Sweet Thursday (2 page)
Authors: John Steinbeck
As this brief summary suggests, when approached from a rigidly analytical position,
Sweet Thursday
can be considered sentimental (like most other hookers at Fauna's Bear Flag brothel, Suzy's indelible goodness erases her stigma as a prostitute, even a half-assed one at that), reductive (Doc imagines he cannot be happy without a woman to complete his identity), and improbable (the plot hinges on coincidences and convenient superficialities). Such flawsâtrumpeted by many critics and scholars as indisputable proof of Steinbeck's declining powersâhave made the book an easy target for snipers, as it was for the unnamed
Time
reviewer who, in its June 14, 1954, issue, held nothing back: “
Sweet Thursday
is a turkey with visible Saroyanesque stuffings. But where [William] Saroyan might have clothed the book's characters and incidents with comic reality, Steinbeck merely comic-strips them of all reality and even of very much interest.”
But to arrive at the deeper significance of this oddball fiction, questions of character motivation and realism need to be contextualized.
Sweet Thursday
is important for what it reveals of Steinbeck's continuing aesthetic and philosophical changes and for his attitude toward the necessity of fictive experimentation in the unsettling wake of a postwar depletion (symbolized by the decline of sardines in Monterey Bay), and a pervasive exhaustion that influenced all levels of Cannery Row's existence.
Steinbeck understood the corrosive nature of discontent and disaffection. There was a span in his career, beginning in mid-1948, when he was cut adrift from accustomed moorings by the death of Ed Ricketts and by his divorce shortly afterward from Gwyn Conger, his second wife, whom he married in 1943 and with whom he had two children, Thom and John IV. On and off for over a year, Steinbeck was mired in enervation, isolation, misogyny, and self-pity, and his self-identity as a writer seemed splintered, fragmented, even fraudulent, as Jackson Benson has graphically documented in
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck
. After
The Pearl
and
The Wayward Bus
, both published in 1947, this customarily resilient writer found it increasingly difficult to settle on his next project (the many versions of
Zapata
, for instance, the false starts on
East of Eden
, and the several unwritten plays he planned during this period). Steinbeck's personal disarray and emotional discontentedness, coupled with his awakening reaction to America's Cold War intellectual climate, which called into question the validity of socialist economies, set him on a road toward an end he could not yet envision but whose allurements he apparently could not refuse. In the feverish and sometimes blind searches of that period from 1948 through the early 1950s, he underwent deep readjustments toward many things, not the least of them his own art.
In his relationship with his third wife, Elaine Anderson Scott, whom he met in May 1949 and married in December 1950, Steinbeck discovered healing powers in love and mutual domestic attachment that in turn had a direct, exponential bearing on his work energy and anticipation and, by his own admission, may have saved him from despair and worse. His May 30, 1951, entry in
Journal of a Novel
puts it all on the line: “And what changes there have been. I did not expect to survive them and I don't think I would have. Every life force was shriveling. Work was non-existent. The wounds were gangrenous and mostly I just didn't give a dam [
sic
]. Now two years later I have a new life and a direction. I am doing work I like.”
Steinbeck validated his recovery by repeating it. In
Sweet Thursda
y, Steinbeck's own emotional and creative processes became the novel's subject. In writing about Doc trying to write his scholarly essay, and in portraying indomitable Suzy as a catalyst for self-awareness and conjugal fulfillment, Steinbeck turned out to be narrating nothing less than the symbolic story of his own emotional rescue and artistic refashioning. Steinbeck probably realized that blurring himself and Ricketts would be problematical: “Wouldn't it be interesting if Ed was us and that now there wasn't any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him,” Steinbeck wrote Ritch and Tal Lovejoy right after Ricketts's death in May 1948. “I've wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which[?]” In the process of writing
Sweet Thursday
, Steinbeck did not “purposefullyâ¦destroy or deprecate Doc,” as Peter Lisca maintained in
The Wide World of John Steinbeck
. Instead, Steinbeck replaced Doc with himself; in recasting his portrait of the artist, he did so in an entirely familiar scale, which is perhaps why he confessed to Elizabeth Otis on September 14, 1953, that the new work is “a little self indulgent.”
Steinbeck took enormous plea sure in producing this blissful novel. He exorcised his painful marriage with second wife Gwyn in
Burning Bright
and
East of Eden
, whose characters reflect aspects of his own tortured relationship. In
Sweet Thursday
he allowed himself the luxury to indulge in the happiness of his present moment and his transformative new life with Elaine. Rationalization or not, as a person who labored with words day in and day out, year after year, he often spoke of his need for his task to be “fun.” “There is a school of thought among writers which says that if you enjoy writing something it is automatically no good and should be thrown out,” he told Elizabeth Otis. “I can't agree with this.” If
Cannery Row
represented the way things were, he explained in November 1953 to Harold Bicknell and Grant Mclean (the real-life models of Gabe and Mack), then his new project became the way things “might have happened to Ed and didn't.” The two propositions (“one can be as true as the other”) are necessary for a holistic view of the novelist's mind and for an understanding of what the spirit of Ed Ricketts meant to Steinbeck, who didn't “seem able to get over his death,” as he told former Stanford classmate Carlton A. Sheffield on November 2, 1953.
Significantly rooted in personal experience, memory, longing, and emotion,
Sweet Thursday
foregrounds the struggle of individual consciousness in (and through) language. In doing so, Steinbeck keeps a good part of Ed Ricketts and his legacy alive. In chapter 6, “The Creative Cross,” Doc's tribulations in researching and writing his proposed scholarly essay, “Symptoms in Some Cephalopods Approximating Apoplexy,” mirror aspects of Steinbeck's preparatory stages in his own creative regime; Doc's prewriting jitters and inability to concentrate are colored as well by Steinbeck's wrenching artistic and personal upheavals of the late 1940s and his awareness of the need for emotional fulfillment:
For hours on end he sat at his desk with a yellow pad before him and his needle-sharp pencils lined up. Sometimes his wastebasket was full of crushed, scribbled pages, and at others not even a doodle went down. Then he would move to the aquarium and stare into it. And his voices howled and cried and moaned. “Write!” said his top voice, and “Search!” said his middle voice, and his lowest voice sighed, “Lonesome! Lonesome!” He did not go down without a struggle. He resurrected old love affairs, he swam deep in music, he read the
Sorrows of Werther
; but the voices would not leave him. The beckoning yellow pages became his enemies.
Writing, like so many other endeavors in life, including romance and courtship, Steinbeck shows, is less a condition of mastery than it is hard work, full of self-doubt, false steps, insecurities, angers, frustrations, and disruptions. Steinbeck suggests that success lies as much in the marshaling of conjunctive forces and ambient fortune as it does in the completion of the scholarly project. Paradoxically, there is a telling difference in ends, because the form Steinbeck adopts for
Sweet Thursday
takes on a life of its own, borrows heavily from other literary works, and veers away from the kind of objective, autonomous document a practicing scientist would be expected to produce. Steinbeck must have realized, as he reread and reimagined the Doc of
Cannery Row
and “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), that only by embracing comedy and tragedy, realism and fabulation, the inarticulate “transcendental sadness” of
Cannery Row
and the “frabjous” expression of joy of
Sweet Thursday
, could Steinbeck lay to rest the ghost of Ed Ricketts, which, by this time, had become the symbol of Steinbeck himself.
Steinbeck playfully names chapter 10 “There's a Hole in Reality through which We Can Look if We Wish,” demonstrating that in the seesaw form of
Sweet Thursday
, Steinbeck was able to bring both the narrative plot and the process of reflexive commentary into a single work. The performance appears to be made up on the spot, and its spontaneity undercuts the novel's pretensions and dismantles the rules of its own invention: “There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen,” the narrator claims at the end of chapter 8. In various characters' use of malapropisms and in Mack's humorous use of Latin phrases and exalted language,
Sweet Thursday
questions the representational ability of language (and class) while it validates the process by which such mysteries emerge without ever being fully concluded. Steinbeck demystifies the role of the artist by emphasizing the prewriting process, the elusiveness of language, and the necessity for human bonding, rather than the finished result (Doc has yet to write his essay as the book ends, but he has been awarded a research grant by Old Jingleballicks). That characters as diverse as Doc; Joe Elegant, the Bear Flag's cook, who is writing a Freudian novel called “The Pi Root of Oedipus”; and Fauna, who not only writes horoscopes but authors Suzy's conduct and manners (“I should write a bookâ¦. âIf She Could, I Could,'” she boasts in chapter 22), all wrestle with compositional acts and problems of inscription highlights Steinbeck's perception that the tangled wilderness of language (whether of speech, writing, sexuality, body gesture, or masquerade dress) is one of the few frontiers left to us in a discontented, uncentered, apocalyptic age. Writing, like Gypsy Rose Lee's stripping, Steinbeck reminds us, is a performance; both are fueled by desire, and they can be nouns as well as verbs.
To aid and abet his novel's satire and literary referentiality, Steinbeck stripped bare a small library of useful works. In the populist echoes and literary parodies, mimicries, puns, word-plays, resonances, and allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
,
The Little Flowers of Saint Francis
, the Welsh
Mabinogion
, Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” Robert Louis Stevenson's
Child's Garden of Verses
, and especially Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, as well as his “Jabberwocky” and “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from
Through the Looking Glass
, and Walt Disney's iconic
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
,
Sweet Thursday
is enriched by Steinbeck's eclectic browsing in these favorite titles. (Consult the notes to this edition for further information.) Perhaps more than anything else, however, Steinbeck's avowed reading of Al Capp's enormously popular, extremely inventive
Li'l Abner
comic strip, which he and his family followed assiduously in newspapers at home and abroad, propelled
Sweet Thursday
toward its cultural shape. “Yes, comic strips,” he told Sidney Fields in a 1955 interview reprinted in
Conversations with John Steinbeck
. “I read them avidly. Especially Li'l Abner. Al Capp is a great social satirist. Comic strips might be the real literature of our time. We'll never know what literature is until we're gone. But more people read comic strips than books or anything else.”
In 1953, the same time he was working on “Bear Flag,” the precursor of
Sweet Thursday
, Steinbeck introduced Capp's book-length collection,
The World of Li'l Abner
. Steinbeck did not habitually provide blurbs or introductions to the work of other writers, but when he did, it was for a strong reason. He told Elizabeth Otis on June 17, 1952, that he would “love to do” the introduction, which he was certain he could write “in a very short time because I have thought of [Capp] a lot.” As with many of Steinbeck's lesser-known or fugitive items, this brief piece reveals much about his creative bearings, influences, and purposes. Beneath his jaunty, ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone there are numerous revelations that bear directly on
Sweet Thursday
's zany style and technique. Indeed,
Sweet Thursday
may be considered Steinbeck's attempt at writing a literary comic book, his conscious attempt “to get into Capp's act.”
Steinbeck boasts that Al Capp “may very possibly be the best writer in the world today” and “the best satirist since Laurence Sterne.” Like Dante, who redefined the established traditions of literature in his time by writing in Italian rather than in Latin, Capp too is a pioneer, perhaps even a visionary. The literature of the future, Steinbeck asserts, might eventually depart from the “stuffy” adherence to “the written and printed word in poetry, drama, and the novel” and eventually include popular forms of cultural discourse such as the comic book, Capp's métier. Steinbeck asks:
