sweet thursday by john steinbeck

Sweet Thursday is a sequel to Cannery Row. Like many novelists who revisit a beloved character, setting, or theme, Steinbeck struggles to do something original with his material. One discovers from the Prologue that Steinbeck himself is aware of this call to innovation.

“I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row,” says Mack, a lovable vagrant and well-intentioned swindler.

“I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about,” he adds.

In addition to chapter headings, Mack wants good clean honest dialogue, too, the kind that lets readers see what characters look like from the way they talk.

Steinbeck, with his gift for dialogue, certainly obliges on this front. It’s easy to hear the different qualities of men at work in their speech. “Maybe that’s what he was afraid of,” said Doc. “Lee wrote to me about it. I couldn’t advise him — I was too far away — so he was safe.”

“You can’t never find out what a Chinks got on his mind…” said Mack. “Why do you suppose he done it…? It was those goddamn movies that done it.”

Once or twice Steinbeck loses control of Mack who, inexplicably, sings a Shakespearean song: “Doc, let’s concealment like a worm in the bud feed on his damask cheek.” Hardly plausible but at least we know something’s eating Doc, our protagonist.

Set in Monterey, California, Doc is a marine biologist and a kind and intelligent man. He returns to Cannery Row after the war and discovers that its quirky denizens have changed—and that he’s changed, too. He’s lonely and restless and discontent. He feels himself a failure—he’s without a woman, and an idea for a scientific paper is stuck in his head, and won’t be knocked loose.

Like Cannery Row, the action of Sweet Thursday is advanced by a simple mechanism: Doc’s friends want to do him a good turn, so they throw him a party, but things go terribly and comically awry. Steinbeck offers a very slight complication to this mechanism. Although there’s one party, there are two groups of friends trying to achieve different goals. One group is raising money to buy him a microscope so he can get to work on his paper, while the other group presents Suzy, a sweet, stubborn prostitute, as his bride so he can find love. The quest to unify mind and body results in double trouble.

Although Cannery Row is a better novel than Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck does make an interesting use of place and location, and the activities commonly associated with them—the grocery store where food and beer are bought; Western Biological Laboratories where science happens; the Palace Flophouse where the homeless sleep and tell stories; and the Bear Flag where men and prostitutes have sex. Not at home in the world, Doc drifts uneasily between these places, confused.

Of all the locations in Cannery Row, the most intriguing one is the old abandoned boiler. That’s where Suzy takes up residence to reinvent herself. And that’s where Doc finally courts her in earnest. Unlike other places in Cannery Row, the boiler is unique because it’s not associated with any characteristic activities.

It’s set apart from them. Like a chrysalis where one become who one is.

As both Suzy and Doc discover.

A vision of wine under the influence of a dream (2 of 2)

I’m not done talking about Tortilla Flat yet.

Everything important comes in gradations of value. There are different denominations for things. Wine is no exception, such is one of the morals of Tortilla Flat. There’s a cup of wine. A glass of wine. A fruit jar of wine. A jug of wine. A gallon of wine. Two gallons of wine. And when a man passes into legend, there’s three gallons of wine, which our hero Danny purportedly drank before he shuffled off his mortal coil and became something more than a man.

His annunciation was the occasion of my closing the book for the night.

I fell asleep and dreamed a dream. A child said What is wine? fetching it to me with tiny hands. How could I answer the child. I don’t know what it is any more than he.

Wait. No, I do.

I guess it must be the liquid patriotism of my soul, or a twiddler of thumbs and whiler away of time, or a gift of friendship, or a triumphant yawp, or fermenting spurts of sensuality, or compensation, or barterable property, or a destroyer of sorrows, or a sweet evening pleasure, or sippable warmth, or a wagger of tongues, or an incentive to philanthropy, or the sunshine and rain of good health.

I awakened, and the child was gone. I saw the world clearly. Of all of the things wine is in Tortilla Flat, it is mostly rain and sunshine and soil. This symbol allows Steinbeck to fuse a quirky Medieval romance with biological naturalism. If we are lucky, old age settles down upon us like the sun on the horizon, at the end of a long, warm pleasant day. We are born; we grow, we decay, and then we die, just like Danny and his friends and his house, and the single living, thriving organism they all become under the glorious influence of wine.

Amen.

Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck (1 of 2)

Published in 1935, Tortilla Flat was Steinbeck’s first major critical success. And if you mistakenly believe that Tortilla Flat is a Medieval romance, you are easily forgiven — what with its thees and thous and thys, with its lovemaking and chivalry, its high adventure and quest for treasures, and its mystical, fog-shrouded settings.

No, Tortilla Flat is a 190-proof paean to wine.

Unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where wine is a subtle fruity accent in an otherwise dark, creepy atmosphere, the pages of Tortilla Flat are veritably soaked in the stuff. Now, you had better be damn well impressed to learn that there are 148 direct references to wine in Tortilla Flat. I counted them. 148! In a book of only 207 pages. And this is a conservative estimate! As I learned while loafing about Tortilla Flat, there are many ways to refer to wine without actually referring to it. 

Interestingly, of the 17 chapters only two are free from the influence of wine. But this is entirely consistent with good breeding, as one chapter deals with the death of a pale sickly baby boy, and the other with a band of paisanos rushing to the aid of a lady in distress — a one Teresina, a mother of eight who mysteriously becomes pregnant with her ninth. 

Of course, the lesson here is obvious: before the great mysteries of love and death, one had better have a clear head.

The Pastures of Heaven

Because I needed a break from the final volume of The Search
and because I wanted to read a small book and, lastly, because I love Steinbeck as a child a parent and mark The Grapes of Wrath as the novel that awakened in me a reverence for the grace and beauty of words, I sauntered through the lush valley of The Pastures of Heaven. A series of overlapping short stories, The Pastures of Heaven, like Winesburg, Ohio, features a common narrative thread that unifies the vignettes. But unlike Winesburg, Ohio, the common thread isn’t a character (a George Willard, for instance), who drifts in and out of the stories, but the setting, a gorgeous stretch of country in central California, “…a long valley floored with green pasture.., and the hills hugged it jealously against the fog and the wind.” Place and landscape, so characteristic of Steinbeck’s writing, figure prominently in The Pastures of Heaven, in particular the influence of the fertile valley floor upon its richly variegated denizens. Plant and animal metaphors abound: a young women has “the firm freshness of a new weed” or skin “as lucent and rich as poppies,” and a man has hands “hard and black and covered with little crevices, like the pads of a bear.” And questions “buzz like mosquitoes.” Each story in the cycle presents an unforgettable character who has a specific relationship to the land, to alfalfa, kale, and strawberries, to oak trees, willows, and sycamores, to geraniums, lavender, and flowering sage, and to meadows, streams and rivers. Firmly rooted to the landscape, each character cultivates a conception of himself, the world, and his place in the world. This unique mode of life works well enough for him until a neighbor unravels his carefully wrought conception with a careless word or even a designed intervention. Unravellings are poignant affairs, so each story ends on a profound note of disillusionment.

Postscript. One of the finest things about Steinbeck is his voice. Often I find myself reading his sentences aloud and am pleased to learn that Steinbeck was aware of this quality himself. In a letter from his vast output of correspondence, he expresses disdain for “collegiate stenographers” who fret about “every nasty little comma.”

I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print… They are more to be spoken than to be read. I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener.

Yes, he does.