The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [14]
Steinbeck understood that the migrants would not vanish from sight, even though official California hoped they would. He also knew that the subject reached further than he had first imagined. Consequently, Steinbeck built on his News pieces and made at least one more monthlong field trip with Tom Collins in October and November 1937. They started from Gridley, where Collins was managing a new camp, but then roamed California from Stockton to Needles, wherever migrants were gathered at work. His purpose was to gather more research for his next version, the “big” book of fiction that had been in his mind for most of that year. (A letter to Elizabeth Otis, written on January 27, 1937, indicates that he had been wrestling with this version since the previous winter: “The new book has struck a bad snag. . . . The subject is so huge it scares me to death.”) In an interview with Dorothy Steel on November 4, 1937, in the Los Gatos Mail News, Steinbeck told of starting a book whose topic was the Dust Bowl refugees, the “Oklahomans.” Though he was “reluctant to discuss the characters and plot,” he said it was “one-third complete and will be about 1,000 pages in length.” Given his comment to Otis, and the fact that Steinbeck traveled a good deal that year, three hundred pages of completed manuscript may have been wishful thinking on his part, or it may gave represented the total number of pages of reports and research notes he had accumulated thus far.
In a second interview two months later, with journalist Louis Walther on January 8, 1938, in the San Jose Mercury Herald, he apparently had not progressed much, if at all. After hitting several “snags,” he was working on a “rather long novel” called “The Oklahomans,” which was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to Walther to indicate that his novel’s focus was the salutary, irrepressible character of the “southern dust bowl migrants” who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California. “Their coming here now is going to change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.” Furthermore, “the Californian doesn’t know what he does want. The Oklahoman knows just exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it.” (In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck did not relinquish his land hunger theme, or his belief that the migrants formed a specific phalanx group within the large national mass movement of the 1930s, but he dropped his imperious and unironic tone.)
Quietly, as nearly as can be determined, between January and March 1938, Steinbeck stopped work on “The Oklahomans.” He never mentioned it again by name, the manuscript has never been found, and—his boasts of three hundred completed pages aside—it is doubtful that he had actually written a substantial amount at all on it. Its existence is shrouded in tantalizing mystery and conjecture. In the first entry of Working Days, on February 7[?], 1938, he mentioned having written “ten pages” of an otherwise unidentified book. And six weeks later, on March 23, 1938, he again told Elizabeth Otis: “I’ve been writing on the novel but I’ve had to destroy it several times. I don’t seem to know any more about writing a novel than I did ten years ago. You’d think I would learn. I suppose I could dash it off but I want this one to be a pretty good one. There’s another difficulty too. I’m trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong.” These comments in February and March 1938 have long been thought to refer to the beginnings of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” (discussed below), but they could as easily refer to one (or more) avatars of “The Oklahomans,” the Ur-Grapes of Wrath, which had not yet found its proper impetus or creative urgency. But in mulling over, rehearsing, and living with this big subject for so long, Steinbeck was staking his claim to its imaginative territory and experimenting with a way to fictionalize material that was, until then, the stuff of reportage.
The migrant situation had worsened, and along with it, Steinbeck