John Steinbeck: Voice of America

"To the red country

"and part of the grey country of Oklahoma,

"the last rains came gently,

"and they did not cut the scarred earth.

"The sun flared down on the growing corn

"and in the water-cut gullies

"the earth dusted down in dry little streams.

"And every day the earth paled further.

"Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.

"A walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist.

"An automobile boiled a cloud behind it.

"Dawn came, but no day.

"In the grey sky a red sun appeared,

a dim, red circle that gave a little light, like dusk

"and as that day advanced,

"the dusk slipped back towards darkness."

This is Oklahoma,

and about 80 years ago

it was one of the starting points,

around here and the neighbouring states,

for the biggest internal migration the United States has ever seen.

Up to half a million people, working people, left their farms,

left their droughted lands and went West,

a thousand miles to the Californian border...

to seek work.

It was an epic journey and it was marked by what became

one of the epic American novels of the 20th century,

The Grapes Of Wrath.

John Steinbeck's novel told a remarkable story

about the intolerance that comes from economic hardship,

and it held up a mirror to America's shameful abuse

and neglect of its own people.

When it came out at the end of the '30s,

it had a dramatic effect.

It was revered.

It was scorned.

Steinbeck himself was accused of being a communist,

a vicious Red,

something he could never throw off for the rest of his life.

In some ways, the immense impact of The Grapes Of Wrath

distorted Steinbeck's reputation.

His range was vast and his output prolific.

In this film, I want to take a fresh look

at the kind of writer he really was.

I've admired John Steinbeck since I first read him in my teens.

For me, he was one of the great writers of the American landscape.

He created enduring myths around the lives of ordinary Americans

who were figures in that landscape,

buffeted by the forces of nature and politics.

I want to revisit some of the places that shaped his imagination -

the California Valley where he grew up,

the Monterey Coast where he studied marine life,

and the Oklahoma plains where he immortalised

the people of the American Dust Bowl in the Grapes Of Wrath.

# That old dust storm killed my baby

# But it can't kill me, Lord

# And it can't kill me

# That old dust storm

# Killed my family

# But it can't kill me, Lord

# And it can't kill me... #

The dustbowl was the worst environmental disaster

in this part of the US.

It occurred in the mid-1930s

when farming conditions from the years before that,

when prices were so good during World War One and afterwards,

caused a lot of farmers to put a lot more of this kind of land

into production that was mainly just for buffalo-grazing

or cattle-grazing before that, causing all that land

to be blown up during the height of the drought.

There wasn't enough cover to hold down that soil.

The dust came rolling in across the fields

and it was black. And I was in school.

I don't remember if my father came and got me

after that or not.

But I do remember that cloud

that was so distinct, so scary.

People in Oklahoma still remember the devastation

of the Dust Bowl and this year,

farmers are experiencing the worst drought

since the 1930s.

I remember my grandparents talking some

and telling some stories about the drought and about the Dust Bowl.

The Depression, you know, was in the late '20s

and then just a few years following...

severe drought, and so it was sort of one extreme hard time

followed by another.

Some of your friends and maybe even neighbours

around this area are going to suffer badly, are they, this summer?

That's correct.

We could see similar numbers that are forced

to find other sources of income,

similar to what was experienced in the '30s.

But it wasn't just dust that drove the farmers out.

Mechanisation was changing farming practices

and smallholdings were becoming uneconomical.

Many farmers started buying a lot more equipment.

That started racking them up in debt even more,

and they kept digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt.

And then we get the economic depression

and the bad climates for bad crops and their notes went belly up.

In The Grapes Of Wrath,

Steinbeck describes the natural disaster

which befell the farmers as a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

But he also focused on the economic collapse which was

threatening their survival, a situation

with telling parallels in today's America.

It was all about turning agriculture into big business,

and Steinbeck had no doubt about who the villains were.

The villains were the banks who were ruthlessly forcing

the closure of the small farms.

This is one of the things he wrote about the banks. "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.

"The Bank - the monster - has to have profits all the time.

"It can't wait. It'll die.

"When the monster stops growing, it dies.

"It can't stay one size."

Steinbeck was always on the side of the working man...

battling the system. In this instance,

it was the broken farmers of Oklahoma.

The main characters in The Grapes Of Wrath

are the Joad family. They came from Sallisaw,

which in the 1930s had a claim to fame -

it was the home town of the bank-robber and folk-hero,

Pretty Boy Floyd.

Pretty Boy Floyd was seen as a Robin Hood figure,

hitting back at the rapacious banks.

Steinbeck uses him as a role model for his main character, Tom Joad.

When the novel starts, Tom Joad has just been let out of prison.

He has spent four years there for killing a man in self-defence.

He gets back home to discover that his family is ready

to hit the road West.

The banks have foreclosed on their farm.

Tom Joad catches up with his evicted family

and joins them in their overloaded truck.

And so begins their gruelling journey to California.

# Lots of folks back East, they say

# Leaving home every day

# Beating the hot old dusty way to the California line... #

The route they take is the arterial road west...

the Mother Road, as it's called - Route 66.

"Highway 66 is the main migrant road.

"66...

"the long concrete path across the country,

"waving gently up and down on the map,

"from Mississippi to Bakersfield...

"66 is the path of people in flight,

"refugees from dust and shrinking land,

"from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership,

"from the desert's slow northward invasion...

"and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads,

"from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads.

"66 is the mother road.

"The road of flight."

Steinbeck described this mass migration as a Biblical exodus.

He was steeped in the Bible

even though he himself wasn't a Christian.

There are 12 people on the truck.

They are the 12 tribes of Israel.

Noah counts them on two by two,

they and the animals as Noah counted them onto the Ark.

We are in the Bible belt,

but even so, Steinbeck wanted to use the Bible

in order to make heroic

the journey of these people...

to give them vast, even mythic, status.

They are like the Israelites, he thinks,

going across the desert, making for the Promised Land.

My fellow traveller, Earl Millen, is a Vietnam veteran

and a vintage car enthusiast.

I wanted to know what he thought

about the mass migration to California.

Do you admire them?

Do you think they must have been tough people?

I look at them as some of the strongest people

in American history.

How would you feel today about putting your family,

say three or four people, in the back of this truck

and driving that thousand miles in this?

What would you feel about that?

I'd probably chicken out.

THEY LAUGH

You'd chicken out, would you?

Even a military man like you...

29 years' service and you'd still chicken out.

As the Joads travel along Route 66,

they begin to experience hostility

at state borders, suspicion at gas stations,

and harassment from the police.

They hear themselves described disparagingly as "Okies",

a term applied to all the migrants irrespective of whether

they came from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri or Kansas.

As one character puts it in The Grapes Of Wrath,

"Well, Okie use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma.

"Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch.

"Okie means you're scum."

# I'm a-going down this road feeling bad

# I'm a-going down this road feeling bad

# I'm going down this road

# Feeling bad, bad, bad

# And I ain't gonna be treated this a-way... #

This is the small town of Needles on the Colorado river,

the border crossing from Arizona into California.

In 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department sent officers

to close the borders to migrant workers

without jobs. They were effectively criminalising

fellow Americans simply for being out of work and foreign to the state of California.

The migrant situation was becoming so serious

that California was cutting its links

to the rest of the United States.

These were cops who stood at the border

and literally turned people away.

If they were coming across into California looking for work,

they said, "There are no jobs here, go home."

And this commonly became known as the Bum Blockade.

There was a determined attempt to keep them out,

almost to secede from the Union, wasn't there?

Yes. There were various attempts to keep the migrants out.

So there were actually radio broadcasts sent

back from different, quote unquote, "citizens' associations",

and they would broadcast back to Oklahoma and say,

if you've heard California's the land of milk and honey,

if you've heard jobs are plentiful,

don't believe it. Don't come, there are no jobs.

We don't want you here. Stay out.

By the time the Joad family get to Needles,

they're already demoralised by the loss

of the grandfather of the family, who's died along the way,

and they are increasingly anxious about what lies ahead of them.

The first sight of California is a huge disappointment.

"Well, we're here.

"This here's California, an' she don't look so prosperous.

"'Got the desert yet', said Tom.

"'An' I hear she's a son-of-a-bitch."

After a pummelling journey across the desert,

the Joads finally catch a glimpse of what they're looking for.

"They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow,

"and the sun came up behind them, and then, suddenly,

"they saw the great valley below them.

"Al jammed on the brake.

"'Jesus Christ! Look!' he said.

"The vineyards, the orchards,

"the great flat valley, green and beautiful,

"the trees set in rows, and the farmhouses. And Pa said,

"'God almighty! I never knowed there was anything like her.'

"Ruthie and Winfield looked at it and Ruthie whispered,

"'It's California.'"

It might look like the land of Canaan,

overflowing with milk and honey, or another Eden.

But down there, in the orchards and vineyards,

the Joad family were going to experience much worse -

squalor, exploitation,

prejudice and violence.

What Steinbeck portrayed in the labour camps of California shocked America.

Below subsistence wages, malnutrition, disease,

beatings, and the complete loss of civil rights.

That was what was waiting for the migrants.

That was their promised land.

The movie version of The Grapes Of Wrath portrays with documentary realism

the hardships and brutality of the labour camps.

The film was made in 1940,

when the migrant crisis was still under way,

and used real locations in the California valleys.

Deputies armed with rifles and pick-axe handles

herd the Joad family into what is effectively a concentration camp.

When the Joads do finally get out to California,

they got up against something

I don't think they were expecting.

They had no experience with big agribusiness here in Oklahoma.

That was something different.

California agricultural history is unique,

because that was always that way.

There were the biggest wheat ranches, the biggest fruit farms.

There were the biggest everything out there.

And they were owned by larger people

who really had a lot of money to invest.

And therefore they could exploit labour.

Steinbeck's understanding of the developing crisis in California

had been gradual.

He was a native of California and had a privileged upbringing,

but he couldn't avoid the violent unrest which shook the state

in the 1930s and was leading to political extremism and mob rule.

Steinbeck was born in 1902

here in the agricultural town of Salinas,

nicknamed "The Salad Bowl of the World".

He grew up in a middle-class household

and from an early age, he knew that he wanted to be a writer.

They read aloud to one another

and they had fierce debates about ideas over the dinner table.

They would talk about ideas.

So there was a kind of literary,

not intellectually pretentious but certainly curious family.

-Did he start writing quite young?

-He said later that

he wanted to be a writer since he was 14.

And so he said, this is all I want to do, is write.

And the amazing thing about Steinbeck is,

having made that decision,

he simply worked at it relentlessly

all of his life. From age 14 until he died at age 66,

he wrote every day,

he wrote letters, he wrote journals to warm up.

He would write for three, four, five hours a day.

Steinbeck came into contact with itinerant field labourers from an early age,

while doing vacation work at a local sugar beet factory.

His sympathy for these marginal figures

was shown in one of his most famous novels, Of Mice And Men,

which follows the fortunes of two itinerant fruit tramps,

Lennie and George.

George describes their solitary life as follows.

"Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.

"They got no family.

"They don't belong no place.

"They come to a ranch an' work up a stake

"and then they go inta town

"and blow their stake, and the first thing you know

"they're poundin' their tail to some other ranch.

"They ain't got nothing to look ahead to."

He was drawn to people who weren't

in the mainstream, workers in the fields,

people who were lonely, people who were isolated,

people on the margins. He always defended

those who suffered in some way.

He seemed to step outside what in England we would

unhesitatingly call his class,

very emphatically and

go over a line and be the man who is now best remembered

for being what was called a proletarian writer.

He describes people working with their hands all the time.

I mean, Of Mice And Men is full of hands.

We're looking at Lenny's hands, George is playing solitaire.

-And then Lenny crushes Curly's hand.

-Exactly.

Hands are very much a part of that book.

But hands are a part of everything he wrote.

Grapes Of Wrath, everybody's working with their hands,

they're digging ditches, they're cooks,

he talks about people frying hamburgers and onions.

They're about workers and people who work.

And I think if somebody like Fitzgerald is always

writing about money and people's fascination with money,

I think Steinbeck really got it right about people who have to

work for a living and work with their hands.

And he knew what that was like himself.

Steinbeck's early reputation as a writer was based on stories

set around the Salinas Valley. They were rural parables of life

in The Pastures of Heaven

or comic tales of Mexican paisanos

in a district known as Tortilla Flat.

But with the migrant crisis of the 1930s, everything changed,

and the marginal figures he was typically drawn to

began to take centre stage.

In 1934, Steinbeck began to notice that new groups of people

were passing through the Salinas Valley.

Jalopies piled high with furniture and people

were coming from Arkansas and Oklahoma

and Texas, and going through the town.

They made for a hill,

and created a little shanty town,

or 'Hooverville' as it was known then.

The Depression had arrived right on Steinbeck's doorstep,

and he began to study the situation in detail.

You had about half a million people who came to California

through the '30s and they swamped the place.

And you can imagine the local reaction to this.

Even if you were open-minded,

you were starting to really feel a squeeze in a lot of ways.

By the middle of 1934,

there were 142 workers for every 100 jobs,

and the incoming migration was driving wages

to below subsistence level for a back-breaking ten-hour day.

In effect, this sort of work was a form of seasonal slavery.

This was a state that was divided between far left and far right.

You literally had communists running around organising the farm fields

and you had business interests

and others who were determined to protect their interests

who leaned very far politically the other way.

Intrigued by what was going on in his own backyard,

Steinbeck set about meeting Communist leaders and organisers.

As a direct result of his exposure to these labour activists,

he wrote the strike novel, In Dubious Battle.

His first idea was to interview a strike organiser

and he was going to write a biography.

So you can see that initially he was kind of detached.

I'm just going to interview this striker and write his biography.

And he said, "I want to achieve a kind of detached perspective.

"I'm non-partisan. I'm just going to report

"as a journalist on what's going on."

So, In Dubious Battle is about a strike,

but it takes a kind of neutral position.

Based on an actual strike which took place in August 1933,

it depicted the battle, the bloody battle,

between the fruit-pickers and the owners

in orchards like these behind me.

In this instance, Steinbeck didn't take sides.

He depicts the Communist organisers as just as manipulative

as the owners of the land themselves.

"Mac said, 'Here's the layout.

"'Torgas is a little valley and it's mostly apple orchards.

"'Most of it's owned by a few men. Now when the apples are ripe,

"'the crop tramps come in and pick them. From there, they go on

"'over the ridge and south and pick cotton.

"'If we can start the fun in the apples,

"'maybe it will just naturally spread over into the cotton.'"

Steinbeck was using this battle as a metaphor for human antagonism.

In a letter, he wrote,

"I'm not interested in the strike as a means of raising men's wages,

"and I'm not interested in ranting about justice and oppression.

"I wanted merely to be a recording consciousness, judging nothing,

"simply putting down the thing.

"I think it has the thrust, almost crazy, that mobs have."

But something would happen to John Steinbeck,

and he would reject his detached position and become full of anger

and political commitment when,

three years later, he wrote The Grapes Of Wrath.

In August 1936, soon after the publication of In Dubious Battle,

Steinbeck was asked by the San Francisco News

to write a series of articles on migrant farm workers.

Steinbeck toured the labour camps of the San Joaquin Valley.

He described appalling scenes of squalor and malnutrition

and young children dying in these slum conditions.

"He will die in a very short time.

"The older children may survive.

"Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent,

"on the dirty carpet.

"It was born dead, which was just as well,

"because she could not have fed it at the breast.

"Her own diet will not produce milk.

"After it was born and she had seen that it was dead,

"the mother rolled over

"and lay still for two days. This woman's eyes have the glazed,

"faraway look of a sleepwalker.

I did have a great-uncle. He lived over here in Oklahoma.

He couldn't make it any more, so he moved to California.

They lived in a tent city.

But they had a daughter

that hadn't been feeling too good when they left.

So she was sick quite a while.

But when you don't have any money,

you don't go to the doctor and take care of it.

So she passed away out there then.

It was scenes like this which provoked Steinbeck

to abandon his detachment and take an angry, partisan stance.

And when he returned from this research trip,

he found an alarming situation developing in his home town.

The Salinas lettuce strike started at the end of August 1936.

Bully boys were marching around the town

to defend it from the strikers.

The local police were in alliance with the growers

and gave charge of the situation to a retired army officer,

Colonel Sanborn, who declared a form of martial law

and deputised 2,000 vigilantes to patrol the streets.

Salinas was producing half of all the lettuce consumed in the USA.

So there were fortunes at stake for the growers facing a strike.

The labourers in the fields had seen

their earnings decline by two-thirds,

and their anger was kept under control

at the end of the barrel of a gun.

The Nation magazine described sinister developments,

"Just outside Salinas, something shockingly resembling

"a concentration camp has recently been constructed.

"A water tower rises in solitary grandeur in the midst of this camp.

"Surrounding the tower is a platform, splendidly adapted

for observation, night illumination and marksmanship.

Tensions reached breaking point when non-union farm workers

were brought in by the growers to bust the strike.

Here, in this charming town of Salinas,

on September 16, 1936,

a pitched battled was fought in these streets.

Pick handles, tear gas, shotguns.

The Battle of Salinas had begun.

By September 17, Steinbeck's home town was a war zone.

250 American Legionnaires,

admirers of European fascism,

joined the battle.

Steinbeck describes the situation in California as

"a bomb ready to explode.

"There are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets

"of that dear little town where I was born."

Looking at the local newspapers is a reminder that

what was going on in the California Valleys reflected

the bigger political struggles unfolding in Europe in the 1930s.

The conflict was often described ideologically

as a battle between communists and fascists,

but the truth was more basic than that.

Steinbeck wrote, "The use of the word 'communist' as a bugbear

"has nearly lost its sting.

"An official of a speculative-farmer group,

"when asked what he meant by a communist, replied,

"'Why, he's the guy that wants 25 cents an hour

"when we're paying 20.'"

Steinbeck was now desperately concerned about

the collapse of democracy and civil rights, and the rise of vigilantism,

the lynch mob and fascism.

He decided to go undercover to research

a big novel about the migrant situation.

He went to the headquarters of the Farm Security Administration

in Washington and said he wanted to work as a migrant worker.

They assigned to him a man called Tom Collins, who was camp manager

at this camp, Arvin, here, and the two men worked in the valleys,

this valley and other valleys, for several months in 1937.

What he saw and experienced with Tom Collins in the fields

and labour camps provided much of the raw material

for The Grapes Of Wrath.

He really got to know the way

the Joads, these migrants, the way they talked,

the way they dressed, the churches they went to,

their dialect, their cars,

their family structures.

He really immersed himself in that world.

Steinbeck wrote the Grapes Of Wrath in a marathon stint.

It's an immense novel.

He made several false starts.

He said that the effort nearly destroyed him.

"I'm trying to write history while it is happening

£and I don't want it to be wrong."

In the end he wrote something that was viscerally documentary,

brutally realistic, and yet rifted with myths

and references to the Bible.

In the end, he said,

"It's a mean, nasty book,

"and if I could make it nastier I would.

"The book has a definite job to do."

He told his publisher, "I want to put a tag of shame

"on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this."

And he was clear who the greedy bastards were -

the big agribusinesses and the banks.

It was Steinbeck's wife Carol

who suggested the title The Grapes Of Wrath.

It's a phrase from The Battle Hymn Of The Republic,

originally from the Book of Revelation,

and Steinbeck insisted that the full text of the hymn

be printed in the front papers of the novel.

This was a statement of patriotism.

Steinbeck was making it clear that this is an American book

to its core, and not a piece of Red propaganda.

It had an enormous impact.

First of all, this was the best-selling book of 1939

across all of America.

It was one of the ten best-sellers of 1940.

The film version of The Grapes Of Wrath came out

the year after it was published and was a big box-office hit.

So this was a story that clearly resonated with people.

It's really a story about people's incredible humanity

in the face of all this hardship.

And here was John Steinbeck, this author who

came in in the midst of this left-right divide and

really identified with the left

with some incredibly incendiary language.

Steinbeck, if he wasn't

out and out calling for revolution -

and that was a word that really meant something in that era -

he was tip-toeing pretty close to the line.

Steinbeck's fear that there would be a right-wing backlash

was totally justified.

He was accused of being a "liar", a "communist",

and undermining the economy

by putting himself on the side of Zionist-Communist interests.

The book was burned in Bakersfield, Buffalo and Illinois.

It was widely banned and has suffered bans

from schools and libraries ever since

because of its earthy language and blunt, sexual content.

It was banned as obscene in Kansas City

and even back in Oklahoma,

there were those who disliked it

and thought it was too lewd and coarse.

You know, there's some four letter words throughout the book.

And I think mainly even more than that, some of the scenes,

particularly the last scene, of course, where Rose of Sharon

gives her breast to a starving stranger,

having just lost her stillborn baby.

That was probably a little too much for some people to bear.

Comments were made in Congress

by Representative Lyle Borden. He said, "I say to you,

"and to every honest, square-minded reader in America,

"that the painting Steinbeck made in this book is a lie, a black,

"infernal creation of a twisted and distorted mind."

Steinbeck hated the attention

that the success of the novel was bringing him.

He also lived in fear of reprisals from the right.

He was concerned about what would happen to him,

and at one point in the '30s he began actually carrying

a Colt revolver with him. That's how scared he was.

When Hollywood decided to ride the wave of the book's success,

the film's producer, Darryl Zanuck,

cleverly cast popular actor Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.

The casting gave the outlaw murderer

the instant status of a people's champion.

They're working away on our spirits,

trying to make us cringe and crawl, working on our decency.

You promised, Tom!

I know. I'm a-tryin' to, Ma. Honest I am.

You gotta keep clear. The family's a-breakin' up.

You got to keep clear.

What's that, a detour?

Fonda was able to play the role of tough guy or peacemaker,

depending on the needs of the situation.

Tom, Tom, please!

Just where do you think you're goin'?

Well...we're strangers here, mister.

We heard about there was work in a place called Tavares.

Yeah? Well, you're heading the wrong way.

What's more, we don't want no more Okies in this town!

If the Grapes Of Wrath publicly damned

California's response to the migrant crisis,

Steinbeck did offer one example of how these people could and should have been treated.

It was in the government camp run by Tom Collins.

Tom Collins was an active campaigner for migrant rights.

He ran this place democratically, this camp,

and this was the model for Weedpatch in The Grapes Of Wrath.

It was the first place in the book that the Joads were treated

with respect and dignity, and in the film,

this camp, Arvin, became Weedpatch, and this shack here

became the camp manager's office.

Camp I was in before, they burnt it out.

Deputies and some of them pool-room fellas.

They don't get in here. Sometimes the boys patrol the fences.

Especially on dance nights.

You got dances too?

We have the best dances in the county, every Saturday night.

-Who runs this place?

-The government.

-Why ain't there more like it?

-You find out. I can't.

Earl Shelton came to this camp as a boy.

He spent seven years living in a tent, before moving into

a tin shack like this one.

He's now in his 80s.

You look pretty fit.

Well, time waits on no-one.

He remembers Tom Collins' camp with affection.

They had...dances, religious meetings,

pie suppers. This was the community building.

The government camps was absolutely gorgeous for the people,

because they had protection.

Those Okies who didn't come to a government camp,

and there were very few of these camps, those who didn't come,

what did you hear about the way they were treated in their camps?

Oh, they were...

they were treated miserably.

They were just looked down on

because they said, well, they were uneducated,

dirty and what have you, and that was wrong.

Earl was one of the lucky ones who found shelter

and human compassion in Tom Collins' camp.

I can see why there's that dedication at the front of

The Grapes Of Wrath from Steinbeck

"To Tom...who lived it."

The Camp at Arvin

has been offering shelter to migrants ever since.

Now, the seasonal workforce

in the fields of California is almost entirely Mexican.

Mexican migrants come up because they can make more money

here in the American West than they can in Mexico.

They do represent the kind of nowaday Joads in several ways.

This is a huge dilemma, especially more so over in California

where there's more need for stoop labour.

At Arvin, I also met a Mexican family who cross the border

every year for the fruit-picking season.

Hard work?

-Duro trabajo?

-Si, si.

And whereabouts in Mexico are you from, Mr Ramirez?

Donde vienes en Mexico, que lugar?

De Juana Cuarto. Mexico.

Mr Ramirez and his family are treated well,

but they made me think of the struggles of all migrant workers

who Steinbeck stood up for and gave voice to

in The Grapes Of Wrath.

Steinbeck had powerfully exposed America's

scandalous neglect of its own people.

The book came out in 1939.

War in Europe meant that a year or so later,

preparations for war began here. The armaments industry grew.

The migrants who couldn't get work anywhere

got work in a factory making arms, and later, work in the forces.

And it was the war

that drew the line under the furore

created by The Grapes Of Wrath.

Steinbeck was exhausted both by the writing of The Grapes Of Wrath

and by the commotion it caused.

At the peak of his fame, he ran away to sea.

This wasn't so much backing away

from political commitment, as pursuing another

important strand of his imaginative life.

Steinbeck had always been interested

in how men fit into their landscape.

He was now moving beyond the political arena

and developing an ecological vision of how man as a species

fits into the natural world.

In 1940 he set off on a boat trip with his close friend Ed Ricketts

to explore the marine life of the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.

Ricketts was a professional collector of marine animals,

and had been a key influence on Steinbeck's thinking

throughout the 1930s.

I think the Sea of Cortez

is the book that best represents what Steinbeck thought,

and what Steinbeck and Ricketts talked about throughout the '30s.

I think there's more... One reviewer said

there's more of Steinbeck the man in Sea of Cortez

than in any other book that he wrote.

So I think it's a compendium of his ideas,

from survivability of the species,

considering man's place in the universe,

or how various species interact.

Steinbeck had developed an interest in marine biology

as a student at Stanford University.

He'd studied at Hopkins Marine Station close to the beach house

where he did a lot of his writing. The coastline here

offered Steinbeck an alternative world

to the Salinas Valley where he grew up. With Ed Ricketts,

he used to explore the coastal tide pools of Monterey Bay,

and became fascinated with their ecosystems.

I think the friendship between Steinbeck and Ricketts

meant everything to both of them.

They were best friends for a decade or more.

Ricketts was a scientist with an artistic sensibility,

and Steinbeck was an artist with a scientific sensibility,

and that's really true. And their gears really meshed.

They worked together, they worked well together,

and they stimulated each other to see new things

that neither of them would have seen alone.

"Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal.

"If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent

"that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species

"is at once the point and the base of a pyramid,

"that all life is relational.

"Species grow misty. One merges into another,

"groups melt into ecological groups until the time when

"what we know as life meets and enters

"what we think of as non-life -

"barnacle and rock, rock and earth,

"earth and tree."

Steinbeck, through his friendship with Ricketts,

was developing his own philosophy

in how man fits into the whole ecosystem.

"And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious,

"most of the mystical outcrying

"which is one of the most prized and used

"and desired reactions of our species,

"is really the understanding

"and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing,

"related inextricably to all reality,

"known and unknowable.

"All things are one,

"and one thing is all things,

"all bound together by the elastic string of time.

"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars,

"and then back to the tide pool again."

What seemed like a totally new direction in Sea Of Cortez

was in fact a continuation of ideas

he had been developing throughout his career.

Sea Of Cortez was really a key,

a Rosetta Stone to reading Grapes Of Wrath.

These are the ideas they had.

Ricketts applies them in philosophy and science overtly.

Steinbeck incorporates them into the novels.

Any work that Steinbeck wrote, basically, you can view

through that lens and see this sort of

interrelationships of people and place,

achieving universality.

It's the philosophy of the ecology

and the environment and personal relations

that he really mastered, I think.

In 1945, Steinbeck applied his ecological vision to the people

he knew and loved in the town of Monterey,

in particular the outsiders and bohemians.

The result was the novel Cannery Row.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem,

"a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone,

"a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

"Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered,

"tin and iron and rust and splintered wood,

"chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps,

"sardine canneries and corrugated iron, laboratories and flop-houses.

"Its inhabitants are, as the man once said,

"'Whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,

"by which he meant Everybody.

"Had the man looked through another peephole,

"he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men',

"and he would have meant the same thing."

Cannery Row is a kind of freestyle jazz novel,

loosely based around two drunken, wild parties

held at a marine laboratory run by a character called Doc.

Doc is effectively a portrait of Ed Ricketts,

who worked here in the Pacific Biological Laboratories,

which this once was.

This wasn't only a laboratory.

It was a hang-out for Ricketts' friends -

artists, Steinbeck, of course, other pals -

and bums like Mack and the boys

who feature so heavily in Cannery Row.

It's opposite what was known as

"Monterey's most genteel and magnificent whorehouse".

Cannery Row is probably the only American novel

with the tide pool as the main metaphor

and it's about the community of assorted people, a scientist, Doc,

the whores in the Bear Flag Cafe, the bums on the street,

Mack and the boys...

it's really a bizarre mix of fringe-dwellers

that are all related in lots of strange ways in Cannery Row.

Steinbeck was trying something radically new with this novel.

The book has very little plot.

He wanted to find a form that reflected

his ecological view of life.

"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise,

"the quality of light, the tone, the habit

"and the dream, be set down alive?

"When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms

"so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole,

"for they break and tatter under the touch.

"You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will

"on to a knife blade

"and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water.

"And perhaps that might be the way

"to write this book -

"to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

The tide pools, here along Monterey's rocky coastline,

was where Steinbeck would often accompany Ed Ricketts

to collect specimens.

The worlds he found in these tide pools fascinated him.

Steinbeck revels in the beauty

and the violence contained inside these pools of trapped sea-water.

For him, they represent a lurid and pungent microcosm of life.

"Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool

"on the tip of the Peninsula.

"When the tide is in, a wave-churned basin,

"creamy with foam, whipped by the combers

"that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef.

"But when the tide goes out, the little water world

"becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom

"becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.

"Crabs rush from frond to frond.

"Starfish squat over mussels and limpets.

"The sharp smell of iodine from the algae,

"and the lime smell of calcareous bodies...

"smell of sperm and ova fill the air.

"The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion,

"of decay and birth."

When Steinbeck turns to describe the inhabitants of Cannery Row,

he describes them with the same zoologist's eye,

and sees them in a tide pool with the same seductions,

appetites and survival instincts.

"Doc said, 'Look at them.

"There are your true philosophers...

"Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in this world

"and possibly everything that will happen.

"I think they survive in this particular world better than other people.

"In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition

"and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed.

"All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs,

"and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy

"and curiously clean. They can do what they want.

"They can satisfy their appetites

"without calling them something else'".

Even though Steinbeck was now a wealthy man,

he was still drawn to those who lived a simple, carefree life.

Perhaps these loafers and idlers held the key to happiness?

When I first read Cannery Row as a teenager in Wigton

up in Cumbria, Mac and the boys reminded me

of people in my home town, characters.

I'm sure it was the same in towns and cities and villages

all over Europe, all over America, all over the world.

He'd hit on a universal type.

In my opinion, Cannery Row, with its celebration of life

in all its forms, is up there with The Grapes Of Wrath.

It's a love letter to a world

Steinbeck left behind when he became

a world-famous author.

Steinbeck spent part of World War II in Italy as a war correspondent.

In 1947 he travelled with photographer Robert Capa

to the Soviet Union, which only added to the mistaken idea

that he was a communist.

By the end of the decade,

he was feeling distanced from his real subject,

Americans in their landscape.

He loved the landscape.

He talks about it always, that it was in his blood,

the lime stone of these mountains.

You see the limestone of the mountains where you are on

the East Of Eden ranch.

You can see him looking up at those and thinking,

"OK, this is where I belong, this is where my people live."

In 1948, Steinbeck decided

to reconnect with his native California.

He wanted to write another epic book,

this time based on his own family.

It would eventually become East Of Eden.

It was a hugely ambitious undertaking.

He described it as his attempt to write his War And Peace.

Two things happened in that year.

Ricketts died.

He was killed by a train. And he was divorced

from his second wife. And I think

that earthquake created something that...

it was kind of a reassessment of where he was at that point.

This was to be his big novel.

"What I have been practising to write all my life," he wrote.

"Everything else has been training.

"It's the whole nasty, bloody, lovely history of the world,

"that's what it is, with no boundaries

"except my own inabilities".

Everybody in America always wanted to write

the Great American Novel from the mid-19th century on,

because we were trying to define ourselves.

And so what is an American novel?

He said I have to write about my home country,

I have to write about Salinas.

The original title of East Of Eden was The Salinas Valley,

and Steinbeck embarked on a period of intense research

into the early settling of the Valley

and into his ancestry on his mother's side, the Irish Hamiltons.

He wanted the Salinas Valley

to be a microcosm for the whole of the USA,

and his own family to stand for what is universal

in all families. Steinbeck's maternal grandfather,

Samuel Hamilton, originally from Northern Ireland,

moved here in 1870 and built this farm.

The farm, and Hamilton himself, feature strongly in East Of Eden

where Steinbeck traces the rugged individualism

and the strength of those early settlers.

"When people first came to the West, particularly from the owned

"and fought-over farmlets of Europe,

"and saw so much land to be had for the signing of a paper

"and the building of a foundation,

"an itching land-greed seemed to come over them.

"They wanted more and more land.

"They took up worthless land just to own it.

"They and the coyotes lived clever, despairing,

"sub-marginal lives.

"I don't know whether it was a divine stupidity

"or a great faith that let them do it."

This novel was written with Steinbeck's two young sons in mind,

and explores the idea of legacy and inheritance

and the individual's ability to shape his own destiny.

Steinbeck wrote, "I am choosing to write this book to my sons.

"They are little boys now and will never know

"what they came from through me, unless I tell them.

"And so I will tell them one of the greatest,

"perhaps the greatest story of all...

"the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness,

"of love and hate."

I think part of the book is his trying to understand

his very personal recent past and his distant past as well.

And I think he wants it to open up, almost like tide pool to the stars,

open up into the story that he thought was...

contained all of human experience, which was

the Cain and Abel story.

As he did in The Grapes Of Wrath,

Steinbeck went to the Bible for his stories

and his themes in East Of Eden,

particularly the fight between Cain and Abel

and the Garden of Eden story itself.

"A child may ask, 'What is the world's story about?'

"And a grown man or woman may wonder, 'What way will the world go?

"How does it end and, while we're at it, what's the story about?

"I believe that there is one story in the world,

"and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live

"in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder.

"Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts,

"in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty,

"and in their kindness and generosity too...

"in a net of good and evil.

"I think this is the only story we have,

"and that it occurs at all levels of feeling and intelligence.

"Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness,

"and they will be the fabric of our last,

"and this despite changes we may impose on field and river

"and mountain, on economy and manners.

"There is no other story.

"A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life,

"will have left only the hard, clean questions.

"Was it good or was it evil?

"Have I done well...

"or ill?"

Steinbeck was again on epic territory,

and in my opinion, he created a powerful foundation myth

for the American West.

East Of Eden received mixed reviews but it had commercial success.

It hit number one in the bestseller list and Elia Kazan's film

starring James Dean added to its popularity and sales.

But it wasn't, and it wasn't thought to be, the epoch-making novel

that The Grapes Of Wrath had been.

Steinbeck had a curious relationship with critics,

because many of them praised many of his books,

even East Of Eden, even Winter Of Our Discontent,

his last novel. But I don't know if...

He always said they didn't understand what he was trying to do.

And I think that's in part because he was trying to experiment

but it didn't necessarily seem as experimental

as somebody like Faulkner or Hemingway, the great modernists.

He was always compared to them,

and I think that he didn't just seem very experimental

and people put writers in slots, and it's hard

to get out of the slot you're put into.

So he was put into a naturalist-realist slot.

Everybody wanted him to keep rewriting The Grapes Of Wrath.

Go back to your best work, the work of the '30s,

the committed artist, the partisan writer.

Steinbeck appeared to be out of step with the times,

and if the critics thought it,

Steinbeck was beginning to think it too.

In the mid-'50s, he dreamt up the idea of making

a road trip across the country

to report on the health of America and reconnect with its soul.

"I want to take a drive

"through the middle west and the south

"and listen to what the country is about now.

"I have been cut off for a very long time and I think

"it would be a very valuable thing for me to do."

He didn't get to make the trip until 1960.

The resulting book, Travels With Charley -

Charley was the dog who went along with him -

was also called "In Search Of America".

What Steinbeck found on his trip was conformity, homogenisation,

urban decay and the ruin of the American landscape.

"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash.

"All of them.

"Surrounded by piles of wrecked

"and rusted automobiles, and almost smothered

"with rubbish. The new American finds his challenge

"and his love in traffic-choked streets,

"skies nested in smog,

"choking with the acids of industry."

Towards the end of his road trip,

he returned to his beloved Salinas Valley

and the coastal town of Monterey.

He found them both changed beyond recognition.

When he reached Cannery Row,

Steinbeck was dismayed by the commercialism of the place.

"They fish for tourists now," he said.

But it's ironic that the tourists come because of Cannery Row.

They changed the name because of his book,

and because of Steinbeck, who was the other great draw here.

Travels With Charley is a jeremiad.

Steinbeck saw the America of that time as decadent.

The problem was not deprivation, as it was in the Depression,

it was modern American affluence.

He wrote that America had gone soft.

"A nation or a group or an individual cannot survive

"being soft, comforted, content.

"The individual only survives when the pressure is on him.

"The American people are losing their ability to be versatile,

"to do things for themselves, to put back in.

"When people or animals lose their versatility,

"they become extinct."

Despite being a hugely popular writer,

Steinbeck's literary reputation had been declining for some time.

He was on the lists of required reading at colleges

and high schools but even that, perhaps mostly that,

counted against him with the literati.

I really think that Steinbeck was somebody who kept trying things,

and the critics really didn't appreciate what he was trying.

And he wasn't going to repeat himself,

and I think that they didn't know what to expect next.

What's coming out of this writer?

He was going in every direction and so that was confusing.

One way of looking at it is that in the commanding east coast

headquarters of the literary establishment,

he just didn't fit in.

There were the great Jewish intellectuals like Saul Bellow,

there were the hipsters like Norman Mailer,

there were the drug-affected writers,

there were the existentialists.

And where was Steinbeck in all that?

Maybe he was too real.

A little too grubby, a little too...

of the real world.

You know, he's a guy, as you said, who had dirt under his nails.

He really immersed himself beyond his mind and really got out there.

There was a sense in which Steinbeck couldn't win.

He was the proletarian writer

too much beloved by Russians at the time of the Cold War.

Then he supported the Vietnam War.

Too much beloved by Lyndon Johnson, the enemy of the intellectuals.

He went out of fashion.

Still, people who go out of fashion often come back with a vengeance.

And what they can't deny Steinbeck is his power as a storyteller

of the working people of this great continent.

It's Steinbeck's understanding

of the common man which gives his books

universal appeal and keeps them in print all over the world.

Rather than being a writer of the 1930s, Steinbeck speaks

directly to our present concerns, and I think

he was also ahead of his time

in developing an ecological view of man's place in the cosmos.

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962, and by then

the American literary establishment had really turned against him.

On the eve of the celebration of the prize itself,

The New York Times wrote,

"Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?"

The newspaper declared that, "After The Grapes Of Wrath

"at the end of the '30s,

"most serious readers have ceased to read him."

The article went on to say that the Swedes had made a serious error

by giving the prize to a writer whose "limited talent is,

"in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising."

That seems to me to be nearer mere abuse than criticism.

Steinbeck didn't like criticism. Who does?

But he took it on the chin. And he chose to answer back

in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

"At this particular time,

"I think it would be well to consider the high duties

"and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated

"critical priesthood

"singing their litanies in empty churches...

"nor is it a game

"for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech.

"It grew out of human need for it,

"and it has not changed except to become more needed.

In my opinion, Steinbeck was a great writer,

and above all, a great storyteller.

He wrote, I think, at least four masterpieces -

The Grapes Of Wrath, East Of Eden,

Cannery Row, and Of Mice And Men.

That's four more than the vast majority of writers

ever manage to do.

And he brought to the American dream of self-betterment

the idea that it should also contain tolerance and compassion,

and, above all, a democratic view of life.

That, I think, is one of the reasons he is so popular

like few great writers are popular.

It's that sense of democracy and Arthur Miller picked it up

in a very strong appreciation he wrote of Steinbeck.

"I can't think of another American writer,

"with the possible exception of Mark Twain,

"who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country."

# Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

# He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

# He hath loosed the fateful lightning

# of His terrible swift sword

# His truth is marching on. #