Robert DeMott: Well, I think the American dream is extremely the American dream is extremely elusive. And a lot of ways. But think about it for myself. Coming from a second generation immigrant family, a Middle-Class Immigrant family, I think of it particularly in terms of a kind of social mobility. I guess I would say, and a kind of freedom to pursue what you feel might be the best part of yourself somehow. And I think that’s been true for me. I was I might never have had the opportunity to have been a teacher or a writer or even a scholar. In many ways, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was born in an age when that kind of mobility was still a possibility, it still seemed to adhere to the American dream. It’s just not possible. I think it’s about possibility. You know, in many ways. And I think that possibility can be defined in a variety of different ways. Some people define it in terms of money or, you know, economic security. Other people defined it in terms of a kind of freedom to be yourself or let’s say artistic or some kind of expression, freedom of expression. Others define it, I suppose, as a way of creating or maintaining a kind of integrity, personal integrity. So I think it has a wide number of applications, but certainly that sense of freedom would be a possibility, would be at the heart of it for me anyway. And sometimes that’s that’s denied. You know, you see that in the American tradition all the time. But but even though even so, it’s there. And that’s one of the things that holds out its possibility for us.
Interviewer: I can’t think of a green. What do you think? What do you think?
Robert DeMott: Well, that’s a curious way of thinking about it, I guess. I grew up in in in suburban Connecticut. And yet, in a lot of ways, my family were the kinds of people who did the service work. And yet, despite that, I still think of possibility as being associated with family. I can probably more than anything else. The specific images, my grandparents house on my mother’s side, which were sort of a center of activity for that part of our family. And so there was always a sense of coming and going. There’s always a sense of kind of networking of of emotional significance and meaning and and validity that we all participated in somehow. And I also think of it as the images that come to mind also are the garden that my grandfather kept in the back of us in the back of his house which…
Interviewer: The American dream.
Robert DeMott: Now that images self-sufficiency in a lot of ways is not going to be.
Interviewer: So that I can get from you.
Robert DeMott: I think that in a lot of ways, that image of my grandparents garden, for instance, is an image of self-sufficiency that’s rooted in the land. It’s rooted in a certain kind of ownership. I guess you could say it’s rooted in a kind of spatial significance, a place where people have the opportunity to be themselves, particularly beyond or after the workday is done. You have a place to come to. So I guess in some ways, part of that notion of the American dream as possibility for me is rooted or is associated with images of home. That is that in a lot of ways we think about a number of the novels that have defined the American experience. They have to do somehow with that notion of either finding, inhabiting or even losing our sense of home. And a sense of home is in a lot of ways a sense of identity, a sense of families, a sense of community. It’s also a place where individuality is somehow nurtured. So I see those things in a lot of ways as being really bound together. I mean, they are kind of significant image of not only possibility, but a kind of organic life. I guess you could say of the heart in the mind.
Interviewer: So. Now, before we get into Steinbeck, why other than the economic reasons, why do you think the Depression. Psychologically.
Robert DeMott: Well, I think in a lot of ways, it was crippling, emotionally and psychologically, crippling because it had to do. I think one of the if you think about it, one of the recurring motifs in a lot of what we would call loosely call proletarian literature, proletarian art is associated with images of work and the idea. And one sees it, of course, in The Grapes of Wrath, that that work is a way of conferring dignity on human experience or for human beings. People really only want to work. Tom Joad says in The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, you know, they just they just want to work. They just want to do an honest day’s work at paid for it and and go home. And so I guess when the opportunity to do that kind of. Dignifying work was lost. It had more than economic significance for, you know, for people all across America. It had psychological significance as well. There was a sense in which one’s destiny was somehow not in one’s hands any longer, that you couldn’t somehow build a future if you weren’t even allowed access to the very building blocks of, you know, of basic social significance.
Interviewer: Just simply depression. Yes. The Depression does what?
Robert DeMott: Well, I think the Depression sapped people of their sense of well-being or their sense of innate vitality, their sense of integrity thing or their sense of self sufficiency. To go back to that, to go back to that significant image. And it made people wards of the state somehow it seemed like in a nation which was somehow still propelled by notions of being a city upon the hill. They go back all the way back to John Winthrop’s sermon in 16, 30 that there was no longer that sense of self-sufficiency and community. It was necessary to do even the most basic things. So people were driven out on the street or they were had lost their savings, or the sense that the future held anything for them was in fact had become vacant, had become voided. It was defined by enormous negativity and absence. No, there was no hope. I think in a lot of ways, you know, except on a very small individual level. You know.
Interviewer: I wanna talking about Steinbeck’s journey into The Grapes of Wrath and really passing out it all through it. When Steinbeck is growing up. Does he know the kind of depravity, that kind of poverty that he was later writing about?
Robert DeMott: No, Steinbeck was a Middle-Class Kid, you know, and he he grew up in Salinas, California. Steinbeck Steinbeck was a Middle-Class Kid who grew up in middle in a kind of Middle-Class Environment in Salinas, California. His parents were actually fairly well known in town. His mother was social, very socially active. His father was at one time had been a businessman and had gone bankrupt, but then became this the county treasurer of Monterey County. So he was a person of some notice in the community. Steinbeck was, I guess in many ways you could say sort of an average high school kid. You know, he played sports and he was interested in, you know, those kinds of things went to Stanford, which at the time was probably didn’t quite have the sort of cachet that it has now is one of the premier universities in the world. But still, it was a it was a significant school. And so he’s not right. Not a law like Dreiser. I mean, he had certain privileges and he had certain I do want to say entitlements. I don’t mean that he was wealthy in that way, but but he had a kind of background that really supported a sense of the middle of a kind of Middle-Class Economic view of the world, which to my mind makes it even more interesting that he would have addressed issues of labor beginning with the middle of the 1930s and onward.
Interviewer: Great. So I want to ask you about, well, specifically that is he always writing about social questions and I guess, you know, this early fiction, is he giving voice to the dispossessed? Because, you know, he’s starting to write as the depression is being felt in the nation. Early thirties or so, late 20s, early 30s. Is he right away, right out of the gate writing this?
Robert DeMott: Actually, he wrote when he started writing his first couple of novels really have nothing to do with the world of social value or economic dispossession or anything else. The first one was a kind of fantasy about how about Panama and about pirates, sort of typical young writers. First book in a lot of ways, very romantic and ways. And his second book was about a kind of mad, dynastic character named Joseph Wain, who comes from Vermont and music.
Interviewer: Is John Steinbeck always like. Yes. He’s just always writing about really honestly writing about the depression in the beginning, the Depression.
Robert DeMott: Steinbeck started as a sort of a romance writer. First novel was about pirates. He really didn’t hit his stride in terms of writing any kind of political fiction until 1936 when he wrote a published novel called In Dubious Battle, which was about an agricultural strike in California. And then from then on, for the next three or four years, much of his energy and time went in to writing what I call a sort of the Labor trilogy in Dubious Battle and 36 of Mice and Men in 1937. And then the novel The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, which in some ways was a culmination of what he had learned from those two earlier novels, plus a very long series of newspaper articles. What we would now call investigative journalism that he did for the San Francisco news in 1936 called The Harvest Gypsys.
Interviewer: So what changed? Why the shift hiring romance? Fantasy, too, was there an individual in his life that sort of changes?
Robert DeMott: I think one of the reasons that Steinback changed in the early 1930s. I think there were two reasons. One of them was. His parents both died in 1934, 33, 34 and 35. They were very ill. Slimier and his wife, Carole, moved home to Salinas to take care of them. And I think that it gave him a view, a kind of gritty view of existence, that his earlier books. Approached, but didn’t fully have. The other thing that was important, I think, along with that loss of of both his father and mother and a kind of coming to an awareness of the deeper implications of grief and loss and so on. The other important thing was that Steinbeck married a woman, Carol Henning, who had a very, very deep social conscience. And she was instigated in some ways, made it possible for him not only to meet people who were in the labor movement in 1934 and 1935 and so on, but also kind of pushed him along that route.
Interviewer: It’s like you always think that a writer is a vessel of their true authors, that there without. Other than what comes from. That’s not always true.
Robert DeMott: Well, I think we’re in Steinbeck’s case. It’s a good example of how a writer is both inside the influences of his own time and place and at the same time tries to get a handle on that by expressing himself as a as a writer, as an author. In stomaches case, he had a lot of help, not only in terms of the actual emotional support that Carol gave him, but also in the sense that she did things like typed his manuscripts forum and talked about the work with him in The Grapes or case of The Grapes of Wrath. She actually found the title. The novel that he wrote was untitled for about three months until she finally discovered the title. But beyond that, Steinbeck had a lot of help in terms of meeting the dispossessed Oklahoma farmers who were then living in California.
Interviewer: I guess the question is, is it possible to overstate Carol’s mind?
Robert DeMott: I don’t think so. I think Carol had an enormously important and profound influence on The Grapes of Wrath. In fact, it’s possible even to see the portrait of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath as owing a good deal to Carol. She was an indomitable spirit and very powerful, very persuasive, very, very forceful in that way.
Interviewer: It’s interesting that she kind of politicized that way. So he’s hired by the San Francisco. That’s right. To go into California. Why, what’s going on?
Robert DeMott: Well, it was already in 1936, the. The system, which had created what is called Agri-Business in California, was beginning to show its strains depended on migrant labor to do that, to do its work, and Steinbeck had heard a great deal about the inequities that occurred in particularly around migrant labor camps and other places, small towns and so on. Hoovervilles those as they were called and wanted to investigate. And he did that because he was writing for the San Francisco news, which in many ways was probably the only pro labor progressive newspaper in Northern California. And so he had a kind of ready audience.
Interviewer: So what does it say? What’s life like? What is what’s going on in the Central Valley? Pushing the news right about this.
Robert DeMott: Conditions in the Central Valley for migrant workers were horrendous from every almost every standpoint you can imagine. Conditions were very bad. It was. Food was difficult to get. Expenses, of course, were outrageously high. And migrant workers, because they had very little economic resources, were at the mercy of the associated farmers, large agribusinesses and so on. It was hard to them. It was almost impossible for them to even think about buying a home. It was difficult for them to be for the children to be schooled. They had no benefits. They had no medical benefits in the way that we would think of them now. They were completely and almost utterly marginalized by the economic situation in California where they lived. They were they were they were living in oftentimes the crudest kinds of fabricated shacks or tents or in what were called tent cities. So there was oftentimes no sanitation, very little water even for washing. They were eating the most basic kinds of of subsistence subsistence meals, potatoes, boiled potatoes, cabbage, things that were very inexpensive. And yet I obviously didn’t afford much in the way of nutrition or protein or staying power. And there was a lot of there was a good deal of disease. There were there was very little ministration of of that kind of. But, you know, just basic fundamental health needs that might have allowed them to feel if they had some dignity in their in their existence.
Interviewer: Great pictures. And my question is, this is nobody’s fault. This is just it is the way it is in life. Sometimes you don’t work hard enough. You try hard enough. You fall.
Robert DeMott: Well, I think and I think in this case, it wasn’t a matter of not trying hard enough. I think that what had happened was that the conditions and the what we now call the dustbowl region, the central part of the United States, particularly in Oklahoma, were so severe and so bad that it could no longer sustain even the smallest kinds of tenant farming. And so people packed up and headed for that place that has traditionally always represented promise. And that’s California in the American imagination anyway. And when they got there. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to work hard enough or weren’t willing to work. They were, in fact. But there were just no opportunities. And when there were opportunities, what happened, of course, was that if five hundred pickers were needed to pick the peach crop, you know, on a particular farm. Ten thousand handbills would be distributed advertising that work. So for 500 positions, maybe two thousand people would turn up. What would happen, of course, is that the the associated farmers would then lower the price of a basket of peaches, for instance, and it would make. They would get people to work, but it would be wouldn’t even be subsistence wage that they would be paid. So it’s a terrible sort of economic cycle that they got involved in really in some ways, not without any without it being any of their own fault. I mean, they just found themselves in the in the car and in the wheels of an enormous machine that seemed to have nowhere to go but to grind them down.
Interviewer: So what is next for you? What is he writing? What do you think he’s feeling?
Robert DeMott: Well, the interesting thing about The Harvest Gypsys was a series of seven newspaper articles that Steinbeck wrote for the San Francisco News. And they are sort of what we would consider to be investigative journalism. We think of it now as or new journalism, the word that we’ve had since the 1960s when we think about people like Truman Capote writing in Cold Blood or or Tom Wolfe’s journalism. And that is it was very emotionally Sambrook was very much emotionally invested in those in the reports that he gave. And so he felt that besides the fact that he’s able to marshal a number of statistics about poverty and about the way the migrant workers are being treated and so on. He really tried to reach his audience at an emotional level, a kind of gut level, and to let them know that in the back door of what was then and probably still is the wealthiest state in the United States, there were people literally starving to death.
Interviewer: So what do you think his before he goes back to life? He’s walking around. Where is he? What do you think he’s feeling?
Robert DeMott: He was one of the great myths about Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath was that he traveled from Oklahoma to California with a family like the Joao’s. That’s not true. He met all the Oklahomans that he met, all the people who had come out of the dustbowl who’d just dispossessed. He may met in California, generally at the government, the Farm Security Agency camps where the migrant workers had the opportunity to stay for a while and gather their resources and so on. What Steinbeck saw firsthand. What it the experiences that he had when he was writing Harvest Gypsies really laid the foundation. In many ways for the work that he would undertake and eventually complete three years later.
Interviewer: What are you going? You see people that can’t eat. They’re eating potatoes. They’re living in cardboard. What is it?
Robert DeMott: Steinbeck was wrenched. Seeing those people living under those circumstances really was devastating to him. And the thing that comes across in the harvest gypsys. I said before it was investigative reporting, but it’s investigative reporting with an edge. You know, it’s it’s reporting with an attitude, if you want to think of it that way. I mean, he wanted his audience to be as wrenched as he was, even with that. He had plenty more. You know, he had plenty more anger and wrenching, an emotion that he would eventually get to in The Grapes of Wrath. But here were the seeds of here were the beginnings of the fact that it’s impossible to report about certain things with any kind of dispassion. We know what was that was a hallmark for foreign journalists. The newspaper person should have kept themselves out, keep himself out of it somehow. But keep yourself at a distance. Right. He was dispassion was not a word in Steinbeck’s vocabulary.
Interviewer: So I ask you this question. Why not just leave it at the harvest gypsys? What does he see this? Why not nonfiction? Nonfiction. You get to say exactly what the problem is. What do you feel about the problem?
Robert DeMott: Well, I think what happened in the harvest Gypsys, is that ultimately as powerful as those pieces are there still an awful lot of sociological statistics? Percentage of people who did this, percentage of people who did that, what the average diet would be during a day. And it didn’t have that kind of life and vibrancy that Steinbeck knew he could give it if he made it the stuff of a novel. In fact, after he had gotten after he’d come back from his journeys into the Central Valley when he was working on a Harvest Gypsys, he wrote to a friend of his, a novelist named Lewis Paul, and totally said, I’ve just discovered the greatest novel in the world. I mean, he didn’t he didn’t say, I’ve discovered the greatest series of newspaper articles ever written. He said, I discovered the greatest novel ever in the world. And that became the hook. That became the thing that triggered him really for the next three years to work on that. What we now know is The Grapes of Wrath. But, in fact, had other manifestations in that in the period before that, that.
Interviewer: Great. So he reads the Oklahomans. He meets Oki’s for the first time at this point. Does he meet a Joad family? You mean literally the.
Robert DeMott: There is no real Joad family. It was a composite in many ways of a number of families from Oklahoma that Steinbeck had met on his journeys for the San Francisco news with people like Tom Collins, to whom the novel won. Tom Collins is well. One of the dead Kati’s of the novel, who ran a Farm Security Agency program and introduced Steinbeck on a very personal level. There were a number of families who contributed to the vision of the Joad family, the Joads. Whether they have any roots in reality or whether they’re purely a matter of Steinbeck’s fictive imagination are extremely important because they humanized. They put a human face to those statistics and those government reports and Farm Security Agency reports and so on, that Steinbeck had utilized and had transformed in the harvest gypsies. So they were a way of adding a level of universality to the experience that the newspaper reports simply couldn’t couldn’t provide.
Interviewer: The vision for the Joads as… We’ve got Tom. He’s come back from jail. He goes to the family farm. What does he see? What’s happened.
Robert DeMott: The first eight or 10 chapters of The Grapes of Wrath is so powerful, I think, because it’s defined as much by absence as it is by presence. Things are missing when Tom comes back from his his several years in McAllister prison. One of the great things that’s missing, of course, is water. There isn’t any which has contributed to the dustbowl. He comes back to his own home and finds that his family is already gone. And so he has to go searching for them and Uncle John’s and finally catches up with them. So that very basic American urge to go home is, from the very beginning, stalled. It’s deferred in the novel, which I think is one of the reasons it has such a powerful kind of resonance for so many for so many American readers. He comes to find nothing there. It’s all gone. It’s been it’s been destroyed not only by environmental disaster of the of the dustbowl itself, but also we’re led to believe the bank has foreclosed on so many people’s properties. So not only is the past taken away, but there is no future here. And part of that becomes the sort of compelling reason why the Johs have decided they’ve got to go to California. The alleged Golden Land, the land of promise and so on to find their fortunes, as it were.
Interviewer: I want to talk to you about one particular kind of moment where we see them finally loading up. The car comes back and you got three hundred dollars.
Robert DeMott: It’s not very much little.
Interviewer: Less pain patient you off.
Robert DeMott: It’s a very powerful scene. It’s like your worst nightmare of going on a family vacation, except that it’s not gonna be pleasurable at all. The whole family is somehow made to fit into this transformed Hudson Super six. And they carry like the famous tortoise that we see at the very beginning of the novel. They carry everything that they own on their back. It’s their shelter. It’s their subsistence. It’s their it’s their life. All of it sort of wrapped up in this in this tiny little truck with many more people than ever should be put in a car. And it’s a very, very powerful image of futility. On the one hand, dispossession. They’ve gotten hardly anything for the things that they owned that they had to sell to get rid of. All they have, in a sense, is their is their memories. And even those are very fragile. So it’s a very powerful scene of dispossession. Its foot is fraught with futility and even the promise, so to speak. The allure of going to California is is tragically tinged by that. And I think that’s part of what makes it such a memorable scene. They have each other, though. They have each other, and that’s about all.
Interviewer: I said, let’s do that again, because I was talking over it. Give me that sentence just.
Robert DeMott: They have each other besides their utility and the possibility, the fragility of promise and so on. That scene, when they’re all gathered together, indicates that the one thing they do have is a communal family.
Interviewer: Do you think jokes at that point in the novel see themselves outside the American dream?
Robert DeMott: I think that one of the reasons that that scene is so telling is that there is a kind of innocence about the Joads awareness at that point. Simek says in another place in the novel that they that they grew up outside of the concept of the paradoxes of an industrial society. In some ways, what he’s telling us is that there is a certain innocence about them, a certain I have to say, and I think in that scene, they see themselves having been utterly divests that we feel that emotionally that quality. But we also feel a certain idealism and the sense that they believe it’s possible to attain it once again if they get to California, attain the American dream. I guess you could say they could. They can. It’s still within their grasp. They still think it’s possible. A part of that possibility is that they are are naive. We as readers are separated from that a good deal. We know that there are tragic implications here that they haven’t quite caught, caught, caught wind of. They’re not quite aware of that yet. And that’s what gives the novel its tension. That’s what makes us go with them on that journey. That there is still a chance that they might get to California. And by God, they might get a piece of land or they might get a job or they you know, they might have that that sense of dignity. But it turns out they have they’re at the point where they’ve just won, you know, who wants to Be a Millionaire or something? That’s right. As rich as they’re going to be because everything else is gonna be downhill from here on.
Interviewer: Yeah. 1937, the year after the first. My point comes out of those things getting better in the Central Valley. Have things improved?
Robert DeMott: After Steinmetz experience in the Central Valley that became the basis for the Harvest Gypsys series of essays in San Francisco, news things. Not only did not get better, they got worse. And Steinbeck kept him. Well, first of all, more people were coming in than ever, Matt. Then you know that even California officials ever imagined would happen. The Dust Bowl migration remained fairly constant through 1938, I believe. So there were more people. The conditions, in fact, were worse. Steinbeck was still very deeply engaged by by what he saw. He kept making journeys, particularly with through Tom Collins. He would visit some of the migrant labor camps and was always kept sort of apprised and abreast of what was happening so that his anger or his sense of engagement never waned. I mean, it was always being fueled by these these repeated forays into the into the Central Valley and other and other places as well to see conditions firsthand.
Interviewer: Marker. Is Steinbeck at this point, thinking that all of writing a novel, is he is he working at all the novel or is he just sort of sitting around scratching his head?
Robert DeMott: I think once Steinbeck finished the Harvest Gypsy series for the San Francisco news, he always saw the potential for that material to become a novel. And in fact, even though we all know the fame and notoriety of The Grapes of Wrath, which was published in 1939, the truth is he wrote to rehearsals before that one of them was a novel that he called The Oklahomans, which does not exist. And we don’t know exactly how much he actually did on it, but that was sort of his working title in that 19 late thirty six into 1937, even into 1938 period when he was doing his onsite research. He thought of himself as writing this book called The Oklahomans.
Interviewer: What was wrong with it? Why do you think he just.
Robert DeMott: I don’t. I don’t think he jettisoned it ultimately because he never quite had a hook as to figure out. In regard to figuring out how he would structure the book, that is, I have a feeling that it may have been primarily narrative following, maybe following a family about family, a family’s fortunes or something like that, which is only part of what The Grapes of Wrath actually does. From there, he seems to have put that aside and then worked on a book called Lawfare. Let Östberg.
Interviewer: It seems part of his next journey. Right. And what what is after.
Robert DeMott: After he after he had been working on the Oklahomans for a while, probably a year or more, doing whatever he needed to do to keep that novel afloat. He had an experience, I think, which was the really the profound trigger. That got us the novel that we now know as The Grapes of Wrath, and that is in the winter of 1938. Steinbeck went with photographer. To Visalia, California, where there was. A devastating experience that he encountered.
Interviewer: Let me stop and ask you, how does Steinbeck get to your place? We just ask it again. How does this time I get to visit? And what what does it do? Is it just like you read in the paper one day? Oh my God, there’s a flood of a cell. I better go. It’s going to be good for my book.
Robert DeMott: Steinbeck had heard of the horrendous conditions at Brazilia. It had been raining in California, I think, for over a month. And so flooding was severe and he had heard that there were. I believe it was 5000 families, migrant workers who were marooned in Brasilia because of the rain. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t get out to work. Cars were mired in the mud. It was nearly impossible to get supplies into them. It was horrendous, horrendous situation. Steinmark had heard about it and.
Interviewer: OK, so maybe this is OK. All set? Yeah. Mm hmm. I’m sorry. Did you forget your time? Third time will be the charm, I promise. Uh. Go.
Robert DeMott: In the winter of 1938. It had been raining in California, I think from February, well into March, probably 30 days or more. I want to say 40 days. I mean, it was almost like the biblical equivalent of of flooding. And Steinbeck had heard about that. It was it was widely covered in local news. And he had heard also that there were 5000 migrant families stuck in Brasilia. The rain was so bad that it was impossible for cars to get in and out. They couldn’t get out to work. Supplies couldn’t be gotten into them. And so he went down to look and to see what was happening. So he went with a photographer named Horace Bristol who had had been. Had been contacted by Life magazine, I believe it was to do a photo spread on it. Steinbeck went down and what he saw there, I think, ultimately made all the difference in the book that we now know of as The Grapes of Wrath.
Interviewer: So what does he see?
Robert DeMott: He saw people starving to death. He says in a letter he saw people literally dying. He saw the most. What he took to be the most callous attitude on the part of official California toward migrant workers, toward the homeless, toward the indigent, dispossessed. And I think that more than any of his other experiences dealing with the migrants, this one really caught him in the heart. And it became the kind of experience that was a wound for him. And he realized at that point that it was impossible. To treat the experience with any kind of coolness, any kind of dispassion, any kind of removal that had become a personal investment that he was witnessing.
Interviewer: And when you say that he’s walking around it, the main emotion.
Robert DeMott: He was there for a number of days. And I guess we could say it was anger more than anything else. That was the deepest emotion that it brought out of him. A kind of sadness, kind of not just sadness, but a kind of awareness over tragic implication, something that was so horrendous that it transcended everything we would associate with any kind of journalistic reporting.
Interviewer: Do you think fury is too over the top of the word fury?
Robert DeMott: There is a kind of fury in it, a furious ness. Maybe we could say because seriousness, I think, of as being allied to a kind of desperateness. He saw desperateness everywhere and he read any and it sort of raised the ante of his reaction to how he would write about the situation that he saw. He starts to write Grapes Wrath. Actually, he doesn’t start. He he doesn’t. That’s the fur. He doesn’t start to write The Grapes of Wrath right away. What he starts to write is a little satire of about seventy thousand words called Lawfare or let Östberg, which in fact had nothing to do with Azalea. It was about the silliness. Let us strike in September of 1936, in which Steinbeck observed and knew that his own hometown of silliness had been sort of taken over by vigilantism. In order to break the silliness, let us strike.
Interviewer: So what is what is. He sits down. He writes What?
Robert DeMott: L’Affaire Lettuceberg was a very angry satire about vigilantism. It was a satire that attacked a lot of the leading families in this silliness and took a course, took the part of the workers he wrote about. He wrote this for a month and a half or so, but sixty seventy thousand words. And his wife read it, Carol, and decided that was really an unworthy book for him. And Simon himself when he was all finished, sort of cooled off a little bit, reread the manuscript and decided that it was a book of tricks. He said at one point it was just a cheap trick. And so he wrote to his agent and to his publisher and said, I have to renege on this. I’m going to withdraw, I’m going to destroy it. It seemed unworthy of of him writing. I think it was probably we don’t know because, of course, the book doesn’t exist. He did literally destroy the manuscript, but it was probably bad writing in the sense that it was.
Interviewer: I guess where you can pick that up.
Robert DeMott: Steinbeck was disappointed in himself, felt that he could write better, that he could do better, but that the important thing about welfare let us work is that it allowed him to deal with his anger at the very deepest level. He had to get it out somehow. And he had to get it out in a way that wouldn’t trivialize the experience of the migrant workers by making easy targets of the associated farmers or the vigilantes, all of which he hated. But he also realized that the whole situation was more complex than he was making it out to be.
Interviewer: So. Much too much by the fear.
Robert DeMott: I think L’Affaire Lettuceberg was touched so much by his anger that had blinded him to the to the more significant and even universal tragic implications of the experience itself. As I say, it was based on really on this lettuce strike of 1936, which, by the way, there is all evidence indicates a steinmark really was not directly involved in this.
Interviewer: Do you like it? Well, let’s just put it off the side and it just kind of ended way into the papers later on.
Robert DeMott: Actually, what happened was that he was so disappointed in having fail. Let’s say I use that term in having failed the implications of the tragic projects, so to speak, that he burned it. He just destroyed it. He was so fed up with it and wanted to put it behind him. And the amazing thing about it is that within a week or even 10 days, this happened about mid-May, 1938, within by Memorial Day weekend of 1938, just a few days later, really. He started right in at word one with the book that we now know as The Grapes of Wrath. So Will Ferrell let us Berg, while it was probably a trivialisation of his talent, was important also because he had to go through it. He had to live through it in order to get to the grapes.
Interviewer: Right. Can I ask you about. Well, specifically the burns and served four months on this.
Robert DeMott: Books were in the middle of May of 1938. Steinbeck destroyed Lawfare. A lot of. And you would think that he would have been sort of. I don’t know, depressed by that experience of having written a sixty or seventy thousand word work and decided it wasn’t worthy of him. But he was a person not to let any grass grow under his feet. And within about a week or 10 days, by Memorial Day weekend of 1938, he started writing on the novel that we now know as The Grapes of Wrath. And again, it was one of those situations where The Grapes of Wrath probably wouldn’t have been the novel that we now have if he hadn’t had those earlier versions, The Harvest Gypsys to think about in terms of its nonfictional dimensions. The Oklahomans to kind of get a sense of how it might work as a novel, even the Ferrall Gettysburg, which gave it a sort of satiric treatment. He had to work through all those to get to the novel that we now know as The Grapes of Wrath.
Interviewer: Does he labor over every word, every word.
Robert DeMott: The interesting thing about the novel is at least it’s interesting to me. I find this remarkable. He thought about he had been thinking about the novel for at least three years, we know, to year two and a half years anyway. And when he sat down to write it. If you look at the original manuscript, there are hardly any cross outs, hardly any deletions, hardly any scratches of any kind. He apparently really had rehearsed the novel in his head for some time before he actually sat down and thought about it. I think he planned out each day’s writing ahead of time, but he was then able to do it in about. He wrote the novel in about 100 hundred days of work, took him through the summer and into the fall of 1938. And what he did was he would allow himself two thousand words a day on the writing and roughly that, you know, nineteen hundred two thousand twenty one hundred or so. And that was his day’s allotment. And then he would rest. Then think about the next day’s work.
Interviewer: So. Let’s talk about the end, the end of it is lovely flood Salyer, there’s a rose of Sharon who’s pregnant. What happens to the baby? And what happens to the judge?
Robert DeMott: The interesting thing about the ending of the novel is that I think is that a lot of those experiences that you had at Brazilia, which took place, as I say, in the winter of 1938, really came to a four. And not only became the setting, the last couple of chapters of The Grapes of Wrath takes place with Jodi’s living in a boxcar in a flooded area, very much like berzelia. But it also brought a very sharpened sense that Steinbeck began the novel with the image of Rose of Sharon giving her breast to a dying man as the image that was in his mind all through the writing of The Grapes of Wrath. He said a number of places. That was the image he had from the very beginning. And he sort of wrote his novel to fulfill that, to fulfill that ending. What happens, of course, is that the rose of Sharon has had a baby. It’s stillborn, but she still is has milk. And the very last desperate scene in the novel is the Joad family mojo in particular, and rose of Sharon going to a barn on a hillside and finding there a man, an elderly man who’s dying. And with mojos support and encouragement, Rose Roseau. Sharon gives her breast that dying man and saves him from starvation.
Interviewer: Does that mean. What’s he getting?
Robert DeMott: Well, one of the interesting things about The Grapes of Wrath is that even though it comes out of a very, very documentary and realistic, even naturalistic sort of mildew in the 1930s, it’s also a highly symbolic, even allegorical novel. Steinbeck was very much from the very beginning of the novel when he has a turtle tortoise at the beginning to symbolize Jody’s journey. We’re led into the fact that we are in the realm of fiction as well as documentary. And that last scene, I think, is so powerful it just simply will not go away. I mean, I think it’s one of the absolutely most tenacious images in all of American literature in the 20th century. And it’s certainly what Steinbeck is suggesting there is that in order for salvation to take place of any kind. Americans need to rethink their the role of family in that in their lives. And that last scene is certainly a scene of nurturing. It’s also a scene in which a new community is formed, even if it’s a matter of forming it with strangers. That’s how survival takes place. And that’s been a theme that’s been building all through the novel with the the different groups coming together, talking among the migrants in order to find strength for themselves and to go on. The novel found it struck a chord and found an audience that I think was so far beyond Steinbeck’s expectations that ultimately it really crippled him for a period. In 1939, after the novel was published, he really thought about giving up writing fiction entirely, which in fact he did for a while. It sold like hotcakes. And I think in the first year sold close to half a million copies were sold as the movie rights were sold immediately and was a very successful movie. In fact, with Henry Fonda.
Interviewer: And others using the Court Courtesan’s. Does everybody let’s talk about the people.
Robert DeMott: It was a it was one of those books that in some ways profited by the fact that it was banned in a number of places. And so there was an allure of the forbidden. And so it is sold by word of mouth, of course, and it was widely reviewed. It just seemed to catch a nerve. It was also given a sort of imprimatur by now by Eleanor Roosevelt, who did a little little segment of it on one of her radio shows, I believe it was, and mentioned that she thought The Grapes of Wrath was really very true to the experience of the California migrants. But that wasn’t everybody’s view of the book. I mean, it was roundly attacked by the associated farmers and particularly by what we might call official California, who wanted to downplay the significance of Steinbeck’s Stomaches novel because it dramatized the kind of tragic skein of experience in California that most Californians didn’t want to deal with. So it was widely attacked. It was even attacked from the floor of the Senate by a congressman from Oklahoma called a pack of filthy lies. It was a wonderful, wonderful way of summing summing it up.
Interviewer: Put it in the context of other novels like Tom’s Cabin for Me or Not. Do you think it had any relationship to those?
Robert DeMott: I mean, I think one of the powerful things about The Grapes of Wrath reception is that when people read it, either consciously or unconsciously, there were echoes of, you know, at least a couple of previous important here, a buzzing in.
Interviewer: What is it about?
Robert DeMott: I think one of the one of the things that The Grapes of Wrath calls up is. The kind of sense of outrage that readers had, for instance, in reading Harriet Beecher Stowe is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which just seemed to catch a nerve in a way that very few novels actually do. And I think The Grapes of Wrath is in that category. I often think of it as as being, in a sense, the other side of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, because we are talking in a sense about wage slavery, I guess you could say, and dispossession and marginalization of a whole class of people. And I think beyond that, the book continues to matter because it becomes a great metaphor for issues of the American dream of attaining what might be possible for members of a free and democratic society.
Interviewer: Why?
Robert DeMott: Because I think it underscores the validity of the American dream and also the fragility of it. I think that’s the important thing, that it doesn’t happen for everyone. I think we also read it becomes it because it becomes a kind of it becomes a kind of metaphor for dispossession that we all somehow feel sometimes in our law and sometime in our lives, whether it’s emotional or intellectual or economic or social or existential dispossession. That sense of being homeless or being cast out, so to speak, is one that all human beings feel at some very deep emotional and psychological level, I think for those reasons. The Grapes of Wrath still speaks to us, still speaks to us in terms of what it means to be utterly and completely marginalized and yet still have hope that things could be could be better. Might be better. Just you know, one of the interesting things about The Grapes of Wrath is that we forget sometimes that Steinbeck was. Consciously writing a novel, and so there are a number of novelistic elements that go into it that redeem it from being just a sociological tract. One of the things is the use and quality of a kind of heightened language all the way through. You see that in the inner chapters where he is writing in the almost in the rhythms of the King James Bible, for instance, a very resonant and kind of different almost death Ambac sort of elevated language to get you involved. The other thing, of course, is that he one of the things he learned while talking to the Oklahoma migrants was how they spoke, how they talked. He had a he had a fairly good ear for dialogue. And that’s what in some ways really enlivens the whole narrative. Joad S.. These people you hear it’s almost as if you’re overhearing them discuss all their problems in a language which is their own, which is not academic in the way that we might think about. Think about the…
Interviewer: Steinbeck writing is this is The Grapes of Wrath. For all of us who have never read the book. Just the story of the Johs chapter in Chapter one is the sum total of the book.
Robert DeMott: I think one of the breakthroughs that Steinbeck made in The Grapes of Wrath. As distinct from his earlier novels in his earlier fiction was that he combined both a narrative thread which allows us to follow the Joads on their journey from Oklahoma to California, and then he also wrote what are called Inter Kalari chapters in which he sort of they’re like little wedges and they’re essentially cinematic or documentary or nonfictional editorial. I guess you might say and I think the success of the novel is that he was able to put these two very different kind of styles and modes of discourse together in the same book so that the book is is its own totality. And I think the interesting thing about it is that in many ways is that he is asking us to make very rapid transformations, crossing a boundary between fiction and nonfiction. That that becomes part of the larger ecological holistic vision of experience that he’s putting in the book that he’s trying to indicate to us that you have a novel embedded in contemporary history and you also have contemporary history defined by individual narrative of a family. And that is what gets our emotional is an emotional hook for us.
Interviewer: It’s great. This is a real religiousness.
Robert DeMott: I think there’s a very I think in a lot of ways, The Grapes of Wrath is kind of a document that comes right out of, you know, mid 19th century American transcendentalism in some ways. I mean, it has a I mean, in the sense that it has a very fervent kind of spiritual quest. I don’t mean a spiritual quest in a you know, in a in a religiously orthodox way, but with a character like Jim Casey, who is a former preacher, there is a sense in which the great subject of the book really is the human spirit, how it gets tested on its road toward salvation, even though that salvation may be tragic and may be, you know, really sort of tainted by by despair and by disaster. Salvation with a kind of salvation occurs at the end of the novel. I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of salvation that will do something like change the way the economic situation in America is. Samwick would have to wait a couple of years for World War Two to start when a lot of the migrants ended up working in defense factories in California. But there is a kind of salvation in a certain symbolic or allegorical way in the sense that what he’s proposing there is that a new vision of humanity is needs to take place, a communal realization of relatedness, of sharing, of self-sufficiency and so on. Those things are very important lessons to learn.
Interviewer: Invents everything, creates it all out of his own imagination.
Robert DeMott: I think Dreiser is a good example of a writer who was well served by his journalistic experience. And I guess that’s part of that overriding concern at the end of the 19th century about how naturalism was sort of formed from a scientific vision and that scientific vision allowed people to be to create a certain kind of distance from this subject matter.
Interviewer: Because I want to know, I don’t want to do a science of naturalism. What’s Dreiser coming up? Forms. Harry. Is he living here as well?
Robert DeMott: Well, I think in some senses, he he always is. He always was. I think what he’s coming out of is a realization of something occurring. That was new in late 19th century society. And by that I mean a sense of the journey away from the traditions of, you know, the early 19th century, which had been sort of rural country and a move toward these great magnets, these very great centers of. Of power of.
Interviewer: Oh, yeah. I don’t want that one. I think that journey that you took. Sure.
Robert DeMott: I think the journey that Carrie Meeber undertakes. And Sister Carrie is a is a. Example of the journey not only that Dreiser made himself, but was already part of the American experience at the turn of the century, and that is that movement from a country life or rural life, essentially, let’s say, agricultural background toward these great magnets of power, economy, wealth, a possibility that the city represented, particularly Chicago for the Midwest. And so I think Carrie Meeber in that sense, has a kind of autobiographical tinge or an autobiographical kind of resonance for Dreiser Dreiser himself. Well, the interesting thing about the interesting thing about it is that I think anyway, is that Dreiser was able to imagine that character as a woman, not as a man. And in that sense, I think he went against the tradition of the young man from the provinces who sort of makes makes his way, by whatever means, toward a kind of success. And I think that that was that was a great moment when Dreiser imagined Carrie. Not, as I say, not as a young man, but as a young woman. I think that there was a sense that a lot. I think that that making that identification of of Carrie as a woman rather than as a man allowed him an element of imaginative portrayal that he might not necessarily have had otherwise, she becomes the other in a sense, and to see her life or to portray it as other somehow opened up possibilities that he might not have had if he had been strictly concerned with making, you know, her gender male.
Interviewer: It doesn’t get more challenging.
Robert DeMott: That’s exactly the thing I think that Dreiser wanted to create. And that book challenges the ways in which things that might have been, you know, doors that might have been open had she been a male were, in fact, close to her. And so she needs then to have or to draw on qualities of her own personhood, let’s say her own drive. You know, that to a reader in nineteen hundred or after may seem immoral because. Well, I mean, these things were not done by young women. I mean, they were things like striving for a kind of upward mobility, striving for a kind of security that normally was associated with a male’s life. Women were sheltered. They were the playthings, so to speak, or the wives sheltered wives of powerful men in that in that turn of the turn of the century society. And Carrie Perry has the possibility in a way, when she’s associated with the doorway at the beginning and then hers would to sort of write the end of her life in those terms. But she she doesn’t she has a kind of drive. We think of it again and we think of it as perhaps immoral or unethical in terms of her relationship to the rest of society. But it’s, in fact, the very thing that makes her memorable. It’s a very thing that allows her to survive in a kind of Darwinian world in which forces are overwhelming, whether they’re economic or personal or whatever they happen to be.
Interviewer: What’s that, what? Which way he gives some money. He said, I’ll take care of you. Don’t go back to your sister. Don’t go back to this.
Robert DeMott: Right. Well. That’s this great moment of American novel. I think you could say is filled with with innocent characters who believe what people tell them. No. And Carrie wants to believe the best about your way. Of course, once you take the money, then there’s a whole other agenda that goes along with it.
Interviewer: With that agenda. Well, I guess it was the contract. It’s going on. OK. Let’s start right away. And Carrie, at that moment, what’s what’s the transaction?
Robert DeMott: That whole scene with Carrie and Way is really revolves around the one great symbol of the late 19th century American novel, that is money, cash. You know, somebody is God and somebody ain’t got it. And the ones who got it can give it to somebody and they get something in exchange. Carrie isn’t aware of the fact that she has to. She has to pay out, so to speak, for what she receives. But in fact, that becomes a kind of turning point in the entire novel. It’s a matter, at least for readers anyway. I think it becomes a moment when we realize there is a threshold crossed that in a sense, not only begins to define her character in a different way, but also lets us know that, in fact, success, money, all the things that go along with it, become a kind of language in that in the novel.
Interviewer: But help me understand what is so bad about having somebody help you? What was Carrie carrying? Prostitution.
Robert DeMott: I think the implications that Dreiser deals with, deals with not quite the right word. I think perhaps some of the things that he’s resonating there in that in that scene and later in the novel is that for a woman, a young woman from a country relatively naive and innocent, to accept money from a man who is in a sense a stranger is a form of prostitution, is a form of being paid to do something that she normally would not or might not want to pursue.
Interviewer: But is there any difference for a woman like Carrie then who’s at the bottom than there is for somebody like Lilly at the top? Do they share something?
Robert DeMott: Well, it turns out that I guess you could say Louis and Carrie Meeber or perhaps two sides of the same the same human equation. I think very in one sense, very different in personality and certainly in terms of their backgrounds. And also, that difference probably defines them. Also, I think in the sense that Carrie is a survivor. I mean, she is one of the great Survivor characters in American fiction. So much so that ultimately the publication of Sister Carrie just enraged people.
Interviewer: You know that for a second. Carrie is a survivor. Not that they think people need money, in a sense.
Robert DeMott: You know, the House of Mirth and Sister Carrie are defined by money. No, I mean, it’s a great language of those of those two books in the late, not late part of the 19th century, early 20th century. And it’s always a matter of never having enough. Lily, in a sense, is an object. And she has a price on her assigned to her. She’s a beautiful thing and is trained to do only one thing, and that is to marry rich, which almost happens. But in the end, doesn’t and courses precipitates her her demise. Carrie Meeber has a little bit different view about money. I think she she takes it at first without realizing what its implications are. But she also realizes that in order to get along, you need to get it. And she manages to do that in a way that Lily can’t because Lily has a kind of fineness. I guess you could say a fineness of conscience that Carrie doesn’t have and isn’t bothered by. And that’s the difference between those two characters.
Interviewer: I think what differentiates little different from Carrie.
Robert DeMott: Carrie has a I don’t know where the Carrie has a crassness, so perhaps you could define it that way. OK.
Interviewer: In terms of their access to the American dream.
Robert DeMott: Both the common denominator for both these woman characters, I think, in regard to the American dream is that at least initially, it requires a man to fulfill that for Lilly especially. This is true. She has to marry at the right elevation and in the right circle in order to fulfill her life. We as readers realize that this shouldn’t be the case. But in fact, in the world that Warton creates there, it is absolutely necessary. And Sister Carrie, Carrie Meeber in a sense, does the same thing. She makes her progress not so much based on the good fortune of the men that she’s with, but sort of over the backs of the men that she’s with. And I think that that sense of the way in which she can use men becomes a defining characteristic, that Lilly is simply not able to replicate or she just doesn’t have it in her psyche to be able to do it in quite the same way.
Interviewer: So what’s Dreiser saying? Let’s pass to separate. What is Dreiser saying, Carrie?
Robert DeMott: Well, I think Dreiser is saying and in Sister Carrie’s journey is that it can be done. It can be made. But you have to be careful what it is you end up with. Or let me put it to you this way. It’s I think it’s like you have to be careful what you ask for because you might get it. And in a sense, you know, we realize that as sort of a moral as that book is, Carrie has made it in a sense, she has become a success. She has sort of grasped the brass ring of the American dream. And yet the last thing we see of her is sort of, you know, rocking back and forth aimlessly in that rocking chair, as if to suggest that, well, you’ve got it, but where do you go from here? So there’s a kind of hollowness. I think there’s a kind of false falseness in that the attainment of that dream, if it’s not a lie to something substantive. It’s a powerful, powerful critique of the American dream in many ways, every much, very much the equivalent of Steinbeck’s critique of the American dream in The Grapes of Wrath.
Interviewer: What’s what’s worth saying? Just a quick novel of manners, a kind of soap opera.
Robert DeMott: Warren’s novel has resonates with a number of those similar kinds of awarenesses of the American dream. Well, the American dream and in in the in the House of Mirth is oftentimes seen from a very rarefied and privileged position of the upper upper class in New York society. And yet the very from the very title onward, the House of Mirth, all the way to the end, when Lily dies, there is an implicit and in fact, not just implicit, but explicit realization that there’s a critique occurring when life is seen only as a parade of manners or a fine consciousness, that in fact something is lost. And in this case, the wife of a person who might have been otherwise very valuable might flower. You might have even become part of Sultan’s Republic of the Spirit. If things had been different somehow.
Interviewer: And that’s one last question. Does it surprise you that. Senator Carrie doesn’t get even published in House and writes the bestseller.
Robert DeMott: Given the given the situation of the American consciousness, if I can use that word broadly at the turn of the century, it isn’t at all surprising to me that the House of Mirth was widely accepted, widely read, I think, because you can it can be read as a kind of upper class social document with a tinge of tragedy. And in fact, Lily, sort of maybe in some minds of some readers, even gets what she deserves in the sense that having made some poor choices, she ends up having to kill herself. She cannot live in the world that Wharton has designed. I think by the same token, or on the other side of the I guess you could say Sister Carrie was reviled in certain ways because Dreiser refused to have Carrie act like she should have act like her. Her audience. I’m sorry. Like his or his audience. On the other hand, Sister Carrie found a different fate as a novel and may have been because Dreiser refused to have Sister Carrie act the way his audience at the turn of the century expected her to act. And that is probably for all or immorality. She she should have been punished, somehow, lost her money or lost her life or whatever. Didn’t matter. There had to be some moral judgment that was normative leveled on her. And of course, in a sense, Dreiser issues that he refuses that entirely. And the last thing we see is Carrie very successful. But then, as I say, rocking in that rocking chair and a kind of endless sort of endless rhythm of dissatisfaction, but not moral. I don’t wanna say this, but not moral.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Robert DeMott: That’s literature.
Interviewer: OK, good. That’s good. That’s a good topic for I was writing to tell this story.
Robert DeMott: You know, one of the things I love about the House of Mirth is that, again, it’s a novel that sort of sums up a period like The Grapes of Wrath, sums up a period several years later with the Depression. Wharton, however, is something that a job not because she’s been doing research at the newspaper archives, but because, in fact, she’s lived through it. She’s writing about a social mileui and a social level, economic and social and mentally that she knew intimately and was part of.
Interviewer: Did she like the world that she’s writing about.
Robert DeMott: I think there are many things about the world that she came out of that she liked. There were certain elements of privilege and entitlement. I think that that.
Interviewer: I guess you do find the house of cards to that Gilded Age.
Robert DeMott: I think one of the great things about the House of Mirth is. The UN flinching way that Warton looks at the very milieu that she came out of and does so in a way that we see immediately beyond the gilded fringes of. Elevated New York society. And in seeing beyond those gilded edges, we see really the underside of the dark side of it. The things that, in fact, make a woman like Lily Bart an object to be bartered and to have literally to have a kind of economic valuation placed on her. And you weren’t saying Wharton’s a Wharton style is such that you one could never assign the word angry to it or furious. But you can certainly sense that quality of indignation she had toward a society which might make of a young woman an object. I mean, a beautiful decorative thing that was only had value in so far as she might be picked up and courted and then married by someone of similar or greater wealth so that she would have been sort thought to have arrived at her true destiny.
