Working Days Read Free Page A

Steinbeck’s participatory aesthetic ensured the novel’s affective impact on a broad range of readers. By conceiving his novel on simultaneous levels of existence Steinbeck pushed back the accepted boundaries of traditional realistic fiction and redefined the proletarian form. Like most significant American novels, The Grapes of Wrath does not offer codified solutions, but instead enacts the process of belief and embodies the shape of faith.
     
    Behind the welter of conflicting opinions and wild imaginings about this most public of novels stands one of the most reclusive of American writers—John Steinbeck (1902-1968). His private story, with its equally impassioned emphasis on the punishing journey toward artistic fulfillment, is recorded in this journal. Working Days, too, is a tale of dramatic proportions—false starts, self-doubts, whining complaints, paranoia, ironic intentions, personal reversals, and—woven tenuously throughout—the fragile thread of recovery. And like the novel, the journal has its own cast of characters, all of whom belong, in one way or another, to the moment of Steinbeck’s labor. Some lives impress upon his, some overlap, some run parallel, some appear and disappear like chimeras, and some remain unidentified, anonymous, lost forever to the currents of history. Among the people who left their stamp on the novel, two names joined preeminently with Steinbeck’s in a kind of spiritual partnership. Without them, the novel might have been far different.
    Carol Henning Steinbeck (1906—1983), the novelist’s outgoing first wife (they married in 1930), was more politically radical than John, and she actively supported members of the fugitive agricultural labor movement before he did. 3 She too was an energetic, talented person—among other things, a versifier, satirist, prose writer, painter, caricaturist—who agreed to relinquish a possible career in favor of helping to manage his. It seems to have been a partnership based more on reciprocal need and shared affection than on deep romantic love. Their marriage was smoother, more egalitarian, in the struggling years of Steinbeck’s career; with the enormous success—and pressures—brought by Of Mice and Men (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), their situation became more tenuous and volatile. Carol, an extremely strong-willed, demonstrative person, was often frustrated, resentful, and sometimes jealous; John, inordinately shy, was frequently beleagured, confused, and demanding. In the late 1930s, whenever John was writing daily, 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 oversaw some of their financial arrangements (an increasingly large job) between Steinbeck and his literary agents. “Carol does so much,” Steinbeck admitted in Entry #45. Once in a while she also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. Carol, not John, went to New York for the opening of Joseph Kirkland’s disastrous play version of Tortilla Flat, and during that same visit, in January 1938, she met with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz, arranging between them Lorentz’s first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck/Lorentz movie version of In Dubious Battle and a private showing of Lorentz’s pioneering documentary films (“APPROVE LORENTZ AFFAIR GREATLY,” Steinbeck wired Carol on January 13, 1938). 4
    Most important of all, as she did with all her husband’s manuscripts, Carol typed and edited The Grapes of Wrath, served in the early stages as a rigorous critical commentator (though by late September 1938, during the book’s final stretch, she confessed to having lost “all sense of proportion,” and felt unfit “to judge it at all”), and, in a brilliant stroke, chose the novel’s title from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” perhaps inspired by her hearing of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama,