in which we live, work and serve. To help guide us in this effort, we invest in renewable energy, green research and development and eco-stewardship. Bringing light to bear on this falsehood, on March 2, 2018, Dennis Pillon of Birmingham Real-Time News reports, “Alabama's state environmental agency fined six coal-fired power plants $250,000 each on Friday, saying the plants' coal ash ponds are violating the state's clean water laws by contaminating groundwater.” Alabama Power operates five of the six plants cited, and faces $1.25 million in total fines. The company did not deny the claims, but protested the fine. Further red flags were raised with Alabama Water Agenda's warning that coal ash “contains arsenic, lead, mercury, chromium, and a range of harmful heavy metals and toxic pollutants that poison the air and drinking water supplies of communities living near coal ash dumpsites. Coal ash threatens the respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological systems of people living near more than 1,400 dump sites across the nation.” When Trump lifted the EPA's restrictions on pollutants in the air, Alabama Power immediately upped its use of coal-powered electricity, threatening land, air, people, and wildlife. Trump's reckless abuse of executive power has thus put the environment and the nation at risk. Steinbeck, the nation's bard, has already sounded the alarm: “All these evils can and must be overcome if America and Americans are to survive” (127).And the evil extends beyond environmental abuse to include neglect and maltreatment of humanity. Steinbeck's view of darkness and evil is like that of Christ's portrayal of evil as a negative action, leading to a loss of the kingdom of heaven: “I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me…. I tell you solemnly, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me” (Matthew 25:42–46, Jerusalem Bible; emphasis added). The primary theme of Grapes is hospitality, most particularly kindness to the stranger in the midst. It is all so very simple. For Steinbeck, love and attention are the panaceas for the world's ills. That is why the details in Grapes matter so much, why they come like a barrage, demanding attention: Danny, the little boy sitting in the backseat, wants a cup of water. Winfield is malnourished because of the Joad family's meager diet. Rose of Sharon needs milk for her unborn child. The Joads and other migrants need shelter from California's winter rains and the flood. Exhausted from giving birth and heartbroken because the child is stillborn, Rose of Sharon is feverish and needs dry clothes. And, in the finale, a starving father in a leaky barn needs sustenance.It is no wonder that some readers grow uncomfortable. For like Toni Morrison's Beloved in the novel by that title, the Joads do not really go away once the book is closed. As Beloved reminds us of the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery, so the Joads remind us of the homeless, underprivileged, sad, and alienated of our own times. Grapes is now an inescapable part of the American myth, of the American Dream gone awry. Hubert Humphrey once said that a nation's greatness may be measured by how it treats the young, the old, and those who are physically or mentally ill. And it is exactly at this point that Steinbeck portrays the great evil in simply ignoring the needs of “the least of these.” And we are reminded of Steinbeck and his own attention to and love for these “little ones.” Today attention needs to be paid.With prophetic fierceness, the narrator in Grapes delivers a jeremiad—warning against greed, injustice, and inhumanity that hardens hearts and tightens purse strings so that the bottom line becomes profit. As a million migrants move westward in search of home and food, landholders are addressed directly in second person—“You who own the things people must have” (152, emphasis added). It is the principle of reciprocity underlying all great religions—the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—a seemingly simplistic Sunday-school lesson. But the real-life application Steinbeck recommends is far from simple: it is, rather, ameliorative and curative. What other reasonable and humane answer could there possibly be?Today the silence of those who drop into the abyss of our society's homeless would grieve Steinbeck. Today he would be horrified and furious over the cries of children separated from loved ones and held in cages on the southern border of the United States. He would be enraged and saddened by the steady undermining of the nation's healthcare system, by the embedded power of the National Rifle Association as the nation faces one mass shooting after another, by the necessity for shooter drills in our schools, by hate crimes that are an assault on the human dignity of us all, by the attacks on our voter and First Amendment rights, by an unprecedented abuse of power in the White House.Steinbeck had an indomitable faith in America's democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people—and he believed that their voices could and would be heard. In our own times—when the marketplace, materialism, and greed take priority over the homeless, helpless, and dispossessed in the midst—such certainties seem wistful. Still, we hear Steinbeck's voice: “I want to go to the other side of home where the lights are given.” He has always been the voice of light, truth, integrity. He shows the way. Attention is the key, and love, and kindness—hardly sappy or sentimental at all—for as Quaker William Penn states, “Love is the hardest lesson of all to learn” (60). Love, with attention—this is the “beacon thing” and the only way to stand against the perils and bring light into the darkness of our times.The lead essay in this issue of Steinbeck Review, Susan Shillinglaw's “John Steinbeck's Participatory Politics, 1936–1968,” concludes, “We need straight-talking Steinbeck, not simply the artist but the citizen provocateur: ‘Our purpose is to keep the state straight by criticizing it, … to show its faults, to make it work hard to overcome the criticism.’ He believed that the American system would steadily improve, that a forward step—toward racial equity, for example—would never turn into a full step backwards. Let's hope he was right, that he'll stay with us to the end, that his will remain an indignant Voice of Americans.” This essay portrays this “straight-talking Steinbeck.”The next critical paper, Lowell Wyse's “The World-Brain and the Watershed: The Spatiality of Steinbeck's Environmental Vision,” continues with an innovative ecocritical survey of “Steinbeck's literary cartography,” examining his “singular blending of geography and ecology,” particularly as presented in two of the Salinas Watershed fictions, To a God Unknown and East of Eden. Those two novels “show how the relative availability of water not only sustains or challenges human and nonhuman life, but also, on a systemic level, dictates patterns of spatial and economic development.” The “world-brain” which appears in To a God Unknown is contemplated as a “sweeping image of an environmental consciousness overseeing space, nature, and time,” one that offers an “inclusive geographical, ecological, and historical framework of place perception—an ecospatial orientation.”In a wide-ranging comparative paper reflective of the current political climate in the United States, Mimi Reisel Gladstein offers a broad-ranging survey of two important motifs in Steinbeck's fiction, business and immigration, arguing that these motifs reflect political and social concerns of continuing significance. Although known for his depictions of big banks and agribusiness in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck also provided more positive and nuanced depictions of those engaged in business. Gladstein argues that more attention should be given to such characterizations, and to the presentation of moral and political aspects of capitalism in his work.In her thought-provoking study of the dynamics of “the ideological potential of literary works,” Danica Čerče carefully examines “the fortunes of Steinbeck's works in East European countries as they were in the grip of communist rule and as they are now since the change in the political systems.” When viewed only through an “ideological lens,” Steinbeck's works had value only as potential support for “oppressive political regimes,” and he was categorized narrowly as a “social realist writer.” Čerče shows that although in the past his work “inadvertently served as a political tool against the social order of capitalism,” publication possibilities, translation opportunities, and critical evaluation have changed substantially in recent years.Leading the Intercalary section with her comparative essay, “From ‘Beach Read’ to Ethnic Urban Drama: Steinbeck's Imprint on the Twenty-First-Century Novel,” Cecilia Donohue examines Steinbeckian elements and influences in two recent fictions, The Vacationers by Emma Straub and There There by Tommy Orange. Steinbeck's novels, particularly The Grapes of Wrath and The Wayward Bus, are shown to contain “multifaceted cultural touchstones” which should be “deemed both influential and inspirational,” whether in relation to light reading or to more serious contemporary fiction.Beth Linder Carr's personal retrospective essay, “On Teaching The Grapes of Wrath,” presents a wide-ranging survey of challenges and rewards encountered over a long teaching career. Besides pointing out useful resources and reliable teaching techniques, Carr also addresses numerous broader issues such as classroom censorship, distractions from the digital world, and even the difficulties of awakening compassion in students unaccustomed to reading.A second consideration of the teaching of Steinbeck is offered in “Truth, Gender, and Black Sheep: Students on Steinbeck,” which provides a fascinating look at three essays on Steinbeck's fiction by students who were fortunate enough to have taken a class drawing directly on the resources of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Guided by Susan Shillinglaw, these students explored their own unique interests, focusing on how Steinbeck's characters addressed various forces shaping subjectivity, gender assignment anxieties, psychological obstacles, and other concerns. The students' perceptive comments clearly demonstrate that Steinbeck's works have retained their power to provoke interesting new responses.William Ray's “Steinbeck Today” rounds out the Intercalary contributions with an announcement that is of high interest to Steinbeck scholars and buffs: “The donation to Stanford of the S. J. Neighbors collection of John Steinbeck papers, ranging from 1859 to 1999, constitutes the most important news about Steinbeck in the first half of 2019, solidifying Stanford's status as a Steinbeck center and opening multiple avenues of research for scholars who like to dig.” The correspondence alone is valuable, featuring exchanges with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other prominent twentieth-century figures.Finally, this issue includes two reviews of recent publications of import to Steinbeck readers and researchers. William Ray succinctly surveys and frankly evaluates the controversial biography My Life with John Steinbeck: The Story of John Steinbeck's Forgotten Wife, by Gwyn Conger Steinbeck and Douglas Brown. He concludes with reference both to primary materials essential to a work on Gwyn's life and to an upcoming Steinbeck biography: “A new biography of John Steinbeck is on the way, and The Closest Witness—along with copies of the tapes—can be examined at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. As for My Life with John Steinbeck: caveat lector.”Thomas Barden reviews Thomas E. Cronin's timely sociopolitical analysis in Imagining a Great Republic: Political Novels and the Idea of America. Although Cronin devotes only twelve of the book's some four-hundred pages to The Grapes of Wrath—one of forty novels included in this tome—it is a treasure for Steinbeck scholars and “a grand tour of American literature.” In addition, he also weaves in “a subtle thread of warning regarding our current political crises…. But the message Cronin sends whenever he brings up Trump—or the power of the wealthy 1%, or the denial of global warming—is that we must not give up on politics.” All of the writers he includes have one quality in common: optimism. Although Cronin writes from the perspective of a political scientist rather than a literary critic, this volume is especially valuable, Barden writes, because of its “underlying ideas, insights, and conceptual structures.”It was so good to see such a diverse representation of Steinbeck scholars—or soon-to-be scholars—at the International John Steinbeck Conference, “Steinbeck and the Twenty-First Century: Identity, Influence, and Impact,” on the beautiful campus of San José State University last May 2019. I met students from Stanford and San José, and I am sure there were others present as well. Participants came from across the country and from such far-flung places as Algeria, Slovenia, and Japan. We look forward to our next coming together to celebrate Steinbeck, the man, and his works.We are very glad to have Kathleen Hicks back as an associate editor, and we congratulate her on her new position at Arizona State University. All of us are deeply indebted to Luchen Li for his exemplary leadership as President of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars. Thank you, Luchen. Congratulations to Danica Čerče on her election as President. She will bring greetings to the Society in the Spring 2020 Steinbeck Review.