Source of book: I own this
I have read a number of Steinbeck books over my lifetime. The Grapes of Wrath pre-dates this blog, but here are the other ones that I have written about:
Of Mice and Men (Novel)
Of Mice and Men (Play)
The Winter of Our Discontent is Steinbeck’s last novel, and one that is often overlooked when listing his works. For whatever reason, it was never as popular or respected as his earlier novels.
While as a general rule, I think it is a bit silly to worry about spoiling books that are older than I am, this is one case where I will give a spoiler warning. I am going to have to discuss plot points from late in the book in this post, but will give a warning in case the reader wishes to stop in order to go read the book.
Astute readers will recognize the source of the title, from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s play about Machiavellian power games, Richard III.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
The line itself doesn’t appear in the book until near the end, but its use in the title should give some clues about the book itself.
The book will center around an anti-hero, who, much like (the fictional) Richard III, decides to take advantage of circumstances to elevate and enrich himself, unfortunately at the expense of others. And, like with Shakespeare’s anti-hero, success doesn’t bring happiness, but only destruction.
That said, unlike Richard III, Ethan Allen Hawley isn’t a pure villain, not by half. He is more like a Greek tragic hero, damned by the fates, caught up in an amoral capitalist game that rewards vice and punishes virtue.
It is a testament to Steinbeck’s writing that as much as I was horrified by the depths to which Ethan sunk by the end of the book, I also had a lot of sympathy for him, and a feeling that the moral issues weren’t nearly as black and white as I wanted to think. (I’ll talk more about them in the section with spoilers.)
The book is seriously cynical and bitter, but also an incredible critique of the immoral heart of capitalism; an uncomfortable examination of the complexities of race, class, and immigration; and a question about who “deserves” success in society and economy.
Consider it a very different book from The Grapes of Wrath in that sense. You can’t completely like anyone in this book, except maybe Ethan’s daughter. Everyone else is to some degree or another tainted by the society they live in.
Ethan is from a formerly aristocratic East Coast family. His ancestors were whalers, before becoming store owners. However, his father managed to squander the fortune, leaving Ethan working as an underpaid clerk in the grocery store his family used to own.
To make things worse, his own family resents their lowered social status, and blame Ethan for lacking ambition.
As we gradually learn, one of the reasons Ethan’s father lost the fortune was through some devious insider dealings from the bank owner, Mr. Baker, which probably included burning a ship for the insurance money, thus putting the losses mostly on Ethan’s father.
The new owner of the grocery store, Mr. Marullo, is an Italian immigrant, who has risen from poverty through a combination of hard work and ruthless business acumen. And Ethan’s low wages are one of the ways he retains profitability. So he is both admirable and an oppressor at the same time. But he too is ground in the wheels of capitalist profit-seeking.
Ethan served in World War Two, as did his family friend, another former aristocrat, Danny, who has turned to alcohol to cope with his PTSD. All that Danny has left is the old family property, which he thinks is worthless except for pride.
Meanwhile, Ethan’s wife’s best friend, Margie, is trying to seduce him, while using her fortune telling skills to encourage him to take a financial risk to better his fortunes.
I should mention the unusual way the book is written. It is in two parts, and at the beginning of the two parts, the chapters are in third person, although mostly from Ethan’s point of view. Then the book switches to first person. I’m not entirely sure why Steinbeck does this.
At this point, I think I have to stop before giving spoilers. So much of what happens in the book is important to my thoughts about it. Hence, stop here if you haven’t read the book, and come back later.
***
Ethan starts off the book as perhaps even a bit too upright for his own good. He turns down a chance at a bit of a kickback from a supplier. He brushes off the banker’s suggestion that he raid his wife’s modest inheritance to invest in a project in the expanding and gentrifying Sag Harbor. He tries to do the right thing whenever he can.
But, as the book goes along, he succumbs to temptation, and eventually commits two pretty lousy acts, although, as I had to admit, there was a level of moral ambiguity present.
Through listening and paying attention, Ethan comes to realize two things. First, Marullo is an undocumented immigrant, and thus vulnerable to deportation. (Hey, this book feels timely…)
The second is that the land Danny owns is coveted by developers (including Mr. Baker) as the only viable site for an airport.
Suddenly, Ethan has two options available that just require a bit of ethical contortion. He also decides on a third: to gain some operating capital, he will use his friend Joey’s (the bank clerk) inside information to pull off a bank heist.
The first two are pretty successful. An anonymous tip leads to Marullo’s arrest, and leverage to purchase the store at a discount. Ethan borrows a bit of his wife’s inheritance and gives it to Danny, with the express instructions that he should check himself into rehab. Knowing full well that Danny will (and does) promptly drink himself to death instead. Oh, and Ethan knows that Danny, having no family left, has left the property to Ethan’s wife.
The third, however, ends up interrupted, so Ethan never does rob the bank.
Everything ends up great for him on the surface. He gets a bit of long-awaited revenge on Baker and Marullo, is given the store by Marullo (who believes Ethan is honest), and is able to insist on a controlling interest in the development of the airport.
Conscience is a bitch, though, and Ethan isn’t able to live with himself. Compounding this is that his son wins an essay contest by ripping off speeches from past statesmen. This is only found out when Ethan’s daughter blows the whistle, thus getting her revenge on her insufferable older brother.
So, here is where things get a bit morally ambiguous.
Ethan would prefer that Danny actually get help. And, he does essentially offer that help. Meanwhile, Baker has tried to trick Danny into selling the property, so Ethan is essentially protecting Danny’s interest. In fact, he was willing that Danny should get the profits, except that Danny is so removed from reality that he refuses to even consider selling.
If not for the fact that Ethan knows full well that Danny will drink himself to death - indeed, fully intends to - Ethan’s actions might be considered moral. And even then, he merely hastens the inevitable. Danny will do himself in fairly soon anyway, and in the meantime, Ethan has just taken an advantage that may well have gone to Baker instead.
And I shed zero tears that Baker gets the short straw. He has lived his life by the immoral demands of profit, and has not hesitated to ruin good men to make money. So anything he loses is fine by me. If only Danny hadn’t had to die.
The other case is tougher. Marullo isn’t an admirable character. He is ruthless in his business dealings, putting competitors out of business. He cuts wages to the bare bone. He is condescending in his treatment of Ethan.
On the other hand, deportation of someone who has lived in the country for decades, built a business, and been a member of society, is immoral in itself. This is the evil of our immigration laws - both the one from 1920 that excluded Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Asians; and our current one that excludes most non-white immigrants from an opportunity to immigrate legally.
Ethan’s revenge on his employer is disproportionate. But it also reveals racist and classist beliefs. Part of why Ethan seethes about his lowly clerk position is that his family used to be something. He sees himself, not as working class, but as a member of the aristocracy.
And worse yet, his family store is owned by a “dago,” a “wop,” one of those dirty immigrants that wouldn’t even be considered “white” for another decade or two.
And yet, Ethan still has a conscience. It bothers him that, rather than just getting a good deal on the store, he is given it because Marullo mistakenly believes Ethan is honest and upright. Kind of the Horatio Alger karma thing.
But this is the problem. Being honest is a serious disadvantage in our capitalist, profit-worshipping system.
It is possible, at least sometimes, to do okay on honesty and reputation. But to actually become rich, you have to be ruthless, and that means harming other people on the way up. Or at least looking the other way while the system harms them.
To get into all the ways this book looks at that idea would take too much space. I do, however, want to share a number of excellent lines.
I’ll start with the dedication, which is pretty spot on.
Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.
There are many passages lovingly describing the grocery store.
The store was greeny from the drawn shades over the big front windows. Again shelves to the ceiling, filled neatly with gleaming canned and glassed foods, a library for the stomach.
This line reminds me so much of my own wife, who can go from crawling into bed to dead out in under 10 seconds. Maybe it is those decades of working night shift.
My wife, Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the ancient Greek gods.
In contrast to Mary, whose inner life we never really know, is Ethan, who struggles to sleep, and who is always inside his own head, something I certainly understand.
“Ethan, you’re talking in your mind. I don’t know what it’s about but it’s loud. Stop thinking, Ethan.”
Another line is about Ethan’s ancestors, who often freelanced a bit on the sea, shall we say.
They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren’t so unalike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people’s property.
And one of many about money, both as a thing, and as an idea encompassing the profit motive, and also in light of the dubious origins of his own family’s money.
Money not only has no heart but no honor nor any memory. Money is respectable automatically if you keep it a while.
Thus the money from piracy becomes “old money” and thus status, if you wait long enough.
This one, about stories, rings true as well.
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.
This applies double for sacred texts, of course.
No one wants advice - only corroboration.
And the hits keep on coming. How about this insight, which seems applicable to MAGA in our time?
When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something - anything - before it is all gone.
There is also a paragraph about the Campbellites, one branch of which became the Church of Christ, with its ban on musical instruments for worship. (One of our neighbors as a kid was a minister at a small Church of Christ - he was a good man, whatever our theological differences.) Back in the day, another branch got heavily into the predictions of Christ’s return. I found this paragraph rather intriguing.
I remember a story Aunt Deborah told me long ago. Early in the last century some of my people were Campbellites. Aunt Deborah was a child then, but she remembered how the end of the world was coming at a certain time. Her parents gave everything away, everything they owned but the bed sheets. Those they put on and at the predicted time they went to the hills to meet the End of the World. Dressed in sheets, hundreds of people prayed and sang. The night came and they sang louder and danced and as it got near time there was a shooting star, she said, and everybody screamed. She could still remember the screaming. Like wolves, she said, like hyenas, although she had never heard a hyena. Then the moment came. White-dressed men and women and children held their breaths. The moment went on and on. The children got blue in the face - and then it passed. It was done and they were cheated out of their destruction. In the dawn they crept down the hill and tried to get back the clothes they had given away, and the pots and pans and their ox and their ass. And I remember knowing how bad they must have felt.
There is still a strain of this in the American Religion. “Cheated out of their destruction” sums it up pretty well.
Another passage analyzes the way that corruption is part of the social fabric to the degree that we don’t recognize it.
The men who governed it, politically, morally, economically, had so long continued that their ways were set. The Town Manager, the council, the judges, the police were eternal. The Town Manager sold equipment to the township, and the judges fixed traffic tickets as they had for so long that they did not remember it as illegal practice - at least the books said it was. Being normal men, they surely did not consider it immoral. All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
One of the best chapters in the book is Margie’s unsuccessful attempt at seduction of Ethan. Wherever Ethan’s weaknesses are, they do not lie in that direction.
Margie’s back story ties in with the themes of the book. When she divorced her first husband, she was awarded alimony, which she has lived off of for decades. However, his health is failing, and when he dies, she will be out of luck, so finding another man to support her is necessary.
But she in a way respects Ethan too much to play the game, and instead offers too much information about herself, perhaps in an effort to scare him off. Her analysis of most men may explain her actions.
Margie had known many men, most of them guilty, wounded in their vanity, or despairing, so that she had developed a contempt for her quarry as a professional hunter of vermin does. It was easy to move such men through their fears and vanities. They ached so to be fooled that she no longer felt triumph - only a kind of disgusted pity.
This too reminds me a bit of MAGA - Trump plays on the same fears and vanities as Margie, but he gets played in turn by smarter operators like Putin.
Another one regarding Margie, who I think is an excellent character.
Margie liked Mary Hawley very much and she had little sympathy and no pity for her. Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.
Oh, do I know women like this. Hell yes.
Margie also turned down Mr. Baker on an occasion, and the reason is interesting.
Baker had made a grammatically correct but obscure pass at her once. Mr. Baker was Mr. Money. Sure he had a wife, but Margie knew the Bakers of this world. They could always raise a moral reason for doing what they wanted to do anyway. She was glad she had turned him down. It left him still in the book.
Ethan spends a lot of time thinking, as I mentioned, and we get his thoughts. This one is another musing on business, and the amorality of the profit motive.
What are morals? Are they simply words? Was it honorable to assess my father’s weakness, which was a generous mind and the ill-founded dream that other men were equally generous? No, it was simply good business to dig the pit for him. He fell into it himself. No one pushed him. Was it immoral to strip him when he was down? Apparently not.
And more:
If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonorable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful…Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure.
This seems to be the philosophy of MAGA, and indeed the Republican party. It is failing not because of how deeply immoral and unethical it is, but because it is incompetent and failing. This is to me and many others deeply troubling. It seems Steinbeck may be right, that most people lack a basic conscience that would check their behavior.
Ethan ties all this back to the war, in that “morality” for a soldier is simple: kill on command. The rest of it doesn’t matter.
He could devote his full capacity, untwisted by conflicting thought and feeling, to the job he had to do - the killing of men. He was the best officer I ever knew. I asked his permission to use his method and he gave it to me. When he was killed, all I could think was that his had been a good and effective life. He had taken his pleasure, savored his love, and paid his debts, and how many people even approached that?
I’ll end with a line that Ethan delivers to Mr. Baker after revealing that he essentially has gone behind his back to seize the opportunity afforded by Danny’s land.
“You’ll feel better, sir, when you have got used to the fact that I am not a pleasant fool.”
Again, I have zero sympathy for Baker: he has lived his life profiting off the misery and misfortune of others, so it is high time someone got the better of him.
The book is definitely cynical, and more than a bit bitter. Perhaps that didn’t much match the mood of 1961, with JFK recently elected. But it seems to fit our own times all too well.
As always, I found Steinbeck’s writing to be compelling, even in a book as unpleasant at its emotional core as this one. It’s worth a read.
