Anti Steinbeck: His writing lacked style, complexity

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Author John Steinbeck was a "man of the people," a "man of the West" — one of the first major novelists to set his work in coastal California, in Dust Bowl Oklahoma, in the orchards and fields with fruit pickers and sharecroppers.

And so, to champion him, his ardent readers often grab for the handle of the "us vs. them" club to smack his detractors.

The centennial of Steinbeck's birth is being celebrated today with a host of exhibitions across the country — what the head of New York's Mercantile Library has even called "the most widespread single author event in American history." Yet, Steinbeck's fans argue, the writer has rarely been accepted by intellectuals, by that parochial, Eastern establishment of publications and professors who believe that, say, John Cheever has cosmic import while Flannery O'Connor is of mostly regional interest.

There's something to that argument. But there's a flaw in it, too. Steinbeck was a "man of the left," a supporter of unions and minority causes. He wasn't a Communist; he stood where populism and a kind of Christian pantheism meets socialism. It's precisely the sort of political stance many people would expect liberal-leaning academics to approve of.

Resistance beyond academe

But it doesn't redeem him. In other words, the resistance to Steinbeck, the unwillingness to grant him equal stature with other acknowledged greats from his generation — William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter — is not reducible to academic snobbery or Eastern provincialism.

It's been argued, for example — by Harold Bloom, the literary critic, for one — that Steinbeck never fully escaped the influence of Hemingway, the major stylistic innovator of 20th-century American prose.

There's plenty of evidence for this. In the opening of "The Grapes of Wrath," for example, one finds Hemingway's influence in the simplicity of the sentences, the stark economy of description. But the scene-setting goes on for pages. One can't help thinking that the young Hemingway would have wrapped up this weather report in no time.

But there are telling differences between the authors, too. Check out this bit of lyricism from "Tortilla Flat," and note what happens toward the end:

"Monterey sits on the slope of a hill, with a blue bay below it and with a forest of tall dark pine trees at its back. The lower parts of the town are inhabited by Americans, Italians, catchers and canners of fish. But on the hill where the forest and the town intermingle, where the streets are innocent of asphalt and the corners free of street lights, the old inhabitants of Monterey are as embattled as the Ancient Britons are embattled in Wales. These are the paisanos."

Although Steinbeck introduced a brief, Arthurian echo before this, his "Ancient Briton" reference here still clunks like an armored knight's head getting lopped off. It doesn't fit; it shifts into another set of references.

The incongruity is typical: Of all the aforementioned, mid-20th-century greats, Steinbeck is the only one without a truly settled, recognizable style.

Style speaks volumes

Literary style isn't everything, and one could argue that Steinbeck wisely shifted his to suit his materials rather than become a self-parody like Hemingway. But mostly his style didn't change — because it remained unsettled.

Style — even a wavering one — can tell us something about an author. Consider that Steinbeck remained restless his entire life, tramping as a young man, traveling in Europe, driving alone with a dog cross-country at 58 (recounted in "Travels With Charley").

Look at his major characters. One of Steinbeck's more impressive and lasting accomplishments was the number of American icons he added to our stock: Lennie and George from "Of Mice and Men," Tom and Ma Joad from "The Grapes of Wrath."

But it's revealing that, with the exception of Ma Joad — one of his only important women and even so, one who is still defined by home — his characters remain wanderers and adolescents.

The other chief difference with Hemingway in that "Tortilla Flat" passage is Steinbeck's love of the land. There's a hushed pleasure in the description ("where the streets are innocent of asphalt and the corners free of street lights"). Steinbeck doesn't have Hemingway's tragic fatalism. Hemingway interacted with nature as a hunter-fisher-bullfighter because that is the way he saw the world, as an implacable dealer in death. Contrast that with Tom Joad's declaration: "Everything that lives is holy."

This is not to suggest that Steinbeck's view is more profound than Hemingway's. It's to point out a good reason Steinbeck remains popular — love of nature and a faith in common people.

Add the restless immaturity of his characters, the humanist and occasionally preachy politics, the nostalgia for a past Eden, and you have Steinbeck's place as an American writer. He can marshal powerful social, even mythic, forces, but his artistic control wavers, sentimentality intrudes. The emotional lessons he teaches lack complexity. This is why his stories can feel universal, resonant even today.

And still stuck back on a truck in the Depression.