Working Days (3 page)

Most important of all, as she did with all her husband’s manuscripts, Carol typed and edited
The Grapes of Wrath,
served in the early stages as a rigorous critical commentator (though by late September 1938, during the book’s final stretch, she confessed to having lost “all sense of proportion,” and felt unfit “to judge it at all”), and, in a brilliant stroke, chose the novel’s title from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” perhaps inspired by her hearing of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama,
Ecce Homo!
, which ends with a martial version of Howe’s song. (“Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one,” Annie Laurie Williams exulted.) Her role as facilitator is evident throughout this journal and is recorded permanently in one half of the novel’s dedication: “To CAROL who willed this book.” Eventually, however, in the wayward recesses of Steinbeck’s heart, Carol’s brittle efficiency, managerial brusqueness, and violent mood swings (she, too, was exhausted by the novel’s completion and histrionic reception) seemed to cause more problems than they solved. His involvement with a younger woman, Gwyndolyn Conger, whom he met in mid-1939, and who quickly came to represent everything Steinbeck felt romantically lacking in Carol, signaled the beginning of the end of their marriage.
⁵
They separated rancorously in 1941, sold their beloved Los Gatos mountain home (which Steinbeck had facetiously taken to calling “Carol’s ranch”), and divorced two years later.

The second part of the novel’s dedication—“To TOM who lived it”—refers to Thomas Collins (1897?-1961), the novelist’s chief source, guide, discussant, and chronicler of accurate migrant information. Collins not only put Steinbeck in touch with the real-life prototypes of the Joads and Jim Casy, but himself served as Steinbeck’s real-life prototype for Jim Rawley, the fictional manager of the “Weedpatch” government camp. (That camp became an oasis of relief for the harried Joads, and is featured in Chapters 22 to 26 of
The Grapes of Wrath.)
An intrepid, resourceful, and exceptionally compassionate man, Collins was the manager of a model Farm Security Administration camp, located in Kern County at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. The Arvin Sanitary Camp (featured in the fourth installment of Steinbeck’s 1936 San Francisco
News
reports, “The Harvest Gypsies,” a documentary forerunner of
The Grapes of Wrath)
was one of several proposed demonstration camps intended to provide humane, clean, democratic—but temporary—living conditions for the growing army of migrant workers entering California from the lower Middle West and Dust Bowl region. (More than two dozen camps were planned in 1935 by the Resettlement Administration, the forerunner of the F.S.A.; by 1940, with New Deal budgets slashed by conservatives in Congress, only fifteen were actually completed or under construction.)
⁶
Collins possessed a genius for camp administration—he had the right mix of fanaticism, vision, and tactfulness—and he and Steinbeck, both Jacksonian democrats, hit it off immediately in late summer 1936, when the novelist went south on the first of several grueling research trips during the next two years to investigate field conditions. (Contrary to popular belief, Steinbeck never traveled with a migrant family all the way from Oklahoma to California.)

Fortunately, Collins was a punctual and voluminous report writer. His lively weekly accounts of the workers’ activities, events, diets, entertainments, sayings, beliefs, and observations provided Steinbeck with a compelling documentary supplement to his own researches. In fact, Steinbeck and Collins struck a deal: Collins would guide Steinbeck through the intricacies of the agricultural labor scene, put him in direct contact with migrant families, and supply Steinbeck with valuable information; in return, besides broadcasting news of the workers’ plight in his own writings, Steinbeck would edit Collins’ reports and pave the way for their publication as a full-length book. Toward that end, at his home in Los Gatos in late 1936, Steinbeck introduced Collins to one of his agents, Annie Laurie Williams, who was in California on a business trip. Williams was immediately impressed with Collins’ forthrightness and with the importance of the “social documents” he had compiled. During the ensuing eighteen months she and Mavis McIntosh set about superintending the book’s evolution, corresponding with Collins, keeping abreast of additional material, and sending the manuscript around to various publishers for evaluations.

Obviously, the more preoccupied Steinbeck became with his projects, the less he did on Collins’ compilation, preferring instead to incorporate some of its “great gobs” of information—always with Collins’ permission—into his own writing. (“Letter from Tom.... He is so good. I need this stuff. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong,” Steinbeck noted in Entry #24.) By late June 1938, already a month into the final version of
The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck was out of the editorial picture entirely; W. W. Norton Company had hired a writer named Madeleine Ruthven to put Collins’ book “in shape for publication.”
⁷
Though he ostensibly “approved” of the Ruthven arrangement, Collins may have been miffed that Steinbeck was unable to maintain his part of their collaboration. That September, after a disagreement with Steinbeck in Los Gatos (“Tom was here. Little trouble Saturday because of liquor and talk,” Steinbeck wrote in Entry #69), Collins, increasingly busy with the creation of new camps, simply failed to supply McIntosh and Otis—and hence Norton—with all the material he promised. As a result his documentary book never appeared. In 1940, at Steinbeck’s suggestion, Collins worked as a technical advisor to John Ford’s striking cinematic production of
The Grapes of Wrath.
And later—probably spurred by the success of both novel and film—Collins himself wrote an autobiographical/fictional memoir, to which Steinbeck, who appears as a character, added a Foreword. This book by “Windsor Drake” (Collins’ pseudonym) was accepted by Lymanhouse, a California publisher, though it never reached print because the owner of the publishing company, pleading wartime paper shortage, reneged on the deal.
⁸
After that, Collins resigned from the F.S.A., and he and Steinbeck passed out of each other’s lives.

Besides Carol Steinbeck and Tom Collins, a caravan of other people crisscrossed the novelist’s life between 1936 and 1941. George West, chief editorial writer for the progressive San Francisco
News,
instigated Steinbeck’s investigations of the migrant labor situation for his paper. Frederick R. Soule, the enlightened Regional Information Advisor at the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration, provided statistics and documents for his News reports, and otherwise opened official doors for Steinbeck that might have stayed closed. Soule’s colleague, Eric Thomsen, Regional Director in Charge of Management at the F.S.A. office in San Francisco, escorted Steinbeck to the Central Valley, where the writer encountered Collins at the Arvin Camp for the first time. (In a convoluted and unintentional way, the federal government underwrote Steinbeck’s research.) A continent away, in New York, Steinbeck’s publisher, Pascal Covici, kept up a running dialogue with the novelist. The two men remained loyal to each other through the embarrassing bankruptcy of Covici-Friede in July 1938, and through Covici’s relocation as an editor at The Viking Press, a felicitous arrangement which also included the purchase of Steinbeck’s contract. Steinbeck had an incredible knack for aligning himself with loyal, generous, and responsible associates. In his literary agents, McIntosh and Otis, he was triply blessed. Mavis McIntosh, Elizabeth Otis, and Annie Laurie Williams not only kept his professional interests uppermost at all times (Otis nearly single-handedly engineered the Viking contract), but did so with the kind of selflessness that made them more like family members than business managers. All three women became trusted confidantes in every conceivable realm of Steinbeck’s life. And closer to home, Ed Ricketts, Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, Louis and Mary Paul, Joe and Charlotte Jackson, George and Gail Mors, Martin and Elsie Ray, Charlie Chaplin, Pare Lorentz, Carlton Sheffield, and Webster Street all managed, at various times, to help keep Steinbeck’s body and soul together. All these people—and more—left tracks in Steinbeck’s journal during the most eventful period of his life.

 

At the center of this maelstrom Steinbeck remained, if not exactly in control, then at least resolutely committed to his art, to the single vision of his purpose. By nature Steinbeck was not a collaborator. “Unless a writer is capable of solitude he should leave books alone and go into the theatre,” he exclaimed years later.
⁹
Solitude was an increasingly precious commodity in Steinbeck’s life in the hectic years from 1934 through 1941, during which everything from the death of his parents to the demise of his marriage conspired to paralyze his will. Despite the constant tumult, he wrote several of his strongest books in stressful situations. “Every book seems the struggle of a whole life,” he lamented in Entry #49. A ruminative, grass-growing mood was rarely his, so he managed to do the best he could with the conditions he had. Although it didn’t always ensure complete solitude, Steinbeck sequestered himself in the “tiny” work room of the Los Gatos Greenwood Lane house: “Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and a little book case. I like to sleep in the room I work in,” he told George Albee (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 133).

By entering his writerly posture, Steinbeck created a disciplined working rhythm and maintained what he called a “unity feeling”—a sense of continuity and habitation with his material. Ideally, for a few hours each day, the world Steinbeck created took precedence over the one in which he lived. Because both worlds can be considered “real,” at times during the summer of 1938 Steinbeck didn’t know where one began and the other left off; walking back into the domestic world from the world of imagination was not always a smooth shift for him (or for his wife). It was a shift exacerbated by Steinbeck’s shrinking sense of humor, his growing popularity, and, of course, by the grim subject matter of
The Grapes of Wrath.
The hard reality of California’s contemporary farm labor conditions—the pitiful spectacle of “three hundred thousand” utterly dispossessed migrant workers and their families (Chapter 14)—demanded his attention so fully that he refused to dissipate his energy in extra-literary pursuits: “I won’t do any of these public things. Can’t. It isn’t my nature and I won’t be stampeded. And so the stand must be made and I must keep out of politics,” he resolved in Entry #92.

Furthermore, Steinbeck, an imposing, but self-confessedly homely man, literally escaped what he once called his “confused, turgid, ugly, and gross” self when he wrote (quoted in Benson,
True Adventures of John Steinbeck,
p. 291). Where his characters use tools to elevate work to a dignified level, Steinbeck turned to his “comfortable and comforting” pen, an instrument that became an “extension” of the best part of himself: “Work is the only good thing,” he claimed on July 6, 1938 (Entry #30). If
The Grapes of Wrath
praises the honorableness of labor it is because the author himself felt it called into being the most committed, the most empathetic, the most resourceful qualities of the human psyche: “Every effort I can bring to bear is and has been at the call of the common working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, wear what they weave, use what they produce, and in every way and in completeness share in the works of their hands and their heads,” he reminded San Francisco News columnist John D. Barry (Entry #36, Note). The communal vision of
The Grapes of Wrath
begins in the ceremonial sweat of Steinbeck’s lonely labor. In fact, Steinbeck believed writing was redemptive work, an act full of transformational possibilities. Ironically, his engagement with the “Matter of the Migrants,” from 1936 to 1939, required so much of himself that by the end of the decade he was not only sick of writing fiction, but needed to turn to other arenas for respite and for inspiration.

Before that, however, Steinbeck rarely questioned the risks involved in bringing his whole sensibility to bear on
The Grapes of Wrath.
Like Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
Steinbeck’s novel had a complicated foreground and grew through a similar process of accretion and experimentation.
The Grapes of Wrath
was the product of his increasing immersion in the migrant material, which proved to be a subject of such related intertwining that it required an extended odyssey of his own before he discovered the proper focus and style to do the topic justice. In one way or another, from August 1936, when Steinbeck discovered a subject “like nothing in the world” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 129), through October 1939, when he resolved to put behind him “that part of my life that made the
Grapes”
(Entry #101), the migrant issue, which had wounded him deeply, remained a central preoccupation.

Between 1936 and 1938 Steinbeck’s commitment to his material evolved through at least four major stages of writing: (1) a seven-part series of newspaper articles, “The Harvest Gypsies”; (2) an unfinished novel, “The Oklahomans”; (3) a completed, but destroyed, satire, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg”; and (4) a final fictional version,
The Grapes of Wrath.
Each stage varied in audience, intention, and tone from the one before it. All the versions overlapped, however, because they shared—with differing highlights and resolutions—a fixed core of elements: on one side, the entrenched power, wealth, authority, and consequent tyranny of California’s industrialized agricultural system (symbolized by Associated Farmers, Inc.), which produced flagrant violations of the migrants’ civil and human rights and ensured their continuing peonage, their loss of dignity, through threats, reprisals, and violence; on the other side, the powerlessness, poverty, victimization, and fear of the nomadic American migrants whose willingness to work, desire to retain their dignity, and enduring wish to settle land of their own were kept alive by their innate resilience and resourcefulness, and by the democratic benefits of the government sanitary camps. From the moment he entered the fray, Steinbeck had no doubt that the presence of the migrants would change the fabric of California life, though he had little foresight about what his own role in that change would be. His overriding concern was humanitarian: he wanted to be an effective advocate, but he did not want to appear presumptuous. (“I am actively opposed to any man or group who ... is able to dominate the lives of workers,” he announced later to John Barry.)