Essays on Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-68) is best known for The Grapes of Wrath,  never out-of-print, still selling at the rate of 50,000 copies every year in the USA alone, and regarded in many USA schools as history, though he wrote 26 other novels and plays, several collections of short stories and numerous newspaper articles, and gained the Nobel Prize for literature.

Isaiah (6th century BCE) is best known for quotes such as ‘He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’ and ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’, thanks largely to Handel’s Messiah which is regularly sung in churches and Concert Halls at Christmas and Easter and is regarded by many as a significant part of British culture. The chapter from which those quotes are taken however from one of four poems, familiar to mid-20th century biblical scholars as the Suffering Servant Poems (or Songs), and it is here we must begin, since the purpose of this paper is to examine possible connections between Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and Steinbeck’s close friend and mentor, Ed Ricketts.

The Servant Songs

The four poems (42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:1-12) do not appear as a single unit but belong to a section of Isaiah which is thought to be by one author. They can be lifted out of the text without disrupting the flow and what binds them together as a unit is their reference to ‘the Servant’, usually known as ‘the Suffering Servant.’¹

Since ‘the Servant’ is never named, and therefore we have no idea who he is, we have to begin by asking what he does, and to anyone familiar with Steinbeck’s work a slight paraphrase of the biblical text may be enough to set some bells ringing.

As a character, ‘the Servant’ is quiet and unobtrusive — he will not hurt a fly or extinguish even a flicker of light — but he will take full responsibility for anything he does, he will never surrender and he will never give up through weariness until he feels his job is done. He is a one-off — when they made him they destroyed the mould! Self-effacing, often ignored, sometimes rejected — but he does a job nobody else can do and part of that job is to be a light constantly shining in dark places. He has the tongue of a teacher, but a teacher who listens. He was never known to bear a grudge, he took on board everybody’s sufferings and hardships, got a lot of stick for it, was often not taken seriously, and it was only after he had gone that people really woke up to what he had been trying to tell them and wondered whatever they would do without him.

His over-riding mission was justice and healing, but his understanding of justice was more than legal justice and exceeded what often passes for justice in religion — more akin perhaps to human rights — because he saw himself as there for the protection of the weak, and though he was committed to relieve suffering he was not afraid to inflict hurt on others if the ultimate aim was healing.

For further clarification we might ask ourselves, ‘Of whom is the prophet speaking?’ and here we have an infinite variety of suggestions and scant agreement among biblical scholars.

The list is endless, from Moses to Jeremiah, Cyrus to Jehoiachin, an unknown contemporary of the prophet or even the prophet himself,² not forgetting of course those who interpret the poems as a prophecy of Jesus some 400 years before he was born! But there is no consensus whatsoever.

The biggest debate, and the most fruitful, is whether ‘the Servant’ is an individual or the community — is it Israel,³ or ‘an Israel within Israel’, or ‘a righteous Remnant’ of the faithful? And does he have to be the same in all four poems?

The One and the Many in Hebrew Thought⁴

H H Rowley⁵ identified a development of thought in the four poems which allowed for a variety of possibilities. In the first Song, the Servant seems to  be the collective Israel with a mission to carry the light of true religion to the world. In the second the Servant seems to have a mission to purify Israel, suggesting an Israel within Israel. In the third, the Servant is going to endure suffering and shame in the fulfilment of his mission and could be either an individual or a collective, but when we come to the fourth it has to be an individual whose suffering will not be incidental to the mission but the very means by which his mission is accomplished.

Such a fluidity of thought between individual and community may not be easy for 21st century westerners to accommodate but it was first adumbrated by H Wheeler Robinson⁶ and others⁷ almost a century ago (and therefore shortly before Steinbeck was writing) as a theory of ‘corporate personality’. Briefly it goes like this.

Robinson and his colleagues noticed that Israelite references to the community never referred only to those who were present at the time, nor indeed only to people. In their world ‘community’ extended backwards to embrace ancestors and forwards to include generations yet unborn. It also included possessions and land, and the land could be both 'earth' and the particular geographical territory which Yahweh had given them when they arrived in Canaan. Israel was a psychical whole, with an extension of personality through family, property, the tribe and tribal possessions, or the nation and national inheritance.⁸

‘Community’ therefore was not ‘an abstract unity’ created out of a ‘mass of individuals.’ Community was the real entity. Unity was prior to diversity. The community was prior to the individual, individuals had their origin in it, belonged to it and derived their identity from it.⁹

Following observations on individual rights and community responsibilities Robinson then focused on the fluidity of thought between them, where words seemed to slide effortlessly between individual and community, so that either it is not clear which is being referred to, or the person speaking or writing seems to feel no need, or has no conscious desire, to make the distinction. He then also drew attention to the force, passion or effectiveness of the community (group, mob or phalanx) as distinct from, and as of a different order from, the sum of its parts, which is particularly relevant when you come to Steinbeck.

It is fair to say that the theory has never had universal acceptance.¹⁰ It was probably never part of the legal structure,¹¹ though there is fairly general agreement that the theory holds in matters of holiness and kinship solidarity.¹² Even John Rogerson,¹³ one of its severest critics, concedes the possibility of a fluidity of thought in the Servant Poems, and C R North¹⁴ concludes that if we are to think of the Servant in terms of the community at all it can only be broadly in terms of ‘corporate personality’ as outlined by Eissfeldt and Robinson.

On the basis of this evidence therefore we propose to address three questions:

1    Did Steinbeck and Robinson know each other and was Steinbeck aware of the Israelite notion of corporate personality? I think the answer to both questions has to be No, though we must not underestimate Steinbeck’s acquaintance with Judaism and his capacity for digging deep to find out what he wanted to know, like the meaning of timshol (Gen 4:7) in East of Eden.

2    Was Steinbeck aware of the Servant poems and did he consciously use the ideas in his writing? Again, I think the answer has to be No.

3    Is there any evidence that Steinbeck’s life and work reflect Isaiah’s Suffering Servant? To this question I think the answer is a resounding Yes and I want to focus the rest of this paper on it, after which I will leave you to consider whether Isaiah helps us to a greater appreciation of Steinbeck, whether Steinbeck helps us to a great appreciation of Isaiah, or both. So to the evidence.

Interpretation

The strength of any poem is its capacity to evoke both thoughts and feelings and to be open-ended, and as scholars have found Isaiah’s Servant in a wide range of people with a variety of interpretations, both individual and collective, so also in Steinbeck the territory is rich with possibilities. With the limitations of time I want simply to mention three possible answers to my original question and then to explore a fourth in more detail, fully aware that we can only scratch the surface, and any of the four (and possibly several others) could easily be the subject of a Master’s thesis.

Steinbeck

First, if the poet in Isaiah were writing about himself, could Steinbeck himself be ‘a type’ of the Suffering Servant? I think the answer is Yes and No. Yes, in the sense that it would be very difficult to write as Steinbeck did unless he had  an empathy with ‘the Servant-figure’, could rub shoulders with him and feel the bond of a kindred spirit. No, because the very essence of ‘the Servant’ is that he is ‘servant’ and therefore always more concerned with drawing attention to ‘the other’ than to himself (and for the same reason I don’t think Isaiah could have been the Servant either). Isaiah’s Servant was anonymous. That is his strength. Steinbeck is never anonymous — though I am bound to add that the fluidity of thought in the Isaiah poems is such that I believe the idea merits much closer examination than I have given it.¹⁵

Community

Secondly, would we do better to see Steinbeck’s Suffering Servant as the community? There are certainly arguments for this.

Like the Servant in Isaiah’s first poem, Steinbeck’s community has a mission, the protection of the weak (Cf 42:1), which transcends legality and religion and is more akin to human rights, but is not necessarily the whole community.

Furthermore, the confusion in Isaiah, arising from the fact that the Servant seems at times to have a message to the community and at other times to be the community, is also reflected in the way in which sometimes Steinbeck’s message is to the community and he is the messenger and at other times the community is the messenger and Steinbeck is its mouthpiece,thus demonstrating a fluidity of thought very similar to that of the poet, as Steinbeck slides very easily from the whole to the part, even to the point of seeing the individual or Representative, until, as in Isaiah’s final poem (52:13-15) Steinbeck sees the community as something from which people benefit without realising it, and truly appreciate only when they have lost it.

But it is when we examine Steinbeck’s ambivalence in his understanding of the relationship between the group and the individual that we come closer to the fluidity of thought associated with the Servant.¹⁶ 

In Argument of Phalanx, for example, instead of seeing mankind as a collection of individuals Steinbeck prefers to think of individuals as ‘units in the greater beast’ (rather like cells are units in the body) and at this point comes very close to the Hebrew concept of the community as primary and the individual as secondary.¹⁷  From this then comes his idea of Group Man, like any other super organism made up of smaller unitss having a will and a direction of its own, often reflecting values and exhibiting behaviour not shared by the members as individuals, and each with a keying-in device by which he becomes part of the whole and at which point his behaviour becomes completely different.

You see this in the great move west in The Grapes of Wrath, in In Dubious Battle, and again in the conflict between the owners (working as individuals) and the workers (acting collectively), but it is perhaps in the ‘westering concept’ in The Red Pony that it finds its richest expression, as Grandfather tells his grandson of the days when he led people across the Plains and they had to defend themselves against the Indians. What made it was not the Indians, nor the adventures nor even arriving, but the experience of ‘westering’. ‘Westering’ was an energetic force of individuals finding personal meaning and direction through joint participation in a concerted effort.¹⁸ It was ‘a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast . . . Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering . . . The westering was a big as God.’

‘Man’, says Steinbeck, ‘is a double thing — a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first.’¹⁹

So, yes, the community could be Steinbeck’s Suffering Servant, with its sense of mission, the fluidity between the individual and the community, the suffering and the peculiar mix of success and failure.

Characters

A third, and more profitable line, perhaps, is to look at some of Steinbeck’s characters. None, of course, embodies all the Servant’s characteristics but several come very close.

Take Casy in The Grapes of Wrath. Casy is a preacher, but he is also a teacher who listens and learns from his pupils (cf Isaiah 50:4), who certainly had a mission when he started — he knew where he wanted to lead people — and though he lost it in the course of his life he found it again, but with a difference, as he identified with the suffering community on the trek from Oklahoma to California. Knowing he had a job to do, and that he must do it even if he died in the attempt, he keys into the phalanx and helps others to key-in also. In course of time he becomes that lone figure, identifying with the community yet always separate from it and knowing that he must suffer with it and possibly even die for it. In so doing he makes the change from ‘I’ to ‘we’ as he discovers that previously he was only a little piece of a great big soul²⁰ and a little piece was no good unless it was with the rest and was whole. Tom, who is running away from justice, becomes a convert when he says, ‘I know now a fella ain’t no good alone’, and his mother, Ma Joad, shifts her orientation from the family unit to the migrant community as she turns faith into action when her daughter whose child has died gives milk to a dying man.²¹   

Slim, the jerkline driver in Of Mice and Men, described by Thomas Fensch²² as a wise almost godlike figure, provides another example. Described as ‘the prince of the ranch’, he is ostensibly just like the rest but undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with. ‘His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.’

George and Lennie are two itinerant farm workers with a quite unrealistic dream. Lennie, a feeble but loving character, thinks one day they will have a farm of their own, but Lennie understands neither the force of his emotions nor the power in his hands. He kills everything he loves, including eventually the wife of Curley, the ranch owner, and George realises that he must shoot him before anybody else does.

Slim is the one who understands their inability to translate that dream into reality, the only person able to bridge the gap between George and Lennie and the rest of the ranch, and the one who gives George the strength in the end to do the necessary. He is also the only one to stand up to Curley and he referees a very tricky situation when Candy is being pressed by one of his fellow-workers to kill his old and disgusting dog.

Like the Servant in Isaiah’s fourth poem, Slim has no cause, no effect, no problem, no solution, is neither hero nor villain, but is at the very heart of what is going on, entirely non-judgemental, and supplies the fulcrum for the final section of the story.

A more developed Suffering Servant appears in Doc (‘half Christ and half satyr’) in Cannery Row and Doc Burton in In Dubious Battle.  Both are sad, lonely characters who have far too much about them to be ignored but who just don’t fit their environment, seem unable to connect with where everybody else is, and disappear into the middle distance with much admiration but little understanding, like a man ‘cut off from his time’ (Isaiah 53 8).

Cannery Row, of course, is a real place in Monterey. Steinbeck describes it as ‘a poem, a stink, a grating noise . . . a nostalgia, a dream . . . tin and iron and rust . . . weedy lots . . .  sardine canneries . . . restaurants and whore houses’. Whether its inhabitants are social outcasts or people who have retreated from society is debatable, but in a tough world of stress and strife they adhere to the philosophy, ‘What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?’

On the one hand, they are essentially ‘animal’ rather than human. All that seems to matter is food, drink, shelter, sex and status. Rarely does anything in their lives survive for more than a night. On the other hand, in a world dominated by a shallow respectability, these illiterate, colourful characters strike a blow for honesty and concern for one’s neighbour.

Into this cauldron Steinbeck places Doc — a character who understands the tension in the poor people who want to escape from their lot but whose mindset prevents them from doing so, described by one commentator²³ as ‘a lonely and set apart man’ and by another²⁴ as one who ‘completes the human community by serving as its local deity.’

Doc Burton,²⁵ in In Dubious Battle, provides an even closer parallel in a story of conflict between unionised migrant labour, who struggle against capitalist farmers constantly wanting more work for less pay, and highly individualistic farmers, who struggle against ever increasing pay demands from their workers. In other words its about strikes, the threat of strikes and negotiations. It is about the tension between the individual and the collective, on both sides. Not all workers are on the side of the unions all the time, and highly individualistic Californian farmers find it difficult to collaborate even with one another to preserve their own interests. And the story is laced with much philosophical discussion on the right use of violence as well as action.

Doc Burton is a concerned observer but not a Party member.²⁶ He eschews violence but in the endhe is blamed for failing to get his philosophy across and defeated by the partisan Party leaders who refuse to listen and reject his ideas. As a result he endures shame and ignominy (Isaiah 53:9) and by not offering alternatives leaves himself open to the charge that he is out-of-touch and not pratical. He also holds a theory of Group Man which distinguishes the individual from the group but then goes on to suggest that Mac, the workers’ leader and an individual, might in fact be an expression of the concept, thus moving between the one and the many²⁷ as in Isaiah 53. Like Isaiah’s Servant he can see the group (or phalanx) but he cannot key into it.

In some cases there is more than one candidate for the role of Suffering Servant in the same novel. Jim Nolan, for example, also in In Dubious Battle, is in some respects a more likely candidate than Doc Burton. Like Isaiah’s Servant, Jim comes from nowhere, has no antecedents or recognised credentials and is one whom life has tested harshly. Initially, with no great feeling for people and no commitment to any cause, he has a detached approach to life and enjoys gazing at the stars, but by the end he surpasses his mentor, Mac, in commitment, courts a disastrous death, which in the story achieves absolutely nothing, leaves Mac saying at his funeral, ‘He didn’t want nothing for himself’ and one commentator²⁸ referring to him ‘as a saviour, a type of Christ.’

In The Moon is Down Dr Winter is perhaps the most obvious character and the parallels are certainly there, but once you introduce Isaiah’s Servant, with the idea of one prepared to die for the people, you find yourself looking more closely at the Mayor who has already been presented as symbol (or Representative) of the people — ‘a heroic character . . . not the hero’ but one who has ‘the hero’s role thrust upon him.’²⁹

Ricketts

By now it will have occurred to those familiar with Steinbeck that Casy, Slim, Doc (in Cannery Row) and Doc Burton have been already identified by others0³⁰ as ‘Ed Ricketts characters’, so we need to take off just one more layer and ask, ‘Was Ricketts (1847-1948), a marine biologist on Cannery Row, co-author of Sea of Cortez,³¹ the man behind at least one of the principal characters in several of Steinbeck’s novels, Steinbeck’s closest friend and responsible for a number of his attitudes and philosophical ideas³² — was he Steinbeck’s Suffering Servant?’

Ricketts and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant certainly have many features in common, some of which have already been mentioned as we have looked at characters modelled on him. But never mind his views —  what he says about the phalanx, group man, westering, teleology or the differences which can be shown between him and Steinbeck. Look rather at what he is. Put him alongside the Servant, especially Isaiah 53, and see what happens.

Obvious similarities include a capacity to accept what comes (to ‘go along with’ rather than to ‘fight against³³), a sense of being part of of the community but not  the community^,34 a recognition that in a world concerned for justice and righteousness punishment and forgiveness must go hand-in-hand,³⁵ with a capacity to ‘receive’³⁶ and to accept all people³⁷, arising from a sense of mission to the outcasts whether they be Gentiles (as in Isaiah) or simply people who don’t fit (as with Ricketts).

Three facets of Ricketts deserve special attention.

First, are we to think of the Servant as an individual or a Representative? I referred earlier to the fluidity of thought in Isaiah between the one and the many and a good example of this in the Old Testament is the king, who is certainly an individual but also stands as Representative,³⁸ sometimes of the deity and at other times of the people. Can we see Ricketts in this role? I think we can.

Unlike the Servant, whose description at times leads one to wonder whether indeed such a person ever existed save in the mind of the poet, there can be no doubt that Ricketts was a real person, but that has not prevented at least the suggestion that he had about him the air of a fictional character, and enables us to look at him again not just as a person but as a type or Representative of a whole genus, species or way of life. These Ricketts-like characters may be few and far between but they do exist, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups and sometimes even as whole nations. Recognising them, understanding them and appreciating them is a recognised part of Christian theology. Ricketts and Isaiah’s Servant together may be more use than either of them apart.

Secondly, though rooted in time and space both Ricketts and Isaiah’s Servant enjoy a kind of timelessness. Put them down in any location in any century and they would have a relevance to the human race, yet for this very reason both are cut off from their generation,³⁹ resist the flow of civilisation and refuse to go along blindly with everything that happens. Neither is one of us, yet both are everyone of us.⁴⁰ In some respects, both sense an inability to deal with the problem (whatever it is) and have an awareness of their inability, but both are content simply to ‘be’ and that is what makes them so vulnerable to others. And in both cases (though probably neither of them can appreciate it) what they stand for will be recognised and valued in years to come and their ‘children’ will be around for ever.  

Thirdly, like the Servant, Ricketts endures suffering and lives with suffering, but always for the benefit of somebody else, and his own sufferings (when they occur) are of a totally different order. He is despised and rejected, misunderstood, left with the feeling that what he says may make sense in a perfect world but is of no practical use in the real world, so that he suffers deeply whilst at the same time being detached from the sufferings of others to whom he is committed in a different way. This is what enables him to hate all suffering and yet be able to apply the scalpel where it is part of the healing process. It is not that he doesn’t feel but that he feels deeply, and differently, and herein lies his strength. For both Ricketts and the Servant suffering is the means of healing. Can they help us together to plumb that?       

The last word on this man, and the final link in the chain, has to go to Steinbeck, whose intention on Ricketts’s death was to clear up his affairs and move on. Astro⁴¹ says ‘fate’ decided otherwise and it was four novels and five years before he got Ricketts ‘out of his system’. Why? Because in Steinbeck’s own words, ‘He will not die. He haunts the people who knew him. He is always present even in the moments when we feel his loss the most.’⁴² Even after writing his tribute which Steinbeck hoped would ‘lay the ghost’ he has to admit at the end that it hasn’t gone. Left with a haunting picture, he says, ‘I guess I’ll have that with me all my life.’⁴³

If the overall mission of Isaiah’s Servant is justice for the Gentiles (that is, the outcasts), to bring light in dark places and dispel obfuscation with clarity, to respond to human need and suffering by taking upon himself the burdens of others and then himself to accept the suffering that inevitably follows, even to the point of ‘death’, then Ricketts is a strong contender for the rôle.

To link the two, with the obvious implications arising from the close association between Isaiah’s Servant and the Messiah will be offensive to some bearing in mind many other aspects of Ricketts’s character,⁴⁴ but then it is of the essence of the Servant that he does give offence. Jesus too was thought by many to be an offensive character who was always keeping the wrong company and getting involved in the wrong things.

So, in spite of all, my answer to the question I started with is ‘yes’ and my Centennial Award for the honour goes to Ed Ricketts.

Memorial to 

Ed Ricketts (1897-1948) 

in Monterey

 at the point where he met his death

 in a railway accident