Steinbeck's Post-War Trilogy: A Return to Nature and the Natural Man

Abstract

While it is impossible to predict the future of John Steinbeck's reputation, it seems certain that what lasting,fame he does achieve will rest primarily on his great novel of the America Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Dealing in this work with the social and economic upheavel of the 1930's, Steinbeck transfers his belief in the inherent divinity of nature and natural phenomena (developed in an earlier work, To God Unknown [1932]) from the forest to the farm by maintaining passionate faith in agrarian reform as solution to the awesome problems caused by depressed American economy.' And, in telling the story of the dispossessed Joads, Steinbeck's belief that true human freedom can come only from private ownership of land; this insistence that man's own land gives him sense of dignity which makes his existence meaningful achieves its finest fictional expression.2 Despite the intensity with which Steinbeck chanted his agrarian idealism in The Grapes of Wrath, the harsh reality of World War II apparently convinced him of the inefficacy of agrarianism as solution to any serious social and economic problems. And all of Steinbeck's war writings are peopled by soldiers instead of by farmers. The absence of the agrarian motif in Steinbeck's fiction continues in his first three post-war works, Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947) and The Wayward Bus (1947), and while each of these works has individual merits, none attains the overall impressiveness of The Grapes of Wrath. Nevertheless, when these ostensibly unrelated narratives are viewed together, they form trilogy in which, contrary to Arthur Mizener's insistence that there is nothing in Steinbeck's fiction after The Grapes of Wrath worth reading seriously,3 Steinbeck becomes absorbed in what, aside from his agrarian novels and war writings, is his most distinctive subject matter as he carefully describes, examines and analyzes the intricate relationships between man and nature. The first of these works, Cannery Row, is at Steinbeck's own insistence, a mixed-up book with a pretty general ribbing in it.4 Moreover, it is work which obviously represents his personal escape from the horrors of war. Even as late as 1953, the novelist wrote that Cannery Row was a kind of nostalgic thing written for group of soldiers who had said to me, 'Write something funny that isn't about the war. Write something for us to read we're sick of war.' 5 No doubt alarmed by the suddenness with which Steinbeck detached himself from current social and political issues, many critics attacked Cannery Row, charging that his plot (which deals with the exploits of group of vagrants on Monterey's waterfront and their attempts to give party for Doc, their dose