Works in Process

My first novel is an historical epic about a research scientist who comes face to face with the victim of his atomic creation. THE GEISHA’S DAUGHTER (unpublished MS) is set in the calendar year following World War II. A story about suffering, I traveled to research the novel in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Los Alamos and Southern France–all place settings in the story. Six months living in an artist’s residence in Argentina allowed me to finish.

The main duty of the novelist is to write another one. Is that right?

John Steinbeck – The Master

The first time I drove through California and laid my eyes on the Pacific Ocean, I had one destination–Monterrey Bay–the oceanside harbor and once-upon-a-time canning district immortalized by John Steinbeck.

Cannery Row (1945) is the story of a wayward,  wine-drinking vagabond, who takes up residence in the discarded hulk of a boiler, and the generous, learned Doctor, who attends to the sick in their homes. Steinbeck’s descriptions of the old wharf town left an indelible impression. At 20, I vowed that I’d go one day to California and hunt down Steinbeck’s old haunts. I’d be the casual traveler in his novel.

Standing on the doorstep five years later, I knocked on the door of Steinbeck’s old tenement house. The door was locked, but a kind woman saw me looking into the window, so she invited me inside. We spoke at length about Monterrey Bay and how the place had informed his social sensibilities.  She gave me a copy of his letters — Journal of a Novel: East of Eden (1969). I promised I’d study his work.

John Steinbeck’s literary success wasn’t a given He was born to middle class German and Irish ancestry, on the Pacific Coast, some distance removed from the agricultural valley that pinned the place setting in Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937). During the summers he’d till earth and plow fields and pick tomatoes, before enrolling in Stanford which he left without a degree. He moved to New York to make it there in literary society. He came back empty-handed.

Steinbeck was a war reporter–in both WWII and Vietnam. By the time of the conflict on the Vietnamese peninsula his political viewes had changed. Some say he turned his back on social liberal principles. To my mind, they had evolved to see the excesses of communism as a great threat to liberty. For supporting the war, he was known as a hawk to his contemporaries. Late in middle age, he traveled across America with his poodle named Charley. Some said he was setting out to dicover America. He wasn’t. He was going to tell it goodbye. For a life-long smoker, A stroke at 59 had heightened his sense of mortality. He’d write East of Eden (1952) for his sons, so they’d know where they come from and what they had meant to him.

A Master is in for the long haul — he published screen plays and novels at length during a publishing history of fifty years. To seek perspectives external to America, he traveled abroad to Mexico and the Soviet Union. About the latter he wrote A Russian Journal (1948). When he accepted the Nobel Prize he’d say, “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” This faith in mankind’s perpetual self-improvement is a virtue of a Master.

The controversy he stoked with businessmen and bankers over the publication of Grapes of Wrath was more than compensated by the equality of assignment he gave to each in his society:

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

Pork or Piggish?

Animals it would seem are forever at the mercy of man. They are whipped to do field work. Their eggs and milk are promptly snatched away. Dogged by cold in winter and tormented by flies in summer–in the end, none escape the butcher’s knife.

George Orwell, who died at 46, was best known for Animal Farm,  a political fable about a group of forward-thinking animals who wrest control of the farm from their owner.  Orwell’s novella (28,000 words) was rejected by three publishers because the Soviet Russia he wished implicitly to criticize was still as yet a British ally.

Old Major–a prize-winning boar–has a dream revealing a future in which animals have taken over the farm from their relentless taskmaster Mr. Jones. The ideologue Old Major inspires the others to revolution with a sing-song that goes:

Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland/ Riches more than mind can picture/ Wheat and barley oats and hay/ Shall be ours upon that day

Old Major dies but his battle message is picked up by Snowball and Napoleon, two pigs. Into the furry ears of the rabbits and the lazy minds of woolly sheep they foment their ideas about revolution. Not long after the  takeover, Napoleon usurps power from Snowball, as the heart of a pig is easily corrupted.

The farm’s various calamities are attributed to Snowball. He’s scapegoated for the failed windmill project and disparaged of the war wounds other pigs will claims were never really earned. Later Snowball will be written out of the revolution’s history entirely. In the “Battle of the Cowshed,” one pig will say, Snowball was really just an enemy spy.

The animals white wash seven commandments on the black tar of a nearby barn to shore up the moral foundations of their new society. These few and noble ideals are soon disregarded–the commandment, “No animal shall kill another animal” is changed to read, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.” Thus a select groups of pigs and their gang of guard dogs pave the path for the occasional bloodletting of the weaker animals.

At the start, they made a promise never to do business with humans. But by the end, Napoleon and his numerous litter have invited the adjacent farmers over to play cards and drink beer. When both man and pig pull an ace of spades from the pile, Orwell concludes,

“From man to pig, and pig to man, it was impossible to say which was which.”

Fast-forward some four decades, to the fall of the Berlin wall, when Animal Farm was made  required reading for high school students in Poland. Across the Soviet bloc, communists were losing their grip on power and their ideas were open to criticism. Because allegory is a shade away from commenting overtly on political matters, it’s a safe choice for a society in transition. In Poland, Animal Farm [Folwark Zwierzęcy] helped to prod the collective cows to action without having to point an incriminating finger at those still in power.

For its general accessibility and long shelf life *process* gives it [9 out of 10.] It would seem to me that Animal Farm deserves a contemporary reworking, an allegorical novella about the rise of China and the threat posed by its intolerance for human rights.