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.
10 Masters of the Novel
If an amateur photographer worries about equipment, a professional about budget, and a master about light–it could be said of novelists–that an amateur frets about fame, professional about book sales, and a master with the search for truth.
*Process* begins a series on “10 Masters of the Novel,” to shed a glimmer of light on that delicious quandary–What makes a master? A good writer may be adept, specific, intelligent, rich, lyrical, pared back, transparent, acessible and so on. But this is the writing. What about the writer? Masters have what aspects of character in common? A Master perseveres, measures time in decades and progress in terms of moral development. In reviewing the Top Ten Masters of the Novel, these attributes seem to be among them all:
1. originality
2. humility
3. courage
ORIGINALITY - call it reason, insight or experience. It’s the capacity to say things new. Think of Leo Tolstoy’s capacity for observing human nature, or Ernest Hemingway’s capacity for observational detail. Some writers synthesize information–Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America or Thomas Mann in his novels of intellectual adventure such as The Magic Mountain. Masters seeks new angles, a bold style or curiosity in form. But there are limits to newness. The Masters pay heed to their predecessors, which leads to the next attribute of their character.
HUMILITY - modesty, moderation or self-control. The perennial novelist is a hard drinking, womanizer, or in the case of female writers, a passionate feminist. Is that correct? According to Flaubert’s admonition: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work,” a Master is concerned first with his own character to imbue his work with moral authority. The masters eschews publicity and embrace independence. They give due to their predecessors and praise their contemporaries. They don’t retreat from society like JD Salinger but are rather like David Eggers, who turned quick fame into a literary society and published the work of other young writers. The Masters heed Cicero’s advice to be “a good man yourself and then seek others like you.” The master has a gentle humility and a quiet self-deprecation, especially in old age, like the loquacious Samuel Clemens. Humility makes a small man great, which leads to number the next attribute of character.
COURAGE - the masters take risks and they fail often. In contrast to painters whose entire corpus could be surveyed in ten minutes from a large coffee table book, very little of what a writer produces will ever be read. Think of your favorite writer. What percentage have you seen? Think of all the notes, letters, corrections, drafts, and so on a writer puts to paper. Since so little will ever be read, Masters must persevere and press forward. Some are attacked, or killed for their ideas. The moral fiber of the Argentinian Rudolpho Walsh, or the publishing consistency of a young William Styron, or the raw unadulterated struggle of Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote Master and Margarita from memory after it burned, these are what the Masters have in common
“Top Ten Masters of the Novel” will be released once a month. When complete they will be collected on one page. They are selected in advance, so honorable mention can go to James Joyce, for linguistic invention, Umberto Eco for fiction as a platform for sholastic discussion, and Willie Collins for writing novels that freely cross genre. The list is my own and reflects a preference for writers who 1. like to travel 2. identify as journalists 3. seek the truth 4. are quite singular and 5. who span language and culture.
IN DESCENDING RANK ORDER:
