East of Eden—John Steinbeck

Timshel, Bitches!

In 1952, at the tender age of fifty and at the height of his career, John Steinbeck published East of Eden, a multi-generational epic about two families. The fictional Trask family reenacts the tragedy of Cain and Abel for two generations in succession. The Hamilton family, however, consisting of Steinbeck’s relatives on his mother’s side, merely cross paths with the Trasks in the novel, and John writes his childhood self into the the story in several places. East of Eden ends in 1918, after America becomes embroiled in the First World War. Steinbeck, only sixteen when the war ended, noticed the changes it wrought on the families in his home town, Salinas, but could not enlist in the army. His childhood memories, then, gave him the perfect material to talk about not just his family but also the human condition.

Steinbeck tells a great story. No matter how much you may dislike his politics, his misogyny, his pretentiousness, or any of his other faults, if you don’t find his novels impossible to put down, you have no soul. High school teachers who fear losing the interest of students in literature can always hook them and haul them back with a good Steinbeck yarn like Of Mice and Men. I fell in love with his writing in high school, despite my infatuation at the time with Ayn Rand. I knew better than to let Steinbeck brainwash me with his commie-pinko propaganda and his melodramas about the clashes between property owners and labor. But damn, I enjoyed reading him.

Yet even back then I did not like East of Eden. Later, in my fifties, during several months of binge-reading the Library of America’s four-volume set of Steinbeck’s writings, I enjoyed East of Eden the least. I never believed Cathy/Kate as a character. She personified pure evil and had not a single redeeming feature other than beauty. At that time in my life, I taught philosophy at the college level and couldn’t avoid rolling my eyes at Steinbeck’s clumsy attempts to reveal life’s secrets—most of which went no deeper than the stoic scribblings of Marcus Aurelius. The writing itself also bothered me. I couldn’t decide what irritated me most: the on-again, off-again first-person narration by a minor character or the god-like insights into the innermost thoughts of everyone else.

This last week, I again found myself torn about how to respond to East of Eden, mostly over his literary style, which bothers me on just about every page. I could fill a book with all the faults I noticed, but why would I want to write such a mean-spirited and petty catalogue? So I seriously tried to understand Steinbeck and this book.

I soon discovered that my own response to it perfectly mirrors the division it has provoked from the start. The public scarfed it up while the critics scoffed at it. It inspired a movie in 1955, a TV miniseries in 1981, a musical in 1995, a stage production in 2015, and a Netflix limited television series this year. But the gentler critics have always had to struggle hard to say something nice.

The book falls neatly into four parts, each about 150 pages long. In Part One, we meet the Hamiltons, the Trasks, and the family of Cathy Ames. The Trask patriarch, Cyrus, briefly and unremarkably serves as a private in the American Civil War. Later, though, having read much about the war, he becomes a military expert. He goes one step further, however, and passes himself off as having played many key roles in the conduct of the war. His invented past earns him much respect in Washington D. C. Meanwhile, His two sons, Adam and Charles, live out the first instance of the Cain-and-Abel pattern. Cyrus loves Adam more than he loves Charles, and Charles resents that favoritism enough to try murdering his brother. After many stories about the Hamiltons, the Trasks, and Cathy, Part One ends when Adam marries Cathy and Cathy seduces Charles.

One of the major structural problems with the book has already emerged: a perceived lack of unity. While Steinbeck obviously relished recounting his own family stories, the Hamiltons play hardly any role in the plot. Some critics have suggested that he should have written two books, one a fiction and the other a family history. But the general public loved these entertaining digressions.

In Part Two, Adam and Cathy move from the Trask family farm in Connecticut clear across the country and buy a farm in Salinas, California. Adam takes on a Chinese servant, Lee, who supplies an intellectual and moral foundation for the rest of the novel. Cathy doesn’t like farm life and after giving birth to twin boys says she will leave, but when Adam tries to stop her, she shoots him in the shoulder and abandons him. Adam, his fantasy about Cathy’s goodness shattered, sinks into a deep depression, so deep that he does nothing to take care of the children. Lee takes over the role of caregiver to them and to Adam as well, and this part ends with the twins at eighteen months finally receiving names: Caleb and Aaron. Notice a pattern? Cain:Abel::Charles:Adam::Caleb:Aaron? Spoiler alert: The C-brothers try to kill the A-brothers.

Part Three jumps about ten years. The two brothers, who have shortened their names to Cal and Aron, develop a fraternal tension right on cue. Meanwhile, Cathy, who has renamed herself Kate, has made a career of gratifying the sexual depravity of most of the respectable and powerful men in Salinas. She also took a few pictures. The last major character enters the scene, Abra, a young girl and future love interest of Aron. Adam moves the family off the farm and into Salinas proper so the kids live closer to school and society. Of course, the inevitable confrontation between Adam and Kate then takes place.

The other inevitable confrontations occur in Part Four, when Cal first and then Aron find out that their mother lives and that she epitomizes evil, sin, and corruption. As this final part of the novel brings all the strands together, the second instance of the biblical tale unfolds with a breathtaking ferocity.

In Steinbeck’s previous novels he explored various moral issues, most famously the various ways that people respond to weakness and dependency. In The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle he showed how the suffering of unfortunate people can elicit ever more cruelty from their oppressors. In The Pearl, he showed how humans and nature team up to crush anyone daring to seek a better life. But in East of Eden and later in The Winter of our Discontent, he turned his sights inward on the religious topics of sin, guilt, and free will. Therein lay the source of my ambivalence. I felt that Steinbeck handled this issue with a terribly heavy-handed clumsiness, and as long as I thought of him as some sort of self-appointed guru or moralist, I could dredge up hardly any good thoughts about him.

But look. What if the preachiness doesn’t come from trying to save me from my sinful ways or teach me a lesson about virtue? He had mulled over this book for a long time before starting it, but when he finally began writing, he did not slow down. Between January and November, 1951, he wrote by hand the entire novel, 638 pages in my edition. I am not aware of his making any major revisions after the first draft. What if an insight had taken possession of him, a simple insight that many have had before him, but one that gobsmacked him at that moment of his life and sent him into such a frenzy that he had to share it with the world? I suggest that something like that must have happened to him. His simple but earth-shattering insight boils down to this: We may choose. We do not helplessly react to circumstances, or succumb to our desires, or even act out archetypal dramas as old as humanity. We may instead come face to face with sin and choose to reject it.

He introduces his insight this way, at about the midpoint of the book. While deciding on names for the twins, Adam and Lee read the story of Cain and Abel. In Genesis 4:7, God admonishes Cain that if he does not do right, sin waits for him and he must conquer it. But Lee later becomes fascinated with a difference between two translations. In the King James Bible, the line reads “...thou shalt rule over him [i.e., sin],” but the American Standard Bible says “… do thou rule over him.” What should one make of this difference? Long story short, Lee settles on a third translation of the Hebraic word that seems to drive the whole novel: timshel.

Now there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, “Do thou,” and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in “Thou shalt.” Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great…”

Steinbeck does not argue for free will. He does not explore determinism or indeterminism or compatibilism. He does not seem aware of existentialism. He does not address the problem of evil, or God’s foreknowledge, or the truth-value of future contingent statements. He comes at this issue with a pure, virgin mind, unsullied by Western philosophical and theological debates that stretch back centuries. He points to a single ambiguous word, “timshel,” as the key that unlocks the doorway to human dignity. And he doesn’t even treat it as the word of God, only imagined by a human storyteller with “a curiously divine mind,” as Lee says.

Well, more than one of us can have insights. Right or wrong, I no longer resented Steinbeck’s pretentiousness, nor did I grimace when the male characters (always the men) intoned profound thoughts which they probably delivered more slowly and an octave lower than their normal speech. Of course! I thought. An insight has possessed him! I could then relax and feel a deeper kinship with him than before. One becomes childish and silly in the grips of an insight. Believe me, I know. In fact, I have lived my adult life in pursuit of the ecstatic state brought on by (possibly puerile) insights.

Steinbeck said about East of Eden such things as, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” “This is ‘the book.’ If it is not good I have fooled myself all the time. I don’t mean I will stop but this is a definite milestone and I feel released. Having done this I can do anything I want. Always I had this book waiting to be written.” In other words, his world had shifted on its axis, and it made him dizzy.

With East of Eden, Steinbeck left behind the naturalism and determinism that characterized his earlier novels. He recognized choice as a reality of the human condition. Only then could he have written a work like The Winter of Our Discontent, the only novel of his that moved me to tears.

§ § §

We’ve reached the end of 2024, and I don’t know what books it makes sense to read next. I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress in learning how to appreciate great literature, but, as a result, I don’t really trust my earlier judgments any more. So I may resurrect some books I had read long before the time of Substack and revisit them. I’ll put out an announcement on the first or second day of the new year.

Thank you for reading the Decade Project. Your support keeps me going, even if I pause once in a while when real life intervenes. If any of these naïve reflections on literature have inspired you or reminded you of your own favorite reading experiences, I would love to hear from you. If you have not already subscribed, please consider doing so. And if you feel like enabling this book-buying addiction, you can always upgrade from a free to a paid subscription, no questions asked.

I consulted or mentioned the following resources in writing this reflection. (Note that I no longer link to Amazon.)

By John Steinbeck:

• In Dubious Battle (1936)

• Of Mice and Men (1937)

• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

• The Pearl (1942)

• East of Eden (1952)

• The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, by William Souder (2020)

Steinbeck in the Schools is a fantastic website and part of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy