On our trip to the USA, Finland and
the UK recently, I re-read The Grapes of Wrath (first published in
1939).[1]
It is years since I first read it, so I had forgotten most of the story
line. However, the following passage has
remained with me. Al Joad is driving an old, second-hand Hudson truck along
Highway 66 (“the main migrant road”), as the family drive out west from
Oklahoma to look for work in California.
Listen to the motor. Listen to the
wheels. Listen with your ears and with your hands on the steering-wheel; listen
with the palm of your hand on the gear-shift lever: listen with your feet on
the floor-boards. Listen to the pounding of the old jalopy with all your
senses; for a change of tone, a variation of rhythm may mean–a week here? That
rattle–that’s tappets. Don’t hurt a bit. Tappets can rattle till Jesus comes
again without no harm. But that thudding as the car moves along–can’t hear
that–just kind of feel it. Maybe oil isn’t getting someplace. Maybe a bearing’s
starting to go.[2]
Perhaps when I
first read that evocative passage, it resonated because I was driving a
second-hand Morris Minor. I could identify with listening “with your feet on
the floor-boards”, or on the accelerator or clutch, as the case might be.
Grapes of Wrath essentially
is the story of an “Okie” family, the Joads, who are pushed off their little
farm by a combination of poor crops affected by dust-storms, and the march of
progress, or rather the banks foreclosing on the owners of the land, and the
tenant farmers being put off their land. So the “Okies”, thousands of them, set
out for California, where they imagine there’ll be jobs and opportunity galore,
and they’ll be able to buy their own houses.
The story charts their progress. It
details their deprivations, their hunt for places to stay along the way, their
time in Government supplied transit camps, or private camps. It describes the
way they are exploited in the jobs that they land: how, because of the
abundance of people looking for work, the employers are able to drive down the
wages to barely subsistence level, if that.
Steinbeck captures the dialect of
the “Okies” beautifully. He conveys their simple faith, and religiosity. He
writes of their everyday interactions on the road, and the way that folk, by
and large, helped each other out, and made friends quickly and easily.
Steinbeck generally conveys the
injustices and the difficulties that the Okies experience through narrative
description. Occasionally he writes a more discursive type of description,
where the narrator’s voice engages in exposition. Here, some of his indignation
shows through, though it is generally fairly muted. Here are excerpts from Chapter
Twenty-One. He writes about how the “moving, questing people [who] were
migrants now”, are changed by the movement, and the reaction of those amongst
whom they hope to settle.
The movement changed them; the
highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself,
changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving
changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them,
united them–hostility that made the little town group and arm as though to
repel an invader, squads with pick-handles, clerks and shopkeepers with
shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.
In the West there was panic when the
migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their
property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had
never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants.
And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend
themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders
bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said: These god-damned Okies are
dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies
are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.[3]
….
Steinbeck writes of how “the great owners
and companies invented a new method” for making profits, by buying a canneries,
and making profits off the end products while cutting the cost of the raw
materials. “And the little farmers who owned no canneries lost their farms, and
they were taken by the great owners, the banks, and the companies who also
owned the canneries”. The little farmers also take to the road, so that “the
roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work.”
And the companies, the banks worked
at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving
men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew
up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. The great
companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and
spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants
and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.[4]
In fact, the
anger, such as it is, does not translate into violence, so much as protest, or strikes,
actions which lead to violence against the protestors and strikers. Such
violence that Okies mete out is localised, individualised and in the heat of the
moment when a friend is attacked (see the incident with Tom Joad).[5] Mostly, they accept their situation docilely,
and compete with each other for work, and drive the cost of wages down:
When there was work for a man, ten
men fought for it–fought with a low wage. If that fella’ll work for thirty
cents, I’ll work for twenty-five.
If he’ll take twenty-five, I’ll do
it for twenty.
No, me, I’m hungry. I’ll work for
fifteen. I’ll work for food. The kids. You ought to see them. Little boils,
like, comin’ out, an’ they can’t run aroun’. Give ‘em some windfall fruit, an’
they bloated up. Me, I’ll work for a little piece of meat.
And this was good, for wages went
down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more
handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up.
And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again.[6]
That final
sentence, an authorial comment, says it all. Have we moved on much from the
circumstances and values of The Grapes of Wrath?
[1] First published by William
Heinemann. The edition I read was in the Penguin Modern Classics series,
published by Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951.
[2] John Steinbeck, The
Grapes of Wrath, 109.
[3] Steinbeck, Grapes of
Wrath, 259.
[4] Steinbeck, Grapes of
Wrath, 260–61.
[5] Steinbeck, Grapes of
Wrath, 354–55.
[6] Steinbeck, Grapes of
Wrath, 260.
