Lucas Blogs About East of Eden

I'm certainly not holding this book in front of my face to hide the tears streaming down my cheeks! What would give you such a ridiculous idea?

So, what's this book's de—Oh for cryin' ou—

That's right! It made me cry! We talked about its author's merits—and demerits! It's also one of my favorite books of all time. I just finished re-reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. The deal is exceedingly simple to explain: it's a genuine, goddamn masterpiece of Modernist and Naturalist prose exploring such topics as the American Dream, the Old Testament, racism, mental health, good, evil, family dynamics, war, peace, moral obligation, how to start a Ford Model T, love, sex, betrayal—

OH. MY. GOD! Stop, just stop! I can't be here for this.

Sorry, I already started this as a Hypothetical Reader formatted post. The novel starts with a loving description of the Salinas Valley then quickly splits into two tracks that only rejoin hundreds of pages later. First there's the story of Cyrus Trask (which is really the story of his two sons, Adam and Charles), who leaves Connecticut to fight in the Union Army in 1862 and gets sent home with one leg in . . . 1862. In the meantime, his wife has born him a son (Adam) and died, so Cyrus quickly remarries and fathers a second son, Charles. I think we can all see where this going, shades of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Essau, Joseph and his brothers, really any story from Genesis about brothers. Cyrus loves Adam better and Charles is jealous. You get the idea. We hop back across the country to the Salinas Valley where Samuel Hamilton has moved from Ireland with his wife, Liza, and fathers a multitude of children. There's George, Will, Tom, and Joe, and Lizzie, Dessie, Olive, Mollie, and Una. Sam is something of a jack of all trades: blacksmith, inventor, farmer, water-witch, and intellectual, but somehow he's never able to translate any of his talents into financial success. Meanwhile, Liza possesses an unshakeable faith and a stern constitution. Together they somehow manage to see all of their children clear to adulthood, and although the children all move away from the ranch, except for Tom, it's clear that there's something about the land itself that gives Samuel his drive and—

 Can you read the words that you're typing? How does any of this connect back to the Trask brothers?

Well, to explain that I'll have to talk about Cathy.

UGGGHHHHH!!!

So, Cathy Ames is about ten years younger than the Trasks, and she grows up in New England. Steinbeck initially describes her as a monster, as if she's missing a piece of her soul. An armchair psychoanalyst might take a stab at diagnosing her with psychopathy or sociopathy or some sort of personality disorder. In any case, she's cold and manipulative. Her means of manipulation are largely left up to the reader's imagination, we only see the effects, like her schoolteacher's suicide. Anyway, she kills her parents in a fire and moves to Boston where she lives the life of Riley as a pimp's kept woman, but learns two lessons: 1) she can't help but reveal all of her worst thoughts and impulses while she's drinking, and B) Mr. Edwards does have a breaking point. After Edwards nearly beats her to death outside a small town in Connecticut, Cathy pulls herself up onto the front door of—

Let me guess, Adam and Charles Trask.

Yep. Only now they're loaded.

Do I want to know how?

Their father embezzled it all from the Grand Army of the Republic. Anyway, Adam served two tours in the Indian wars, lived as a hobo, and eventually moved back in with his brother in Connecticut. Charles' violent temper had cooled somewhat by this point but eventually the brothers clashed over what to do with their inheritance. One evening, after they'd decided that Charles would buy out Adam so that Adam could move to California a mysterious woma—

It's Cathy!

Yes, Cathy appears on their doorstep. Adam's like a child nursing an injured bird back to health, but Charles doesn't trust her, thinks maybe she's a little too much like him on the inside. Anyway, long story short, Cathy sleeps with Charles and marries Adam, but that backfires on her, because he insists on moving her out to California with him in spite of her frequent protestations that she doesn't want to go to California. And in California, Adam needs help putting down wells so he hires—

Samuel Hamilton, I get it!

But wait, there's more!

Of course there is!

Cathy is pregnant with twins! (though you only find out it's twins when she gives birth) Also, Adam's hired a Chinese domestic servant named Lee. And—

You're not going to recount the whole damn plot of the novel, are you?

Oh, well, no. I guess, I won't.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

I guess not. Anyway, um, Cathy runs away, shooting Adam. Adam spends the rest of the book trying to find something to live for, sort of ignoring the possibility that maybe his sons could give his life meaning. The boys, Aaron (aka Aron) and Caleb (aka Cal) sort of repeat the cycle, only now they also have to wonder how much of their mother they have in them (at least after they find out that she isn't really dead). Sam Hamilton's daughter Olive marries John Steinbeck and then becomes the mother of the John Steinbeck who wrote the novel. Samuel's kids realize that he's getting too old to stay on the ranch. I cry. Tom Hamilton commits suicide. I cry. The novel ends by tying back to an important conversation about translating the book of Genesis from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English. I cry.

And you left out how much?

Just so, so much. Steinbeck dedicates the book to his editor by saying that it's a box full of everything he had, and that it's still not full. It's like Scrooge McDuck's coin vault.

I suspect Steinbeck might object to that characterization.

It's possible.  Anyway, I first read this book as the summer reading assignment for Advanced Literature and Composition in high school (that was like the JV version of AP English), along with excerpts from the Bible, and I just fell in love with it. First off, there's the fact that nobody can describe the beauty of the California landscape like John Steinbeck. There's just something about the rhythm and texture of his prose that feels Californian.

I think you might be confusing cause and effect.

Whatever, and I mean that in both good and bad ways.

Oho? What's this, are we about to get some spicy hot takes?

No. I've set these takes on the windowsill to cool a bit. See, one of the things that didn't sit as well with me on this reading is Steinbeck's clumsy handling of race and class. In fact, in the very first chapter, I was taken out of the story by the way that Steinbeck described indigenous Californians as an "inferior breed without energy," but that probably didn't even raise an eyebrow for mainstream audiences in the fifties. It's easy to dismiss casual racism as a product of its time, but race is one of the many issues addressed explicitly in the text. For example, it's clear that the character of Lee is meant to challenge depictions of Chinese Americans in popular culture. Lee confides in Sam Hamilton that he only speaks in pigdin because white people expect him to and don't know what to make of him if he doesn't. However, the text still depicts him as sexless and slightly effeminate, a not uncommon stereotype of Asian men in popular culture (not that there's anything wrong with being sexless or effeminate, but, you know, stereotyping an entire group of people is bad). Then there's the fact that the closest thing to a named black character is the proprietress of a brothel in Salinas who is referred to solely by a racial slur.

But like you said, the novel is a product of its ti—

That's true, and there is a history of bigotry in California and I just wanted to point out that while the novel directly confronts that history in some ways, it maybe isn't as aware of the effects of that bigotry as it thinks it is.

And what about the way that Steinbeck portrays women? I mean, if you look at Liza Hamilton and Cathy Ames you've got a pretty stark madonna-whore thing going on?

I think that's a weird way to characterize the author's depiction of his grandmother. And I wouldn't necessarily say that we're meant to specifically compare and contrast those two characters. Though I would say that women often get short shrift in the novel. With Adam as the primary viewpoint character through Cathy's pregnancy, there is perhaps a desire to side entirely with him. Especially when Cathy is such a horrible person. At the same time, Steinbeck foregrounds the ways in which Adam is blinded to, and even outright ignores Cathy's words and actions when they don't fit the idealized version of Cathy that he's built in his head. And there are a number of minor roles played by women in the novel, often in the form of Steinbeck's aunts.

Like the story of his Aunt Una who married a chemist and died young?

And the story of his mother who "wins" a flight on an airplane for selling liberty bonds, his Aunt Dessie the dressmaker whose death prompts Tom Hamilton's suicide, and, of course, there's Abra.

I forgot about Abra.

How could you forget Abra? She's pretty pivotal to the plot by the end of the novel. In any case, she may be the central figure in a love triangle between Cal and Aron, but she's also a well-rounded character who knows what she wants a fights for it.

A strong female character?

If we have to use a cliché, then yes. But she isn't solely defined by being the object of the brothers' affections. Despite introducing her in the back-half of the book, Steinbeck still manages to make her one of the more memorable characters.

But I forgot about her.

But you're just a rhetorical device that I use to clumsily shoehorn in all the points I want to make.

Fair enough. Speaking of, would you like to address the criticism that some of your Advanced Lit & Comp cohorts raised about the Trask and Hamilton narratives not really meshing?

No.

Just no?

Well, I know this will sound wishy-washy, but that might just be something that either works or it doesn't. The Old Testament is a clear influence on the novel and it similarly features a mash-up of themes and types of stories. And well, I mean, how could they not see the connections. The Trasks and the Hamiltons live out two different kinds of American (and specifically Californian) stories. They occupy different ends of the Salians Valley's social spectrum their stories reflect different Old Testament stories. Adam, tired of being Abel, wants to play at being Adam in Eden, Samuel is listening for someone to call out his name and doesn't hear it, but is worried that his son Tom does hear the call and isn't prepared to answer it. One of the primary themes of the novel is families and how family members relate to each other. But let's get back to something from earlier.

What are we getting back to, exactly?

Cathy! I have more things to say about Cathy, because it's tempting to just say that novel makes me uneasy because the most prominent woman in the story is a lying, duplicitous, possible sociopath (psychopath? Look, I'm not going to read the DSM). But at the same time, even Steinbeck questions his own characterization of her as a monster. There is more depth to her than is initially apparent. True, she is cruel and manipulative, but she's also painfully aware of some lack in herself. At first she merely thinks everyone else is deluding themselves, but encountering her grown sons sparks a change in her. Well, maybe not a change, her fantasy of finally acknowledging Aron as her own has more than little to do with her vanity, but still by the end of the novel she's trapped in her own paranoia and isolation and retreats to a childish fantasy about shrinking down and joining Alice in Wonderland. Abra may be one of the novel's more memorable characters, but honestly, no one stands out quite like Cathy. She's a compelling antagonist, in spite of her first appearance implying that there isn't more to her than what's on the surface.

There's certainly something about her stuck in your craw.

There is. And I often find that with Steinbeck's novels. There are sticking points that I keep coming back to in my head. Look, this book is a towering achievement, the prose is lively and engaging, the characters stick with you, and it never fails to reduce me to a blubbering mess. I find something new each time I read it, and while parts of it have aged poorly, somehow something in it still feels true.

Maybe this is the place to cut things off?

Am I starting to ramble?

Starting?

Point taken. See you on Friday for A Year of Unfortunate Events.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Penguin Books trade paperback edition, 2002 (originally published in 1952), 601 pages, pairs well with ng-ka-py and Hebrew lessons

Links:

Here's a link to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA. I liked it, Steinbeck would have hated it.