The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [19]
Steinbeck needed only a few more days to finish his novel. Around noon on Wednesday, October 26, 1938, Steinbeck, “so dizzy” he could “hardly see the page,” completed the last 775 words of the novel; at the bottom of the manuscript page, Steinbeck, whose writing was normally minuscule, scrawled in letters an inch and a half high, “END#”. Having brought the weight of his whole life to bear on the new book should have been cause for wild celebrating, but Steinbeck felt only exhaustion and some numb satisfaction. In The Grapes of Wrath the multiple streams of subjective experience, current history, ameliorism, graphic realism, environmentalism, biblical themes, literary traditions, and symbolic forms gather to create the “truly American book” Steinbeck had planned. “Finished this day,” his simple final journal entry read, “and I hope to God it’s good.”
IV
In 1963 Steinbeck told Caskie Stinnett: “I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process.” Though Steinbeck actually wrote the novel in ninety-three sittings, it was his way of saying that The Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion. The entire 200,000-word manuscript took up 165 handwritten pages (plus one smaller sheet) of a 12‘ × 18‘ lined ledger book. When he was hot, Steinbeck wrote fast, paying little or no attention to proper spelling, punctuation, or paragraphing. On top of that his script was so small he was capable of cramming more than 1,300 words onto a single oversized ledger sheet (the equivalent of four pages of The Viking Press text). In short, the novel was written with remarkably preordained motion and directed passion; British scholar Roy S. Simmonds says it demonstrates a “phenomenal unity of purpose,” an example of “spontaneous prose,” years before Kerouac’s On the Road. Except for two brief added passages of 82 and 228 words and a deleted passage of approximately 160 words, the emendations are not major or substantive. Ironically, though Steinbeck severely doubted his own artistic ability, and in fact wavered sometimes in regard to such niceties as chapter divisions (he originally conceived the novel in three major books), in writing this novel he was on top of his game. From the vantage point of history, the venture stands as one of those happy occasions when a writer wrote far better than he thought he could.
Steinbeck had lost sight of the novel’s effectiveness and had little grasp of its potential popularity, so he warned Covici and The Viking Press against a large first printing. Viking ignored him and spent $10,000 on publicity and printed an initial run of fifty thousand copies. After recuperating in San Francisco, the Steinbecks moved to their new Brush Road mountain home. It was still under construction, so they camped awhile in the old homestead, where Carol finished typing the 751-page typescript, and together they made “routine” final corrections. At Covici’s badgering (he had read four hundred pages of the typescript on a visit to Los Gatos in late October), Steinbeck gave in and sent the first two chapters to him on November 29. The whole of Carol’s cleanly typed copy, which was actually only the second draft, was sent to his New York agents on December 7, 1938, roughly six months after Steinbeck had started the novel.
Elizabeth Otis visited Los Gatos in late December to smooth out some of Steinbeck’s rough language, like the dozen or so instances of “fuck,” “shit,” “screw,” and “fat ass,” which were the chief offenders (restored, along with other corrections, in the Library of America’s 1996 edition). They reached a workable compromise: Steinbeck agreed to change only those words “which Carol and Elizabeth said stopped the reader’s mind”; otherwise “those readers who are insulted by normal events or language mean nothing to me,” he told Covici on January 3, 1939. The novel’s enthusiastic reception at Viking was spoiled by the wrangling that ensued over the controversial Rose of Sharon ending, which the firm wanted Steinbeck to change. On January 16, 1939, he fired back: