The Winter of Our Discontent (2 page)

The freedom to critique one’s country, he felt with increasing urgency, was the role of the artist in a free nation. Trips to the Soviet Union in 1937, 1947, and 1963 as well as charges made by Communist writers that he had moved politically to the right crystallized his independent stance—Steinbeck’s Cold War was a “Duel Without Pistols” (a 1952 article he wrote in Italy after being attacked in a Communist newspaper for not objecting to the “degeneracy and brutality of American soldiers” in Korea). While American citizens and artists could voice opinions freely, he wrote, Communist artists were constrained by orthodoxy. Speak as an American critic he would, to the end of his days. That defiant patriotism informs
The Winter of Our Discontent
. In effect, Ethan Allen Hawley, his central character, asserts his own freedom to speak out and, in the process, replaces a hollow self with a more authentic self, however morally imperiled. What makes it such a quirky and important book is that it suggests, through Ethan’s voice, the simmering discontent of its time, the cacophony and dislocation of Cold War America, overtly a superpower, internally super powerless.

“A novel may be said to be the man who writes it.”
( John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton, April 1957)

With a particular man in mind, Thomas Malory, John Steinbeck wrote this in 1957, one year into his three-year investigation of this fifteenth-century author of
Le Morte d’Arthur,
his era, Arthur’s Camelot, and Middle English manuscripts. Such layered understanding was essential, he thought, before attempting his own translation of Malory’s
Arthur
into modern English. But the same sentence might be written about Steinbeck himself:
The Winter of Our Discontent
is the restless man who wrote it. A decade-long winter of discontent is, in several senses, his own. And the project he put aside in the fall of 1959, his modern translation of Malory, informs the background of his final novel.

Steinbeck’s discontent, however, was artistic and cultural, not personal. The year 1950 was a watershed; he moved permanently from California, his birthplace, to New York City in December 1949, and a year later he married his third wife, Elaine Scott. This marriage gave him far more stability than the first two—certainty of love shared with a self-confident woman. Once an assistant stage manager on Broadway (for
Oklahoma!
when it opened), Elaine stepped into her new marriage with style, energy, wit, and steady love. For their eighteen years of marriage, she kept much of the world at bay. Some qualities of Steinbeck’s happy marriage to Elaine make their way into
The Winter of Our Discontent
—certainly the solidity of the union (this is, in fact, the only Steinbeck book that opens with a bedroom scene). Ethan’s rather cloying nicknames for Mary are close to Steinbeck’s own for his beloved Elaine, who was “
moglie
” when they traveled and “Lily Maid” at home. Most important, the steady light that Mary casts for Ethan is Elaine’s for John: “No one in the world can rise to a party or a plateau of celebration like my Mary,” Ethan muses. “With Mary in the doorway of a party everyone feels more attractive and clever than he was, and so he actually becomes.” The marriage of Ethan and Mary is Steinbeck’s most fully drawn portrait of marriage and home life—at least in part an index of his own contentment.

With an equal sense of renewal, this displaced Californian embraced his and Elaine’s new home, New York City, and made it his own: “As far as homes go,” he wrote in a 1953 essay, “Autobiography: Making of a New Yorker,” “there is only a small California town and New York. . . . All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all night. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else.” There is a kind of steely determination expressed in that essay about his new terrain. Steinbeck needed and staked personal stability. His stance as an East Coaster was solidified further when he and Elaine purchased a small house in Sag Harbor in the spring of 1955: “We have a little shack on the sea out on the tip of Long Island at Sag Harbor,” he wrote to his old friend Carlton Sheffield. “It’s a whaling town or was and we have a small boat and lots of oak trees and the phone never rings. We run there whenever we need a rest—no neighbors, and fish and clams and crabs and mussels right at the door step.” Sag Harbor was Steinbeck’s haven and the setting for New Baytown, the village where Ethan lives in one of the old whalers’ houses that, in fact, line Sag Harbor’s Main Street and beyond. Schiavoni’s Grocery, the model for Ethan’s store, has been in that family since the 1950s and still operates in Sag Harbor’s tiny downtown.

But personal and territorial contentment was stirred first by the restlessness that was always his (and Elaine’s, who would pack a suitcase willingly) and second by artistic indirection. Ethan as store clerk, nibbled by small defeats, is, in some respects, Steinbeck as compromised writer once he left his native soil of California. In a 1955 interview with Art Buchwald, Steinbeck admitted that he was “tired of my own technique. . . . I’ve been highly discontented with my own work for some time. In
East of Eden
I used all my tricks and used them consciously and with finality.” It would not be his only admission of artistic frustration in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, he felt he’d written only “bits and pieces” for fifteen years and during that time had “brought the writing outside.” It was a harsh self-assessment for a decade that included
East of Eden;
the marvelous essay about his best friend, marine biologist Edward Flanders Ricketts, “About Ed Ricketts” (1951); as well as the frothy bits of fun
Sweet Thursday
(1954) and
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication
(1957). But it is also true that his writing of the 1950s was characterized, for the most part, by a deep split in sensibility: He wavered imaginatively between his own journalistic urge to tap into the present—writing a number of articles about contemporary culture, political conventions, and European travel—and his deep emotional ties to California that took him back to his Salinas birthplace and Monterey’s Cannery Row, where he’d spent most of the 1930s. Ethan’s internal dance between past and present is a dark form of Steinbeck’s own.

Like Ethan’s, Steinbeck’s past was a siren call, voices not easily silenced. Shortly after moving to New York City with Elaine, Steinbeck wrote his epitaph for Ricketts, who was killed in 1948. He then considered and abandoned the idea of turning
Cannery Row
(1945) into a play: “I have finished that whole phase. . . . I’m not going to go over old things any more.” That was written by a man who was about to start
East of Eden,
a man who would contemplate and begin writing in Paris in 1954 a short-story cycle about Salinas, and a man who would, that same year, turn
Cannery Row
into
Sweet Thursday
, a book whose characters seethe with discontent. And having finally laid to rest the Cannery Row material and Ed Ricketts’s ghost with the 1955 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
Pipe Dream,
he turned the next year to King Arthur, hero of a beloved childhood saga.

But in fact those Arthurian tales shadowed all his work of the late 1940s and 1950s. Again and again in his search for order and meaning in a postwar world, he was drawn to figures who embodied the gallantry that was Arthur’s, heroic individuals like Sam Hamilton in
East of Eden
—characters who took a moral stand, born out of justified anger, and found creative solutions: Emiliano Zapata, central figure in the film script he wrote for Elia Kazan’s
Viva Zapata!
(1952); or Don Quixote, a book he reread and in 1958 recast in an abandoned manuscript, a western, called “Don Keehan,” written with Henry Fonda in mind. In 1947 he wrote a play-novelette about Joan of Arc, “The Last Joan.” He began one about Columbus. He considered writing one about Jesus. “Wyatt Earp, King Arthur, Apollo, Quetzalcoatl, St. George all seem to me to be the same figure,” he wrote in a 1958 letter, “ready to give aid without intelligence to people distressed when the skeins of their existence get bollixed up.” For Steinbeck, gallantry countered Cold War complacency, graft, and mind-numbing materialism. “The western world and its so called culture have invented very few things,” he wrote in 1953. “But there is one thing that we invented and for which there is no counterpart in the east and that is gallantry. . . . It means that a person, all alone, will take on odds that by their very natures are insurmountable, will attack enemies which are unbeatable. And the crazy thing is that we win often enough to make it a workable thing. And also this same gallantry gives a dignity to the individual that nothing else ever has. . . .” The questions facing Steinbeck—and Ethan—are whether gallantry is an outmoded virtue in America, 1960, or whether entering the fray, as Ethan does, might well be a quixotic kind of gallantry.

Ethan’s anguished status in the contemporary world is thus in part Steinbeck’s own. Both are deeply committed to blood-lines, to the meaning of place, home, old friendships—and to probity as an ancestral inheritance. But looking back doesn’t suffice, for a writer, for Ethan Allen Hawley—or for New Baytown itself, a place “whose whole living force had been in square-rigged ships and whales.” And the old Hawley whaling ship, suggestively, has sunk to the bottom of the sea. Memories do not nourish creative action.

One aspect of Ethan’s nostalgia in particular lends poignancy to
The Winter of Our Discontent:
his betrayal of his childhood friend Danny, now a drunkard. In offering a thousand dollars to “help” Danny dry out at a sanatorium, Ethan also betrays him by giving money that might cure but might also allow Danny to drink himself to death. Giving money to friends had been one way that Steinbeck tried to connect with those whose lives seemed less bountiful than his own—and his efforts to nurture
Monterey Herald
journalist and would-be novelist Ritchie Lovejoy (to whom he gave his 1940 Pulitzer Prize money from
The Grapes of Wrath
so that Lovejoy could complete his own novel, which he never finished), to help his Stanford University roommate Carlton Sheffield earn a Ph.D. (which he never earned), and to support Ricketts’s marine-biology supply business (which was always precarious) had not ended particularly well. Lovejoy resented Steinbeck’s gesture, Sheffield and he were estranged for years, and Ricketts simply bowed out in death. The love and guilt associated with these close friends was part of Steinbeck’s psyche—that and a suspicion that somehow they had retained in poverty an integrity he’d sacrificed with success. “You drift toward peace and contemplation,” he wrote Sheffield, “and I drift toward restlessness and violence.” And Danny tells Ethan that he is “better off” than Ethan, a mere clerk. Possibly Steinbeck’s discomfort over removing Ricketts’s name from the 1951 publication of
The Log from the “Sea of Cortez”
(published as
Sea of Cortez
in 1941) found its way into Ethan’s guilty treatment of Danny. But even if that reading seems a stretch, it’s certainly true that the Steinbeck-Ricketts friendship is echoed in the brotherly bond between Danny and Ethan and in the question that Ethan articulates: Is he his brother’s keeper? Danny knows Ethan to the core; Danny is shrewd and lonely; Danny haunts Ethan’s dreams—and in one dream Danny and Ethan embrace with a kiss of betrayal. All of these can be traced back to Steinbeck and Ricketts’s deep and complex friendship.

Looking to his California past increasingly chafed Steinbeck the writer, however. The first of at least three identifiable “shocks” that propelled him toward writing
Winter
came by way of a French journalist’s query in 1953: “Isn’t it true that American writers are abandoning the present for the past?” The question came as “a shock of recognition,” Steinbeck admitted. “It has occurred to me that we may be so confused about the present that we avoid it because it is not clear to us,” he wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, while on vacation in Paris. “But why should that be a deterrent? If this is a time of confusion, then that should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time. For instance, the effect on young people of the McCarthy hearing is going to be with them all their lives. The responses to this spectacle, whatever they are, are going to be one of the keys to our future attitudes toward everything. If such things are not written as fiction, a whole pattern of presentday thinking and feeling will be lost.” Although he would not “try” for another six years, the problem of how to confront American issues in fiction niggled at him. A few months later, now in Italy, he told an Italian reporter that “the novel in America is on a plateau. Outside of the neurotic crowd, none of us are digging into or writing about our present life or trying to look into the future. Instead, we are seeking refuge elsewhere than America or going into the past. I don’t know exactly why this is. It might be laziness, since it’s easier to go to historical sources for your material. It might be terror or fear of some to call the shots as they see them. And it might be a listlessness before a big event . . . a revolution of the human mind against collective pressure.” His immediate solution, he declared, was to write about what was most exciting in the postwar world: outer space. That project never saw fruition.

In the late 1950s, not outer but inner space engaged his full attention, one last siren call from his past—this the most compelling—Arthurian gallantry. He had cherished a copy of
The Boy’s King Arthur
since he was nine. Arthur was Steinbeck’s Rosebud: “The Bible and Shakespeare and
Pilgrim’s Progress
belonged to everyone. But this was mine,” he wrote in an introduction to the manuscript (published posthumously). “It was a cut version of the Caxton
Morte d’Arthur
of Thomas Malory. I loved the old spelling of the words—and the words no longer used. Perhaps a passionate love for the English language opened to me from this one book.” In 1956 the embroidered language and “remembered music” of this “magic book” brought him back to his childhood passion and the lovely and fertile Salinas Valley, where he grew up; to the shale cliffs that soar above the Valley’s Corral de Tierra—Arthur’s keep in the eyes of a dreamy lad; to archaic words and the cadence of language; and to his admiration and love for his little sister, Mary, once his very own squire. Before he translated a word of text, he wrote the dedication to Mary, lines that bring both brother and sister back home: “from this hour she shall be called Sir Marie Steinbeck of Salinas Valley—God give her worship without peril John Steinbeck of Monterey Knight.”