Free Working Days by John Steinbeck

demands. He was writing a novel, not a journalistic tract. If this section reveals comparatively few new secrets about Steinbeck’s novel, it says plenty about the tumultuous conditions of his life, and his mode of working, during the stretch that produced his finest novel. Like most great books, The Grapes of Wrath was certainly not created in a vacuum.
    Understandably, maintaining his intensity was paramount. Without looking back, Steinbeck overcame the disappointing “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” which he had destroyed in mid-May; within a week, or perhaps ten days at the most, he started headlong on the new, unnamed manuscript, which wasn’t actually titled The Grapes of Wrath until early September. However, his work on “L’Affaire” wasn’t wasted, and certainly cannot be underestimated, because it cleared the way for The Grapes by purging his deep personal depression, and by exorcising his base instincts, including unchecked anger and the desire for his own brand of artistic vengeance. Naturally, his partisanship for the migrants and his sense of indignation at California’s labor situation carried over to the new book, but they were given a more articulate, and therefore believable, shape. The whole process of passing through a “bad” book proved beneficial. Without stopping to analyze its effects, he told Elizabeth Otis on June 1, “... it is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive all fall. I like it. I only feel whole and well when it is this way. I don’t yet understand what happened or why the bad book should have cleared the air so completely for this one. I am simply glad that it is so” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters , p. 167).
    The epic scale and engaged purpose of Grapes had been building for some time, but apparently crystallized between May 15 and May 25, 1938. During that time—perhaps the most fertile germinative moment in Steinbeck’s writing life—the organizational plan of the novel, with its alternating chapters of exposition and narrative, leaped to life in his mind. Judged against his contemporary, William Faulkner, Steinbeck was not a sophisticated literary practitioner, and while he wrote nothing to rival the architectural virtuosity of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), he did achieve in The Grapes of Wrath a compelling combination of individual style, visual realism, and rambunctious symphonic form that was at once accessible and experimental. Furthermore, as these entries suggest, he actually envisioned the novel whole, all the way down to the subversive last scene “ready for so long” (Rose of Sharon giving her breast to a starving man), which became both the propelling image of the book and the imaginative climax toward which the entire novel moved.
    Indeed, except for a few particulars, The Grapes of Wrath was written with remarkably preordained motion and directed passion. Steinbeck apparently did not work from a formal outline (nothing of the kind has ever turned up); rather, he sketched out the novel in his head—in aggregate first, then followed by a brief planning session each day. He had plenty of questions about his ability to execute the plan, but few about the plan itself; from the outset he knew the direction his book and his characters would take. Unlike his other “big” novel, East of Eden, which discovered its form (and sometimes its content) in the act of composition, The Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole. This journal records the sweaty process through which Steinbeck liberated his materials, gave them direction, shape, and form nearly commensurate with his primary vision. The Grapes of Wrath embodies the form of his devotion: in the entire 200,000-word handwritten manuscript the number of deletions and emendations is proportionately so few and infrequent as to be nearly nonexistent. (The textual changes—mostly minor—occurred in Carol’s typescript and on Viking Press’s galley