In Dubious Battle Read Free Page B

self-interest.
    Joining the group does not alter the individual’s tendencies. It only provides a cover for an individual’s behaving in a manner that he would not have the nerve to initiate, a cover for relaxing his inhibitions.
    Steinbeck most lucidly presents the feelings of a member of a lynch mob in a short story dating from the same period as
In Dubious Battle,
originally titled “The Lonesome Vigilante.” (It appears in
The Long Valley
as simply “The Vigilante,” and it is based on an actual event that occurred in San Jose, the home town of Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol.) After participating in a fatal lynching, a character named Mike is charged by his “thin, petulant wife” with having been with another woman. “By God, she was right,” he thinks to himself. “That’s exactly how I do feel.” Violence compensates for sexual frustration.
    Steinbeck had picked up the phalanx theory from lectures he’d heard at Stanford on the writings of William Emerson Ritter, a professor of marine biology at the University of California at Berkeley. He evidently pursued Ritter’s writings, for the concept of the “phalanx” utilized in
In Dubious Battle
is developed principally in “The Organismal Conception: Its Place in Science and Its Bearing on Philosophy,” co-authored by Edna W. Barby (
California Publications in Biology,
1931). Steinbeck’s attraction to these ideas appears to have been in some measure based upon his inability to accept violence as a conscious manifestation of an individual’s behavior. He clung to the theory that the human race is basically educable, and Ritter’s speculations provided him with a means of rationalizingbehavior that he could not deal with as another’s deliberate choice.
    Since Steinbeck’s choices were not objectively intellectual but compassionate (as critics have begun to recognize, his writings derive from a basically romantic temperament), he ran into perplexing problems when he had Doc Burton follow up his pronouncements about man’s hating himself with some observations about split personalities. The dynamic characters in this novel, however—and in most of his work through
The Moon Is Down
—are not the troubled products of splits in their own psyches but of their differences from others, often exacerbated by social prejudices.
    The emotionally driving force of the narrative, however, distracts readers from what many of them, agreeing with Mac, would probably see as Burton’s “high-falutin’ ideas,” while the novel goes on about its own business, which Steinbeck manages masterfully through structure. In later works, however, his proclivity for shaky speculations like the phalanx theory was to cause serious problems, including charges that he was soft on the fascists in
The Moon Is Down,
though even in that work his underlying point is that the enslaved phalanxes manipulated by fanatical leaders will at length be defeated by enlightened individuals motivated by self-preservation and independence.
    Under the pressure of his own experiences on the home front and briefly observing the battlefront during World War II, he gradually replaced emphasis upon the disastrous results of phalanx behavior as the “condition” shaping his fiction with a vision of redemption by a magnanimous and caring secular hero who achieves self-fulfillment, best embodied in the all-loving Doc of
Cannery Row.
It is likely, however, thatSteinbeck could not have attained the rapport he did with international audiences during his greatest period without the inspiration he derived from a theory that enabled him to deal dispassionately with the horrors of mob behavior as a curable aberration, although he would frequently have to face charges of sentimentality from the more cynically minded.
    The shakiness of both the group-psychological theory that influenced Steinbeck during the period and the philosophical conclusions that he reached suggests that—despite his