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Book Reviews

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/steinbeckreview.17.2.0246

1754-6087

William Ray,

American Literature and Culture

William Souder's Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck may well become the biography of choice for the broad readership that Steinbeck desired for his own writing. Five years in the making, it is the first full-length treatment of Steinbeck's life since Jay Parini's John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994), and it is shorter by half than The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, the 1984 biography by Jackson Benson which has become the bible of Steinbeck specialists. A journalist by training, Souder had access to sources unavailable to Benson or Parini. Souder was also unencumbered by the second-guessing from Steinbeck's survivors and descendants that delayed and disrupted Benson's work and caused him to complain, in Looking for Steinbeck's Ghost (1988), about the cost of their interference to his pocketbook and psyche. As a result, the tone of Mad at the World is more relaxed and less formal than Benson's, and Souder's genial style has qualities of simplicity, immediacy, and grace that attract readers to Steinbeck's writing. The interplay of individual consciousness and historical events constitutes an organizing principle of Souder's commentary on Steinbeck's development, like the interconnection of private lives with public events that provides depth and dimension to the story of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, or the Trasks in East of Eden. Style and subject are a perfect match.Exhaustively researched and annotated, Mad at the World challenges some old assumptions about Steinbeck, who was frequently complicit in fictionalizing his own life by burning letters, perpetuating myths, and discouraging interviewers who might be potential biographers. Thanks to the generosity of individual collectors and the accessibility of archives at institutions including Stanford University and the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas—where Souder took fifty thousand words of notes from interviews with friends and associates of Steinbeck recorded in the 1970s and 1980s, including several interviews undertaken by Jackson Benson—Mad at theWorld manages to fill major gaps left in our knowledge of Steinbeck's life. Fresh sources tapped by Souder include Steinbeck's correspondence with Kate Beswick in the 1920s and 1930s, the private journal kept by Steinbeck in 1948, and letters from Steinbeck to his younger sister, Mary Steinbeck Dekker. Among the nuggets retrieved from the Beswick trove is Steinbeck's account of an episode from his childhood which sets the stage for Souder's portrait of a feeling man who never stopped being a brooding boy. The first of many revelations in a book full of surprises, the incident introduces the theme of Steinbeck's anger—at the kind of world where adults are often less lovable than animals. “There would always be a Steinbeck dog” in Steinbeck's life, says Souder: One named Teddy figured in an incident John long regretted. His parents were entertaining friends one evening when they got out some photos of John as a toddler, naked and in his bath. John's humiliation simmered for days. Finally, when John Ernst and Olive were out, he found the pictures and burned them. When he was discovered, John's punishment was that he could not play or even speak with Teddy for two weeks. Remembering this as a young man, Steinbeck told a friend that it had been a terrible time—because it was so hard on Teddy. Driven by the conflicting demands of self-absorption, self-assertion, and dependence on others, Steinbeck sought the companionship of dogs and people who were good listeners and compliant companions. Competent females with typing and editing skills, like Kate Beswick and Carol Henning, served this purpose. So did attentive, accommodating men like George Mors, Max Wagner, Dook Sheffield, and Ed Ricketts—loyal comrades who complemented Steinbeck's personality and complimented his work until separated from Steinbeck by death, distance, or disagreement. Told here through letters, journals, and personal interviews, the story of Steinbeck's anger with the world is as much a history of disrupted personal relationships as it is a record of literary protest against private cruelty and public corruption. Like most critical studies of Steinbeck's writing that concern themselves with matters of literary influence and modeling, Souder's account of Steinbeck's literary career largely limits itself to comparisons and references to other American writers, such as Fitzgerald, who shared Steinbeck's time and place in history. But the author of Of Mice and Men and The Winter of Our Discontent did his best borrowing from the Bible and from British writers such as Shakespeare, not from Hemingway. John Milton—the seventeenth-century English poet who inspired the title of In Dubious Battle—shared characteristics with Steinbeck which can help us better understand Souder's interpretation of Steinbeck's anger at the world.Like Milton, Steinbeck was a born idealist, blessed with literate, liberal-minded parents, access to a well-stocked home library, and an appreciation for great music bolstered by piano lessons and choral singing. Like Milton, he decided to write at an early age, reading widely in the solitude of his room, displaying impatience with his classmates, and leaving Stanford under circumstances suggested by the word used to describe Milton's departure from Cambridge: rustication. Like Milton, Steinbeck was a reluctant husband who found male friendship happier than marriage or fatherhood; like Milton, he teetered on misogyny in his treatment of women, though not—unlike Milton—in his writing about them. Once Steinbeck set his course to become a writer, his father, like Milton's, provided money, moral support, and a model of unfulfilled potential to be avoided at any cost. Unlike Mrs. Milton, Steinbeck's mother was an outgoing ex-schoolteacher who dominated domestic affairs, resisting her son's rougher impulses and rearing three daughters who went on to successful college careers and marriages of their own. Milton was a militant Puritan who embraced Christian self-denial while espousing the secular virtues of free speech, republican government, and the right to divorce. Steinbeck was a confirmed anti-Puritan who drank, took drugs, and considered suicide a matter of personal choice. Both men died at sixty-six, despite this difference, and both were acquainted with darkness and despair, despite the brilliance of their writing.Souder's portrayal of Steinbeck's painful psychology will come as no surprise to those acquainted with his portraits of two other Americans who were complicated figures in a turbulent landscape that put them out of tune with their time. Under a Wild Sky, his 2004 biography of the nineteenth-century naturalist and nature artist John James Audubon, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. On aFarther Shore, his 2012 life of the twentieth-century naturalist and nature activist Rachel Carson, approached the previously ignored issue of Carson's sexuality with sensitivity and discretion. Like his earlier books, Mad at the World avoids critical cant and common opinion to create an unconventional picture of an unconventional genius who brought all the resources of art and science to bear on the problem of personal and human survival in an impersonal and inhumane world. Survival, progress, and authenticity were preoccupations in all three lives, and Souder's work with Audubon and Carson prepared him superbly for exploring Steinbeck's vision of social justice through individual action.Souder's survey of the Salinas Valley at the beginning of the book offers the same blend of geological history and human drama that brought Steinbeck country to life for first-time for readers of Cannery Row and East of Eden. The Lost Generation of which Steinbeck was not a member is introduced early and with similar skill. Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's editor at Scribner's, Max Perkins, served in General Pershing's campaign against Pancho Villa; Souder leverages this fact like a novelist, reimagining the march of Pershing's Troop C down Main Street Salinas as Steinbeck might have seen it as a teenager, when America entered World War I. Familiar lines of counterpoint and causation in Steinbeck's career—the stock market crash and Great Depression, FDR and LBJ, World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam—are developed deftly, without overwhelming the narrative focus on a writer who remained at war with himself.Along with the usual subjects who dominate discussions of Steinbeck's life and career—Carol Henning Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, Toby Street, Joseph Campbell, Pat Covici—Souder pays attention to less familiar figures who influenced the course of his career: Kate Beswick, Edith Mirrielees, Carl Wilhelmson, the brothers Wagner and the brothers Albee, and the Oklahoma-born writer Sanora Babb. What we learn about each of them in the course of events helps shed new light on Steinbeck's fortunes as a lover, celebrity, and friend. As previously noted in a biography of Carol Steinbeck, the writer's first wife, Carol, registered as a communist in Santa Clara County in 1935, but the ensuing government file on Steinbeck was instigated by the U.S. War Office, not the FBI. The Grapes of Wrath narrowly beat Babb's neglected Dust Bowl novel to publication in 1939—a stroke of luck that was underappreciated at the time. The falloff in Steinbeck's friendship with his college classmate Carlton Sheffield was the fault of both men. But the monkey wrench in his relationship with the writer George Albee came from Albee's wife, who threw it with a ferocity foreshadowing Cathy's behavior in East of Eden.Like certain events in Travels with Charley, the so-called Easter Sunday episode—written by Ricketts and inserted into the text by Steinbeck—that occurred on board the Western Flyer in Sea of Cortez turns out to be an act of inspired invention. As Souder observes, “This section of the book would have been more entertaining if it had actually happened the way Steinbeck hinted—if it really had been Ed Ricketts pontificating, Carta Blanca in hand and half in the bag, while the bored crew kept a casual eye on Carol sunning her torso.” As for the veracity of Travels with Charley, Souder takes time to vindicate the work of Bill Steigerwald, the investigative reporter whose 2014 book DoggingSteinbeck reveals how and where Steinbeck fictionalized the record of his 1960 road trip “in search of America.” Ignored or rejected when he published his findings, “Steigerwald could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.”Among those credited with influencing the writing of Mad at the World are two authors with a close connection to Souder's career as a Minnesota writer passionate about the same things that moved Steinbeck: social justice and ecology. One is Souder's “longtime friend and mentor” Michael Lannoo, the Indiana polymath whose study Leopold's Shack and Ricketts's Lab was published by the University of California Press in 2010. The other is James Gray, the Minnesota newspaperman and critic whose “slim but penetrating monograph” John Steinbeck was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1971. Unlike others at the time, Gray perceived a linkage in Steinbeck's extended expression of anger—at human cruelty, hypocrisy, and greed—from Cup of Gold to The Winter of Our Discontent. Picking up this thread, Souder concludes that Steinbeck was “America's most pissed-off writer.”The shortcoming of Mad at the World is also a strength—its carefully controlled compression—and the longer version of the book Souder may have turned in to Norton might well have noted the appearance in 1939 of a pamphlet with the title “The Wrath of John Steinbeck,” by one Robert Bennett, a person incorrectly believed by previous biographers to have been a classmate of Steinbeck's at Stanford. The incident of righteous indignation ascribed to Steinbeck by Bennett was spurious. But the fabrication exemplifies the mythologizing that Steinbeck condoned by allowing stories like it to stand, and Bennett's title can now be seen as foreshadowing the theme of Steinbeck's abiding anger first articulated in Gray's monograph. Near the end of Souder's book he quotes a passage of Gray's which reminds us that Steinbeck's abiding sense of humor and self-transcendence—antidotes for anger in any age—is as fundamental to understanding his life and work as the quality of being pissed off. “Though his logic was cool,” notes Gray of Steinbeck, “his temper was not”: All his work steams with indignation at injustice, with contempt for false piety, with scorn for the cunning and self-righteousness of an economic system that encourages exploitation, greed, and brutality. What saved him from helpless vexation against frustrating reality that characterized his mother was in part his humor, which exercised a sanative and corrective influence on all his judgments, and in part his belief in oneness, in “a kind of wholeness to sense and emotion.” Building on the work of Gray, Lannoo, Benson, and Parini, Souder's elegant and engrossing biography of Steinbeck adds substantially to our understanding and appreciation of an author whose feeling for wronged humanity, like Faulkner's sense of Southern history, is never out of date.