Books, Arts & Manners: Sentimental Journey

THE STEPPENWOLF Theater Company’s Broadway production of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath comes to us with the express imprimatur of Steinbeck’s widow—in the form of a “message” to the audience printed in the playbill— and the implied one of the deceased novelist himself. Her tenses may be a bit off, but the message is clear: “My husband would love what they have done with his book.” No doubt. For what they have done is to make palatable to a contemporary audience a sentimental saga of impotence and despair that offers as its only hope a belief in the innate goodness, selflessness, and generosity of the individual American.

In its unabashed mawkishness, Steinbeck’s 1939 best-seller was no different from most of the popular culture of its time. Indeed, the final scene—in which Rose of Sharon, having just given birth to a stillborn baby, offers her breast to a starving man— evidently caused some embarrassment in the editorial offices of The Viking Press, but Steinbeck could not be convinced to part with it. There were those at the time who felt that the bathos of Depression-era popular culture was, in the words of Arthur Miller, “weirdly misplaced.” Writing in his recent autobiography, Timebends, he recalls his reaction to the scene in the novel in which a shopkeeper lets Ma Joad keep ten cents’ worth of groceries without paying for them: This “might be inspiring,” he writes, “but it was an amazing departure from any reality I had experienced.”

ER

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Eva Resnikova

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THE STEPPENWOLF Theater Company’s Broadway production of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath comes to us with the express imprimatur of Steinbeck’s widow—in the form of a “message” to the audience printed in the playbill— and the implied one of the deceased novelist himself. Her tenses may be a bit off, but the message is clear: “My husband would love what they have done with his book.” No doubt. For what they have done is to make palatable to a contemporary audience a sentimental saga of impotence and despair that offers as its only hope a belief in the innate goodness, selflessness, and generosity of the individual American.

In its unabashed mawkishness, Steinbeck’s 1939 best-seller was no different from most of the popular culture of its time. Indeed, the final scene—in which Rose of Sharon, having just given birth to a stillborn baby, offers her breast to a starving man— evidently caused some embarrassment in the editorial offices of The Viking Press, but Steinbeck could not be convinced to part with it. There were those at the time who felt that the bathos of Depression-era popular culture was, in the words of Arthur Miller, “weirdly misplaced.” Writing in his recent autobiography, Timebends, he recalls his reaction to the scene in the novel in which a shopkeeper lets Ma Joad keep ten cents’ worth of groceries without paying for them: This “might be inspiring,” he writes, “but it was an amazing departure from any reality I had experienced.”