Just How It Is

John Steinbeck - The Long Valley

I haven’t come across any direct link between John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver – apart from the obvious: American writers in the ‘realist’ tradition; and Carver clearly will have read and assimilated and so on. But I haven’t found any critical commentary that has pursued links, or writing from Carver that references Steinbeck in any detail.

I have been looking for this overt link because as I am reading Steinbeck’s wonderful short story collection The Long Valley I am constantly thinking of Carver, but only at a specific point. Steinbeck’s detailed descriptions, especially of the natural world either as an entity or in its relationship with any particular protagonist, are second to none. He must have had the most observant eye and retentive memory. Carver’s world doesn’t use or rely on this level of description. It is simply different, and where there is the need for detail it is more about people and how they act.  Both writers, of course, excel in the use of realistic dialogue. But that's not the critical point of comparison.

Where I have been making the key juxtaposition is at the endings of Steinbeck’s stories. In so many ways, for example in The Chrysanthemums, The White Quail, The Snake and Breakfast [I haven’t finished the book yet], Steinbeck adds explaining and/or alluding lines at the very end where Carver would have left the story ‘hanging’ more. He would have left the moment of clarity or confusion or, especially in his case, nothingness, to speak for itself.

Take Breakfast for example: a superb snatch of a moment. The final paragraph, spoken by the first person narrator, explains where no explanation is really necessary, 

That’s all. I know, of course, some of the reasons why it was pleasant. But there was some element of great beauty there that makes the rush of warmth when I think of it.

The last line of the preceding and penultimate paragraph is And I walked away down the country road. That’s where Carver would have ended it. The story about a shared, random breakfast in the early morning is a quintessential vignette: a moment and mood conveyed with palpable simplicity. As readers, we have sensed the ‘great beauty’ and ‘warmth’ as it happened, and in that respect there is no need to be reminded. The other stories I have mentioned have similar additions. Perhaps it is to do with the time and a reader’s expectation of explication. I don’t know.

This will sound like preference, but it isn’t. Both writers are brilliant; and literary heroes. It’s just something distinct that struck me today as I was reading.

John Steinbeck - To A God Unknown

Proper Lust

I have just finished this, beginning it many months ago, and don't know why it has taken so long - having been quite gripped by its portentous narrative - apart from the rather feeble reality that I like reading outside in the sun and it has just returned after a long and grey absence.

It is a novella and Steinbeck's second significant book, completed in 1933 and having taken, apparently, five years to write. It is the polar opposite of Of Mice and Men being laden with language and philosophy. What is does share, however, is a tragic inevitability as the protagonist Joseph Wayne is consumed by his love and worship of the land and eventually sacrifices himself to it, literally, when that land finally rewards him for his gift - not that he can then benefit. But others do, and that is perhaps crucial.

I sound like I am saying Of Mice and Men has no philosophy which would be inaccurate. But To A God Unknown is heavy-handed in this respect, not that this weight in any way dissuaded me - indeed, this and the voluptuous language Steinbeck was exploring to encapsulate such early literary and philosophical preoccupation is the book's strength. There are times when Joseph's communing with nature is so intensely realised that you want to partake wholly in its pastoral ideal, though that makes it sound more cerebral than acknowledging the primacy given to the physical commitment required in achieving that spiritual attainment.

It is above all, I think, a humanist attainment too. There seems to be an undercurrent of rejecting Christian precepts of humbling oneself before God in gratitude for what is given through the natural world, and Steinbeck offers a pantheism of which even Coleridge couldn't conceive. Perhaps it would have been too pagan for someone like Coleridge too.

I am intrigued by the cover of the book that will end this posting and its notion of a 'lust' for the land - which is quite appropriate - but  is quite inappropriately [if comically] represented by the near-naked female. There is a strong and powerful quest for love through Joseph's marriage to Elizabeth in the story, but this too has its tragic conclusion,

John Steinbeck - Burning Bright

Artifice Alight but Alright

If you teach GCSE English in this country, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is the holy grail of engaging in educational pragmatism: teaching a book of unquestionable literary quality that is accessible, meaningful, challenging and examinable for all. That this is the only prose literally hundreds of thousands of young people here will ever know in any depth is both glorious and despairing, but I'm not pursuing that paradox now. Come January 2012, my next examination period, I will no doubt be reading and assessing hundreds of more OMAM responses, and I love it.

Like the other millions who know Steinbeck's work well, I am a devoted fan, both as reader and teacher. I read most of his work when I was 19 years old: in brief, whilst working on the farm I once spent a few weeks driving a tractor and trailer that collected silage and this entailed long periods of simply waiting my turn to have the latter filled, and in these moments I read Steinbeck's novels, there in the tractor cab. That said, I do recall exactly where I was when I finished The Grapes of Wrath, my favourite novel of all authors: in the small second bedroom of my cottage. I can't remember where I was when JFK was shot, or the moon landing, but I do when I read that astonishing ending. And what a colossal work: the storyline, the politics and philosophy, the dialogue, the intercalary chapters with their metaphoric reflections, the biblical prose and the expansive descriptive narrative.

This is by way of introducing and writing briefly about Burning Bright which I have just finished. As I said recently, I thought I had read all of Steinbeck's work but found this untouched on the shelf. It is problematic as a read in a way his other work isn't. I chose not to read Steinbeck's own forward at the beginning, though I did after the first Act, a clue I had missed when I began. The opening descriptive detail is classic Steinbeck, for example in the introduction to Joe Saul,

A lithe and stringy man of middle age, Joe Saul. His jaws muscled against strain and cables down the sides of his neck. His arms were white and blue-veined, with the long chords of clinging and hanging rather than the lumps of lifting. His hands were white, the fingers spatulate, and palms and fingers calloused from the rope and bar.

The setting for Act One is a circus, and the opening detail is typically taut and clear in presenting place and the four main characters: Joe Saul, Friend Ed, Mordeen and Victor. We see immediately the tent where Joe is getting ready to perform and the stubbled field where this and others are pitched. We also see immediately that he is a trapeze artist and Friend Ed is a clown, and so on. Simple and succinct and vivid. It is soon apparent, however, that the dialogue is full of artifice. When Friend Ed enters, he speaks with a knowing that doesn't ring true, but background detail - Joe's loss of his wife and partner - is quickly conveyed in the rather heavy opening exchanges.

At this point I sensed the theatricality of the dialogue and turned to the forward where Steinbeck talks about the experimentation of writing this as a 'play novelette' and his rationale for doing so - obviously referencing the roots of this in Of Mice and Men - so my instinct was correct though I should have known this anyway, considering myself to know his work well!

And here is an example of the artifice and melodrama in the speech,

Joe Saul stirred. 'Yes, I know that. But something like a ceremony, something like a golden sacrament, some pearl like a prayer or a red flaring ruby of thanks. Some hard, tangible humility of mine that she can hold in the palm of her hand or wear dangling from a ribbon at her throat.'

The artifice is carried into the structure too, the four Acts taking us with the same characters and situation/plot into wholly different contexts - from circus, to farm, to the sea [on a freighter], and to a hospital room. The central plot twist is also quite evident near the end of Act One, so it is a highly crafted, and visibly so construction. As a tale of love, friendship, self-sacrifice, deceit and human compulsion, it tackles the major literary and real human themes. I think I would find a stage production as inevitably stilted, and because Steinbeck attempts to embrace both prosaic and theatrical genres, it is ultimately - but because it is him - a jack of both and marginal master of each. And perhaps my experimental appropriation of a summation is equally contentious.

So would I recommend it? Of course - it's Steinbeck! Even with the stylised dialogue and plot projection I found the story compelling, from simply wanting to know how it ended, to being fascinated by the experimentation and wanting to see/read it through. When first published in 1951 [as a companion piece to The Pearl; it was first published as a single volume in 1971] it was, apparently, criticised in reviews both as prose and as a play, though the experimentation was acknowledged more positively, this a little condescending though if I'm honest I suspect I too value it for this creative impulse over its realisation.

I have located a video version of a 1959 stage production of Burning Bright and I am intrigued enough to want to see if I can get this. I wasn't able to find a picture of my single volume Pan edition, but I do like the two versions I did find, which both focus illustratively on BB rather than The Pearl [the latter of course highly regarded] and it is interesting how those images so clearly 'sell' the human relationship drama as soap opera!