Letter from Delano

The California table-grape boycott has become fashionable. Recently George Plimpton (The Paper Lion) threw a fund-raising party for César Chavez’ United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, and the New York press featured pictures of Plimpton’s stable of décolleté dollies sipping champagne and pouting at the cameras. Old liberals such as James Wechsler have embraced the cause with lachrymose ardor, and new-breed liberal mutants—Jimmy Breslin, for instance —find in the boycott opportunity to show that they are just as warm-hearted and fuzzy-headed as any of the old timers.

Few Easterners have any real knowledge of the facts of the boycott. It is enough that emotions can be aroused and played on. The typical view is presented by Breslin in one of his New York Post columns. “John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath almost thirty years ago and it is one of the few truly meaningful novels ever written in America, and in California they still grow grapes of wrath.” Now there is a lot wrong here, not the least of which is Breslin’s lardish prose style. The piece has a Christmas Eve setting, complete with four grape-pickers wandering lost in a New York snowstorm looking for a supermarket to boycott. The style is fat Hemingway (“ ‘They take from your check the cost of the place to live,’ Pajemola said”), the atmosphere mid-Victorian, the thought contemporary liberal, as if a few peasants from For Whom the Bell Tolls had wandered into a production of The Grapes of Wrath as staged by Charles Dickens.

JR

About the Author

John R. Coyne Jr.

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The California table-grape boycott has become fashionable. Recently George Plimpton (The Paper Lion) threw a fund-raising party for César Chavez’ United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, and the New York press featured pictures of Plimpton’s stable of décolleté dollies sipping champagne and pouting at the cameras. Old liberals such as James Wechsler have embraced the cause with lachrymose ardor, and new-breed liberal mutants—Jimmy Breslin, for instance —find in the boycott opportunity to show that they are just as warm-hearted and fuzzy-headed as any of the old timers.

Few Easterners have any real knowledge of the facts of the boycott. It is enough that emotions can be aroused and played on. The typical view is presented by Breslin in one of his New York Post columns. “John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath almost thirty years ago and it is one of the few truly meaningful novels ever written in America, and in California they still grow grapes of wrath.” Now there is a lot wrong here, not the least of which is Breslin’s lardish prose style. The piece has a Christmas Eve setting, complete with four grape-pickers wandering lost in a New York snowstorm looking for a supermarket to boycott. The style is fat Hemingway (“ ‘They take from your check the cost of the place to live,’ Pajemola said”), the atmosphere mid-Victorian, the thought contemporary liberal, as if a few peasants from For Whom the Bell Tolls had wandered into a production of The Grapes of Wrath as staged by Charles Dickens.