"What's Your Opinion of...Steinbeck's Prose?"

Figure 1.

John Steinbeck at the "Scoppia del Carro" festival in Firenze, Italy, on Easter morning, April 21, 1957

That's a Line From a Major Number, "Conga!," from the 1953 Broadway musical Wonderful Town, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and the late Adolph Green. The show was only recorded as late as 1958, when it captured (after a telecast) the notable starring performance of Rosalind Russell. To many of us who remember the original telecast, the question to be asked over nearly half a century has been, "Why not again, or since?" But that's an aficionado's query; to others, it's a matter of what "Steinbeck's prose" is doing in a '50s musical, and to what it refers.

In fact, Wonderful Town is itself a musicalization of the 1940 stage adaptation (by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov) called My Sister Eileen of the autobiographical contributions to The New Yorker of the late Ruth McKenney, who constantly deferred to her sister Eileen as the pretty one of the duo. These stories can also be called Steinbeckian in tone, as indeed they are—stylistically reminiscent of the journalistic pieces Steinbeck wrote for money during the last decade of his life. The McKenney sisters came to New York in 1933, though the stage versions suggest 1935 as the likelier date—which still doesn't give much explanation for the question of "Steinbeck's prose."

The McKenney girls came from Ohio (whether Cleveland or Columbus is up to which version you are reading); suffice it to note that William Dean Howells had taken literary Ohio out of the Wild West three-quarters of a century before the McKenneys were in business. Ruth wanted to be a writer, and such she became; her sister's pheromones were directed towards the male gender, and when the stories and play (and eventual film version) take leave of her, Eileen has become the wife of the Hollywood screenwriter (and fictionist) Nathanael West. The latter two died together in a car crash in 1940, just days before the play version opened.

Bernstein, and Comden and Green, were just into the writing of what might be properly called a Saga of New York City when they took on a failed draft stage version of My Sister Eileen (with music by Leroy Anderson) and converted it into a successful Broadway production in the space of not quite a month. But let's finally get to "Steinbeck's prose." It isn't likely that anyone would have remarked upon that commodity as an object for discussion in 1933, or even 1935. What then?

In fact, little of what was gathered together as the story collection My Sister Eileen ever made it into the stage or film versions, though interestingly, Ruth's pursuit of a journalistic career leads her to work on a book following the history of the United Rubber Workers of America (205) Obviously, Steinbeck was at roughly the same time ready to start working up his studies of migratory farm workers into what would become The Grapes of Wrath. The two may thus have been kindred stylistic spirits by reason of their shared sympathies.

"Conga!" is the only story—then entitled "Beware the Brazilian Navy"—to make it more or less recognizably intact into the later staged versions of My Sister Eileen. In it, Ruth pursues the notion of interviewing visiting Brazilian Navy personnel, reputedly the heirs of coffee fortunes, on a shore visit to Manhattan. As eventually staged, the story becomes a manic episode in which the mariners pursue Ruth, who is in turn trying to ask the usual inept questions about their impressions of "good neighbor" America; in return, she (improbably) teaches them to dance the conga, which of course only excites them further.

McKenney's Eileen stories are, as noted, primarily autobiographical, in spite of the title of a later anthology of all the stories, All About Eileen. Whenever one piece entitled "Love, Marriage, and Broadway" was actually written, it speaks of a second...