Sweet Thursday

PENGUIN
 
CLASSICS

SWEET THURSDAY

JOHN STEINBECK
(1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California, in 1902, and grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions,
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), and worked on short stories later collected in
The Long Valley
(1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), stories about Monterey's
paisanos
. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. The powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village
(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez
(1941). He devoted his ser vices to the war, writing
Bombs Away
(1942) and the controversial play-novelette
The Moon Is Down
(1942).
Cannery Row
(1945),
The Wayward Bus
(1947),
The Pearl
(1947),
A Russian Journal
(1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright
(1950), and
The Log from the
Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden
(1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday
(1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication
(1957),
Once There Was a War
(1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962),
America and Americans
(1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters
(1969),
Viva Zapata!
(1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976), and
Working Days: The Journals of
The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

ROBERT DEMOTT,
recipient of the 2006 Trustees Award from the National Steinbeck Center, is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University, the author of
Steinbeck's Typewriter
, an award-winning book of critical essays, and the editor of
Working Days
, a
New York Times
Notable Book. He lives in Athens, Ohio.

Introduction by ROBERT DEMOTT

Suggestions for Further Reading

Prologue

1. What Happened In Between

2. The Troubled Life of Joseph and Mary

3. Hooptedoodle (1)

4. There Would Be No Game

5. Enter Suzy

6. The Creative Cross

7. Tinder Is as Tinder Does

8. The Great Roque War

9. Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts

10. There's a Hole in Reality through which We Can Look if We Wish

11. Hazel's Brooding

12. Flower in a Crannied Wall

13. Parallels Must Be Related

14. Lousy Wednesday

15. The Playing Fields of Harrow

16. The Little Flowers of Saint Mack

17. Suzy Binds the Cheese

18. A Pause in the Day's Occupation

19. Sweet Thursday (1)

20. Sweet Thursday (2)

21. Sweet Thursday Was One Hell of a Day

22. The Arming

23. One Night of Love

24. Waiting Friday

25. Old Jingleballicks

26. The Developing Storm

27. O Frabjous Day!

28. Where Alfred the Sacred River Ran

29. Oh, Woe, Woe, Woe!

30. A President Is Born

31. The Thorny Path of Greatness

32. Hazel's Quest

33. The Distant Drum

34. The Deep-Dish Set-Down

35. Il n'y a pas de mouches sur la grandmère

36. Lama Sabachthani?

37. Little Chapter

38. Hooptedoodle (2), or The Pacific Grove Butterfly Festival

39. Sweet Thursday Revisited

40. I'm Sure We Should All Be as Happy as Kings

Notes

John Steinbeck was born in the agricultural community of Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, to middle-class parents: John Ernst Steinbeck, a businessman who would later become Monterey County treasurer, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck grew up in Northern California and was influenced from his earliest days by the region's diverse geographical landscape and its common people, which, along with his interest in democratic principles and social justice, remained foundations of his art for the rest of his life. Steinbeck attended Salinas High School, where he was an undistinguished but bookish student, then enrolled sporadically at Stanford University from 1919 to 1925. An English-journalism major, he took a short-story-writing class from Professor Edith Mirrielees and was published in Stanford's undergraduate literary magazine, but because he was restless and craved adventure, he never finished his degree. He held a variety of temporary jobs during the next four years (laborer and cub reporter in New York City, fisheries manager, and resort handyman and caretaker at a private estate near Lake Tahoe), eventually publishing his first novel,
Cup of Gold,
in 1929. The book, a historical novel about the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan, scarcely sold, but Steinbeck's choice of vocation was sealed. He never again held a traditional nine-to-five job. Beginning in 1930, with the support and encouragement of his parents and especially of his first wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, whom he had married that year, writing became Steinbeck's daily occupation, and it continued so through lean and flush times for the remainder of his life. When Steinbeck, who had left California in the early 1940s, died in New York City on December 20, 1968, he had managed to support himself and his families (he was married three times and had two sons and one stepdaughter) exclusively on his writing-based income, primarily from the thirty books of fiction, drama, film scripts, and nonfictional prose he published between 1929 and 1966, many of them translated into numerous foreign languages worldwide. In 1962 Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception,” according to the Swedish Academy, which administers the award. Steinbeck was only the seventh American writer to have been chosen since the prestigious prize's inception in 1901, yet his election provoked vehement and highly publicized reactions among his critics, who wondered aloud whether he deserved the award. In his acceptance speech, delivered on December 10, 1962, in Stockholm, the humble and self-deprecating Steinbeck confessed, “…there may be doubt that I deserve the…award…over other[s] whom I respect and reverence—but there is no question of my plea sure and pride in having it for myself.”

John Steinbeck is best known for his hard-hitting, socially conscious novels of the 1930s, especially the three novels that form his “labor trilogy”:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), all of which depict the tragic economic and social conditions for migrant agricultural workers during the Depression era in his native state. One of the most searing indictments of California as a promised land ever written,
The Grapes of Wrath
(often considered among the greatest of twentieth-century novels) was such a controversial best seller that the reclusive and private Steinbeck experienced a personal backlash from its unprecedented and unanticipated success: “I have always wondered why no author has survived a bestseller,” he told John Rice in a June 1939 interview. “Now I know. The publicity and fan-fare are just as bad as they would be for a boxer. One gets self-conscious and that's the end of one's writing.” Steinbeck did not give up writing altogether, as he once threatened to do, but after 1940 much of his important work centered on new topics: ecological issues, scientific discourse, and the interrelatedness of nature and culture in two brilliant books,
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research
(1941), cowritten with Ed Ricketts, and
Cannery Row
(1945); the implications of individual choice, heroism, and moral action in
The Pearl
(1947),
East of Eden
(1952),
Viva Zapata!
(1952), and
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961); and nonfiction narratives in
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962) and
America and Americans
(1966), both of which engage in a kind of lover's quarrel with America. Steinbeck, a prophetic postmodernist given to literary experimentation, explored the paradoxes of the creative process itself in
Sweet Thursday
(1954), and in the posthumous
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters
(1969) and
Working Days: The Journals of
The Grapes of Wrath (1989).

For all his dark pessimism and tragic vision, Steinbeck loved writing comedic fiction.
Tortilla Flat
(1935),
Cannery Row
, and
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
(1957) come immediately to mind.
Sweet Thursday
, which started life as an unfinished novel–cum–musical comedy called “Bear Flag,” is Steinbeck's happiest, most lighthearted fiction and formed the basis for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's short-lived 1956 Broadway musical,
Pipe Dream
. A novelistic sequel to
Cannery Row
,
Sweet Thursday
is among Steinbeck's least-known works (despite having provided much plot action and characterization for David Ward's 1982 romantic film
Cannery Row
, which starred Nick Nolte and Debra Winger).

From the late 1930s onward Steinbeck was generally assured of popular and commercial success no matter what he published.
Sweet Thursday
was no exception—it sold remarkably well. One day alone—on June 15, 1954—Viking Press sold two thousand copies, which prompted Pascal Covici, Steinbeck's editor, to predict it would top one hundred thousand for the year, and later to exult: “the book keeps on selling!” Covici's claims were optimistic. According to Meghan Mahan,
Sweet Thursday
was on the best-seller list for five weeks, and was the seventh-best-selling fiction work of 1954, ultimately accounting for over sixty thousand copies. Among professional reviewers and cultural tastemakers, however, Steinbeck's novel garnered a less friendly (and often hostile) reception. But a few level-headed critics, such as Hugh Holman writing in the
New Republic
on June 7, 1954, struck a balanced appraisal that put the novel in perspective:

As Holman advises, this quirky but raffish, ebullient, and pleasurable short novel deserves to be taken on its own terms. Who knows but that it will “set free” another reader or writer, as it did prolific crime novelist Elmore Leonard when he read it in 1954?

In
John Steinbeck
, biographer Jay Parini claims that Steinbeck “was not always writing realistic fiction…. His imagination was puckish, and he worked by charm, incantation, invocation, and philosophical musing.”
Sweet Thursday
's multiple layers of meaning, its self-confessed “reality below reality,” its rambunctious tone, and its blurring of historical reality and actual persons with invented scenarios and made-up actions took precedence over traditional novelistic methods. The fictional Mack (based on a real-life person), upon reading some unflattering reviews of
Cannery Row
, claims to “have laid out a lot of time on critics” and wonders whether they all read the same book: “Some of them don't listen while they read, I guess,” he states, because they are more interested in assigning handy catchwords to a work—“overambitious,” “romantic,” “naturalistic doggavation”—than in “understanding.”

In the truncated, forty-seven-line version that became
Sweet Thursday
's published prologue, Mack's suggestions about chapter headings, character descriptions, and loose-limbed hooptedoodle are laid out as matters of personal preference, not as punitive markers, but they are incorporated in the novel to undercut aesthetic distance and to facilitate the audience's willing participation in the story. Steinbeck is in on the con game and is part of its web of artful intrigue: marginalized characters in an earlier roman à clef,
Cannery Row
, discuss a novel in which they appeared; its real-life author follows their advice in a fictional sequel in which they once again appear as dramatis personae commenting on their earlier experiences as though they were real. Steinbeck's April 1, 1959, letter to film director Elia Kazan summarizes his postwar aesthetic belief: “Externality is a mirror that reflects back to our mind the world our mind has created of the raw materials. But a mirror is a piece of silvered glass. There is a back to it. If you scratch off the silvering, you can see through the mirror to the other worlds on the other side. I know that many people do not want to break through. I do, passionately, hungrily.”

Steinbeck's post–World War II fictions differ from his earlier realism. Think of the
Monty Python
mantra: “Now for something completely different.” His radical shift toward a more self-referential style occurred after 1947. Following his third trip to Russia, his interest in a communal vision of human organization (the bedrock of his earlier fiction) waned. His new Cold War–inspired thinking that totalitarian groupthink is the enemy of democracy is exemplified in his June 8, 1949, letter to novelist John O'Hara, in which he relinquishes his earlier mode: “I believe one thing powerfully—that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind…. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. The great change in the last 2,000 years was the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious. Unless we can preserve and foster the principle of the preciousness of the individual mind, the world of men will either disintegrate into a screaming chaos or will go into a gray slavery.”

Following this pronounced shift in political orientation, Steinbeck composed four experiments between 1950 and 1954: the play-novelette
Burning Bright
, the film script
Viva Zapata!
, the epic
East of Eden
, and the comic
Sweet Thursday
. These “deeply personal” texts, as he called them, constitute a different order of writing from their more famous proletarian predecessors. By calling attention to their own literariness through such elements as literary allusions and references, language play, and artful framing devices, these works demonstrate Steinbeck's turn toward an incipient postmodernism, a condition of textual openness and metafictional high jinks where the act of writing becomes its own valid end. “If a writer likes to write,” he claimed in “Critics, Critics, Burning Bright” in 1950, “he will find satisfaction in endless experiment with his medium. He will improvise techniques, arrangements of scenes, rhythms of words, and rhythms of thought. He will constantly investigate and try combinations new to him, sometimes utilizing an old method for a new idea and vice versa. Some of his experiments will inevitably be unsuccessful but he must try them anyway if his interest be alive. This experimentation is not criminal…but it is necessary if the writer be not moribund.”

In its original form,
Sweet Thursday
was consciously proposed as a tonal, thematic counterbalance to the “weight” of
East of Eden
, Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent and the dedicatee of
Sweet Thursday
, on September 14, 1953: “it is kind of light and gay and astringent.” A boisterous sequel to Steinbeck's more famous
Cannery Row
, which appeared nine years earlier (treating Monterey's prewar era),
Sweet Thursday
shares the same Monterey Peninsula location in Northern California and many of the same characters as
Cannery Row
, but it takes up the post–World War II life of Doc (based on Steinbeck's soul mate, Edward F. Ricketts, who had died in an auto-train crash on Ocean View Avenue in May 1948). The novel emphasizes Doc's difficulties in reestablishing his Western Biological Laboratory business, his struggles with writing a scholarly treatise on octopi, and his rocky off-again, on-again relationship with an angry, tough-talking, golden-hearted hooker-turned-waitress named Suzy. It also features the burlesque-like antics of the Row's Palace Flop house denizens (Mack, Hazel, and others) and Fauna, the madam of the Bear Flag, who—playing Cupid for Doc and Suzy—wants to ensure a romantic fairy-tale ending for the incompatible but otherwise smitten couple.