Essays on Steinbeck

A paper exploring the meaning of timshol in East of Eden in the light of Steinbeck's magnum opus, in Michael J Meyer and Henry Veggian (eds), East of Eden. New and Recent Essays, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2013) pp 257-288. 

 

Corral de Tierra 

where Steinbeck

drew inspiration 

for East of Eden

Prologue

In words which echo The Red Pony as Jody struggles to find his way ‘through the contrary pulls of light and dark, life and death,’ the theme and the tone of East of Eden are set by the opening paragraphs, reflecting the tension between the Gabilan Mountains to the east (the harbinger of light) and the Santa Lucias to the west (dark and foreboding).¹ In between lay the Salinas Valley with a long history and years of accretion, through which Steinbeck’s father drilled to find levels of top soil, gravel, sand, black earth and imperishable wood. Thus begins East of Eden. That Valley reflects the two halves of society in which Steinbeck was nurtured and mirrors the ever-present conflict within himself, the ups and downs, strains and tensions, good and evil, light and dark, hope and despair he experienced in trying to understand himself and his fellows, until finally he reaches the point where the child of the evil monster and the epitome of goodness finally come together as the waters from both sides of the Mountains converge in the Valley. In between we have the story of his life in a way no straight autobiography could have achieved.

Coming from a background of biblical studies (the Old Testament in particular) and pastoral work rather than literary criticism I was cautious about entering into the field of ‘biblical studies and Steinbeck’, knowing that it was well-trodden territory, but so much seemed to come from ‘Steinbeck-and-literary-interests’ rather than biblical scholars. It was mostly Steinbeck plus a few biblical allusions (some quite superficial), rarely a biblical or theological approach to Steinbeck and his work. In the same way biblical scholars seemed loathe to use literature as midrash and my gentle attempts to introduce them to Steinbeck led mainly to a modicum of interest accompanied by deaf ears and distant eyes. Hence my desire to build bridges by coming at it from a different angle, beginning with my paper at the Hofstra Centennial Conference, 2002.²

Timshol and the Magnum Opus

When invited to contribute to this volume therefore I knew my only qualification was as a pastor and biblical scholar. Hence the need to focus on timshol, which admittedly to some may seem rather like an irrelevant if not intrusive concept which really only features at the end of East of Eden, but another way of looking at it would be to see that, as the Salinas Valley sets the tone for the whole story, timshol provides the coping stone as Steinbeck’s way (and I think a very good way, with a strong biblical basis) of resolving his dilemma. The two halves of the society, like the two ranges of hills remain unchanged. So too do the fundamental questions — who or what makes us what we are, what we can we do about it, and matters of sin and personal responsibility — but timshol at least provides a platform for starting in a different place. To achieve this, and following in his father’s footsteps, Steinbeck also plumbed the depths of the Salinas Valley, but with words rather than machines, in order to discover the meaning of life and what it is to be a human being. He decided to go back in time as far as he could, to explore the Cain and Abel myth (remembering all the Bible stories he had been told as a child), and eventually finding himself engaged in the origins of good and evil. In the end he focused on the word timshol as giving us the capacity to choose and to take control of our lives.

That was not, however, where he started. East of Eden was clearly intended to be his magnum opus, but far from being a theological treatise or a midrash on Genesis 4:7, it began as a factual work intended for the benefit of his sons. He wanted them to know where they had come from and what they had inherited but this proved such a difficult task that it was close to four years before he actually put pen to paper and began to realize that he was actually addressing his own problems, doubts and uncertainties.

We can only speculate as to what led him from his original intention to the conclusion he arrived at but, being the open and transparent man that he was, with a wealth of fiction and a volume of letters constantly spilling out, it may not be all that difficult at least to spot some of the stepping stones.

The Hamiltons, the Trasks and the Valley

The autobiographical section (starting with the Hamiltons) was fairly straightforward, but Steinbeck clearly felt the novel needed a setting and whereas the Salinas Valley was a mixture of light and shade (if not light and dark) he also recognized that the Hamiltons were a fairly monochrome family. Some way had to be found of portraying the other side (or sides) of life to convey the reality, and to do that he invented the Trasks. The Hamiltons were real. The Trasks were fictional, even legendary, but that did not make them any less real. Like Morte d’Arthur,³ they existed and you could find them everywhere. In short, they were real in a different way.

Originally he intended alternative Hamilton and Trask chapters but it soon became evident that that would not work. The two halves had to meet and in their encounter the autobiography of Steinbeck began to morph into a biography of Salinas, as good and evil, with issues of acceptance and rejection, the desire to please whilst retaining freedom and autonomy, alongside a number of other tensions vied with each other for recognition and power. So, with his biblical background, Salinas became Cain and Abel rolled into one, but to tell the story they had to be separated out. That led Steinbeck to three sets of pairs in three generations.

As he wrote, Cain and Abel, biblical symbols of acceptance and rejection, if not altogether good and evil, could never have been very far below the surface, popping up frequently for the reader even if not always obvious to the author. At no point (with the possible exception of Cathy) do we find the one without the other, and Steinbeck began to see that Salinas, and all its residents, were a mixture of the two and East of Eden the story of the tension he lived with.

Our starting point therefore has to be Cain and Abel if only to begin where we may reasonably believe Steinbeck began. First, we need to see his use of the story in relation to more traditional interpretations. Second, to unearth Steinbeck’s life and work (his two worlds) to see what might have led him to develop the story as he did. Third, to see how all that got fed into the content and characterisation in East of Eden, and always with one eye on how Cain and Abel might have shaped his understanding of what was going on in the Valley and how what was going on in the Valley might have shaped his understanding of East of Eden, eventually leading him to his interpretation of timshol.

Traditional Interpretations of Genesis 4:7

Since Steinbeck had no pretensions to biblical scholarship there are those who will question the validity of his interpretation and possibly even his right to embark on it, but since that is what he did we may legitimately examine it.

Interpretations of Genesis 4, which have occupied biblical scholars, Jewish and Christian, from time immemorial⁴ have revolved round a number of allied issues, such as why the younger is mentioned before the older,⁵ why one person’s sacrifice is accepted and another's rejected,⁶ why agricultire is 'in' but hunting is 'out’⁷ and why some people seem to be inherently good and others inherently evil.⁸ Norman Whybray dismisses most such explanations on the grounds that they are purely speculative with nothing in the text to support them.⁹ The same goes for the mark of Cain and he makes no mention of timshol. Instead he sees the story as the first instance in Genesis of death and the first case of violence by one human being against another, suggesting that in the context of these chapters it is the symbolic beginning of evil, culminating in the statement later that mankind has become wholly corrupt.¹⁰

Similarly, von Rad¹¹ notes that it is not Cain but his sacrifice that is rejected and that there is still hope for him since sin (or evil?) is an objective force to which human beings are vulnerable (pp 101-2), while coping with its consequences is still within our control (vv 6-7). Cain, however, has to take responsibility for what he does and to live with any guilt that goes with it.¹²

Since, however, there is no single interpretation of Genesis 4 the door is wide open to further interpretations, some of which can be quite perceptive. Working under oppression in South Africa, for example, Boesak and Mosala both see it as a story of oppression but in different ways. Boesak¹³ sees Cain in the white oppressors, feeling threatened and licking their wounds, whereas Mosala,¹⁴ coming at the tale from a different angle, sees Abel as representative of the landed classes emerging under the monarchy in the 10th and 9th century BCE being used to legitimate the dispossession of small peasant freeholders whom they regard as Cain. Significantly, neither addresses the issues that have troubled biblical scholars over the years; they simply say, ‘this is our story’ and we can tell you what it means.

With that in mind, therefore, it is but a short step for Steinbeck to move from the Gabilan Mountains, the Santa Lucias and the Salinas Valley to the world of Genesis 4 and it is no surprise that Steinbeck found that step easy to take.¹⁵ Nor is it difficult, reading East of Eden against that backdrop, to hear Steinbeck saying ‘this is my story too’. But how, and why?

To answer that question we have to combine Whybray’s summary (the symbolic beginning of evil) with Steinbeck’s own assessment of the story as 'powerful, profound and perplexing', a tale whose implications have made a deeper mark on people than any other story, save possibly the story of the Tree of Life and original sin, because this realization seems to be what led him to his title where the story becomes central to an understanding of ourselves and the meaning of life.¹⁶

The story raises three issues: one, a basic, human desire, prior to any reference to death or violence, evil or corruption (despite Whybray), to please and to be accepted. Two, the consequences of acceptance and rejection, with questions as to why, leading to an eternal search for a solution. Three, the tension between an accepting and unquestioning approach to life on the one hand and a feeling of helplessness on the other. Both often result in anger and aggression in some and pain and guilt in others. All three, directly or indirectly, form something of a backdrop to East of Eden as the two worlds of John Steinbeck are reflected in the narrative, together with other tensions in his personal life as revealed in his writing and (in the case of East of Eden) in his correspondence.¹⁷

The Two Worlds of John Steinbeck

Sufficient ink has already been spilt on whether East of Eden is autobiographical, and it is not our purpose to revisit that territory.¹⁸ What is not in dispute is that East of Eden is a story of two families (or two worlds); one giving a fair reflection of the world Steinbeck grew up in, and the other providing an imaginary, constructed portrayal of a quite different world he encountered later in life. Both are real but in different ways; the first because some of the characters can be identified and checked, the second because, though none actually exists to the point of being identified and checked, few would doubt that one could have met any of them in that part of the world when Steinbeck was growing up. For some thirty years prior to writing East of Eden, Steinbeck lived in tension between the two and an examination of his writings and correspondence may help us to see how he came to East of Eden in general, and to Genesis 4 and timshol in particular.

Early Encounters with ‘the other World’

In school, Steinbeck was a boisterous, disruptive student, very shy yet wanting to mix and always seeking approval.¹⁹ At Stanford, his teachers judged him 'woefully immature emotionally.'²⁰ From an early age he seems to have been well aware of a world other than the Episcopalian one in which he grew up, questioning the concept of God and the place of religion in his life, and confused about himself as a social being.²¹

Timmerman describes Salinas as the valley where his parents were respectable citizens whose evident prosperity bespoke the genteel advances of Salinas at the beginning of the 20th century, yet 'underneath the patina of gentility remained the more notorious elements of what was essentially a rough-and-tumble California frontier town.'²² Steinbeck grew up in one and was well aware of the other with its shady side of human nature, having worked with migrants on the huge Spreckels Ranch and spent his teenage years getting around Salinas, including Chinatown, its red-light district and Mexican neighbourhoods as well as Pacific Grove, Monterey and Cannery Row.²³

Tributes abound from fellow-American writers on Steinbeck’s capacity to empathise with the farmers and the common people, and after reading his letters, fiction and non-fiction, many who never had the opportunity to know him so closely or professionally would have no difficulty identifying with them.²⁴ Once out from under the family umbrella he rejected most of the Christian faith and much of the practice. Religion and life seemed incompatible, organised orthodox religion hypocritical and unable to relate to daily living. He never became a firm believer though he mellowed with the years and became increasingly sensitive to religious experience and to the faiths of others.²⁵

Growing Tensions

Stories drafted while at Stanford University in the 1920s give us a peep into the tension between the two worlds and the way his mind was developing.²⁶ 'St Katy the Virgin,' a mixture of satire, fable and allegory, for example, shows him wrestling with a sensitivity to traditional religious practices on the one hand and a totally different set of beliefs on the other, as he explores the experience of Katy, of good lineage gone bad, not by something she inherited (original sin) but by something in her environment.²⁷

On leaving Stanford, Steinbeck found that tensions mounted as he became involved in The Log from the Sea of Cortez and was introduced by Sue Gregory²⁸ to that other side of Salinas subsequently portrayed in Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945). It was a world so different from the one he grew up in. He liked it and was drawn to it, or (to be more precise) to the people in it. What fascinated him in Cannery Row, says Susan Shillinglaw, was not so much the business and commerce of the day but the people who inhabited the street when the day’s labours were over, when Cannery Row became

They were the whole of life, 'the gathered and the scattered’, the publicans and sinners, the rejects of an established society, an amoral fringe maybe but in this interconnectedness of lives Steinbeck found both companionship and true life. Here he found what is, not what might be or even necessarily what ought to be, and they are the heart of ‘Steinbeck’s purest non-judgemental, non-teleological text’.³⁰ These were the people who knew what it was always to be on the wrong side, not necessarily of the law but of every desk or counter. Like Cain, they knew what it was to have their offering rejected even if Steinbeck did not necessarily see it that way at the time. They knew the shame, the hurt, the puzzlement as to why, while still having to get on with their lives. They also knew (and the Hamiltons knew) that they lived in two different worlds. Metaphorically, they lived on opposite sides of the Valley.

Some of the tension is spelled out in Tortilla Flat, where much of what Danny and the Boys get up to is of questionable legality, enough to make the Hamiltons’ hair curl. The Hamiltons were not averse to turning a blind eye occasionally in extenuating circumstances or in the interests of a good cause but there were limits, whereas for Danny and the Boys 'protecting the weak' meant fighting for those who could not fight for themselves whatever the consequences.

‘Tortillas and Beans’ (Chapter 13) is a prize example where we see Steinbeck’s growing commitment to those who belonged to that ‘other world’, appreciating their finer qualities, re-assessing his own sense of values and raising questions for others to worry over.³¹ When, as if that were not a big enough pill for any ‘Hamilton’ to swallow, he adds a final paragraph: 

Steinbeck loved these people. His heart went out to them but the questions never went away and, the more he lived in the two worlds and moved between them, the more intense they became. The questions of Genesis 4 were his questions. Why so? Did it have to be this way? Was it their fault, or the fault of the Hamiltons?³² Did either world have a choice? Could it ever have been different for them? Could it, even now? All found their way into East of Eden as he pondered where he stood in relation to the two worlds.

Acceptance and Rejection

Allied to this is the matter of acceptance and rejection. Steinbeck’s natural empathy with those who knew from personal experience what it was to have their ‘offering’ not so much rejected as ignored made him acutely conscious of the consequences, as many of his short narratives in the short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, demonstrate.

Tularecito, for example, so obviously a misfit, his specific gifts and skills unrecognized, firmly rejected by Miss Martin and whose subsequent acceptance by Miss Morgan was not nearly enough to undo the damage that had been done. Or the Lopez Sisters, similarly, struggling to run a small business making tortillas, driven to a way of life that leaves them consumed with guilt to the point where, victims of their emotions and local gossip, they are driven out of the Valley by the well-intentioned on the grounds that they are running a house of ill repute. Others include Hilda van Deventer (a child not of sound mind), Molly Morgan (a teacher unhappy with her father) and Pat Humbert (a man hung up on his parents). But why? None is particularly evil. None has done anything to deserve what happens to them. None of them understands why it happens to them but not apparently to many others. Answers still elude us. Why their Valley or indeed any Valley?

The idea that the Valley was cursed following the arrival of one family (the Monroes) is hardly sufficient explanation, but with one disaster after another it is hardly surprising Steinbeck turned to the idea for a thread to hold them all together, expressing itself partly in human conflicts between the residents and partly in the tensions between individuals and social structures.³³ All, including Steinbeck and the Hamiltons (though not necessarily aware of it) are children of Cain, searching for an answer nobody can offer. Evil is part of the human experience. It is one of the consequences of being born, nobody escapes and the price to be paid is toil and pain.³⁴

Steinbeck’s Story is Our Story

If we are all Cains then the Valley is our world, but it is not an isolated unit, and to see it sharply divided into light and dark (or good and evil) is to over-simplify it and fails to do justice to other tensions of which Steinbeck was only too acutely aware. For two of these tensions we may turn to In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men. Other examples can be found in more of his short stories.³⁵

In Dubious Battle (1936) puts the two worlds in a specific (but different) context, as Capitalists and Communists lock horns, with Capitalists unable to change, Communists wanting change but only so that they can set up an equally unchanging structure. Both ironically are actually and obsessively wedded to the status quo, leaving the uneducated masses as the pawns on the chess board.³⁶ Some of this may reflect a further tension in Steinbeck himself, the fruit of experience with migrant workers at the Gridley Migrant Camp, north of Sacramento³⁷ and though the specifics have no place in East of Eden the difference between the two approaches is not unlike that reflected in Adam and Charles, the one content with things as they are and the other with a mission to change the world. Nonetheless, the underlying tension is not so much social or political as theological and when his publisher suggested that what started as a straightforward journalistic account of a strike might be turned into fiction it gave Steinbeck just the opening he needed. It enabled him to use a small strike on an orange valley as the symbol of man’s eternal, bitter warfare within himself, taking the title from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the struggle of Satan with an almighty power. In this regard Steinbeck sees strikes or social justice as no more than the symptoms of the conflict within all of us, a battle which relates directly to the heart of East of Eden’s message.

In Dubious Battle also demonstrates Steinbeck’s ambivalence as between the individual and the community. Childhood reading led him to nurture and expand his individuality, whereas in his parents’ world ‘security and respectability’ regarded individuality as ‘eccentric and undesirable’, something to be suppressed or even sacrificed in the interests of a respected career for the good of the society. As Steinbeck grew older his reading of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman and his increasing interest in Transcendentalism,³⁸ with its emphasis on the individual as opposed to society, led him to put the individual at the centre though always requiring the individual to be altruistic, serving the needs of others.³⁹

All the time, however, Steinbeck often seems to be in two minds as to how the two opposites relate to each  other. On the one hand, he can warm to the concept of westering, reflected in The Red Pony,⁴⁰ recognising its positive affinity with the rushing mighty wind of Pentecost 'when two or three were gathered together.’⁴¹ On the other hand, In Dubious Battle and letters to his friends⁴² reflect his anxiety during this time concerning the Mob and the Phalanx and the ease with which a person may lose (or surrender) their individuality and be taken over by the group.⁴³ In the end he settles for some fluidity between the individual and the group.⁴⁴ This sentiment is most directly expressed when he says,

Increasingly Steinbeck’s two worlds are less ‘two’ and more ‘one’ than is often recognised, with lines of demarcation more blurred than rigid. Are Lenny and George, for example, in Of Mice and Men, two? Or are they really one?

Interpretations of Of Mice and Men (1937) are legion, but after a brief survey of political, sociological and traditional approaches, William Goldhurst unearths what he describes as 'a more basic and accurate interpretation’.⁴⁶ Penetrating to the essential meaning beneath the surface he puts the emphasis on ‘the religious sources and its mythic-allegorical implications’. It is a story of aloneness versus relationships, a variation on the tension between the individual and the community found elsewhere, dealing with the nature of man’s fate in a fallen world where the predominant issue is, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’⁴⁷ If that actually is the case, it suggests once again that not only the issue but also the Genesis story was never far from Steinbeck’s thinking as he wrote East of Eden, and the concept paves the way for a broader interpretation of Cain and Abel with some such characters, Cathy especially, as more than simply an individual.

The Letters

Up to this point we could only speculate and read between the lines to find out the issues that were occupying Steinbeck for the first twenty years of his working life. We are however on firmer ground when we turn to his correspondence,⁴⁸ described by him in one letter as ‘an attempt to understand myself’,⁴⁹ all of which helps us to sense what he was feeling, thinking, and trying to do.

From his letters it is clear that what began as an attempt to introduce the Valley and his immediate family for the benefit of his sons is only part of the story.⁵⁰ Before he ever put pen to paper he is seeing it as two books, 'the story of my country and the story of me’, though at that point he intended to keep the two separate.⁵¹ Early in the writing he confesses that he feels more at home with the Trasks (whom he has created from his experiences with the other half of the Valley) than he does with his own people which he finds much more difficult to handle.⁵²

Before he was halfway through he is ‘drilling’ or plumbing the depths of the paradox. 'It is not local', he writes, 'it is not primarily about the Salinas Valley nor local people’.⁵³ It is to give an impression not so much of the physical life of the county as of the spiritual life, the thinking life, the state of mind and the plateau of thought. In this way Steinbeck moves to a general title with its roots in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, not because he understands it (he doesn’t) but because he sees it as powerful, profound and perplexing, very short but with implications which have made a deeper mark in people than any other save possibly the story of the Tree of Life and original sin.⁵⁴ Within weeks this passage becomes 'a measure of ourselves'.⁵⁵ By the time he got to the end he says 'Cal is my baby . . . the battleground between good and evil . . . the sorry man'.⁵⁶ When we return to the text (East of Eden, 503) we find that Cal is a man at war with himself, suggesting that what we find in Cal may well be a reflection of the internal struggle within the author and (by implication) in all of us. The novel is a theological treatise after all, with a crucial biblical text at its heart.

Steinbeck’s letters also give a few minor but not insignificant indications as to what matters to him and how he wishes us to read it. The letter from Charles to Adam at the end of chapter 4, for example, should be read 'very carefully because if you miss this, you will miss a great deal of this book and maybe will not pick it up until much later,' thereby demonstrating an awareness that what causes maximum hurt is not so much rejection as being left with the feeling that you are not there and don’t count while others seem to be getting all the attention.⁵⁷

So too, as Steinbeck moves to his final section and begins to see things more clearly, he more than hints that the essence of his story is hope as the new day begins to dawn with two new characters, Adam’s awakening, Aron (though less important) as the catalyst of Cal, and the inherently good Abra teeming up with the damaged but redeemed Cal to open a new chapter. In what follows therefore we begin to explore some of these movements in East of Eden itself.⁵⁸ 

Content and Characterization: Cathy

Now that we know Steinbeck’s motivation and intentions, when he wrote and as he wrote, we can take a closer look at the way his characters reflect his world and shape the story, and since East of Eden is a treatise on the nature and price of evil then the heart of the story has to be Cathy. The author’s correspondence confirms this, not only in general but in detail.⁵⁹

Neither a Hamilton nor a Trask, Cathy has an incredible capacity to unsettle others and is specifically introduced as a monster (East of Eden, 74), the very epitome of evil, complex yet simple, frightening yet fascinating, easy to spot yet difficult to understand and, with no conscience and no human reaction, virtually impossible to handle. It is never clear what she wants and difficult to get into her mind.⁶⁰ All we can be sure of is that what matters is what matters to Cathy. She is the epitome of our common humanity, both Trasks and Hamiltons at their worst without any of the redeeming features of either.

Steinbeck is well aware that some people will not believe in this character, yet he has no doubt that Cathy and her like really do exist⁶¹ and, though he concedes that some readers may wish to overlook the implications of his creation, neither has he any doubt that her presence is necessary to his presentation.

She is the fulcrum for the whole story, not because she is a monster but for two other reasons. One, because she is the most powerful influence in the story, directly in the sense that she has the most influence on Adam and indirectly by transmitting her blood to their sons, but also because she is the catalyst for change in most of the others.⁶² Two, since there is something of Cathy in us all she is the key to an understanding of ourselves and the people around us. In spite of all that, or perhaps because of it, Steinbeck concedes it would be difficult to imagine a worse character, or even one as bad. Simply writing about her was difficult, and he records that chapter 20 in particular gave him bad dreams.⁶³ He knew, however, that despite the fact that some readers would find it hard to believe in her as a real person others who hate her for being a monster would still be drawn to her, as people are always drawn to evil if they can pretend their contact with it is clinical. They then forget that she is evil, possibly because she is a little piece of the monster within us all.⁶⁴ That is all the more reason why her story must be told in great detail, and also in a casual way as though it were not at all unusual, with the reader left to supply the emotion and make a judgement.⁶⁵ Since this is a novel, a mixture of autobiography (the Hamiltons) and the ‘others’ (the Trasks), and since there is no sign of a Cathy in the one, and few, if any, obvious candidates among the ‘others’ in the Valley (despite what Steinbeck says), what prompted him to create her?

The Apotheosis of Evil

We can probably discount the view that when Steinbeck conceived the book he was suffering from some personal experience which had embittered him, such as the failure of his second marriage, or that he held strong views on American women.⁶⁶ By the time he wrote it, he was happily remarried and fully supported by his new wife and there is nothing in his biography and very little (if anything) in his writings to suggest that he was an unpleasant or embittered individual.⁶⁷ On the contrary, almost (if not all) his writings show acute sensitivity to the needs of others, especially to those in need or living on the margins, and it is difficult to see how anyone sensitive enough to reflect life in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, not to mention In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, The Pastures of Heaven and especially the story of Tularecito, could suddenly turn up with a Cathy and expect to be taken seriously. We need to look therefore for another explanation, and it is not difficult to come up with a hypothesis.

Cathy is larger than life, not so much a person as an overwhelming power — the apotheosis of evil on the one hand, the personification of our common humanity on the other. Presented as a monster, she is variously described as a whore and a controller, with the capacity to control and disrupt the lives of others, lacking all feeling about their strengths and goodness.⁶⁸ Her life is not so much that of a normal person as a programme of revenge on other people because of a vague feeling of her own deficiencies, just as a man born blind must hate eyes as well as envy them and might wish to remove all the eyes in the world.⁶⁹

For Steinbeck the issue is not the popular interpretation of sin as a few misdeeds, nor the result of a few wicked people, nor the occasional wrongs we all do to one another; it is the evil that is generic (today we might almost say systemic) within us all, going back to the Garden of Eden. Some might describe it as original sin,⁷⁰ others as pure self-interest, but with a problem of that magnitude Steinbeck had to have a Cathy. Support and corroborative evidence for this hypothesis may be found in two places.

The Grapes of Wrath

First, the climax to the conflict in the Valley between the Hamiltons and the ‘others’ (subsequently the Trasks), whom he found so attractive if at times puzzling, began with The Grapes of Wrath, and this is where we may detect the seeds of ‘Cathy’ in a force that was neither Hamilton nor Trask but which threatened and affected both. It took the form of an impersonal power which manifested itself in all large institutions, including the church, the banks and big business, government and political parties, the landowners or whatever — an impenetrable force with an agenda all its own which showed little concern for people, individuals or groups once their interests conflicted with its own agenda. It was an independent, exterior and mighty force whose ways were not the ways of most people whose lives were deeply disrupted by it. Some may call it the devil, Norwegians may speak of trolls, New Testament believers of principalities and powers,⁷¹ all those hidden forces which are entirely beyond our control and which affect us all in various ways. They were an inevitable part of East of Eden, more central and more crucial than in The Grapes of Wrath, and whereas in The Grapes of Wrath they are focused on an an institution East of Eden embodies them not in an institution but in a human being, thereby bringing out the breadth and depth of meaning in such a way that the connection with Cathy cannot be missed. 

To take one illustration, on the very day that Steinbeck tried to find a reason for Adam falling in love with Cathy he suggested that perhaps it was because having been trained to operate under a harsh master (the army) he welcomed a tough mistress; in the very next paragraph of his letter he then wrote that it was important not to miss the significance of the way in which in this story ‘people dominate the land, gradually. They strip it and rob it. Then they are forced to try to replace what they have taken out’.⁷² The institutions in The Grapes of Wrath have become Cathy in East of Eden. She too exploits the weaknesses of others and lacks any appreciation of their strengths and goodness.⁷³ In addition, she is easy to believe when she lies though not credible when (sometimes) she tells the truth.⁷⁴ With no conscience or human reactions it is difficult to know what makes her tick, just what she wants, or is up to, and with one notable exception rarely gets her comeuppance.⁷⁵

Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur

Second, corroborative evidence for Steinbeck’s attraction to this literary device can also be found in his letters where he attributes it to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

Following the assassination of John Kennedy in 1964, Steinbeck (somewhat inadvisably perhaps) used the word ‘myth’ to describe him in a letter to his widow. Sensing that she took exception to it, he was prompted to give us some insight into his understanding of the term. When he was nine, his Aunt Molly gave him a copy of Morte d’Arthur in Middle English and he never stopped working on the idea. As a result he saw people like the Buddha, Jove, Jesus, Apollo and Arthur as ‘myths’ — not that they didn’t exist but that within themselves they embodied characteristics and concepts such as authority, heroism, pride, and victory which are permanent and, in a day when such characters have been lost (or gone underground), one or two need occasionally to be brought out and verified by 'a Hero'. Each answered a call and so became a harbinger of hope. ‘There was and is an Arthur as surely as there was and is a need for him. And meanwhile, all the legends say, he sleeps — waiting for the call’.⁷⁶ John Kennedy was one such person.

Generic Evil

With that background Cathy is as real a person as any of the other ‘myths’ that Steinbeck mentions. All are more than human beings, with a tremendous power for evil (or for good) which surrounds them like an aura, which was there before they were created and will continue to be there long after they have gone. Such people embody in themselves so much that people hate or long for and will receive wide recognition for generations yet to come as symbols of a reality which is more powerful than they are.

Add to this Steinbeck’s predilection for a certain fluidity of thought between the individual and the community (to which we referred earlier) and, though we have no certainty that Steinbeck had this specifically in mind, it would not be surprising if his affection for such characters did not filter through as the character of Cathy emerged.

What is less questionable is that Steinbeck knew only too well, as his thinking on the Mob and the Phalanx to which we referred earlier demonstrates, that the power of evil is greater than the power of evil people, with an ability to take over a community or even a generation, almost without them becoming aware of it, so that people suddenly find themselves part of something vast over which they have no control. This was what led 90,000 Okies to find themselves slaves of the Dust Bowl in the early 1930s in a new world where one tractor could do the work of a dozen families,⁷⁷ where landowners were in hock to the banks and 'the bank is something more than men . . . It’s the monster. Men made it but they can’t control it’.⁷⁸ At the same time, turn a man off his land and he is powerless, but let two men squat together of an evening on the highway and “‘I lost my land’ becomes ‘we lost our land’, the first step from ‘I’ to ‘we’'.⁷⁹

Cathy is all these things rolled into one. We know Steinbeck’s feelings about big institutions. Like them, Cathy is a law to herself. She thinks she can do anything and get away with it. She has a capacity to inflict untold hurt and damage to others whilst believing she can be totally untouched by it herself. Occasionally she may not get away with everything and get her comeuppance, but no sooner is she down than she will be up again and back in business. She is the one whom (or which) nobody can satisfactorily handle and all the others have to be seen in relation to her.

Adam

Adam, though a Trask, is somewhat akin to a Hamilton, an individual in a fairly tight and regimented society (as it seemed to Steinbeck when he was growing up) who 

For this reason, unlike Cathy, he is very real and believable. The Hamiltons would have no difficulty recognizing him and receiving him into their home. He is typical of many who are content in their own world, find all change difficult (unless they initiate it which they rarely do), and so isolate themselves that they neither see nor hear much of what is going on around them, preferring to insist on maintaining their image of the world even when it has changed beyond all recognition or is tumbling round their ears.⁸² Inherently unable to accept the unacceptable, they retreat into a world which is not the real world at all but one they have invented for themselves and are content to live with. This is ‘Adam’ apparently not hearing Cathy even when she tells him she is going away and it also explains Steinbeck’s insistence that Adam never really gave up Cathy at all; he simply went on living with the Cathy he had invented.⁸³  When the awakening does come towards the end, and it is a painful process, Steinbeck draws attention to 'the reticences a man would feel together with the revealing things that creep through' as he becomes a living man,⁸⁴ when for example in a moment of confidence he tells Cal, 'My father made a mould and forced me into it. I was a bad casting but I couldn’t be re-melted. Nobody can . . .’⁸⁵ How different life might have been if only his father had been able to accept Adam as he was (the giver) with the affection he showed to his pup (the gift).

From another angle, however, if Cathy is the apotheosis of evil Adam is capable of rising to heights of glory in times of need or when strongly motivated. He is protective of his brother⁸⁶ and once in the army, notwithstanding his revulsion for violence and an inability to kill anyone, he has the courage to go out and bring in the wounded, surprising his colleagues who treat him with ‘contemptuous affection’, possibly confirming his father’s judgement that he needed the army to make a man of him.

At other times, however, and for some Hamiltons all the time, he is living in a world where he feels trapped, a victim of forces beyond his control and totally unable to do anything about it. The cards have been dealt. He must live with the hand he has been given. This is the power of Cathy, and this also explains why it is easy for us to identify with him. Adam is us, some of us all the time and all of us some of the time. He lives with the question which so often troubled Steinbeck. ‘Does it have to be like this and can I do nothing about it?’

Charles

Charles who grew up in the same broad environment is totally different, but it would be no more accurate to call him ‘bad’ than to call Adam ‘good’. Both are good and bad but in different ways. To Adam, clearly his father’s favourite, Charles is a ‘destructive machine that chopped down anything standing in its way’.⁸⁷ Charles knows it and, not surprisingly, suffers from a massive dose of insecurity. Alice, his step-mother, saw him differently: ‘All rough shell, all anger until you know him’, she said, and Charles responded by leaving her small presents, very much a reflection of the way Steinbeck saw and portrayed the Trasks.⁸⁸

Charles is also a Trask, but a more relaxed character with an ability to take life as it comes. Growing up in a world where he was not so much rejected as ignored, and with gifts which were not appreciated or even noticed, he has developed a capacity to ignore the traditional rather than to challenge it. His cards too have been dealt. He too must live with the hand he has been given. He could happily live on Tortilla Flat and work in Cannery Row, but (though not without cause) he does have an enormous chip on his shoulder and the key to it is to be found in the letter he writes to his brother at the end of chapter 4, still smarting from his father’s rejection of the penknife.⁸⁹ We can of course speculate how different life might have been if only his father had been able to accept the penknife (the gift) with the affection he showed to Charles (the giver) but that is not the story. He didn’t. Perhaps he too had his cards, and Steinbeck is trying to open our eyes to all the implications.

It is an over simplification to say that Adam (Abel) got it right and Charles (Cain) got it wrong. That was no more than a scratch. It is not even that Adam was accepted and Charles was rejected, though that is how it was perceived and it irritated. What bites deep with any Trask is the sense of unfairness, having no choice, never really knowing what was expected and nobody ever taking the trouble to tell him the rules or the mores. How then could Adam manage as he did? Yet even then it is none of these things, every one of which he could have lived with, that really matters. What draws blood is that he put so much effort in, and Adam virtually did nothing. Surely that can’t be right, and that is a problem which afflicts all humanity, the Hamiltons as much as the Trasks.

Together they tell the story of Steinbeck’s two worlds which are not nearly as different or distinguishable as may at first appear, as they merge in the one family. Hamiltons and Trasks may (and probably will always) be two separate people with different qualities, but with many shared resources and each needing the other to survive.

This is why, for the purposes of the story, it may be helpful to think of Adam and Charles (Abel and Cain) not as two but one, remembering that Abel and Cain were twins and so enabling us to see their world and our world through new, and different, eyes with a potential to increase both our understanding and sensitivity.

Were the brothers perhaps a reflection of the way Steinbeck saw himself at one stage in his self-understanding? ‘Adam’ is the world he grew up in, relaxed and easy going but never quite at peace with himself and not sure what if anything he could do about it and if he could what exactly it would be. ‘Charles’ is the other world, the world over the fence or the other side of the Salinas Valley, strongly attractive, fun to share but not one he could ever quite belong to. Turn where he would the tension between the two never went away. Why was he like this? Who had the upper hand? ‘Adam’ or ‘Charles’? And where did he see the future?

The Next Generation

When we come to Aron and Cal Steinbeck offers a deliberate reversal of roles with another two brothers who dominate the remainder of the book.⁹⁰ Whereas the first half of the story comes through the eyes and emotions of Adam (or Abel), with Charles (or Cain) as the dark one who remained dark, the second part comes through the eyes and emotions of Cal (or Cain), with the spotlight falling on Cal and Abra, and with Aron in a subsidiary role, partly because he is the catalyst of Cal and partly to make the point that there is something of Cain in us all, with a positive side to his character, often missed.⁹¹ 

As with Adam and Charles, Aron and Cal are very different. Aron is shy, delicate and loved by all, but tough; once he has set his path nothing can change him.⁹² Cal on the other hand is dark-skinned, clever, smart, secretive; not popular but a natural leader, feared but not respected, who drifts, craves affection, was invariably rebuffed and had to learn loneliness. Aron wins people by his beauty and simplicity, is always well received, is content to be part of the world he lives in and to a fair degree to conform to it. Cal, by contrast, always feels he had to change it⁹³ and inevitably lives with the frustration.⁹⁴

Steinbeck decided early on Cal was his ‘baby' and set out to show how Cal’s problems are of a different order from those of Aron.⁹⁵ Unlike Adam or Charles, Cal had to contend with an inordinate share of evil within himself from the beginning and is at war with himself.⁹⁶ As if it were not enough that he believes he has something of his mother in him (a fear in due course reinforced by his mother),⁹⁷ towards the end of the novel he has to face responsibility for the death of his brother and his father.⁹⁸ The inherent guilt he also has to live with personifies the Trasks who have to endure with the feeling that they have never really had a chance. Cal is clearly a challenge to the reader to re-evaluate the lines of division and discrimination and maybe to discover that they do not always run in the same place or where we think they do. The mark of Cain is not a curse but a sign of protection.⁹⁹                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The fact that he specifically names Cal as his favourite may suggest that by this stage Steinbeck is coming to terms with one side of himself, neither Adam nor Charles but a single, refined offspring from ‘the twins’, neither the one nor the other and not exactly a mixture of the two, but a recognition of what it is that makes him tick. No longer a Hamilton, no longer an unsatisfactory Stanford graduate and definitely not a Trask-once-removed, but his own man, growing, maturing changing with age, experience and circumstances.

To handle this situation Steinbeck sees that Cal (and his like) will need the support of an outsider and so introduces Abra, a woman, who emerges as ‘the strong female principle of good as opposed to Cathy’, who provides him with a rock and a defence. Abra is a secondary and less developed character (as goodness so often has to play second fiddle to evil) but one whom Steinbeck intends us to see as ‘a fighter and an effective human being’ whose ‘strength will not be soft.¹⁰⁰ She is well aware of Aron’s problem and knows about Cathy before Cal tells her. She also knows that her father is not ill and she has the strength of character to bring the relationship with Aron to an end by destroying his letters.¹⁰¹ As one from another planet, neither a Hamilton nor a Trask, she has a perception, an objectivity and a freedom denied to many other characters but is the harbinger of hope and the source of strength for all, especially in company with Lee, who (as we shall see presently) doubles as ‘rock and defence’ for Steinbeck for the next stage of his growth and development.

Conclusion: Two Worlds or One?

By the time he reached fifty there is sufficient evidence at least to suggest that Steinbeck’s hope sprang from the realisation that the two worlds over which he had exercised so much thinking for thirty years were really one. Nothing much had changed in the Valley but the two sides, situationally opposed to each other and with a different ambience, were really one. So too were the Hamiltons and the Trasks, Adam and Charles, Aron and Cal and (to pick up Whybray’s point that Abel and Cain were symbolic) we may even argue that each pair is symbolic, not of evil (as Whybray suggests) but more like twins symbolising an inner unity. Not two but one.

Nor is this simply a bright idea or a new phenomenon which Steinbeck suddenly springs on us at the end. The seeds are there in his early writing, particularly in To a God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven.

In To a God Unknown there is a charming vignette where he describes Joseph taking Elizabeth, his new bride from ‘another world’ (or at least another valley), up the hills and through the pass to her new home. As they approach the pass Elizabeth is suddenly gripped with fear. Only it isn’t the pass — the high mountains, the limestone rock, the steep drop on either side or the water in the bottom. It is not clear what it is, but her heart keeps missing a beat with anxiety. It is something in the atmosphere. Even the horses seem to sense it. Joseph suggests that what she is feeling (and fearing) is ‘going through the pass’ to a new life; moving from one world to another. The marriage ceremony is over. The familiar has gone. It is time to leave the old world for the new one. But it isn’t only Elizabeth who has to adjust. Marriage requires both of them to die to the one (singleton) world and go through the pass together to form a new unit, like the sperm and the egg in the birth canal, to a new and independent life.

Even here it is not difficult to see Steinbeck, like Joseph, not once but many times, standing at the crossroads, on the edge of one world, gazing at the other and beginning to see them as one.¹⁰² Even here, we can see him standing in the heart of the Valley, twixt the Gabilans and the Santa Lucias, the light and the dark, the good and the evil, beginning to see that in accepting ‘the other’ and appreciating what it has to offer it need not be the end of the world he is familiar with and could indeed be the matrix for the new. Twenty years later, writing East of Eden, he can describe how the two worlds may come together and complement each other because they are all the time not really two worlds¹⁰³ but one, with Lee reminding Cal that he is not only the child of his mother but also of his father with very different qualities; he is a mixture of two worlds.⁹⁸ Similarly, as a counter to the curse and catalogue of disaster that afflicted twenty families in that remote valley that served as a backdrop to The Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck saw a different world. All the stories are examples of remarkable courage and radiant humour in the face of adversity but simply by setting them in a valley which was there before the curse (when things were very different) Steinbeck at least suggests that even then he was beginning to see that if there was once a time when the world was different might it not mean that one day it could be the same again?

Eden came before the Fall, and if we can fall, we can also rise. Herein is hope and the seeds of the hope which is fleshed out at the end of East of Eden, by which time he seems to be saying not only that ‘it doesn’t have to be like this’ but offering an even more perceptive hint that if the characters in the Valley represent a picture of fallen humanity finding their way in a latter day Eden, presumably we too may find our Eden as we learn to stand alongside them.¹⁰⁴

The Valley may have two sides, but it is one Valley. Each side contributes to the other and the whole combines elements of both. In that moment the story of the Valley is the story of Steinbeck. Steinbeck is the Valley, the Valley is Steinbeck and the biography he set out to write for his sons (albeit not quite as he intended) is almost complete. The tensions may not go away, but they don’t have to dominate, much less control. Individually, and corporately we have not only the capacity for change but the right and privilege to bring it about, just as in marriage one world must die to create another. ‘We may’ (timshol in Genesis 4: 7) is the message that enables those seeds to blossom, but is it right and can it really happen? For that we have to turn to Lee, ‘the rock and defence’ and to Abra, now on hand for Steinbeck, picking up the baton laid down by Ricketts many years before, and able to verbalise the message of hope for those who find it difficult or may even miss it altogether.

Lee

Lee, Adam’s ‘pig-tailed Chinese cook’,¹⁰⁵ is a narrator but significantly more than a narrator and, with virtually no story of his own, the only character who is there from start to finish. Like Abra, he too comes from, and lives in, another world. With a watchful eye and a listening ear, he enables people to see and understand what is going on around them. In spite of an inherent blindness and a lack of fluency in English, he speaks pidgin because English is what people expect and he is saying things they do not expect to hear and often find hard to come to terms with; it also serves to maintain the distinction between him and the rest of society.¹⁰⁶

As friend and confidant to all (or nearly all), he is mostly engaged in interpreting what is going on rather than taking part in it, yet his almost unseen, unheard presence is the catalyst for change in others, and is crucial to the interpretation of timshol, fortifying Steinbeck’s belief that a man may free himself of his past and conquer evil with his shrewd interpretation of Genesis 4:7.

By the time we get to the end of East of Eden, Lee and Abra have bonded sufficiently for Abra to say she wishes Lee were her father. Lee responds by saying he wishes Abra were his daughter,¹⁰⁷ and when Cal is still struggling to believe what he wants to believe (‘thou mayest’) Lee reassures him as he explains that a craftsman, even in his old age, still lives with the urge to make a perfect cup. The he adds, 'Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us — would stop trying?’¹⁰⁸

By the end nothing has changed but for some the prospect is more hopeful and positive, thanks largely to the perception of these two people (the inherently good Abra teaming up with the damaged but redeemed Cal) with Lee on hand to supply the theory and the language (timshol) and Adam able to assure Cal that what he wants is what Aron has given him:

That, followed by a ‘marriage of ideas and understanding’ between Lee and Abra must surely say something to Cal and others like him. The key however which unlocks the guilt, redeems the offender and releases him for new life is Steinbeck’s ‘discovery’ of the meaning of timshol. Things don’t have to be as bad as they are but change requires us to receive forgiveness for ourselves and to offer forgiveness to others, to accept responsibility for what is (which is much broader than what we have done) and to claim the responsibility (one might almost say the human right) to see and do things differently. It is also to capitalise on the positive. Nobody, least of all Steinbeck, is going to argue that rejection (any more than pain and suffering) is a good thing but what Steinbeck has also come to see is that rejection and frustration can be an impetus and is that part of our humanity which enables us to become ourselves.¹¹⁰ The issue is not whether we are accepted or rejected but what we do with what happens to us. That is our choice.

Whether that is so or not is debatable but can Genesis 4:7 be interpreted to mean that we have a choice and is that a legitimate translation of the Hebrew timshol as Lee suggests and Steinbeck accepts? Steinbeck’s rabbi said it could and a leading contemporary Hebraist acquaintance of mine assures me that the rabbi was right. That is not the same thing as stating categorically ‘that is what it means’. Nobody can claim to know what it meant 3,000 years ago. What we can say is that it one of a number of possibilities, yet one more example that ‘you don’t have to (believe it)’ but ‘you may.’

Postscript

East of Eden begins with the Gabilans and the Santa Lucias. Steinbeck does not return to them at the end, but had he done so it is a fair thought that, though nothing there would have changed, his perception may have been different — possibly more light and less dark and perhaps also an appreciation not of the two but of the one and the way in which each contributes to the other to make a whole. Might he perhaps have seen Cal, the child of an evil monster, not so much 'forgiven' as 'redeemed', sitting side by side with Abra, the quixotic essence of goodness, the two of them calmly relaxed and chatting between the light and dark of the Gabilan Mountains, dangling their feet in the gentle stream which comes from the side of the rising sun and ‘bumbles over round stones and washes the polished roots of the trees that hold it in,’ the two who make it to the Promised Land?¹¹¹