Imperial (34 page)

What is Imperial? A Mexican woman in a serape walks slowly along the beach, tilting back her head yet shading her eyes with a forearm. Suppose that I could “bring her alive,” which means in part to appropriate her, in part to reimagine her, so that she (or the character, the alphabetical trick which pretended to be her) grew vivid, consistent, interesting, noble and flawed and serenely ordinary all at once—in short, “real.” Moreover, suppose that her reality corresponded in some fashion, probably metonymically, to the reality of this imaginary “Imperial.” Steinbeck’s Okies in
The Grapes of Wrath
were well constructed puppets; one can actually grieve for them, and thereby be encouraged to ask important and maybe even practical questions about human rights, California agricultural policy, whatever; in other words, one can respect their burdens; whereas a purely statistical, objectively truer approach, by occluding the humanity of dispossession, and thereby obstructing our grieving, partakes of the worm-ball character of a fallen palm tree’s inner flesh; we can touch its complex deadness, know it in a way that a living thing, for instance a woman in a serape, can never be known; the only way to approach knowing that woman in a serape, unless you live with her, is to invent her; but can knowing the dead palm tree profit us as much? I’ve written that Imperial widens itself almost into boundlessness, and so does my task.

Who should
my
heroine be?

Imperial is palm trees, tract houses, and the full moon. Imperial is the pale green lethal stars of chollas, whose spikes can go right through shoe leather. Imperial is a landscape like wrinkled mammoth-flesh; Imperial has broad breasts and innumerable pubic mounds, long reddish-grey tendons of crumblestone; Imperial’s hair is comprised of snaky washes in the badlands. Imperial is mica; Imperial is gypsum: translucent pages of a rock’s broken book. How many books might Imperial contain?—An infinite number, of course; but just as my eye has accustomed itself to retracing certain mapscapes (Highway 111, the Algodones Dunes, the border wall, the loop around the Salton Sea), my mind’s eye, trying to see Imperial, overgazes a few very particular bookscapes:
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
and
The Winning of Barbara Worth,
of course; and
The Grapes of Wrath . . .
Oscar Lewis’s great oral history
The Children of Sanchez
I meant to write about later in this book; I expected to reread the life of Cortés more closely . . .

STEINBECK, MOST AMERICAN OF US ALL

I feel protective toward this dead writer, who doesn’t need my protection at all. A friend of mine has been teaching American literature for a long time in a certain California university. Year after year, she assigns
The Grapes of Wrath,
and they love it. Very likely on account of that selfsame popularity, the critics jeer that Steinbeck writes, if I remember correctly,
novels with training wheels.

When a scientist embarks on a series of experiments to test a new hypothesis, it is likely that most of them will “fail,” reality being more complicated than even the most torturous assertion. Science corrects, revises, goes on. In this respect writing is more like science than the other arts (except, of course, for musical composition), because we can replace one word by another as many times as we like, even resurrecting deleted choices; whereas I have only so many chances to paint over my bad oil painting before it turns into a sticky brick. Nonetheless, once a work of art gets sent out into the world, revision ends. (Writers such as James Branch Cabell, who corrected their novels after publication, are decidedly not the rule.) So what would prudence entail, should my
Grapes of Wrath
turn out imperfectly? We find one of Steinbeck’s would-be mentors advising him to write the next
Grapes of Wrath,
set this time among the Puerto Rican population of New York City. Had Steinbeck accepted this counsel, he might have created something quite powerful. Who knows? Maybe he could have been another Zola, constructing an entire series of novels about dispossessed or underpossessing Americans. Instead, he chose to devote himself to loopy failures such as
The Winter of Our Discontent
and the never-to-be-finished translation from ancient English to archaic English of Malory’s tale of King Arthur. I love him for it.

People simplify Steinbeck into a populist, a pseudo-common man who idealized the true common man, a socialist like Jack London. For an instant corrective to that notion, read his short story “The Vigilante,” about a fellow who helps to lynch a “nigger fiend.”
Somebody said he even confessed.
With genius’s restraint, Steinbeck sets this tale in the hours
after
the murder, chronicling the changes in the vigilante’s heart from emptiness to cocky pride. At the end he comes home to his bitter, shut-down wife, who gazes into his face in astonishment and decides that he must have been with another woman.
By God, she was right,
thinks the vigilante, admiring himself in the mirror.
That’s just exactly how I do feel.
And the story ends. One quasi-socialist thread does spin itself through “The Vigilante” as it does through all of Steinbeck’s work: the receptivity of human beings to one another, and specifically of the one to the many. It is the bloodthirstiness of the lynch mob, and later on the admiration of the bartender, and the look in his wife’s eyes, which in turn tell the vigilante how to feel. Thus we are to one another, for good and for evil.

Steinbeck’s astonishing novel
In Dubious Battle,
which narrates the course of a fruitpickers’ strike in California’s Central Valley, and which like all his best writing is unbelievably
real
down to the last detail (the mud between the tents, the look and smell of dinner-mush, the ugly dialogues between apple-pickers and the checkers who dock their pay, the practicalities of sanitation),
⁴⁹
magnifies the vigilante’s susceptibilityinto something larger, less evil, if still problematic, and longer lasting: the way in which workers can be manipulated for political ends. Just as he did with the vigilante, Steinbeck dares to show the human nastiness of the strikers.
When we get down to business,
says one “sullen boy,”
I’m gonna get me a nice big rock and I’m gonna sock that bastard.
But while he is helping us to see what is wrong about the rank and file strikers, Steinbeck does two more things: He makes it powerfully clear to us
why
they strike, putting much of himself into their cause; meanwhile, he savages the vanguardist puppeteers who so often infest political movements. Their motto:
The worse it is, the more effect it’ll have.

Were Steinbeck’s writing to be simplified into anything at all, the motif would be
distrust of authority.
In 1947 he visited the Soviet Union, and in his account of that journey he reports that while Russians, or at least the Russian spokespeople whom he was allowed to meet, tend to support their government and believe that what it does is good, Americans prefer to begin with the profoundest suspicion of government and its coercive powers. Of course the latter is no longer true at all, if it ever was. Hence Steinbeck is one of the most un-American Americans of his time.

I want to be un-American like him, unaffiliated with anything but balance. I want to show Félicité’s goodness and stupidity together. Maybe then, in the book called
Imperial
which I hope someday to write, I can achieve greater goodness while exposing my own stupidities.

Steinbeck desired all of us to be angry and sorry about the plight of the Okies, and his own outrage makes
The Grapes of Wrath
a great book. He wanted to tell us that the people in the Soviet Union were not the monsters that our Cold Warriors insisted they were; and because the apparatchiks distorted and limited what he could see, his
Russian Journal
is dated and slight, but true enough to annoy both Russians and Americans. (Let’s call it a failure.) When he wrote
The Winter of Our Discontent,
he was worried about American materialism and hypocrisy. The defects of this novel remind me of those of socialist realism. Here lies a book with a message, and because that message is sometimes too stark, and other times camouflaged to the point of eccentric mysticism, it makes the story itself waver and warp. Well, fine; so he did have messages; he hoped to actually accomplish something in his own time, in which case I love him for that, too.

The book of his which I admire the most is
East of Eden.
For two decades now the character of Kate, whom some critics find unconvincing, has haunted my head; she’s horrific, pathetic, steady, successful and lonely; she perfectly is what she is. The retelling of the Cain and Abel story is touchingly accomplished, the landscape descriptions lovely and lush, the plotting as careful and convincing as the best of George Eliot. And of course Steinbeck has written in a message, a flaw, personified by a Chinese servant who tells us, sometimes at great length, what to think. But Lee has never annoyed me. He speechifies intelligently, at times wittily, and sometimes compassionately. Do I care that nobody I’ve met talks like that? He is sincere because Steinbeck is sincere. And this is what I love about Steinbeck most of all, his sincerity.

He once wrote about his friend Ed Ricketts that the man loved what was true and hated what wasn’t.
⁵⁰
If Steinbeck occasionally mistook sentimentality for truth, well, there remain worse vices. Steinbeck worried and at times grew bitter, but he was never cynical. One aspect of his credo which too many of us misperceive as sentimental is his very Imperial glorification of individual choice. If I dislike, say, what America “stands for,” and if I express that feeling in public, I may find that certain other Americans dislike
me.
That happened to Steinbeck. The many bannings of
The Grapes of Wrath
comprise its badge of honor. This book upset people. It actually had something to say. It was angry, unashamedly sexual and un-American. Being un-American, Steinbeck was the most American of us all.

IMPERIAL

by

John Steinbeck

1

María loved truth and hated untruth . . .

Were I writing a
Grapes of Wrath
about Imperial, I would have to first attempt what Steinbeck did for the whole of agricultural California in “The Harvest Gypsies”; I’d construct a sociology of Imperial.
Let us see the fields that require the impact of their labor and the districts to which they must travel,
he writes, then inserts a true and pathetic detail, just as any novelist or journalist would do; afterwards, he gets down to delineating his data:
There are the vegetable crops of the Imperial Valley, the lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes, cabbage to be picked and packed, to be hoed and irrigated. There are several crops a year to be harvested, but there is not time distribution sufficient to give the migrants permanent work.

Maybe I don’t get out as much as Steinbeck used to. In any event, before getting my shoes dirty in any Hoovervilles, I’ll pick up the telephone to order up some piping-hot statistics. First I have to learn the female employment rate; then and only then may I go interview some Marías. The Department of Health Services has kindly ranked the fifty-eight counties of California in regard to various unpleasant things, a ranking of one being the best. And from these profiles I learned the following:

Imperial County comes in thirteenth for deaths due to all causes, fifty-second for fatal motor vehicle crashes, eighteenth for murder deaths, fourteenth for suicide deaths, seventh for cancer deaths, fiftieth for drug-related deaths, fifty-second for incidence of hepatitis C, fifty-seventh for incidence of tuberculosis (only San Francisco County is worse), nineteenth for infant mortality, forty-ninth for births among adolescent mothers, fifty-fifth for incidence of minors living in poverty. So what? We need a novelist to make sense of it.

What is the story of the Joad family? If you lack time to read
The Grapes of Wrath,
you can read the synopsis in “The Harvest Gypsies”:
Families who had lived for many years on the little “cropper lands” were dispossessed because the land was in the hands of the banks and finance companies, and because these owners found that one man with a tractor could do the work of ten sharecropper families. Faced with the question of starving or moving, these dispossessed families came west.

If I were going to write my
Grapes of Wrath
about Imperial, maybe I’d take my synopsis from Officer Dan Murray of the Border Patrol:
You should see these guys pickin’ watermelon, bent over all day. They do work most Americans wouldn’t do.

The novel might open in a certain perfectly arrayed jungle on the border of Thermal, a humid, shady little kingdom across the street from the sign for the Jewel Date Palm Co. Each uprooted fan-palm made a royal progress, marching slowly down the road between the wheels of the white Bobcat, holding high its green-crowned head: The king was coming! With a proud white smile, José ground the vehicle down that rutted mud road, which could have been somewhere in Central America, and then he emerged into the hot naked reality of Imperial where his colleague Marciano, who came from Michoacán and lived in Indio, was whacking each treetop into tight flat-topped bundles, then tying them off. José gripped the lever. The king’s many fronds whirled; then he began to lurch, to dance, slowly bowing to the forces of severance, until José had laid him crosswise upon his fallen predecessor, expertly sliding the loop out from under his trunk. Mariano began binding and maiming the king. They shipped three hundred palms a month to the MGM Grand and other hotels in Las Vegas. And now José was grinding down the shady alleys, back to the place where a stinger-tailed chainsaw machine had already cut out a cube-shaped chunk of root from the earth. He said to me: To move the big one is very difficult because that’s the most dangerous. If you no have strong machine, you can be killed.