Editor's Column
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/steinbeckreview.13.2.v
ISSN1754-6087
AutoresBarbara A. Heavilin, Kathleen Hicks,
ResumoIt is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage…. Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. (115)—John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters John Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be the most important book he had ever written. It is a book about love of family and, most especially, love for his two sons, Thom and John, Jr. In this book he left for them a record of all of his wisdom for living a good life, all of his love for them, all of his hope for their future. In Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters—daily letters to Pascal Covici written on facing pages with the manuscript of the novel—he stated his intention to write this book for his two young boys. Like every good parent, he had an eye to who they might become when they grew into manhood, and he was concerned for their future well-being. These intentions are doubly underscored as he stated with great deliberation that he has chosen to write this book specifically to them: I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little. And if the book is addressed to them, it is for good reason…. I think it will be necessary to speak very straight and clearly and simply if I address my book to two little boys who will be men before they read my book. They have no background in the world of literature, they don't know the great stories of the world as we do. And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness…. And so I will start my book addressed to my boys. (4–5) As he takes on a father's most important task—to leave an enduring legacy for his sons after he has gone—he determines to put his best efforts into this most important book, asking for Covici's prayers as he endeavors to remember how it was to be a child. “I think adults forget about children,” Steinbeck notes, continuing, They just literally do not remember how it was. I think I do remember and I am going to try very hard to remember more…. And now I would engage your prayers for me because I am going to try to go into the minds of children, but more than that. I am going to try to set down those minds on paper…. And these are not children as they are conceived by adults but children as they are to and among themselves…. And so I will set it down and I think it will be an unique record of the thinking of children. (149–50) Toward the end of East of Eden, after he describes the death of the evil Kate, he tells Covici, “And now you see, Pat, that I had to put in that last chapter to the boys” (170, emphasis added). And in final comments, he writes, “My book is about good and evil” (181).Thom Steinbeck was most fortunate to have had this father, whose love is forever preserved in the pages of his epic East of Eden—part novel, part history, part family lore, but most of all what Robert DeMott has called “a kind of ‘manner book,’ a guide to ethical conduct and moral deportment passed on from elders to children” (69). The cinematic conclusion of East of Eden telescopes on Cal's receiving his dying father's blessing. The scene enacts Steinbeck's own best wishes for his two sons—a blessing of sorts that embodies his high hopes for them as they grew into manhood. The accolades for Thom that follow attest that those hopes were well fulfilled—revealing John Steinbeck's eldest son to be a person of great magnanimity, warmth, and good humor. Nick Taylor recalls that “he liked to tell audiences that his father taught him an artist's job was to ‘remind us of our humanity,’ a dictum Thom kept close to his heart.” His father would have been most pleased and proud.San Jose, August 12, 2016. With sadness, the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State marks the passing of Thomas Steinbeck, eldest son of John Steinbeck and author of the story collection Down to the Soundless Sea (2002) and the novels In the Shadow of the Cypress (2010) and The Silver Lotus (2011). After a long struggle with pulmonary disease, he died peacefully at home in Santa Barbara at seventy-two years old.Thom Steinbeck and his wife, Gail, were supporters of the Center from its earliest days as a small university archive in the 1970s. Their donations to our collection include family heirlooms such as Steinbeck's Hermes portable typewriter, etched with the ominous phrase “the beast within.” The typewriter and other Steinbeck family memorabilia are on permanent display in the Center's facility on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in downtown San Jose.With the support of the Steinbeck family, the Center in 1996 created the “in the souls of the people” Steinbeck Award, given annually to artists and activists who embody Steinbeck's commitment to social justice. Thom Steinbeck frequently appeared at Steinbeck Award ceremonies to present the statuette to luminaries such as Garrison Keillor, Jackson Browne, and Rachel Maddow. He liked to tell audiences that his father taught him an artist's job was to “remind us of our humanity,” a dictum Thom kept close to his heart.Steinbeck Center board member Ted Cady, who coordinates the Steinbeck Award program and has known the Steinbecks for twenty years, remembers Thom fondly: “The world sold Thom Steinbeck short. Too often people heard the name Steinbeck and never got past it. They never saw Thom as Thom; they saw him only as John Steinbeck's son. That was unfair. He was extremely bright and very, very funny. I'm going to re-read his first book, Down to a Soundless Sea. Because above all, Thom Steinbeck was a master storyteller.”Rest in peace, Thom. Your friends in San Jose will miss you.Sad news, indeed, to hear that Thom Steinbeck died. I rue not having been able to see Thom in July when I was in Santa Barbara. He and his wife, Gail, and I had made plans to visit and catch up, but the plans were scratched by time constraints, my running late on the drive down from Salinas, and another prior obligation of mine.But Thom and I went back a long time—to 1984 when I was the newly appointed director of the San Jose State University Steinbeck Research Center (as it was then known), and I drove down one late winter afternoon to Carmel Highlands where Thom was living and spent a most pleasurable day in his company, aided no doubt by more wine and wide-ranging gossip than was good for either of us. Whatever the reason, we hit it off immediately. I'll never forget this moment because it was something of a blessing: as I was leaving, Thom, who had just gotten off the phone with brother John IV, said he had something he wanted me to have: it was his father's portable Hermes typewriter, the one John Steinbeck took on his Travels with Charley trip. I was flabbergasted by his generosity and John IV's, who was in on the gifting (I was after all a stranger), but told him that as I was representing the Steinbeck Center I could not accept it for myself but would donate it to the Center (where, happy to report, it is still on display). A photograph of it is on the cover of my book Steinbeck's Typewriter, and the thing became a metaphor for much of the way I have approached Steinbeck's creativity in the last three-plus decades. All thanks to Thom, bless his soul.And over the decades Thom was always that kind and generous to me, and I deeply appreciated his friendship, though I knew he was navigating some fractious personal and professional waters. We stayed in touch, met at various conferences (Hofstra University, for instance, in 2002), and in 2006 I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing him on stage before an audience at a Steinbeck Festival in Salinas. Thom made my job easy! He had a great sense of humor, he was lively, forthcoming, bone honest, engaging, animated, entertaining, full of interesting stories and anecdotes, and altogether a unique person. Some of the stories he told me about his father stay with me to this day, especially the one about his father putting a piece of broken mirror in a stream in the Los Gatos mountains so the only trout in the stream wouldn't be lonely! I am richer for having heard such tales, and richer for his having told me once that he felt he could talk to me as one writer to another writer, not as the son of a famous person to an inquiring scholar.Thom's resemblance to his father was uncanny, and talking to him you sometimes could not help thinking you were talking to John himself. But I was delighted when Thom's own writing career took off and he got out from under the shadow of being just a famous person's child, with all the baggage and detritus that can bring. I will miss him, miss his long-distance phone calls and notes and Facebook posts, miss his enthusiastic inquiries about my fishing adventures (a week before he died, Gail told me he was enjoying Angling Days and of course I was deeply moved), miss his advocacy for the Steinbeck literary line and name, miss just knowing he was alive in the world and a force for good on so many fronts.Viva Thom Steinbeck!I had the great pleasure of meeting Thom Steinbeck in 2002. He was gregarious, fun, smart, and wide open. Later we exchanged books, and he wrote in my copy of Down to a Soundless Sea, “Never write in the nude.” Good advice. He invited me to lunch with him in Santa Barbara and I regret very much that I never got out there. Thom was a great champion of John Steinbeck's work, and I am sure he made his father proud.Upon the death of Thom Steinbeck, whose well-being, along with his brother's, figures as a prominent concern in his father's Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, Robert DeMott's “Private Narratives / Public Texts: Steinbeck's Journals” provides timely reflection on the value of Steinbeck's journals for understanding this writer's craft. DeMott examines the intersections between Steinbeck's public compositions—his novels, nonfiction, and other works written for public consumption—and his private writings, which include the journal entries he produced as part of the composing process of his public works. DeMott argues, “Steinbeck created a kind of sub-genre—the journal of compositional procedure, or the narrative of creative literacy—that provides a window into his complex scene of writing and indicates a tantalizing relatedness between process and product.” By an analysis of Working Days, which details the composition of The Grapes of Wrath; of the journal Steinbeck kept while composing The Wayward Bus; and of Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, written during the composition of East of Eden, DeMott explores both the important function of the journals in Steinbeck's writing process and the insights they provide into the artist's craft and the writer's mind. DeMott's text shows that contemporary scholars should not underestimate the value of these journals and unpublished primary works and the contribution they have made to our understanding not only of his composing process, but also of Steinbeck himself as an artist and fellow human being.Jill Gold Wright's “Tortillas from Grapes: T. Coraghessan Boyle Reimagines Steinbeck's Social-Protest Novel” provides an intriguing comparison of T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel The Tortilla Curtain and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Wright demonstrates that Boyle deliberately ties his novel to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath to reimagine its themes and relevance in a contemporary setting. Wright examines Boyle's incorporation of Steinbeck's primary themes of natural disaster and prejudice against migrant workers to shed light on the social, racial, and economic ostracism experienced by California's contemporary population of predominantly Hispanic migrant workers. Wright's comparison demonstrates that there seems to have been little social and economic improvement for migratory workers in California since Steinbeck's time. While Boyle's novel certainly does not overshadow The Grapes of Wrath, she concludes, it does bring fresh attention to the rampant social and economic injustice that the migratory working population still faces in California today.This is followed by “The Legacy of Steinbeck's Interchapters: The Effects of Palimpsest on Group Consciousness and Universality” by Sonia Hamilton, the 2015 Louis Owens Prizewinner. Hamilton posits that an understanding of The Grapes of Wrath as palimpsestic, particularly through Steinbeck's use of the intercalary chapters, provides for a transcendent view of both time and subject, thus ensuring the work's continuing relevance for contemporary audiences. Comparing these interchapters with the Builders Association's play House/Divided, which interlays components of Steinbeck's narrative alongside visual images of contemporary economic collapse, Hamilton concludes that the intercalary chapters are critical because they enable readers “to draw connections between the individual and the group, to illuminate historical patterns, and ultimately, to expand their audience's group consciousness and highlight the timelessness and universality of the texts' shared narrative.” This layering effect similarly created by both the intercalary chapters in Steinbeck's text and the imagery in House/Divided enriches and deepens the significance of the Joads' personal experiences by broadening their impact on their own community and on society at large.Brian Railsback's “A Twenty-First-Century Grapes of Wrath: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones” begins the Intercalary section. The paper avows that Ward's Salvage the Bones “is our Grapes of Wrath for today.” Railsback writes that Ward has created a warning for us as “ever-widening income inequality, growing racial alienation, and disastrous climate change” are all occurring without much promise that “the people will keep moving forward. Perhaps, Salvage the Bones suggests, in the twenty-first century the people have nowhere to go.”In like manner, in “Specters of Joad,” William Brevda examines a complex, layered intertextuality in The Grapes of Wrath that is embodied in the figure of the specter of Tom Joad. Beginning with Tom's haunting proclamation that his spirit will persist wherever injustice is found, Brevda examines the spectral figures in the novel, such as Tom and Muley Graves, as well as texts that “haunt” the novel itself, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto, the Bible, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass—texts that influence the social commentary in the work. Brevda couches his examination in Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, thus providing an intriguing new perspective of the image of haunting in the novel and on the figure of Tom Joad, whose spirit, Brevda asserts, has continued to haunt readers and other artists across the decades.Following a discussion of the numerous references, events, and publications on John Steinbeck over the past six months, Will Ray concludes “Steinbeck Today” on an optimistic note: “The variety of venues in which Steinbeck appeared in recent months astonished those who care most deeply for his reputation as a writer. The diversity of work inspired by his ideas, and their relevance to current issues, justifies this journal and validates the vision of Martha Heasley Cox in founding the Center for Steinbeck Studies more than forty years ago. In April San Jose State University announced that Cox had left $4.8 million to fund digital bibliography of works by and about Steinbeck and to ensure that the Steinbeck Fellows program, which she also founded, would continue.”Among the reviews in this issue is Lowell Wyse's favorable commentary on The Western Flyer: Steinbeck's Boat, the Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries by Kevin McLean Bailey. Wyse characterizes this short, 146-page text as an excellent work of environmental history that also further contributes to the body of scholarship devoted to examinations of Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts's environmental philosophy. Also, Spencer Cunningham favorably reviews James R. Swensen's Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography. Cunningham asserts that Swensen's book effectively and artistically sheds new light on the Depression-era photography that influenced the composition of The Grapes of Wrath. Cunningham further praises Swensen for drawing connections between Depression-era photos and contemporary economic injustice, which he believes makes the work timely and relevant. Samantha Hunt reviews Steinbeck in Avalon: Bruton, Somerset, 1959, Andrew Pickering's recent work on the period of time Steinbeck spent in Somerset struggling with the composition of The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. Although Hunt notes that the work is well researched and provides an abundant useful geographical and historical context, she concludes that it fails to grapple adequately with some of the more intriguing issues surrounding the composition of this work, including Steinbeck's inability to finish it. Finally, Ryder W. Miller provides a review of the classic The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin, which is back in print. Miller notes that those who appreciate Steinbeck and environmental writing in general will certainly enjoy Austin's detailed account of the desert landscape with all of its beauty and perils. Drawing connections between Austin's text and Steinbeck's foreboding passages about the southwestern desert in The Grapes of Wrath, Miller finds that reading her work with Steinbeck in mind provides for a satisfying and perhaps a spiritual experience.Finally, Luchen Li, President of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars, provides both an overview of the international Steinbeck conference held in May 2016 at San Jose State University and also an account of recent and upcoming Steinbeck-related events. Li concludes, “Because of their timeless literary and artistic value, Steinbeck's works will continue to engage scholars, and our Society will continue to expand, building on the solid foundation laid by Steinbeck scholars in the past half century and the new dynamics demonstrated by students of the younger generation.”It is our hope that this issue of Steinbeck Review will be a fitting tribute to the memory of Thom Steinbeck and to his father, who encouraged writers “to lift up, to extend, to encourage.” The Spring 2017 issue of Steinbeck Review will feature “To a God Unknown: Drought, Climate, and Race in the West” by Gavin Jones of Stanford University and “John Steinbeck's Beacon in Darkness: East of Eden as a Morals Paradigm for Sons” by Barbara A. Heavilin. Some papers from the international Steinbeck conference held at San Jose in May 2016 are still under review for future issues. Also, please see the call for papers on the back cover of this journal issue.
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