E s s ays

OH

East of Eden

]Ohl'l Ditsky

Steinbeck Monograph Series, No. 7, 1977 · A A ` EM

_ ams!

r' L5 *• '

,

` yyyeezé '—*§ :/·¢¢C»£

ME}!

» ,e·>¤,.’%§ ··‘$a!

‘2'¤;;l { {W Hkigéi Au?

°22*% [52 ¤j·x.’€:>%€ · im"}“E"3 » x:img;?, _, e· ·# ; 7i;$‘~» ` &, - `.»&:M EZQWQ

’ »rJw_ “

V »?a¢[?§ .;=;;~$& E s says

OI]

East of Eden

]0lm Ditsky

S i w U 7 ’ibélli /Lx f·

\/""~ ~ Wit/”

Steinbeck Monograph Series, N0. 7, 1977

The ]0hn Steinbeck Society 0fAinerica English Department, Bail State University Muncie, Indiana 47306 U.S.A. Steinbeck Monograph Series

Published by the ]0hn Steinbeck Society of America under the Sponsorship of Ball State University

Sponsors: Richard W. Burkhardt, University Sponsor Robert L. Carmin, College Sponsor Advisor: Warren French (Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis)

A Checklist of Published Monographs (1971-1977)

* No. 1971: Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed.,]ohn Steinbeck: A Guide to the Doctoral Dissertations (1946-1969) * No. 1972: Reloy Garcia, Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence: Fiction Voices and the Ethical Imperative * No. 1973: Lawrence William ]0nes,]ohn Steinbeck as Fabulist, ed. Marston LaFrance * No. 1974: Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed., Steinbeck Criticism: A Review of Book-Length Studies (1939-1973) * No. 1975: Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed., Steinbeck and the Arthurian Theme No. 1976: Roy S. Simmonds, Steinbeck’s Literary Achievement No . 7, 1977: ]0hn Ditsky, Essays on “East of Eden,) No . 8, 1978: Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed.,]ohn Steinbeck: A Collection of Dissertation Abstracts (1946-1977) (forthcoming) out of print

Editorial Staff (1976-1977)

Tetsumaro Hayashi (Ball State University): Editorial Duector Richard Peterson (Southern Illinois University); Associate Editor Donald L. Sielker (Ball State University), Kenneth D. Swan (Taylor University), and George H. Spies, III (Culver Military Academy): Assistant Editors

© 1977 The ]ohn Steinbeck Society of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-71393 for my wife, and for his ’A Contents

Pages Acknowledgements v1

Foreword (By Tetsumaro Hayashi) . vii

Preface 1x

I. Toward a Narrational Self.

II. Outside of Paradise: Men and

the Land in East 0fEden 15

III. The “East” in East ofEden . 41

Steinbeck Monograph Series (1971- ) . 51

Steinbeck Society Pamphlet Series (1971- ) . 52

Contributor and Editors . 53

Quotations from ]ohn Steinbeck in this monograph are used by permission of the Steinbeck Literary Estate through Mrs. Elizabeth R. Otis Kiser. I can hardly improve on the performance of Reloy Garcia who, for the second number in this series, paid tribute to Dr. Tetsumaro Hayashi of Ball State University in these words: “I know of no Steinbeck scholar who has promoted more Stein beck criticism for so little recompense, except for the respect and admiration of his friends and colleagues? Ditto and Amen. Respects are also owing to my unseen and unmet benefac tors at Ball State University, and to my graduate students at the University of Windsor, whose collective encouragement meant so much to me during the preparation of this manuscript. Thanks also to these distinguished clergymen-colleagues for their assis tance: Professor Samuel Stollman of the University of Windsor and Professor Nonnan McKendrick ofthe University of Detroit. A negative acknowledgement is also due: to the man’s many detractors who condemn what they have rarely ever read, my thanks for leaving so much to be said.

]0hn Ditsky University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario, Canada

v1 In 1970, acting as editorial director, I initiated the Steinbeck Monograph Series under the sponsorship of Ball State Univer sity. ]udging from the public response, I can safely say that this series has met some of the important demands in Steinbeck studies and reflected some of the manor interests of our active Steinbeck scholars in many lands. Fortunately our sponsors at Ball State University, Dr. Richard W. Burkhardt, Dr. Robert L. Carmin, and many other leaders, who firmly believe in the edu cational and scholarly value of our monograph series, have con tinued their unflagging support. ]ohn Ditsky’s Essays on “East of Eden” (Steinbeck Mono graph Series, No. 7, 1977) represents our continuing effort to publish a longer essay on Steinbeck’s work or a series of essays that approach a common Steinbeck theme. Professor Ditsky, who shares with me the belief that Steinbeck’s East ofEden de serves to be more fully explored and more dimensionally re assessed, was invited to do this monograph in 1976-1977. A dis tinguished poet in his own right, he is also well known for his impeccable devotion to Steinbeck studies as teacher, scholar, and editor. If the finest tribute any one can pay to our senior scholars who have pioneered Steinbeck studies is to pursue the goals inspired by their achievements, I feel Professor Ditsky has accomplishedjust that. Iwelcome and appreciate the author’s dedication and originality in exploring the new dimensions of East of Eden in this monograph. I had the good fortune to have Professor Richard F. Peterson of Southern Illinois University as Associate Editor, and Profes sors Donald L. Siefker of Ball State University and Kenneth D. Swan of Taylor University along with Dr. George H. Spies of Culver Military Academy as Assistant Editors. I wish to express my profound indebtedness to their editorial service and advice. Tetsumaro Hayashi Editorial Director of the Steinbeck Monograph Series October 25, 1976

vii The Viking editions of three of Steinbeck’s works are cited in parenthetical references made within my text and indicated by abbreviations as follows: East of Eden (1952): ]our— al of u Novel (1969): UN"; Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975): “SLL.’

vm What follows are three interrelated essays that aim to give ]ohn Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) the closer look their au· thor believes the book deserves. These pieces are indebted to no prior criticism; thus, while they may inadvertently repeat an observation of another reader, they are in no sense meant as an attack on any writer or critical approach. Rather, they attempt to supplant the previous, cookie cutter form of attention with serious and original readings not pre-formed by any school of criticism. Quite simply put, if Steinbeck is the writer — at any stage of his career ——— that many of us take him for, then East of Eden, simply by being, deserves our attention. Having myself grown impatient oflate with all sorts ofjudgments that claim to be qualitatively normative, but are in reality based on obscure and highly personal criteria, I have almost gleefully concluded that the ultimate praise is attention itself East of Eden requires attention; it is therefore to some degree praiseworthy. Luckily, it earns its praise and rewards its perusing. The man knew what he was doing. Most of us, devoted to Steinbeck scholarship but browbeaten by sometimes-ignorant colleagues, are accustomed to a professional defensiveness and the habit of pious apologetics. We ought to quit acting as though we were indulging in some harmless milquetoast hobby, some futile piety. ]ohn Steinbeck’s own humility was, perhaps, his own worst enemy. Had he the ego ofa Hemingway, a Roethke, or a Robert Frost, he might have had us cowed. We might have fear ed to call him less than great. Instead, we fear to do him simple justice. The Steinbeck Quarterly and the Steinbeck Monograph Series have made a giant step towards changing all that. I am proud to be a participant in the latter enterprise, and hope that these essays achieve the synthesis of approach I have intended. In the first of these pieces, I discuss the ways in which Stein beck’s career might be said to have been a conscious — and un conscious — preparing for the writing of East of Eden. In the second, I examine the various ways in which the relationship ofindividuals in the novel to Nature can be said to be an index of their characters, and in turn contributes to the structural ar rangement of the book’s materials. And in the final essay, I at tempt a fusion ofthese ideas along with Ste inbeck’s employment

1x of "Eastem” influences — Oriental and Biblical — in a novel meant to possess a general societal impact, yet spring out of the writer’s own past. I make no claims for what I have done, nor for the novel’s final worth, beyond the statement that I hope the fonner is proportioned to the latter, and that I have begun to get at the hidden thing. In 1930, ]ohn Steinbeck wrote to Carl Wilhelmson about a new book, Dissonant Symphony, he was at work on. "A series of short stories or sketches,” the new work nevertheless . is not the series in Salinas at all. I shall not do that yet. I am too vindictive and harsh on my own people. In a few years I may have outgrown that. (SLL, 22)

And later that same year, he wrote Amasa Miller that he was working on a novel “which will get some spleen out of my sys tem. Bile that has been sickening me for years” (SLL, 28). Stein beck was unsuccessfully trying to use one book to unblock an other’s path; apparently, the poisons proved too strong for this piece of deliberate therapy to overcome. What were the sources of the "bile” and "spleen” that in fected Steinbeck’s vision in 1930? I have no factual information to offer beyond what is already available to us, especially in the letters, but clearly Steinbeck’s feelings had to do with anguish caused by his own struggle for self—identity and self-worth, or with the quest for self—definition or for self-accommodation; the letters make this likelihood too strong to ignore. In 1935, he wrote to George Albee that the forthcoming In Dabioas Battle was to present a strike situation "as the symbol of man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.” This generalized "man hates some thing in himself He has been able to defeat every natural ob stacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every in dividual.” Steinbeck had therefore written about "this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self—love,” becoming in the process “merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing” (SLL, 98). In choosing the sub ject of man’s inner struggle, then Steinbeck had developed the device of the objective and dispassionate narrational voice. At the same time as Steinbeck’s inner struggle led to its objectification in a fictional narrational voice, Steinbeck was beginning to recover from his malaise. To Wilhelmson and Al bee he had written, around the period of his parents) illnesses and deaths (1934-35) and of his first literary success Tortilla Flat (1935), that he was now working with pleasure, and was “losing a sense of self to a marked degree and that is a pleasant thing" (SLL, 87), and that only his awareness of his parents’ declines remained as obstacle to his attainment of a relatively ambitionless, comfortable state — that of an egoless person who ” wouldn’t “want to possess anything, nor to be anything Two things I really want and I can’t have either of them and they are both negative. I want to forget my mother lying for a year with a fright ful question in her eyes and I want to forget and lose the pain in my heart that is my father. In one year he has become a fumbling, repeti tious, senile old man, unhappy almost to the point of tears. But these wants are the desire to restore the lack of ego. They are the only two things which make me conscious of myself as a unit. Except for them fh I spread out over landscape and people like an enonnous jelly is, having neither personality nor boundaries. That is as I wish it . (SLL, 93)

This passage, which I think can be taken at face value, is an in dex of Steinbeck’s self-understanding as of 1934, early into his first marriage, his first literary success, and therefore on his way to relative financial security. And the man who in the same letter describes himself as being without morals evidently felt that further conscience, or self-consciousness, was a luxury he could well do without. Work is the enemy ofthe self, and since the self is a bad thing, it must not appear in the work. The prescription must have been a success: the same letter reports that Steinbeck is working hard and is therefore happy, for "Some very bitter thing dried up in me last year” (SLL, 94). And in a letter to ]oseph Henry ]ackson in 1935, ]ohn Steinbeck specifically connects the loss of bittemess with the submerging of the self and with his " development of a dispassionate narrational voice. The whole early part of my life was poisoned with egotism, a reverse ego- ), tism, of course, beginning with self-consciousness.But now he has lost that noxious egotism, because through his books his "life had been multiplied through having become identified in a most real way with people who were not me” (SLL, 119), and now he can identify as well with a host of characteristics that are finer than his own. And it is the book, one concludes, that holds his life together . Steinbeck's critics have almost universally spoken of a de cline in the quality of his work, one which is assumed to have taken place anywhere from the ending of The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to the beginning of East of Eden (1952). The question of decline is personally considerably less interesting than the

question of Steinbeck’s chameleon-like adaptability: the con- d stant experimenting with form which occupied him, quite e liberately, for all of his active life. Yet within that formal experi mentation there existed, for all of the vast middle period of his , career and almost as if seeming to offer confirmation ofhis critics

generalizations, a steady and level tone to his letters, and a fair- d ly consistent attitude towards his self and his work. At one en of this larger time span, therefore, we note in the rising young writer Steinbeck the desire to have done with the self, to im merse the consciousness in literary effort, and to put the bitter ness ofthe past behind him. The objective events of this period are Steinbeck’s first successful volume, his first marriage, and the growing influence upon him of his new friend Ed Ricketts. With respect to the latter factor’s undisputed importance, it is no accident that Steinbeck devotes the better parts of two long letters — to Carlton A. Sheffield and to George Albee — to excited explication of what would come to be known as the “phalanx” or "group-man” theory of behavior (SLL, 74-77, 79-82), just at the time when the other changes under discussion were happening — in 1933. And at the other end of the time span under discussion, we have, along with a renewal ofinterest in his own family’s history (or, perhaps more accurately, a resumption of an _interest long deferred, and plans long since roughed in), a Steinbeck ready to accommodate a new vision of the self The objective events of this period are the dissolving of his second marriage (to Gwyn Conger) and the love affair with and subsequent marriage to Elaine Scott, the death of Ed Ricketts, and the decline of Stein beck’s interest in, and respect for, the notion of the group-man. As early as November 1947, Steinbeck is writing to Toby Street that he “would like to stop everything to do a long novel that I have been working on the notes of for a long time” (SLL, 301). It is to be his historical “Salinas” book at last, and he writes to Covici the following February that, in doing the local research for the new novel, he realizes now that the book will have to be “long,” and the end product not merely “good,” but “unique.’ “I’m afraid Iwill have to build a whole new kind ofexpression for it. And maybe go nuts doing it . . .” (SLL, 304). The same letter identifies the new book by intended scope as “the whole nasty bloody lovely history ofthe world,” and other letters of this pe riod (to Gwyn, to Ed, and to Bo Beskow) confirm his sense ofthe challenge in terms in size and style that this book-of-a—lifetime represents; to Beskow he also confides that this retum to old scenes and former lifestyles is the necessary follow-up to a bad time when he had been "very close to a crack-up” (SLL, 311). Yet later the same year, depressed by the process of separation and divorce, he suffers a diminishment of creative energy while in retreat at Pacific Grove, and recovers only gradually — thanks at last to the massive incentive of the unfinished book, “my big train ofa book.” He is able to make plans again, including these for another film — one based on the life ofChrist; and he is able to express at last a healthy and cleansing rage at a certain kind of American woman;

And I think I could love a European woman or a negress or a Chinese but the breed of American woman — part man, part politician — they have the minds of whores and the vaginas of Presbyterians. They are trained by their mothers in a contempt for men and so they compete with men and when they don’t win, they whimper and go to psycho analysts. The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant. American married life is the doormat to the whore house. (SLL, 343)

And on and on, he vents his spleen gorgeously and probably un fairly — but clears his head and restores his heart in the process. One also sees, in this resurgence ofvigor, the raw materials for with a bit of tinkering — two new characters: East of Ederfs Cathy and the Christ-like, Steinbeck-like Ethan Allen Hawley of The Winter 0f Our Discontent (1961). And Ed Ricketts had been killed the previous May. “I miss Ed and I don’t all at the same time,” he writes Covici in October. "It’s a thing that is closed — that might possible have been clos ing anyway. Who can tell`?” (SLL, 334) There is a “panic alone ness,” but he is learning to cope with that, to redefine the self; and with the new year (and a new pair of glasses) comes new vigor, a gutsy new sense of responsibility — one based at least partially upon his pride in having survived the sadness caused by his life with individual women, just as he had once (he re members) survived the "desolating sadnesses” of childhood (SLL, 345-46). But now, his “will power” has returned: I am tough and mean after quite a house cleaning. My closets were full of dust, of little feats, of half felt emotions. IfI am to be a son ofa bitch, I’m going to be my own son of a bitch. I’ve kicked out the duty emo tions. (SLL, 347)

As his editors note (SLL, 358), he has changed his ideas about the group as well — in addition to his adjusting his ideas about women. By some deserved irony, no sooner had Steinbeck de cided that he could handle women best when they were part of a relatively faceless female mass than he met one strikingly ex ceptional individual: Elaine Scott. Freed of Ed’s shadow, and made aware of his abiding needs of“women and work,” Stein beck is able to write ]ohn O’Hara what he has written elsewhere: I think I believe one thing powerfully — that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group. The group un governed by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. (SLL, 359)

Opposing the notion of the ungoverned group, Steinbeck spe cifically cites “the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious”; and within the next few lines, he retums to the notion of the big book in the works, the one for which he has been "practicing . . . for 35 years” (SLL, 359-60). So that at the point when Elaine Scott enters his life and the book is once more under way, ]ohn Steinbeck has finally resolved the issue of the group-man by returning to something like the Christian idea of moral responsibility — and is ready to incorporate the changes in his attitudes, and in himself as a person, into the novel. There is one final contributory factor in this coming-together of forces and events which would result in East of Eden, one which -— in its very obviousness -— we have not dealt with as of yet. I should like to suggest that the sadnesses and bitter feelings of Steinbeck’s past were the products of his relations with his own family, and thatEast of Eden represents their being laid to rest at last. He had received, as a Christmas present from his sis ter in 1944, a wooden box (specifically, ofolive wood) containing his grandfather’s Civil War papers, and had begun browsing through them almost at once (SLL, 278). It seems quite reason able to infer that this sisterly present became, or served as cata lyst to already-existent plans for East of Eden. Four and one-half years later, his feelings for his family now coming under control, he carries on a secret correspondence with the still-married Elaine in which he addresses her by his mother’s maiden name, "Belle Hamilton”; and that November, he sends her his mother’s engagement ring for her own (SLL, 388). I need not exaggerate the significance of that gesture, given the evidence available, in order to prove the role of Elaine Steinbeck as one ofa harmo nious incorporation into a family which would now make pos sible the writing ofa book. That family, with its traditions and beliefs, was much on Steinbeck’s mind during 1949-50, as he prepared at last to write his long Salinas novel. In ]une of the former year, he writes to “Belle” that he has been carving her “a little Celtic or Gaelic cross" out ofthe olive wood brought by his grandfather from the Holy Land — wood taken from “one ofthe ancient olives on the Mount of Olives], It is an object to be held and caressed, and it is being made on a night filled with omens (SLL, 363-65). This talismanic cross, therefore, is similar to the stone in The Winter of Our Discontent, and represents the same sort of combination of religious totem and family heirloom as Ellen’s does; more over, the sources of the cross echo Ethan Allen Hawley’s ago nies, and one is reminded that the Hawleys were of “pirate" stock by the reflection by Steinbeck that "We were always a fam ily oflooters.” In ]uly, he is telling Elaine how he placed a flower “in on the bird to propitiate” — reference to a magic humming bird in a "tiny coffin” he had brought back from Mexico; a few days later, he is reading omens in Nature (SLL, 369-373). In Oc tober, he speaks of plans to make Elaine’s daughter — prototype of Ellen Hawley? — an olive wood cross, too (SLL, 382). With such concerns as these, therefore (and with the additional con cern of an estranged husband for his sons by Gwyn), ]ohn Stein beck is able to tell Bo Beskow in ]uly 1950 that he will at last commence the long novel in October; next February, it is indeed under way. Both of these references emphasize the novel’s in tended dimensions (SLL, 403, 418). And what of that sense of self, that ego which had caused him so much anguish in the early thirties? He is, he tells Bo Be skow, now rather at peace on that score. He has learned that an ‘outsize ego” is "wrong and unhealthy,” as is a “pride” that takes the form of trying to live others’ lives for them. Whereas once ]ohn Steinbeck had thought a plastic personality that spread out over the landscape, merging with those of other people, might offer a solution to the problems of the poisonous ego, now he speaks in a kind of Christian paradox about the preciousness of the self “your individual, lonely self,” which you can only find ‘after you have given it up” (SLL, 410). In effect, he wrestles with the remaining problems of self-identification as he wrestles with the novel: the outlines of the one seem to become those of the other. So that he apologizes to Pat Covici in August 1951 when the book “boils over" and the result is “nervous collapse" that neces sarily discomforts those around him; the book marks a phase in his life, he assures Elizabeth Otis, and presumably its completion will mark an end to the present effort at self—understanding (SLL, 426-28). In the new book, he tells Pat Covici, “Cal is my baby. He is the Everyman, the battle ground between good and evil, the most human of all, the sorry man. In that battle the survivor is both.” It is to be, therefore, “a book about morality” —— a genre Steinbeck thinks without recent addition, at least in the patent sense ofEast of Eden (SLL, 428-29). (Of course, he had felt that way about Burning Bright; but perhaps there were good reasons not to think ofthat peculiar morality play.) Was the struggle over selfcompleted with the conclusion ofEast ofEdenP The answer may be implied in the letter of relieved accomplishment with which he informs Bo Beskow on November 16, 1951, that the “milestone” (the book that was always waiting to be written) had been passed, but that in a couple ofyears he would have to write the sequel! (SLL, 431). To complete this survey of the origins of East of Eden in the mind ofits writer, we might note the coming-together of ele ments of this discussion in Steinbeck’s final presentation, for Christmas 1951, of the manuscript of East of Eden to Pat Co vici—— in a box carved out ofsolid mahagony by Steinbeck himself: Well here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it and it is not full. All pain and excitement is in it and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts — the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation. (SLL, 433)

It is a book which, he insists later to Carlton Sheffield, was "care fully planned,” including the more incredible aspects of the character Cathy (SLL, 459). But having finished it, however or ganic or preplanned its design, Steinbeck finds he is now out of contact with the West Coast; he is anxious to avoid being tied to a facility oftechnique (SLL, 495, 497, 499). Talk ofa sequel even tually ceases, and before long the Steinbecks are living at Sag Harbor. I think that, in a way, that sequel came to be written, and that it was The Winter of Oar Diseontent. East of Eden is Steinbeck’s book of changes. I intend the phrase to denote the coming—together of those lines of develop ment which have been described above, making the novel a rec ord of human growth —— whatever its merits. Those who admire the earlier Steinbeck and find sympathy with the theoretical underpinnings of the works of that first period do not always demonstrate the same capacity for growth; indeed, as Steinbeck confides to Toby Street in ]uly 1955, Ed Ricketts might not have been able to accommodate such a transition: “I’ve often thought that if he hadn’t been killed he would have had a miserable time of it because I do not think he could have accepted change. In himself, I mean” (SLL, 506). But ]ohn Steinbeck could: as late as 1968, confessing himself unable to say what a novel is, he writes a tongue-in—cheek letter to Elizabeth Otis in which he acknowledges the power ofthe wish: “ ‘What is’ cannot compete with what we want it to be” (SLL, 833). The conclusion seems to be that one must own up at last to the reality of metaphysics, to the power of should and might. For a man who let his name go out over a much—quoted paragraph on “is” — thinking, and whose final hero himself debates the accuracy of the equation derived from Boodin ofthe laws ofthought and the laws ofthings, it was a long way to have come: nearly all the way home again. Compared with Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975), the earlier-issued journal of a Novel (1969) seems relatively (and surprisingly) infertile territory; rather, its letters to Pat Covici serve to confirm the impressions already gleaned from the fuller volume, yet might not be capable of creating that impression themselves were a reader to consult the journal alone. It is not difficult to theorize about this difference. Most apparently, Steinbeck would seem to have long since sublimated his per sonal anguishes into the work—in—progress that was to become East of Eden; one therefore looks in vain for new intimations of the author’s state of mind on the journal pages, for they are simultaneously appearing on the pages of the novel itself invisible gestures of writing that are transferred by a clever ma chine, as it were, to another locus. Might it not be too radical to suggest that the journal ofa Novel and East ofEden do in fact constitute a single work, exactly as written? Not only has the new novel been long in the planning stage, Steinbeck writes Covici, but he had first “planned it when he didn’t know what it was about" yet — and “developed a lan guage for it" that is consequently now quite useless. Yet only now, with the pain of the past few years behind him, could he write it; the "selfness” that “nourishes" bitterness is gone at last. “In a sense it will be two books — the story ofmy county and the story of me. And I shall keep these two separate" (]N, 3). The form was not meant to be “startling”; but whatever else can be said of the novel’s finished structure, its deliberate fusion of stylistically and materially differing narratives is clearly in tended by the author, just as certainly as he had anticipated the objections that would follow. This doubling, or mirroring, is to be reinforced at several levels within the work. Dedicated to his two sons, Steinbeck’s double-narrative will tell “the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness” — the “inseparable,” mutually-dependent pairings out of which "cre ativeness” is bom. And this book — "perhaps . . . the only book he has ever written,) — will be ]ohn Steinbeck’s attempt to ex press the “awareness” that these doublings have fostered in him. No “tricks” will be needed; the book will establish its own style. In other words, its artistry will result from the same sort of cre ative antagonism (if not synthesis) of forces as have shaped the vision of its author (]N, 4-6). He would like to create “a universal family living next to a universal neighbor,” though plans for a strict alternation of chap ters —— and for the continuation ofthe epistolary motif- are soon abandoned (]N, 7-8): the book is growing around its author-- to use an image he might have approved of- like the shell of a chambered nautilus. “A kind of unconsciousness” takes over as he writes; it is like a dream of sex (]N, 9-11). It would seem that Steinbeck experienced a form of erotic excitement from the writing ofEast of Eden that can only be explained as the plea sure of a total and imaginative sexuality — the release accom panying a mutual surrender, and thus a passion. His “most complicated,” "most simple sounding book" would be a “history” — a book of apparent “fom1lessness” that is in fact a leisurely working-out, an organic growing (]N, 14, 17). Geography (its specifics, that is) are only initially important, for it is ultimately a book about people, ifnot in quite the usual sense (]N, 15). Steinbeck is so immersed in the story of these other people, however, that he can hardly “see out of it,” and scarcely is able to think about himself apart from it; so much is this the case that he can identify the remaining term of his life with the time needed to finish the work, and not be dismayed by the pos sibility (]N, 19). “But in this book I am in it and I don’t for a mo ment pretend not to be”; the book is thus a vehicle for all he is, and each of its chapters is a “cell” (]N, 24-25). This book will not please the "expecters,” for while it will use “symbol people” as characters, the symbols will not be mere overlay in a realistic — or naturalistic — unfolding of events; rather, there will be "a semblance of real experience,” "the trap pings of experience,” to “clothe” the symbols (]N, 26-27). The book as well “lacks tension,” but by design; comparing its pacing to that of Moby—Dick, he promotes the likelihood of in ference as to its intended “epic” quality (in Brecht’s sense) (]N, 29). Thus his method enables him to describe Cathy, that peculiar “monster,” directly; nothing is lost because no matter how much is revealed, there will still be “the great covered thing" (]N, 41-43). Hence the book’s deliberate lengthiness: to baffle, disorient, and ultimately force into new patterns ofthought those people who are committed to “facts” (]N, 66). Ifthe book is equated with a pattern ofideas on the one hand, it is equated with its setting on the other. And the two are one. The "mood ofthe Valley” is his starting point; it is a place where "people dominate the land, gradually. They strip it and rob it" (]N, 31, 39). Not merely the Trasks, but "the whole Valley” is/are the story — “a microcosm of the whole nation.” “It is almost the autobiography of the Valley” (]N, 65). When the reader is finish ed with it, “he will actually be a native of that Valley” (]N, 61). Thus size and length and commentary are appropriate to this novel in which idea equals Valley equals people equals nation equals book. And the book equals ]ohn Steinbeck. “Plans are daydream ing and this is an absolute measure of a man,” says Steinbeck, affirming his belief that one can know a man by knowing the plans he makes (]N, 74). It takes no stretching ofthe point to con clude that for Steinbeck, this most planned of his novels is most genuinely his portrait of the artist as a mature man. Nor is this final unit in Steinbeck’s series of equations merely an example of clever word—play, something all artists are apt to affirm in the abstract- but are considerably less able to demonstrate in the concrete. It is his way ofcoming to grips with the problem ofthe self of keeping the ego at bay, which is so evident a concern in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Steinbeck even wonders whether he has “monster blood,” resembling Cathy as he does in the sense that he lacks certain basic human characteristics, such as domination, possessiveness, the desire for immortality, and competitiveness (]N, 83, 89). And in an even more striking way, Steinbeck lacks a major quality of humanity at large: I refer to the will to live. I have very little of it. This must not be con fused with a death wish. I have no will to die but I can remember no time from earliest childhood until this moming when I would not have preferred never to have existed. No moment of joy or excitement or Sham €Xp€I`I€I'IC€ of pain OI` SOITOW has €V€Il I`H3.d€ HIE want to be 3.llV€ if the opposite were possible. You see it is no longing for death but a kind ofhunger never to have lived. (]N, 89)

And perplexed by the mystery ofa parent’s sin that leads to "love and death,” he dedicates his book to his own two sons, boys much on his mind as he confronts the theme of Cain and Abel, and with it the further mystery of how "Cain invented murder and he is punished by life and protection. The mark put on him is not placed there to punish him but to protect him" (]N, 90-91). In wondering if he is not indeed all the people he is writing about, Steinbeck confesses his direct involvement in the tragic mutuality of opposites he found in Genesis: love and death; punishment by life and protection (]N, 92). We are left trying to cope with issues about which Stein beck, whatever his eventual degree of understanding, was him self relatively reticent — or allusive, if we read the fiction and the letters properly. But a greater certitude may arise only when we possess a reliable biography — if then! Yet as East of Eden unfolded on those right-hand ledger pages, Steinbeck’s thoughts retumed to his own origins in clashing traits of Hamilton and Steinbeck, and to whatever Fall lurked within those distant days." . . . the Salinas Valley is surely East of Eden,” he muses in choosing his eventual title (]N, 104); and although the book is meant to be universal, and therefore not “about” Salinas at all, we are left with the inescapable fact that Steinbeck’s origins struck him as the perfect metaphor for a post-Edenic state. His father, he tells Covici, was a silent, unmusical man, whose “rest lessness. . . sometimes filled the house to a howling. . .” “Clever ness only confused him," and yet it was this father who backed Steinbeck’s “struggle to be a writer,” not his mother. Having himself“abandoned his star in little duties,” his father “admired anyone who laid down his line and followed it undeflected to “ the end.” Though his mother wanted Steinbeck to be some thing decent like a banker,” his father only wanted him to be himself:

To be anything pure requires an arrogance he did not have, and a self ishness he could not bring himself to assume. He was a man intensely disappointed in himself. And I think he liked the complete ruthless ness of my design to be a writer in spite of mother and hell. Anyway he was the encourager. Mother always thought I would get over it and come to my senses. And the failure of all the Hamiltons might be that they came to their senses. (]N, 103)

In discussing Tom Hamilton’s "strange and rather sweet” sac rifice, Steinbeck admits, "I guess the Hamiltons were all nuts, just as my father said.” “Deep in Tom,” he dreams at length of his own "paralysis and death" (]N, 106). Simultaneously deep

10 into his inquiry after the correct translation of Timshelf, he writes of the “high-strung bunch, the Hamiltons,” that they were probably as crazy as his father had always said they were and so, he guesses, is he (]N, 109). Is it not possible, indeed like ly, that Steinbeck perceived his personal Cain-ness to lie in being condemned to life in some mid-kingdom between the sane but failed father’s encouragement and his involvement in the Hamilton craziness, “mother and hell” I think so. East of Eden would become, as his letters al ready referred to suggest, an act of exorcism of private poisons, personal woes. “Elaine is sometimes called E and so signs her name .... ” He thinks of the book as "E" (]N, 118), he reports; that “E” will reconcile all those conflicting, love-hate As and Cs. So that the author can at last fade into the paper: The book is a thing in itself and it is not me. There is no ego in it. Iam glad that you sense that while I am in it and of it, I am not the book. It is much more than I am. (]N, 125)

And things are under control at last: the book’s last stages are a progress towards softening, towards reconciliations. He can create and manage a scene from his own past, one in which his father had tried to make a cheerful Christmas for his invalid mother; and meanwhile, the box to hold the finished MS for Pat was nearing completion (]N, 141-42). He will tell the reader where he stands in this book (]N, 170); presumably, he has in vested too much of himself to take chances. What else can we call this working-through but something glib, something dis ingenuously paradoxical, like love-hate, for instance? Yin and yang, and balance; he had found it in his life, and the book would relfect the anguish which brought thatbalance into being. It does. And so to East of Eden. As we might by now expect, it is a novel which dramatizes the conflict existent within the author himself, a book with a "great covered thing" in it that might trap the reader just as it had embodied the writer. If Steinbeck con ceives the moral dilemma he portrays as being primarily a male’s burden, then he correspondingly represents the dilemma itself in female terms — as source of “sin,” as catalyst, as “monster.’ Sexuality functions, therefore, not merely as simplistically as it does in theatre — as the union of opposing forces out ofwhich a dramatic synthesis, a child, emerges — but as a warring ofcon— flicting urges within each individual: as, in other words, the polarities of character between which every individual must make his Cain-like choices towards redemption. Because he may. This is not yet the time and place to make those detailed speculations about the novel’s structure and philosophical car go that will make full use of the relationships between what Steinbeck has said in his letters and the clues available in the

11 novel itself. However, there are intimations we ought not t0 ig nore in reaching certain initial conclusions. Steinbeck’s refer ences to “covered” meanings in the novel are tallied by Adam’s suspicion that his brother Charles’ letter contains such a "cov ered meaning”; that letter reveals its author gradually surren dering to an almost panic at his inability to understand the failure of the Cyrus-Adam-Charles triangle to manifest itself in clarity and justice (EE, 36). Exactly what the "covered thing” in Stein beck’s own thinking — which may or may not correspond with whatever was lurking in Charles’ letter — was, we may never know; but it seems logical to presume that both are connected with the presence within Steinbeck’s “Everyman” characters, including himself, of the contradictions which, if not maintained in some sort of balance of forces, lead to monstrosity of person ality. ]ust as Cathy’s lying resembled the telling of stories by a " successful writer in that it became "a device for profit or escape (EE, 74), perhaps East of Eden itself was a means of hiding a way a dilemma by bringing it out into the open, or seeming to. For like Steinbeck, Cathy was able to “hold two opposing thoughts at the same time” (EE, 474); indeed, that ability is one of the sources of her power over other, more Andersonian-gro tesque, individuals. What she does not possess, however, is the belief that she is free to choose the good, and that it is important that she do so. Thus she excludes herself from humanity — a point to be reconsidered and amplified later — whereas her creator presumably sublimates his tendencies towards mon strosity by means of artistic expression/disguise, by positive ad herence to the Timshel! principle, and by the exercise of that principle. It becomes extremely important, therefore, to note that at the moment of her suicide Cathy/Kate retreats into a di minished consciousness that finally terminates in the state Steinbeck admits to having cherished for himself; ". . . she grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared —— and she had never been” (EE, 554). For as much as Steinbeck desired precisely that condition more than anything life could offer him, he utterly refused to take the means available to bring it about: his acts re mained life-oriented, and his big Salinas Valley novel was to be the repudiation for others of the course of action which The Winter of Our Discontent was to dramatize him as repudiating for himself. We have examined some tentative suggestions as to the role Elaine Steinbeck — and her daughter — may have come to play in these final novels: hope, futurity, in female guise. Certainly Abra is such a presence here, and though I shall return to her elsewhere at greater length, let me draw attention here to Lee’s giving Abra “a small carved ebony box” bearing the figure ofa dragon climbing “toward heaven,” and containing “a small, dark 12 green jade button” — on the surface of which was carved "a human right hand, a lovely hand, the fingers curved and in re pose.” In a novel in which attention is drawn to Abra’s lovely hands, as well as to the disfigured hands of Cathy, we cannot ignore the young girl’s instinctive lifting ofthe carved button, her moistening it with the tip ofher tongue and her gentle moving ofit over "her full lips,” and her pressing ofits cool shape “against her cheek” (EE, 584). It is the sort of sensual-spiritual — mystical, in other words — gesture by which Steinbeck’s possessors of saving grace affirm the fact, like Ellen Hawley still to come. But the ultimate inclination of East of Eden is towards a male-depicted, existential Now. Small wonder; for in such a sense does it enact the present tense of Steinbeck’s striving, the drama of his self. Throughout a lifetime of writing third-person fiction, john Steinbeck had resisted the temptation to moralize, but he had done so at the cost of a sundering of spirit and sub stance. The price of his apparent objectivity was a mistaken reputation as a naturalist, however impressive the achieve ments. The strength of that reputation must therefore have seemed the more tentative, given the evident desire ofthe older man to make his intentions clear. And now the various factors contributing to the healing of that psychic breach also enabled him to represent himself directly for perhaps the first time since the days of Cup (pf Gold: rather diffidently, as Pippin; far more severely, as Ethan Allen Hawley; but most ambitiously, as the vocal prism that is East of Eden itself. Certainly there would be no further need for that stalking-horse, his friend Ed Ricketts; for Burning Bright and Sweet Thursday are to the Doctor what the present book is to the author, in reverse. The arbitrary — that is, artificial, artifice—ial — ramming-together of differing literary styles, still apparent in East of Eden even after revision gentled much ofthe original plan, can only be justified as the organic ex tension of the authorial personality, for only in that personage (who is and is not the book, as he variously admitted) is any unity achieved. It is as ifthe cast ofT0 a God Unkown were to wander onto the Pastures of Heaven and set up their peculiarly mythical household. The mix is startling; its success in doubt. We have scarcely learned to cope with it. (judging by the criticism to date, perhaps we never shall.) And one thing is certain: he knew what he wanted. And he got it. Relentless experimenter, he fused together multiple styles: that of his expository prose (the commentator voice that introduces sections, generalizes, and creates con texts); the similar voice that is used to recount the saga of the Hamiltons (and which begins to surface as an “I” — though one still contained in “we” —— only near the end, when a Steinbeck

13 only slightly younger himself recalls a season he had shared, co existed in, with his scarcely-elders, Cal and Aron Trask); and the elevated, rather mannered, even somewhat theatrical, ex pressionistic voice ofmuch ofthe Trask material- soaring when and as it does into a rarer, philosophical articulation in which the epiphany of Timshelf puts an end to strict determinism. It is as though Steinbeck had deputized himself to draw the cur tain on an era of literature, many seem to assume he is still be hind that curtain, captive. He is not. He fooled us with a daring mix that could only work in a “big” novel, ifthen; and East of Eden was born big in the imagi nation of its author. Though its blend of voices might almost seem to beg italics for a greater clarity — like some of Faulkner’s novels — it might be fairer to drive home the fact of what the book imposes on the reader: a forced montage of sounds; a vocal equivalent of a 3-D motion picture. It is a kind of confessional novel: what I called above a portrait ofthe self. It/he says: at half a century old, I have purged myself of the bitterness that made me suspicious of the self the “I”; you see before you the com posite ofa real past (a history oflimited, imaginative Hamiltons) and a fictional present (a fable of newly freed, try-task Trasks); I am whole, entire, and integral, and know that art and life alike depend on lonely anguish, solitary effort. Compared to never having been, it is the next best thing. It is assertion ofthe selfand its negation, all at once. And by it, the inseparability of past and present is demonstrated, as well as the reliance of the future on the meld ofboth. Background and fore ground, Valley and man; conflict of parent became conflict of self, the drama re-enacted in each single and creative act . But not so clearly until East of Eden.

14 II. Outside of Paradise: Men and the Land in East of Eden

For ]ohn Steinbeck as much as for certain other American writers of fiction — such as William Faulkner, Willa Cather, and Robert Penn Warren — the relationship of individual characters to something which (for want of a more specific term) can be called "Nature” becomes the index of their personal worth, the graphs on which their human development- or lack ofit — can be traced. It is this correspondence between Nature and "vir ture" (in the older sense of the word) to which I now intend to give consideration at some length, for I believe that in East of Eden Steinbeck attained a height of sophistication in the usage of this device which he consistently used throughout his novel istic career. Given the anthropomorphic qualities ofthe California land scape, moreover, it is hardly surprising that a California writer should tend to create fictional echoes of Indian religions (that is, in this instance, North American Indian) in his work — much as Robinson ]effers, Frank Norris, and others have done. Nor is it surprising that an American writer of any origin whatever, writing for the general literary audience before, say, 1950, would make use of Nature for straightening out his creations, list of moral imperatives — much as Huck Finn did for himself when ever he instinctively retreated to the woods to think, or as the real-life (but scarcely less "created”) Henry David Thoreau did in his pondside shack within the city limits of Concord, Mass. Yet Steinbeck’s participation in these recognizably Californian, American, activities is, as I have said above, distinctive and sophisticated, especially in East 0fEden, and for that reason I should like to examine it further from this chosen perspective with an eye to making it a kind of key to the value ofthe Nature presence in Steinbeck’s overall output. In a sense, the meaning of Nature in the broadest sense is also the domain of the word "TimsheZ!” — for the supposed Biblical injunction to do good, to “rule,” whether as command or as reassurance of capacity, is in fact a divinely official approving ofthe imposition ofhuman intelligence and force ofwill over an unruled, unruly Nature: the realm of mere moral possibility. It is therefore a question of techniques, of attitudes, of means; the moral worth of every individual human being can be measured, Steinbeck says in East ofEden and elsewhere, upon the scale of

15 the right use of Nature’s gifts, including his own raw capacity for positive attainment. And yet it is, of course, precisely in the area of imposition of will upon Nature that mankind’s greatest capacity for evil evidences itself This dilemma is the drama of East of Eden. just such an imposition is reflected in the opening pages of the novel, wherein the attachment first by Spaniards, and then by Americans, of their own distinctive place names to locales within the Valley is cited; it is the initial and crude response to the vision of the simple capacity for change, for "improving,” that the Valley summons up in its viewers — rather like the opening of the not-dissimilar The Pastures of Heaven. Similarly, the dual possibilities of good and evil, life and death, which the Valley affords its onlookers, its potential settlers, are emphasized by the contrast of moods associated with the two opposed moun tain ranges: the "light gay mountains" to the east, suggesting as they do a “brown grass love,” a maternal welcome, birth, and morning; and the "dark and brooding” peaks to the west, which intimate the "unfriendly and dangerous', sentiments, death, and night. It is rather like the contrast drawn between the same mountains in The Red Pony; but East of Eden goes on to flesh out its opening with an extremely full catalogue of animals and plants, place names and peoples. The Valley is thus introduced more or less as the central character might be — like Mother Russia in a Chekhov play, a Dostoevsky novel — and dimen sioned out in all directions, especially in terms of time (with the recital of Nature’s cycles). And finally, the dependence of man on Nature’s changes is included in this description which pos sesses the epical amplitude of an older literature: The wind whistled over the settlements in the afternoon, and the farm ers began to set out mile-long windbreaks of eucalyptus to keep the plowed topsoil from blowing away. And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City. (EE, 7)

In this novel ofcarefully delineated human predicaments, there fore, the opening pages are devoted to a theatrical setting that is more than simply that; in East of Eden, setting interacts with character, and in the end defines it. There is a special irony, then, in the presentation ofthe first ofthe novel’s characters, the Steinbeck-ancestral figure, Samuel Hamilton. For Samuel is a great lover of the soil, and yet he has chosen poor land on which to settle; although he is by the yard stick of Nature a good and wise man — one whose influence pervades the novel, lasting long after the man himself is gone, and in a sense providing a positive counterpart to the Munroe family (they of the "baby curses”) in The Pastures of Heaven

16 his lot in life is destined by that choice to be poverty and frustra tion. When Samuel made drawings, plans of"work he intended to do with iron or wood,” he decorated their edges with “other drawings, sometimes trees, sometimes faces or animals or bugs, sometimes just figures that you couldn’t make out at all. And these caused men to laugh with embarrassed uneasiness.” Ifin time it was clear that “Samuel belonged to the valley, and it was proud of him in the way a man who owns a peacock is proud,” that fact was not always so, and it did not alter the essential “fail ure" ofthe man in terms ofthe settlers, success ethic (EE, 39). Be cause people settled the Valley not as they had learned to do in Europe, taking only a minimal portion of good land, here they “took up worthless land just to own it,” becoming "rat-poor” as a result. Like the coyotes, such persons "lived clever, despairing, submarginal lives"; yet “the families did survive and grow” (EE, 12): But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected them selves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units — because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. (EE, 12)

We remember that Steinbeck is toying with Genesis here, and for him to establish the Hamiltons as the sort of people who responded to adverse circumstances with the sort of “courage and dignity” that ennobled God as their source of strength is to suggest that in the Valley, as in America generally, not all land constituted an Eden, and not all settlers therefore responded to their lot with the Adamic vision that made for a tragic potential, the success and failure of great dreaming. Samuel Hamilton, of the “good and gentle” hands, is an agent ofNature who can help with a childbirth, or a birth of any sort, because "he was equally good with mare, cow, or woman.” Perhaps it is better to describe Samuel -— the type from which the author himself springs — as one ofthose who never lost their Eden, never having been there in the first place, but who accomplished their own salvation by lesser means — by coping as if agents of Nature herself with the slender means afforded them, neither complaining nor reaching towards more grandiose attainments (EE, 8-10, 39). Ifthis distinc tion of types of character should be sustained, therefore, our weighing ofthe novel’s structure must be substantially affected thereby. For if some have sought Eden and lost it, there are others who never had the chance; and the interaction of the two might well be said to constitute a balance: a mutual-assistance pact between the owners (and the dispossessed) and the freer spirits, those who relate to Nature in their inner selves, and not through paper title.

17 We might expect, therefore, the involvement of these lovers of Nature who do not possess her to be direct, concrete, while that of the others might “naturally” express itself in metaphor, and thus by indirection. Small wonder, then, that the Trask ad venture expresses itself by different tonal means — by poetry of a sort, rather than solid Hamilton prose. It is this admixture of differing styles that is probably at the base ofmost readers, nega tive comments, when they have occurred, for the resultant novel must of necessity look like a clumsy and inadvertent mix, a slip page of technique. Not so, I hope to show. For Hamilton prose suits Hamilton existence, and the poetry of Trask bespeaks a literary, a poetic claim on life — no matter how far east of Eden it be lived. And if we remember Steinbeck’s recollection of the Hamiltons as imaginative but constrained by practicality, then the reversal of values inherent in their dramatizing here be comes a part ofthe pattern ofoppositions which is East ofEden. Then we must consider Adam Trask:

While many people came to the Salinas Valley penniless, there were others who, having sold out somewhere else, arrived with money to start a new life. These usually bought land, but good land, and built their houses of planed lumber and had carpets and colored-glass dia mond panes in their windows. There were numbers of these families and they got the good land of the valley and cleared the yellow mustard away and planted wheat. Such a man was Adam Trask. (EE, 12-13)

So that while others made the best of what was never productive enough soil, there were those who misused what was best or did not use it at all. "Such a man was Adam Trask,” and also his progeny. The pattern of Nature-metaphors as means of characterizing the Trasks begins at once; for example, Adam sees his half brother Charles "as a bright being ofanother species, gifted with muscle and bone, speed and alertness, quite on a different plane, to be admired as one admires the sleek lazy danger of a black leopard], It would no more occur to him to confide in Charles than to "share his thoughts with a lovely tree or a pheasant in f1ight." Adam envies his dead mother, who (he does not know) has drowned herself out of shame, held her head beneath the water of a shallow pond by shear force of will; if he could learn what her crime had been (there was none), he reckons, “why, he would sin it too —— and not be here.” He stalks his foster—mother, Alice, the way he had “the woodchucks on the knoll,” so as to spy upon her when, thinking herselfunobserved, “she permitted her mind to play in a garden." And when Adam takes to leaving her little presents she does not expect, each time “the garden smile flashed and disappeared the way a trout crosses a knife of sun shine in a pool" (EE, 21-22). 18 One sees in these few passages consistent strands of Nature imagery displaying themselves. Nature is used to describe the detached power of the dangerous brother Charles, and also the death urge of the absent mother figure —— who has, by incredible force of will, returned to Nat11re’s womb and by that act accom plished what must have been Adam’s wish, would be Cathy’s wish, and was Steinbeck’s too — never to have been. Alice is, on the other hand, a figure associated with secret pleasures in Na ture — elfin and delicate. And as for Adam himself, he lives between the brother’s force and the foster—mother’s grace, and he feels all the while the impulse towards extinction, extinguish ment, instinctively, he retires "secretly” to a "sheltered place behind a stump that he knew well” out in the woodlot, there to settle “deep between the protecting roots" (EE, 21). The Edenic innocence of Alice, which is called a kind of nakedness, entices the boy, prone as he is to regression into obscurity and littleness, hiding from discovery by his God-figure like the guilty Adam in the Garden. Yet his simple desire to please cannot protect him in the world ofthe knowledge of good and evil, nor can he in fact cope with the implications of that world’s terrible gift. Most importantly, all these parts of the formula of plot being set forth in these first few pages are dependent upon, concerned with, and expressed in terms of Nature and her properties. As I have said, it is the poetic movement in a plot which also has its history, its Hamiltons, its facts. Adam sees "out of the long tunnels of his eyes" (EE, 21) towards a world he cannot understand; when he has been beaten by his brother, he learns from his father ofthe need to develop or rediscover — protective instincts, capacities for actions like ‘the way a bee makes honey or a fox dips his paws in a stream to fool dogs.” His father Cyrus plans to make him join the Army, so that by surrendering his humanity he will learn to survive becoming in the process part of a "machine” that is “trium phantly illogical” (EE, 25). And out ofthat surrender to illogic what in other Steinbeckian parlance is called the world of the herd-man — will come "a reason and a logic and a kind of dread ful beauty.” And having descended into "the common slough,° one can rise into “a holy joy, a companionship almost like that ofa heavenly company of angels” (EE, 26). And having said this much, Adam’s father tells him that he has known about his hiding place all along. Again, along with the mythic patterning familiar from Genesis and the conscious echoes of Yeats’ “terrible beau ty” and The Red Badge of Courage, we have the old story of the need to be fully human: that is, composed of angel and animal both — and in an harmonic combination in which neither ele ment dominates the other to the point of distortion. Cyrus’s sort of transcendentalism is that of Lucifer —-— the temptation to throw

19 off humanity for a godlike, disembodied perfectness that is both chilling and fatal. For if Charles’s attempt to kill Adam makes one brother resemble a “run-out dog" and causes “the instinc tive fear and fierceness ofa rat” in the other, that is but one of the polarities of evil available (EE, 25-28, 3I). The other polarity is the father’s path, the purging of human emotions in the name ofa frigid purity. Placed by his father in the Army, Adam sees firsthand the results of the herd—man’s attainments:

By this time the Indian fighting had become like dangerous cattle drives — the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen remnants settled on starvation lands. It was not nice work but, given the pattern of the country’s development, it had to be done. (EE, 35)

But not by Adam, who feels rising up within him an “emotion” of nonviolence that causes him to act with conspicuous bravery, yet keeps him from actually doing injury to any enemy. To the extent that these same Indians, being driven like cattle onto reservations, were the bearers of the culture which accepts Na ture without the accompanying attempt to alter it, their reduction is itself a destructive attack upon Nature. If Cyrus — with his commander-king’s name — is Adam’s God-the-Father figure, he is also a bit ofa Fascist: he sounds like the Nazi types in The Moon Is Down. And if the practical result of his ]ehovahism is, as in the Old Testament, approval of genocide, then Steinbeck’s tongue—in—cheek reference to the necessity of “the pattern of the country’s development" makes clear the real identity of that macrocosm for which Adam’s actions may take on a larger mean ing. Such a “pattern,” such a divine plan, and My Lais become logical and moral necessities in the scheme of manifest destiny, of “saving” the world by destroying it. It is perhaps a bit like lending Messianic purpose to First-Person firepower. Steinbeck seems to yoke the case at hand with the national purpose, and in questioning the one he also questions the other. And lastly, the novel’s ending is being foreshadowed here: Adam’s blessing upon Cal is not imposed upon the novel at all, but is the response to an existential situation preconditioned by behavior in his past: the habit of making right decisions, of recognizing ethical im peratives within the context of ethical freedom. In effect, he recognizes himself in his son. Steinbeck’s method of proceeding, then, is by the parallel and alternating advancement of his double plots — until the point where, for all practical purposes, they merge. Until that point, however, he largely continues the distinction between direct and metaphorical portrayal of character through allusion to Nature. Returning to the Hamiltons, then, he ironically de scribes Tom as living “in a world shining and fresh and as unin 2O spected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surround ed him, he plunged right through it and out.” The description rare metaphors and all- is ironic because Tom has no real chance at living in Eden; the paradise being described is the imaginary one of his father’s library. More realistically, he is deeply af fected by the death of his dog, and has the combination of sym pathy, courage, and instinctual knowledge to sever with his pocketknife a membrane causing a speech impediment in his younger sister Mollie (EE, 40-41). Another brother, quite lost in the world ofimagining, is ]oe; so poor is he at riding a horse and at farming generally that he becomes, in effect, a family charge. He even bungled a try at sheepherding, managing to lose his flock of sixty animals (EE, 41-42). But the other children could lend a hand when necessary, thanks to having occupations not land-related; so that while the Hamilton ranch was never any thing but poor, the family that lived there could be called “a good firm—grounded family, permanent, and successfully planted in the Salinas Valley . . .” (EE, 44). Advancing the Trask plot, on the other hand, Steinbeck has Charles receive a scar on his forehead, his mark of Cain, from an accident on his farm — almost as iffrom Nature herself. Trying to remove a large rock from a field with a crowbar (that is, at tempting to impose his will upon Nature), Charles accidentally gives himself what looks like “a long fingermark laid on his fore head,” a scar which, he writes to Adam, looks “like somebody marked me like a cow” (EE, 47). Though this mark is thematically related to his father’s Ahab-like leg injury, it does not keep Charles from enthusiastically trying to serve his land as the most excellent of farmers (EE, 54). Meanwhile, Adam is wander ing the country as a bindlestiff, living off Nature as he learns to live with It/Her; as such, he is part ofa fraternity who are "broth ers to the coyote which, being wild, lives close to man and his chickenyards: they were near towns but not in thern.” (EE, 56). Escaping from a Florida prison road gang, he learns to live off the land, and to use the rain and the dark for cover. Adam, who had given his father a valueless puppy and who, as favorite son, returns home on news of his father’s death after an ironic term as a wanderer, then feels an enormous relief; Charles, who loved his father without discernible return of that affection, reacts to Adam’s state by becoming the confused brute in his failure to understand the situation: he protests with "fierceness,” and his brother says he is walking around the issue "like a terrier around a bush,” about to be bitten by the worry itself (EE, 56-59, 63-64). Charles, who gave his father a knife, a weapon for taming and altering Nature, cannot stop thinking about that worthless pup 21 his brother gave Cyrus, and the strain ofhis obsession makes him dog—like in his frenzy. Even the distressing possibility that Cyrus made his fortune dishonestly serves to separate the brothers: Adam, freed, goes off to California while his brother stays at home and broods. And then there is Cathy! If there are physical monsters in the world, misshapen beings once “considered the visible pun ishments for concealed sins,” then whose concealed sin might have caused Cathy, the "psychic monster” with the “malformed soul”? In Steinbeck’s portrayal of Cathy, there is an evident dis tinction between the imagery used to describe Cathy’s innocent seeming appearance to the outside world (at least initially) and that employed to delineate her real state. These distinctions are merged in the first, authorial description of her physical appearance: she has a tiny mouth, lobeless ears, small and deli cate hands, and breasts that are scarcely there — with nipples that are even turned inward; this incompleteness makes her seem frail, helpless, and sweet to those who have not felt the effects of her cunning. Her prettiness thus operates “as though nature concealed a trap,” for she is an “inner monster.” Though she has a "boy’s body,” both men and women are strangely at tracted to her. Yet her feet, "small and round and stubby,” are iialmost like little h0ofs.’* If there is only this single specific clue, apart from her apparent sexlessness, to her devilish nature, Steinbeck may be trying to persuade us that the devil in our Eden is merely what he calls Cathy — a “variation,” to whom others in turn seem “monstrous.” Learning that sexuality is a drive by which others can be manipulated — but that society forces its earliest expressions into the mold of furtive behavior in secret recesses in Nature — Cathy begins to treat sex as a sale able commodity, though no adult can quite believe what she is up to (EE, 72-78). Cathy’s life is a long withdrawal from it; early on, she is found avidly reading Alice in Wonderland, presumably already wanting to emulate its heroine in growing smaller and smaller and finally vanishing into Nature as if she never were. She es capes from home by means of a murder plot in the execution of which she slays a chicken for its blood, yet she arouses no real suspicion on her disappearance. “Cathy left a scent of sweetness behind her” (EE, 89). With her “cat smile,” she enters into a career that is a series of merciless exploitations of male weak nesses; only alcohol causes her to tell the horrible truth about herself, and the result is a near fatal beating to which Nature is an oblivious witness (EE, 92-99). Like the bartender Adam en counters during his wanderings, the man called “Cat” with a birthmark on his forehead (EE, 48-49), this Cat/Cathy/Kate also bears the mark of Nature’s disapproval, but the scar is psychic at least until her beating. 22 At that point, she tums up at the farm of the Trask brothers. Though Adam notices the scar that she has acquired on her own forehead, only Charles seems to understand its significance: she and Charles study each other, and Cathy feels a tie between them as she watches him rubbing at his own forehead scar (EE, 111, 115-16). When Charles calls her a "devil," Cathy accepts the name with laughter. “That makes two of us,” she tells him (EE, 117). When Cathy seems to confide in Adam, he looks out over the land where he sees his brother again struggling with the sort of burden — a large stone — which caused his own scar ring; and Adam is deceived into a heightened awareness of Nature — the clouds rolling in, the sounds of the chickens cack— ling and the wind blowing, the pounding of a horse’s hooves and the sound ofa barn being shingled; even visual elements take on extra emphasis — and feels that there has suddenly been "a change in everything. A flight of sparrows dropped into the dust and scrabbled for bits of food and then flew off like a gray scarf twisting in the light.” It all becomes “a kind of music” he thinks he hears, and he responds by starting to “hum a droning little tune" (EE, 119-20). And so he proposes to her, Yet Adam has misinterpreted Nature, so bemused by the unfamiliar pres ence of this monster is he, for she denies her relationship to him at once, preferring to drug her husband in order to give her body to his brother —— on their wedding day. Steinbeck pauses at this point to ally Cathy’s flight and its resultant effects on Adam with the changes taking place in the society at large: it is the watershed year 1900, and the United States enters the new century accompanied by the conscious ness ofa loss ofinnocence, a disillusionment, and a nostalgia for what had been left behind. You can’t find a good stone for throw ing any more; and if the country has expanded enormously through the satisfaction of its controlling impulse, land greed, it has left an ache for what once was: "Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!” (EE, 129-30). It is as if the country itself were being brought up to date along with the twin plots of Hamilton and Trask, as though it too were something of the race of Cain, de stroying Eden in the pursuit ofit. Chapter 13 begins with a kind of sermon, the counterploy to the expression of national malaise just concluded; an individual, Steinbeck says, can feel “a kind of glory” that “lights up the mind of a man.” Its signs are the heightened presence of Nature in her sights and smells within his consciousness; its expression is creativity. Through it, “a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not dimin ished.” Then follows the sermon proper — the strong defense of the “preciousness” of "the lonely mind ofa man" against the forces that would, especially in our day, restrict that mind’s creative freedom (EE, 131-32). 23 Against the freedom of the individual mind are arrayed the evil things that breed in each man’s darker self- the “secret pond" we may all have “where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.” When this "swimming brood" is able to “swim free” in certain men in whom it waxes particularly strong, “our monster" is the result; ". . . are we not related to him in our hid den water?” Steinbeck asks. It is in this sense that Steinbeck himself could speak of having “monster blo0d,” and thus claim kinship with Cathy. Cathy herself, in whom the “swimming brood” has certainly swum free, is thus such an angel/devil to Charles and Adam that she causes them to express themselves differently according to their perception of her moral intent: Charles goes to a whore, finds himself impotent as a result of Cathy’s influence, and thereafter throws himself with renewed zeal into the betterment of his farm; Adam, deluded into be lieving that Cathy loves him, sets out for California — the Salinas Valley, which promotional literature claimed "heaven unsuc cessfully imitated” (EE, 132-34). Thereupon Adam "drove ex uberantly from farm to farm, picked up dirt and crumbled it in his fingers, talked and planned and dreamed” — for "He was here to settle, to found a home, a family, perhaps a dynasty.’ While Adam is indulging himself in this old Whiteside ego ambition dream, Cathy is trying to abort her child (EE, 134-35). He finds the ideal ranch, a place where "huge live oaks shaded the valley, and the earth had a richness and a greenness foreigr1 to this part of the country.” His self-deception about Cathy causes his life to seem to extend “long and pleasantly ahead of him,” and so he examines the ranch carefully, inquiring per sonally into its flora and fauna and the quality of its earth (EE, 136-37). It is at this point that Steinbeck at last stages the meeting of the Trask and Hamilton plot lines, and of Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask. The dreams of Adam need the practical application of the imaginative and Nature-oriented Samuel, who himself lives on land ofmarked aridity (EE, 138-40). Sam has an intimate knowledge of the Valley’s geology, complete with theories as to its prehistoric past; as his son Will has said, Sam talks to trees when he "can’t find a human vegetable.” In the presence of Adam, Samuel waxes enthusiastic over the Valley’s prospects; Adam briefly plays for Samuel the role which Cathy plays for him — inciter to dreaming —— but by another irony Samuel dreams dreams for other people, not for himself. Yet when a “cloud” comes over his face with further thought, Sam reveals his fear that "there’s a blackness on this valley" — “a black violence” like “some old ghost" out of “the dead ocean below” bearing traces of“hidden sorrow" (EE, 145-46). One notes that Steinbeck has Samuel describing his Edenic Valley in much the same terms 24 as he has described the monster in us all- as having a secret lake of evil beneath that might rise to the surface and trouble all who live there. The monster potential, therefore, can be restated as the potential for paradise: the one lurks within the other. The devil monster creeps within the angel Valley. Again, we have echoes here of the mythic structure of The Pastures of Heaven, presented with a greater fullness, a greater subtlety. “Adam sat like a contented cat on his land,” dreaming his dreams of dynasty. As he gazes out over the rich land he has al ready started to improve, Adam shares the commitment to the future of the men of the West of his day. Steinbeck makes this universal dream ofa vast area in a long era find its encapsulation in the Salinas Valley, which makes onlookers concoct their sun dry schemes for ways to make themselves wealthy — including the idea of shipping produce to market over long distances, and preserved by refrigeration. It is interesting to note that this specific notion is planted in the novel by its author as one of the dreams which the Valley evokes in certain kinds of men, then restated as the idea of Adam’s son Cal — himself already described as someone who feels he must change Nature — and finally becomes the scheme by which Adam loses a consider able portion of his wealth. ]ust at this point in the novel, there fore, when Adam’s New England past is being blotted out by the contemplation of the new landscape, Steinbeck has planted within the book the device that will in time lead to the scene in which Adam, on his deathbed, will move to bless his son. “Con— tentment would flood raging down the valley like the Salinas River in March ofa thirty-inch year,” oh yes, but Samuel Hamil ton, the greatest dreamer ofall, knows better: “There’s a capacity for appetite,’ Samuel said, ‘that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.’ ” Steinbeck’s language and sentence struc ture in this section resembles that of the inter-chapters of The Grapes of Wrath in which he restates the thoughts of great masses of people; quite clearly, he is doing so here as well, for the Salinas Valley is all the West, is all America, westering in fulfillment ofa dream, a destiny, a pattern of extension upon the body of Nature (EE, 156-58, 348-49, 380). But “if Adam rested like a sleek fed cat on his land, Cathy was catlike too. She had the inhuman attribute of abandoning what she could not get and of waiting for what she could get. These two gifts gave her great advantages? "Her self was an is land," we are told, though the line makes us think ofits contrary in Donne; Cathy bears the scar of monstrosity, "like a huge thumbprint,” and we cannot forget that she has been described as directed by impulses that men learn to control in order to maintain their humanity (EE, 159-60). Steinbeck himself, for all

25 his claim to be like Cathy (or his examination ofconscience, trial of self, to learn whether he might be), possessed no island of a self, for he felt that he lacked an outline and that he spilled over into the lives and selves of others. Cathy’s isolation would con stitute the essence of the tragic situation were it accompanied by some degree of self-awareness. Instead, it seems expressible as aloof malice, as selfish manipulation. Between the sleek fed cat and the opportunist feline lies all the difference a metaphor can muster. Conversation brought about by the search for water on Adam’s land helps further distinguish Sam and Adam: the for mer is ironic, wise, willing to comprehend in more than one sense (he speaks ofman’s unwillingness to part with his sins, and says of his water stick that he does not believe in it except that it works); the latter is naive, idealistic, and in search of the im possible (he reminds Samuel that though his name is Adam, he has yet to make his Eden, much less be driven out). The garden he wishes to create is for Cathy, who brought him out of a “swamp” of personal disillusionment by means of her “light”; but Samuel, reacting "satirically,” says that it would be his duty to sully Adam’s dream, to "spread slime on it thick enough to blot out its dangerous light.” Even before meeting Cathy, there fore, Sam has instinctive knowledge of the inhuman quality of an apparent and impossible goodness, he knows better than to believe in gardens, however strenuously he will throw himself into the project to create Adam’s (EE, 168-71). Cathy and Samuel, not surprisingly, take an instant dislike to each other, the opposite of her meeting with Charles. He notes with a shiver the way she tears at a piece ofroast lamb with her “small sharp teeth,” and her scar visibly darkens with ap prehension at what he might know. He feels “a tenseness coming over him that was somewhat like the feeling he had just before the water wand pulled down, an awareness of something strange and strained” (EE, 172-73). In other words, Sam feels a warning from Nature herself, while Adam dreams blissfully on, talking of planting trees and staring at the stars as ifhis wife had not just told him plainly that she did not intend to stay on the ranch perhaps out of fear that Samuel might come to run the place, among other motives (EE, 175). As The Pearl had already shown, there is an evil light as well as a good, and man can be led astray by the reflection ofthe lurid glare within himself, or by the mag nified answering beacon ofa kindred source. For Samuel, riding home through a landscape alive with "secret movement" in Nature and dominated by the stark light of the moon, there is only the discomforting realization that what troubled him about Cathy’s gaze was its resemblance to that ofa man about to be

26 hanged he had once seen — “The man’s eyes had no depth they were not like other eyes, not like the eyes ofa man.” They are, he remembers having thought, like a goat’s eyes: a gaze of archetypal evil (EE, 176-79). And the goat-eyed Cathy, pregnant, eats her pieces of chalk while Adam plans his Eden; as she goes into labor, Samuel is out at the well rig, fascinated into philosophizing by the apparent discovery beneath the surface of a meteorite, a buried fallen “star” (EE, 185-87). Placed in the novel at this auspicious mo ment, the "star” is either an omen with a time fuse — for good or ill — or a more specific warning about ambitions attached to stars. Though Samuel connects the finding of the star and the impending birth, he also notes the strangeness of the beautiful day on which these events occur (EE, 189-90). Inside the house, Cathy is found “mewing” and “snarling” in her labor, and her resentment of Samuel reaches the point of her savagely biting his hand: a few moments before, he had been surprised that she was emitting — instead of cries and screams — only “a series of grunting squeals”; now, he has to disengage her teeth as he would those of a fighting dog and, laughing nervously, he com pares her to a “collie bitch" and threatens to have her muzzled (EE, 191-93). Samuel divulges to Lee his fears for this house, over which he senses "wings” beating, “a dreadfulness coming”; the births have been too easy, “like a cat having kittens,” and he fears for that helpless litter (EE, 195-96). And sure enough, Sam uel comes down with a three-day fever from Cathy’s nasty bite (EE, 198). If the animal comparisons to aspects of Cathy’s career are not in full cry everywhere throughout the novel, they surely reach a crescendo in this chapter on the births of Aron and Cal: never is Cathy so animalistic as during this moment of ritual joy in human life. Small wonder that shortly thereafter, she shoots her husband to make good her escape from his paradise garden, leaving him wounded and her twins unfed. Sam finds Adam bereft of ambition, and warns him that even if he allows himself to lie fallow, he will pass something along to the future — even if only “weeds” (EE, 215). Meanwhile Cathy, now known as "Kate,” has entered the world of prostitu tion again; and since Steinbeck basically approves of the in stitution, he must do some fairly chancy reasoning about the simultaneity of the arrival of churches and brothels on the fron tier (EE, 217-21), if only to suggest what a false religion the de pravity offered by Kate’s place represents. But first, Kate must eliminate her employer, Faye, by means of poison; and as she plots, she seems like a “sniffing animal" (EE, 237). And when her plans reach their fruition, she buries the evidence as an ani mal would, in the ground (EE, 251). As her career “ascends,” that of the Trasks declines: the neglected ranch shows inatten

27 tion directly; soon Samuel retums to berate Adam fiercely as "a dog wolf with a pair of cubs, a scrubby rooster with sweet pa temity for a fertilized egg! A dirty clod!” (EE, 258) He continues the attack in the name ofthe boys — who as yet lack names — and reminds their father that Cathy was never what Adam had thought, but only a projection of his own ambitions, and that the boys should not suffer by his mistake, and certainly not because of any bad "blood” they might have inherited from their mother. To Adam’s "You can’t make a race horse of a pig” Samuel an swers, “No . . . but you can make a very fast pig” (EE, 262-63). The twins are at last given names, and Samuel tells Adam that his garden dream need never die — until Adam himself does (EE, 272). Kate’s sinking back into the primordial slough of evil yearnings, therefore, need not affect what her sons become, Steinbeck seems to be saying by his juxtaposition of materials. By such means great lengths of time are passed, though there is little thematic development — rather, a recapitulation and clarification of what has already appeared. And thus great passages of East of Eden pass, meant as a kind of hiatus for further thought, like a fallow period in the life of a nation, or an individual- Steinbeck himself, say. And so we return to the Hamiltons, to the story of Una, who had ankles “as slender as grass” and who “moved like grass,” with nails "shaped like almonds” and glowing skin, and who died young (EE, 276). Or to Tom, who “needed not to triumph over animals,” whom Steinbeck remembers in a first-person reminiscence as a quiet fellow-presence in a natural setting; Tom was someone who “felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic moun tains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks.’ The recollections of Tom are, in fact, idyllic experiences in Nature (EE, 281-82). And then there is Samuel, whose character istic gesture is to touch the earth, crumbling the soil between his fingers (EE, 288). When Sam is to leave his ranch, which he regards as a “relative,” he goes about saying goodbye to the “mountains and the trees, even at faces, as though to memorize them for eternity” (EE, 293). It is the identity of man and soil that gives Sam the authority to challenge Adam as a "fallow man” on "fallow land” living a fallow life (EE, 295). As for his own land, he loves "that dust heap” the "way a bitch loves her runty pup. I love every flint, the plow-breal

28 “dust heap,” successful at having quickened Adam’s dreams of a "garden” but himself productive of little but the "web” of his own children (EE, 298-99). Section 3 of Chapter 24, which is now begun, is perhaps a representative example of Steinbeck’s Nature-usage in this novel, and its central positioning is reason enough to develop that claim at greater length. It begins with Lee and Adam walking Samuel out to the shed to say goodbye; "it was one of those clear early winter nights when the sky riots with stars and the earth seems doubly dark because of them. A silence lay on the hills. No animal moved about, neither grass eater nor predator, and the air was so still that the dark limbs and leaves of the live oaks stood unmoving against the Milky Way” (EE, 304). This detailed consulting of Nature's Almanac is a sure clue to matters of import to follow, and the mood of expectancy is not disappointed. The ancient horse Doxology inspires a discussion oflife and death values, and Samuel uses the moment to inform Adam that Cathy has become Kate, and has associated herself with all that is “vicious and depraved,” “evil and ugly, the distorted and slimy, the worst things humans can think up"; she satisfies the "crippled and crooked,” and maims the "fresh and young and beautiful” beyond repairing (EE, 306). And Adam runs from the news, disappearing into Nature’s dark; but Samuel justifies his infonnation by comparing his act to chop ping off the tail ofa strychnine—poisoned dog to save his life by means of countershock — an elaborate and perhaps overdone image (EE, 306-307). Lee compares this judge and prophet Samuel to a “young lamb leaping in a daisy field" (EE, 308), a man who until recently had never “taken a bulldog grip on any thing” (EE, 308); Lee senses that Samuel has death shining all about him, which Samuel agrees to: he says that the music of his life has become a single note of sorrow these days, but that Lee’s explanation of“Timshel!” has given his “music . . . a new last melody like a bird song in the night” (EE, 308). And when Lee leaves Samuel, he sees the old man “against the sky, his white hair shining with sta.rlight” (EE, 308-09). The thematic analysis of this chapter or section ofa chapter is not particularly difficult, once its use of Nature imagery has been attended to. Briefly put, it shows the leader ofthe Hamilton clan — the imaginative, impractical Hamiltons, whose relation ship with Nature is direct, unclouded by dreaming, making a last visit to the camp of the dreaming Trasks, whose characters are expressed by means ofa metaphorical relationship to Nature. As a result, Samuel acquires a nimbus of metaphor himself: Nature-descriptives and a Nature background and, finally, a raying-forth of starlight (stars generally representing the refrac tive mirroring of human dreams in the Emersonian tradition) which is called the sign of death, together with a bird song of 29 melody that is also the song of death (a harmony with Nature producing music, as one sees most clearly in The Pearl). Nor is one surprised to find the next chapter beginning with news of Samuel’s death, a piece of information to which thematic tran sition is provided by an initial description of the changes in the Valley brought by a long winter, and backgrounded by the usual weather report — the news arriving to Tom Hamilton watching as “gray water-bearing clouds sailed in over the mountains from the ocean, and their shadows slid under them on the bright earth” (EE, 310). ]ust as the Salinas Valley story had been a longstanding agency of change in his own life, Steinbeck pays back the favor by making an ancestor·figure, Samuel Hamilton, into a catalyst for the mixture that is the Trask narrative, briefly dormant. In so doing, he interjjects a surrogate self into the fictional fabric of East of Eden, freeing the Trasks to complete their own journey as though Samuel had no other reason for being than to play a role in the Trask-drama; and as though the real world were giving the world of imagination a godlike prodding-along. For Adam has no sooner paid his respects to the newly-buried Sam, consulting the distant mountains and the rainy sky as he walks among white violets, when his sojourn in Nature results in ac tion: he goes to visit Kate (EE, 310-14). By the time he gets to Kate’s place, pathetic fallacy is in full swing: the ground is "deep in sticky mud,” the air is “raw and wounded,” the clouds are “the gray of rats,” and the prevailing dankness is that of “rot and fermentation? He is met at the door by a girl with the “pretty and sharp” face of"some secret and predatory animal,” and even Kate meets him with a look of “vixen carefulness” (EE, 314-15, 321). We are back in metaphor’s domain; the world is fully "created” once more. Indeed, Kate has never been less human. After showing her husband the evidence of human depravity she keeps, she says she would rather be a dog than a human; agreeing with Adam’s suspicion that she is not human at all, she questions the value of allying oneself with such a debased species. She disgusts Adam by showing him a hand "wrinkled as a pale monkey’s paw,” then screams "a long and shrill animal screech” (EE, 324 25). Small wonder that when Adam returns home again, he feels near ecstatic with relief at having conquered his love for Cathy by meeting Kate: On his drive back to the ranch Adam found that he was noticing things he had not seen for years. He saw the wildflowers in the heavy grass, and he saw the red cows against the hillsides, moving up the easy ascending paths and eating as they went. When he came to his own land Adam felt a quick pleasure so sharp that he began to examine it. And suddenly he found himselfsaying aloud in rhythm with his horse’s

30 trotting feet, “I’m free, I’m free. I don’t have to wony any more. I’m free. She`s gone. She’s out of me. Oh, Christ Almighty, I’m freel’ (EE, 329-30)

And, stripping the fur from the sage growing along the roadside, he plunges his face into the “sharp penetrating odor” of the sap on his fingers, thinking, as he resumes this fresh and healthy contact, ofthe sons he has left at home (EE, 330). It may be more than an exorcism; it may be a return to the Garden. With this reGenesis, the novel returns to where it started out; the scene of the rabbit hunt follows, together with the first appearance ofthe magically-named Abra. Into the idyllic March scene, lovingly described at length and ultimately presented from the viewpoint of the slain rabbit, death strikes, bringing its innocence to an end. The boys arrive, dressed as noble savages, and begin to squabble almost at once over whose shot killed the rabbit (EE, 334-35). The grown boys are now described: Aron has a look of“angelic innocence,” with wide eyes and a “beau tiful soft mouth" — as well as “fine and golden” hair that the sun seems to light up; Cal, called enigmatic, looks more like his father, and is heavier and darker than his brother. But if Stein beck wishes to make the Cain-Abel distinction a parallel no reader could miss, he has more subtle purposes in mind, too: if the set of Cal’s jaw reminds one of Adam, his small and delicate hands (which he carefully protects) are reminiscent of no one, unless it be his mother. It would seem as though a careful mix ofheredity and potential for free-will expression is being given both boys by their creator, so that no critic could call East of Eden mechanically plotted unless at the risk of being called simple—minded. (The strategy has not worked.) Moreover, when the darker brother reduces Aron to tears by telling him that his mother is not in Heaven, but still alive on earth, the rabbit be comes a weapon for striking the speaker, who quickly retracts his story for possible future use; and when the sky seems to glower on their performance with a “black monster” of a cloud that pelts them with rain, the boys resume their merriment by running home, tossing their game back and forth as they do (EE, 336-39). In all ofthese instances, direct portrayal by Nature metaphor is compromised by ironic possibility, lest we should forget that augury is what we say it is. Genesis, too, was a kind of novel set in Nature; its values are no less ambiguous. Enter Abra. Her mother calls the boys "poor lambs,” and Adam speculates that though they have “gone wild like the land,” they are healthy; but being forced to consider his sons takes Adam out of himself: "He was thinking of a big globe of the world, suspended and swaying from a limb of one of his oak trees” (EE, 345-44). And thought of sons takes him backwards to

31 thoughts of his father and of his brother Charles. Steinbeck has juxtaposed the Trask generations with one another, then the Trasks themselves with the image of all humanity’s home, the planet imagined hanging from a tree in Adam’s "garden” (still in potential) like a nest, a lantern — or a fruit. And as for Abra, destined to play the redemptive role so often played by Stein beck’s women, she has a hand that is "as soft as a handful of petals,” and a mouth that is “as sweet as a flower and very wide and pink" (EE, 341, 345). Yet if Abra possesses the potential of Nature itself, she can thereby polarize the characteristics ofAron and Cal into hard and apparently immutable traits, as when Cal is moved to lie in order to destroy the value ofthe gift- the rab bit —- which Aron wants to give her (EE, 351). As Steinbeck explains the matter in a conscious aside, Aron would be the sort of boy who, coming upon an anthill, “would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground,” while Cal would “kick it to pieces and watch while the frantic ants took care of their disaster. Aron was content to be a part ofhis world, but Cal must change it" (EE , 348 49). Cal’s gift and curse, therefore, are his creative imagination and his force of will — in short, his human consciousness of self. At this point in the narrative, Steinbeck interrupts the nar rative flow to present Lee’s tale of how he got there — came up from a lower order of existence, as it were, to a position where he could preserve and comment upon the human values which Cal will eventually come to represent. Brought to the West Coast to work on the railroads, Lee’s parents were treated like "ani mals,” like “herds of men” when considered with their fellow Chinese, “human cattle” who were not to bring their women along, lest there be “breeding,” “digging in, . . . pulling the earth where they are about them and scratching out a home.” And so Lee’s mother worked along with her husband, pretending to be a man, hoping that she could successfully give birth in a “burrow” in the mountains; but the other men find out that a woman is among them, and gang-rape the mother-to-be, and Lee’s father has to claw his son “out ofthe tattered meat" ofhis mother "with his fingernails.” Whereupon the other men, ashamed, become Lee’s collective mother. “It is a beauty — a dreadful kind of beauty,” says Lee of this harrowing account; indeed it is, for the story encapsules human evolution right up to the sort of collec tive familial relationships we find the ]oads entering into at the end ofThe Grapes of Wrath. Lee’s narrative (EE, 356-60) is thus an instructive fable of redemption, a foreshadowing of the values of “Timshel!” making their triumphal entrance into the novel. It is, moreover, the ultimate meaning of westering in terms a Whitman would have appreciated — the unfolding of democratic amelioration with a sort of historical inevitability.

32 Adam now writes to his brother Charles, attempting to make up for past hurts; yet he has a vision of his brother’s angry face that gives him pause — with “glinting heat in the brown eyes,” the lips writhing “back from the teeth and the blind destructive animal” taking over (EE, 362). Perhaps because he has not fully learned his lesson yet, Steinbeck’s Adam is shown as having for gotten how to make willow whistles; thus distanced from his past in Nature, he purchases a car (EE, 364-69). “Even as in Biblical times, there were miracles on the earth in those days” (EE, 370). One assumes that the ironic tone is meant to be mild, and yet Adam’s innocence is betraying him into further on inability to cope with the real world, as Kate implies in calling him “Mr. Mouse" (EE, 384-85). It is time for nearly our last glimpse of the Hamiltons, and Steinbeck has positioned the death of Dessie and the suicide of Tom against the Trask materials as alternative modes of coping with the demands of human frailities. For the fatally-ill Dessie, therefore, coming back home to the Valley for a painful death is a firsthand encounter with Nature’s unsentimental processes: though the very bushes are decorated with welcoming placards, she can only take from the tremendous vitality of the flora and fauna around her house feelings of “sadness and death,” reflec tions of the absent loved. But Tom’s enthusiasm is infectious, and she decides that he is like “some goat-foot with a wheat flute on a hill in Greece,” and responds to his inventiveness by asking for a “pu1ple egg” (EE, 359-98). Therefore they scheme to make money on acorns and shoats to finance a trip to Europe, for until now their "whole world” has been the Valley; but when Dessie worsens and dies, Tom blames himself and rejects the thought of flight from the Valley. Facing his capitalized enemies like a Cyrano, he leaves the novel intent on a suicide by gun and fall from his horse. “He was a gallant gentleman,” Steinbeck avers; but the strategic positioning of this incident at the end of Part Three of the novel may raise more questions than it lays to rest (EE, 402-03, 406-10). The answer, such as there is, is found again in Steinbeck’s transitional materials, for the next part starts with an extended reflection on Good and Evil, the ultimate criteria by which a human existence can be judged. Whatever flights of imagination the Trasks make possible for the reader, there has already been the earthborne counterpart of the Hamiltons to show that, for “real” people, the Valley equals Life itself, and that its demands cannot be escaped: one must avoid weakness and seek to love, and in the process "remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world" We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that

33 evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world (EE, 415)

Thus East of Eden has rejected a sentimental outcome long before its conclusion, recognizing that for real life there can be no fabulous formulae to a virtuous existence. The final judg ments are moral ones, but their circumstances must suit their subjects. As the novel tightens structurally around the Trasks, the character of Cal at last emerges as the final moral focal point. As for Abra, she is initally Aron’s girl, though when the two retreat beneath a willow tree to "the house of leaves made against the willow trunk by the sweeping branches,” it is the role of Mother that occupies her as much as that of future Wife. Aron draws a line ofthe dark earth before accepting her maternal solicitude, a traditional device of self-reinforcement in Stein beck, then as she holds his head in her lap Aron experiences a sunset of birdsong and golden light; “It was as beautiful under the branches ofthe willow tree as anything in the world can be" (EE, 423-25). Abra has been playing a game of the possible, but Aron is fantasizing about what can never be; so that while the willow retreat is a womb in Nature which she dominates, for him it is a refuge in unreality. A “huge thing" comes in at last as the evening frogs serenade Salinas Valley: the realization that his mother is alive after all (EE, 428-29). His father Adam has abstracted himself into schemes for refrigerating produce, schemes which fail expensively (EE, 437, 439); Will Hamilton has, on the other hand, more practically advised buying beans. And Cal? “His growing restlessness drove him out at night. He grew tall and rangy, and always there was the darkness about him” (EE, 443). His "dogged ad0ration” for his father persists, but he can only enjoy his father’s physical attentions when Adam is unaware of what he is doing. Meanwhile, Aron goes through a phase of puritanical religiosity, a perverse rejection ofany aspect of sexuality (EE, 445, 450-51). At last, Cal confronts his mother and declares his moral independence of her: “If I’m mean, it’s my own mean.” Kate has become a sport of Nature, withering with arthritis and shrinking away from light; she seeks a “cave to hide in, a dark burrow in the earth, a place where no eyes could stare at her" (EE, 474). So that while Aron takes his mother’s route, trying to hide away from uncomfortable “light,” his brother Cal becomes a man, with a growing sense of existential freedom. He expresses that freedom by seeking out a kindred spirit. Will Hamilton, the practical member of that family, thinks Cal is “as close to his own soul as it is possible to get,” and the boy’s

34 presence makes him think of all his family, and in Nature meta- ’ phors (EE, 479-80). It ought to be noted that Cals scheme is precisely the sort ofidea which Will has been making money by for years, and represents the infusion of Will’s active will into Cal’s forming spirit; moreover, it is just the kind of activity that Steinbeck had earlier called characteristically Cal’s: the impos ing of intelligence upon Nature, the desire to change it. Cal’s acceptance ofWill’s partnership marks the real end of the Ham ilton contribution to East of Eden, unless one also counts —- as one must — the influence of Samuel on the book’s last page. This sustained but now ending series of reciprocal contacts, primarily influences by Hamilton upon Trask, has now become, in effect, the substitution of real Nature for metaphor in the development ofthe novel’s pivotal character as a free moral agent. And what, by way of contrast, are the other characters in the Trask circle doing? Adam is oblivious of his son’s love as usual. "" Aron, off at school, makes of Abra an immaculate dreamto whom he pours out letters of sexual abjectness; remembering that Abra had spoken of their living on the Trask ranch, he turns “the great oaks and the clear living air, the clean sage-laced ” wind from the hills and the brown oak leaves scuddinginto an impossible setting for an impossible Abra. He is hiding “from ugliness,” associating his abstract ideals with a real piece of property, of whose nature he appears to have as little idea as the George and Lennie of Of Mice and Men have a chance of owning theirs; and he is unsure about Cal’s realistic plans for a partnership on the Trask ranch (EE, 495, 497, 500, 524, 536). Aron’s frigid soul is asking to be violated. As for Kate, she is depicted as retreating to a "gray room to rest her eyes; the suggestion that Kate cannot bear the sight ofvery much reality is too patent to be ignored. Ironically, how ever, this madam hiding in her gray room is a woman who cannot abide the grays of existence, who would pretend that only evil really is -— becoming in the process no less a monster than the unrealistically good Aron, a Billy Budd of moral insufficiency (EE, 515). The death capsule she keeps hanging around her neck is a "comfort and reassurance” to her, for apparently the only way she can cope with the reality she has created for herself is by maintaining the proximity of oblivion (EE, 530-31). She has " always been this way: as a child, the occasional "lonely fear would make her feel “surrounded by a tree-tall forest of ene mies.” Then paranoiac fear would drive her in search ofa hiding place, but the only clue to a real place of concealment came to her when she discovered Alice in VVonde»rland, its congenial heroine and her magic bottle: When the forest of her enemies surrounded her she was prepared. In her pocket she had a bottle of sugar water and on its red-framed label she had written, “Drink me.” She would take a sip from the bottle and she would grow smaller and smaller. Let her enemies look for her then! Cathy would be under a leaf or looking out of an anthole, laughing .

“She had only to drink the whole bottle and she would dwindle and disappear and cease to exist. And better than all, when she stopped being, she never would have been.” Cnat-sized, she could comfort herself with the chance of total oblivion should it prove necessary, and with that security in mind, she could feel that the "light filtering down at one through a cloverleaf was glorious” (EE, 551-52). Planning to rejoin Alice walking among the blades of tall grass, she imagines the faces of the people in her past who had stood in her way; at the last moment ofher life, they seem to taunt her with what she has missed out on, and she realizes as she dimishes into death that she is going right on past Alice, right into never-having-been (EE, 554). It would seem that Cathy/Kate, in satisfying her craving for a regression to an infantile state — a condition more horrifying, in its ultimate meanings, than what happens in Peter Pan — is a dramatic depic tion of what happens when an individual refuses to accept the implications of the moral state, or of adulthood: she curls into a fetal anti-potency, "her fingers curled as though they held small breasts” (EE, 554) all heartbeat and slow breaths. Her monstrosity is, again, the denial of her humanity. There seems little doubt that Steinbeck, who in his letters confessed similitude with only two ofEast 0fEden’s characters, Cal and Cathy, was in his careful interweaving of narrative in these penultimate pages creating the drama of the self, the the atre of his own personal psychohistory — and one not free of self-accusation, either. For Cal, who appears as a menacing presence in Kate’s final picturings, is no sooner disappointed by his father’s lack of appreciation of his present then he is remem bered by Lee that he is free to choose, whereupon he determines to do evil — to tell his brother what their mother is (EE, 544, 546). When Aron runs away, Cal complicates his deed by deny ing him (EE, 564). His guilt drives him to drink — till the “earth tipped and swayed” for him as he struggled home “like a broken bug.” A dog avoids him, so unnatural does he smell; yet he him self feels that he is as “raw and angry as a surly dog . . . — a vicious cur he was, unloved, unl0ving.” He had made himself drunk, “like a pig” (to which Lee, who has been reading Marcus Aurelius, responds, "Always animals —”), but has the moral instinct to make amends, beginning with the holocaust he makes of the found-wanting money (EE, 567-79). Lee drives him fur ther, beginning with a general bawling—out but broadening his attack to include an entire nation, suggesting as he does that

36 Cal’s traits and failings are those of Americans generally -— a tirade that is as realistically out of place (yet as thematically justified, ultimately) as Colonel Sherburn’s assault on mobs and armies in Huck Finn (EE, 570-71). If the “A” characters in East of Eden have their problems with vision (such as when Adam cannot quite "see” the message Aron sends him by postcard —— the news of his enlistment- or when Aron sends Abra another card — this one whining that he is not good enough for her (EE, 571, 576), so do the “C” ones. The pattem of Nature metaphors which accompanies the progress of Aron, Adam, and Cathy into one or another sort of darkness has its counterpart in what temporarily happens to Cal — but the difference for Cal, as it would be with his Steinbeck-like succes sor Ethan Allen Hawley, is the presence ofan uplifting feminine spirit. For Abra loves Cal because he is not good, not "good,” and because they share a common origin in persons possessing fortunes won by dubious means (again, like the “pirate” blood that unites Ethan and Margie) (EE, 578, 592, 598). Cal under stands: when he thinks of putting flowers on his mother’s grave, he rejects the notion of placing carnations there — the Salinas Valley wind would blow them away, the flowers the Mexicans call “Nails of Love.” Maybe marigolds — "Nails of Death” would be better; but that is an Aron—like thought (EE, 587). It is Abra who understands, because she is also “bad” (EE, 500) like Cal. Pathetic fallacy continues: if the coming of a “raw” day’s wind brings on a dream by which Adam recalls the way his father made his money (EE, 581-82), the day on which Abra reveals to Cal their common heritage of guilt is an idyllic one, a precious and planned—for event of azalea-gathering; and on this day, Abra strikes Adam as being “pink as a rose,” and though her invitation to join the young people is appealing, he decides against it in the name offurther improvements down at the ice plant (EE, 590 91). Thus Adam, behaving characteristically, nevertheless acts out in terms of Nature imagery the crisis he will shortly complete on his deathbed; for his own stroke, following the news ofAron’s death, is framed by Cal and Abra’s discovery of their natures) alliance. Lee attempts to buck up Cal with the reflection that You can stand anything. We’re wonderful animals that way,” which Cal briefly tries to evade accepting; but Lee°s wrath is sudden, and expressed in animal imagery (he calls Cal a “mouse,” a “nasty cur” (EE, 597). Lee sends Cal to Abra, but for comple tion, not for retreat; she’ll not be his Alice, for when he urges her towards the place under the willow tree where she and Aron had been together so often, she refuses to go if it means that Cal

37 is hiding — as Aron had used to do (EE, 599). Instead, she puts him back on the path of moral decision — the path to his father’s house. This moment is highly significant in Steinbeck’s develop ment ofthought and expression, for his habitual usage of"caves” in Nature as places of retreat and refreshment- spiritual Nature wombs for rebirths of character — is deliberately rejected in East ofEdcn; in its place, there is a conspicuous emphasis on the immediate assumption of manliness, the ready shouldering of moral responsibilities. In the sequence of cowardly hidings-out that can be termed the plot ofEast 0fEden — Cyrus’s militarism; Adam’s wandering, and his later involvement in fanciful schemes; Charles’s use of Nature as a refuge, a place of with drawal; Aron’s wish-dream of a ranch of pure virtue, followed by his own fatal flirtation with wartime death (note the consis tency ofthe usage of this motif here: three generations of Trasks avoid the real world by convincing themselves that war is some how "realer,” or by accepting the judgment of another to the same effect); and Kate’s descent into an Alice’s wonderland of death and negation — in all this sequence there is at last only Cal’s rejection, aided by Abra’s faith, to run counter to the pre vailing downward motion of the human devolution depicted in the novel. It is not, as Lee decides at the ending, a matter of inherited "scars” and “impurities” at all, for that would be too simple, too artificially pat (EE, 600). Rather, as Ethan Allen Hawley learns, there is a time to leave one’s cave and yearn up wards, leaf—like, to the light. So that when Lee addresses the recumbent Adam in the book’s last pages, we must pay special attention to the speaker’s ornate language: Adam may, he says, be “alert and keen” behind his eyes, or he may “be living in a confused gray dream.” “You may, like a newborn child, perceive only light and movement,” he says (EE, 601). It may be that Adam is now "a new thing in the world.” Lee is repeating the novel’s Nature-oriented themes here, wondering aloud whether Adam has entered a death-like state of grayness resembling Kate’s entire career, or whether he may even have regressed to the point of pre-infancy, or potency alone. He therefore subjects Adam to the sort of shock therapy Samuel had earlier attempted in order to bring Adam back to the land of the fully living — or kill him in the process: he tells him that he has been a cause of Cal’s actions, and that he must do something — whatever his condition — to redeem himself and especially his posterity from the crushing curse of “guilt.” And the therapy works: a "terrible brightness shone in Adam’s eyes,” against which the patient instinctively closes them, finding the truth too much to bear. Lee repeats his imprecations, asking Adam to “free” Cal, because his freedom is “all a man has over

38 the beasts.” And Adam makes a mighty effort, and by it conquers original sin: he blesses his son with a final “Timshel!” (EE, 602). A comparison ofEast ryf Eden with Steinbeck’s other “big” novel The Grapes of Wrath, will help support my claim that its structure, premised on the use of Nature imagery to delineate character, makes sense. In an article on the earlier work’s ending (in the Fall 1973 Agora), I argued for the validity of Steinbeck’s decision to end The Grapes (gf Wrath on a high note, a kind of tableau indicating the arrival of the ]oads at a new order of exis tence; and I should like to do as much for East of Eden. For despite their sharing of California as the setting for much ofeach work’s length, the two books are also markedly dissimilar in mode of action: The Grapes of Wrath is a novel of the endless American highway, while East ofEden is relatively static, being at least in conception Steinbeck’s long-anticipated novel of the Salinas Valley. Yet there are striking similarities. Importantly, both novels make use of interchapter material which relates the main action to the microcosm and macrocosm of Nature and the American society generally, and both end on a scene of quasi-religious intensity — a visitation, an apotheosis, an epiphany. In The Grapes ryf Wrath, the progress westward of the joads is compared to such natural forces as the famous turtle, but also to the mass movement ofwhich it is but a part; the inter chapters drop away when they have contributed their catalytic effect to the novel’s progress and when their extra resonance is no longer necessary — when, in other words, the ]oads are well on their way to joining the new society that Rose of Sharon’s final transfiguration represents. In East of Eden, the movement of the Trask family towards a renewed sense of their own moral freedom — freedom, that is, from the heritage of guilt, of curse, and of the inhibition of shame — is related to the saga of the Hamiltons which, as we have seen, is directly influential upon the education ofthe Trasks at every stage; the Hamilton material drops away at roughly the halfway point of the novel, at least in the form of substantial interchapter material, and its most signif icant spokesman, Samuel Hamilton, departs at roughly the same point. At the novel’s ending, there is again an awe-filled moment, that of Adam’s deathbed blessing of Cal, which represents a sudden arising of the book into another, higher realm of fiction. I once argued against the validity of Steinbeck’s treatment of his closing scene, considering the language stilted beyond all tolerable limits, and certainly unjustified in terms of the effect it was intended to achieve, one surely premised on credi bility. Now, with original sympathy for the artist’s intentions as my starting point, I have found it easy to recant ofthat immature position; for while the fact that Steinbeck was fully aware of the

39 effect he was producing and in fact desired just such an effect is not in itselfany sort of grounds for critical approval, I do think that the prior example of The Grapes (gf Wrath gives us a better understanding of just what was intended and, I think, in due course achieved. I refer to the elevation of the novel’s tone — a device which seems to stem from Steinbeck's experiments in the theatre — to what might be called an expressionistic utter ance. If we can agree that the Hamiltons are more or less "real” while the Trasks are purely fictional creations, then their ability to move magically as creatures of artifice becomes not only capable of explanation, but of conviction. It is at the ending that the novel’s Biblical antecedents make themselves most fully felt, along with the notion that human history is merely the repetition of that Edenic narrative in the early pages of Genesis. In the presence of an operating myth man is rightly silent, or at least reverent; the working—out is surely awe-inspiring. And Genesis is, as we have said, itself a narrative in which individual character is assessed in terms ofits relationship to Nature. The direct involvement of the Hamiltons however unsuccessful in worldly terms — and the meta phorical involvement of the Trasks — based upon dreaming (Adam, Aron) of an unrealistic Eden — are both consistently related to their ground and basis, Nature itself, the Salinas Valley which was the germ for the entire novel. When Cal becomes a Hamilton, I would conclude, a kind of necessary miracle takes place. Best to describe it as one.

40 We all live somewhere east of Eden. Never mind what anthropologists tell us ofour origins in Africa; in our race’s imag ination we come out of the East, out of the lands where the sun rises. And in America, in California, we contemplate the starting out on our imaginary journey even as we stand in the place of our ending. Aware that the westering movement has incorpora ted all of human history — at least in the consciousness of the West —- we stand “Facing West from California’s Shores,” like Whitman:

Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

That rare note of uncertainty in this most optimistic of authors could only have been provoked by the mythic significance of California — the golden land of our dreaming, the embodiment of all our doubts. No writer more than ]ohn Steinbeck has attempted to deal with and assess this strange American malaise, this nagging wonder in the midst of dreams fulfilled. We might put the par adox this way: Have we deserved so much? Why have we not done better? Is there no more? And what next? No novel more than East of Eden has attempted to deal with these questions directly, and in the setting which makes them spring to mind as naturally as grass along a creek bed. I would like to look at East Bible; in Hindu India, especially as Americanized in the form of Emersonian Transcendentalism; and in the Orient, at least insofar as Steinbeck could speak of it at all: that is, as the invention ofa literate Western mind, a mind that on its own japanese visit of nearly twenty years ago was

41 alternately baffled, flattered, and wilted by the heat (SLL, 564 72). In moving backwards as Steinbeck did, I think, we can catch up again with what we were, and in the process find out better what we are. That is what I think East 0fEden is, in great part, all about; and I would like to try to retrace that geographical and conceptual journey eastward with him now, and through his book. The first stop must be the longest. Steinbeck’s Biblical referents are numerous and fairly explicit, so much so that many workings-over of the obvious have taken place before this; I should like to extend their resonance by discussing those parts of the first chapters of Genesis which it would appear likely Steinbeck was especially attracted to and aware of in writing East 0fEdcn, and then by speculating on Steinbeck’s appropria tion of the myth of Cain and Abel — as myth — itself. In surveying Genesis, one notes — or recalls — that God first creates light (Genesis 1:3 K]V), then the concept of Heaven (1:7-8), then vegetation (1:11-12), almost in the process paral leling the openings of Steinbeck’s Edenic fictions; light’s pri macy (the point to which late Steinbeck novels return) is assured when (1:18) He promises light’s agencies, the sun and the moon, that they will “rule over the day and over the night.” Light is therefore the first and finest fonn of“ruling” in Genesis, and its authority pre-exists man’s promise, then command, that he “have dominion” over all created things (1:26-28). This light, a traditional metaphor for grace, is Steinbeck’s consistent image for the recognition of moral freedom. And in Genesis 2, man is created of“the dust ofthe ground” (2:7), whereupon “the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden” (2:8)- almost as if man’s banishment were not merely foreknown but being planned for with a minimum of fuss. We are told ofthe four sorts oftrees in Eden: those for looking upon, those for eating of, that of life, and that of the "knowledge of good and evil” (2:9). Almost at once, man is given the task that directly involves concern with trees: to “dress . . . and . . . keep” the garden, but not to eat ofa third of the four kinds of tree, the tree of knowledge (2:15, 17). Almost as an afterthought, but likelier because the imposition of these pastoral cares implied man’s inadequacy for the task, woman is created (2:22-24). In Chapter 3, one realizes how carefully crafted is the myth of Genesis. Man eats of the forbidden tree, moving in the pro cess an evolutionary stage upward from mere "seeing” and "eating,” but in the process loses any right to the fourth kind of tree — that oflife (3:6). The Nature imagery explains the paradox of our existences, and the irony of our progress (which Stein beck’s novel is to Americanize). Even the serpent, the arche type of all upwardly mobile creation, is specifically cursed to 42 eat “dust” — the substance out ofwhich man has been formed as if to confirm his consignment to meddling in human affairs by literalizing the most basic of Nature images (3:14). At this point, God promises the serpent enmity between his seed and the woman’s, assuring her a redemptive role, whose physical sign is the creation of progeny. Whereupon God, with that peculiar sense of irony already noted, turns sexual distinctions (heretofore simple matters of pleasure, one assumes, like the usage of the first sorts of trees) into sources of anguish — the pain of childbearing, and the sexist relegation of woman to an inferior status. That status, woman’s punishment for being the serpent’s unwitting tool, is expressed, Steinbeck must have noted, in language much the same as that with which God tells Cain that he may rule over sin; "he shall rule” over thee, he tells woman in re ference to man (the Hebrew is YIMSHAWL; 3:16); “thou mayest rule,” he assures Cain about evil (here the Hebrew is TIM SHAWL — Steinbeck’s "Timshel!” ——— formed of the same verb root; 4:7). If God’s words sound like the source of traditional association of woman and temptation to evil, they are more properly read as parallel statements of reciprocal responsibility. And as for man, in a further piece ofirony that is the creation of pathetic fallacy in the universe as well, God curses the ground (3:17) and condemns man to sweat to eat (i.e., to pay for his new spirituality by a more difficult physicality) until he shall “return unto the ground” — as dust- from which he sprang (3:19). Man is then sent out ofthe garden "to till the ground from whence he was taken” (3:22-23), lest he should miss the point; thus agri culture is, in Western man’s oldest story, the metaphor for his dealing with his own nature, whereas his hearkening back to the garden is a yearning for a simpler mode of existence, in reality a pre—moral, non-human one. Therefore it is no accident that we find Abel a shepherd, but Cain “a tiller of the ground” (4:2). Abel’s simple-minded goodness is its own reward, and a terminal act: Abel dies with out issue. Was Cain’s gift genuinely inadequate, or is that merely supposition? More likely, the incident demonstrates that Cain is the true heir of not only Adam but Eve as well, and is therefore doomed to try, but not to be able to evade uncertainty: to live, in other words, in existential doubt. Cain is, as Steinbeck knew, true man, for the itch to be better is upon him — and leads him to sin as well as to glory (4:7). “Cursed from the earth" (4:11), this farmer is condemned to do poorly at his favorite occupation; one step further in development from his father, he becomes "a fugitive and a vagabond” (4:12) dwelling “on the east of Eden’ (4:16). If Adam yearns for his garden, Cain in his wandering longs for good farm land and a place to belong to — in other

43 words, he is the archetypal American, moving west, thus moving backward even as the pragmatist, he makes his progress. And yet a little more: it is not long before Cod, as if seeing Himselfin his created world, decides that the earth is "corrupt” and that “all flesh” should be destroyed "with the earth” (6:12 13). Like Cal burning his banknotes in sorry holocaust, He purges the world — absurdly, self-punishingly — and then, His tantrum over, promises not to "curse the ground any more for man’s sake" (8:21). The finely wrought pastoral tragedy of Gen esis, therefore, is a reasoned attempt to live without a Mani chaean view of existence, and to emphasize the possibility indeed the need — of moral choice. It argues order based on hierarchy, and therefore on rule — and in the process gives up order based on balance: the chance of serenity. It starts a long trek westward, so oddly like Columbus’s, on the pretense of going home — and, double-irony, both gets there and does not. For East of Eden starts with Cyrus — a "C” character while Genesis begins with God. Each man, each father, john Steinbeck seems to say, plays God to his own sons; as Cyrus, that militarist, indeed loves Adam better (EE, 28), but makes him suffer (as victim) for this, he leaves his other son Charles feeling that something is not right: he should be the wanderer (EE, 37). Cyrus had loved Adam, but Adam didn’t love his father; but Cyrus hadfaith in Charles, though Adam has faith in Cyrus (EE, 70). Only the death ofthe father figure seems to free the sons — a possible hint as to Cal’s post-novel future (EE, 63-64). And when Charles and Cathy betray Adam (EE, 124-25), are we to make much more ofthe process than life’s committed finding their mutual attractioning? If the Bible is therefore chosen as the source of the names for Adam’s children (EE, 256), it is with a heavy-handed sense of continuity in the tradition of appropriating A and C initial names, a continuity that ultimately enforces an irony. In other words, john Steinbeck apparently uses the mechanical scheme of A and C to suggest a generational cycle which his subtler characterization then undercuts. In assuming that knowing the initials ofa Trask tells us all we need to know about that person, therefore, readers commit a blunder that can create a serious distortion in their critical perceptions of the novel, as well as doing a disservice to the novelist. For Steinbeck was surely aware of the limitations inherent in allegorical characterization; he had explored those limits with varying degrees of success —— repeatedly. When Samuel Hamilton reveals his awareness of his Biblical namesake (EE, 264-65), it is with the consciousness that his own personal cour age was necessary before the name’s prophetic suggestiveness might begin to function. This “symbol story of the human soul,”

44 as Lee refers to the Genesis account of Cain and Abel, is one of the everlasting patterns of guilt and rejection; courage, obvious ly, is all that can break the hold the pattern has — especially in the form of the inheritance implied by names. As Lee con cludes, it is a complicated matter, “But at the end there’s light" (EE, 266-72). The point of Steinbeck’s use of A and C initials, then, is that there need not be any point at all; that no man need feel inhibited by heritage, and that the light can be refound. Perhaps in his notion that men can have done with the weight of original sin — and by their own efforts — Steinbeck is being most typically American. In East of Eden, two sorts of courage are presented for praise: the silent courage of Tom Hamilton, who does not need to "triumph over animals" (EE, 281) but buckles under the weight of his own sense of guilt and ends his life in suicidal gallantry; and the articulate (because possessed of the word “Timshel!”), forgiving sort of courage to live and allow others to live freely. It is this latter code of courage, developed by Lee on the basis of the example of Samuel — Old Testament king maker and preacher of the possibility of redemptive action and put into practice by Adam, that presumably advances Cal’s existence from a sentence of death-in-life to a new enlight enment. Unlike the fifteen-pound buck rabbit that Aron plans to give his father for his birthday (EE, 299), the reciprocal gift of freedom is not automatic, and never easy. And like the ng-ka-py that Lee produces for the book’s central discussion of “Tim shelf”, this moral freedom has "a lot of wormwood” in it, but it is "a ladder to climb to the stars” with (EE, 301-304). In this universal story, Lee maintains, the focus is on the here-and-now: it is “not theology”; it is a prescription for becoming. Becoming what? Fully a man: that is, part god. For a cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there (EE, 304). The tree of knowledge of good and evil, therefore, must in Steinbeck’s view be picked from; the precious human soul must rise. We must become as gods, and if we in the process lose our lives, we do so willingly. What Robert Lowell, in “Children of Light,” called “Serpent’s seeds of light,” or what Stanley Kubrick pre sents in 2001: A Space Odyssey as awesome ideal shapes that impel us upward on the evolutionary ladder, are necessary prods to our ambition as a species. We must give the devil his due, for he knows where the stairway is. We must therefore resist the temptation to categorize the characters in East 0fEden according to simple formulaic listings of “A” and "C” traits. True enough that the A characters seem to affirm belief in idealistic norms of purity, a blank and witless goodness that is perhaps as potentially murderous as any out 45 burst ofpassionate evil. True enough, too, that the C characters seem morbidly aware of the evil within them, yet are concerned with hard work and progress generally — and in their ways do real good, practical good, in the world. But A and C are alphabet and algebra, not constants of human behavior. And what of Abra of the magical name? As "Abra Bacon,” do her Bs suggest a bridge between our A and C? She loves both brothers, we recall, and does acknowledge sharing “badness" with the second of them, Cal (EE, 500, 592, 598). What of Cathy? Is she composed of C and A, perhaps because both elements coexist in serene and impossible balance in her —— making her a “monster,” an animal, who is able to take advantage ofless single minded individuals? She is described as able to hold two con tradictory ideas in mind at once,just when she is longing for her “burrow” in the earth (EE, 474); her imaginary counterpart in her wish-dream withdrawal into non—being is another combina tion ofA and C; Alice (EE, 554). Mere ingenuity and name-play aside, these two women would seem to represent alternate results ofA and C characteristics in conflict: that is, the enmity of woman seed and serpent seed promised in Genesis. But it is Cal who is the novel’s "hero.” In what sense, one may rightfully ask, may a character no more important than any of several others in terms of acts committed, understanding shown, or personal interest created, and whose prominence is largely delayed until the closing pages ofa novel containing six hundred of them, be considered the “hero”? Surely the answer is that Cal’s presence, altering the novel from family saga to Bildungsroman, is what makes possible the book’s climactic transformation. In a very real sense, Cal’s "heroism” is his futur ity: he lives for our sins, and with a freedom to act that is affirmed at the n0vel’s closing. “When the first innocence goes, you can’t stop — unless you’re a hypocrite or a fool” (EE, 448), Lee tells him, for Lee is a character committed to self-definition through action. As Cal says to Kate, "My name is Caleb . . . Caleb got to the Promised Land” (EE, 465). And a page later, he defies her by telling her what Steinbeck had in effect said of himself(SLL, 347), that he is his own man: “IfI’m mean, it’s my own mean.’ Making her face the fact that light won’t hurt her more than her own fears, he has already broken the pattern — and in the process helped free his father to free him in return. Unlike ]oe, who says a few lines later on that, in effect, ignorance is bliss, Cal seeks the truth that makes you free — even if, as is often the case in American drama, the truth is also what makes you dead. Stein beck uses the Bible, then, as emblem of the act of liberation; it is humanity that it frees, frees it of the barbed-wire fence of Eden’s garden — frees it to resume its double joumey west and east.

46 One sees, moreover, how intrinsic to Steinbeck’s critical self-examination the use of Biblical referents has been. Central to the drama of the self identifying and justifying itself is the myth of Eden and the subsequent First Murder. If Steinbeck’s isolation ofthese events makes the second seem the direct result of the first, perhaps that effect is also part ofhis intent; to make aggressive violence stem, by way of explanation, from arbitrary deprivation based on dimly-understood causes. The paradox of violence in aid ofthe crusade to recapture Eden — or Canaan or any Holy Land is thus made credible, on the national level, while the rages of the ego at war with its frustrated self are as believably dramatized, on the personal level. East of Eden uses the Bible, finally, to flesh out in familiar dress the stresses within an author’s lifetime, such stresses are relieved, in time for this book directed to the author’s sons, by the redemptive power of a woman, a new wife, and by the death ofa father figure whose theories of human values were as rigid and absolute as those of the God of Eden. Steinbeck’s ancient sorrows, probably family connected, worked their way to resolution over the decades dur ing which the idea for a “Salinas valley” novel lay fallow. The notion of the Edenic valley appears in other Steinbeck works — but without the presence of a personal voice justified by the positive contribution of the “real” Hamiltons, or the epic sweep the discovery ofthe Adam—Trask equation made possible. In East tf Eden, local materials contribute to the presentation ofboth Hamiltons and Trasks. As I have argued (in Chapter II), the former are depicted and also evaluated largely in terms of their direct participation in Nature, usually insofar as they in volve themselves in the agriculture ofa not particularly reward ing land; while the latter are characterized by a largely metaphor ical relationship to Nature, though the land of the Trasks is of the best. In other words, Steinbeck uses Nature imagery to flesh out and judge his fictional creations whose Valley is most often purely conceptual, a remembered Eden. Now the use of Nature as index of character, so prominent in certain American writers, is a recognizable trait of the Ameri can literary heritage, chiefly Emerson and his Transcendentalist school ofphilosophy. In Transcendentalist belief, the individual moves through the particular organic goods represented by aspects of Nature towards the spiritual perfections of love, the Oversoul, the One and the Good. Whether Steinbeck primarily contracted his Emersonianism directly or through his reading of latter—day Emersonian-influenced scientific writers, I cannot conclusively judge, but the parallels between Emerson’s think ing and Steinbeck’s are innumerable — and not capable ofsurvey here. Even if Steinbeck picked up his Emersonian beliefs from the water supply, as it were, one must call him the Master’s fore

47 most modern disciple. And the relevant source of Emerson’s Romantic association ofNature and Soul, one need hardly repeat, is the sacred and narrational texts of Hindu India. Of course, Steinbeck knew some of those texts firsthand that is, in the translations available during his formative years as a writer and thereafter — as the occasional direct reference proves. Such available translations may also have included examples from the third great body of Asiatic influences on East of Eden — the Far Eastern, including Chinese and ]apanese writings. All such examples confirm the fundamentally mystical that is, physical/spiritual — quality of Steinbeck’s usage of Nature. But I have obviously ignored till now that most tentative yet important presence in the novel, who by his very lack of ordinary novelistic credibility constitutes Steinbeck’s most conspicuously artificial creation in East 0fEden — the Chinese servant, philosopher, and amateur psychologist, Lee. Lee may, as a character, spring from Steinbeck’s earlier conception of Orientals as mysterious personages, but he can hardly be described by that platitudinous racial epithet insem table. Indeed, the highly Americanized and articulate Lee is nothing ifnot scrutable: he is a raisonneur figure who does much of the novel’s explaining. He is as present to the novel’s central characters (though invisible to their racist neighbors) as he is removed from direct participation in its main events. He ob serves, and he comments, and he moves the action along. If he displays the protective guise of the “tomming” American black, a matter of using the words and gestures that the unthinking expect of your ethnic group, he is also a puller of strings who organizes scenes with the careful orchestration ofa tea ceremony. But why a Chinese interpreter of events, if that is what Lee becomes? I think the answer lies in candid consideration ofjust what Lee embodies. He is Chinese, he is American: he moves from one role to the other with theatrical effectiveness, becom ing each time the clear epitome of Western views of what he ought to be: servile, obscure, and foreign; or congenial, learned, and recognizably progressive. A kind of Pirandellian stage manager — or, more accurately, a Nick Carraway on the fringes of things — he is deliberately maintained as a type. Of what? Of, I suggest, what his history literally represents: the assimila tion into the American fabric of the geographically most exotic of foreigners, and the mutual assumption of values by immi grants’ child and adopted nation. He is, then, the most extreme possible example (at least apparently) ofthe value-testing drama East cyf Eden really is. In a novel about self—delusion generally, and the false dream of Eden in particular, the theme of self-concealment from un pleasant reality affects not only Cathy, Cal, Adam, and Aron, but

48 even Lee — who initially wears his hair in a queue and talks pidgin English to strangers. Sam Hamilton, whom Lee credits with being “one ofthe rare people who can separate . . . observa tion from . .. preconception,” calls it rightly when he openly envies the “green touch of convenience” of Lee’s “hidey-hole" (EE, 163). Though Lee provides Adam with comfort as the latter pursues his dreaming (EE, 156-57), his presence makes Cathy uncomfortable because “Lee’s brain gave and repelled like rub ber" (EE, 161). To these people oflesser comprehension, Lee is a reflection oftheir own minds; but to the understanding Samuel, the moment of frank human contact between them suddenly removes Lee’s Chineseness: Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm' with understanding. (EE, 163)

What is Steinbeck up to here, assuming that his treatment of Lee is not an attempt at racial caricature? He is, I think, using Lee as a challenge to stereotype thinking of all sorts, and in suggesting that Lee himself might be the victim of his own role playing, he underscores his belief in the universality of human experience. It might be argued that Steinbeck’s Americanness is akin to Whitman’s, and that such external differences as “being Chinese” are ultimately insignificant in terms of an expanding democratic view of human evolution in his eyes. I rather think so. For though Lee, like Steinbeck, talks of omens (and, in this case, demons) without believing in them (EE, 189), it is a matter of picking and choosing which elements in one’s heritage are worth preserving; Liza Hamilton identifies Lee as “a Presbyte rian” (EE, 200), but if Lee can describe himself to Samuel as being “no more Oriental than you are" (EE, 271), it is not in order to accept a doctrine of predestination that Lee has adapted to new ways. And on the other hand, though Lee says he seems “to get more Chinese as I get older” (EE, 294), it is on the occa sion of having cut off his queue. The eclecticism of Lee’s approach is crystalized in the account — otherwise inexplicable in terms of novelistic credi bility — ofthe four Chinese Biblical scholars and their research es. In describing the way these ancient sages took to a foreign "true story” because it was universal- improving on their own Confucian tenets in the process — Lee admits, "I began to love my race, and for the first time I wanted to be Chinese” (EE, 303). He will be able to tell Cal, when Cal needs to hear it, not to use "ancestry” as an excuse, and in the process surrender his own "oriental repose” (EE, 449). For we are truest to our heritages, Steinbeck seems to say, when we are actively engaged with living matter, not passively the victims ofinert ideas. Lee is most

49 Oriental, paradoxically, when he is most the member of the new humanity, and never so American as when he helps his friends to rise above the inhibitions of their roles as self-appointed victims moaning Chosen People woes. It is not easy to conclude, as East of Eden almost certainly forces us to do, that Steinbeck’s interest in the East was by way of setting up a straw man meant for knocking down. Yet even his own American identity, I feel, was subject to the same willing ness to trade for a better thing. Ever critical of his countrymen even as he maintained his hope for them, he found his final nationality in what could be — not what was: in new forms felt emerging. If he at last came to feel that choice was necessary that yin and yang in balance made no human progress possible then he betrayed ideas unremittingly Western in their approach to Eastern values. Perhaps he was American at heart beyond his knowing, ready to follow a future Eden once having done with the past one. Yet I cannot help but feel that the eastward progress I have described was, in an Eastern way, quite matched by Stein beck’s westering; that in the end both "East” and “West,” in japan and Califomia, stand looking at each other, as if into a mirror. In the end, there is no ocean there.

50 Steinbeck Monograph Series (1971- )

Published by the Steinbeck Society under the Editorship of Tetsurnaro Hayashi, Founder and Editorial Director

No. 1971: Tetsumaro Hayashi (ed.), john Steinbeck: A Guide to the Doctoral Dissertations (1946-1969) No. 1972: Reloy Garcia, Steinbeck and D. H. Lawrence: Fictioe Voices and the Ethical Imperatives No. 1973: Lawrence William ]ones,]ohn Steinbeck as Fabiilist, ed. by Marston LaFrance No. 1974: Tetsumaro Hayashi (ed.), Steinbeck Criticism: A Review of Bo0k—Length Studies (1939-1973) No. 1975: Tetsumaro Hayashi (ed.), Steinbeck and the Arthurian Theme No. 1976: Roy S. Simmonds, Steinbeck’s Literary Achievement $2.00 No. 1977: ]ohn Ditsky, Essays on "East 0fEden” $2.00 No. 1978: Tetsumaro Hayashi, (ed.),]ohn Steinbeck: A Collection of Dissertation Abstracts (1946-1977) (forthcoming)

Nos. 1-5 are all out of print. If you wish to obtain any ofthe out-of-print monographs, write directly to: Kraus Reprint Company Route 100 Millwood, New York 10546

51 Steinbeck Society Pamphlet Series (1971- )

Tetsumaro Hayashi, Annual Steinbeck Bibliography: A Checklist of Steinbeck Criticism after 1968 (1971). (34 pp.). ( A limited number of copies are still available. $1.00 for U.S.A. residents and $1.50 for non-U.S. residents. This is no longer being issued annually because of the limited funds.) Tetsumaro Hayashi, The Agony and Ecstasy of Writing and Editing (1973). (22pp.). (Out of print). Tetsumaro Hayashi, A Guide to Steinbeck Studies: Questions and Answers (1976). (22 pp.), ( A limited number of copies are still available. $1.00 for U. S. residents and $1.50 for non-U.S. residents.) Tetsumaro Hayashi, A Guide to Steinbeck Conference Directors How to Prepare a Regional Steinbeck Conference (1976). (4 pp.). ($ .50 per copy).

The Steinbeck Society Pamphlet Series (mostly "statarnatically” produced) are being issued for fund-raising purpose. Ifyou wish to obtain 1, and 3, and 4, send a check for the appropriate amount, payable to Steinbeck Society, to:

Director’s Secretary Steinbeck Society English Department Ball State University Muncie, Indiana 47306 U.S.A.

52 Contributor

]ohn Ditsky: Ph.D. (New York University, 1967); bom De troit, 1938. Specialist in American Literature and Contemporary Drama. Professor of English, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Various editorial posts, Steinbeck Quarterly; Associate Editor for Poetry, University of Windsor Review. Well over thirty-five critical articles in print, many of them on Steinbeck, in such journals as Queen’s Quarterly, Georgia Review, Dal housie Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Steinbeck Quarterly. Over five hundred poems in print in more than two hundred and fifty journals in five countries, including Western Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Ontario Review, and Southern Humanities Review.

Editors (SMS, No. 7, 1977)

Editorial Director: Tetsumaro Hayashi, Associate Professor of English, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. Associate Editor: Richard Peterson, Associate Professor of English, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. Assistant Editors: Donald L. Siefker, Assistant Professor of Library Service, Ball State University; Kenneth D. Swan, Associate Professor of English, Taylor University, Upland, Indiana; and George H. Spies, Senior Instructor of English, Culver Military Academy, Culver, Indiana.

53

.» x ` M » `,, . F ? »,;;J*éi§ `I wi ` fw. » ¤»*· ¤,~p§£= ’ » Kéiéf

~¤.;€`§&é _j-jfQ%X = ,_j$?, ` wm

ih s .§n;,;?# ` wif

7»§_`= ·¢ F M; ‘ MGF 4.; >·zf"iZ*£"* ..:_ N wi ‘` ww :.’.;%&§; £ <;,§i=

&·» ~

:33%} , #.»