A Love Letter for John
I have a friend, who shall remain nameless as though by magic, who does not like John Steinbeck. “Too dry,” is what I’ve heard the two or three times I’ve asked. And sure, Steinbeck does have a moment-to-moment tendency to give us prose that’s been soaking in the drought sun deep in the produce fields of the Salinas Valley. I can’t help but love him.
I can’t help but adore the way Steinbeck meanders through a sentence as his characters chug across the desert in search of a future everyone promises will be better. “The handbill says there’s plenty of work! Field after field of bursting harvests all in need of hands and hands and hands. Easy money to be made!” I love The Grapes of Wrath. Half a novel about towing a dying woman and a pregnant girl towards the promise of wealth before realising the money isn’t there and never was. The dying are dead for nothing and the baby has mercifully gone to join them before it could feel the burn of a disappointingly empty harvest sack.
Have more kids. We certainly won’t deport them. The job market is great, have you not seen the Dow Jones? Don’t trust your eyes, the blisters on your hands and the boils on your feet, trust the handbill that a stranger from a strange land promises is real. Underpaid and overworked? That’s just how the American dream starts my boy, we all work our way to the top eventually. Ignore the fact that no one who looks like or speaks like or acts like or reads like you is up here with me.
My references are on the nose only because John’s (can I call him John?) references were on the nose one hundred years ago. The grapes of wrath didn’t predict the future, we’re all just too busy to notice that this country hasn’t changed since John was mortified with his own travels through it. It’s the same stolen, abused land that he saw, worked by the same tired souls that he put in his books. The titular quotation in Grapes is not just an observation of tragedy unfurling over vast swathes of our seemingly failed society, it’s a threat. We’ve seen the promise fulfilled a few times with the various civil rights movements in the United States holding at their core a wee babe of socialism desperate for its first breath. It’s been aborted and snuffed and thrown in the dumpster a few times now as the beneficiaries of the status quo fear the day they are forced to reconcile with the reality that they are just like all of us, but the grapes John wrote of swell still.
The Moon is Down is perfect only excepting for my personal opinion that Nazis are not to be humanised in the way he did. I admit that I have the benefit of hindsight and he was working through the emergence of fascism which left him without the wisdom we now have today. Didn’t stop me from cringing each time I see John try to make the commanding officer a sympathetic figure. Only following orders as he contends with the clear PTSD he harbours from some old, unnamed war. I like my Nazis how I like my Nazis: punched, dead, forgotten, and buried. I commend the man for his drive to make compelling characters though and The Moon is Down is a very human story. An occupying force has to come to terms with the lack of power it truly has and only emboldens the occupied as fascism does what it can only do - enact greater and greater violence to keep the population tame. It doesn’t end with a victory, where the fascists are heroically kicked to the curb and everyone can celebrate and kiss and then talk about how swell the Dow Jones is looking that day. We end in media res, honestly just as it was getting good.
The moon is still down and the grapes are still swelling. Will they burst at their seams and scatter juice across our nation in an indiscriminate rain, or will we poke a hole the right size, the right time, to see our oppressors swept away under a rising sun.
John didn’t know, but I love him more for admitting it.