The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [16]
Perhaps as early as the first week of February 1938—and no later than the first week of April—galvanized by reports of the worsening conditions in Visalia and Nipomo, he felt the need to do something direct in retaliation. John Steinbeck never became what committed activists would consider fully radicalized. His writings stemmed more from his own feelings and humane sensibility than from the persuasiveness of the Left’s economic and social ideas, but by putting his pen to the service of his cause, he was as close to being a firebrand as he ever would. He launched into “L’Affaire,” a vituperative satire aimed at attacking the leading citizens of Salinas, who put together a cabal of organizers called “the committee of seven” to foment the ignorant army of vigilantes (assembled from the common populace of Salinas—clerks, service-station operators, shopkeepers). “L’Affaire” was a “vulgar” tract of seventy thousand words but shortly after mid-May 1938, Steinbeck wrote to Otis and Covici (who had already announced the publication of “L’Affaire”) to inform them that he would not be delivering the manuscript they expected:
This is going to be a hard letter to write. . . . This book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! these incidents all happened but— I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire. . . . I know, you could sell possibly 30,000 copies. I know that a great many people would think they liked the book. I myself have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the argument but I don’t like the book. And I would be doing Pat a greater injury in letting him print it than I would by destroying it. Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly. And that I won’t admit, yet.
The final stage of writing culminated in The Grapes of Wrath. His conscience squared, his integrity restored, Steinbeck quickly embarked on the longest sustained writing job of his career. Ridding himself of poison by passing through a “bad” book proved beneficial, he told Otis on June 1, 1938: “It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.” Naturally, his partisanship for the workers and his sense of indignation at California’s labor situation carried over, but they were given a more articulate, directed shape.
Everything he had written earlier—from his 1936 Nation article, “Dubious Battle in California,” through “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” an April 1938 essay that functioned as the epilogue to Their Blood Is Strong, and even a poignant short story called “Breakfast” that he included in The Long Valley (New York: The Viking Press, 1938)—became grist for his final attempt. “For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have,” he wrote in Working Days on June 11, 1938. From his numerous field travels with Tom Collins, and from countless hours spent talking to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems, Steinbeck summoned all the concrete details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler imaginative nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures that animate fictional characterization.