The Grapes of Wrath, Robert DeMott, and rumblings of non-teleological thinking

Steinbeck Country...

Today we were back at the Hopkins Marine Station for a series of lectures from noted Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott, the author of Working Days (among other things), the authoritative textual recreation of Steinbeck's personal journals kept during the construction of the timeless epic Grapes of Wrath. 

DeMott's lecture was comprehensive, stimulating, and essentially felt like the graduate school program I wish I would have pursued.

Steinbeck, DeMott noted, had a "picture making faculty" akin to what we might call a photographic memory. Throughout Working Days, Steinbeck regularly pushes himself to work 5 days a week, composing approximately 2 pages of handwritten manuscript (though this industriousness varied) each day. While most teachers and students of writing are pushed to compose notes, outlines, and other tactile planning apparatuses prior to drafting, Steinbeck commonly "thought through the next piece over the weekend." It seems widely accepted that Steinbeck's planning was entirely internalized. When taking into consideration the profundity of a work like Grapes of Wrath, it is staggering to imagine that the work was composed in this way. DeMott linked Steinbeck to Kerouac (or Kerouac to Steinbeck) in an interesting way:

"this notion of automatic writing--30 years before Kerouac--was part of Steinbeck's creation methodology...there were only two amendations to the original manuscript [of Grapes of Wrath]. Steinbeck removed an apparently irrelevant anecdote about Roman troops and returned to the manuscript to add the passage explaining the departure of Noah Joad."

It is well documented that Steinbeck abandoned two manuscripts prior to beginning Grapes of Wrath (The Oklahomans, reputedly a manuscript of over 1,000 pages and L'Affaire Lettuceberg, an invective--DeMott uses the word "vituperative"--satire related to agricultural labor strike organization in/around Salinas). I am inclined to think of these abandoned efforts, in addition to Steinbeck's exercises in Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle, as the proxy rough draft materials for Grapes.

One other topic (one among many, really) we touched on dealt with the "symphonic" quality of Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck was widely known to compose his books under the influence of music:

"the pure and effective religion of Bach was Steinbeck's 'narcotic' during the final draft of To a God Unknown."

Steinbeck apparently listened to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake during his writing Grapes of Wrath... in Working Days, Chapter 5 (the coming of the tractors in Grapes) is surrounded by Steinbeck openly yearning for a musical interlude:

"I am very happy in this work, I do know that. It satisfies me so far. But I wish I could have music. I really need the music. Too many things happening. It would be interrupted and that would be worse than not playing it at all....Have to make the sound of the tractors and the dust of the tractors. I'll have to have music before that..." (DeMott 22).

How much influence, I wonder, did music play in Steinbeck's structural planning phase of his composition? As a devotee of Bach's fugues and the symphonic work of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, how much did the mathematics of musical composition and the structure of symphonies figure into Steinbeck's literary framework? After all, a symphony is typically composed of four movements: exposition - development - recapitulation - coda. Coincidentally or not, Grapes of Wrath follows a similar four-part structure. The compositional point/counterpoint motifs created by symphonic composers are easily seen in the alternating "general" and "particular" chapters that occur throughout Grapes. 

What else, in addition to Swan Lake, was on Steinbeck's turntable?

After our lectures, the group adjourned to smaller discussion pods back at the hotel -- my group touched base with 'Gilly' regarding the "human ecology" ingrained in Grapes of Wrath... some rumblings of the non-teleological thinking of Ed Ricketts started to bubble up... I find myself looking forward to discussing The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Dr. Robert DeMott at the Red Pony ranch...