The Winter of Our Discontent (4 page)

Steinbeck wrapped his novel around the plot of these two drafts and a story that was published out of them, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank,” appearing in the March 1956
Atlantic Monthly.
In this sly tale, Steinbeck’s touch is light—a “comedy,” notes the header, careful guidelines concerning a bank robbery. “How” in the title is thus central, since for a year Mr. Hogan meticulously plans his robbery and executes it with aplomb: “Mr. Hogan was a man who noticed things, and when it came to robbing a bank, this trait stood him in good stead.” His strategy is Ethan’s in the novel. Both depend on the world at large paying little attention to the unexpected. On a Saturday before Labor Day, Mr. Hogan opens the grocery store where he is clerk at 9:00 A.M., and at 9:04 he grabs an Iver Johnson .38 pistol (Steinbeck loved weapons of all kinds, the more unusual the better), shoves a Mickey Mouse mask under his coat, and walks out the door. Whereas Ethan’s planned robbery is foiled, Mr. Hogan’s is not, and at 9:07 ½ he finishes tucking the stolen money under the top tray of the cash register. That night he comes home to dinner and calmly hands each of his children one of the pilfered bills, five dollars each. “What a fine family!” he declares, the word “fine” used three times in the final paragraph. Mr. Hogan’s fine world remains intact.

In
Winter,
however, bank robbery is no laughing matter but rather the novel’s moral fulcrum; the modern Everyman, Ethan, first abandons righteousness in a willed act of transgression. The bank-robbery scheme is the supreme fiction, a radical reordering of consciousness that makes possible a newly hatched man. Ethan’s “immorality” turns on his own gamesmanship, his technique, his solipsism—seemingly with the ghost of Ayn Rand’s 1957
Atlas Shrugged
in the background of Ethan’s single-minded quest. He determines that he will be a contestant in a game of chance—not so very unlike participation on rigged quiz shows that pitted apprised and unapprised contestants against one another. Can Ethan win the jackpot, come what may? His willed depravity is, in this most self-reflective of novels, a work of art. In a long passage in the manuscript of
Winter,
omitted in the final text, Steinbeck sets forth Ethan’s “reordering,” the mental process that prepares him to rob a bank, act immorally, and do so without blinders. It is worth including the omitted passage in full to understand how Ethan’s plan is linked to the power of language to shape and reshape experience. Ethan addresses his canned goods:

Here Steinbeck strips behavior as he strips language of its vestments: Is it possible, Ethan asks, to act immorally with searing honesty, a seeming oxymoron? But it is that quandary that gives
Winter
its edge: “I had thought I could put a process in motion and control it at every turn,” he muses late in the book. Some critics have called Steinbeck to task for the bank-robbery plot, since the robbery does not occur and seems unnecessary after Ethan “falls” to a quartet of temptations offered in the first chapter by the banker Mr. Baker, Margie Young-Hunt, store owner Marullo (“look out for number one”), and salesman Biggers. But the essential questions in the novel hinge on that scripted transgression: Does honesty to self, lucidly articulated, trump self-aggrandizement?

Indeed, Ethan’s plunge from observer to player energizes him. Drawing from yet another text, Steinbeck alludes to Ed Ricketts’s and his own notions of the survivability of a species. Both men frequently discussed the fact that adversity strengthened a species’ survival quotient. In the 1930s Ricketts wrote an essay entitled “Wave Shock,” arguing that the toughest and most resilient animals are those battered most severely by waves. That concept provided Steinbeck with a metaphor for human existence in a Darwinian world. In another deleted passage from the novel, Ethan muses on his new stance as wily competitor: “I knew I would win and I felt kindly not only toward Marullo but toward the others I knew now I could beat. I felt related to them, a powerful brotherness. . . . Business is combat,” Ethan continues in the manuscript: “Someone must win and someone must lose. Even if there were enough of everything for everyone, and probably there is, the winners would take it away from the losers.” In becoming a player, the Harvard-educated Ethan is bound to prevail in his highly polished, well-considered, and fully articulated matches with the clueless. Ethan is Van Doren, masterful contestant.

Drawing from the world’s library, Steinbeck composed this story with his father as his imagined audience, a quiet, bookish man who had died twenty-five years before. In addressing this manuscript to his father, Steinbeck wrote to a man of absolute integrity—and also a man who had failed at business and was, finally, appointed as treasurer of Monterey County after corrupt actions by a former treasurer. During Steinbeck’s adolescence his father had faltered, the family’s finances darkened. Perhaps Steinbeck’s own filial infidelities are written into this plot: Ethan’s and his own waywardness blend with the manuscript’s “willfulness” so that each sentence is addressed to the man who had taught him what integrity meant. Ethan’s surrogate fathers—Marullo, his boss; Baker, his banker; and old Cap’n, his grandfather—give him questionable ethical advice and act inconsistently, yet Ethan embraces their energy rather than his father’s torpor. In this book the actions of fathers and sons, their integrity and their lapses, signal some kind of patriarchal, cultural collapse.

Finally, the book is dedicated to his older sister, Beth, “whose light burns clear.” Steinbeck’s women often embrace humanistic, life-giving tendencies that men sometimes ignore: Aunt Deborah’s rigid morality, for example, or Ellen’s insistent whisper of good faith, or even Margie Young-Hunt’s brutal honesty, a woman who understands Ethan better than anyone save Danny. Might it be that in establishing these writerly ties to his own family, he grounded his text in the imperiled values of his youth—what was most at risk, in his mind, in 1960s America?

The epigraph to Steinbeck’s novel reads: “Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.” He throws down the gauntlet for any attentive reader: Participate in the full range of Ethan’s textual echoes, verbal antics. Listen. Take heed.

“Words should be wind or water or thunder.”
(John Steinbeck, 1962)
“Any critic knows it is no longer legal to praise
John Steinbeck.”
(
Newsweek
, 1961)

A word about the book’s language. The remarkable and perplexing quality of Steinbeck’s final novel is Ethan Allen Hawley’s voice, and one is tempted to post a cautionary epigraph: “Not
The Grapes of Wrath
.” It’s a many-voiced narrative, with cultural references shifting, colliding, undercutting one another. If Ethan echoes Christ, Judas, Cain, Richard III, and J. Alfred Prufrock, a solitary night walker, he is also Melville’s Ishmael, basically decent, down on his luck, and an extravagantly verbal narrator who filters and combines voices and ideologies. Steinbeck ensnares the reader in Ethan’s verbal webs—his sharp intelligence and broad learning, his charm, his dangerous forays into wickedness. His speeches shift in tone and audience and intention with dizzying speed, as Ethan remembers and hears and engages the voices of the cacophonous present, the urgent past, the slick future.

Ethan’s voice is alternately silly, sermonic, passionate, reflective. He loves puns (“the Morphy law” or wife Mary as his “holy quail”) and conversations with dogs. He taps into his unconscious at “the Place” near the sea. He channels voices from his ancestral and national past, from his morally unsteady present, from a tentatively promising future in his daughter. He sermonizes with canned peaches. Each verbal exchange is loaded with an array of social and mythical attitudes and nuances: “I’ve thought so often,” Ethan muses, “how telling changes with the nature of the listener.” In shifting moods for each auditor, Ethan forces attention to language. Technique becomes a statement of the bewildering attitudes and cultural contexts of the modern world, “a time of confusion.” Ethan’s controlling voice subverts any cultural norm or tradition he engages; he speaks extravagantly because he acts extravagantly in detaching himself from his associates and, at the same time, subverting the very notions they embrace.

A single example. His most intimate discourse is, tellingly, his least convincing, heard in the pillow talk between Ethan and his wife on the opening page, where Ethan calls Mary by a range of sweet endearments, “Miss Mousie,” “chicken-flower,” and “ladybug.” And even as he speaks in this mincing, often wry and witty voice, he mixes in “Pilgrim talk,” religious references to Good Friday; “pirate talk,” acknowledging the ruthlessness of humanity; and, on the second page of the novel, swearwords and bitter phrases that lend testimony to his sense of personal defeat. This language keeps Mary separate. She repeatedly accuses him of catching people in “word traps” or “hiding” in his words. He lies to her about his intentions for her money. And Mary, for her part, is a bit thick: She speaks ungrammatically, and she cannot fathom either her husband’s mind or Margie Young-Hunt’s character.

Throughout the book, conversations are similarly packed with irony and parody. Speeches mask intentions, conveying the uneasiness and essential isolation of each character in the novel. The deliberate shifting of contexts and moods contains both Ethan’s rebellion and his anguish about the morality of “looking out for number one” or claiming that “everybody does it . . . —just read the papers”—phrases that beat ominously throughout the book. Literalizing the book’s verbal dexterity is the mask Ethan has on hand for his planned robbery—Mickey Mouse. A silly mask covering deadly designs is the perfect metaphor for Ethan’s dialogues. He’s a ventriloquist. He’s a trickster—hardly surprising for a hero who gambles his soul.

This is clearly not the world evoked in
The Grapes of Wrath,
where an order existed outside the text, even if temporarily disrupted within. In
The Winter of Our Discontent,
there is no such order apparent. We don’t know Hawley—intentionally; can’t identify a voice that is authentically his—intentionally; and have difficulty judging whether his action is reprehensible or unavoidable—intentionally. Appropriately, it’s his son’s plagiarized essay, a written and performed amalgam of cultural dialogues, that finally brings Ethan to a nasty confrontation with his own tactics. His son’s inauthentic voice, in effect, is more extravagantly out of whack than his own. Checkmate.

Critics did not find much to love in Ethan, a difficult character to get a bead on. Resistance came first from those closest to Steinbeck: His wife, Elaine, didn’t like the cloying tone of Ethan’s speech; his agent, Elizabeth Otis, hated the novel, even after being instructed by Steinbeck to read it as a “unit” because it was a “whole thing in time, place, and direction.” And his editor, Pascal Covici, greeted it with a lackluster sigh.

Steinbeck withstood the opprobrium from his own circle and, as suggested, rewrote parts of the text; he omitted bits of Ethan’s windy speeches and cut the suggestion of incest between Ethan’s children, Ellen and Allen—undoubtedly intended to further illustrate depravity of contemporary life. But after the novel was published and reviews were decidedly mixed, he sank into a deep depression—an emotional trough that yawned deeper than any previous ones of his career, perhaps because the writerly stakes had been so very high: Create or die. Few critics seemed to comprehend the risks he’d taken with Ethan’s voice. Several judgments in particular must have stung. The
New Republic
declared the book “a failure.”
Time
—the magazine that had never given him a particularly positive review— quipped that the book “sounds curiously like late-middle-aged petulance.” The
New York Herald Tribune
resisted the “implausibility at the heart of it,” and Orville Prescott of the
New
York Times
disliked the “manner of the writing,” which he found “jocular, gay and flippant.” He concluded, “Satire, if it is to draw blood, inspire feelings of guilt and contrition, cannot afford to seem too light and playful.”