Ep 15: Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH

I'll be all around in the dark, I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beaten up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know stuff is ready. And when the people are eating this stuff they raise, living in the houses they deal, I'll be there too. Hello and welcome to the Great American Novel Podcast. I'm Kirk Kernut and I'm Scott Yarbray. And this is episode 15, hard to believe we have done 15 of these so far. But to celebrate our 15th episode we are looking at what most people would consider one of the most readily identifiable Great American novels. And that is John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. Scott do you remember when you first read this book? I first read this book in high school and thought it went on forever and forever and forever. Although I did like it and it did affect me. And then I returned to it in graduate school and was really impressed with how much better the book had managed to make itself in those intervening years. I think you and I had a very similar experience. Most people if they are exposed to this book probably get it junior senior year of high school. It remains an often banned book in part because during the time period it was written its message of being pro labor, pro migrant was perceived as being communist. A lot of school boards always go for the dirty words and the sexual situations that those are very minor in this book. So it's really the politics that have upset people in the sort of communitarian spirit, although in Steinbeck case. As we shall see it's very non ideological. Scott do you want to just give us a little overview of the plot? Absolutely. So we have this family of the jodes and it's set during the desk bowl and they are people that have to leave the desk bowl and make their way along the highways to California where they've been told is the land of milk and honey and everything's fine. You're seeming protagonist and I don't know that I agree with this but most people tell the protagonist being Tom jode the older brother of this family of jodes who is just kicked free of spending a few years in jail for killing a man in a fight. And it's going to join his family in heading west and they're joined by Jim Casey, the former fallen preacher and they're all kind of under the 30 steadfast love and guidance of mojo the matriarch of the clan. One of the things that I would say about this book is that it is the artistic pinnacle of its author's career. I'm going to throw an analogy out there and I hope you don't laugh or heckle me too hard. Scott, but when I think of the career of John Steinbeck, I compare it a lot in my mind to that of John Cougar melon camp, believe it or not. John Cougar melon camp entered the rock and roll business got us first recording contract in the mid 70s under the management of David Bowie's first manager promptly took out the melon camp and renamed him Johnny Cougar and he produced four or five albums before he found his voice, the sort of heartland voice that we think of. And this analogy is not entirely gratuitous because melon camp is a recent winner of the Steinbeck award that San Jose State gives out so there is a connection there with the popular spirit, but John Steinbeck has a very interesting up and down career and certainly the grapes of wrath is the book that we think of when we think of him. Although one or two other classics might pop into mind, this was his seventh book and what's interesting is he started out really writing more in a pop cult vein if we want to think of it that way. His first novel was called Cup of Gold, which was a pirate story and only after that did he discover his subject matter California and it really wasn't until his fourth book called tortilla flat that he had much commercial success, but also that he zeroed in on the subject matter and that's the life of working class people in many cases. He was at least in tortilla flat case of mixed race people, but he really found the subject matter of grapes of wrath in his next novel, which I think is probably his most underrated book, which is called in dubious battle, which came out in 1936, very transformative year for him, and that is a wonderful example of proletarian fiction, which grapes of wrath sort of is but is not so. Can you give us a quick overview of proletarian fiction and then we'll talk about in dubious battle on our way to grapes of wrath. Well, I guess we'd start with the definition of what do we mean by the who make up the proletariat, and so maybe your early example of a book that's kind of tending that direction and trying to avoid it is war in peace. And so the proletariat, of course, are the working serfs and the peasantry and the hard working the lowest of the working class people across Russia in that novel, and where that book fails and being that kind of novel is that although we get glimpses into their life and glimpses and lives of those people trying to in some ways or another reform how serfs are treated and of course it's antichorrent and it heads a lot of these same directions. It isn't really about those characters is still about the gentry and the people who own the lands and who own all the surrounding territory. So the proletariat novels would be the ones that are really focused on these people. What life has been like suffering under whatever kind of overlords or are usually they're connected to the land and the people who oppress them and the system which oppress them are all about owning the land and it's usually a grey area and based. And I would say that also when you're dealing with people there's often a lot of earthy humor, earthy realism when it comes to sex, when it comes to people being kind of simplistic in some ways. And ironically many of the people who write proletarian fiction are not themselves of the proletariat. So there's always a dangerous little step of condescension and if you're thinking of the person in American letters who maybe in some ways does it best with in those barriers completely vanish because there's even a little little bit of that's concentration in this book. You know the way he writes the phonetics with the Joed family the way Tom and Jim Casey joke about getting girls out in cornfield or whatever. I think Faulkner's your guy who actually manages to rest with proletariat and the upper classes and deals with them very fairly in a way that earths can call well in the south and even time back this is a great novel. You know that maybe one of the places he's still an observer who's been among them morning is one of them. Thank you and I agree with you completely I find it very hard to read earths can call well to me that's just kind of little little labner type country stuff but I do agree that there tends to be in proletariat fiction. The writers tend to come from the middle class and they tend to reinvent themselves as what John Lennon called the working class hero the spokesman for the downtrodden. Yeah very obviously the 1920s were the era of modernist experimentation but when the economy collapsed in 1929 and the depression set in there was almost an immediate urgency for writers to become politicized. And a lot of that generation that started out as experimental writers really struggled with becoming social activists Fitzgerald claimed that he was a Marxist which I have never quite believe. I don't think this started evening post believe that either they wrote out those big checks. In fact there are some really interesting pro business pro capitalist stories that he cranked out. Maybe we should set the stage a little bit because World War One leads to two things one immediately and one by and by what happens. Immediately is of course the Russian revolution. We have the rise of the Bolsheviks who are of course the proletariat in some ways too but they're focused into kind of a if you will a political spear point in order to eventually overthrow everything going on over there and before long you have a new order arising in the Soviet Union. Very repressive order and absolutely and in a few years by and by after the kind of indulgence and carelessness of having won the war and thinking of the incredible economic impact of World War One will be felt in Europe but America can move in and cash in on this. Instead the bottom falls out everywhere and we plummet into the great depression at the end of the 20s and still very much swing throughout the 30s and so suddenly the notion as people are losing their jobs and their properties. And the numbers of unemployed skyrocket and homelessness sky rockets and you have who reveals and all these migrant labor camps and work camps springing up everywhere. The idea that everyone should share everything and it should be based on your need not your wants. Start sounding more attracted than it ever sounded to people before and the news about Soviet practices and Stalinism had the intelligent people and those who are willing to turn author ideology listen to the brain were figuring out in the 30s what's going on. but there are a whole lot of people who are intellectually downing with it and love with it. Now Steinbeck, despite everyone's arguments to the contrary, wasn't really one of those guys. He was always pretty clearied about it because he is first and foremost kind of an individualist, probably a little bit of a libertarian. - He never got sucked into the political or the ideological labeling or branding of himself. - Yeah, late in his career, you know, people attacking because he goes, he's kind of proven on more, but he's not really alone in people of his generation who saw that as an attempt to stem the tide of communism, which if you're watching what happens with Stalin, what happens with Mao is actually pretty frightening if you go through it and you don't have the value of hindsight that we have. So this book then is his response to his things he writes but also dubious battle in what he's seen in these camps, what he'd seen with people and how they're being treated. And this is also at the time the rise of fascism. - Also at this time, we had the rise of fascism in Germany and in Italy, we have the Spanish Civil War is underway and things are going very badly for the republic by this point, actually maybe the war's over by 38, right? - Sure. - So by the time the novel comes out, they've lost and Hitler's gearing up to invade Poland. So it's actually a pretty scary time and he's writing about a lot of that in this book as well. And so this is of course part of why it's has the weird reception it has. And again, he was not unusual in authors that were trained to think of literature as using mythology and symbolism and all of a sudden in the early 30s being told the urgency of literature is with the social scene. Sherwood Andersson struggled with that. Maybe the most successful writer to do that that was a modernist was John Dos Pasos and his trilogy USA has a huge influence on the grapes of wrath. So in 1936 he publishes in dubious battle which gets a lot of attention. And in the fall of that year, he is contacted because of the political content of dubious battle by the San Francisco news to do a series of journalistic pieces on the Dust Bowl migrants. The Dust Bowl of course was a natural disaster partially man-made in which the land erosion of the land was caught in the wind and it drove away many of the homesteaders that originally settled that state and surrounding states, not just Oklahoma where the derogatory term Oki comes from but Kansas, Texas, New Mexico. All of those folks hit the road in a very famous highway that the grapes of wrath made legend on Route 66. Long before you got your kicks on Route 66 this is the path to California the land of what was supposed to be the land of plenty. Those articles that came out in the fall of 1936 were called the Harvest Gypsies collected under that name. Steinbeck was in a weird way in that period beginning to live two very different lives. On the one hand he was becoming a very popular success of Mison Men was published in the spring of 1937 became an immediate bestseller on the strength of tortilla flat which was also a popular book became an immediate Broadway smash. So on the one hand he's all of a sudden besieged by the press and by fans he's becoming a celebrity author but at the same time he is slipping anonymously into the valleys of Northern California and exploring the migrant camps that the refugees from these dust bowl states are living in. Now there were two types of camps in that period there were but what you mentioned before the Hooverville's which were the informal slums that sprung up but also there were government run facilities and we see both of those in the grapes of wrath we get a very different contrast. The government facilities which were done under the auspices of the New Deal and the relief agency were an attempt to give that labor force living conditions that were humane. There were toilets, there were showers, there were regular meals. The Hooverville's were just squatters and the conditions that there were just terrible when Steinbeck first saw those Hooverville's he was absolutely mortified by the conditions there. Interestingly enough the harvest gypsies was illustrated with photographs by Dorothy Alang probably the most famous depressionier photographer for the image of the migrant mother. It's hard to think of that picture without thinking of the grapes of wrath or vice versa. So he does that series of articles and spends 1937 in this kind of dual life. I mean on the one hand he is touring Europe going to Sweden and Denmark and Finland but all at the same time he's coming home and emerging into these camps as an anonymous reporter collecting data. And during that time he meets a guy there who is running one of the camps named Tom Collins who not only takes him on tours of the camps not only introduces him to many of the migrant families which Steinbeck will interview but he's also giving him copies of his reports to his bosses in Washington. And the interesting things about these reports is they're not dry government ease. Tom Collins has a flair for incorporating all sorts of detail into these books whether it's particular language or speech of these migrants, their folk songs, their habits, their cooking. It's almost a sociology of these people. And Steinbeck is fascinated by this detail and he begins to form a plan that now that of Myson Men is a big success that he's gonna write a magnum opus. He's gonna write the definitive big book that he spent the last 10 years basically aiming to write. - People who are coming to this podcast who know a little bit of Steinbeck, they probably think of him as a writer of doorstop novels. But only two of his books are really in that category. They're just his two of his most famous, this one and the somewhat, let's be sure to say somewhat melodramatic East of Eden from 1950 was it '54? - '52, I believe. - '52. And these are the novels he becomes so well known but the truth is most of his aura are short, very readable, quick novels. Tertia Flat is a very funny, hilarious, quick novel about a bunch of Mexican-American guys who are modeled after King Arthur's round table but they're drunk homeless guys, you know, and it's not with the depression but there's no melancholy or sadness in it at the same time. It's very interesting in that way. And many of his novels are very comedic. So if you only know him through East of Eden and the grapes of wrath, you've only seen one small part of a very multifaceted writer. - I'm glad you mentioned the humor because another book that he will become famous for that had a huge influence on northern California tourism as Canary Row, which is again a humorous look at the derelicts and the bombs and the life of Monterey there along the coast, back when it was in a depression era. - Yeah, his mentor was a marine biologist and a ecologist named Ed Ricketts and he spent a lot of time, this is an overfell, not a whole lot over but who really took time back under his wing and time back became a not too bad amateur marine biologists himself and so he bases Doc from Canary Row in the sequel sweet Thursday on Ed Ricketts. One of the other things is a little surprising when you look at the body of work, he wrote 33 books, which is significant but 18 are works of fiction. Mostly novels, couple of novellas are works of short stories. 15 nonfiction books. - Yeah. - So he wrote an awful lot of nonfiction as well. And so he's someone who's very involved with all these things and of course this novel, great giraffe, we should say for we jump into a curve, wins a national book award and a Pulitzer Prize and of course comes out and we'll talk about this later, a giant film just a year later. - It's also very controversial reception that we want to talk about precisely because of the politics of it. One of the things that's always struck me about this book is this is a book that was written very quickly. He essentially knocked this out in six months. This is a 200,000 word novel written between May and first draft was finished in October 1938. One of the great resources that we have for understanding how this book together is his diary that he kept at the time or his journal, not really a diary where he would go over and his thoughts reflect upon the days writing that's called Working Days. Really wonderful. I wish every great American novel had this kind of companion to it because you get to see the creative process developed. - Yeah, no kidding. - What's fascinating about the book is it's very organic. He essentially knew all of the pieces. There was very little revision in terms of form or structure. He sort of knew where he was going with the story. Of course part of that is about the fact that this is a journey narrative. We are roughly a third of the novel in Oklahoma and then we hit the road and we are on the journey to the promised land. And then it is the disappointment in the promised land. He did struggle to get traction on this book, however. And there were a couple early precursors that he began and then destroyed. So we don't have those early drafts. But after he did the harvest gypsy, he was telling people he was writing a novel called the Oklahoma's. [BLANK_AUDIO] And nobody has really ever found any of that manuscript. There's really not clear what it was other than he was telling people in 1937 that he was working on fictionalizing the harvest gypsy's material. Maybe more to the point. And this is why we understand the tone in the mood and the epic ambition of this novel. Is he tried to write a satire about a strike in his hometown of Salinas that occurred in 1936? It was over lettuce, the lettuce production. So this was a book that was supposed to be called LaFaire Lettusburg. Lettusburg was going to be the unofficial title of the novel. His publisher at the time, whose name was Pat Covici, ran a small firm called Covici Freed, was desperate for the book because Steinbeck was his only author that was making any kind of money. And Steinbeck's wife Carol, who played a huge role in this novel and helping shape it, read the manuscript of LaFaire Lettusburg and said, "Burn it." So he did. So one of the ways that we understand why he was able to write the novel so effortlessly, and I say that in the sense that it didn't require a lot of juggling of the pieces, was because he had stewed on it for a long time. And I'm just kind of curious, Scott, as we shift into talking about the novel itself, let me throw an idea out, I think sometimes this novel suffers a bit from over-familiarity, in the sense that it is so iconic in the popular culture, and so well-known, and frankly so associated with high school reading, that we take it for granted a little bit. But I also think that part of that comes from the fact that it is a novel written toward the end of the period of high-modernist experimentation, that emphasized symbolism and illusion and analog and all of these devices to give importance to the novel. Sure. So one of the things that I think this book suffers from is, sometimes the symbolism can feel a little creaky, a little obvious. A little heavy-handed. Yeah, heavy-handed. And actually in the 50s, when modernism is really on its death now, and Steinbeck is doing it in books like East of Eden, but also in the 40s with a short novella, like The Pearl, or Hemingway's doing it with the old man in the sea, or Faulkner's doing it with his arguably his worst novel. The fable. There you go, even the title is allegorical. These are guys that are writing and trumped up importance of the subject matter. And what happens is literary critics at the time come to associate this with middlebrow literature. This was a term that Dwight McDonald invented to heap upon books that were literary but for the popular audience. And they don't quite have the organic immediacy, or even the irony of something like, as I lay dying. When we think of high modernism, we do tend to think of the gears and the flashy lights and all the important stuff that goes on in the books. But what we also tend to forget is the quality of the prose. So whether it's the lyrical stretches of dense poetry and Faulkner, or the more clear lucid poetry of Fitzgerald, that kind of, wow, where did that come from sparseness of Hemingway. And really Steinbeck's style is pretty straightforward. He will occasionally throw on a kind of humorous, elevated tone, such as intratia flat, where he's kind of writing as if it's a fable or a folktale in a way. But mostly it's very straightforward prose. And I don't really think mostly he's that interested in modernism other than like you said, dissembles and the intervening or interlude in chapters, where I think that's a bit of a modernist trope. If we think of, as I lay dying, as a really good example of one, or even for that matter, the uberge modernist novel has got to be elicis by James Joyce. And in a same thing in a minor key, Mrs. Dalloway, but Virginia Woolf, where we had the kind of deviations to other things going on. That's kind of a tour de force, Mrs. Dalloway, and it's very much achieving a certain stylistic. All the stuff goes on at once, you know, she's messing up time and the theories are fine. So I think people judge him a bit because he is very readable and straightforward. And they also perhaps, in this book, he does the phonetic rendering of class in the way that every other writer in the 20s and 30s and 40s, including his friend, Orson Caldwell, who we disparaged inappropriately so earlier. I think they judge it for that. And what they leave out are two things, Kurt, where one place for literary writers often go wrong and middle-brow writers get it right, is in development of character and making you care about characters. So when you think about teenagers staying up all night, get caught up in a book and people loving a book that they reread it immediately, we often are really thinking about genre novels and melodrama. When people go online and say, I cried and cried and cried with so and so died, they're not usually talking about James Joyce or Faulkner. They are talking about Pat Conroy, who would be your more recent holder of the middle-brow banner, right? And I think Steinberg does get his caught up in his characters, and that's where probably people don't give him the credit he deserves. And he knows, unlike a lot of modernist writers, he does know how to plot. So I don't know if that really addressed your question at all. It does, and I'm going to expand on what you said just a bit and suggest that the quality of literaryness that a lot of critics want to see that distinguishes something from middle-brow or sentimental, which is another word to get slapped on Steinberg a lot, is irony. And I think one of the ways of understanding how different grapes of wrath is than most modernist works that are this experimental is to compare it or contrast it to as I lay dying. There's a lot of similarities there in terms of the journey motif. But Faulkner invents his suffering family in order to heap misery upon misery upon them to almost turn their tragedy into a grotesque comedy of endurance. And it ends with a joke. Right. They've come all this way only to discover that all along their father was aiming to get a new wife. Right. And now it can get me them teeth. Right. That would never fly in grapes of wrath, and part of the reason is because of Steinberg's political ambitions for the novel as well. So one of the things that he's doing, even in an era of proletariat fiction, is he is trying to import a little art into political novels, which were almost defiantly anti-experimental, at least the front line ones. Dos Pasos is very experimental, but people like Jack Conroy or Mike Gold or some of the other writers that were doing novels about strikes, they were really aiming to rouse people rather than dazzle them. It's very hard to write a political novel that is worth reading five minutes after the political causes subsided slightly. People can do it, and a lot of Steinberg's contemporaries fell because of that. But he's writing a book that's about more than the political moment. It is about humanity and about what William Faulkner would call the human heart and conflict with itself, and that's going to pay dividends. So where I would say this book strives to be modernistic, at least in terms of experimentation and form, is the alteration of chapters, which is probably its most famous or most controversial element of structure and style. These are come to be known as intercalary chapters, these are where we have 16 chapters about the Joed family on their literal journey, and then in between them are more expository chapters in which he is universalizing the experience, and presenting them in a melange of voices. I think it's one of the great things about the novel. A lot of people don't think this technique works. It's probably the most controversial aspect of the novel in terms of its style. Absolutely. I think it's fair to ask what would the novel be like without those. It'd be kind of like taking all the whale stuff out of Moby Dick. And that's a novel that in many ways, even though I don't think Steinbeck was necessarily familiar with it, certainly wouldn't working on it as a blueprint. But it has a lot of parallels to in terms of its ambition. Yeah. There's always a desire on the part of the great American novel to take what is specific and somehow make it universal. And that's where the epic quality comes from. You're absolutely right because, and he does it in two ways. He most of always grand, philosophizing in those chapters and for the listeners I had to confess to Kirk, and I've taught English at the college level for quite some years now. And I still have not run into the word intercalorie before. And I was thinking, isn't that what you do when you're really hungry, but you don't eat as much as you want and get out of calories you want? You eat an intercalorie meal instead, but no, it turns out this is what's nice about doing this podcast. I get to learn things with Kirk. I'm not sure why that term became associated so much with grapes of wrath, but you just do see it used a lot in the criticism. So I ran with that. I'm with you on it. And he has a few cases where he does something that's a little, you know, where it does the third person applied author is given his reigns and can kind of wax on a bit. But I think it's actually pretty successful and well-written. But the other thing he does is he creates in these little vignettes, little stories, real people in these little, they're almost like short, short stories. - Yeah. - I wouldn't say prose poems, 'cause that's not where his style goes in the way that you can use that for the intercalorie sections to, in our time by Hemingway, our interstitial, how do we call those? But in this case, he locates some like, the waitress who ends up giving the kids candy more than they're supposed to. And the truck driver who teases her over it, and then he tips her when he's not supposed to temper her that much. - And a little bit of trivia on that, that specific chapter, Chris Christofferson, cites that as an inspiration for his songwriting career, believe it or not. - Wow, well, maybe the name of that trucker needs to be Bobby McGee. I don't, I don't, you threw me a Chris Christofferson, and I'm thinking of as my dad has the album, William Nelson sings the greatest hit, Chris Christofferson. And if you haven't heard it, you haven't lived. - There you go. - So Kurt, tell us where does a title of the novel come from? - The title of the novel was actually not Steinbeck's choice, believe it or not. - 'Cause he had "Docal Holman's" ready to go. And that would really line people up, I've ever worked with Nebraska. - Right, his first wife, his then wife, Carol, who was basically his informal manager, an editor at the time, even though he had an agent and an official editor. He makes reference in one of the intercalary chapters to the wrath of the workers. And she picked up on that illusion to the battle him of the Republic, Julia Howe's famous Civil War abolition and song from the early 1860s. And we all know the verse. - My eyes have seen the vineyards where the grapes are afterstored. I was waiting for you to sing that out. - Luckily for you and for the dozens of people out there in podcast land, I didn't so injure your ears. - What do you think the grapes of wrath means, Scott? Not necessarily in the context of this novel, but just as a metaphor. - So the context of that song is that you are making God angry, and at some point he's gonna visit his wrath upon you. 'Cause my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. - So the great, as you so shall you reap and the ways of succend are death. - Right. - And I think that the woman who wrote that song and I'm gonna throw out a guest and say, it's Julia Ward Howe. I'm not even consulting my research assistant. Mr. Google for that. And I can tell you how I remember that in a second. And she wrote that song. I think it was very much with the idea that the South was sinful and evil. And we're gonna see the comeuppance for their ways for creating the Civil War. And for holding on slavery. The reason I can remember it is that my college roommate married his name was Darryl Ward and he married a woman named Julie Howe and so her name became Julie Howe Ward. And I said, well, you got it pretty close, Julie, but you didn't quite get there for the great surprise. - Yeah, I think I said Julia Howe and I left out the ward, but she is one of the three name author poets there. So I'm glad you specified that. In fact, in the first edition of the novel, the song, the music itself was printed on the end papers. - Oh, wow, that's very cool. - And Steinbeck demanded that of Pat Covici, the editor. One of the things that happened as Steinbeck was writing this and it added pressure to the completion of the novel is his publisher went out of business. And Covici freed ceased to be and Steinbeck's contract because he had had a couple of hit books, was sold to Viking press and they brought Pat Covici on as an editor, specifically to handle Steinbeck. So there was a lot of pressure on Steinbeck to produce a big book. There was a lot of rumbling about it being written. And in fact, even before it made the news, there were rumors being circulated by California associated farmers, the agribusiness people who did not want this novel to sway public opinion about Steinbeck's political loyalties but also about his personal character. At one point, the FBI was even sort of looking into whether he was a commie or not. So no matter how quickly you cranked out this novel in six months, he was also facing a lot of personal and business pressures. - Right. - Let me give you that passage where the term grapes of raft pops up. This is in chapter 25 and this is an intercalary chapter. Probably one of the best ones, not my favorite. Little later on, we're gonna Scott and I are each gonna pick our favorite of them and explain to you why we think those are pretty good examples of the poetry that he was aiming for. But this is about the harvest of the fruit and the way that the fruit is industrialized, the way that it is kept from the hands of the people. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river and the guards hold them back. They come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges but the caracena sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to putrifying ooze. And in the eyes of the people, there is the failure. And in the eyes of the hungry, there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. And when Carol saw that line, she said, "That's your title right there." That is a powerful, sermonic passage. It's often described as a Jeremiah, which is a term out of Puritan literature and which a preacher stands up and denounces the flock for its sins and basically says if we could only get back to where we once belonged, we could write the moral ship. - Wow, and if it were an originated with the Beatles rather than the Puritans, it would have been called a Jojo ad instead of a Jeremiah ad. (laughing) So obviously one of the major themes of the novel is the great divide people saw during the depression of how much the depression particularly impacted people from in the poorer working classes of the country. And how they took the brunt of it on their shoulders while some of the large landowners, some of the large business owners took cuts and pay, maybe sold off an extra house, but in some cases, whether things relatively well. And that disconnect is one of the prevalent themes throughout the book. And I think it's shown exactly what you just read that they're willing to let the food go bad, be thrown away before they give away food to hungry people. - That passage has always reminded me of when you go to grocery stores and you see the amount of food that is wasted on expiration dates. And I can never understand why that one or two day past the expiration date is not taken to homeless shelters or to other places and allowed to be social relief. But there are laws against it. - And the guess is everyone's so scared of getting sued because someone got sick for meeting a, - Right. - They old pork chop or something. And this I think dovetails into one of the other things that shows up so much in here, which is just how one human can stand by and see this other human who is in some way or another, his brother, his sister, and turn a completely cold shoulder and have no sympathy for that person whatsoever. - And that's one way to think of the relationship between the Joe chapters and the more universal chapters is he is trying to urge us to take a move from seeing them in order to see us. - Right. - And to get people to identify with that experience. One of the interesting things about the book is Steinbeck himself sort of claimed to Pat Kovici that there were five layers to the novel. You know, in the heyday of new criticism or formalism, this was a big generator of critical articles on the grapes of wrath with everybody and their uncle taking their shots at defining what these five layers are. But you can simply think of it this way. Now, there's a scholar named Susan Schilling Law who's run a lot of Steinbeck studies for years out of San Jose State and she has a great book called on reading grapes of wrath and she takes a little different approach to these five layers drawing from Ed Rickett's work, which is what Steinbeck meant. But generally, literary critics look at it this way. You have the literal level, which is the story of the Joe's. A little bit higher up on that on the wrong is the level of the dust bowl immigrants. It's telling the story of a specific group of people at a specific time. And then you have the story of America, which is the story of the push west and the settling of the west. I think it's very relevant here that Steinbeck wrote a story after the grapes of wrath to cap off his beautiful trilogy of stories called The Red Pony. But this particular ending story that he did not write until 1946 is called The Leader of the People. And it is about the end of westward expansion and sort of the enemy that sets in at that point. So this is a way in which grapes of wrath is the story of Americans, the story of the push west. And there are all kinds of references to the denuding of the landscape and the dispossession of the Native Americans that makes us understand that the quote-unquote "okis" are not simple victims of capitalism. ism here that there is a pattern of abuse that is going on and what they have, what they have shown, they are now reaping themselves. Then there's the level of mankind, humanity, maybe the most general level. But then maybe the fifth one, the way to look at it is at the level of the organism or of biology where you take all of the humanism out of it and you look at the way that species adapt in order to survive. So. Oh, interesting. If you can come up with five different layers to the story, you too can can be a literary critic. But it is something that he clearly wanted these wanted this novel to have a multivalent structure to it. You know, Kirk, I got an extra layer for you. Okay. Maybe I'll save it until we jump into the symbolism. Okay. The first I want to ask you. So we have all these horrible things that we're dealing with. The dealing with the grapes of graft that are being visited upon us as well as being oppressed by the no good bankers and the tractor drivers being oppressed by the people along the way. And what you put forward to me in some of the notes we pass back and forth through we record is that obviously the way you contend with all these issues and it's the central core of the novel is to first you start with the family. And of course, this is a story of a family and how it holds together and fails to hold together as it moves west. And then how that family you come to incorporate others into it and look out for others as if they're your family. Right. And that's the building of community. And the other term you used that I'm not familiar with how you mean it in this case. I know what it means in terms of the history of warfare, but I don't think you mean it in this case is the failings. So could you explain that a little bit? Well, that's a term that Steinbeck seized upon in his own reading. And it was basically his theory again of survival. And the idea is basically that in biology, a group clusters together and forms a protective shield and survives through that kind of mutuality. And I think that's really his vision of the family, which is the nucleus of of any cluster of humans, but then communities. And what we see here is the effort to extend beyond the jodes as a basic unit of family. And Ma is always trying to keep the family together, but can't then there's the effort to bond together with the larger community of struggling migrants. And so that's basically what the failings is. And for those you don't know, and most of you probably do, this is a military formation of forming a square invented by the Greeks, perfected by the Romans. So so many people, and they lined up their troops, they just lined up Willie Million, ran down the attack. And here he had the Greeks and lay the Romans who were forming these squared off units with these large shields facing their opposition that would lock together and they could hide under them. And even they could place them overhead if they're in the second and third ranks to stop arrows from landing among them and hurting them while people would have spears and short stabbing swords when people got close. And it was devastatingly effective. Right. And so the idea that they're all bonded together in a tight unit and in shielding makes perfect sense to me. At a political level Steinbeck sees this. And again, this is important to stress. Not as a metaphor for communism because he was communitarian in the sense that he believed there should be a social support network for these people. The government should help out in the wake of a natural disaster like this and not allow right business, not allow agribusiness to exploit or the banks to exploit the workers situation. But he really sees it as a democratic metaphor or metaphor for democracy in the idea that we're all bonded together by mutual interests and common purpose. As we dig into the novel, he clearly uses a number of symbolic structures to build his story upon. One of them that fits right in and I'm jumping a little bit ahead on our outline that we can circle back. One of the very much fits this notion of the Phalanx is at some level the turtle. Right. Everyone's the most famous turtle in the history of literature. The guy trying across the road, hit by the car, it's not squished flat, but knocked off, gets over, starts making his way back across the road. So there is, it seems to be the same idea here, you have to be protected, you have to have your shell in place. And when you get knocked into the ditch, you had to get up and start trying across the road again, but of course there's more to it than that. You also carry your home with you as a turtle. Right. This also kind of connects his interest in biology in general. And just throughout the book, he's very aware. And this goes back to the layer that you talked about before. So the opening scenes, it is everything is dead and desolate. And the name of the man who's too stubborn to leave this land at a dead that the novel opens up in is mule graves. So he's stubborn as a mule. And of course, everything's dead. And he's going to, at least in some way die if he stays, yet he's determined to. And that's one of the things that's interesting. We talked about the notion of being tied to the land. Right. When we talked about the Maya Sanilla, and then you where you really see it played out is the Joed grandfather cannot leave the land. He physically can't do it. And when he does, it destroys him. He's not adaptable. Right. And so he he's not adaptable. He's not able to change. He's not able to pick up and go somewhere else. And this is one of the problems they run into. We also see instances of people in this community that abandon each other. Rosa Sharon's husband Connie just takes off. And that's one of the urgent messages of the novel is we have to maintain solidarity. So Rosa Sharn, we see here a a picture of someone who is in the earliest stages novel. And there's a good reason for this, but she's young. She's in fact, we would say too young to be married pregnant, but that's the world these people grown up in. She's married pregnant and she kind of feels like she is the center of the universe. And she has a hard time filling empathy for others, sympathy for others. And it's not so much that she's bad or mean. She simply doesn't really care about others all that much. She's more concerned with her own circumstances and situation. But the entire book is at some level about trying to move people out of that framework and into the idea of the family has to tie into the community. And they have to form that failings, as you said before. And all of these characters have biblical analogues. Yes. And that is a way that we dramatize the journey as a spiritual quest as well as one just for survival. Right. Obviously Rosa Sharon's name comes from Song of Solomon. She's a principal of sensuality if we want to think of it that way. But probably the most controversial one, Tom Joed is often regarded as a kinds of Moses figure who's supposed to lead his people out of the desert. And there's one I'm going to take a little issue of how we all see Tom Joed and Woody Gutty writes a song about him and Springsteen does. But I would argue that if you leave a side John Ford's film and really pay attention to the book, the leader here is is Mojoed. Yeah. She is a hero of the novel. She may not have as much page time as Tom does. And the biblical figure I think you would point to for him is doubting Thomas. Interesting. Oh, at first has to be convinced that it's not about just protecting yourself, not striking back, not reacting in anger, but instead being able to take the lumps. And when you do fight, you fight for others and not for yourself. And so Tom has to have a, in some ways, he has the classic literary hero of a classic journey quest. He has to grow along the journey and quest and evolve to a new place by the end of the story. But the one who is the rock solid, you know, the rockage of Braulto they can all anchor to is Mojo. She's the one that keeps him focused. She's the one that has the heart and soul of the book. Now, and of course, Jim Casey initials JC. That's, that's a spot where a lot of literary critics would say, you know, it's that that maybe just a little too on. Yeah, it's just a little too obvious. Well, I think he thought he was leading people away when early on, the first thing he admits is, yeah, at the meetings, I'd get the young women. So worked out would go have sex in the weeds. So thinking, well, that's not like Jesus. Yeah. And so maybe that will lead him astray. But it was still obvious. And he does eventually sacrifice himself for others. And he's killed, although he's done nothing wrong. And his words to his killers are echo Jesus's words. I mean, he says, you boys don't know what you're doing. That's the one that's a little heavy-handed that we talked about before. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, you mentioned Tom as an epic hero in that quest, a little bit attributed. I'm always fascinated by a Steinbeck was good friends with Joseph Campbell in the early 30s. They kind of fell out by the mid 30s. But, you know, Joseph Campbell, the mythologer who would go on to write the hero of a thousand faces. And eventually all of that, the idea that there is a cross-cultural universal pattern of heroism or journey or identity growth. And it's Jungian archetypes that you follow. Right. That becomes the basis for our favorite movie, Star Wars, of course, which is basically Joseph Campbell with a different title. So there's an interesting grapes of breath, Star Wars connection there. There you go. Well, and Tom is practicing as a Jedi knight. And my joke is clearly where Yoda comes from and Yoda and Yoda was supposed to be Yoda, but okay, I'm making all this up. You can feel free. the late the last 30 seconds. So let me ask you this, what about the Route 66? So I mean, clearly that's the way you went west. And it's just choosing the road everyone uses when they go west. Is there anything, on the other hand, whenever people start looking at biblical symbolism, it's really hard to stay away from numbers. If those numbers have anything to do with three, or with 40, those being the big biblical numbers. So, you know, we have two, threes, that makes a 66, and we have the Tom as your kind of leader figure. We have gem cases, so we have to, I mean, there's a Route 66, anything. As you said, it's not Route 66. Yeah, I was just going to say, I think that's a case where if you go into numerology, you're probably pushing your luck there. One of the stories that Steinbeck later told, which was not true, was that he had researched the novel by traveling with a family from Oklahoma across Route 66. Now, he did do that with Carol in spring of 1937, but that was on his way back from a trip to Europe, not exactly the kind of journalistic research that he would later claim that he had done. But he certainly interviewed many of those folks that had made that journey. And again, so much of America is about the mythology of the road. And so, I think that's maybe where rather than a biblical precedent, maybe more mythological one, I mean. Okay, so now we're coming to my layer. I want to point out that I was going to add to it that we talked about earlier. So, if you're thinking of 20th century American culture, what primary thing distinguishes it from all other world cultures, with the possible accession of those cultures that have been profoundly influenced by American culture? Well, if we weren't doing this in 2022, I would say affordable gas prices. Well, you're headed in the right direction. We are a culture that is utterly obsessed with the automobile. Exactly. And when we think of the great road novel in American literature, the one that usually comes to people's mind is Jack Kerawax on the road, which would still be almost 20 years away at this point. But I got to say this is probably we have earlier great journey novels. But this one's actually about a car. And the car throughout this section, throughout the novel, that vehicle seems to have a symbiotic relationship with the Joed family. It's all everything's piled on and they're piled on and it's right out of the Beverly Hill buildings, which is clearly making a reference to rapes of wrath in the opening of that show. And Kirk and I are of a generation where everyone had seen the same 25 primary television shows and you can always make references. For those of you from the internet generation, go to YouTube, watch the opening minutes with the song with Ernest Tubbs or whoever it is and you'll see what we're talking about. And that shows up. And he even goes a little further. And so one of the intercalary chapters, this is the eleventh chapter. He talks about how there's a warmth of life in the barn and the heat and smell of life. But when the emulator of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like living heat. It leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home the town. Perhaps 20 miles away. He need not come back for weeks or months for the tractor is dead. This is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work. So efficient, the wonder goes out of land and the working of it with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man grows a content that comes only to his stranger as a little understanding in the relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates, and the length of fiber in a cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, or salt, or water, or calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more, and the land is so much more than its analysis. That man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his PowerPoint for a stone, dropping his handles the slide over and out cropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch. That man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land, he does not know and love understands only chemistry, and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home and his home is not the land. And that divide between the coming industrialization of America and the former, and maybe it romanticizes agriculture, but the former people who were tied to the land, I think that divide is one of his other layers here, the difference between people who see the land. It's living in the world and not just presuming ownership of the world, right? Right, I think that's a really wonderful example. When we talk about root 66, I wanted to point out a passage out of the subsequent chapter, I think if you're in chapter 11, then the next chapter, chapter 12, which may be the only point in the novel where we do have two intercalary chapters right next to each other. But this is where he talks about root 66. And I want to read this, and then I want to give you two examples, one literary and one pop culture, I think of why this sort of tribute to the road really bulls it straight down the middle in terms of its appeal. Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, then there's the end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City 66 down from Tulsa 270 up from McAllister 81 from which it all falls south from Eden, North Edmund, Loud Purcell 66 out of Oklahoma City, El Reno and Clinton going west on 66 Hydro, Elk City, Texola. It's almost like he's giving us a map here. And then there's an end to Oklahoma 66 across the Manhandle of Texas, Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Emerillo, the Yellow, Wilderado and Vega and Boise and there's an end of Texas. You know, it's almost like he's taken us on a travel log here. It reminds me so much of the poet, the modernist poet, experimental modernist poet, Hart Crane, who did a book of poems called The Bridge. And one of those he has a train poem, the specific title of it escapes me right at the moment. But he talks about all the sites that you see as a hobo when you ride the train and the different stops that you go through and the different voices you hear. But the pop culture one I'm going to suggest to you that this gets echoed in the popular culture is Johnny Cash's song. I've been everywhere. You know that song, don't you scout? Oh yeah, it's been ended. I want to say UPS commercials lately or post office or every morning when I watch the news. I find that being played ad infinitum. Yeah. But yeah, it's basically like a roll call of cities. And again, the thing we want to stress at that this idea of the open road is a very, very American theme or issue. And it's a way of mythologizing our own westward expansion, but also the idea that there is no sitting still in America. Graves of Wrath is sometimes described as an anti-oddacy, and that the journey is not toward home, but away from home. Absolutely. It's trying to figure out, you know, where home is maybe in some ways. So when we look at this notion of home, you know, what makes home to you? Is it the building? Is your hometown? Or is it the people you think of? I think for myself, it really does come down to the people who can become home, who make it home, who you want to see and have. And that again, that idea that you have to be for people other than yourself, you have to reach out, which we see with Tom. We see with Rosa Sharon. I talked about earlier her defining characteristic for much of the book and self-centeredness, self-absorption. But it all changes toward the very end of the book. And it's something my daughters both had to read this in their AP literature classes over the past two years. And so my long time very durable, excellent paperback copy here. This old Centennial edition copy, that's such a good paperback. She's seen a lot of beating, which I think mostly came from the younger daughter, but she was so grossed out by the Rosa Sharon breastfeeding sequence. And so here's the man who's dying of starvation. And they find him and save him. And I'm trying to remember his name. And what's funny is, of course, we also have the stillborn bait or the baby dying, right? And that is disposed of in a very almost casual way. And then we had the breastfeeding scene. So it's weird to me the kids don't really focus on that. And the symbolism there is pretty straightforward. This is a land of the dead in a way. You have to find out how you can make things grow again and how it can be fruitful again. But when she breastfeeds a man, they're horrified by it. And yet it shows that she's willing to give her herself. She isn't going to fall back into horrible grief and self-pity. Although that would be the kind of thing we might expect from anyone in that circumstance. But instead, she is moving towards becoming more like a ma or Tom jode in that case. And not like her husband, who's kind of useless and is one of those literary characters where you want to put him on your horse whipping list. Whatever point we start having people be horse whipped again, we're going to nominate him for being whipped a bit. So typical guy, in other words. Well, I think there's typical guys in there are overachievers and he's on the top you can in list of overachievers. The ending is probably at the time was one of the most startling images imaginable and it's often cited as the reason that the book gets banned. There's an interesting history to that image because Steinbeck actually discovered it in the 1920s when he was a young aspiring writer and he would go hang out at hobo camps and sometimes listen to men's stories and pay for the stories. It's actually give them money to be able to take details and it crops up in his correspondence very early on before he ever writes anything that gets published that he has heard this story of a woman that offered to suckle a dying man. It's a shocking image because we associate that idea of suckling with a kind of sensuality. We tend to think of that as a sexual thing instead of a nourishing thing but it's a way I think of also fusing into the communitarianism of the novel. This whole notion of we take care of each other, the plenitude and the richness of song of Solomon which is where they get the name of Rosa Sharon and that's the idea that the sensuality of life is found in the sharing of resources. And it's a way of almost literally bringing him into the family. Right. In closing him within the kind of failings of protection again, I realize I'm overusing the term and I promised not to use again for at least a day and a half after we finished this episode. Again, we have within the first generation of humankind and the Bible one brother murdering another and the question of course it's asked of you know am I my brother's keeper the brother asked God for having for you know cane having slay enable and my brother's keeper and the unspoken response is clearly yes you are your brother's keeper and yet how do you show it when you don't keep them. Exactly and that's his criticism of capitalism of the greed of of agribusiness the idea that these refugees could come and look at all of this land that is owned by an absentee landlord or a corporation that is exploiting labor years later when he wins a Nobel Prize there's a lot of controversy and a lot of American book critics are very much against it and he you know he writes some pretty good books after this I right I don't really put east of Eden among his best books but I think when of our discontent which is one of his last novels is actually a pretty interesting book and some of his nonfiction his World War Two books are pretty good he's a pretty active war correspondent will it gets there a little late but he does a great job talking about the bomber crews helping people understand those travels with Charlie is a very famous book and it tells us an experience late in life that recapitulates a lot of the research that he did for grapes of wrath because there's a famous story and travels with Charlie where he goes out and he buys this van that he fits with the bed and everything he can live in it calls it a ronsano after the after the horse in donkey hote yeah but 30 years earlier when he was researching and going to these migrant camps he bought an old bakery truck and refitted it so he could live in that while he was going to these camps and immersing himself in the in the culture which you can do in northern California now what I would tell you is with our heat index of 105 degrees today in South Carolina and I know that Alabama's got a heatwave going on right now as well that don't sleep in the back of a panel truck retrofitted into a camper without air conditioning if you can help it public service announcement yeah this is not what on Instagram is known as van life if you ever look up that hashtag where people buy the old books wagon vans and refit them into very chic and absolutely unaffordable living quarters in order to take pictures of of themselves as if they're living in the open wild well and again and again we're back to that idea that in a consumerist culture how do you define your value will you define it by what you can buy and how you display it and how significant it is and not by saying give moves you know giving food from the grocery store it's about to expire to you know what's the what's the service for elderly people meals with wheels meals wheels thank you I wanted to read one of the biographies by I was written by Jackson Benson is that the Fitzgeralds yep Jackson Benson that book there's a whole story behind that book that was a 15 year in the making biography and when the book was not the you know received as the magnum opus it was he was kind of devastated by that but it is the standard Steinbeck biography it's just you know it raised the question when it came out in 1984 do we really need a thousand page biography of John Steinbeck what else are you doing at your time so he says this about Steinbeck winning a Nobel who who self told people maybe you know maybe he didn't deserve it and Benson writes and I got this again from my research assistant mr. Google this honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy and are gained by political maneuver precisely because committee made its judgment on its own criteria rather than plugging into the main currents American writing it's defined by the critical establishment that the award had value so they didn't it's saying that they're not looking at a fact that Steinbeck had fallen out of style and where people go wrong when they think about Nobel price literature is they always think it's for a book and it's not it's for a career and we do know that politics has a place in Nobel price selections particularly maybe these last 20 years but it's kind of nice to see that with Steinbeck they didn't worry so much about it it's interesting because when that was first announced the person that really kind of led the anti Steinbeck protest against him receiving the Nobel was Arthur Meisner who had just a decade earlier written the very first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and you know the title of his pieces kind of become infamous it's called does a moral vision of the 1930s deserve a Nobel prize and I guess my answer would be well why not why not you know and again that's that's a moment where you see his humanism being used against him that's a period in which I think almost the opposite of what we live in when Tony Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993 immediately the naysayers all said well it's just a political thing they're just wanting to honor a black woman so they're giving it to her which is absolute BS so you see how the term shift you know Meisner was complaining that he only won it because of the politics yes that the politics sacrifice the art and of course the politics of 1930s are far in the past by 62 so it's a bit silly now Steinbeck only outlives the award bay years and has a bit controversy toward the end because he's fairly pro Vietnam war in the early days which I think for a man of his generation who was really worried about communism and who also saw what happened with the fascist world war two spent time again covering the war is is probably not surprising well his son was also serving in Vietnam right so it's a little hard to be objective and and Steinbeck was a friend of Lyndon Johnson so there were other reasons for him right to do that and it was before general public attitudes toward the war changed again we said this before there's always a tendency to take people out of context and judge them by a later days political pedestal and most of us I think we'll find that were we to have actually been in that time and place maybe we wouldn't be able to do that it's easily as we think but it's legacy though he lives only six years the legacy lives on different ways no right after the book comes out we have a tremendous film adaptation by one of the best filmmakers of the classic era of Hollywood John Ford when the screen rights for grapes of wrath were sold the it earned $75,000 which at the time was one of the highest prices paid for a novel it's hard it's not hard to understand why Hollywood pays so much I mean when grapes of wrath came out within the first year it sold $440,000 hardback copies and then it came out in a cheaper cloth edition kind of proto paperback edition and sold another half million copies it was in the news a lot it was a huge controversy one of the library systems in in California burned the book claiming that it was propaganda another novelist wrote a response to it and sort of portrayed the agribusiness owners as very gentle caring people in a lot of ways that it had the kind of responsive writer can only dream of but you're exactly right the Hollywood version I think sometimes competes with the novel although the ending is very different the rose of Sharon scene is not in it that could not have been filmed in 1940 but it also takes as its centerpiece what is maybe the passage that I think people remember the most from it but I'm kind of curious what you think of this type of passage this is very typical of proletariat novels this is the passage in which Tom is choosing to leave the family for its own safety Casey has been killed is a almost immediate response Tom kills one of the strikebreakers who clubs Casey to death and he's hiding out but his little sister Ruthie gives him away accidentally. She's a child, she doesn't know better. But Tom says to Ma, you look around and you'll see me wherever you look. There's always a fight so people can eat, I'll be there, wherever there's a cop beating a guy, I'll be there. If Casey knows why I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad and I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, that's really the line that people have seized upon, to think of this novel as a call to political action. And when you're mentioning the legacies of the grapes of wrath, both Woody Guthrie's Ballad of Tom Jode, which essentially summarizes the book in 17 verses, but also Bruce Springsteen's Ballad, the Ghost of Tom Jode, both of those make use of that particular speech. What's interesting to me about Springsteen's song is that came out right in the heyday of the Clinton era. And it really did not find an audience, I don't think at that moment, because the whole notion of poverty and of people being denied a means to life was under the radar at that time. It just seems so out of sync. That song is so much more appropriate today. And of course, Springsteen at his most political now plays a version of it, a hard rock version of it, that was inspired by the version that raged against the machine. The indie punk band came up with. - That was at a time when Springsteen was kind of retiring from rock and was trying to just do singer, songwriter, acoustic, folk type stuff. - Yeah. - It's a very successful album that goes to Tom Jode and it's a successful song, I would say. You're right, it is weird timing for it. And I think you could argue that this is also the time of the.com millionaires and people again, it probably had to feel to someone like Springsteen of the 1920s with the excessiveness. And again, the over evaluation of consumerist culture and the love of people demonstrating their worth through demonstrating their wealth. And first there's the.com bubble bursts within a few years and then we hit the Great Recession in 2006. Seven, you know, and really pixel space team in seven, last for a few years. - I think that song had its most valiance during the Occupy Wall Street era when Thomas Piketty and economists were questioning wealth and equity. And of course that's a big theme going on today. - You would think this book could be turned into a mini series or filmed again as a movie. I kind of hope they don't because the art of a movie adapting a long novel is to choose the essence of it and be true to it. And not exactly mimic it or copy it. And it's very rare to get it right. And of course John Ford is one of the all-time greatest filmmakers and he couldn't have done it much better. His is a bit more dignity in the Tom Joed and the film than there is in the novel because I think the stoic, cold, calm nature of Henry Fonda and because of how Ford knows how to frame that perfectly. But I think that's who Steinbeck wanted Tom Joed to be. You know, there are a few times where he's a little too chatty and he's a little too talking about the themes of the book to really get there. - Well, and in the film that is the most stirring moment even though it's not necessarily the end of the film. - Right. - But it's also very typical of proletariat fiction. I mean, there's a line that Tom says earlier about a man can't do it alone is prefigured in Hemingway's very failed proletariat novel to have and have not. - Well, and I think our problem there is that the proletarian parts of that novel are not really the parts that fell. It's the parts he writes where he's trying to trash the writing culture and the tourist culture of Key West that fell. The Harry Morgan parts are pretty good. - It's almost as if Hemingway tried to incorporate his own LaFaire lettuceburg into a proletariat novel and didn't know better than to burn it to the ground. - I know that Hemingway liked this book pretty well, but did he have much of a point of view on Steinbeck? I mean, he's usually only charitable to people he discovers and not people who are popular. - His great rivalry was Faulkner. Fitzgerald, he kind of felt like he had already lapped by the thirties, but I think he saw Steinbeck as kind of a lesser version of himself. And I think in some ways unfortunately Steinbeck imagined Hemingway was always gonna be a better writer than he was. Fitzgerald was very derogatory about Steinbeck. Of course Fitzgerald had very little interest in the peasant folk hero and saw that as playing at socialism. - Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford and went to work in farms and ranches and then bought a boat, did some fishing and crab work and know that he got a handouts from his parents to make it. Had a pretty tough time for a few years where the writing took off. Whereas Fitzgerald flunked out of Preston and went to work for an ad agency and hit. He didn't have that kind of long apprenticeship of the sort that Steinbeck that he had immediately was the best seller and his stories are selling in the thousands at a time when in the hundreds was a big deal. Even in even through the thirties he's still got paid relatively well until he kind of dried up. - Well let me ask you this Scott, do you think Grape's Wrath is a great American novel? - I absolutely do. I think that the themes are in every way essentially American. I think it's ambitious and it takes chances. Like a lot of the books we discuss, it's not without its faults, but it has virtues singly outweigh those. And I think in terms of durability, it's still when people talk about great American novel, this is on the most people's short list and most significant novels about the American subject. - I would agree completely. I think it is such a great American novel where we underestimate its greatness as I began the podcast saying it's maybe too obvious of the touch tone sometimes. You were mentioning, in fact, I was reminded when you were talking about hoping they didn't make a mini-series of it. A few years ago, Amazon ended up doing a one-season mini-series of the Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel about Hollywood. And they just very painfully grafted on the grapes of Wrath into the storyline by having a jowed-like family camping out outside the Hollywood studio and incorporating that predatory to element. It was very jarring. - Like the studio police would not have rounded those guys up. - Well, and that's exactly what happens is they're not out picking peaches. They're trying to get jobs on the studio a lot. So it's very interesting that way. But yeah, I think we will always have adaptations of it because we will always have poverty in this society and there will be a desire to use literature to unite people to a political cause against the corporate world. And just remember, Tom Joe is out there somewhere fighting for you. Kurt, we've got this time on our podcast where we always think about some of the book which should be seen as worthy of the canon that we like to promote. Sometimes we'll bust one out, but today we're promoting one. What is that book, Kurt? - I want to mention a couple things that people might read before I quite get to the potential canon fodder. But grapes of Wrath is often read alongside a book by another California journalist named Carrie McWilliams called Factories in the Field that came out around the same time. And that was a book that was used to prove through nonfiction, through journalism to document some of the abuses that the farmers' associations claimed Steinbeck was making up. There's also an interesting book that's just been published in the last 20 years that was written in the '30s by Sonora Bab called Whose Names are Unknown, which was supposed to be published by Random House in 1939, but Bennett Surf, the founder of Random House, canceled that contract because the grapes of Wrath was such a big success. Bab worked at one of the camps under the Sky Tom Collins and there is a lot of speculation that Collins may have given Steinbeck some of her notes 'cause there are really profound correspondences between both novels in terms of the descriptions and some of the elements. People have leveled the yield plagiarism claim against Steinbeck, but there's nothing in any of the documentation that suggests he actually knew her. So if he did know some of her notes, he probably thought they were Tom Collins's. But the contemporary book that I would offer is Dorothy Allison's bastard out of Carolina from 1992. Probably the most famous story of childhood poverty of our own time. It's a novel that I think is contemporary in the sense that it uses poverty as a analog for sexual and familial abuse. It's a very graphic novel. There was a wonderful film version made with Jennifer Jason Lee in the mid '90s, but it's a very angry and bitter book. But Allison has always cited Steinbeck as one of her major influences. In fact, when they had the Steinbeck centennial in 2002, I went to a Lincoln Center. Don't ask me how I got there, but she spoke at that alongside Arthur Miller and several other literary luminaries. So it was kind of cool to see her speak. But it is a good book and it bridges that idea of poverty as a trauma every bit as damaging to the psyche as. sexual abuse. Well, our next book is not going to be a book as such. Instead, we're going to have a special episode called Great American Noir. And we're going to tackle a handful of writers with their most significant book or two. And just to have kind of a brief fun discussion about classic works of Ramon Noir or literary noir that we think the readers might enjoy, these are books that are crime novels or detective novels, but are written at a high enough level that we think everyone should be reading them and they're definitely worthy of consideration. And we thank you for listening to the Great American Noir podcast. Please follow us on Apple's Spotify, Google Play Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are so inclined, please leave a review, especially if it's a favorite one. If you enjoyed this podcast, you may enjoy others such as Master of Forty, with Kirk and Robert Troggan focusing on the short stories of Scott Fitzgerald, and reading McCarty with myself and guests about the works of Corman McCarty. And you can always email us at Great American Noir podcast at gmail.com and we thank you for listening.