Sweet Thursday Read Free

believe one thing powerfully—that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind…. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. The great change in the last 2,000 years was the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious. Unless we can preserve and foster the principle of the preciousness of the individual mind, the world of men will either disintegrate into a screaming chaos or will go into a gray slavery.”
    Following this pronounced shift in political orientation, Steinbeck composed four experiments between 1950 and 1954: the play-novelette Burning Bright , the film script Viva Zapata! , the epic East of Eden , and the comic Sweet Thursday . These “deeply personal” texts, as he called them, constitute a different order of writing from their more famous proletarian predecessors. By calling attention to their own literariness through such elements as literary allusions and references, language play, and artful framing devices, these works demonstrate Steinbeck’s turn toward an incipient postmodernism, a condition of textual openness and metafictional high jinks where the act of writing becomes its own valid end. “If a writer likes to write,” he claimed in “Critics, Critics, Burning Bright” in 1950, “he will find satisfaction in endless experiment with his medium. He will improvise techniques, arrangements of scenes, rhythms of words, and rhythms of thought. He will constantly investigate and try combinations new to him, sometimes utilizing an old method for a new idea and vice versa. Some of his experiments will inevitably be unsuccessful but he must try them anyway if his interest be alive. This experimentation is not criminal…but it is necessary if the writer be not moribund.”
    In its original form, Sweet Thursday was consciously proposed as a tonal, thematic counterbalance to the “weight” of East of Eden , Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent and the dedicatee of Sweet Thursday , on September 14, 1953: “it is kind of light and gay and astringent.” A boisterous sequel to Steinbeck’s more famous Cannery Row , which appeared nine years earlier (treating Monterey’s prewar era), Sweet Thursday shares the same Monterey Peninsula location in Northern California and many of the same characters as Cannery Row , but it takes up the post–World War II life of Doc (based on Steinbeck’s soul mate, Edward F. Ricketts, who had died in an auto-train crash on Ocean View Avenue in May 1948). The novel emphasizes Doc’s difficulties in reestablishing his Western Biological Laboratory business, his struggles with writing a scholarly treatise on octopi, and his rocky off-again, on-again relationship with an angry, tough-talking, golden-hearted hooker-turned-waitress named Suzy. It also features the burlesque-like antics of the Row’s Palace Flop house denizens (Mack, Hazel, and others) and Fauna, the madam of the Bear Flag, who—playing Cupid for Doc and Suzy—wants to ensure a romantic fairy-tale ending for the incompatible but otherwise smitten couple.
    As this brief summary suggests, when approached from a rigidly analytical position, Sweet Thursday can be considered sentimental (like most other hookers at Fauna’s Bear Flag brothel, Suzy’s indelible goodness erases her stigma as a prostitute, even a half-assed one at that), reductive (Doc imagines he cannot be happy without a woman to complete his identity), and improbable (the plot hinges on coincidences and convenient superficialities). Such flaws—trumpeted by many critics and scholars as indisputable proof of Steinbeck’s declining powers—have made the book an easy target for snipers, as it was for the unnamed Time reviewer who, in its June 14, 1954, issue, held nothing back: “ Sweet Thursday is a turkey with visible Saroyanesque stuffings. But where