The Devil Gets His Due by Leslie Fiedler

Author:Leslie Fiedler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Looking Back After 50 Years

When The Grapes of Wrath was first published on the eve of World War II, it was acclaimed (or at least so it then seemed) by all men of good will. Only pious hypocrites and reactionary yahoos demurred: labeling it “vulgar,” “obscene,” “false” and “un-American,” even as its more extravagant admirers were hailing it as a uniquely American masterpiece, worthy of being ranked with Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass. Ironically enough, it is this hyperbolic assessment which continues to appear as a jacket blurb on its latest editions. I say ironically because more recently the critical consensus has drastically changed. Indeed, when—after the passage of twenty-five years—Steinbeck was belatedly given the Nobel Prize for Literature, most reputable critics greeted the news with derision and scorn. Typical of the response was that of Arthur Mizener who deplored the granting “of this most distinguished prize to a writer whose real but limited talent is watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing.” Moreover, even after another quarter of a century, as distinguished a critic as Harold Bloom agreed, writing that “because he inevitably falls into bathos, lacks invention and is clearly incapable of creating characters with real inwardness,” Steinbeck is clearly not one of the “inescapable novelists” of America, like Faulkner and Hemingway, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon.

But why, I feel impelled to ask, has Steinbeck’s reputation thus declined—so swiftly, indeed, that by 1962, as Mizener was able to contend with few to say him nay, “most serious readers” had long since “ceased reading him.” Surely this state of affairs cannot be, despite what an ever-diminishing number of hardcore fans—chiefly Californians—argue, because a conspiracy of “Eastern intellectuals” caused The Grapes of Wrath to disappear from the required reading lists in the majority of university courses in American literature all up and down our land: lists on which, it is worth noting, other provincial authors, Western, Mid-Western and Southern, continue to appear. To understand the unique reasons for Steinbeck’s precipitous decline, we must begin in quite another way, by trying to understand the unique reasons for his initial success.

There now seems little doubt that The Grapes of Wrath was originally over-prized because it seemed to embody so perfectly the mood and sensibility, the anti-puritanical morality, the leftist politics—and especially the apocalyptic vision of the thirties. To be sure, that morality, politics and vision were not shared even in that age by most ordinary Americans—certainly not by most blue collar workers or (hard as Steinbeck tries to persuade us of this) the dispossessed sharecroppers of the Dust Bowl. The vision did, however, possess the minds and hearts of some intellectuals and would-be intellectuals in the metropolitan East and Midwest, who controlled the review sections of mass-circulation newspapers and influential magazines. It was they who hailed Steinbeck not just as a consummate artist but one on the “right side”—i.e., one who was a prophet of the coming of socialism.

To make him seem an artist on the level of Melville or Whitman, they had to ignore all in him that was maudlin, sentimental and overblown, which was not easy.

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