The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s
332
The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s
332eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826274151 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 332 |
| File size: | 663 KB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Steinbeck
1934–1939
Gauging John Steinbeck's political views in the mid-1930s is tricky: such words as "contradictory" and even "paradoxical" come to mind, and certainly "drastically changing." Steinbeck scholars reflect this ambiguity in their sharply contrasting depictions of his politics then. Was he drawn to the "communist movement," forging an "alliance" with it in the 1930s? Alan Wald would have it so. Was he, rather, essentially apolitical, at most a "New Deal Democrat?" This is the view of Steinbeck scholar and biographer Jackson Benson: "Steinbeck [while writing In Dubious Battle] really did not like or trust politics, particularly mass movement politics, because he saw that it often used man rather than served man. ... He also saw particular political phenomena as rather minor events within the whole course of natural history." Susan Shillinglaw, another distinguished Steinbeck scholar, states that he was, by nature, a loner, not a joiner.
Yet in 1934/35, Steinbeck and his spouse, Carol, were virtually inundated by leftist politics close to home. Agricultural workers struggled for something better than their pitifully low wages in the fertile Central Valley; leftists and communists attempted to organize these workers. On the other side, the big growers and their powerful cohorts — the Associated Farmers, sheriffs, and vigilantes — combined to break the strikes and harass and jail the organizers. Most important, friends and associates of the Steinbecks expressed strong sympathy for these organizing efforts and for the Left generally. Out of Steinbeck's contacts with workers, strikers, organizers, and supporters came his labor novel of 1936 In Dubious Battle. In 1937, he joined the communist-organized League of American Writers — an uncharacteristic act for someone who was not a "joiner."
Steinbeck's contacts with the Left in these years came primarily through two liaisons, both of whom lived in Carmel, close to the Steinbeck home in Pacific Grove. The well-known author and socialist Lincoln Steffens and his radical spouse, Ella Winter, were themselves the hub of a group of young radicals. Steinbeck met Steffens in late 1933, and often visited the Steffens-Winter home to talk politics, even though Steffens's views were far more radical than his own (Benson, Steinbeck, Writer, 294–96). When Steffens urged Steinbeck to write about labor conditions in California, instead of dismissing the idea out of hand, Steinbeck was interested. According to Carol Steinbeck, the young radicals who congregated at the Steffens-Winter home were "members of either The John Reed Club or the Young Communist League" (or both) and "started dropping by the Steinbeck cottage in Pacific Grove on almost a regular basis. They came to talk and be fed." And "[t]hey glowed with a spirit of holy mission. ... [Steinbeck] did more listening than talking" to their absolutist views (Steinbeck, Writer, 294). Sometimes they were accompanied by Ella Winter, sometimes by Anna Louise Strong and Mike Gold. Even though Steinbeck was far less leftist than these fervent radicals, he must have gotten an earful from their vociferous advocacy of communism.
Another source also worked on Steinbeck's political sensibility: Francis Whitaker, a metal sculptor and a leader of the local John Reed Club. He and his wife "worked hard during the early and mid-thirties to convert John and Carol to a socialist point of view. ... [but] Steinbeck remained skeptical of Whitaker's politics" (Benson, Steinbeck, Writer, 225). Whitaker did persuade the Steinbecks to attend some John Reed Club meetings, where Steinbeck was "a meticulous observer." More important, Whitaker helped Steinbeck meet two union organizers who, in 1934, were hiding from the law — meetings that would lead directly to Steinbeck's next novel. One of these organizers, Cecil McKiddy, a migrant from Oklahoma, had helped organize the peach and cotton strikes that same year, and had much information to share with Steinbeck about labor organizing in general and these strikes in particular. Sympathetic to the men's destitution, Steinbeck offered to buy their story to help them — and help himself: he planned to use McKiddy's knowledge to write a first-person narrative, an autobiography in diary form, of an experienced labor organizer, based on the man who had mentored McKiddy, Pat Chambers. Chambers and McKiddy would become models for the labor organizers of In Dubious Battle, Mac McLeod and Jim Nolan. Steinbeck met with McKiddy often for several weeks, "questioning him in great detail." He also visited labor camps in the Salinas area to gain more experience listening to workers (Steinbeck, Writer, 298).
On the advice of one of his agents, however, Steinbeck turned this pseudo-autobiography into a novel narrated from a conventional third-person limited point of view. But other aspects of the novel were quite unconventional for the time. Here was the literary Left's favorite topic of the 1930s: oppressed workers taking action and organizing a strike; proletarian novels and plays employing this theme are too numerous to mention. But Steinbeck did not intend to write a proletarian novel. Instead of focusing on the oppressed workers, the novel limits itself to the organizers' perspective, particularly their strategies and schemes for organizing — and manipulating — the workers. The novel's emotional tone is cool, its stance toward both the organizers and the strikers is detached rather than sympathetic. Steinbeck was much more interested in studying the behavior of the organized workers as a distinct unit — a "phalanx" as he called it — than in advocating their cause; his perspective was sociological, rather than political and leftist.
This approach to a highly political subject suggests that, despite Steinbeck's continuous exposure to the radical Left's advocacy of these strikes, he was not won over to its point of view. As Benson observes, "although surrounded by the genuine concern of many near him for the misery of the farm worker and migrant, Steinbeck remained emotionally uninvolved" (296). Yet questions remain. Did he listen to the young radicals and go to the meetings of the John Reed Club just to gather material and study their mindsets? Why did he focus on communist organizers and oppressed workers in InDubious Battle, rather than on the big growers, local police, and vigilantes, who had also organized themselves to fight the workers? Or why not focus on both sides equally? Clearly, he wanted to observe, to study how people behave in groups, but is it coincidental that the groups, like his two protagonists, were leftist? Did nothing of their devotion rub off on Steinbeck's "objective" sensibility? He had recently published his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), on a group of Mexican-American paisanos living together, but their wine-soaked misadventures were clearly apolitical. Now, political organizing itself was the issue, and Steinbeck was clearly curious about these passionate organizers and their selfless devotion to this cause, devotion that often landed them in jail or in a ditch badly beaten or worse. At what point does curiosity — and its satisfaction in extensive knowledge — edge into sympathy? Were seeds being planted now that grew so impressively just a few years later? Certainly, detachment from and curiosity about the Left were both at work in Steinbeck's complex sensibility — and perhaps the beginnings of something more.
The Phalanx
That detachment was an increasingly rare commodity for writers in the mid-1930s. The Popular Front had been attracting increasing numbers of formerly apolitical authors, publishers, and book reviewers to the left, but Steinbeck's intellectual interests since the early 1930s focused on a blend of science and sociology rather than politics. In 1930, living in Pacific Grove, California, he met Ed Ricketts, who, having studied biology and ecology in college, had constructed and operated his own biological lab on the Monterey coast, where he collected and sold biological samples to local schools. Ricketts was Steinbeck's intellectual mentor and close friend in these years; Steinbeck and Carol even worked for a time in Ricketts's lab, and Steinbeck went there often — nearly every day for a time — for good conversation, drink, and good music. Ricketts's impact on Steinbeck's ideas and writing was, in Benson's view, "unquestioned" (Steinbeck, Writer, 183); critics and biographers disagree only on the degree, but nearly all would concur that the influence was profound, especially in the early 1930s when they lived nearby, and again after the publication of The Grapes ofWrath. From Ricketts, Steinbeck developed not only a love of scientific investigation, but also a way of seeing human struggles in a broader biological context. A few years later, Steinbeck recalled their discussions in general terms:
Very many conclusions Ed and I worked out together through endless discussion and reading and observation and experiment. We worked together, and so closely that I do not know in some cases who started which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds.
From these experiences evolved Steinbeck's own socio-biological interest in studying human behavior in the context of groups, or "phalanxes." He summarizes this theory in a letter to a friend, "Dook" Sheffield (21 June 1933). The key hypothesis is that people in groups behave differently than they do as individuals. The group operates with a will of its own:
When acting as a group, men do not partake of their ordinary natures at all. The group can change its nature. It can later alter the birth rate, diminish the number of its units, control states of mind, alter appearance, physically and spiritually. ... [Thus,] the group is an individual as boundaried, as diagnosable, as dependent on its units and as independent of its units' individual natures, as the human unit, or man, is dependent on his cells and yet is independent of them.
Again, Steinbeck's attitude towards the phalanx was detached — "scientific" — as a biologist would examine a colony of microbes under a microscope. The behavior of phalanxes deserved study, not admiration or fear: "[A]s individual humans we are far superior in our functions to anything the world has born — in our groups we are not only not superior but in fact are remarkably like those most perfect groups, the ants and bees" (Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 76).
By 1934/35, there was no shortage of phalanxes to observe: the goose-stepping Nazis and Italian fascists, the invading Japanese armies sworn to the code of Bushido, the communists' rigid conformity to Marxist-Leninist doctrine in their worldwide fight against capitalism, and the many smaller causes and their followers. But, as noted above, the group issue that most interested Steinbeck at the time — an issue that was currently being played out all around him in the fertile fields of the Central Valley, as well as in the dockyards of San Francisco — was the organizing of self-interested workers into a group with a common purpose: to receive higher wages and better treatment from the "bosses" — the big growers and corporate owners — and, if necessary, to strike for those collective improvements. Could the workers be organized? If so, by what techniques? How could the group mentality be maintained; how long would it hold together? And how would the workers' behavior as a group differ from their individual behaviors?
In Dubious Battle: "I'm not interested in ranting about justice and oppression ..."
These are clearly the questions that In Dubious Battle explores. Its point of view is revealing, following in third person not the exploited workers but the two communist organizers: Mac, the experienced mentor, and his protégé, Jim, who has just joined the Party. Rather than experience the workers' exploitation firsthand, which could elicit empathy, the reader learns of it from a distance, only after Mac and Jim arrive on the scene. Throughout, the narrative focuses on the two organizers' plans and intentions; the workers are merely the objects of these plans. In Mac's many decisions and statements, once he and Jim arrive at the apple orchards, it is clear that he cares only for organizing the men successfully: whatever furthers their coherence as a group is good; whatever impedes it is bad. About their individual welfare, he is indifferent. Numerous instances reveal his views and strategies. After he single-handedly and successfully organizes an effort to deliver an indigent girl's baby, even pretending to have medical experience, he reveals to Jim that he didn't care about her welfare:
That was a lucky break. We simply had to take it. 'Course it was nice to help the girl, but hell, even if it killed her — we've got to use anything [that comes to us]. ... With one night's work we've got the confidence of the men ... we made the men work for themselves, in their own defense, as a group. That's what we're out here for anyway, to teach them to fight in a bunch. (48)
When Old Dan's fall from a tree galvanizes the pickers, Mac comments, "The old buzzard was worth something after all. ... He tipped the thing off. We can use him now" (79). Using people or situations to further his ends is all that matters to Mac. When Jim admits to liking Anderson, an old farmer who allows the strikers to camp on his land, Mac corrects him: "Don't you go liking people, Jim. We can't waste time liking people" (90). Even the murder of a comrade, Joy, elicits no sympathy from Mac; instead, he exploits the murder by displaying Joy's body on a platform to work up the group. When Anderson suffers grievously for his generosity to the strikers, Mac tells Doc, "I can't take time to think about the feelings of one man. ... I'm too busy with big bunches of men" (158). Nor is he averse to seeing his own men killed by the police: "Suppose they do kill some of our men? That helps our side. For every man they kill ten new ones come over to us" (253). About the strike itself he is pessimistic. When questioned by Jim, he admits that "we don't have a chance to win," but "some day — it'll work" (121). Thus, the strikers are merely pawns of a much larger struggle; their personal suffering during the strike doesn't matter: "It doesn't make any difference if we lose. Here's nearly a thousand men who've learned how to strike" (222). One of the strike leaders perfectly sums up Mac: "You're a cold-blooded bastard" (129), a label Mac indirectly confirms when he praises Jim's emerging coldness: "You're turning into a proper son-of-a-bitch. Everybody's going to hate you, but you'll be a good Party man" (208).
Because the point of view remains strictly with Mac and Jim, their enemies — the landowners and the police and vigilantes whom the landowners have skillfully organized — remain distant, impersonal forces. Steinbeck inserts only two face-to-face encounters: a perfunctory "get back to work" demand from the superintendent and a meeting with the landowners' representative, who is atypically oily in trying to smooth over the deep divisions between the owners and workers. The strikers — and thus the readers — experience the repressive actions of the owners, but never really see their faces.
The one character in In Dubious Battle who stands at right angles to the novel's dual struggles (between organizers and workers, and between both and the power-conglomerate) is Doc, a genuine doctor who works tirelessly to treat the strikers' wounds and keep the temporary camp sanitary, until he mysteriously disappears. Unlike Mac's narrowly pragmatic nature, Doc is philosophical, speculative, and more interested in observing and understanding the dynamics of these conflicts than in committing himself ideologically. "I don't believe in the cause," he tells Mac, "but I believe in men" (153). Unlike the organizers, Doc sees ironies and paradoxes of the "us versus them" mentality. He tells Jim, "[I]n my little experience the end is never very different in its nature from the means. ... [Y]ou can only build a violent thing with violence" (199). Benson is spot on when he asserts that Doc is clearly Steinbeck's surrogate — as when Doc declares, "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" (113). Doc virtually paraphrases Steinbeck's letter (quoted above) in describing the "group-men" the strikers are becoming:
I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all, he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. ... [Group man's] nature, his ends, his desires. ... [are not] the same as ours. (104–5)
(Continues…)
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