The Harvest Gypsies

John Steinbeck

In this series the word 'dignity' has been used several times. It has been used not as some attitude of self-importance, but simply as a register of a man's responsibility to the community. A man herded about, surrounded by armed guards, starved and forced to live in filth loses his dignity; that is, he loses his valid position in regard to society, and consequently his whole ethics toward society. Nothing is a better example of this than the prison, where the men are reduced to no dignity and where crimes and infractions of the rule are constant.
We regard this destruction of dignity, then, as one of the most regrettable results of the migrant's life, since it does reduce his responsibility and does make him a sullen outcast who will strike at our Government in any way that occurs to him.

Dignity is a register of man's responsibility to the community. What Steinbeck says here of the migrants from Oklahoma applies equally to the various other 'problem groups' in our societies today--the homeless, the poor, illegal immigrants, felons, sex offenders, etc...

Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that the actions or attitudes of these various groups have precluded their valid position towards society. We act as if it would be nice if such groups could have a valid position towards society, and ethics towards society sound good too, but, well....we shrug our shoulders. After all, there is a reason they are the groups they are. I guess what we really say is that it wasn't us who took their dignity away, it's them, they gave it up. Coming here illegally, committing a felony (or getting caught), their choices, their foolishness, their addictions, their faults are what have brought them to this undignified situation. They stepped away from society; we didn't step away from them.

Though expectations are not what will determine their actions, though by expecting upstanding citizenry of them we won't erase their faults, it is still possible that the return of a clear position in regard to society might be the first, necessary foundation from which to fix their problems. They them their. Theirs those, these, them. The arrogance behind fixing their problems, behind the language of they is more evidence of the loss of relation to society.

Expecting a man to be a man won't make him one, but expecting him to be a pig will achieve even less. At least if we expect a man of him, we have a chance of recognizing the man in him...I don't know what we'll ever see expecting a pig of him. If a man is expected to be an animal, how will we recognize when he has become a man? I guess being poor takes away your dignity, but it seems that dignity, as in 1936, is something we still haven't connected with success in society.

The old story of giving a man a fish and that guy eating for a day has been told in many versions, but I'm going to add another. It's been said that it's better to teach him to fish, so that he'll eat for more than a day; it's been said that it's hard to learn when your starving, so giving a fish and teaching at the same time are probably pretty good in relationship; and it's even been said that you have to look at the pond the man is fishing in, to see if there are any fish for him to catch; but what about the reason the man would want to fish in the first place? If while he is learning he doesn't feel that his fishing has any meaningful relation to society, if he doesn't feel like society needs him to fish, how long will even the best fisherman keep at it?

I agree with Steinbeck: the destruction of dignity is one of the most regrettable results of our current attitude towards poverty, crime, and addiction.

Travels with Charley

John Steinbeck

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has a personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

Charley is a tall dog. As he sat in the seat beside me, his head was almost as high as mine. He put his nose close to my ear and said, "Ftt." He is the only dog I ever knew who could pronounce the consonant F. This is because his front teeth are crooked, a tragedy which keeps him out of dog shows; because his upper front teeth slightly engage his lower lip Charley can pronounce F. The word "Ftt" usually means he would like to salute a bush or a tree. I opened the cab door and let him out, and he went about his ceremony. He doesn't have to think about it to do it well. It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness--chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."

I succumbed utterly to my desolation, made two peanut-butter sandwiches, and went to bed and wrote letters home, passing my loneliness around. Then the rain stopped falling and the trees dripped and I helped to spawn a school of secret dangers. Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protests against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was a caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true--a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? Now and then there appear accounts of babies raised by animals--wolves and such. It is usually reported that the youngster crawls on all fours, makes those sounds learned from his foster parents, and perhaps even thinks like a wolf. Only through imitation do we develop toward originality. Take Charley, for example. He has always associated with the learned, the gentle, the literate, and the reasonable both in France and in America. And Charley is no more like a dog dog than he is like a cat. His perceptions are sharp and delicate and he is a mind-reader. I don't know that he can read the thoughts of other dogs, but he can read mine. Before a plan is half formed in my mind, Charley knows about it, and he also knows whether he is to be included in it. There's no question about this. I know too well his look of despair and disapproval when I have just thought that he must be left at home. And so much for the three notes below the red stain on the ketchup bottle.

Here, Charley, I give you a warning, should you be drawn to generalities. If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback? And if this is so, why are there no condiments save ketchup and mustard to enhance their foods?

The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life. And what the scorching, searing, freezing, poisoning weapons of non-life have failed to do may be accomplished to the end of its destruction and extinction by the tactics of survival gone sour. If the most versatile of living forms, the human, now fights for survival, as it always has, it can eliminate not only itself but all other life. And if that should transpire, unwanted places like the desert might be the harsh mother of repopulation . For the inhabitants of the desert are well trained and well armed against desolation. Even our own misguided species might re-emerge from the desert. The lone man and his sun-toughened wife who cling to the shade in an unfruitful and uncoveted place might, with their brothers in arms--the coyote, the jackrabbit, the horned toad, the rattlesnake, together with a hoist of armored insects--these trained and tested fragments of life might well be the last hope of life against non-life. The desert has mothered magic things before this.

It's hard to know what to say when there is so much to say. Without wanting to spoil either the thoughts I've had or the thoughts you might have, I don't know how to let out all the excitement and wonder with which reading Travels with Charley filled me. It is not unlikely that in reading this book you will come to the conclusion that John Steinbeck was a prophet.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

John Steinbeck
Ed. Chase Horton

In a corner lay the giant's hoard. Gold and silver, jewels and bright cloth, crucifixes of precious things and chalices set with rubies and emeralds, and along with these colored stones and pieces of broken glass from church windows and quartz and knobby crystal and shards of blue and yellow pottery--a mighty mixture of great wealth and great nonsense. And Sir Marhalt, looking at the heap, said sadly, "Poor thing. He didn't know the difference. He coudln't learn to steal only valuable things as civilized men and women do."

Can you imagine the Tales of King Arthur told with the burnished dust of Steinbeck? If only he had finished them. But writers write in the mystery and no one more so than Steinbeck. So who's to say why he never did. But he managed to get through a good half of the King Arthur stories, and what good stories they are. In Steinbeck these stories become clear as the round stones beneath a mountain creek. Rinsed and smoothed and formed by water down to solidity. These stories are beautiful. There are weariness and joy, sadness and rage, cheer and darkness, and all the stories are sharp as Excalabur. Read these stories to your kids, throw away the trash that's peddled now days. Read these stories to your kids and you will set them on the path to becoming men and women. Read these stories to your kids while they are young and small so their imaginations can take full hold of them and swing with full might.

Log from the Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.
It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.
It requires a self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
Once Ed said to me, "For a very long time I didn't like myself." It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. "It was a very difficult time," he said, "and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them pure fancy. I would hate to have to go back to that. Then gradually," he said, "I discovered with surprise and pleasure that a number of people liked me. And I thought, if they can like me, why cannot I like myself? Just thinking it did not do it, but slowly I learned to like myself and then it was all right."
This was not said in self-love in its bad connotation but in self-knowledge. He meant literally that he had learned to accept and like the person "Ed" as he liked other people. It gave him a great advantage. Most people do not like themselves at all. They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they do not like themselves. But mostly they do not even know themselves well enough to form a true liking, and since we automatically fear and dislike strangers, we fear and dislike our stranger-selves.
Once Ed was able to like himself he was released from the secret prison of self-contempt. Then he did not have to prove superiority any more by any of the ordinary methods, including giving. He could receive and understand and be truly glad, not competitively glad.
Ed's gift for receiving made him a great teacher. Children brought shells to him and gave him information about the shells. And they had to learn before they could tell him.
In conversation you found yourself telling him things--thoughts, conjectures, hypotheses--and you found a pleased surprise at yourself for having arrived at something you were not aware that you could think or know. It gave you such a good sense of participation with him that you could present him with this wonder.
Then Ed would say, "Yes, that's so. That's the way it might be and besides--" and he would illuminate it but not so that he took it away from you. He simply accepted it.
Although h is creativeness lay in receiving that does not mean that he kept things as property. When you had something from him it was not something that was his that he tore away from himself. When you had a thought from him or a piece of music or twenty dollars or a steak dinner, it was not his--it was yours already, and his was only the head and hand that steadied it in position toward you. For this reason no one was ever cut off from him. Association with him was deep participation with him, never competition.
I wish we could all be so. If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away. Maybe we would not have to hurt one another just to keep our ego-chins above water.

We have thought in this connection that the speed and tempo and tone of modern writing might be built on the nervous clacking of a typewriter; that the brittle jerky thinking of the present might rest on the brittle jerky curricula of our schools with their urge to "turn them out." To turn them out. They use the phrase in speeches; turn them out to what? And the young biologists tearing off pieces of their subject, tatters of the life forms, like sharks tearing out hunks of a dead horse, looking at them, tossing them away. This is neither a good nor a bad method; it is simply the one of our time. We can look with longing back to Charles Darwin, staring into the water over the side of the sailing ship, but for us to attempt to imitate that procedure would be romantic and silly. To take a sailing boat, to fight tide and wind, to move four hundred miles on a horse when we could take a plane, would be not only ridiculous but ineffective. For we first, before our work, are products of our time. We might produce a philosophical costume piece, but it would be completely artificial. However, we can and do look on the measured, slow-paced accumulation of sight and thought and of the Darwins with a nostalgic longing.

And then we thought of what they are, and we are--products of disease and sorrow and hunger and alcoholism. And suppose some all-powerful mind and will should cure our species so that for a number of generations we would be healthy and happy? We are the products of our disease and suffering. These are factors as powerful as other genetic factors. To cure and feed would be to change the species, and the result would be another animal entirely. We wonder if we would be able to tolerate our own species without a history of syphilis and tuberculosis. We don't know.

An Indian had paid three pesos for the harpoon several years ago. Obviously, since that had been paid, that was the price. But he had not yet learned to give time a money value. If he had to go three days in a canoe to get another harpoon, he could not add his time to the price, because he had never thought of time as a medium of exchange. At first we tried to explain the feeling we all had that time is a salable article, but we had to give it up. Time, these Indians said, went on. If one could stop time, or take it away, or hoard it, then one might sell it. One might as well sell air or heart or cold or health or beauty. And we thought of the great businesses in our country--the sale of clean air, of heat and cold, the scrabbling bargains in health offered over the radio, the boxed and bottled beauty, all for a price. This was not bad or good, it was only different. Time and beauty, they thought, could not be captured and sold, and we knew they not only could be, but that time could be warped and beauty made ugly. And again it was not good or bad. Our people would pay more for pills in a yellow box than in a white box--even the refraction of light had its price. They would buy books because they should rather than because they wanted to. They bought immunity from fear in salves to go under their arms. They bought romantic adventure in bars of tomato-colored soaps. They bought education by the foot and hefted volumes to see that they were not short-weighted. They purchased pain, and then analgesics to put down the pain. They bought courage and rest and had neither. And they are vastly amused at the Indian who, with his silver, bought Heaven and ransomed his father from Hell. These Indians were far too ignorant to understand the absurdities merchandising can really achieve when it has an enlightened people to work on.

Well, if you waded through the massive amounts of text above, you are now a better person, or at the least a person inspired to try and be better, to try and be more like--this is where you expect me to say, more like Ed, but that's not the point--to try and be more like yourself. You've heard the phrase, Ask and you shall receive? It is true, but in ways you'd never imagine. This world is the biggest book and it's waiting to be read. It's a book that teaches you it's language as you read it--truly a wonderful thing. And this book, like any good book, points every word and sentence at every other word and sentence, so that you can learn about the petty nature of dissatisfied people from the wigglings of a tube worm. If while you are walking (reading) you see what may be a strange colored leaf or a rusted bolt from a car or a rolling soda lid or a flying piece of paper, maybe it is worth your while to stop and read that sentence a little more carefully. In good writing, even the phrases about tiny things are filled with the weighty meaning of the whole book. This world is written by an excellent author.

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

I could give a little party, she insisted. Just a small affair. Nobody will dress. It's the anniversary of the founding of the Bloomer League--you didn't even remember that.

Mack and the boys, too, spinning in their orbits. They are the virtues, the Graces, the Beatitudes of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world rules by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the fight of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for the no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

It has always seemed strange to me, said Doc. The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?

Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, "You love beer so much. I'll bet some day you'll go in and order a beer milk shake." It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn't let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn't forget it.

Cannery Row, one of the Steinbeck books that I got a hold of when just beginning to sprout my tendrils above the garden soil, has wielded a mightier grip over me than most books. Tortilla Flat, being similar in my mind, has an equally iron-fisted hold on the course of my dreams.
But if ever there were a motto for a life described by a book, Cannery Row's would be 'Simple as it should be.' The life of Mack and the Boys and Doc and Lee Chong and Dora and her girls is a life that sounds too idyllic to be true, but has enough realism to make you wonder. Steinbeck doesn't pull any punches; some of the saddest most heart-wrenching instances I've ever heard are in his writing, some are in Cannery Row, yet the life is one I would have, for all this.
Could a man be foolish enough to choose it?
Could a man be dreamily distracted enough (from ledgers) to notice the beauty of Nature's balance book?
There is one chapter towards the end of Cannery Row that deals with two characters who are alive only in a few brief pages. Mary and Tom Talbot. I know a girl who is like Mary, or who's inside, who's narrator, that girl not yet tied down beneath the world's webs, still strives for her parties.
Throw a party, Mary, infect the whole house with gaiety and use your gift as a weapon against despondency. More than anything in the world, Mary Talbot loved parties. She loved to give parties and to go to parties. Since Tom Talbot didn't make much money Mary couldn't give parties all the time so she tricked people into giving them. Sometimes she telephoned a friend and said bluntly, 'Isn't it about time you gave a party?' Regularly Mary had six birthdays a year, and she organized costume parties, surprise parties, holiday parties. Christmas Eve at her house was a very exciting thing. For Mary glowed with parties.
A life full of parties, this is what Cannery Row is about because there is so much that needs celebrating. But celebration with the richness of feeling that is this:

Even now
If I see in my soul the citron-breasted fair one
Still gold-tinted, her face like our night stars,
Drawing unter her; her body beaten about the blame,
Wounded by the flaring spear of love,
My first of all by reason of her fresh years,
Then is my heart buried alive in snow.

Even now
If my girl with lotus eyes came to me again
Weary with the dear weight of young love,
Again I would give her to these starved twins of arms
And from her mouth drink down the heavy wine,
As a reeling pirate bee in fluttered ease
Steals up the honey from the nenuphar.

Even now
My eyes that hurry to see no more are painting, painting
Faces of my lost girl. O golden rings
That tap against cheeks of small magnolia leaves,
O whitest so soft parchment where
My poor divorced lips have written excellent
Stanzas of kisses, adn will write no more.

Even now
Death sends me the flickering of powdery lids
Over wild eyes and the pity of her slim body
All borken up wtih weariness and joy;
The little red flowers of her breasts to be my comfort
Moving above scarves, and for my sorrow
Wet crimson lips that once I marked as mine.

Even now
They chatter her weakness through the two bazaars
Who was so strong to love me. And small men
That buy and sell for silver being slaves
Crinkle the fat about their eyes; and yet
No Prince of the Cities of the Sea has taken her,
Leading to his grim bed. Little lonely one,
You clung to me as a garment clings; my girl.

Even now
I love long black eyes that caress like silk,
Ever and ever sad and laughing eyes,
Whose lids make such sweet shadow when they close
It seems another beautiful look of hers.
I love a fresh mouth, ah, a scented mouth,
And curving hair, subtle as smoke,
And light fingers, and laughter of green gems.

Even now
I remember that you made answer very softly,
We being one soul, your hadn on my hair,
The burning memeory rounding your near lips;
I have seen the priestesses of Rati make love at moon fall
And then in a carpeted hall with bright gold lamp
Lie down carelessly anywhere to sleep.

Even now
I mind the coming adn talking of wise men from towers
Where they had thought away their youth. And I, listening,
Found not the salt of the whispers of my girl,
Murmur of confessed colors, as we lay near sleep;
LIttle wise words and little witty words,
Wanton as water, honied with eagernes.

Even now
I mind that I loved cypress and roses, clear,
The great blue mountains and the small gray hills,
The sounding of the sea. Upon a day
I saw strange eyes and hands like butterflies;
For me at morning larks flew from the thyme
And children came to bathe in little streams.

Even now
I know that I have savored the hot taste of life
LIfting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light--

keep glowing with parties, m.

The Pearl

John Steinbeck

Juana dragged herself up from the rocks on the edge of the water. Her face was a dull pain and her side ached. She steadied herself on her knees for a while and her wet skirt clung to her. There was no anger in her for Kino. He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man. Although she might be puzzled by these differences between man and woman, she knew them and accepted them and needed them. Of course she would follow him, there was no question of that. Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino's manness and save them all. She climbed painfully to her feet, and she dipped her cupped palms in the little waves and washed her bruised face with the stinging salt water, and then she went creeping up the beach after Kino.

Stories are like houses. Some are made of mud bricks and some are made of wood and some are made of stone and are great big castles. Stories are good as they are; there are times we want a lean-to of a story and there are times we need a Victorian mansion. But Steinbeck has the faculty of using building materials more precious than most. The Pearl is a story made of delicate but solid granite timbers. Each sentence holds the weight of the world in it and each sentence will bear all the force you can push against it with.
The Pearl is like a parable and like a fable but has got more story than either.

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

He was born in a fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar--if he is financially fortunate.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deepdrawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and tress of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

Caleb and Aaron--now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.

Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery and they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.

Thou mayest rule over sin, Lee. That's it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles--only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. Thou mayest, Thou mayest! What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before. Do you see now why I told Adam tonight? I exercised the choice. Maybe I was wrong, but by telling him I also force him to live or get off the pot. What is that word, Lee?

You're pretty full of yourself. You're marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask--Caleb the magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself as a snot-nose kid--mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits and curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside of that you're very like all the other snot-nose kids. Are you trying to attract dignity and tragedy to yourself because your mother was a whore? And if anything should have happened to your brother, will you be able to sneak for yourself the eminence of being a murderer,snot-nose?

Do you know where your brother is?

I'm not going to say anything about this book because it is the best book I have ever read.

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

John Steinbeck

Not that it is necessary to be remembered bu there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth. Now this I must say and say right here and so sharply and so memorably that it will not be forgotten in the rather terrible and disheartening things which are to come in this book; so that although East of Eden is not Eden, it is not insuperably far away.

I think I know. It is fascinating how method assembles itself. The man who holds on to an impossibility is a frightening spectacle to many people and yet that is exactly what we all do more or less. It is simply a matter of degree.

He admired anyone who laid down his line and followed it undeflected to the end. I think this was because he abandoned his star in little duties and let his head go under in the swirl of family and money and responsibility. To be anything pure requires an arrogance he did not have, and a selfishness he could not bring himself to assume. He was a man intensely disappointed in himself. And I think he liked the complete ruthlessness of my design to be a writer in spite of mother and hell.

And now to the book. Today I am going into plans for the Salinas Valley. I am going to set down Adam's plans for his life. The fact that he isn't going to get even one of them has no emphasis whatever. Plans are real things and not experience. A rich life is rich in plans. IF they don't come off, they are still a little bit realized. If they do, they may be disappointing. That's why a trip described becomes better the greater the time between the trip and the telling. I believe too that if you can know a man's plans, you know more about him than you can in any other way. Plans are daydreaming and this is an absolute measure of man. Thus if I dwell heavily on plans, it is because I am trying to put down the whole man. What a strange life it is. Inspecting it for strangeness. There are strange things in people. I guess one of the things that sets up apart form other animals is our dreams and our plans. Now that is enough of that.

Steinbeck's letters to his editor, Pascal Covici, will help you write. Steinbeck whines and complains and crows and rejoices about all his struggles in writing East of Eden. He also throws in a good bit of philosophy. Hopefully these letters will open your mind just a little into the vast ocean that is beneath every book.

The spots of gold on this page are the splatterings from beautiful thoughts.

Burning Bright

John Steinbeck

The twins have the same blood. They'd understand. Old Joe Saul said then in Greece we wore high shoes and wooden masks when we were gods. He said in Rome we tumbled in the red sand of the arena after the blood had run, and we juggled burning sticks in front of the set-up crosses and their burdens.
Then in the dark centuries, he said, we laughed and played in the miracles, and we were the only gay in that laughter-starving time. From then on, he said, everybody knows.

I'm sailing at midnight. I've done everything I can--everything. Now you will be all alone on your particular dark ocean. Maybe your soul will require the destruction of everything beautiful around it for its small integrity. But I always thought it might be a little braver soul than that, Joe Saul. It is so easy a thing to give--only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive.

There are two aspects of this story that deserve especial notice. First, the form. Steinbeck called Burning Bright one of his play novelettes (or something like that) and intended it to be a play readable as a novel and vice versa. However this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the actual text, Steinbeck works wonders. He begins the first act with a compelling enough story in a certain setting. But in the second act he keeps the characters and storyline but completely changes the setting. What was a circus full of circus performers becomes a farm with farmhands--names and all completely the same. But the story keeps right along as if there had been no change at all. Steinbeck continues this change in each act, making Burning Bright incredibly enchanting. There is a great pleasure in recognizing the characters in their new skins, sometimes even with new traits and features. Not only does Joe Saul the farmer who was the trapeze artist surprise you at times, but he also is entirely recognizable as Joe Saul, regardless of his name. Each character remains exactly who they were though they are a new human being. This form of Steinbeck's not only makes for an enjoyable read, but is also quite fast.
The second aspect of the novel is its topic. As usual Steinbeck makes you feel like you are hearing an ancient, almost primordial tale. Steinbeck would have been one of those bards in the dark ages who kept fur-clad warriors in rapt attention around a small fire in the midst of the raging wilderness as he told the ways of the world. All the more so now, though we have a much more fearsome wilderness to keep us from hearing him.
You will be surprised by the course of Burning Bright. I am not sure what to think of it myself, it will challenge you, and that for sure. Especially Mordeen's comments at the end. Look for them, make sense of them if you can, or maybe don't.

In Dubious Battle

John Steinbeck

Burton sighed. “You see? We’re going to pile up on that old rock again. That’s why I don’t like to talk very often. Listen to me, Mac. My senses aren’t above reproach, but they’re all I have. I want to see the whole picture—as nearly as I can. I don’t want to put on the blinders of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and limit my vision. If I used the term ‘good’ on a thing I’d lose my license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don’t you see? I want to be able to look at the whole thing.”

Steinbeck. I am starting to wonder if I am not blinded by my admiration of his writing; I have yet to read something written by him that I did not enjoy immensely. There is always a point in his books where I let the book slip down and stare at the wall or out the window for a while. He has captured, not perfectly but piercingly, what it is to be human.
In Dubious Battle is not the sort of book that would normally catch my interest--being the story of early communists at work in depression era America. But when Steinbeck tells the story, my preconceptions are broken in moments. Though In Dubious Battle sounds like propaganda at times, it is more realistic than anything else--not realistic in the documentary sense, but realistic in the mythological sense. Though the men and women in Steinbeck's books move about like great raging furies, orchestrating and living such drama as is fit for the gods, they have the meaning of reality. That men will take advantage of whatever system they live under, that men are often cowards and often enjoy evil, that men will sooner betray a friend than face a fear, that men are capable of God's good.
In Dubious Battle is not about Communism or Socialism or Labor Rights or Capitalism--it deals with nothing else. But these things are merely the stage upon which a much greater theater is performing--the performance of strangers having a conversation, of friends sitting in silence together.
If you do read it, pay especial attention to the character of Doctor Burton. Almost all of Steinbeck's novels have this sort of weary character; his voice often is the quietest, sometimes the strangest, almost certainly the wisest. He is a character who will scare you, but he will also make you wish you were strong enough to be him. He says, "We fight ourselves and we can only win by killing every man. I'm lonely, Jim. I have nothing to hate."

Pastures of Heaven

John Steinbeck

When they saw it was a beautiful baby, they did not know what to say. Those feminine exclamations of delight designed to reassure young mothers that the horrible reptilian creatures in their arms are human and will not grow up to be monstrosities, lost their meaning.

"Helen, every man must some time or other want to beat a woman. I think I'm a mild man, but right now I want to beat your face with my fists." He looked into her dark eyes and saw that he had only put a new tragedy upon her, had only given her a new situation to endure.

The people of the valley told many stories about Junius. Sometimes they hated him with the loathing busy people have for lazy ones, and sometimes they envied his laziness; but often they pitied him because he blundered so. No one in the valley ever realized that he was happy.

Once again, I am in awe. There are times when the thing you read is no longer a set of black lines on white page, no longer words and symbols of images far away, no longer even vivid pictures of good things going on right before you; instead the words become a mirror into your own self--a picture of your heart which only you would have recognized in the first place. Steinbeck has an uncanny knack for catching what is in your heart exactly and then sending characters out dancing before you, clothed in your deepest being. It can be startling, but it always makes you surge forward with the recognition of yourself.
Pastures of Heaven is like some less frolicking version of Tortilla Flats and Cannery Row. Yet, it is by no means dark. The word I think which summarizes it best would be solemn. With Steinbeck's usual attachment to the earth and its hearty biology (which no human is free from) is especially present. And as he tells the half melancholy, half joyous stories of the inhabitants of this blessed valley, you cannot help but walk beside the characters.
There are many memorable persons who haunt this book. Every chapter, though linked tightly to all the others, is the story of a separate family in the valley. And every family has its separate burdens, desires, dreams and struggles. I cannot do justice to all, or even one, but cannot help but mention the chapter on Junius and his son. I have never seen a more idyllic portrait painted of poverty and wisdom. While I am almost sure such an existence could never be, Steinbeck has me doubting my certainty.
There is a deep meaning in this tale which I do not yet understand. I think I could just barely smell it, see its shadow coming around the corner. There is something about being content, something about peace, something about living with the world. And it is strange that it takes words of heaven to speak of this. Heaven is what it is. As long as we are refining it, molding it, shaping it to be ours, we will not ever reach it.

The Wayward Bus

John Steinbeck

Back in the bus he had felt, in anticipation, a bursting orgasmic delight of freedom. But it was not so. He felt miserable. His shoulders ached, and now that he was relaxed and stretched out he wasn't sleepy. He wondered, "Won't I ever be happy? Isn't there anything to do?" He tried to remember old times when it seemed to him that he was happy, when he had felt pure joy, and little pictures came into his mind. There was a very early morning with chill air and the sun was coming up behind the mountains and in a muddy road little gray birds were hopping. There wasn't any reason for joy, but it had been there.

And another. It was evening and a shining horse was rubbing his lovely neck on a fence and the quail were calling and there was a sound of dropping water somewhere. his breath came short with excitement just remembering it.
And another. He road in an old cart with a girl cousin. She was older than he--he couldn't remember what she looked like. The horse shied at a piece of paper and she fell against him, and to right herself she put out her hand and touched his leg, and delight bloomed in his stomach and his brain ached with delight.
And another. Standing at midnight in a great, dim cathedral with a sharp, barbaric smell of copal smarting his nose. He held a skinny little candle with a white silk bow tied about it halfway up. And like a dream, the sweet murmur of the mass came from far away at the high altar and the drowsy loveliness drew down over him.

I find that when I read Steinbeck, I tend to quote large chunks of him. This is well though, for if anyone were ever worth quoting it is this man who knows so well the human heart. Perhaps the one thing which keeps drawing me back to Steinbeck is this ominous feeling I get during certain descriptions of his--I feel as if he were described my inmost soul, those feelings that you think are yours and yours alone which no one else ever sees. Steinbeck knew his own heart well enough to capture simply and accurately on paper the feelings, the great wellings of emotion that every person is subject too.
The Wayward Bus is less well known than other books he has written but still deserves acclaim. It operates off such a simple and beautiful plot, one would have thought it never needed telling--indeed many of the stories Steinbeck tells never actually need or even deserve telling; it is the manner in which he goes about telling them that makes essential stories about life--there is a small bus station in the middle of a large valley of farmland. Few characters mingle here and there is the daily run which the bus driver must make down to the town. Who would have imagined such a story could become an intriguing, gripping, even startling tale?
Reading The Wayward Bus is like shoving your hands deep into moist dirt and pulling up handfuls of the stuff to let it crumble away and be ground into your fingers. Steinbeck is one of the few authors of the twentieth century who has not forgotten that he is dust and to dust he shall return. Steinbeck has a more intricate link with the soil, the leaves and bugs than any other writer I have read. It shows in his writing--his characters are often more primeval than we find in our day.
The Wayward Bus is a quick read and it will be pleasant. It can be a long read and teach you more than pleasantries. Be careful though, Steinbeck might turn you into a dryiad or a fawn, or worse, a man who can feel the dirt and smell it and take joy in this.

Cup of Gold: A Life of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with occasional reference to history

John Steinbeck

I know it's a sad thing to a man to be leaving a girl and running off to sea. Haven't I left hundreds of them--and all beautiful? But here's another cup to you, boy. Wine is better to a woman than all the sweet pastes of France, and a man drinking it. Wine makes every woman lovely. Ah! If the homely ones would only put out a little font of wine in the doors of their houses like holy water to a church, there would be more marriage in towns. A man would never know the lack they had for looks. But have another cup of the grand wine, sad boy, and it may be a princess, and you leaving her behind you.

He is still a little boy and wants the moon. I suppose he is rather unhappy about it. Those who say children are happy forget their childhood. I wonder how long he can stave off manhood.

I am changed. The Henry Morgan you knew is not the Sir Henry Morgan who sentences you to death. I do not kill ferociously any more, but coldly, and because I have to.

When I first embarked upon this book, I imagined I was reading some children's tale of pirates and romance, but the depth of the words and how they lie quickly made me reconsider. The reader, whoever you may be, would do very well to remember that Steinbeck does not always tell the truth. Indeed, beware of what he says. Never give him easy access to your mind, and never imagine he fancies himself a truth-teller.
It may be especially pertinent to this story, but Steinbeck plays on all the lies in human nature when he paints us the picture of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer. As usual Steinbeck rises to great poetic moments which are worthwhile whatever the story, but the story here is good too. The great unsettled heart of Captain Morgan hangs in the air like a heavy balloon, puffed by the wind. It wanders and wanders, but never lands.
And also in keeping with what other works of his I have been privilaged to read, Steinbeck startles you with dark thoughts and darker characters. These characters skip happily up to you out of the sunshine as beautiful little children but when their faces become clear evil grins and mottled scars are all you see. In this way, I guess Steinbeck paints portraits as true to life as ever they can be. And truly you will get the sense as you slip through these excellently composed pages that you are listening to a great dirge, a magnificent funeral air for some drowning humanity.
Humanity is the one word I would apply to anything written by Steinbeck. He may strike you at first as a mystic but he is a humanist before all else, only sometimes he deifies it and so begins to sound like a mystic. Henry Morgan will tear your heartstrings out despite his evil nature and will leave you like the foam of a passing wave, to drift and float upon a raging sea. 8/10