John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle as a Lesson of Commitment

John Steinbeck first received the attention of the Slovene reading public in the early 1940s with Rudolf Kresal's translation of The Grapes of Wrath (Sadovi jeze Ljubljana: Zalozba Plug, 1943). Since then, ten of Steinbeck's works have been translated, including the most recent, Tortilla Flat (Polentarska polica Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, translated by Ciril Kosmac), in 1995. Although to date there are nineteen Slovene publications of Steinbeck's work in book form and numerous translations of his stories in various magazines and newspapers, the writer has been very poorly represented in Slovene literary history and criticism. His art has been assessed primarily in periodical and newspaper articles whose authors, in great part book reviewers and journalists, examined the author's commitment to social criticism. It is significant to note that until 1992 Slovenia was a part of the former Yugoslavia, where the communist party played a crucial role in the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural spheres. While noting ideological structures embedded in his work, Slovene critics missed the irony in Steinbeck's wording as well as his mythical and literary allusions. Tortilla Flat is hardly a "hymn to chivalric ideals such as friendship, loyalty and simplicity," as Dusan Mevlja writes in a 23 November 1953 review for Vecer (17). Nor should East of Eden be seen primarily in light of communist ideals: "in times of international crises Steinbeck, who is a writer of high repute, always attentively listened to the Yugoslav President Tito's opinion," an opinion voiced by Joze Turk in "Steinbeck in njegov raj" ("Steinbeck and His Eden") in the 1980 Mladinska knjiga edition of Steinbeck's East of Eden (Vzhodno od raja) (540).

Figure 1.

Clearly, Steinbeck did not entirely meet the demands of dogmatic communist critics. In the 2 May 1944 newspaper Jutro's "Sadovi jeze," for example, the anonymous author lamented the "naturalistic and far too dark" presentation of life in The Grapes of Wrath. "There are no bright tones," he claimed, "except for the symbolism of the last scene" (8). Despite the lack of a distinctive political synthesis in his works, however, the warmth and empathy in his depiction of the deplorable labor situation, his socially enlightened views, and his refined sense of human and civil rights accounted for the fact that he was considered "an effective advocate for the workers' cause" and successfully manipulated by communist propaganda (Borko 135). This tendency to view Steinbeck mainly as a writer of protest novels, striving for equitable social conditions, may explain why his postwar work, showing a conspicuous change in fictional method and his venturing into new forms and subject matter, has brought negative responses. The opinion that Steinbeck betrayed the working class by "ignoring the analysis of social conditions" and surrendered instead to "skeptical individualism" was expressed by the influential Russian critic A. Starcev in the 1947 Novi svet article on social realism in the United States (133). Two years later, the Slovenski porocevalec anonymous informational overview of the contemporary American literature, "Knjizevnost v ZDA," depicted Steinbeck as "an ardent supporter of the system he had previously attacked" (31 March 1949: 10). Marija Cvetko, among others, underrated Travels with Charley. "Many would be ashamed of this book," she claimed in Tedenska tribuna of 24 March 1964, and then went on to attack Steinbeck's "lukewarm personal involvement and the lack of intensity of his critical insight" (7). Steinbeck's initial support of the Vietnam War was the source of many opposing voices in the late 1960s: he "betrayed his principles and everything he had ever fought for," wrote Bulgarian writer Blaga Dimitrova in 1967 (92). This keen sense of disappointment resulted in a lack of serious critical interest in Steinbeck's work. Apart from some brief notices following the writer's death and the first Slovene translation of Sweet Thursday (1979), it was not until 1993 that the Delo newspaper assessed Steinbeck's career in a balanced reappraisal (22 March 1993: 7).

Despite a more receptive literary climate since Slovenia became a sovereign, democratic republic, many books that...