1.
One of my main activities during this period of home-confinement is
reading. The libraries remain closed; what has been borrowed has been read. I
needed a book; I've been watching operas which the Met has kindly been
streaming, but I wanted to have something to hold in my hands while my mind
soared, or, at the very least, found succor from the virus by being,
imaginatively, somewhere else. Would I find what I was looking for in the
basement? It's damp, it's dark, but there are a lot of books down there.
What I came up with was, "The Winter of Our Discontent"
by John Steinbeck. I had never read it before; I didn't even know how it had
come into my possession.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that this was a first-edition
printing of the novel. If the site I consulted is to be trusted, a
first-edition copy, with the now-valuable jacket intact, is worth $12,500!
Well, the jacket is missing on mine.
Where did this book come from? I certainly hadn't bought it back in
1961. The only reasonable conclusion is that my father had bought it and read
it. My father died in 1967. It was odd to hold the same book in my hands that
he had held in his hands so long ago. Nobody on earth
remembers him now, poor man, except me, with the possible exception of one with
whom I've lost contact. If he read it when it was new, which I assume he
did, what was going through his mind? A few years later, everything fell apart
for him, and, after several suicide attempts, he was dead.
I am more like him than I'd like to admit, but for your sake and mine,
dear readers, I refuse to descend into that terrible ditch; I rise from the
grave like Lazarus and return to better times, the plague of 2020, to review an
outstanding book.
2.
This novel is an American classic, no doubt about that. Published in
1961, this, the last of Steinbeck’s many novels, was one of the main reasons
the author won a Nobel Prize a year later. It is the story of a midlife crisis;
the how and the why a decent man succumbs to corruption. For the epigraph of
the novel Steinbeck wrote: “Readers seeking to identify the fictional people
and places here described would be better to inspect their own communities and
search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.”
In this respect, the book is very prescient. It was written at the end
of the Eisenhower era, two decades before greed began its almost exponential
upswing with the Reagan presidency. The novel’s protagonist, Ethan Allen
Hawley, scion of a well-established family fallen onto hard times, is without
doubt the smartest person in the book; he reflects, one easily assumes, many of
the author’s views. Hawley knows that selfishness was nothing new; he called
his ancestors, who were involved in the whaling industry, “Puritan-pirates.” His
ancestors strove for a balance, however imperfect, between self-interest and
community. The replacement of God, however understood, with money as the center
of worship would have surprised them all.
In a recent edition of the New Yorker, (May 11, 2020), Evan
Osmos, in an article about America’s shift to the right, writes, quoting a
Dartmouth sociologist: “The underlying massive change is that wealth no longer
needs to justify itself—it is self-justifying…I look back, and I think, That’s when
we gave up on being ‘we’”
This shameless self-justification of money; the reduction of ‘We the
People,’ to ‘I, the Person,’ Steinbeck saw coming, which gives the book an aura
of prophesy. Hawley’s mid-life crisis thus is the beginning of America’s
mid-life crisis; the banker in the novel, Mr. Baker, is a prototype of the
oligarchs who have ushered in this, what might be called the Second Gilded Age,
where terms like fairness and equality are old hat, traded for, as it were, the
older hats of Gilded Age elites.
Some parts of the book, however, point back into the past. The role of
women in the novel is limited. There are two types of females in the book: one
is represented by Hawley’s wife; she stands by her man and pushes him to
succeed. She is not nearly as intelligent as her husband; she remains in the
confines of domestic chores. (At one point she says to her husband, regarding
the banker, Mr. Baker: ‘But he might want a word alone with you. Businessmen
don’t like ladies listening.’) The other type is represented by the childless
Margie Young-Hunt, who has no qualms about using her sexuality to get what she
wants. The only way she believes she can get ahead is by manipulating men to do
her bidding.
This book was written decades before the acceptance of diversity; the
Italian businessman, Murillo, is the butt of many ethnic slurs. No trace of
political correctness here! There is also a tendency to blame foreigners for
everything; this trend, unfortunately, is still with us. Written a few years before the commencement of
the Civil Rights era, the book contains almost no references to African
Americans. Their wintry discontent is not mentioned at all, even in
passing.
Despite these defects, the book is a classic, worth more than a single
read.
Schiller wrote a story called, “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre,” (“The
criminal due to lost honor”)—the title is a good characterization of the
protagonist’s descent. Hawley, the scion of a respected family, has lost
everything; to keep his family from hunger, he is forced to work as a clerk in
a grocery store which he formally owned. His boss is Murillo, a shrewd
businessman who barely speaks English. Hawley, in contrast, is a Harvard
graduate, who majored in languages and literature.
Hawley’s education and intelligence provide no advantages. His frequent
quoting of writers such as Shakespeare and Milton and his thorough knowledge of
the Bible do not compensate for his lack of respect in the community.
His daughter asks him point-blank, “When are we going to be rich?” His
son wants to go to camp. They can’t even afford a TV. Hawley’s resultant self-hate
is expressed in the ironic nicknames he gives his wife: flower feet, fern tip,
etc. They indicate an aggression of which his wife is scarcely aware.
H realizes that the values of the society in which he lives proclaim,
“Gentry without money gradually ceases to be gentry.” He also realizes that
once rich, nobody is interested in the means by which one’s wealth has been
gained. After thinking things over, he decides, after attending Easter service,
to resurrect himself as someone as dishonest as the banker and his ilk. He anonymously
reports Murillo to the Immigration Department, which gets him deported; he betrays
his best friend, now the town drunk, in order to obtain his property; he even
plans to hold up a bank.
He is brought back to his senses when he discovers that his son, who has
won an honorable mention in a coveted essay contest, has done so by
plagiarizing historic texts. “Everybody does it,” is his defense.
This drives Hawley to consider suicide. Holding a family talisman, he
decides to live for the sake of his daughter who still has a chance of not
being corrupted. The book ends with the following lines:
I had to get back to return the talisman to its
new owner.
Else another light may go out.
The novel, by the way is dedicated To Beth, my sister, whose light burns
clear.
The book is brilliantly written. It contains many interesting passages regarding
what has been going on in Hawley’s head. One of the asides I especially enjoyed
is a Scottish grandfather’s response to his teenage granddaughter, who constantly
worries about what people are thinking about her: ‘Ye wouldna be sae worrit wi’
what folks think about ye if ye kenned how seldom they do.’ Modern translation;
“Put down the cell phone, Sweetheart; the hits you desperately want to receive
are from kids who don’t really care”.
“The Winter of Our Discontent” illustrates the American past, yet also foreshadows
the current American mess. When the pursuit of money and prestige triumphs over
ethics and relationships, what are we left with? Read the newspapers; read this
novel; else another light may go out.
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