Sweet Thursday Read Free Page A

[William] Saroyan might have clothed the book’s characters and incidents with comic reality, Steinbeck merely comic-strips them of all reality and even of very much interest.”
    But to arrive at the deeper significance of this oddball fiction, questions of character motivation and realism need to be contextualized. Sweet Thursday is important for what it reveals of Steinbeck’s continuing aesthetic and philosophical changes and for his attitude toward the necessity of fictive experimentation in the unsettling wake of a postwar depletion (symbolized by the decline of sardines in Monterey Bay), and a pervasive exhaustion that influenced all levels of Cannery Row’s existence.
    Steinbeck understood the corrosive nature of discontent and disaffection. There was a span in his career, beginning in mid-1948, when he was cut adrift from accustomed moorings by the death of Ed Ricketts and by his divorce shortly afterward from Gwyn Conger, his second wife, whom he married in 1943 and with whom he had two children, Thom and John IV. On and off for over a year, Steinbeck was mired in enervation, isolation, misogyny, and self-pity, and his self-identity as a writer seemed splintered, fragmented, even fraudulent, as Jackson Benson has graphically documented in The True Adventures of John Steinbeck . After The Pearl and The Wayward Bus , both published in 1947, this customarily resilient writer found it increasingly difficult to settle on his next project (the many versions of Zapata , for instance, the false starts on East of Eden , and the several unwritten plays he planned during this period). Steinbeck’s personal disarray and emotional discontentedness, coupled with his awakening reaction to America’s Cold War intellectual climate, which called into question the validity of socialist economies, set him on a road toward an end he could not yet envision but whose allurements he apparently could not refuse. In the feverish and sometimes blind searches of that period from 1948 through the early 1950s, he underwent deep readjustments toward many things, not the least of them his own art.
    In his relationship with his third wife, Elaine Anderson Scott, whom he met in May 1949 and married in December 1950, Steinbeck discovered healing powers in love and mutual domestic attachment that in turn had a direct, exponential bearing on his work energy and anticipation and, by his own admission, may have saved him from despair and worse. His May 30, 1951, entry in Journal of a Novel puts it all on the line: “And what changes there have been. I did not expect to survive them and I don’t think I would have. Every life force was shriveling. Work was non-existent. The wounds were gangrenous and mostly I just didn’t give a dam [ sic ]. Now two years later I have a new life and a direction. I am doing work I like.”
    Steinbeck validated his recovery by repeating it. In Sweet Thursda y, Steinbeck’s own emotional and creative processes became the novel’s subject. In writing about Doc trying to write his scholarly essay, and in portraying indomitable Suzy as a catalyst for self-awareness and conjugal fulfillment, Steinbeck turned out to be narrating nothing less than the symbolic story of his own emotional rescue and artistic refashioning. Steinbeck probably realized that blurring himself and Ricketts would be problematical: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if Ed was us and that now there wasn’t any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him,” Steinbeck wrote Ritch and Tal Lovejoy right after Ricketts’s death in May 1948. “I’ve wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which[?]” In the process of writing Sweet Thursday , Steinbeck did not “purposefully…destroy or deprecate Doc,” as Peter Lisca maintained in The Wide World of John Steinbeck . Instead, Steinbeck replaced Doc with