John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1939)

In 1936 Steinbeck had written In Dubious Battle, a novel which recounts an activist for 'the Party' organising a fruit-pickers strike in a Californian valley. He wrote: I wanted to achieve a kind of detached perspective. I'm non-partisan, I'm just going to report, as a journalist, what's going on.

The savage anger, the raw yet measured fury of The Grapes of Wrath, was not penned by a detached observer. I'm trying to write history while it's happening...it is a mean, nasty book and if I could make it nastier I would...the book has a definite job to do...I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this. It comes as no surprise that Steinbeck was reviled as a communist and a falsifier; the book was banned from libraries and schools. Congressmen fulminated against it. But what a masterpiece! I felt only compassion for the Joad family and the other migrants. The heartbreak scene when they sell the possessions they can't take with them: You're not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives. And more - you're buying bitterness... Off they set, with thousands of others for California, every one a drum-major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness...and now can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it. This is raw, visceral reporting, not of an aloof reporter but of an empathetic participant - which is what Steinbeck became, going undercover for months to do his research.

  

John Steinbeck and his famous book

Highway 66: ‘the main immigrant road…the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and the shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership’ is the central artery for the biggest internal migration in American history. ‘The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but (the ancient Hudson) was the active thing, the living principle…this was the new hearth, the living centre of the family’; and if the truck was a centre, with Al becoming ‘the soul of the car’,  Ma Joad was the epicentre. What a near-indomitable matriarch. The land turtle, having seen off Tom and the cat, took his home with him on his travels; in a way so did Ma Joad – the fambly was ‘home’.

The authorial knife plunges deep with regularity: The big cars on the highway. Languid, heat-raddled ladies...eyes sullen...hating time that rarely makes them beautiful and always makes them old...beside them, little pot-bellied men...reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is... ; the powerful Chapter Nineteen, on how a horde of feverish tattered Americans  stole land from the Mexicans to colonise California but, in turn, vented the angry fear on the Okies - 'scum' and the 'reds' (any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five); the mocking account of a preacher whipping the people with his voice...he calculated them, gauged them, played on them...and he prayed that all men and women might grovel and whine on the ground;  but, above all, The bank - the monster - has to have profit all the time. It can't wait...It'll die when the monster stops. 

The characters are all deftly drawn: Grampa, forever failing to button his pants; Granma – ‘Puraise Gawd fur vittory’ -dying before reaching the Promised Land; Casy, the erstwhile preacher who loved  the ‘human sperit’ and people ‘so much I’m fit to bust’ but because he knew nobody named Jesus, could not love him; Uncle John, who just had to indulge in  a burst of sin to keep his spirits down; Muley Graves, ‘like a damn ol’ graveyard ghos’ ‘; Al, hero worshipping young Tom, but equally worshipping female flesh; the one-eyed wrecking-yard attendant, wallowing in self-pity and hatred for his boss; the ragged man with his bitter home truths no one wanted to believe; the nameless ring of camp children, ‘their faces blank, rigid…’ watching Ma Joad cook the stew;  and (the one passage that made me laugh out loud!) , the Ladies’ Committee: ‘three ladies, dressed in their best clothes: a lean woman with stringy hair and steel-rimmed glasses, a small stout lady with curly grey hair and a small sweet mouth, and a mammoth lady, big of hock and buttock, big of breast, muscled like a dray-horse, powerful and sure…’ I can see them now!  

The long ‘familial’ chapters usually interspersed with the brief ‘reportage’ ones didn’t always work for me, as it interrupted the ‘flow’ of the narrative; but I understood what Steinbeck was ramming home: the microcosm that was the Joad family, dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the wider horror. 

So much to draw from this powerful novel, so many home truths, so timeless about the human condition and man’s inhumanity to man; so much to ponder and discuss.

P.S.  I bought the John Ford 1940 film, with Henry Fonda (too middle class!). Although, inevitably it leaves out so much – e.g. Ivy and Sairy Wilson – it is pretty faithful to the book.