The Grapes of Wrath(13)

Plenty of other people had interest, though. The Grapes of Wrath was widely and favorably reviewed and its fidelity to fact discussed and debated in the popular press when it was first published. It has been praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing, nominated by critics and reviewers alike as “The Great American Novel,” given historical vindication by Senator Robert M. La Follette’s inquiries into California’s tyrannical farm labor conditions, and validated by Carey McWilliams, whose own great work, Factories in the Fields (1939), is the classic sociological counterpart to Steinbeck’s novel. The Grapes of Wrath was defended on several occasions by President and Eleanor Roosevelt for its power, integrity, and accuracy. For instance, after inspecting California migrant camps in 1940, Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.” (Steinbeck responded gratefully: “I have been called a liar so constantly that… I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard.”)

But The Grapes of Wrath has also been attacked by academic scholars as sentimental, unconvincing, and inartistic, banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries for its rebellious theme and frank language, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as communist, immoral, degrading, warped, and untruthful. Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” A Jesuit priest, Arthur D. Spearman, called it “an embodiment of the Marxist Soviet propaganda.” The Associated Farmers mounted a smear campaign to discredit the book and its author. Rebuttals, designed to whitewash the Okie situation, were published by Frank J. Taylor (“California’s Grapes of Wrath”) and by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s Los Gatos neighbor (Of Human Kindness). None of them had one iota of impact.

Since then, of course, The Grapes of Wrath has been steadily scrutinized, studied, interrogated, and analyzed by literary critics, scholars, historians, and creative writers. It is no exaggeration to say that, during the past half century, few American novels have attracted such passionate attacks and equally passionate defenses. It seems hard to believe that critics have read the same book. Philip Rahv’s complaint in the Partisan Review (Spring 1939) that “the novel is far too didactic and long-winded,” and “fails on the test of craftsmanship” should be judged against Charles Angoff ’s assessment in the North American Review (Summer 1939) that it is “momentous, monumental, and memorable,” and an example of “the highest art.” This dialectic still characterizes the novel’s critical reception. In a 1989speech, the prominent cultural critic Leslie Fiedler attacked the novel as “maudlin, sentimental, and overblown”; another review a month later by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy praised it for standing “tall… a mighty, mighty book.”

The past fifty years have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, though most contemporary analysts now treat the book as a legitimate work of fiction rather than a propagandistic tract. As a result, there is a great deal of deserving attention to Steinbeck’s art and technique. Whether Grapes is viewed through a social, historical, linguistic, formal, political, ecological, psychological, mythic, metaphysical, or religious lens (all examples of recent critical methods), the book’s textual richness, its many layers of action, language, and character, continue to repay enormous dividends. As scholar John Ditsky observed, “the Joads are still in motion, and their vehicle with them.” Intellectual theories to the contrary, reading remains a subjective act, and perhaps the only sure thing about The Grapes of Wrath is its capacity to elicit powerful responses from its audience. This of course was Steinbeck’s intention from the first. “I don’t think The Grapes of Wrath is obscure in what it tries to say,” he claimed in 1955. “Its structure is very carefully worked out…. Just read it, don’t count it!”

As a result of shifting political emphases, the enlightened recommendations of the La Follette Committee (that the National Labor Relations Act include farm workers), the effects of loosened labor laws (California’s discriminatory “anti-migrant” law, established in 1901, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1941), the creation of compulsory military service, and the inevitable recruitment of migrant families into defense plant and shipyard jobs caused by the booming economy of World War II that signaled the beginning of their successful assimilation (California growers soon complained of an acute shortage of seasonal labor), the particular set of epochal conditions that crystallized Steinbeck’s awareness in the first place passed from his view. Like other momentous American novels that embody the bitter, often tragic, transition from one way of life to another, The Grapes of Wrath possessed, among its other attributes, perfect timing. Its appearance permanently altered the literary geography of the United States.