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"To the red country | 0:00:02 | 0:00:03 | |
"and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
"the last rains came gently, | 0:00:06 | 0:00:08 | |
"and they did not cut the scarred earth. | 0:00:08 | 0:00:11 | |
"The sun flared down on the growing corn | 0:00:11 | 0:00:15 | |
"and in the water-cut gullies | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
"the earth dusted down in dry little streams. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:20 | |
"And every day the earth paled further. | 0:00:20 | 0:00:23 | |
"Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air. | 0:00:23 | 0:00:29 | |
"A walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist. | 0:00:29 | 0:00:32 | |
"An automobile boiled a cloud behind it. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:37 | |
"Dawn came, but no day. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:39 | |
"In the grey sky a red sun appeared, | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
a dim, red circle that gave a little light, like dusk | 0:00:43 | 0:00:48 | |
"and as that day advanced, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:51 | |
"the dusk slipped back towards darkness." | 0:00:51 | 0:00:55 | |
This is Oklahoma, | 0:00:57 | 0:00:58 | |
and about 80 years ago | 0:00:58 | 0:01:00 | |
it was one of the starting points, | 0:01:00 | 0:01:02 | |
around here and the neighbouring states, | 0:01:02 | 0:01:04 | |
for the biggest internal migration the United States has ever seen. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:09 | |
Up to half a million people, working people, left their farms, | 0:01:09 | 0:01:12 | |
left their droughted lands and went West, | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
a thousand miles to the Californian border... | 0:01:15 | 0:01:18 | |
to seek work. | 0:01:18 | 0:01:19 | |
It was an epic journey and it was marked by what became | 0:01:19 | 0:01:23 | |
one of the epic American novels of the 20th century, | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:27 | |
John Steinbeck's novel told a remarkable story | 0:01:29 | 0:01:31 | |
about the intolerance that comes from economic hardship, | 0:01:31 | 0:01:34 | |
and it held up a mirror to America's shameful abuse | 0:01:34 | 0:01:37 | |
and neglect of its own people. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
When it came out at the end of the '30s, | 0:01:40 | 0:01:42 | |
it had a dramatic effect. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:43 | |
It was revered. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:45 | |
It was scorned. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:46 | |
Steinbeck himself was accused of being a communist, | 0:01:46 | 0:01:49 | |
a vicious Red, | 0:01:49 | 0:01:51 | |
something he could never throw off for the rest of his life. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:54 | |
In some ways, the immense impact of The Grapes Of Wrath | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
distorted Steinbeck's reputation. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:02 | |
His range was vast and his output prolific. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
In this film, I want to take a fresh look | 0:02:05 | 0:02:08 | |
at the kind of writer he really was. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:10 | |
I've admired John Steinbeck since I first read him in my teens. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:27 | |
For me, he was one of the great writers of the American landscape. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:31 | |
He created enduring myths around the lives of ordinary Americans | 0:02:31 | 0:02:35 | |
who were figures in that landscape, | 0:02:35 | 0:02:37 | |
buffeted by the forces of nature and politics. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:39 | |
I want to revisit some of the places that shaped his imagination - | 0:02:41 | 0:02:45 | |
the California Valley where he grew up, | 0:02:45 | 0:02:47 | |
the Monterey Coast where he studied marine life, | 0:02:47 | 0:02:52 | |
and the Oklahoma plains where he immortalised | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
the people of the American Dust Bowl in the Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:59 | |
# That old dust storm killed my baby | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
# But it can't kill me, Lord | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | |
# And it can't kill me | 0:03:04 | 0:03:07 | |
# That old dust storm | 0:03:07 | 0:03:09 | |
# Killed my family | 0:03:09 | 0:03:11 | |
# But it can't kill me, Lord | 0:03:11 | 0:03:13 | |
# And it can't kill me... # | 0:03:13 | 0:03:16 | |
The dustbowl was the worst environmental disaster | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
in this part of the US. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:20 | |
It occurred in the mid-1930s | 0:03:20 | 0:03:22 | |
when farming conditions from the years before that, | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
when prices were so good during World War One and afterwards, | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
caused a lot of farmers to put a lot more of this kind of land | 0:03:27 | 0:03:30 | |
into production that was mainly just for buffalo-grazing | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
or cattle-grazing before that, causing all that land | 0:03:33 | 0:03:36 | |
to be blown up during the height of the drought. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
There wasn't enough cover to hold down that soil. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
The dust came rolling in across the fields | 0:03:44 | 0:03:47 | |
and it was black. And I was in school. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:49 | |
I don't remember if my father came and got me | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
after that or not. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:53 | |
But I do remember that cloud | 0:03:53 | 0:03:57 | |
that was so distinct, so scary. | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
People in Oklahoma still remember the devastation | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
of the Dust Bowl and this year, | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
farmers are experiencing the worst drought | 0:04:05 | 0:04:08 | |
since the 1930s. | 0:04:08 | 0:04:09 | |
I remember my grandparents talking some | 0:04:09 | 0:04:11 | |
and telling some stories about the drought and about the Dust Bowl. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:15 | |
The Depression, you know, was in the late '20s | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
and then just a few years following... | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
severe drought, and so it was sort of one extreme hard time | 0:04:20 | 0:04:26 | |
followed by another. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:28 | |
Some of your friends and maybe even neighbours | 0:04:28 | 0:04:30 | |
around this area are going to suffer badly, are they, this summer? | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
That's correct. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:34 | |
We could see similar numbers that are forced | 0:04:34 | 0:04:38 | |
to find other sources of income, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:41 | |
similar to what was experienced in the '30s. | 0:04:41 | 0:04:44 | |
But it wasn't just dust that drove the farmers out. | 0:04:44 | 0:04:47 | |
Mechanisation was changing farming practices | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
and smallholdings were becoming uneconomical. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:54 | |
Many farmers started buying a lot more equipment. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
That started racking them up in debt even more, | 0:04:57 | 0:04:59 | |
and they kept digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:03 | |
And then we get the economic depression | 0:05:03 | 0:05:05 | |
and the bad climates for bad crops and their notes went belly up. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:10 | |
In The Grapes Of Wrath, | 0:05:12 | 0:05:14 | |
Steinbeck describes the natural disaster | 0:05:14 | 0:05:16 | |
which befell the farmers as a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
But he also focused on the economic collapse which was | 0:05:20 | 0:05:24 | |
threatening their survival, a situation | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
with telling parallels in today's America. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:29 | |
It was all about turning agriculture into big business, | 0:05:32 | 0:05:35 | |
and Steinbeck had no doubt about who the villains were. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
The villains were the banks who were ruthlessly forcing | 0:05:38 | 0:05:42 | |
the closure of the small farms. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:44 | |
This is one of the things he wrote about the banks. "If a bank | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
"or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
"the Bank - or the Company - needs - wants - insists - | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
"must have - | 0:05:55 | 0:05:57 | |
"as though the Bank or the Company were a monster. | 0:05:57 | 0:06:00 | |
"The Bank - the monster - has to have profits all the time. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
"It can't wait. It'll die. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
"When the monster stops growing, it dies. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
"It can't stay one size." | 0:06:09 | 0:06:11 | |
Steinbeck was always on the side of the working man... | 0:06:13 | 0:06:17 | |
battling the system. In this instance, | 0:06:17 | 0:06:19 | |
it was the broken farmers of Oklahoma. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
The main characters in The Grapes Of Wrath | 0:06:23 | 0:06:25 | |
are the Joad family. They came from Sallisaw, | 0:06:25 | 0:06:27 | |
which in the 1930s had a claim to fame - | 0:06:27 | 0:06:29 | |
it was the home town of the bank-robber and folk-hero, | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
Pretty Boy Floyd. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:34 | |
Pretty Boy Floyd was seen as a Robin Hood figure, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
hitting back at the rapacious banks. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:39 | |
Steinbeck uses him as a role model for his main character, Tom Joad. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:45 | |
When the novel starts, Tom Joad has just been let out of prison. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:49 | |
He has spent four years there for killing a man in self-defence. | 0:06:49 | 0:06:53 | |
He gets back home to discover that his family is ready | 0:06:53 | 0:06:56 | |
to hit the road West. | 0:06:56 | 0:06:58 | |
The banks have foreclosed on their farm. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:01 | |
Tom Joad catches up with his evicted family | 0:07:10 | 0:07:12 | |
and joins them in their overloaded truck. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:15 | |
And so begins their gruelling journey to California. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:18 | |
# Lots of folks back East, they say | 0:07:18 | 0:07:20 | |
# Leaving home every day | 0:07:20 | 0:07:22 | |
# Beating the hot old dusty way to the California line... # | 0:07:22 | 0:07:27 | |
The route they take is the arterial road west... | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
the Mother Road, as it's called - Route 66. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
"Highway 66 is the main migrant road. | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
"66... | 0:07:40 | 0:07:41 | |
"the long concrete path across the country, | 0:07:41 | 0:07:45 | |
"waving gently up and down on the map, | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
"from Mississippi to Bakersfield... | 0:07:48 | 0:07:51 | |
"66 is the path of people in flight, | 0:07:51 | 0:07:53 | |
"refugees from dust and shrinking land, | 0:07:53 | 0:07:55 | |
"from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
"from the desert's slow northward invasion... | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
"and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, | 0:08:02 | 0:08:06 | |
"from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
"66 is the mother road. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:10 | |
"The road of flight." | 0:08:10 | 0:08:11 | |
Steinbeck described this mass migration as a Biblical exodus. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
He was steeped in the Bible | 0:08:19 | 0:08:21 | |
even though he himself wasn't a Christian. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:24 | |
There are 12 people on the truck. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:26 | |
They are the 12 tribes of Israel. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:28 | |
Noah counts them on two by two, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:29 | |
they and the animals as Noah counted them onto the Ark. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
We are in the Bible belt, | 0:08:32 | 0:08:34 | |
but even so, Steinbeck wanted to use the Bible | 0:08:34 | 0:08:38 | |
in order to make heroic | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
the journey of these people... | 0:08:40 | 0:08:42 | |
to give them vast, even mythic, status. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:45 | |
They are like the Israelites, he thinks, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:47 | |
going across the desert, making for the Promised Land. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:52 | |
My fellow traveller, Earl Millen, is a Vietnam veteran | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
and a vintage car enthusiast. | 0:08:55 | 0:08:58 | |
I wanted to know what he thought | 0:08:58 | 0:08:59 | |
about the mass migration to California. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:01 | |
Do you admire them? | 0:09:01 | 0:09:03 | |
Do you think they must have been tough people? | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
I look at them as some of the strongest people | 0:09:06 | 0:09:09 | |
in American history. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
How would you feel today about putting your family, | 0:09:11 | 0:09:14 | |
say three or four people, in the back of this truck | 0:09:14 | 0:09:16 | |
and driving that thousand miles in this? | 0:09:16 | 0:09:18 | |
What would you feel about that? | 0:09:18 | 0:09:20 | |
I'd probably chicken out. | 0:09:20 | 0:09:21 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:09:21 | 0:09:22 | |
You'd chicken out, would you? | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
Even a military man like you... | 0:09:24 | 0:09:26 | |
29 years' service and you'd still chicken out. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:30 | |
As the Joads travel along Route 66, | 0:09:35 | 0:09:38 | |
they begin to experience hostility | 0:09:38 | 0:09:40 | |
at state borders, suspicion at gas stations, | 0:09:40 | 0:09:42 | |
and harassment from the police. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:45 | |
They hear themselves described disparagingly as "Okies", | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
a term applied to all the migrants irrespective of whether | 0:09:49 | 0:09:52 | |
they came from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri or Kansas. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:57 | |
As one character puts it in The Grapes Of Wrath, | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
"Well, Okie use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:04 | |
"Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
"Okie means you're scum." | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
# I'm a-going down this road feeling bad | 0:10:10 | 0:10:14 | |
# I'm a-going down this road feeling bad | 0:10:14 | 0:10:19 | |
# I'm going down this road | 0:10:19 | 0:10:21 | |
# Feeling bad, bad, bad | 0:10:21 | 0:10:25 | |
# And I ain't gonna be treated this a-way... # | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
This is the small town of Needles on the Colorado river, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
the border crossing from Arizona into California. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:42 | |
In 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department sent officers | 0:10:42 | 0:10:46 | |
to close the borders to migrant workers | 0:10:46 | 0:10:48 | |
without jobs. They were effectively criminalising | 0:10:48 | 0:10:51 | |
fellow Americans simply for being out of work and foreign to the state of California. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:56 | |
The migrant situation was becoming so serious | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
that California was cutting its links | 0:10:59 | 0:11:01 | |
to the rest of the United States. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:03 | |
These were cops who stood at the border | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
and literally turned people away. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
If they were coming across into California looking for work, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:11 | |
they said, "There are no jobs here, go home." | 0:11:11 | 0:11:13 | |
And this commonly became known as the Bum Blockade. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
There was a determined attempt to keep them out, | 0:11:16 | 0:11:19 | |
almost to secede from the Union, wasn't there? | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
Yes. There were various attempts to keep the migrants out. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:25 | |
So there were actually radio broadcasts sent | 0:11:25 | 0:11:27 | |
back from different, quote unquote, "citizens' associations", | 0:11:27 | 0:11:31 | |
and they would broadcast back to Oklahoma and say, | 0:11:31 | 0:11:34 | |
if you've heard California's the land of milk and honey, | 0:11:34 | 0:11:37 | |
if you've heard jobs are plentiful, | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
don't believe it. Don't come, there are no jobs. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
We don't want you here. Stay out. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
By the time the Joad family get to Needles, | 0:11:46 | 0:11:50 | |
they're already demoralised by the loss | 0:11:50 | 0:11:52 | |
of the grandfather of the family, who's died along the way, | 0:11:52 | 0:11:56 | |
and they are increasingly anxious about what lies ahead of them. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:00 | |
The first sight of California is a huge disappointment. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
"Well, we're here. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:07 | |
"This here's California, an' she don't look so prosperous. | 0:12:07 | 0:12:12 | |
"'Got the desert yet', said Tom. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:14 | |
"'An' I hear she's a son-of-a-bitch." | 0:12:14 | 0:12:17 | |
After a pummelling journey across the desert, | 0:12:18 | 0:12:21 | |
the Joads finally catch a glimpse of what they're looking for. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:25 | |
"They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
"and the sun came up behind them, and then, suddenly, | 0:12:28 | 0:12:31 | |
"they saw the great valley below them. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
"Al jammed on the brake. | 0:12:34 | 0:12:35 | |
"'Jesus Christ! Look!' he said. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
"The vineyards, the orchards, | 0:12:38 | 0:12:40 | |
"the great flat valley, green and beautiful, | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
"the trees set in rows, and the farmhouses. And Pa said, | 0:12:43 | 0:12:47 | |
"'God almighty! I never knowed there was anything like her.' | 0:12:47 | 0:12:50 | |
"Ruthie and Winfield looked at it and Ruthie whispered, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
"'It's California.'" | 0:12:54 | 0:12:55 | |
It might look like the land of Canaan, | 0:12:55 | 0:12:58 | |
overflowing with milk and honey, or another Eden. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:00 | |
But down there, in the orchards and vineyards, | 0:13:00 | 0:13:03 | |
the Joad family were going to experience much worse - | 0:13:03 | 0:13:07 | |
squalor, exploitation, | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
prejudice and violence. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:12 | |
What Steinbeck portrayed in the labour camps of California shocked America. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:20 | |
Below subsistence wages, malnutrition, disease, | 0:13:20 | 0:13:25 | |
beatings, and the complete loss of civil rights. | 0:13:25 | 0:13:29 | |
That was what was waiting for the migrants. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
That was their promised land. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:34 | |
The movie version of The Grapes Of Wrath portrays with documentary realism | 0:13:39 | 0:13:43 | |
the hardships and brutality of the labour camps. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:45 | |
The film was made in 1940, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:47 | |
when the migrant crisis was still under way, | 0:13:47 | 0:13:50 | |
and used real locations in the California valleys. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:54 | |
Deputies armed with rifles and pick-axe handles | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
herd the Joad family into what is effectively a concentration camp. | 0:14:07 | 0:14:11 | |
When the Joads do finally get out to California, | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
they got up against something | 0:14:15 | 0:14:16 | |
I don't think they were expecting. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:18 | |
They had no experience with big agribusiness here in Oklahoma. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:22 | |
That was something different. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:23 | |
California agricultural history is unique, | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
because that was always that way. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:27 | |
There were the biggest wheat ranches, the biggest fruit farms. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:31 | |
There were the biggest everything out there. | 0:14:31 | 0:14:33 | |
And they were owned by larger people | 0:14:33 | 0:14:35 | |
who really had a lot of money to invest. | 0:14:35 | 0:14:37 | |
And therefore they could exploit labour. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
Steinbeck's understanding of the developing crisis in California | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
had been gradual. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:46 | |
He was a native of California and had a privileged upbringing, | 0:14:46 | 0:14:49 | |
but he couldn't avoid the violent unrest which shook the state | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
in the 1930s and was leading to political extremism and mob rule. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:58 | |
Steinbeck was born in 1902 | 0:15:04 | 0:15:05 | |
here in the agricultural town of Salinas, | 0:15:05 | 0:15:08 | |
nicknamed "The Salad Bowl of the World". | 0:15:08 | 0:15:11 | |
He grew up in a middle-class household | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
and from an early age, he knew that he wanted to be a writer. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:28 | |
They read aloud to one another | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
and they had fierce debates about ideas over the dinner table. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:34 | |
They would talk about ideas. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:36 | |
So there was a kind of literary, | 0:15:36 | 0:15:38 | |
not intellectually pretentious but certainly curious family. | 0:15:38 | 0:15:42 | |
-Did he start writing quite young? -He said later that | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
he wanted to be a writer since he was 14. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:48 | |
And so he said, this is all I want to do, is write. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
And the amazing thing about Steinbeck is, | 0:15:50 | 0:15:53 | |
having made that decision, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:54 | |
he simply worked at it relentlessly | 0:15:54 | 0:15:57 | |
all of his life. From age 14 until he died at age 66, | 0:15:57 | 0:16:01 | |
he wrote every day, | 0:16:01 | 0:16:02 | |
he wrote letters, he wrote journals to warm up. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:06 | |
He would write for three, four, five hours a day. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
Steinbeck came into contact with itinerant field labourers from an early age, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:16 | |
while doing vacation work at a local sugar beet factory. | 0:16:16 | 0:16:20 | |
His sympathy for these marginal figures | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
was shown in one of his most famous novels, Of Mice And Men, | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
which follows the fortunes of two itinerant fruit tramps, | 0:16:25 | 0:16:29 | |
Lennie and George. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:30 | |
George describes their solitary life as follows. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:34 | |
"Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:39 | |
"They got no family. | 0:16:39 | 0:16:41 | |
"They don't belong no place. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:43 | |
"They come to a ranch an' work up a stake | 0:16:43 | 0:16:45 | |
"and then they go inta town | 0:16:45 | 0:16:46 | |
"and blow their stake, and the first thing you know | 0:16:46 | 0:16:49 | |
"they're poundin' their tail to some other ranch. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:51 | |
"They ain't got nothing to look ahead to." | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
He was drawn to people who weren't | 0:16:54 | 0:16:57 | |
in the mainstream, workers in the fields, | 0:16:57 | 0:16:59 | |
people who were lonely, people who were isolated, | 0:16:59 | 0:17:01 | |
people on the margins. He always defended | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
those who suffered in some way. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:06 | |
He seemed to step outside what in England we would | 0:17:06 | 0:17:09 | |
unhesitatingly call his class, | 0:17:09 | 0:17:11 | |
very emphatically and | 0:17:11 | 0:17:12 | |
go over a line and be the man who is now best remembered | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
for being what was called a proletarian writer. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
He describes people working with their hands all the time. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
I mean, Of Mice And Men is full of hands. | 0:17:22 | 0:17:24 | |
We're looking at Lenny's hands, George is playing solitaire. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:28 | |
-And then Lenny crushes Curly's hand. -Exactly. | 0:17:28 | 0:17:31 | |
Hands are very much a part of that book. | 0:17:31 | 0:17:32 | |
But hands are a part of everything he wrote. | 0:17:32 | 0:17:35 | |
Grapes Of Wrath, everybody's working with their hands, | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
they're digging ditches, they're cooks, | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
he talks about people frying hamburgers and onions. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:43 | |
They're about workers and people who work. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:45 | |
And I think if somebody like Fitzgerald is always | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
writing about money and people's fascination with money, | 0:17:48 | 0:17:51 | |
I think Steinbeck really got it right about people who have to | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
work for a living and work with their hands. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:57 | |
And he knew what that was like himself. | 0:17:57 | 0:18:00 | |
Steinbeck's early reputation as a writer was based on stories | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
set around the Salinas Valley. They were rural parables of life | 0:18:05 | 0:18:08 | |
in The Pastures of Heaven | 0:18:08 | 0:18:09 | |
or comic tales of Mexican paisanos | 0:18:09 | 0:18:11 | |
in a district known as Tortilla Flat. | 0:18:11 | 0:18:13 | |
But with the migrant crisis of the 1930s, everything changed, | 0:18:13 | 0:18:18 | |
and the marginal figures he was typically drawn to | 0:18:18 | 0:18:21 | |
began to take centre stage. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
In 1934, Steinbeck began to notice that new groups of people | 0:18:23 | 0:18:27 | |
were passing through the Salinas Valley. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:29 | |
Jalopies piled high with furniture and people | 0:18:29 | 0:18:32 | |
were coming from Arkansas and Oklahoma | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
and Texas, and going through the town. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:37 | |
They made for a hill, | 0:18:37 | 0:18:38 | |
and created a little shanty town, | 0:18:38 | 0:18:41 | |
or 'Hooverville' as it was known then. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:43 | |
The Depression had arrived right on Steinbeck's doorstep, | 0:18:43 | 0:18:47 | |
and he began to study the situation in detail. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
You had about half a million people who came to California | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
through the '30s and they swamped the place. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
And you can imagine the local reaction to this. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:00 | |
Even if you were open-minded, | 0:19:00 | 0:19:02 | |
you were starting to really feel a squeeze in a lot of ways. | 0:19:02 | 0:19:05 | |
By the middle of 1934, | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
there were 142 workers for every 100 jobs, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:13 | |
and the incoming migration was driving wages | 0:19:13 | 0:19:16 | |
to below subsistence level for a back-breaking ten-hour day. | 0:19:16 | 0:19:20 | |
In effect, this sort of work was a form of seasonal slavery. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
This was a state that was divided between far left and far right. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:30 | |
You literally had communists running around organising the farm fields | 0:19:30 | 0:19:36 | |
and you had business interests | 0:19:36 | 0:19:38 | |
and others who were determined to protect their interests | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
who leaned very far politically the other way. | 0:19:41 | 0:19:44 | |
Intrigued by what was going on in his own backyard, | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
Steinbeck set about meeting Communist leaders and organisers. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:51 | |
As a direct result of his exposure to these labour activists, | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
he wrote the strike novel, In Dubious Battle. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
His first idea was to interview a strike organiser | 0:20:00 | 0:20:02 | |
and he was going to write a biography. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
So you can see that initially he was kind of detached. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
I'm just going to interview this striker and write his biography. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:12 | |
And he said, "I want to achieve a kind of detached perspective. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:15 | |
"I'm non-partisan. I'm just going to report | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
"as a journalist on what's going on." | 0:20:18 | 0:20:20 | |
So, In Dubious Battle is about a strike, | 0:20:20 | 0:20:22 | |
but it takes a kind of neutral position. | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
Based on an actual strike which took place in August 1933, | 0:20:25 | 0:20:29 | |
it depicted the battle, the bloody battle, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
between the fruit-pickers and the owners | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
in orchards like these behind me. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:36 | |
In this instance, Steinbeck didn't take sides. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:40 | |
He depicts the Communist organisers as just as manipulative | 0:20:40 | 0:20:44 | |
as the owners of the land themselves. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:46 | |
"Mac said, 'Here's the layout. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:49 | |
"'Torgas is a little valley and it's mostly apple orchards. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
"'Most of it's owned by a few men. Now when the apples are ripe, | 0:20:52 | 0:20:56 | |
"'the crop tramps come in and pick them. From there, they go on | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
"'over the ridge and south and pick cotton. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:01 | |
"'If we can start the fun in the apples, | 0:21:01 | 0:21:04 | |
"'maybe it will just naturally spread over into the cotton.'" | 0:21:04 | 0:21:08 | |
Steinbeck was using this battle as a metaphor for human antagonism. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:12 | |
In a letter, he wrote, | 0:21:12 | 0:21:14 | |
"I'm not interested in the strike as a means of raising men's wages, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
"and I'm not interested in ranting about justice and oppression. | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
"I wanted merely to be a recording consciousness, judging nothing, | 0:21:21 | 0:21:26 | |
"simply putting down the thing. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:28 | |
"I think it has the thrust, almost crazy, that mobs have." | 0:21:28 | 0:21:32 | |
But something would happen to John Steinbeck, | 0:21:32 | 0:21:35 | |
and he would reject his detached position and become full of anger | 0:21:35 | 0:21:39 | |
and political commitment when, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:41 | |
three years later, he wrote The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
In August 1936, soon after the publication of In Dubious Battle, | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
Steinbeck was asked by the San Francisco News | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
to write a series of articles on migrant farm workers. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:57 | |
Steinbeck toured the labour camps of the San Joaquin Valley. | 0:21:57 | 0:22:01 | |
He described appalling scenes of squalor and malnutrition | 0:22:03 | 0:22:08 | |
and young children dying in these slum conditions. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
"He will die in a very short time. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:14 | |
"The older children may survive. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:16 | |
"Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:20 | |
"on the dirty carpet. | 0:22:20 | 0:22:22 | |
"It was born dead, which was just as well, | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
"because she could not have fed it at the breast. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
"Her own diet will not produce milk. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
"After it was born and she had seen that it was dead, | 0:22:31 | 0:22:34 | |
"the mother rolled over | 0:22:34 | 0:22:36 | |
"and lay still for two days. This woman's eyes have the glazed, | 0:22:36 | 0:22:40 | |
"faraway look of a sleepwalker. | 0:22:40 | 0:22:42 | |
I did have a great-uncle. He lived over here in Oklahoma. | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
He couldn't make it any more, so he moved to California. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:52 | |
They lived in a tent city. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:54 | |
But they had a daughter | 0:22:54 | 0:22:55 | |
that hadn't been feeling too good when they left. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:58 | |
So she was sick quite a while. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
But when you don't have any money, | 0:23:01 | 0:23:03 | |
you don't go to the doctor and take care of it. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
So she passed away out there then. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:10 | |
It was scenes like this which provoked Steinbeck | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
to abandon his detachment and take an angry, partisan stance. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:20 | |
And when he returned from this research trip, | 0:23:20 | 0:23:22 | |
he found an alarming situation developing in his home town. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:27 | |
The Salinas lettuce strike started at the end of August 1936. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:33 | |
Bully boys were marching around the town | 0:23:33 | 0:23:35 | |
to defend it from the strikers. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
The local police were in alliance with the growers | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
and gave charge of the situation to a retired army officer, | 0:23:40 | 0:23:43 | |
Colonel Sanborn, who declared a form of martial law | 0:23:43 | 0:23:46 | |
and deputised 2,000 vigilantes to patrol the streets. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:51 | |
Salinas was producing half of all the lettuce consumed in the USA. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:57 | |
So there were fortunes at stake for the growers facing a strike. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
The labourers in the fields had seen | 0:24:01 | 0:24:03 | |
their earnings decline by two-thirds, | 0:24:03 | 0:24:05 | |
and their anger was kept under control | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
at the end of the barrel of a gun. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:11 | |
The Nation magazine described sinister developments, | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
"Just outside Salinas, something shockingly resembling | 0:24:14 | 0:24:18 | |
"a concentration camp has recently been constructed. | 0:24:18 | 0:24:21 | |
"A water tower rises in solitary grandeur in the midst of this camp. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:26 | |
"Surrounding the tower is a platform, splendidly adapted | 0:24:26 | 0:24:29 | |
for observation, night illumination and marksmanship. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:33 | |
Tensions reached breaking point when non-union farm workers | 0:24:34 | 0:24:38 | |
were brought in by the growers to bust the strike. | 0:24:38 | 0:24:41 | |
Here, in this charming town of Salinas, | 0:24:43 | 0:24:45 | |
on September 16, 1936, | 0:24:45 | 0:24:49 | |
a pitched battled was fought in these streets. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:51 | |
Pick handles, tear gas, shotguns. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
The Battle of Salinas had begun. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
By September 17, Steinbeck's home town was a war zone. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
250 American Legionnaires, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:10 | |
admirers of European fascism, | 0:25:10 | 0:25:12 | |
joined the battle. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:13 | |
Steinbeck describes the situation in California as | 0:25:27 | 0:25:31 | |
"a bomb ready to explode. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:32 | |
"There are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets | 0:25:32 | 0:25:37 | |
"of that dear little town where I was born." | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
Looking at the local newspapers is a reminder that | 0:25:39 | 0:25:42 | |
what was going on in the California Valleys reflected | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
the bigger political struggles unfolding in Europe in the 1930s. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:50 | |
The conflict was often described ideologically | 0:25:50 | 0:25:52 | |
as a battle between communists and fascists, | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
but the truth was more basic than that. | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
Steinbeck wrote, "The use of the word 'communist' as a bugbear | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
"has nearly lost its sting. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:03 | |
"An official of a speculative-farmer group, | 0:26:03 | 0:26:05 | |
"when asked what he meant by a communist, replied, | 0:26:05 | 0:26:08 | |
"'Why, he's the guy that wants 25 cents an hour | 0:26:08 | 0:26:11 | |
"when we're paying 20.'" | 0:26:11 | 0:26:13 | |
Steinbeck was now desperately concerned about | 0:26:13 | 0:26:16 | |
the collapse of democracy and civil rights, and the rise of vigilantism, | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
the lynch mob and fascism. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
He decided to go undercover to research | 0:26:24 | 0:26:26 | |
a big novel about the migrant situation. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:29 | |
He went to the headquarters of the Farm Security Administration | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
in Washington and said he wanted to work as a migrant worker. | 0:26:33 | 0:26:37 | |
They assigned to him a man called Tom Collins, who was camp manager | 0:26:37 | 0:26:40 | |
at this camp, Arvin, here, and the two men worked in the valleys, | 0:26:40 | 0:26:44 | |
this valley and other valleys, for several months in 1937. | 0:26:44 | 0:26:48 | |
What he saw and experienced with Tom Collins in the fields | 0:26:48 | 0:26:52 | |
and labour camps provided much of the raw material | 0:26:52 | 0:26:55 | |
for The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:26:55 | 0:26:56 | |
He really got to know the way | 0:26:57 | 0:26:59 | |
the Joads, these migrants, the way they talked, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
the way they dressed, the churches they went to, | 0:27:02 | 0:27:05 | |
their dialect, their cars, | 0:27:05 | 0:27:08 | |
their family structures. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
He really immersed himself in that world. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
Steinbeck wrote the Grapes Of Wrath in a marathon stint. | 0:27:15 | 0:27:18 | |
It's an immense novel. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:19 | |
He made several false starts. | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
He said that the effort nearly destroyed him. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:24 | |
"I'm trying to write history while it is happening | 0:27:24 | 0:27:28 | |
£and I don't want it to be wrong." | 0:27:28 | 0:27:31 | |
In the end he wrote something that was viscerally documentary, | 0:27:31 | 0:27:35 | |
brutally realistic, and yet rifted with myths | 0:27:35 | 0:27:39 | |
and references to the Bible. | 0:27:39 | 0:27:42 | |
In the end, he said, | 0:27:43 | 0:27:46 | |
"It's a mean, nasty book, | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
"and if I could make it nastier I would. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:51 | |
"The book has a definite job to do." | 0:27:51 | 0:27:53 | |
He told his publisher, "I want to put a tag of shame | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
"on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this." | 0:27:56 | 0:27:59 | |
And he was clear who the greedy bastards were - | 0:27:59 | 0:28:02 | |
the big agribusinesses and the banks. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:05 | |
It was Steinbeck's wife Carol | 0:28:09 | 0:28:10 | |
who suggested the title The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
It's a phrase from The Battle Hymn Of The Republic, | 0:28:13 | 0:28:15 | |
originally from the Book of Revelation, | 0:28:15 | 0:28:17 | |
and Steinbeck insisted that the full text of the hymn | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
be printed in the front papers of the novel. | 0:28:20 | 0:28:23 | |
This was a statement of patriotism. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:25 | |
Steinbeck was making it clear that this is an American book | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
to its core, and not a piece of Red propaganda. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:32 | |
It had an enormous impact. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:34 | |
First of all, this was the best-selling book of 1939 | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
across all of America. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
It was one of the ten best-sellers of 1940. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
The film version of The Grapes Of Wrath came out | 0:28:43 | 0:28:45 | |
the year after it was published and was a big box-office hit. | 0:28:45 | 0:28:49 | |
So this was a story that clearly resonated with people. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:53 | |
It's really a story about people's incredible humanity | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
in the face of all this hardship. | 0:28:56 | 0:28:58 | |
And here was John Steinbeck, this author who | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
came in in the midst of this left-right divide and | 0:29:00 | 0:29:05 | |
really identified with the left | 0:29:05 | 0:29:08 | |
with some incredibly incendiary language. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:11 | |
Steinbeck, if he wasn't | 0:29:11 | 0:29:13 | |
out and out calling for revolution - | 0:29:13 | 0:29:15 | |
and that was a word that really meant something in that era - | 0:29:15 | 0:29:18 | |
he was tip-toeing pretty close to the line. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:21 | |
Steinbeck's fear that there would be a right-wing backlash | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
was totally justified. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:29 | |
He was accused of being a "liar", a "communist", | 0:29:29 | 0:29:31 | |
and undermining the economy | 0:29:31 | 0:29:33 | |
by putting himself on the side of Zionist-Communist interests. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
The book was burned in Bakersfield, Buffalo and Illinois. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:42 | |
It was widely banned and has suffered bans | 0:29:42 | 0:29:44 | |
from schools and libraries ever since | 0:29:44 | 0:29:47 | |
because of its earthy language and blunt, sexual content. | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
It was banned as obscene in Kansas City | 0:29:50 | 0:29:52 | |
and even back in Oklahoma, | 0:29:52 | 0:29:53 | |
there were those who disliked it | 0:29:53 | 0:29:55 | |
and thought it was too lewd and coarse. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
You know, there's some four letter words throughout the book. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
And I think mainly even more than that, some of the scenes, | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
particularly the last scene, of course, where Rose of Sharon | 0:30:05 | 0:30:09 | |
gives her breast to a starving stranger, | 0:30:09 | 0:30:11 | |
having just lost her stillborn baby. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:14 | |
That was probably a little too much for some people to bear. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:18 | |
Comments were made in Congress | 0:30:18 | 0:30:19 | |
by Representative Lyle Borden. He said, "I say to you, | 0:30:19 | 0:30:23 | |
"and to every honest, square-minded reader in America, | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
"that the painting Steinbeck made in this book is a lie, a black, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:31 | |
"infernal creation of a twisted and distorted mind." | 0:30:31 | 0:30:35 | |
Steinbeck hated the attention | 0:30:35 | 0:30:37 | |
that the success of the novel was bringing him. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:39 | |
He also lived in fear of reprisals from the right. | 0:30:39 | 0:30:42 | |
He was concerned about what would happen to him, | 0:30:42 | 0:30:45 | |
and at one point in the '30s he began actually carrying | 0:30:45 | 0:30:50 | |
a Colt revolver with him. That's how scared he was. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:55 | |
When Hollywood decided to ride the wave of the book's success, | 0:30:59 | 0:31:02 | |
the film's producer, Darryl Zanuck, | 0:31:02 | 0:31:04 | |
cleverly cast popular actor Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
The casting gave the outlaw murderer | 0:31:08 | 0:31:10 | |
the instant status of a people's champion. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:13 | |
They're working away on our spirits, | 0:31:13 | 0:31:15 | |
trying to make us cringe and crawl, working on our decency. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:18 | |
You promised, Tom! | 0:31:18 | 0:31:19 | |
I know. I'm a-tryin' to, Ma. Honest I am. | 0:31:19 | 0:31:21 | |
You gotta keep clear. The family's a-breakin' up. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:23 | |
You got to keep clear. | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
What's that, a detour? | 0:31:25 | 0:31:26 | |
Fonda was able to play the role of tough guy or peacemaker, | 0:31:29 | 0:31:33 | |
depending on the needs of the situation. | 0:31:33 | 0:31:36 | |
Tom, Tom, please! | 0:31:36 | 0:31:37 | |
Just where do you think you're goin'? | 0:31:42 | 0:31:44 | |
Well...we're strangers here, mister. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
We heard about there was work in a place called Tavares. | 0:31:49 | 0:31:53 | |
Yeah? Well, you're heading the wrong way. | 0:31:53 | 0:31:55 | |
What's more, we don't want no more Okies in this town! | 0:31:55 | 0:31:58 | |
If the Grapes Of Wrath publicly damned | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
California's response to the migrant crisis, | 0:32:00 | 0:32:03 | |
Steinbeck did offer one example of how these people could and should have been treated. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:08 | |
It was in the government camp run by Tom Collins. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
Tom Collins was an active campaigner for migrant rights. | 0:32:12 | 0:32:16 | |
He ran this place democratically, this camp, | 0:32:16 | 0:32:19 | |
and this was the model for Weedpatch in The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:32:19 | 0:32:23 | |
It was the first place in the book that the Joads were treated | 0:32:23 | 0:32:26 | |
with respect and dignity, and in the film, | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
this camp, Arvin, became Weedpatch, and this shack here | 0:32:29 | 0:32:34 | |
became the camp manager's office. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
Camp I was in before, they burnt it out. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
Deputies and some of them pool-room fellas. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:42 | |
They don't get in here. Sometimes the boys patrol the fences. | 0:32:42 | 0:32:45 | |
Especially on dance nights. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:47 | |
You got dances too? | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
We have the best dances in the county, every Saturday night. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:53 | |
-Who runs this place? -The government. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:56 | |
-Why ain't there more like it? -You find out. I can't. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
Earl Shelton came to this camp as a boy. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:04 | |
He spent seven years living in a tent, before moving into | 0:33:04 | 0:33:08 | |
a tin shack like this one. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:10 | |
He's now in his 80s. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
You look pretty fit. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:15 | |
Well, time waits on no-one. | 0:33:15 | 0:33:17 | |
He remembers Tom Collins' camp with affection. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
They had...dances, religious meetings, | 0:33:20 | 0:33:24 | |
pie suppers. This was the community building. | 0:33:24 | 0:33:29 | |
The government camps was absolutely gorgeous for the people, | 0:33:29 | 0:33:35 | |
because they had protection. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:37 | |
Those Okies who didn't come to a government camp, | 0:33:37 | 0:33:40 | |
and there were very few of these camps, those who didn't come, | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
what did you hear about the way they were treated in their camps? | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
Oh, they were... | 0:33:47 | 0:33:49 | |
they were treated miserably. | 0:33:49 | 0:33:51 | |
They were just looked down on | 0:33:51 | 0:33:54 | |
because they said, well, they were uneducated, | 0:33:54 | 0:33:59 | |
dirty and what have you, and that was wrong. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:02 | |
Earl was one of the lucky ones who found shelter | 0:34:04 | 0:34:06 | |
and human compassion in Tom Collins' camp. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:08 | |
I can see why there's that dedication at the front of | 0:34:08 | 0:34:12 | |
The Grapes Of Wrath from Steinbeck | 0:34:12 | 0:34:14 | |
"To Tom...who lived it." | 0:34:14 | 0:34:16 | |
The Camp at Arvin | 0:34:17 | 0:34:19 | |
has been offering shelter to migrants ever since. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
Now, the seasonal workforce | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
in the fields of California is almost entirely Mexican. | 0:34:25 | 0:34:28 | |
Mexican migrants come up because they can make more money | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
here in the American West than they can in Mexico. | 0:34:31 | 0:34:34 | |
They do represent the kind of nowaday Joads in several ways. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
This is a huge dilemma, especially more so over in California | 0:34:37 | 0:34:41 | |
where there's more need for stoop labour. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
At Arvin, I also met a Mexican family who cross the border | 0:34:46 | 0:34:49 | |
every year for the fruit-picking season. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:51 | |
Hard work? | 0:34:51 | 0:34:52 | |
-Duro trabajo? -Si, si. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
And whereabouts in Mexico are you from, Mr Ramirez? | 0:34:55 | 0:34:58 | |
Donde vienes en Mexico, que lugar? | 0:34:58 | 0:35:00 | |
De Juana Cuarto. Mexico. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:02 | |
Mr Ramirez and his family are treated well, | 0:35:05 | 0:35:08 | |
but they made me think of the struggles of all migrant workers | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
who Steinbeck stood up for and gave voice to | 0:35:11 | 0:35:13 | |
in The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:15 | |
Steinbeck had powerfully exposed America's | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
scandalous neglect of its own people. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
The book came out in 1939. | 0:35:20 | 0:35:22 | |
War in Europe meant that a year or so later, | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
preparations for war began here. The armaments industry grew. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:28 | |
The migrants who couldn't get work anywhere | 0:35:28 | 0:35:30 | |
got work in a factory making arms, and later, work in the forces. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:35 | |
And it was the war | 0:35:35 | 0:35:36 | |
that drew the line under the furore | 0:35:36 | 0:35:39 | |
created by The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
Steinbeck was exhausted both by the writing of The Grapes Of Wrath | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
and by the commotion it caused. | 0:35:48 | 0:35:51 | |
At the peak of his fame, he ran away to sea. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
This wasn't so much backing away | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
from political commitment, as pursuing another | 0:35:57 | 0:36:00 | |
important strand of his imaginative life. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:04 | |
Steinbeck had always been interested | 0:36:04 | 0:36:06 | |
in how men fit into their landscape. | 0:36:06 | 0:36:08 | |
He was now moving beyond the political arena | 0:36:08 | 0:36:11 | |
and developing an ecological vision of how man as a species | 0:36:11 | 0:36:14 | |
fits into the natural world. | 0:36:14 | 0:36:16 | |
In 1940 he set off on a boat trip with his close friend Ed Ricketts | 0:36:18 | 0:36:23 | |
to explore the marine life of the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:27 | |
Ricketts was a professional collector of marine animals, | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
and had been a key influence on Steinbeck's thinking | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
throughout the 1930s. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:35 | |
I think the Sea of Cortez | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
is the book that best represents what Steinbeck thought, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:42 | |
and what Steinbeck and Ricketts talked about throughout the '30s. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:45 | |
I think there's more... One reviewer said | 0:36:45 | 0:36:47 | |
there's more of Steinbeck the man in Sea of Cortez | 0:36:47 | 0:36:50 | |
than in any other book that he wrote. | 0:36:50 | 0:36:52 | |
So I think it's a compendium of his ideas, | 0:36:52 | 0:36:55 | |
from survivability of the species, | 0:36:55 | 0:36:57 | |
considering man's place in the universe, | 0:36:57 | 0:36:59 | |
or how various species interact. | 0:36:59 | 0:37:02 | |
Steinbeck had developed an interest in marine biology | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
as a student at Stanford University. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:09 | |
He'd studied at Hopkins Marine Station close to the beach house | 0:37:09 | 0:37:13 | |
where he did a lot of his writing. The coastline here | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
offered Steinbeck an alternative world | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
to the Salinas Valley where he grew up. With Ed Ricketts, | 0:37:18 | 0:37:22 | |
he used to explore the coastal tide pools of Monterey Bay, | 0:37:22 | 0:37:24 | |
and became fascinated with their ecosystems. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:28 | |
I think the friendship between Steinbeck and Ricketts | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
meant everything to both of them. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
They were best friends for a decade or more. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
Ricketts was a scientist with an artistic sensibility, | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
and Steinbeck was an artist with a scientific sensibility, | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
and that's really true. And their gears really meshed. | 0:37:45 | 0:37:48 | |
They worked together, they worked well together, | 0:37:48 | 0:37:51 | |
and they stimulated each other to see new things | 0:37:51 | 0:37:54 | |
that neither of them would have seen alone. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:57 | |
"Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:03 | |
"If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
"that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
"is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, | 0:38:10 | 0:38:13 | |
"that all life is relational. | 0:38:13 | 0:38:16 | |
"Species grow misty. One merges into another, | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
"groups melt into ecological groups until the time when | 0:38:19 | 0:38:23 | |
"what we know as life meets and enters | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
"what we think of as non-life - | 0:38:26 | 0:38:28 | |
"barnacle and rock, rock and earth, | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
"earth and tree." | 0:38:31 | 0:38:33 | |
Steinbeck, through his friendship with Ricketts, | 0:38:35 | 0:38:38 | |
was developing his own philosophy | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
in how man fits into the whole ecosystem. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
"And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, | 0:38:46 | 0:38:51 | |
"most of the mystical outcrying | 0:38:51 | 0:38:53 | |
"which is one of the most prized and used | 0:38:53 | 0:38:55 | |
"and desired reactions of our species, | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
"is really the understanding | 0:38:58 | 0:39:00 | |
"and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, | 0:39:00 | 0:39:04 | |
"related inextricably to all reality, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:06 | |
"known and unknowable. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:09 | |
"All things are one, | 0:39:09 | 0:39:11 | |
"and one thing is all things, | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
"all bound together by the elastic string of time. | 0:39:14 | 0:39:17 | |
"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars, | 0:39:18 | 0:39:21 | |
"and then back to the tide pool again." | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
What seemed like a totally new direction in Sea Of Cortez | 0:39:29 | 0:39:34 | |
was in fact a continuation of ideas | 0:39:34 | 0:39:36 | |
he had been developing throughout his career. | 0:39:36 | 0:39:39 | |
Sea Of Cortez was really a key, | 0:39:39 | 0:39:41 | |
a Rosetta Stone to reading Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:43 | |
These are the ideas they had. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:44 | |
Ricketts applies them in philosophy and science overtly. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
Steinbeck incorporates them into the novels. | 0:39:47 | 0:39:50 | |
Any work that Steinbeck wrote, basically, you can view | 0:39:50 | 0:39:53 | |
through that lens and see this sort of | 0:39:53 | 0:39:55 | |
interrelationships of people and place, | 0:39:55 | 0:39:58 | |
achieving universality. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:00 | |
It's the philosophy of the ecology | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
and the environment and personal relations | 0:40:02 | 0:40:05 | |
that he really mastered, I think. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:07 | |
In 1945, Steinbeck applied his ecological vision to the people | 0:40:08 | 0:40:11 | |
he knew and loved in the town of Monterey, | 0:40:11 | 0:40:13 | |
in particular the outsiders and bohemians. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:16 | |
The result was the novel Cannery Row. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:20 | |
"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:25 | |
"a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, | 0:40:25 | 0:40:28 | |
"a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. | 0:40:28 | 0:40:30 | |
"Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, | 0:40:30 | 0:40:33 | |
"tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, | 0:40:33 | 0:40:37 | |
"chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
"sardine canneries and corrugated iron, laboratories and flop-houses. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:44 | |
"Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:47 | |
"'Whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, | 0:40:47 | 0:40:49 | |
"by which he meant Everybody. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
"Had the man looked through another peephole, | 0:40:52 | 0:40:54 | |
"he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men', | 0:40:54 | 0:40:59 | |
"and he would have meant the same thing." | 0:40:59 | 0:41:01 | |
Cannery Row is a kind of freestyle jazz novel, | 0:41:03 | 0:41:07 | |
loosely based around two drunken, wild parties | 0:41:07 | 0:41:10 | |
held at a marine laboratory run by a character called Doc. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:15 | |
Doc is effectively a portrait of Ed Ricketts, | 0:41:15 | 0:41:17 | |
who worked here in the Pacific Biological Laboratories, | 0:41:17 | 0:41:21 | |
which this once was. | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
This wasn't only a laboratory. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:25 | |
It was a hang-out for Ricketts' friends - | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
artists, Steinbeck, of course, other pals - | 0:41:28 | 0:41:32 | |
and bums like Mack and the boys | 0:41:32 | 0:41:34 | |
who feature so heavily in Cannery Row. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:37 | |
It's opposite what was known as | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
"Monterey's most genteel and magnificent whorehouse". | 0:41:39 | 0:41:44 | |
Cannery Row is probably the only American novel | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
with the tide pool as the main metaphor | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
and it's about the community of assorted people, a scientist, Doc, | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
the whores in the Bear Flag Cafe, the bums on the street, | 0:41:54 | 0:41:58 | |
Mack and the boys... | 0:41:58 | 0:42:00 | |
it's really a bizarre mix of fringe-dwellers | 0:42:00 | 0:42:03 | |
that are all related in lots of strange ways in Cannery Row. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
Steinbeck was trying something radically new with this novel. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:10 | |
The book has very little plot. | 0:42:10 | 0:42:14 | |
He wanted to find a form that reflected | 0:42:14 | 0:42:16 | |
his ecological view of life. | 0:42:16 | 0:42:17 | |
"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise, | 0:42:19 | 0:42:22 | |
"the quality of light, the tone, the habit | 0:42:22 | 0:42:25 | |
"and the dream, be set down alive? | 0:42:25 | 0:42:27 | |
"When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
"so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:33 | |
"for they break and tatter under the touch. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:35 | |
"You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
"on to a knife blade | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
"and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:43 | |
"And perhaps that might be the way | 0:42:43 | 0:42:46 | |
"to write this book - | 0:42:46 | 0:42:47 | |
"to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
The tide pools, here along Monterey's rocky coastline, | 0:42:52 | 0:42:55 | |
was where Steinbeck would often accompany Ed Ricketts | 0:42:55 | 0:42:59 | |
to collect specimens. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:00 | |
The worlds he found in these tide pools fascinated him. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:04 | |
Steinbeck revels in the beauty | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
and the violence contained inside these pools of trapped sea-water. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
For him, they represent a lurid and pungent microcosm of life. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:17 | |
"Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
"on the tip of the Peninsula. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:23 | |
"When the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
"creamy with foam, whipped by the combers | 0:43:26 | 0:43:28 | |
"that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:32 | |
"But when the tide goes out, the little water world | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
"becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom | 0:43:35 | 0:43:39 | |
"becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:42 | |
"Crabs rush from frond to frond. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:46 | |
"Starfish squat over mussels and limpets. | 0:43:46 | 0:43:50 | |
"The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, | 0:43:50 | 0:43:53 | |
"and the lime smell of calcareous bodies... | 0:43:53 | 0:43:55 | |
"smell of sperm and ova fill the air. | 0:43:55 | 0:43:58 | |
"The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, | 0:43:58 | 0:44:02 | |
"of decay and birth." | 0:44:02 | 0:44:04 | |
When Steinbeck turns to describe the inhabitants of Cannery Row, | 0:44:04 | 0:44:08 | |
he describes them with the same zoologist's eye, | 0:44:08 | 0:44:11 | |
and sees them in a tide pool with the same seductions, | 0:44:11 | 0:44:14 | |
appetites and survival instincts. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
"Doc said, 'Look at them. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:22 | |
"There are your true philosophers... | 0:44:22 | 0:44:24 | |
"Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in this world | 0:44:24 | 0:44:28 | |
"and possibly everything that will happen. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:30 | |
"I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
"In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition | 0:44:34 | 0:44:38 | |
"and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. | 0:44:38 | 0:44:42 | |
"All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, | 0:44:42 | 0:44:46 | |
"and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy | 0:44:46 | 0:44:51 | |
"and curiously clean. They can do what they want. | 0:44:51 | 0:44:54 | |
"They can satisfy their appetites | 0:44:54 | 0:44:56 | |
"without calling them something else'". | 0:44:56 | 0:44:59 | |
Even though Steinbeck was now a wealthy man, | 0:44:59 | 0:45:01 | |
he was still drawn to those who lived a simple, carefree life. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:05 | |
Perhaps these loafers and idlers held the key to happiness? | 0:45:05 | 0:45:09 | |
When I first read Cannery Row as a teenager in Wigton | 0:45:09 | 0:45:12 | |
up in Cumbria, Mac and the boys reminded me | 0:45:12 | 0:45:14 | |
of people in my home town, characters. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:16 | |
I'm sure it was the same in towns and cities and villages | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
all over Europe, all over America, all over the world. | 0:45:19 | 0:45:22 | |
He'd hit on a universal type. | 0:45:22 | 0:45:25 | |
In my opinion, Cannery Row, with its celebration of life | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
in all its forms, is up there with The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:32 | |
It's a love letter to a world | 0:45:32 | 0:45:33 | |
Steinbeck left behind when he became | 0:45:33 | 0:45:35 | |
a world-famous author. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:37 | |
Steinbeck spent part of World War II in Italy as a war correspondent. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:43 | |
In 1947 he travelled with photographer Robert Capa | 0:45:43 | 0:45:46 | |
to the Soviet Union, which only added to the mistaken idea | 0:45:46 | 0:45:50 | |
that he was a communist. | 0:45:50 | 0:45:52 | |
By the end of the decade, | 0:45:52 | 0:45:53 | |
he was feeling distanced from his real subject, | 0:45:53 | 0:45:56 | |
Americans in their landscape. | 0:45:56 | 0:45:57 | |
He loved the landscape. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
He talks about it always, that it was in his blood, | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
the lime stone of these mountains. | 0:46:03 | 0:46:05 | |
You see the limestone of the mountains where you are on | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
the East Of Eden ranch. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:09 | |
You can see him looking up at those and thinking, | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
"OK, this is where I belong, this is where my people live." | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
In 1948, Steinbeck decided | 0:46:27 | 0:46:29 | |
to reconnect with his native California. | 0:46:29 | 0:46:31 | |
He wanted to write another epic book, | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
this time based on his own family. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
It would eventually become East Of Eden. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
It was a hugely ambitious undertaking. | 0:46:39 | 0:46:42 | |
He described it as his attempt to write his War And Peace. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:46 | |
Two things happened in that year. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:51 | |
Ricketts died. | 0:46:51 | 0:46:52 | |
He was killed by a train. And he was divorced | 0:46:52 | 0:46:55 | |
from his second wife. And I think | 0:46:55 | 0:46:57 | |
that earthquake created something that... | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
it was kind of a reassessment of where he was at that point. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
This was to be his big novel. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:08 | |
"What I have been practising to write all my life," he wrote. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:11 | |
"Everything else has been training. | 0:47:11 | 0:47:13 | |
"It's the whole nasty, bloody, lovely history of the world, | 0:47:13 | 0:47:17 | |
"that's what it is, with no boundaries | 0:47:17 | 0:47:20 | |
"except my own inabilities". | 0:47:20 | 0:47:22 | |
Everybody in America always wanted to write | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
the Great American Novel from the mid-19th century on, | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
because we were trying to define ourselves. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:30 | |
And so what is an American novel? | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
He said I have to write about my home country, | 0:47:32 | 0:47:34 | |
I have to write about Salinas. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
The original title of East Of Eden was The Salinas Valley, | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
and Steinbeck embarked on a period of intense research | 0:47:40 | 0:47:43 | |
into the early settling of the Valley | 0:47:43 | 0:47:46 | |
and into his ancestry on his mother's side, the Irish Hamiltons. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:51 | |
He wanted the Salinas Valley | 0:47:51 | 0:47:52 | |
to be a microcosm for the whole of the USA, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:55 | |
and his own family to stand for what is universal | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
in all families. Steinbeck's maternal grandfather, | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
Samuel Hamilton, originally from Northern Ireland, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
moved here in 1870 and built this farm. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
The farm, and Hamilton himself, feature strongly in East Of Eden | 0:48:07 | 0:48:12 | |
where Steinbeck traces the rugged individualism | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
and the strength of those early settlers. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
"When people first came to the West, particularly from the owned | 0:48:19 | 0:48:23 | |
"and fought-over farmlets of Europe, | 0:48:23 | 0:48:24 | |
"and saw so much land to be had for the signing of a paper | 0:48:24 | 0:48:28 | |
"and the building of a foundation, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:30 | |
"an itching land-greed seemed to come over them. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:33 | |
"They wanted more and more land. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:35 | |
"They took up worthless land just to own it. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:38 | |
"They and the coyotes lived clever, despairing, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:40 | |
"sub-marginal lives. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
"I don't know whether it was a divine stupidity | 0:48:42 | 0:48:44 | |
"or a great faith that let them do it." | 0:48:44 | 0:48:48 | |
This novel was written with Steinbeck's two young sons in mind, | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
and explores the idea of legacy and inheritance | 0:48:51 | 0:48:54 | |
and the individual's ability to shape his own destiny. | 0:48:54 | 0:48:57 | |
Steinbeck wrote, "I am choosing to write this book to my sons. | 0:48:57 | 0:49:01 | |
"They are little boys now and will never know | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
"what they came from through me, unless I tell them. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:07 | |
"And so I will tell them one of the greatest, | 0:49:07 | 0:49:09 | |
"perhaps the greatest story of all... | 0:49:09 | 0:49:12 | |
"the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, | 0:49:12 | 0:49:15 | |
"of love and hate." | 0:49:15 | 0:49:18 | |
I think part of the book is his trying to understand | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
his very personal recent past and his distant past as well. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:26 | |
And I think he wants it to open up, almost like tide pool to the stars, | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
open up into the story that he thought was... | 0:49:30 | 0:49:34 | |
contained all of human experience, which was | 0:49:34 | 0:49:37 | |
the Cain and Abel story. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:39 | |
As he did in The Grapes Of Wrath, | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
Steinbeck went to the Bible for his stories | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
and his themes in East Of Eden, | 0:49:43 | 0:49:45 | |
particularly the fight between Cain and Abel | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
and the Garden of Eden story itself. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
"A child may ask, 'What is the world's story about?' | 0:49:52 | 0:49:56 | |
"And a grown man or woman may wonder, 'What way will the world go? | 0:49:56 | 0:50:00 | |
"How does it end and, while we're at it, what's the story about? | 0:50:00 | 0:50:04 | |
"I believe that there is one story in the world, | 0:50:04 | 0:50:07 | |
"and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live | 0:50:07 | 0:50:11 | |
"in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:15 | |
"Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
"in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, | 0:50:18 | 0:50:21 | |
"and in their kindness and generosity too... | 0:50:21 | 0:50:24 | |
"in a net of good and evil. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:27 | |
"I think this is the only story we have, | 0:50:27 | 0:50:30 | |
"and that it occurs at all levels of feeling and intelligence. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
"Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:36 | |
"and they will be the fabric of our last, | 0:50:36 | 0:50:39 | |
"and this despite changes we may impose on field and river | 0:50:39 | 0:50:42 | |
"and mountain, on economy and manners. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
"There is no other story. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:47 | |
"A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, | 0:50:47 | 0:50:50 | |
"will have left only the hard, clean questions. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
"Was it good or was it evil? | 0:50:53 | 0:50:55 | |
"Have I done well... | 0:50:55 | 0:50:57 | |
"or ill?" | 0:50:57 | 0:50:59 | |
Steinbeck was again on epic territory, | 0:51:00 | 0:51:02 | |
and in my opinion, he created a powerful foundation myth | 0:51:02 | 0:51:06 | |
for the American West. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
East Of Eden received mixed reviews but it had commercial success. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:12 | |
It hit number one in the bestseller list and Elia Kazan's film | 0:51:12 | 0:51:15 | |
starring James Dean added to its popularity and sales. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:19 | |
But it wasn't, and it wasn't thought to be, the epoch-making novel | 0:51:19 | 0:51:23 | |
that The Grapes Of Wrath had been. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:25 | |
Steinbeck had a curious relationship with critics, | 0:51:25 | 0:51:29 | |
because many of them praised many of his books, | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
even East Of Eden, even Winter Of Our Discontent, | 0:51:32 | 0:51:35 | |
his last novel. But I don't know if... | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
He always said they didn't understand what he was trying to do. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
And I think that's in part because he was trying to experiment | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
but it didn't necessarily seem as experimental | 0:51:45 | 0:51:47 | |
as somebody like Faulkner or Hemingway, the great modernists. | 0:51:47 | 0:51:51 | |
He was always compared to them, | 0:51:51 | 0:51:54 | |
and I think that he didn't just seem very experimental | 0:51:54 | 0:51:56 | |
and people put writers in slots, and it's hard | 0:51:56 | 0:51:59 | |
to get out of the slot you're put into. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:01 | |
So he was put into a naturalist-realist slot. | 0:52:01 | 0:52:05 | |
Everybody wanted him to keep rewriting The Grapes Of Wrath. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:09 | |
Go back to your best work, the work of the '30s, | 0:52:09 | 0:52:11 | |
the committed artist, the partisan writer. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:15 | |
Steinbeck appeared to be out of step with the times, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:19 | |
and if the critics thought it, | 0:52:19 | 0:52:21 | |
Steinbeck was beginning to think it too. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:23 | |
In the mid-'50s, he dreamt up the idea of making | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
a road trip across the country | 0:52:26 | 0:52:28 | |
to report on the health of America and reconnect with its soul. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:31 | |
"I want to take a drive | 0:52:33 | 0:52:34 | |
"through the middle west and the south | 0:52:34 | 0:52:36 | |
"and listen to what the country is about now. | 0:52:36 | 0:52:40 | |
"I have been cut off for a very long time and I think | 0:52:40 | 0:52:43 | |
"it would be a very valuable thing for me to do." | 0:52:43 | 0:52:45 | |
He didn't get to make the trip until 1960. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:48 | |
The resulting book, Travels With Charley - | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
Charley was the dog who went along with him - | 0:52:50 | 0:52:52 | |
was also called "In Search Of America". | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
What Steinbeck found on his trip was conformity, homogenisation, | 0:52:57 | 0:53:03 | |
urban decay and the ruin of the American landscape. | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash. | 0:53:08 | 0:53:11 | |
"All of them. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:14 | |
"Surrounded by piles of wrecked | 0:53:14 | 0:53:15 | |
"and rusted automobiles, and almost smothered | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
"with rubbish. The new American finds his challenge | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
"and his love in traffic-choked streets, | 0:53:21 | 0:53:24 | |
"skies nested in smog, | 0:53:24 | 0:53:26 | |
"choking with the acids of industry." | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
Towards the end of his road trip, | 0:53:30 | 0:53:31 | |
he returned to his beloved Salinas Valley | 0:53:31 | 0:53:34 | |
and the coastal town of Monterey. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:37 | |
He found them both changed beyond recognition. | 0:53:37 | 0:53:39 | |
When he reached Cannery Row, | 0:53:42 | 0:53:44 | |
Steinbeck was dismayed by the commercialism of the place. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:47 | |
"They fish for tourists now," he said. | 0:53:47 | 0:53:49 | |
But it's ironic that the tourists come because of Cannery Row. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
They changed the name because of his book, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
and because of Steinbeck, who was the other great draw here. | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
Travels With Charley is a jeremiad. | 0:54:00 | 0:54:04 | |
Steinbeck saw the America of that time as decadent. | 0:54:04 | 0:54:07 | |
The problem was not deprivation, as it was in the Depression, | 0:54:07 | 0:54:11 | |
it was modern American affluence. | 0:54:11 | 0:54:13 | |
He wrote that America had gone soft. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:17 | |
"A nation or a group or an individual cannot survive | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
"being soft, comforted, content. | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
"The individual only survives when the pressure is on him. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:25 | |
"The American people are losing their ability to be versatile, | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
"to do things for themselves, to put back in. | 0:54:28 | 0:54:32 | |
"When people or animals lose their versatility, | 0:54:32 | 0:54:35 | |
"they become extinct." | 0:54:35 | 0:54:37 | |
Despite being a hugely popular writer, | 0:54:39 | 0:54:41 | |
Steinbeck's literary reputation had been declining for some time. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:45 | |
He was on the lists of required reading at colleges | 0:54:45 | 0:54:49 | |
and high schools but even that, perhaps mostly that, | 0:54:49 | 0:54:52 | |
counted against him with the literati. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
I really think that Steinbeck was somebody who kept trying things, | 0:54:55 | 0:54:59 | |
and the critics really didn't appreciate what he was trying. | 0:54:59 | 0:55:02 | |
And he wasn't going to repeat himself, | 0:55:02 | 0:55:05 | |
and I think that they didn't know what to expect next. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:07 | |
What's coming out of this writer? | 0:55:07 | 0:55:09 | |
He was going in every direction and so that was confusing. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
One way of looking at it is that in the commanding east coast | 0:55:12 | 0:55:15 | |
headquarters of the literary establishment, | 0:55:15 | 0:55:18 | |
he just didn't fit in. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:19 | |
There were the great Jewish intellectuals like Saul Bellow, | 0:55:19 | 0:55:22 | |
there were the hipsters like Norman Mailer, | 0:55:22 | 0:55:24 | |
there were the drug-affected writers, | 0:55:24 | 0:55:26 | |
there were the existentialists. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:28 | |
And where was Steinbeck in all that? | 0:55:28 | 0:55:30 | |
Maybe he was too real. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:32 | |
A little too grubby, a little too... | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
of the real world. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:36 | |
You know, he's a guy, as you said, who had dirt under his nails. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:40 | |
He really immersed himself beyond his mind and really got out there. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:44 | |
There was a sense in which Steinbeck couldn't win. | 0:55:44 | 0:55:47 | |
He was the proletarian writer | 0:55:47 | 0:55:49 | |
too much beloved by Russians at the time of the Cold War. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
Then he supported the Vietnam War. | 0:55:52 | 0:55:54 | |
Too much beloved by Lyndon Johnson, the enemy of the intellectuals. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:59 | |
He went out of fashion. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:00 | |
Still, people who go out of fashion often come back with a vengeance. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:04 | |
And what they can't deny Steinbeck is his power as a storyteller | 0:56:04 | 0:56:08 | |
of the working people of this great continent. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
It's Steinbeck's understanding | 0:56:11 | 0:56:13 | |
of the common man which gives his books | 0:56:13 | 0:56:15 | |
universal appeal and keeps them in print all over the world. | 0:56:15 | 0:56:18 | |
Rather than being a writer of the 1930s, Steinbeck speaks | 0:56:18 | 0:56:22 | |
directly to our present concerns, and I think | 0:56:22 | 0:56:25 | |
he was also ahead of his time | 0:56:25 | 0:56:26 | |
in developing an ecological view of man's place in the cosmos. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:31 | |
Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962, and by then | 0:56:32 | 0:56:35 | |
the American literary establishment had really turned against him. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:39 | |
On the eve of the celebration of the prize itself, | 0:56:39 | 0:56:42 | |
The New York Times wrote, | 0:56:42 | 0:56:43 | |
"Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?" | 0:56:43 | 0:56:47 | |
The newspaper declared that, "After The Grapes Of Wrath | 0:56:47 | 0:56:50 | |
"at the end of the '30s, | 0:56:50 | 0:56:52 | |
"most serious readers have ceased to read him." | 0:56:52 | 0:56:55 | |
The article went on to say that the Swedes had made a serious error | 0:56:55 | 0:56:59 | |
by giving the prize to a writer whose "limited talent is, | 0:56:59 | 0:57:02 | |
"in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising." | 0:57:02 | 0:57:06 | |
That seems to me to be nearer mere abuse than criticism. | 0:57:06 | 0:57:11 | |
Steinbeck didn't like criticism. Who does? | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
But he took it on the chin. And he chose to answer back | 0:57:14 | 0:57:17 | |
in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. | 0:57:17 | 0:57:20 | |
"At this particular time, | 0:57:20 | 0:57:21 | |
"I think it would be well to consider the high duties | 0:57:21 | 0:57:24 | |
"and the responsibilities of the makers of literature. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated | 0:57:27 | 0:57:31 | |
"critical priesthood | 0:57:31 | 0:57:32 | |
"singing their litanies in empty churches... | 0:57:32 | 0:57:35 | |
"nor is it a game | 0:57:35 | 0:57:37 | |
"for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:40 | |
"It grew out of human need for it, | 0:57:40 | 0:57:43 | |
"and it has not changed except to become more needed. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:47 | |
In my opinion, Steinbeck was a great writer, | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
and above all, a great storyteller. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:52 | |
He wrote, I think, at least four masterpieces - | 0:57:52 | 0:57:55 | |
The Grapes Of Wrath, East Of Eden, | 0:57:55 | 0:57:58 | |
Cannery Row, and Of Mice And Men. | 0:57:58 | 0:58:00 | |
That's four more than the vast majority of writers | 0:58:00 | 0:58:03 | |
ever manage to do. | 0:58:03 | 0:58:04 | |
And he brought to the American dream of self-betterment | 0:58:04 | 0:58:07 | |
the idea that it should also contain tolerance and compassion, | 0:58:07 | 0:58:11 | |
and, above all, a democratic view of life. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:13 | |
That, I think, is one of the reasons he is so popular | 0:58:13 | 0:58:16 | |
like few great writers are popular. | 0:58:16 | 0:58:19 | |
It's that sense of democracy and Arthur Miller picked it up | 0:58:19 | 0:58:22 | |
in a very strong appreciation he wrote of Steinbeck. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:25 | |
"I can't think of another American writer, | 0:58:25 | 0:58:28 | |
"with the possible exception of Mark Twain, | 0:58:28 | 0:58:31 | |
"who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country." | 0:58:31 | 0:58:35 | |
# Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord | 0:58:36 | 0:58:42 | |
# He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored | 0:58:42 | 0:58:48 | |
# He hath loosed the fateful lightning | 0:58:48 | 0:58:50 | |
# of His terrible swift sword | 0:58:50 | 0:58:54 | |
# His truth is marching on. # | 0:58:54 | 0:58:58 |