Steinbeck Revisited

This year is the Steinbeck Centennial and Penguin Putnam has published a boxed set of some of his more famous works most of us were forced to read and write papers on in grade school. I never liked The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and I cried my way through The Red Pony. I identified him with depressingly sad tales that I had no way of relating to as an 8 year old but, on a whim, I looked on Amazon to see what titles they had of his and I noticed he wrote quite a bit of nonfiction so I loaded up my basket and decided to give him a second chance.

What a difference a genre makes! His nonfiction is glorious, crisp and I suspect Tom Wolfe was influenced by Steinbeck's journalistic style. The Wayward Bus, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, A Russian Journal, Once There Was a War and Travels with Charley in Search of America are a tribute to the craft of telling a story which seems to be a dying art these days.

With all the mad hoo-ha over blogging replacing journalism it's easy to see in prose like Steinbeck's why that will never, ever happen as long as there is a story to tell and someone worthy of telling it. Blogging isn't journalism any more than the gossip page in the local paper is journalism but both have their place. In an age of the 5 second newsbite and millions of cross-linking blogs I would love to see more real in-depth stories told by the likes of a Wolfe or a Steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

The mark of a good storyteller is how timeless and classic the work remains with the passage of time like Aeschylus and Shakespeare as, while fads come and go, the human condition is at its core still the same as it ever was. So, Happy 100th Birthday Mr. Steinbeck and I humbly apologise for dismissing your work on the basis of my dislike of your depressing fiction. May you fly to the stars on the wings of a pig. :)