People often reach for the familiar when they near the 25 December. Whether it be through rewatching The Great Escape or Love Actually, or by listening to the Queen’s Speech, the bottom line is usually cosiness and dependability. But when it comes to festive cultural consumption, I am not like most people. I crave something that can cut through the mawkishness of all the Shakin’ Stevens, Cliff Richard and Wham! And in my reading life I have found few palate cleansers to match The Grapes of Wrath.
Some might ask what a 500-page novel about the suffering caused by the Great Depression and the Oklahoma drought has to do with the festive season – especially in our current, British, faux-snow-flecked incarnation. But beyond being a Christian celebration of the birth of Christ – or a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, depending on who you talk to – isn’t Christmas really a time for exchanging gifts with loved ones and reuniting with family members scattered across an increasingly globalised world? Steinbeck’s magnum opus is obsessed with what the narrator calls the “citadel of the family” and demonstrates at great length the bonds that can unite blood relations despite twists of fate and ill fortune. Losing yourself in a Californian labour camp certainly helps to put your Uncle Chris’s feeble ability at charades into perspective.
Like many children of the 80s, I came to Steinbeck through the school curriculum and the harrowing, Michael Gove-baiting Of Mice and Men, which in turn lead me on to the Nobel prizewinner’s magnum opus. I found the epic story of the Joad family struggling against all odds to survive profoundly touching, as had John Ford, Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie before me. Yes, its exhortations to socialism can seem a little clumsy and, yes, there is expository dialogue and wanton repetition throughout – but there is also a righteous anger unmatched by little in modern fiction.
Further than that, with great recession-induced austerity currently hitting the worst off throughout the western world, this Great Depression-era tale of have-nots being at the whim of faceless corporations and blood-sucking banks has special resonance. Steinbeck’s message could certainly be accused of being Manichean – but I would challenge anyone to find a book that can make the meek burn with equal fury. The author famously said that he wanted his book to “rip a reader’s nerves to rags” and he succeeded in doing exactly that, which is part of the reason why 75 years later it still enthrals.
Political message aside, what I love about the novel is that it drips with humanity. It’s not simply a leftist rebuke to the ruling classes, it is also a warm-hearted celebration of the persistence of the human spirit. What could be more Christmassy than that? Personal tragedies are recounted and suffered, as characters are picked off like infantrymen, but the citadel of the family – and the heart – remains un-breached. The novel’s celebrated and shocking ending – in which Rose of Sharon, the recent mother of a stillborn child, nurses a starving man with her breast – can be seen as a demonstration of the salvation that community spirit offers. More than that, this modern-day depiction of Roman Charity helps Steinbeck move past the plentiful Christian allegories and embrace the pagan.
There is no mainstream Christian doctrine to be found in The Grapes of Wrath. The humanist message espoused by the former preacher Casy draws on Thoreauvian transcendentalism to affirm that “all men’s got one big soul ever’body’s a part of”. Without fuss or the use of a children’s choir, the novel shows how the concept of family extends beyond one’s own relatives. Its depiction of generosity matches Steinbeck’s personal philosophy, and is utterly inclusive, giving the reader both a jolt and a hug at the same time. In its own way, The Grapes of Wrath shows how important the family unity can be, whether you’re destitute like the Joads or washing down the last pig-in-blanket with a drop of sherry.
