Steinbeck’s Agony (A Reminder to Chill)

Fonda, Darwell in Grapes of Wrath

Fonda, Darwell in Grapes of Wrath

My novelist friend Rachel Kranz recently sent me an article by novelist William Kennedy about John Steinbeck’s self-doubts as a writer. She herself has been wrestling with self-doubts, even though she has a completed manuscript of what I think is a remarkable work, and the article lets her know that she is not alone.

It is not only novelists who suffer from self-doubts.  This is a time of year, I think, when we should look at ourselves with kindly eyes.    We are often better and more accomplished people than we give ourselves credit for.  By all means (to paraphrase Browning) we should reach beyond what we think are the limits of our grasp.  But sometimes we have already reached pretty high.  Kennedy tells a story about Steinbeck being depressed because one of his novels had come up short of his dreams.  At one time he was convinced that Grapes of Wrath was a mediocre book.

He was wrong.  Kennedy believes, as do I, that Grapes is one of America’s great novels.  My sense of its power was reconfirmed a couple of years ago when I taught it in a survey class. I also recall my father telling me how it turned his head around when he read it during the Great Depression. As the quintessential book about immigrants in search of the American Dream, it seems more timely than ever with the Senate’s rejection of the DREAM act over the weekend, an act that would have made eligible for citizenship those children of illegal immigrants now serving in the military or completing a college education.  (Joe Klein of Time describes the defeat as the result of “staggering cynicism and ugliness on the part of most Republicans and five morally-deficient Democrats” and notes that opponents Orrin Hatch and John McCain at one time were sponsors of the bill.) Described by Kennedy as  a novel with a great heart, Grapes of Wrath challenges us to step into our greatness as a multicultural nation.

Anyway, back to the story of the book’s creation. Here’s Kennedy describing Steinbeck’s crisis of confidence:

By this time he was in the first of four stages of creation of The Grapes of Wrath. The first was seven articles for the San Francisco News in October 1936 on the desperation of migrant farm workers and Steinbeck’s plea for change; the second a novel called The Oklahomans, which he destroyed; the third a satirical novel called L’Affaire Lettuceberg, which attacked a cabal of power figures who, through terrorism, destroy a migrant workers’ strike. This novel was announced as forthcoming, but when Steinbeck finished it he wrote to his publisher:

“It is a bad book and I must get rid of it . . . It is bad because it isn’t honest . . . I’ve written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it . . . Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well . . . I had forgotten that I hadn’t learned to write books. A book must be a life that lives all of itself and this one doesn’t do that  . . . Mice was a thin, brittle book . . . but at least it was an honest experiment . . . I think I got to believing critics—thought I could write easily and that anything I touched would be good simply because I did it. Well, any such idea, conscious or unconscious, is exploded for some time to come.”

Steinbeck then began the manuscript that became The Grapes of Wrath, wrote it in five months, beginning in May and ending in late October 1938. He wrote in longhand, producing two thousand words a day, the equivalent of seven double-spaced typed pages, an enormous output for any writer. But in his diary, published as Working Days, he flagellated himself: “Vacillating and miserable . . . I’m so lazy, so damned lazy . . . where has my discipline gone?” This would be his ninth fiction book in ten years and he’d be thirty-seven years old.

The diary also shows him choking on self-doubt as he finishes Grapes:

“No one else knows my lack of ability the way I do . . . Sometimes I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done, it slides into mediocrity . . . Got her done. And I’m afraid she’s a little dull . . . My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads . . . My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it . . . I’m slipping . . . I’ve been slipping all my life . . . Young man wants to talk, wants to be a writer. What could I tell him? Not a writer myself yet . . . I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do.”

For me, Steinbeck’s creative angst increases my gratitude for him and for all writers. They go through torment so that we readers can sink back into our soft chairs and have books that light up our lives.

I also suspect that each of us has metaphorical Grapes of Wrath manuscripts, things we have done that we undervalue.  This is a good week to honor yourself for what you have done and forgive yourself for what you haven’t.  ‘Tis the season.

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