This month on the Reading group, we’re going to read John Steinbeck. His novels Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat were pulled out of the hat on a joint ticket.
Two readers nominated both books, while Steinbeck himself was a popular choice as an author to help us celebrate the human spirit, winning many nominations for other books, such as The Grapes of Wrath. This feels like a good result. Not least because both novels have their own special kind of glow and warmth.
When it came out in 1935, Tortilla Flat’s reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle was so delighted that he was lost for words:
The problem with a book like this is that you can’t describe it. The best you can do is to indicate it – faintly, in the sketch book manner, at best leaving out all the intangibles that really give it its quality. I can’t reflect the charm, the humor, the pathos, the wit and wisdom and warm humanity which illuminate every one of Mr Steinbeck’s pages.
Cannery Row, meanwhile, was greeted by the often stern US critic Edmund Wilson with a simple expression of pleasure: “I believe that it is the one [Steinbeck book] I have most enjoyed reading.”
I hardly need add that Steinbeck remains a popular author. His books still sell in their millions. Here in the UK, Of Mice and Men is a staple of school exams, while The Grapes of Wrath remains a favourite around the world. Almost half a century after Steinbeck’s death, his reputation seems as solid and secure as any writer of his era. So the fact that he won the Nobel prize in 1962 feels uncontroversial. But surprisingly, Steinbeck’s elevation was viewed as an odd choice when the Nobel committee granted the award. The New York Times complained that it was “interesting” that it had not gone to someone who had made “a more profound impression on the literature of our age”. They also noted, acidly, that Steinbeck’s “limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising”.
When Steinbeck himself was asked if he thought he deserved the award, he said “frankly no”. In 2013, we found out that the judges themselves more or less felt the same. The opening of the archives 50 years after the event revealed that judge Henry Olsson thought, “There aren’t any obvious candidates for the Nobel [literature] prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation.” It also emerged that Steinbeck was a “compromise choice”. He was up against Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell (so much for the lack of choice!), as well as French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. No one wanted to give it to Graves while Ezra Pound was still alive, because Ezra Pound was thought to be a superior poet (but one with poisonous political views). Durrell, meanwhile, had been previously ruled out because he “gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications”. Blixen became ineligible when she died. Less is known about why Anouilh was skipped – but skipped he was.
And so Steinbeck ended up with what must have seemed a poisoned chalice (even if it was also one brimming with cash) – but the decision has eventually matured into one of the more enduringly popular choices by the Nobel committee.
While I understand the New York Times’ reservations about Steinbeck’s preachy tendencies and his occasional heavy-handedness, he just as often provides light and beautiful prose, prose brimming with warmth and charm. The opening of Cannery Row is a case in point:
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. 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 holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.
Yes please! Since both these books are short – and promise to be fun – I suggest we should try to read both. They also connect thematically as reactions to the US depression of the 1930s: Tortilla Flat was written in its midst in 1935, Cannery Row 10 years later, in 1945. It makes sense to start with the earlier book, so let’s whizz through Tortilla Flat and reconvene here soon.
Before we get there, all comments and suggestions for discussion topics will be welcomed, as usual. Just in case you need more inducement, thanks to Penguin we have five copies of both Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat to give away to the first 10 people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. Let us know if you’d rather one over the other.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Lucy Poulden with your address (lucy.poulden@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
