Working Days (4 page)

Not counting a warm-up essay (in the September 12, 1936, issue of
The Nation
), or his editing of Tom Collins’ camp reports, Steinbeck’s first lengthy excursion into the migrants’ problems was published in the San Francisco
News,
a Bay area daily paper. “The Harvest Gypsies” formed the foundation of Steinbeck’s concern, raised issues and initiated forces (which reverberate in Part Two of his 1938 journal, and so enter the history of
The Grapes of Wrath
), gave him a working vocabulary with which to understand current events, and furthered his position as a reliable interpreter. This first stage of Steinbeck’s commitment actually stemmed from the notoriety caused by his recently published strike novel,
In Dubious Battle
(New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), after which Steinbeck found—often against his will—that he was fast becoming considered a sympathetic spokesman for the contemporary agricultural labor situation. (This was a profound irony, because while
In Dubious Battle
exposed the capitalist dynamics of corporate farming, it took no side for or against labor, preferring instead to see the fruit strike as a symbol of “man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself”; Steinbeck’s “unequivocal” partisanship occurred later, in the winter and spring of 1938.)

Thus, at the invitation of George West, Steinbeck produced “The Harvest Gypsies,” which, punctuated with Dorothea Lange’s graphic photographs of migrants, appeared in the liberal, pro-labor San Francisco
News,
from October 5 to 12, 1936. These hard-hitting, unflinching investigative reports detailed the plan of California’s feudal agricultural labor industry. The pieces introduced the antagonists, underscored the anachronistic rift between the Okie agrarian past and the mechanized California present, explained the economic background and insidious effects of the labor issue, examined the deplorable migrant living conditions, and exposed the unconscionable practices of the interlocking conglomerate of corporation farms. Primarily, though, his eye was on the migrants, who were “gypsies by force of circumstance,” as Steinbeck announced in his opening piece: “And so they move, frantically, with starvation close behind them. And in this series of articles we shall try to see how they live and what kind of people they are, what their living standard is, what is done for them, and what their problems and needs are. For while California has been successful in its use of migrant labor, it is gradually building a human structure which will certainly change the state, and may, if handled with the inhumanity and stupidity that have characterized the past, destroy the present system of agricultural economics.”
¹⁰

Written mostly in a measured, restrained style (the voice is reasonable, the tone is empirical, the ends to be achieved are understanding and intelligent solutions), Steinbeck’s News articles are full of case studies, chilling factual statistics, and an unsettling catalogue of human woes (illness, incapacitation, persecution, death) observed from close contact with migratory field workers he had met. But in the best tradition of advocacy journalism, Steinbeck concluded his series with a number of prophetic recommendations for alleviating the conflict with federal aid and local support; this in turn would create subsistence farms, establish a migratory labor board, encourage unionization, and punish terrorism. When they were published in 1936 (and again when they were printed in 1938 as
Their Blood Is Strong
), Steinbeck’s articles solidified his credibility—both in and out of the migrant camps—as a serious commentator. “The Harvest Gypsies” (and Tom Collins’ continuing reports) provided Steinbeck with a basic repository of precise information and folk values. It would still be more than a year before the subjective intensity of his engagement deepened; however, events were already transpiring in his hometown and elsewhere that would eventually change his attitude from methodical reporter to literary activist.

The last of Steinbeck’s San Francisco
News
articles ended with a comment that became the basis for the second stage of his writing: “The new migrants to California from the dust bowl are here to stay. They are of the best American stock, intelligent, resourceful, and, if given a chance, socially responsible.” Steinbeck understood that the migrants wouldn’t vanish from sight, and couldn’t be ignored, though official California tried to do just that. Steinbeck built on his
News
experiences and on at least one more month-long field trip, in October and November 1937, with Tom Collins to plan the writing of a “big” book. They started from Gridley, where Collins was managing a new camp, but then roamed California from Stockton to Needles, wherever migrants were gathered to work. By late in the year, after hitting several “snags,” he was working on a “rather long novel” called “The Oklahomans,” which, he reported a few weeks later, was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to journalist Louis Walther to indicate that the focus of his novel was on the salutary, irrepressible character of the migrants, who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California. “Their coming here now is going to change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.” Furthermore, “The Californian doesn’t know what he does want. The Oklahoman knows just exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it.”
¹¹

Quietly, in late January 1938, Steinbeck stopped work on “The Oklahomans” (the manuscript has never been found and it is doubtful that he had actually written a great deal on it). Judging from his comments to Louis Walther, however, it is reasonable to assume that “The Oklahomans’ ” uncomplicated duality of conception, the untangled lines of its proposed struggle, and the dispassionate tone of its narrative voice (probably a holdover from “The Harvest Gypsies”) struck Steinbeck as belonging increasingly to the reductive world of pulp fiction or wish-fulfillment. The truth was the migrant situation had worsened, and along with it, Steinbeck’s capacity for pity and his need for direct involvement had grown. The misery of the migrant condition was heating up in the winter of 1938, especially in Visalia and Nipomo (Entry #1, Note), where thousands of families were marooned by floods. From Los Gatos, Steinbeck wrote Elizabeth Otis in February:

Suddenly Steinbeck realized that the issue was not as simple as portraying the “naive directness” of the migrants’ desire for land. Indeed, the cauldron of his own soul was beginning to boil with frustration, powerlessness, and anger; “The Oklahomans” could not adequately redress the injustices he had recently contemplated. “When I wrote the
The Grapes of Wrath,”
he declared in a 1952 Voice of America radio interview, “I was filled ... with certain angers ... at people who were doing injustices to other people....”

 

As a novelist, Steinbeck often experienced a delayed reaction to piercing events. He needed time to let them gestate before they rose to the surface of his awareness and began pushing back at him, demanding their transformation to words. From February through May 1938, the third stage of his writing development produced “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” With this abortive—but necessary—venture, Steinbeck’s migrant subject matter took its most drastic turn, inspired by an ugly event in Salinas, California, his hometown. Earlier, in September 1936, Steinbeck had encountered the vicious clash between workers and growers in a lettuce strike—“there are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born,” he told George Albee (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 132). The strike was smashed with terrorism, and recollections of the workers’ defeat festered in Steinbeck for more than a year. Then, in early February 1938, galvanized by reports of the worsening conditions in Visalia and Nipomo, Steinbeck felt the urgent need to do something direct in retaliation. “It seems to be necessary to write things down,” he said in Entry #1. “Can’t stop it.” John Steinbeck never became what dyed-in-the-wool activists would consider fully radicalized, but by putting his pen to the service of a political cause, he was stepping as close to being a firebrand as he ever would. He launched into “L’Affaire,” a vituperative satire aimed at attacking the leading citizens of Salinas, “the committee of seven,” who organize and direct the ignorant army of vigilantes. The cabal of organizers remain aloof, but “work out the methods by which vigilantes are formed and kept steamed up.” The vigilantes were assembled from the common populace of Salinas—clerks, service station operators, shopkeepers—all of them “dopes” and “suckers” for creating mayhem.
¹²

By all accounts, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” was the angriest, most thesis-ridden book Steinbeck ever attempted. It presented difficulties from the outset. Carol, his closest critic, did not like its subject (despite her leftist beliefs), its title was concocted and unwieldy, and its approach was a detour from his main concern for the migrant workers, already adumbrated in “The Harvest Gypsies.” In fact, “L”Affaire“ wasn’t really a ”literary“ work, but a ”vulgar“ tract. In May 1938 Steinbeck confessed to Annie Laurie Williams: ”I’ll have the first draft of this book done in about two weeks. It is only a little over seventy thousand words. And it is a vicious book, a mean book. I don’t know whether it will be any good at all. It might well be very lousy but it has a lot of poison in it that I have to get out of my system and this is a good way to do it. Then if it is no good we can destroy it. I’ll send it on for the opinion of you all though before I destroy it. I feel so ferocious about the thing that I won’t have much critical insight. Probably be almost ready to send out by the first of June. But it is going so rapidly there will be a good deal of cleaning up about it.“
¹³

Within days Steinbeck’s critical insight returned. The careful artist triumphed over the ferocious propagandist, and he destroyed “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” Immediately, Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis, his main literary agent, and to Pascal Covici, who had already announced the publication of “L’Affaire,” to inform them that he would not be delivering the manuscript they expected. The following excerpted letter to Otis, written around mid-May 1938, offers a statement of Steinbeck’s artistic integrity, because it serves as a covenant with the abiding principles of his art and with the noble qualities of his migrant subject matter, which his blind anger had blurred in the headlong rush for revenge. This letter also sets up a resonant echo with many of the concerns voiced in the main journal section of
Working Days:

 

The fourth and last stage of Steinbeck’s writing culminated in
The Grapes of Wrath.
His conscience squared, Steinbeck stood ready to embark on the longest sustained writing job of his life. From late May 1938, when he struck the first words of the new novel to paper (“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth”), through the winter of 1939, when the last of the corrections and editorial details were settled (“I meant, Pat, to print
all all all
the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music if you can”),
The Grapes of Wrath
was a task which, as the main section of
Working Days
makes clear, fully commanded his energy. Everything he had written earlier—from his 1936
Nation
article, “Dubious Battle in California,” through “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” an April 1938 essay that functioned as the Epilogue to
Their Blood Is Strong
—became grist for his final attempt. From his numerous field travels with Tom Collins, and from countless hours of talking to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems, Steinbeck drew all the concrete details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures, which animate fictional characterization. But the choreography of details alone, the dance of his ear and eye, won’t fully account for the metamorphosis from “The Harvest Gypsies” to
The Grapes of Wrath.