Triumph of the Human Soul
An all time book.
I finished East of Eden two weeks and two days ago. I haven’t been able to read anything since, except for True as the Barnacle Tree and some Bob Hicok poems, and this piece on found lists, which I quite liked, and a chapter and a half of my Little History of Philosophy, which I’m beginning to suspect is really meant for children. I fell asleep last night in the middle of Descartes.
It feels unfair to make anything in novel form follow East of Eden. I’ve been joking that I think I might have to just read the Bible next, and it’s only half a joke. Its not a joke because the novel draws so much on the Bible, you want to understand the story better, and also because East of Eden feels like the last book. From it, you must go back to the beginning. It was one of Steinbeck’s later novels, though not his last. He himself refers to it as “the first book,” the one that all his other writing was practice for.
East of Eden tells the story of two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons. That’s what every back blurb claims at least, and it’s not totally off. The novel does open on the Hamiltons—Samuel Hamilton in particular—and it’s narrated by a Hamilton too (one John Steinbeck, born to Olive Steinbeck née Hamilton). Nonetheless, it’s clear by the end of the first part that the story is really with the Trasks.
Adam and Charles Trask are born to Cyrus Trask by two different wives who both die young. They grow up on a farm somewhere in Connecticut, and they grow up different. Adam is introspective and searching, Charles is literal and stationary. The shepherd and the farmer if you will, and you will. When the boys are young, they each present Cyrus with a birthday present. Charles saves all his money and buys a pocket knife. Adam finds a stray puppy on the side of the road. If you’re familiar with the story of Cain and Abel, you may be able to guess what happens next. Charles can never understand why his father didn’t like his gift. It was a good gift, to show his love, which was consuming then and continues to be consuming through his life. He feels—he knows—even as he feels this love and suffers with it, that his father loves Adam more.
Cyrus dies and leaves Adam and Charles with an unexpectedly large sum of money. Predictably, Adam wants to go—maybe to California—and Charles wants to stay right where he is on his farm in Connecticut. They exist uncomfortably, and sometimes comfortably, with each other for some time, until a battered young woman literally claws her way up the path to their front door.
The woman is Cathy Ames, and on the story of her life leading up to this moment, I will refrain from expanding. I will only say that when she is introduced, our narrator describes her as a monster born to human parents, and this reader finds that claim difficult to argue with. Charles also sees the monster in her, but Adam falls in love with her, nearly at first sight (swollen shut eyelids and all). As soon as she’s well enough, he marries her and brings her out to California—the idea of settling there made sweeter by his love for her. On the way there, Cathy discovers that she’s pregnant.
The baby turns out to be two babies—Cal, who is dark and brooding, and come to think of it, looks an awful lot like Charles, and Aron, who is pretty like Cathy, but open and sweet unlike her. Cathy quite dramatically abandons them shortly after their birth, and Adam with them. Her departure nearly kills him, and certainly turns him into a shell (or a shadow, whatever you prefer), so the boys are raised by Lee, the Chinese American man who cooks for Adam and otherwise manages his entire life.
Part two turns its lens on the twins as they grow up. Aron is still sweet and well liked. In fact, he’s beloved by all who meet him. Cal on the other hand is impenetrable. He is respected, maybe a little feared, but ultimately lonely. Eventually, Adam decides to move into Salinas so that the boys can get a better education. The boys don’t know it, but this puts them in spitting distance of the house of ill repute where their mother lurks, now known as Kate.
The story moves along from a plot perspective as a sort of multi-layered bildungsroman, tied to the story of Cain and Abel. First Adam, then his boys, so really their family, and really the Salinas Valley and California and maybe also America. But don’t let me get carried away. I’ll oversimplify and say the first half is Adam growing up, the second half, Cal and Aron. Outside of the plot, though, it’s a novel of many discursions, which is largely how the story of the Hamiltons comes in. Oh right, them. Samuel, Liza and their brood of nine children: George the eldest, Una the serious and hungry one, Will the enterprising businessman, Tom who could be great, Lizzie who chooses her husband’s family, Dessie the laughing one, Olive the formidable mother of our narrator, Molly the beauty, and Joe, the precious youngest.
Steinbeck, in the journal he kept predicted that readers may become frustrated with or confused by the seeming pointlessness of the Hamiltons. I hate to even write that sentence, but outside of Samuel, who plays a more active role in the lives of the Trasks, the others in the clan come to the stage for their scene—sometimes because they have a role to play in the action and sometimes randomly—before exiting to hover in the wings again. To me, though, their stories are essential. They create the larger world in which the plot plays out. Their presence slows the pace of the novel, which in turn creates a feeling of grandness, and the grandness is spectacular.
Perhaps most importantly though, the characters are lovely. They give Steinbeck the chance to flaunt his great gift of portraiture. He is so tender and so trusting with his creations—it doesn’t really feel like he’s creating them at all, rather recording them. They feel like real people just pressed between the pages. They are contained and convincing in a way that feels utterly unique to Steinbeck. And the few pages that some of the auxiliary stories take up does nothing to lessen their impact.
So yes, I love the discursions for the time they give to the characters, but also because the discursive nature of the novel allows it to tell you just what it thinks. The message(s) that lie therein are not too difficult to parse out. Our narrator, our Steinbeck (<3), is a searcher. He’s searching for truths, and as he closes in on them, and he wants to share them with you, his reader.
On growing up, we have,
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone…It is an aching kind of growing.
On falling in love,
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone…Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories.
On culture’s arrival in new lands,
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the sining, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
The pronouncements feel like there’s a worthiness behind them. Whether they’re strictly accurate or transferrable to our time (though not so many years have passed), there’s something foundational in them that rings essentially true. They’re worthy for the effort the narrator makes to arrive at them. The narrator, too, is worthy for making the effort, for contemplating and seeking to understand.
The most striking example of this comes later in the novel, when he tells us that there is only one story in the world: the story of good and evil. We can deduce that if he believes this to be true, then his goal in writing this story down is to speak to that same battle. Who sits on which side of the line? There are good characters, loyal Lee and wise Samuel, and there is certainly evil embodied in Cathy, but I think that facing these characters off against each other misunderstands the Steinbeck’s intent. Cathy shocks and horrifies but she never feels like a villain. Despite appearances, in this book, there is no external villain to be defeated in the name of good—our characters won’t get off that easy.
Instead, the battle of good and evil plays itself out over and over again within each character—and, of course, within each of us.
Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners.
Yes! There is a war for every man to fight, and in order to fight well, we must accept and become comfortable with our own unsavory and dishonorable impulses and tendencies.
Accepting the badness is essential to being a good person, and through East of Eden we see what it’s like when man is overcome by the bad. Cathy has no fighting good in herself and is incapable of seeing the fighting good in anyone else. It corrodes her from the inside out and poisons those around her. But too much good is, well, no good either. Through other characters (one in particular, no spoilers), Steinbeck shows what happens when one refuses to accept the bad. It’s equally destructive. You must find a way to square it in your mind if you’re to live. We are sometime, often bad, but that badness cannot not take away our goodness—cannot—unless we let it
To the contrary, without the enemy, the hero cannot exist. Our own badness allows us a choice, and gives us the opportunity to overcome, even just for one moment, and then another, and God please, another after. That is the philosophical center of the novel, delivered not obliquely or surreptitiously, but straight from Lee’s mouth, in no uncertain terms, in a “chant of triumph.”
Lee has studied the story of Cain and Abel, and one Hebrew word in particular: Timshel. It appears when God asks Cain why he is angry—he tells him that if he does well, he will be accepted, and that when he does not do well and sin lies at his door, he shall rule over it. But that “shall” piece is translated differently in different places, and Lee wants to understand what it really means, It feels important to him. With his family’s elder scholars in San Francisco, he studies the Hebrew, and decides that Timshel should be translated as “Thou mayest.”
‘Though mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.
I know that stories of individualism have fallen somewhat out of vogue, but as far as I’m concerned it’s high time they come back. The power to choose, to struggle, to triumph is the key to the human soul. And the soul is the one thing that, amidst all things, cannot be taken away. As Lee goes on to say, “It is a lovely and. unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because ‘Thou mayest.’”
I want always to do what the better half of my soul commands, and Steinbeck confirms my belief that this impulse is both worthwhile and possible to fulfill.