The Winter of Our Discontent (3 page)

In many ways Sir John Steinbeck’s three-year immersion in the Arthurian matter, from late 1956 to 1959, was his way to remain tucked away from the present, something he admitted. But in fact the project insistently drew him to his own times. As his understanding of Malory’s world increased, so did his awareness that the Middle Ages were not so very different from contemporary angst: “My subject gets huger and more difficult all the time,” he wrote to Malory scholar Eugene Vinaver in 1959, when he was living in Somerset trying to complete his manuscript called “The Acts of King Arthur.” “It isn’t fairy stories. It has to do with morals. Arthur must awaken not by any means only to repel the enemy from without, but particularly the enemy inside. Immorality is what is destroying us, public immorality. The failure of man toward men, the selfishness that puts making a buck more important than the common weal.” The letter itself moves seamlessly from his struggle to understand the Middle Ages to his present dismay, the nagging sense that he, like Malory, lives in a world where the center will not hold: “we are as unconsciously savage and as realistically self-seeking as the people of the Middle Ages.” Perhaps one reason he could not finish the Malory project, which he reluctantly shelved in late 1959, was that he could not hold back the tidal wave of his own time.

Certainly he could not after his return to America in October 1959, following an eight-month sojourn in Arthur’s territory of Somerset, England. Two additional “shocks” awaited him and turned him from Malory’s dilemmas to America’s in 1960. One was psychic and physical—his failure to complete the Malory translation. He had to face the fact that he was “not good enough nor wise enough to do this work.” Being able to write only scattered “acts” nearly brought on his own
morte
. In November 1959 he landed in a New York City hospital with, he said, the porthole open to the other side. But the gravely ill writer was not quite ready to “break his brushes.” The “shock therapy” of illness made him, he said, “take back command.” That meant, for this writer, to launch other “experiments,” as he called each book throughout his long career. In the first few months of 1960, he would write
The Winter of Our Discontent;
plan his trip around America with Charley, “Operation America”; and drive his camper truck out of Sag Harbor in September to take the pulse of his country.

Indeed, America itself, the country’s plight and its potential, was the final shock that centered Steinbeck. In Somerset, wrestling each day with his writing, tramping over land that Arthur’s foot may have trodden, Steinbeck lived imaginatively and physically in another era. Discove Cottage had walls two feet thick and had “sheltered 60 generations,” Steinbeck wrote his editor, Pascal Covici. In his garden he found shards of ancient pottery. He plucked dandelion greens to cook. He wrote with a quill pen. “I feel that I belong here,” he told Covici. His deep contentment in a rural simplicity was doused by the icy bath of America, October 1959. Like a latter-day Crevecoeur, seeing America for the first time, Steinbeck took the measure of his country upon his return: “For a long time I had not been reading any papers, even English newspapers,” he wrote in March 1960, well into writing
Winter
. “And then suddenly, every morning, the front pages of the American papers with the breakfast coffee. The front pages and much of the insides were reports of rigging, cheating meat inspectors, fuel oil cheats, payola, charges of false advertising, false representation, drug company jet-propelled markups, government and state contract thefts, and this against what used to be called crimes—rape, mugging, murder, burglary, delinquency. It was staggering after the lapse of time.”

In the background of
Winter
are those headlines and more— the drawn-out proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), for example, that he felt had deeply tainted the country. In a 1957 essay, “The Trial of Arthur Miller,” he takes Congress to task for ignoring a man’s private morality. A few years earlier, in 1952, he had stood by filmmaker Elia Kazan when he named names before HUAC; even though Steinbeck despised the committee’s actions, he defended Kazan’s “courage” in acting according to his conscience. As the critic Clifford Lewis notes, Ethan as “betrayer and informer” may owe something to Kazan’s clouded stance.

In addition, the quiz-show scandal that wound to its grim conclusion in November 1959 haunts the pages of
Winter,
as scholars Robert and Katherine Morsberger have convincingly shown. For fourteen weeks in late 1956 and 1957, literate and well-connected Charles Van Doren dazzled America with his brilliance on the quiz show
Twenty-One,
one of the most popular programs of the late 1950s. Van Doren “kept on winning,” notes Eric Goldman in
The Crucial Decade—and After: America, 1945-1960,
“downing corporation lawyers or ex-college presidents with equal ease on questions ranging from naming the four islands of the Balearic Islands to explaining the process of photosynthesis to naming the three baseball players who each amassed more than 3,500 hits.” But Van Doren had been coached, fed answers—a charge he denied for months under growing pressure in 1959. On November 2, 1959, however, the “new All-American boy,” as magazines had crowed earlier, appeared before the Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight in the House of Representatives and confessed to cheating on the show and lying to cover up his deception. “I was winning more money than I had ever had or even dreamed of having,” he said under oath. “I was able to convince myself that I could make up for it after it was over.” His response anticipates Ethan’s own duplicity: “my objective was limited,” declares Ethan, “and, once achieved, I could take back my habit of conduct. I knew I could.”

For Steinbeck it was a shabby little episode that reflected “symptoms of a general immorality which pervades every level of our national life and perhaps the life of the whole world. It is very hard to raise boys to love and respect virtue and learning when the tools of success are chicanery, treachery, self-interest, laziness and cynicism or when charity is deductible, the courts venal, the highest public official placid, vain, slothful and illiterate.” It would seem, however, that Steinbeck’s outrage was not shared by a majority of fellow Americans. Although Van Doren was fired both from NBC and from his position as lecturer at Columbia University, others refused to denounce his actions. At the end of 1959,
Look
magazine surveyed Americans’ values, and the editor concluded that “a new American code of ethics seems to be evolving. Its terms are seldom stated in so many words, but it adds up to this: Whatever you do is all right if it’s legal or if you disapprove of the law. It’s all right if it doesn’t hurt anybody. And it’s all right if it’s part of accepted business practice.” This is a survey that Steinbeck may well have read.

Nor did politics in 1960 offer much solace. Steinbeck’s friend Adlai Stevenson was not running for president— although Steinbeck would start a petition urging him to do so. Instead the 1960 presidential campaign was taking shape between the relatively unknown and vigorous John F. Kennedy and the positively unscrupulous Richard Nixon, whom both Steinbeck and Stevenson agreed two years before was the “greatest danger to the Republic.” Midway through
Winter,
Steinbeck wrote to Stevenson that “I rather liked Nixon when he was a mug. You knew to protect yourself in a dark alley. It’s his respectability that scares the hell out of me.” With McCarthy, Van Doren, and Nixon in his mind as he wrote, it’s hardly surprising that New Baytown affluence is represented by a smug banker, Mr. Baker, whose superficiality, greed, and duplicity are foils to Ethan’s integrity at the beginning of the book. Mr. Baker epitomizes values of
The Affluent Society,
a 1958 book written by another of Steinbeck’s friends, economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Baker’s plan to line his own and friends’ pockets with the wealth brought by a New Baytown airport serves as a microcosm for many Americans’ heedless pursuit of affluence, to the exclusion of the needs of undernourished citizens like Danny Taylor—or like impoverished Ethan himself in the opening chapters. This text peels back layers of economic exploitation, historical and contemporary.

Triple shocks administered by ghosts of past, present, and future, then, brought Steinbeck to the book that would chart the “time of confusion” to the day—
Winter
is set in 1960, and the time sequence in the second part of the novel precisely reflects his own writing schedule in that summer. But if Steinbeck lunged into the present as he began his novel in early 1960, it is also true that
The Winter of Our Discontent
is deeply tinged by the mighty project that preceded it, the aborted
Arthur.
Certainly one way to consider
The Winter of Our Discontent
is as an ironic Malorian-Steinbeckian “act,” featuring a knight of Steinbeck’s own invention, the impeccably credentialed Ethan Allen Hawley. But this American Lancelot is lonely, unsuccessful, cornered—initially unprepared to tilt lances, for his own Knight Templar sword is packed away. Sir Ethan’s military career has concluded, his lady has been won, the grail of life’s possibilities evaporated. Ethan is now simply a clerk in a grocery store, a squire at best.

Detached, always the observer, ironic and self-contained, Ethan is a modern everyman. “The Alone Generation,” read a headline from the late 1950s, assessing postwar temperament. But for Steinbeck, humanity’s lot was always something other than gritty individuality. “I believe that man is a double thing,” he wrote in “Some Thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency,” a 1955 essay, “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.” Old Cap’n Hawley echoes that sentiment.
The Winter of Our Discontent
is Ethan’s quest to assert his individuality, however ruthlessly pursued, and then to find the double thing in himself, his deep connection to a group, family and community and friends—an Arthurian circle intact. By the end of his quest, the thread of connection is a frail one at best, but it is there. The talisman in his pocket sends him back to his daughter’s light.

“I don’t know any book save only the Bible and perhaps
Shakespeare which has had more effect on our morals,
our ethics and our mores than this same Malory.”
( John Steinbeck to Mr. and Mrs. David Heyler Jr.,
November 1956)

He would wrap all three and more into his novel: Arthur’s gallantry, Christ’s temptations, the Cain and Abel story, Richard III’s wiliness. Add to that mix
Moby-Dick,
mentioned in the opening pages: Ethan is Ishmael, teasing out meanings from each strand of his story, diving deeper. And to that add “part Kafka and part Booth Tarkington with a soup-song of me,” his description of the novel sent in a letter to a friend. (Indeed, a copy of Kafka’s
Penal Colony
sat on his study shelf, and he was reading Kafka’s stories as he wrote the novel.) The novel’s structure, he said, “is conceived in the sonnet form,” a Shakespearean sonnet with two quatrains and a closing couplet at the end. And in mood and impulse, the book owes much to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and
The Waste Land,
where a fortune-teller’s voice directs action. (Even the physical manuscript is a mongrel document, written partly in pen and partly in pencil on his beloved yellow legal pads.)

This energetic borrowing from literary sources, all rubbing together, suggests on one hand cultural dislocation—verbal fragments thrown up like flotsam and jetsam on America’s sterile shores, a veritable wasteland. But there is cultural resonance in this richly allusive novel as well. Drawing repeatedly from Shakespeare and company, Ethan interlards his story with textual referents and thus traces parallels and reversals, paradoxes and adaptations. The title of the novel comes from the first speech in Shakespeare’s
Richard III,
where Richard, at this point Duke of Gloucester, growls that he will plot to darken any “glorious summer” that is possible “now” that the Wars of the Roses have concluded: Ethan is wily Richard, a puppeteer holding the threads of each character’s destiny. The book begins on Good Friday, and Ethan’s temptations are an ironic inversion of the story of the Passion. As John Ditsky has noted, Ethan is both Christ the redeemer and Judas the betrayer. He is also Cain, killer of brother Abel/Danny.

Indeed, Ethan’s tendency to self-consciously invoke biblical, heroic, patriotic, historic, or mythical referents suggests the complexity of his moral choices, layered as they are by references to other texts. Insistently Steinbeck connects Ethan’s tale to literary and cultural contexts, a copious connectivity not unlike his environmental consciousness of two decades earlier. The ecological holism of
Sea of Cortez
(“None of it is important or all of it is”) becomes the cultural holism of this last novel: The choices made by a grocery clerk in New Baytown, Long Island, matter within the textual pageant of human anguish—or else nothing matters.

To find his title in
Richard III
is highly appropriate to the mood of
Winter,
a tragedy, a melodrama, and a soliloquy all at once. But the taproot of this novel was not in fact Shakespearean drama but an earlier play of his own, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank, or the American Dream, an unpublished, unproduced, unconsidered play in One Act by John Steinbeck.” The play
was
never produced (and probably never intended to be), but it does exist in two manuscripts, the other titled “The Bank Robbery,” testifying to the hold it had on Steinbeck’s mind. These two plays undoubtedly shaped the intimate dialogues of
Winter.
As he was composing both, probably in mid-1955, he wrote to his agent about the importance of dramatic speech: “They say that a life is written in the face but now it seems to me, after listening, that it is even more written in the speech. The background is all there and the fears, the nature of the man in his speech.” In the novel that came five years later, Ethan’s speeches convey all shades of dramatic intensity.