The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [9]
Steinbeck augmented his ability with hard work and repeated practice. Where his characters use tools to elevate work to a dignified level, Steinbeck turned to his “comfortable and comforting” pen, an instrument that became an “extension” of the best part of himself: “Work is the only good thing,” he claimed on July 6, 1938, in Working Days. For Steinbeck, who had a pronounced nesting desire, writing was a kind of textual habitation, a way of building a home in the architectural spaces of his imagination. (This creative and interior level of engagement is the elusive, unacknowledged fifth layer of Steinbeck’s novel.) There was something positively totemic about his daily work routine and the ritual protocols he performed at the scene of his writing. Steinbeck often sequestered himself in the eight-by-eight-foot workroom of Arroya del Ajo (Garlic Gulch), the house he and Carol built in 1936 on Greenwood Lane in Los Gatos: “Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and a little book case. I like to sleep in the room I work in,” he told George Albee. Although Steinbeck insisted on effacing his own presence in The Grapes of Wrath, the fact remains that it is a very personal book, rooted in his own compulsion. The “plodding” pace of Steinbeck’s writing schedule informed the slow, “crawling” movement of the Joads’ journey, while the harried beat of his own life gave the proper “feel” and tone to his beleaguered characters. Their unsavory weaknesses and vanities, their struggles for survival, their unsuspecting heroism are Steinbeck’s as well. If The Grapes of Wrath praises the honorableness of labor and ratifies the obsessive quest for a home, it is because the author himself felt these acts were deeply ingrained psychic components.
If The Grapes of Wrath’s communal vision began in the fire of Steinbeck’s own labor, the flames were fanned by numerous people, especially Carol Steinbeck and Tom Collins. Carol Henning Steinbeck (1906-1983), his outgoing first wife, was more politically radical than John (she registered as a Communist on the voting roles of Santa Clara County in 1938 to 1939, though partly as an experiment to test local reaction) , and she actively supported northern California’s fugitive agricultural labor movement. (According to definitive biographer Jackson J. Benson, Steinbeck was not much interested in doctrinaire political theories at this point in his career.) Carol was an energetic, talented person in her own right, who agreed to relinquish a possible career in favor of helping to manage his. Their partnership and marriage was smoother and more egalitarian in the struggling years of Steinbeck’s career; with the enormous success—and pressures—brought first by Of Mice and Men (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), and then by The Grapes of Wrath, their situation became more tenuous and volatile. Carol was an extremely strong-willed, demonstrative person, and she was often frustrated, resentful, and sometimes jealous; John, inordinately shy, was frequently beleaguered, confused, and demanding. In the late 1930s, whenever John was writing daily, which was much of the time, Carol handled—but didn’t always like—most of the routine domestic duties. She also shielded her husband as much as possible from unwarranted disruptions and intrusions, and she oversaw some of the financial arrangements (an increasingly large job) between Steinbeck and his literary agents. “Carol does so much,” Steinbeck admitted on August 2, 1938.
Carol also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. In January 1938, on a trip to New York City, she met with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz (1905-1992), arranging between them his first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck-Lorentz movie version of In Dubious Battle (which was never made) and a private showing of The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains. These pioneering documentary films, which Lorentz made for President Franklin D. Roosevelt