READING: East of Eden
I'm still reading The Forsyte Saga. It's just, I've now got to re-read East of Eden for one of my bookgroups.
I first read East of Eden maybe three or four years ago. The only other Steinbeck I'd read had been The Grapes of Wrath which, okay, not really my bag what with the relentless and, eventually, monotonous bleakness. "Can't someone give the Joad family a hug?" I kept thinking while reading it. "Or a puppy? But not a puppy that they'd have to worry about feeding, nor a puppy they'll have to kill to eat." Eventually, though, I just kept thinking, "Can't someone give the Joad family a bath?" I don't think one good thing happened to that family. Not one. And the end? With Rose of Sharon breast-feeding a hobo? Are you kidding me?
So, I picked up East of Eden and I'm pretty sure that first time I loved it. It was large and grand and sweeping, and not in the middle of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck wasn't winning any points with me as a writer; there were never any sentences where I stopped and thought, "Now that is writing." But the story/saga engaged me, and come chapter 8, when the treacherous Cathy Ames is introduced, I was hooked. She was just so incredibly and unapologetically evil that I figured I had to like her or she'd do something awful to me with knitting needles. Towards the end of the book, Cathy stopped being as awesomely evil and sort of became this caricature of evil; the kind of person who hisses and shrinks from the light of the sun. But by that point, I didn't care as much; I just wanted to be done with the novel and I wanted to find out what was going to happen to the Trask family.
And now it's March's book for my book group and I picked it up a couple nights ago to start it because that mofo's long, and I'm still neck-deep in Forsytes.
In the 3+ years since I last read it, I guess I'd forgotten a lot. Like, Cathy Ames isn't introduced immediately and there's a lot about the Salinas Valley that I don't know is terribly necessary. We get it John: it's a valley. Between two mountains. Can we get to Cathy now? But no, we can't, we've got to wade through all this stupid backstory about the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and every five minutes I'm checking my watch and thinking, "You know what this page needs? Cathy Ames."
Steinbeck is a little more misogynistic than I remember, too. Twenty pages in, I stopped and took stock. In that time, we'd been introduced to four pretty wretched and not entirely redeeming women: Liza Hamilton, too religious to be any fun and a total teetotaler who never smiles; a "Negro girl" who gives Cyrus Trask the clap; the first Mrs. Trask, who gets the clap from Cyrus and then commits suicide; and Alice, the second Mrs. Trask, who has consumption and never smiles and has to be married to Cyrus Trask. At another point, Steinbeck writes of one character, "[He] was glad...the way a woman is glad of a fat diamond, and he depended on his brother in the way that same woman depends on the diamond's glitter and the self-security tied up in its worth." But I have to tell you, none of the women in this novel that Steinbeck has introduced us to up to the point where he writes that sentence (page 21) seem at all like woman who would give a plug nickel for a fat diamond of any kind.
Right now, I'm on chapter 8 -- the chapter where finally we get some Cathy Ames action, and again I'm noticing some clumsiness on Steinbeck's part that I didn't pick up on my first rush through the novel. Chapter 8 opens with Steinbeck musing, "If a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?" This is his way of saying, "And now: Cathy!" Which, heh, yeah. That's Cathy all right: she's got a malformed soul. But thinking about the implications, I don't know that I agree with Steinbeck here. First off, it's a pretty tragic misunderstanding of biology and genetics. More importantly, though, I think it's a misunderstanding of monsters.
Cathy Ames is a monster, according to Steinbeck; heck, according to anyone after a quick perusal of her laundry list of accomplishments: she murders her parents, drives a school teacher to suicide, tries to abort her babies with knitting needles, and then becomes this crazy pimp/madam in a bad wig. But if we pretend for a moment that Steinbeck's biological algebra is correct, that twisted genes or malformed eggs can influence a soul -- does she have any control over that? Is it her fault that she's evil? If the answer is no, then what use is the word "evil" in this context? If she's genetically predestined to be wicked -- and wicked, in this case, is supposed to be pejorative -- well, it can't be. Because she has no control over it. But Steinbeck wants her to be both evil, and for it also to be her fault, even though he's spent all this time trying to say that Cathy is born this way.
I think that it's now better apparent, to me at any rate, that Steinbeck is too married to his source material: the Bible. East of Eden is the land of Nod, where Cain finds a wife after he murders Abel. The novel is a retelling, of sorts, of the Eden/Fall of Man story. Steinbeck, though, wants it too many ways (and some of them illegal). He wants to examine evil and the fall of man; but then he wants this predeterminism crap that just don't hunt.
I first read East of Eden maybe three or four years ago. The only other Steinbeck I'd read had been The Grapes of Wrath which, okay, not really my bag what with the relentless and, eventually, monotonous bleakness. "Can't someone give the Joad family a hug?" I kept thinking while reading it. "Or a puppy? But not a puppy that they'd have to worry about feeding, nor a puppy they'll have to kill to eat." Eventually, though, I just kept thinking, "Can't someone give the Joad family a bath?" I don't think one good thing happened to that family. Not one. And the end? With Rose of Sharon breast-feeding a hobo? Are you kidding me?
So, I picked up East of Eden and I'm pretty sure that first time I loved it. It was large and grand and sweeping, and not in the middle of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck wasn't winning any points with me as a writer; there were never any sentences where I stopped and thought, "Now that is writing." But the story/saga engaged me, and come chapter 8, when the treacherous Cathy Ames is introduced, I was hooked. She was just so incredibly and unapologetically evil that I figured I had to like her or she'd do something awful to me with knitting needles. Towards the end of the book, Cathy stopped being as awesomely evil and sort of became this caricature of evil; the kind of person who hisses and shrinks from the light of the sun. But by that point, I didn't care as much; I just wanted to be done with the novel and I wanted to find out what was going to happen to the Trask family.
And now it's March's book for my book group and I picked it up a couple nights ago to start it because that mofo's long, and I'm still neck-deep in Forsytes.
In the 3+ years since I last read it, I guess I'd forgotten a lot. Like, Cathy Ames isn't introduced immediately and there's a lot about the Salinas Valley that I don't know is terribly necessary. We get it John: it's a valley. Between two mountains. Can we get to Cathy now? But no, we can't, we've got to wade through all this stupid backstory about the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and every five minutes I'm checking my watch and thinking, "You know what this page needs? Cathy Ames."
Steinbeck is a little more misogynistic than I remember, too. Twenty pages in, I stopped and took stock. In that time, we'd been introduced to four pretty wretched and not entirely redeeming women: Liza Hamilton, too religious to be any fun and a total teetotaler who never smiles; a "Negro girl" who gives Cyrus Trask the clap; the first Mrs. Trask, who gets the clap from Cyrus and then commits suicide; and Alice, the second Mrs. Trask, who has consumption and never smiles and has to be married to Cyrus Trask. At another point, Steinbeck writes of one character, "[He] was glad...the way a woman is glad of a fat diamond, and he depended on his brother in the way that same woman depends on the diamond's glitter and the self-security tied up in its worth." But I have to tell you, none of the women in this novel that Steinbeck has introduced us to up to the point where he writes that sentence (page 21) seem at all like woman who would give a plug nickel for a fat diamond of any kind.
Right now, I'm on chapter 8 -- the chapter where finally we get some Cathy Ames action, and again I'm noticing some clumsiness on Steinbeck's part that I didn't pick up on my first rush through the novel. Chapter 8 opens with Steinbeck musing, "If a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?" This is his way of saying, "And now: Cathy!" Which, heh, yeah. That's Cathy all right: she's got a malformed soul. But thinking about the implications, I don't know that I agree with Steinbeck here. First off, it's a pretty tragic misunderstanding of biology and genetics. More importantly, though, I think it's a misunderstanding of monsters.
Cathy Ames is a monster, according to Steinbeck; heck, according to anyone after a quick perusal of her laundry list of accomplishments: she murders her parents, drives a school teacher to suicide, tries to abort her babies with knitting needles, and then becomes this crazy pimp/madam in a bad wig. But if we pretend for a moment that Steinbeck's biological algebra is correct, that twisted genes or malformed eggs can influence a soul -- does she have any control over that? Is it her fault that she's evil? If the answer is no, then what use is the word "evil" in this context? If she's genetically predestined to be wicked -- and wicked, in this case, is supposed to be pejorative -- well, it can't be. Because she has no control over it. But Steinbeck wants her to be both evil, and for it also to be her fault, even though he's spent all this time trying to say that Cathy is born this way.
I think that it's now better apparent, to me at any rate, that Steinbeck is too married to his source material: the Bible. East of Eden is the land of Nod, where Cain finds a wife after he murders Abel. The novel is a retelling, of sorts, of the Eden/Fall of Man story. Steinbeck, though, wants it too many ways (and some of them illegal). He wants to examine evil and the fall of man; but then he wants this predeterminism crap that just don't hunt.
posted by Mike at 7:35 AM
1 Comments:
So far, the only Steinbeck that I've read is Cannery Row, and I remember loving it, but I was in college and very impressionable. I may need to reread.
Mind you, I have several copies of the complete works of Steinbeck, even though I've only read the one book, because someday I'm going to get around to the rest of his stuff.
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