'Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck' Review: The Poison Cup of Gold - WSJ

As William Souder recounts in his biography “Mad at the World,” this was the start of Steinbeck’s painful transition “from struggling writer to Great Man of Letters.” It’s common enough to read about authors whose lives are at odds with their work, but has there ever been one so profoundly in conflict with his own popularity? Steinbeck is one of America’s few bona fide literary celebrities—perhaps only Twain and Hemingway enjoyed more international renown—yet he was horrified by public exposure and detested his fame, taking every opportunity to undermine it. Two clashing impulses provide the tension in Mr. Souder’s book: Steinbeck’s deep-seated distrust of success and the unyielding creative passion that brought his success about. As he was fending off admirers in the wake of “Of Mice and Men,” Steinbeck was also engrossed in his next book, a big, ambitious novel about Dust Bowl migrants that would spell the end of his remaining hopes for anonymity.

Like so much of Steinbeck’s life, the road to writing “The Grapes of Wrath” is marked by a refreshing lack of pretense. Born in 1902 in Salinas, Calif., he led an introverted childhood passed mostly in solitude in the natural world. Mr. Souder writes that his interest in books arrived with the force of a religious conversion at age 9, when a relative gave him a young-adult version of Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur.” From then on he read and wrote voraciously, drawn especially to mythology and legends, an affinity he would never outgrow.

Some writers are content to write nothing until they have something they need to say. Steinbeck was the opposite. From early on, writing was an addiction, a raison d’être: “[He] could no more stop writing than a fruit tree could stop bearing,” Mr. Souder says. He worked incessantly in his knockabout youth, moving from Stanford to New York to a hand-to-mouth, bohemian life with Carol back in California, but he lacked a compelling subject. His first novel, “Cup of Gold,” about the pirate Henry Morgan, is a boys’ adventure yarn that was repeatedly rejected and then, once published, ignored and quickly remaindered. He labored for years on “To a God Unknown,” a curious fable about animism, and he even tried his hand at a murder mystery. The impression Mr. Souder gives of these wilderness years is of a man who felt comfortable being overlooked. “I have come to be a complete fatalist about money,” he said in a letter in 1931. “Even the law of averages doesn’t hold with me. Any attempt to get me any kind of an award is pre-doomed to failure. Furthermore I seriously doubt my brand of literature will ever feed me.” Marriage, stimulating friendships, the companionship of dogs and the daily struggle with what he called the “sharp agony of words”—it made for a noble kind of penury.

But once Steinbeck focused his writing on his native California, in books like “The Pastures of Heaven” and “Tortilla Flat,” he acquired a reputation as a regionalist. As well as being obsessively disciplined, he was a world-class listener, and many of his stories and ideas were openly borrowed from acquaintances. The most influential friend was the charismatic marine biologist Ed Ricketts, whose avatar would appear in no fewer than three of Steinbeck’s books. It was Ricketts who put him on to the philosophical theory of the phalanx, a version of biological determinism premised on the idea that the needs of groups rather than of individuals dictate human behavior, as with schools of fish or colonies of coral.

It’s easy to forget the role this theory plays in “The Grapes of Wrath,” given the novel’s fame as the pre-eminent fictional account of the Great Depression. The book sprang from a series of articles Steinbeck wrote for the San Francisco News titled “The Harvest Gypsies,” which revealed the squalor and disease endured by migrant fruit pickers but also the spirit of community that persisted among their ranks. Now, in writing his novel, his usual creative monomania was intensified by political outrage, and he had a wealth of firsthand details he was desperate to convey. The Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw has pointed out that in the early pages of the manuscript, he took care to make the text large so that his wife would have an easier time typing it up, but soon, as the story possessed him, he began omitting punctuation and paragraph breaks and his handwriting grew minuscule and frenzied.

If “The Grapes of Wrath” were strictly a work of naturalism, it would be respected but not beloved. But Steinbeck wove his theories about the group-man into the story, endowing it with broader allegorical possibilities. (High-schoolers reading it today may interpret it as a timely parable about ecological destruction.) And coursing throughout is Steinbeck’s boyhood love of heroic romances. The novel’s heightened, dramatic episodes reside somewhere between journalism and fantasy, as though Steinbeck were a medieval historian relating an era of miracles and wonders. It’s a true epic, with all the excesses that entails.

Mr. Benson’s monumental 1984 biography, written across 15 years and nearing 1,200 pages, hangs over Mr. Souder’s endeavor. On one hand “Mad at the World” is condensed, clear and readable. (Mr. Souder’s previous books include brisk lives of Rachel Carson and John James Audubon.) But it achieves its relative brevity by omitting excerpts from Steinbeck’s journals and letters. What remains are the gloomy externalities of divorce and depression, which inform Mr. Souder’s argument that anger was the animating force behind Steinbeck’s art.

There’s a lot to this, and certainly the bitterness toward domestic life in later works like “East of Eden” and “The Winter of Our Discontent” is hard to miss. But I’m more persuaded by Mr. Benson’s claim that Steinbeck holds our attention because “he was a lover of life, rather than a hater of life.” The innocence and restorative joy that Steinbeck felt from writing never deserted him. One senses it in the soaring raptures of his sui generis work of natural history, “Sea of Cortez,” or in his delightful comic idyll, “Cannery Row,” written in the midst of an emotional collapse. His zeal for creation is undimmed even in his rascally penultimate book, “Travels With Charley,” a collection of stories masquerading as nonfiction.

Still, he couldn’t free himself from his obligations to the outside world. In 1962, six years before his death at 66, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When asked if he thought he deserved the honor, Steinbeck answered, “That’s an interesting question. Frankly, no.” This wasn’t false modesty; it was a plea. All he wanted was to be left alone so that he could get back to work.

—Mr. Sacks is the Journal’s fiction columnist.