The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [22]
It also changed Steinbeck irrevocably. Many “have speculated,” Jackson Benson writes, “about what happened to change Steinbeck after The Grapes of Wrath. One answer is that what happened was the writing of the novel itself.” The effects of writing 260,000 words in a single year “finished” him, he told Lawrence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939. After his long siege with the “Matter of the Migrants” (“I don’t know whether there is anything left of me,” he confided in October 1939), his “will to death” was so “strengthened” that by the end of the decade he was sick of writing fiction. It was a decision many critics and reviewers held against him for the rest of his life; they wanted him to write The Grapes of Wrath over and over again, which he refused to do. “The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it,” he told Herbert Sturz. “Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren’t going to write that one again anyway. When you start another—the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.”
The unabated sales, the frenzied public clamor, and the vicious personal attacks over The Grapes of Wrath confirmed Steinbeck’s worst fears about the fruits of success and pushed the already hostile tensions between John and Carol to the breaking point, a situation exacerbated by his willful romance with Gwyn Conger (they were wed from 1943 to 1948; the marriage produced two children) and his repeated absences in Hollywood and Mexico. Steinbeck did not quit writing, as he had threatened, but by the early 1940s he was no longer content to be the person he had once been. His letter of November 13, 1939, to former Stanford roommate Carlton Sheffield pulls no punches: “I’m finishing off a complete revolution. . . . The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel as I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it— a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking.”
Steinbeck’s sea change was not caused by bankruptcy of talent, change of venue from California to New York, divorce from Carol, or failure of nerve or integrity (critics offer these reasons to explain his alleged “decline” as a writer). Rather, it resulted from reaching the end of a consciously planned work project that produced his labor trilogy—In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and Grapes—and a subsequent backlash from their unprecedented and unanticipated success, which caused in him a repugnant “posterity.” “I have always wondered why no author has survived a best-seller,” he told John Rice in a June 1939 interview. “Now I know. The publicity and fan-fare are just as bad as they would be for a boxer. One gets self-conscious and that’s the end of one’s writing.”
His new writing lacked the aggressive political bite of his late 1930s fiction, but it had the virtue of being different, varied, and experimental. After 1940 much of his important work centered on explorations of newly discovered topics: ecological issues, scientific discourse, and inter-relatedness of nature and culture in two brilliant books, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), written with Ed Ricketts, and Cannery Row (1945); the implications of individual choice, heroism, and moral action in The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), Viva Zapata! (1952), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961); personal nonfiction narratives in Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966). A prophetic postmodernist, Steinbeck