Tough times? Read Steinbeck
Dear T,
There are three things an aging man really needs to be happy. There are different ways of classifying them, but from what I can tell, they fall into the classes of God, blood, and earth.
All three can be passed up to some degree in your early years; but as you get on with life you pile up sins and secrets and worries, and (with great irony I add: conversely) you start wondering if anything you do actually matters in the long run. If you’re lucky, God becomes the depository of these thoughts and the meaning of your actions. Not that you become a saint and live in a monastery, but that life itself becomes kind of holy, and you develop the idea that you’re being watched, and that what you do matters. This is what St Paul meant by godliness — not that you’re acting like God, necessarily, but that you believe you’re acting with Him. Which may be more important anyway.
Second is the idea of earth. You begin to connect yourself with the soil. Not just dogs or cats, but a whole slew of animals become important to you. You start to notice seasons changing more, and the colors of the birds landing on your fence, and the next thing you know you’re playing in the dirt again. You want to pour your soul into the earth, and care for it, and for this pouring of life into the earth to bring life out of it, and for you to feed yourself from the earth that you yourself fed. You want to smell the soil as you turn it up, and churn the moist dirt and feel it between your fingers, and pull up things that stand between you and your dreams, and to take pride in your output. You want others to know you can grow, and that you’re good at growing, and that what you grow is beautiful and you love it.
Third comes blood. Most of us have already fallen in love by 30 and got some kind of a family. This is of crucial importance, but what I mean by blood isn’t just making the future and investing yourself in it heavily, but connecting with the past. It means recognizing your life is well past half over and that you’re a link in a long story, and now not even the latest link, but a link inching closer, every second, to the forgotten middle. Then a question creeps in, who were the other links? Who passed their life force to me? And how did they live? And what did they love? And where were they from?
These questions lead us climbing down the family tree towards the earth, as far as we can go, many times, until things get dark — not far enough to solve the great mystery of Adam and Eve, but enough to give us surer footing, well off the weaker limbs and closer to the trunk. Then we discover traditions and history and make them our own: we might fuse blood and God and find Catholicism, if we’re lucky, or maybe pagan rites and maypoles, or lederhosen, or log tossing, or riverdancing, or bluegrass. Either way we become a repository of old loves and customs; and no longer looking to satisfy ourselves with what’s hip, or new, we seem intent on making ourselves look out of date — neither retro-cool, nor out of fashion, but ancient: timeless, if we dig well and wisely. Then thousand year-old hymns replace Christian contemporary music. Antiques are found and held on to. You want Christmas to feel less like a commercial and more like stained glass and miracles. You want your bookshelf to showcase more dead men than living.
For those of us who are starting to chase these things, Steinbeck is the bard of blood and earth. Those of us who are looking for God can look elsewhere, because Steinbeck hasn’t found Him. There are brief questions of God in The Grapes of Wrath, but no answers; and the most spiritual thinker in the book is an ex-preacher who’s abandoned the faith and believes it was all a game. Ex-reverend Casy says,
‘Here’s me preachin’ grace. An’ here’s them people gettin’ grace so hard they’re jumpin’ an’ shoutin’. Now they say layin’ up with a girl comes from the devil. But the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she wants to go out in the grass.’
— a confusion of sexual energy and spiritual ecstasy which is common in cults, but led him to ask too many questions. Being an honest lecher, Casy throws preaching aside because of it, but redeems God Himself and the holiness of life:
“I ain’t gonna baptize. I’m gonna work in the fiel’s, in the green fiel’s, an’ I’m gonna be near to folks. I ain’t gonna try to teach ’em nothin’. I’m gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear ’em talk, gonna hear ’em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin’ mush. Gonna hear husban’ an’ wife a-poundin’ the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with ’em an’ learn.’’
His eyes were wet and shining. “Gonna lay in the grass, open an’ honest with anybody that’ll have me. Gonna cuss an’ swear an’ hear the poetry of folks talkin’. All that’s holy, all that’s what I didn’ understan’. All them things is the good things.’’
This cheapens the Biblical idea of holiness, of course, which is the idea that God's ways are high and clean and you need to get right before you meet Him. Thus Casy's philosophy excludes Judgment Day and is offensive to all real Christians; but it contains the idea that all of life is God-breathed and sustained, and that all good hearty things belong to God Himself anyway — an attitude that all Christians ought to maintain, instead of just setting God aside for church.
Not that we don't have a good reason to set time and things aside; but what of the man who recognizes God in all things — as Paul asks us to (Romans 8:28)? And how does He pray when God is really behind all things? Are evil and good really separate things, or are they both driving us toward the same end? Does God give us only answers — or is part of this whole process letting us sort through good questions?
So much can be said for Steinbeck’s ideas about God — an area writers like Tolstoy leave him in the dust. But where Steinbeck shines like Tolstoy is his love of blood and earth — the understanding that a whole man is part of the earth, and the earth is part of him, and that family really does matter, and tradition (particularly in the little forms) is a spiritual extension of that family.
He writes about the matriarch of the Joad family, who can be recognized in many stable, hearty families,
Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.
He shows Ma Joad in action, later, when they’re in desperate straits in the Dust Bowl and ready to hit the road,
“Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?’’
“No,’’ she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much—livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but—it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me. An’ it’s jus’ how soon they gonna wanta eat some more pork bones.’’ Her face tightened. “That’s all I can do. I can’t do no more. All the rest’d get upset if I done any more’n that. They all depen’ on me jus’ thinkin’ about that.’’
—the one-step-at-a-time attitude of a real stoic and survivor: what we would call manly today, but which anyone can be, any time, if they choose.
Steinbeck has real ideas about land and the families that live on it, and work it, and who have histories on it; and this makes him stand out above most authors. He regrets machine civilization with its banks and inscrutable laws and its owners who live far away — too far to see the damage they cause, and for the people being ruined to even plead to, or shoot at. He says, wisely, as the Joads were being kicked off their patrimonial estate, which they’ve tended for generations,
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time.
— a prophetic foresight of corporate America, where faceless companies are traded in milliseconds to people who don't care about them or the people they employ. He has a real distrust for the abstraction of human relations that big-business (and in fact all large-scale life) brings; for the families being turned into mathematical calculations, for the men caught in the middle who are just “doing their jobs” with no concern for families they hurt, and can be replaced for not doing their jobs, and thus have no power to change things even if they did care. He believed big wealth dehumanized us, tore us away from the land and the people on it.
“Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn’t successful he’s big with his property. That is so.’’ And the tenant pondered more. “But let a man get property he doesn’t see, or can’t take time to get his fingers in, or can’t be there to walk on it—why, then the property is the man. He can’t do what he wants, he can’t think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big—and he’s the servant of his property. That is so, too.’’
And as far as the land itself goes, what tied a man to it? Not just that you'd cared for it for generations and it cared back for you, but the fact that you saw your father die by the fence, or that your kid was born in a room, or that you made love for the first time by a ditch. You had put your sweat into it, known the smell of it, been a part of it your whole life. And of your earthly possessions, many of which you had to leave behind because you couldn’t fit them in the truck,
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
and of being driven off your property and selling your best goods for a few bucks and starting over in a new land,
You can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me—why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again. The bitterness we sold to the junk man—he got it all right, but we have it still. And when the owner men told us to go, that’s us; and when the tractor hit the house, that’s us until we’re dead.
Thus there isn't too much Tradition in the Catholic sense; but there are so many beefy, beautiful, earthy quotes in Grapes of Wrath worth sharing, like what Steinbeck said of the women and children looking out the front door at a ruined farm, studying the fathers’ faces,
Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.
and of a man expressing his desire to kill anybody who was involved in bulldozing his home — the landowner, or the banker, maybe even the driver,
“You should talk,’’ he said. “Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin’ man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an’ not do no murder.”
and of the germ of human goodness, untamed:
“He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be.’’
and of holding yourself in a crisis:
‘Anybody can break down. It takes a man not to.’ We always try to hold in.’’
and about what it means to keep yourself standing tall:
the rifle? Wouldn’t go out naked of a rifle. When shoes and clothes and food, when even hope is gone, we’ll have the rifle. When grampa came—did I tell you?—he had pepper and salt and a rifle. Nothing else.
All of which, combined, makes this book not only manly, but gives a strong whiff of American.
I’ve quoted enough here to give a good idea how rich Steinbeck is, and why we ought to pass him on to our grandchildren. But even more important than passing him on to our grandchildren, I think Steinbeck, alongside Tolstoy, ought to be read to make us into good grandparents.
Yours,
-J
P.S. Steinbeck was the bard of the small-scale farmer, tied to the land and in love with it, just like Ayn Rand was the life-blood of the entrepreneur, the industrialist, and the moneyman — also valid, also living, also beefy; his (or in this case her) perspectives, her virtues, her life-blood on paper. Certainly not as earthy as Steinbeck, but still earth-ly.
Neither of these perspectives, at bottom, are Christian. Christians can have parts of either, but neither in entirety; and despite their insuperable differences, the thing Steinbeck and Rand share is their tie to this world, right here, right now; a deeply-felt and unashamed sensuality, a belief that the world has turned against them and everything healthy, and a keen sense of revenge to go with it.
And who do they blame? Jesus blames worldly desires, worldly Steinbeck blames “the machine”, Ayn Rand praises the machine and blames Jesus — or what amounts to Jesus, the idea of giving when you won’t receive, to people who don’t deserve it. Thus they each have their guns on the other, and probably would have been fun to watch at parties.
*The American Dream spread so wildly because it’s marketable to halfwits. Not that fighting to feed your family and actually making it are stupid, or low; but two cars and a white picket fence are concrete concepts, all tangible to geniuses and bumpkins alike — unlike calling out to God all night and finally getting an answer**, or chasing a new understanding of yourself and your fellow man, or reaching out to your ancestors and having them touch back: all of which are hard to explain, and have to be in you first. You might almost say you have to go through them first in order for somebody to explain them.
Thus people complain about The American Dream because you can see it in your mind but you can't always hold it with your hands. But God and blood and soil are the opposite. They can kill you before you even die if you don't have them, and you won't be able to explain why. Yet almost any of us can touch them, no matter how poor we are. We need only ask God for the first. We need only act for blood and soil.
**What do I mean and God answers? Does He audibly speak to me in the middle of the night? No — but when you’re in pain or wondering what to do or you're upset about something you did or the world is falling apart and then all of a sudden you remember who you are and who God is and that everything we see and everything we go through means something, you come to an understanding. It might be the realization that you’re sorry — a redemption of your soul. It may be the realization that you're forgiven, or understood — even if not by people. It might be the realization that God is handling things beyond what you can handle, and that you can only do what you can do.
But it’s always a realization, and after the realization a peace: not just a relaxing of the senses and a moving on to something else, but a deep feeling that it’s going to be okay, even if right here and right now it isn’t. The confirmation in your soul that what you’re feeling is true is followed by a burst dike of thank-yous, flooding out your mind through your mouth and carrying away your whole being. You’ve been released. And then after skyrocketing from the abyss into outer space, you go back to sleep.