Steinbeck’s Literary Dimension: A Guide to Comparative Studies, Series II ed. by Tetsumaro Hayashi (review)

Reviews 237 The chronological approach to Olsen’swriting places emphasis upon each individual text. I would welcome more context. Olsen’s life may help explain her art, but biography is one context among others—historical, cultural, and literary—which raise questions worth pursuing. For to ask how the Communism of the thirties influenced Olsen’s themes places them within a perspective that enhances their significance. To ask how modernism affected the fragmented form of her fiction presupposes a place for Olsen within literary history. And to ask which writers, specifically, she has influenced accepts the claim that “[e]very woman now writing in America has felt the subtle effects of Olsen’s groundbreaking insights.” Though other women have written as well as Tillie Olsen, and written more, few are as venerated. Ifveneration has turned Olsen into an “icon,”it has not dispelled the mysteries still surrounding this enigmatic figure. BLANCHE H. GELFANT Dartmouth College Steinbeck’s Literary Dimension: A Guide to Comparative Studies, Series II. Edited by Tetsumaro Hayashi. Introduction by Reloy Garcia. (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1991. 180 pages, $22.50.) Here is a sequel to Professor Hayashi’s first Literary Dimension volume, published in 1973. Like numerous other collections by the indefatigable Hayashi, this anthology has a predictable air. Typically, Hayashi gathers around a focal concept articles mostly from his Steinbeck Quarterly, engages a Steinbeck Society member to write a praiseful introduction, and provides a minimalist preface himself to the whole lot. In the early days of the revitalized Steinbeck movement, this publishing formula was useful and stimulating. Now, however, we are accustomed to ask a good deal more from critical collections than mere handiness. These essays view Steinbeck from a comparative angle: Steinbeck “juxtapose [d] against another important literary figure, the better to see them both,” editor Hayashi writes. The essays are intended to enlarge our sense of Steinbeck’s modern literary connectedness, but the scatter gun approach oblit­ erates a consistent methodology or coherent argument, particularly regarding the restiveness of influence, a lurking topic which deserves a great deal more attention than it is given here. There is not really a bad essay in the bunch, though the cumulative results are uneven, which in turn makes the readerly pleasures mixed. The disparate ages of the essays pose a problem, because some date back nearly two decades, to the antediluvian era before the appearance of three 238 'Western American Literature volumes of Steinbeck’s letters (1975, 1978, 1979), and before Jackson Benson’s monumental biography (1984). None of the essays were updated or revised for this book, so the sensation from reading the earlier ones is like looking at daguerreotypes. In particular, the essays by Bett Yates Adams (formerly Betty Perez) on Steinbeck, Ricketts, and Sea of Cortez seem spectacularly quaint. And given their juicy subjects, at least two might have been developed more fully (Duane Carr’s “Steinbeck’s Blakean Vision in The Grapes of Wrath"\ Donald Stone’s “Steinbeck, Jung, and The Winter ofOurDiscontent"). The three finest essays (Benson’s model piece, “Hemingway the Hunter and Steinbeck the Farmer”; Richard Allan Davison’s “Hemingway, Steinbeck, and the Art of the Short Story”; Roy S. Simmonds’s “Cathy Ames and Rhoda Penmark: Two Child Monsters”) really stand out because they are fresh—even startling—in their connections, solidly grounded in their scholarship, and penetrating in their valuations. If your taste runs to what Garcia calls simple “fourteen-bean soup,” then you will find this book worth buying; if not, not. ROBERT DeMOTT Ohio University John Steinbeck as Propagandist: The Moon is Down Goes to War. By Donald V. Coers. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1991. 165 pages, $21.95.) John Steinbeck is generally conceived of as a man very much of one country' who wrote about one country—his own—and whose brilliance was his under­ standing of place. But The Moon is Down is not about America. It is set in a country invented by Steinbeck and chronicles an experience he neither wit­ nessed close at hand nor shared. In 1941, Steinbeck wanted to write a book that would be essentially a piece of propaganda in support of the war effort. According to...