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Chapter 4. Steinbeck and the Tragedy of Progress
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Steinbeck and the Tragedy of Progress 98 JOHN STEINBECK LEARNED in late 1962 that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Fearing that the award would prove to be an “epitaph” for his writing career, he hesitated to embrace the accolades of the literary establishment. Shortly afterward, critics who believed his writings were unworthy of the award spoke up. Steinbeck complained to his friend Bo Beskow, a Swedish artist, “I suppose you know of the attack on the award to me not only by Time magazine with which I have had a long-lasting feud but also from the cutglass critics, that grey priesthood which defines literature and has little to do with reading. They have never liked me and now are really beside themselves with rage.”1 One such critic, Cornell professor and Fitzgerald scholar Arthur Mizener, published a scathing commentary in the New York Times Book Review on December 9, just a day before Steinbeck accepted the prize in Stockholm. In the article Mizener deems The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck’s best novel, after which “most serious readers seem to have ceased to read him.” Mizener attributes this novel’s success to the emotional atmosphere of the late thirties, when Americans were “responsive to even feeble renderings ” of suffering induced by unemployment and poverty “and, with the typically impatient idealism of Americans, eager to be offered a course of action that sounded, however superficially, as if it would remedy the situation .”2 Mizener is particularly critical of what he calls Steinbeck’s tendency to explore “idea[s] for solving a social problem or explaining human nature.”3 He claims that the author’s “theory of what human nature ought to be has made him forget all he has observed of what men are.”4 Like many later CHAPTER 4 Adrienne Akins Warfield Steinbeck and the Tragedy of Progress 99 critics of Steinbeck, Mizener assumes true art should stay detached from political commitments: art should concern itself not with what should be, but with what is.5 Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was in many ways a response to critics like Mizener. In his letter to Beskow, Steinbeck said of the speech, “I should like to make it as near to the truth as possible.”6 In a letter to longtime friend Carlton Sheffield, Steinbeck spoke of his struggles to formulate a “suave and diplomatic” speech and his final rejection of such an approach: “Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether it’s good but at least it’s me.”7 After initial thanks to the Swedish Academy, Steinbeck’s Nobel speech quickly moves to an examination of the role of the writer: “It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.” These “makers of literature,” Steinbeck asserts, should not be “a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches—nor is [writing] a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.” Rather, the “functions,” “duties,” and “responsibilities” of the writer are “decreed by” the needs of the human race for hope, improvement, and survival. For Steinbeck, the particular need of the hour is for the writer to address “the present universal fear” that “has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledge and manipulation of certain dangerous factors in the physical world,” most specifically the threat of nuclear weapons. Steinbeck acknowledges that humanity’s ethical understanding and environmental concerns have not progressed at the same rate as discoveries and developments in science and technology but contends that “there is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast. Indeed it is a part of the writer’s responsibility to make sure that they do.” Situating his argument within the context of the life of Alfred Nobel, Steinbeck refers to Nobel’s realization of “the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions” and to his efforts to “invent a control, a safety valve” for the destructive power of dynamite and other such inventions. According to Steinbeck, Nobel found such control “only in the human mind and the human spirit,” as evidenced by the categories of the Nobel Prize awards. Steinbeck, agreeing...