Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. Viking, New York, 1952. F;9/26.
Steinbeck thought this famous novel his best which would make it very good indeed. There’s no question it’s excellent, I loved it. But I’ve got this premonition I won’t be able to do it justice in my review, and I’m not going to label plot alerts here. So if you haven’t read it I strongly suggest you stop reading this, go get a copy, and read it. For me it’s pretty close to as good as fiction gets. I hope you enjoy it.
Two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, become acquainted near the town of Salinas in central California at around 1900. There is a backstory describing the Trask patriarch Cyrus around the time of the Civil War who successfully cons everybody including government officials and becomes wealthy. His son Charles said, “How did he get away with it? How in hell did he get away with it? Nobody ever questioned it. Did you? Did I? Did my mother? Nobody did.” His two boys Adam and Charles are quite different. Adam follows his father into the military, but is jailed, escapes, and heads back to the home where Charles who kept “one slovenly woman after another. When they got on his nerves he threw them out the way he would sell a pig” has been living. The old man dies and leaves a huge fortune to his sons.
Meanwhile Cathy Ames is a smart attractive but viciously self-centred girl. “just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? … Cathy’s lies were never innocent”. She murders her parents in a fire and leaves for California where she is beaten up by a blasé professional pimp. She is rescued by Adam who falls in love and marries her. He is unaware that his brother Charles has slept with her and she is now pregnant. She has twin boys Aron and Caleb (Cal) but quickly leaves Adam to be a prostitute in Salinas. Adam with the help of Chinese servant Lee raises the boys who have no idea their mother is still alive.
The other family is Samuel Hamilton’s. He has a dry unproductive farm near Salinas but can build and fix anything. Somehow he never manages to make money. He sees Cathy for what she is: she reminds him of a hideous scene where as a child his dad tries unsuccessfully to protect him from witnessing the hanging of a dreadful criminal with golden hair and one who had eyes like a goat’s: “eyes (with) no depth—they were not like other eyes, not like the eyes of a man”. Samuel has nine children with his wife Liza who is as “humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do”. Samuel helps Adam who is developing a farm in the region.
Adam’s twin boys are as different as Adam and Charles. “For hours (Aron) would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground. If, on the other hand, Cal came upon the same anthill, he would kick it to pieces and watch while the frantic ants took care of their disaster”. Mind you Aron’s “prettiness caused some difficulty until it was discovered … that (he) was a dogged, steady, and completely fearless fighter.” The boys meet a young girl Abra who begins a relationship with Aron.
Adam languishes over his wife’s abandonment and then loses most of his fortune in a bad business venture. Cal makes money and tries to give it to his dad but Adam refuses. Cathy (“Kate”) poisons the madam of the whorehouse and inherits it along with a lot of money. She keeps photos of importent men enjoying prominence-ending sexual perversion. Cal discovers this and berates her but also shows Aron what she’s doing. Aron gets religion and enters Stanford University but leaves it to join the military. He is killed in World War I. Cal and Abra develop a relationship.
Lee, Adam’s Chinese employee is a brilliant philosophical man who raises the boys, helps Adam, and provides sage and practical advice. Cathy commits suicide as her murder is being discovered, and Adam dies at home with Lee, Abra, and Cal close by.
This plot summary doesn’t include engaging secondary characters, Mr. Edwards the pimp, Joe, Cathy’s tough enforcer, and many of Samuel’s quite varied children. One daughter Olive has a son named John Steinbeck who turns out to be the narrator of the story.
Steinbeck carries the intersecting lives of all these characters into deepening moral dilemmas as he endows them with depth and life. A few quick quotes I hope will give you a sense of Steinbeck’s writing which flies off the pages. I had too many saved pieces in my Kindle, more than those in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Charles jumped in front of him so that Adam had to stop, his chest almost against his brother’s chest. Adam backed away, but carefully, as one backs away from a snake.
There is great safety for a shy man with a whore. Having been paid for, and in advance, she has become a commodity, and a shy man can be gay with her and even brutal to her. Also, there is none of the horror of the possible turndown which shrivels the guts of timid men.
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
All through the story and Steinbeck’s turning the characters into real people we discover he is referring back to Cain and Abel (from Genesis 4:7 in the Old Testament). Whart’s going on? First initials of Charles and Adam and Adam’s twins hint at this and their character contrasts are similar to the mythical sons of Adam and Eve. Charles has a mark on his forehead. Cal’s attempt to help his father financially is rejected.
But it’s Lee, who fakes Chinese-servant pidgin to hide his education, discussing the biblical brothers who recognizes from deeply questioning conversations of Chinese sages an important difference in english Bible translations. Here it’s tempting to see these textual differences as technical until we understand that what specific words mean can make a huge difference. Steinbeck quietly letting on there’s truth in text.
The King James Bible has God promising “Thou shalt rule over him”, the American Standard Bible puts it as a command: “Do thou rule over him” (“him” here is sin, evil, one’s devils). East of Eden is where Cain is sent, like the characters in our story are thrown against bad people and circumstances: Cyrus the liar, vicious Charles’s inhumanity, Cal’s disregard for sensitivity (although he is troubled by it) and finally casually but blindly amoral Cathy/Kate, the multiple murderer and blackmailer without a hint of humanity.
Lee’s sages discovered in in the original Hebrew of God’s message of how you deal with evil: the verb timshel which can be taken to mean “thou mayest” or “you can”. Steinbeck was writing just after World War II in the late 40s/early 50s. His slowly-developing message seems an idea ahead of its time: you have a choice.
I was happy to feel a moral understanding seeping up symbolically through the gripping ambiguous lives of Steinbeck’s people. In recommending that I read this my daughter called it “juicy”. It’s all of that and more. It improves my all-time favourites list.
9.7/9.6
