transformation through work
Steinbeck on the cost of devotion
“I find myself now with a growing reputation. In many ways it is a terrible thing… Among other things I feel that I have put something over. That this little success of mine is cheating.”
— John Steinbeck, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath
Transformation oftentimes arrives uninvited — through loss, through circumstance, through the things that happen to us before we can determine how to respond. To be transformed by one’s work, however, is something else entirely. It is, I think, a particular kind of luck, and not everyone gets it.
Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days. This is the fact that makes it into anecdotes, the recognition of the discipline that produced such extraordinary compression of it; and like most facts that get repeated so often, it obscures more than it reveals. By the time the novel was published, Steinbeck was not the same man who had begun it. The anecdotes omit its real cost. His journals record anxiety, fear, troubles with home life, intrusions, and his own feelings of inadequacy. Some days were better than others, but the only real certainty was the devotion, something closer to what he called a “breaking through to glory.” What some people find in religion, Steinbeck believed, a writer may find in his craft.
The point of work is to arrive somewhere new — to produce what never existed before, to write a book that had never been written, to answer questions that had not yet been asked. But to be truly changed by the work requires something more than effort. It requires devotion and complete surrender. Total devotion transforms a person, irrevocably, into someone they never intended to become. In a 1976 interview with John Gruen, abstract-expressionist painter, Agnes Martin said about her painting process:
“[…] when you finally paint what you’re supposed to paint, then something tells you, ‘O.K., this is it!’ If you accept a painting that has good points, but isn’t really it, then you’re not on the track. You’re permanently derailed. It’s through discipline and tremendous disappointment and failure that you arrive at what it is you must paint. […] For months, the first paintings don’t mean anything — nothing. But you have to keep going, despite all kinds of disappointments.”
Martin’s own art, once remarked1 as having “the quality of a religious utterance, almost a form of prayer,” bore this out. After a seven-year hiatus, she returned in the mid-1970s to find that the grids she had become known for were gone, replaced by new colour palettes and an abandonment of strict symmetry. The shift, she said, was as much a shock to her as to anyone. She had painted and painted, thrown away canvas after canvas, unable to understand what was wrong. “I just couldn’t understand what was the matter. I could hardly believe that that was what I had to do.” She had not chosen the new direction but had rather surrendered to it. Elsewhere in the same interview, she offered what I think is the clearest possible statement of what it means to be genuinely changed by one’s work: “I think that in order to be an artist, you have to move. When you stop moving, then you’re no longer an artist.”
With similar sentiments, Steinbeck wrote to his friend, Carlton Sheffield, right after he finished writing The Grapes of Wrath:
“I’m finishing off a complete revolution. […] The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel as I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it— a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new, but I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking.”
Speaking about the time he took to finish the novel – ninety-three sittings, more accurately – he told Caskie Stinnett in 19632, that many years of preparation preceded it. “I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process.” Shortly before The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck had turned down a magazine commission to write about migrant workers. “The suffering is too great for me to cash in on it,” he wrote in a letter to his agent, “so don’t get me [the] job.” Before this, he wrote The Harvest Gypsies, a seven part article for the San Francisco News on lives of immigrant farm workers. He tried to write a novel, The Oklahomans, which he abruptly stopped working on and never mentioned by name again. Then, L’Affaire Lettuceberg, a satirical novel whose publication had already been announced when he decided it was not good enough. He wrote to his publishers saying he would not be delivering the manuscript: “Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious pleasure that comes when work is going well. […] If I can’t do better I have slipped badly.” The novel was, according to Robert DeMott, an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion.3
To give yourself fully to something is to accept that you will not emerge from it unchanged. I know something of this myself. The change is not incidental. It is the work. And by the time the people around you are ready to understand why you have moved on, you have already outgrown the conversation. The criticism arrives too late, as Steinbeck knew. In a letter to Herbert Sturz, Steinbeck wrote:
“The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it. Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren’t going to write that one again anyway. When you start another – the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.”
(Published as “The Author, On ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” The New York Times, 1990)
The novel finished him, in the way that complete devotion finishes a person. “I don’t know whether there is anything left of me,” he wrote in October 1939. The following year he told journalist John Rice he had always wondered why no author survived a best-seller4. Now he knew. The publicity, the fan-fare — as destructive, he said, as what they do to a boxer. You become self-conscious, and that is the end of it.
His new work lacked the aggressive bite of the late 1930s fiction. DeMott is careful to call this not failure, and he is right to be careful. It was something harder to name than failure: the work of a man who had been changed by what he made, who could not go back to the place the earlier work had come from because that place no longer existed. He had moved. He had no other choice. The work had changed him. The work is all that matters.
In Working Days, Steinbeck wrote, on July 6th, 1938, “Work is the only good thing.”
references
Hilton Kramer, “An Art That’s Almost Prayer,” The New York Times, May 1977
Caskie Stinnett, “A Talk with John Steinbeck,” in Back to Abnormal, 1963.
Robert DeMott, Introduction to The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin Classics edition, 1992.
Robert DeMott, Introduction to The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin Classics, 1992 — citing Steinbeck's interview with John Rice, June 1939.
