East of Eden
Arguably the best Steinbeck I’ve ever read.
I might have been 14 when I first read The Grapes of Wrath, and I’ve been hooked on Steinbeck ever since. I immediately fell in love with his writing— his ability to write about struggling characters of the working class, politics, history, and religion. And while I’ve never been to California, through his writing I feel as though I know the geography well.
Wrath in particular, drew my breath away. It follows the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers of the Great Depression — the Joad family. Through bad luck, they are unable to earn a living through farming on their land, thus embarking on a journey to California, where they become migratory workers. They exhaustingly search for housing, food, work, and dignity— putting a strain on their family dynamics while pursuing solidarity with unlikely allies.
Every American should read Wrath— it could not be more relevant: a story about how we treat the poor and the outsider, a story about greed and the powerful who make decisions that widen the gap between the haves and the have nots. It is an epic like no other.
Along the way, I’ve also read his wildly popular novella, Of Mice and Men, and boy did I cry through that one.
It wasn’t until recently that I picked up East of Eden, and I don’t know what I was waiting for. This might be his best (in my humble opinion). Grapes of Wrath may have a Pulitzer Prize but East of Eden is a tour-de-force. I have never felt more understood while reading a novel, and it explores one of my favorite themes in literature:
Love. The consequences of the absence of love. The limits of love. The depths of love.
Steinbeck is famously quoted for saying that everything he had written up until Eden was just practice. This was the novel he was waiting for.
This my friend, is the one.
East of Eden is a novel for our sons and their fathers.
It is about how children rewrite the story their parents have given them.
In this novel, we span three generations and two families— the Trasks and the Hamiltons— who mirror the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel. A modern retelling of the Book of Genesis……what else do you need?
The story starts with Adam. Adam Trask moves his family out to California, only to be left completely alone to raise two twin boys after his wife descends into madness. Raising these boys into manhood become central to the novel, as one grows up surrounded by love, while the other folds into loneliness.
This is also a story of good versus evil. About two boys who choose to write a different chapter in their families saga, by surpassing the eye of their father and the father of all stories: God. In doing so the sons change the origin of the “original sin”, to wrestle with a larger pain:
that all of us grow up in a world trying to make meaning out of the different expressions of our parents’ love and are left trying to determine whether or not love was present in our lives in the first place.
Steinbeck reveals a deep truth about love: that it is truly a lonely endeavor. And that what makes life difficult is that we love in the first place, even and especially if it is not returned.
My Favorite Quotes
PASCAL COVIVI
Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, "Why don't you make something for me?"
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, "A box."
"What for?"
"To put things in.
"What things?"
"Whatever you have," you said.
Well, here's your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
JOHN
“I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east.” (3)
“She frightened her grandchildren because she had no weakness. She suffered bravely and uncomplainingly through life, convinced that that was the way her God wanted everyone to live. She felt that rewards came later.” (12)
“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not 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 is gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” (20)
“If you can go down so low, you will be able to rise higher than you can conceive, and you will know a holy joy, a companionship almost like that of a heavenly company of angels. Then you will know the quality of men even if they are inarticulate. But until you have gone way down you can never know this.” (26)
“Tom bruised himself on the world and licked his cuts.”
“It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatsoever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy— that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.” (55)
“— maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure— never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself?” (70)
“I didn’t know then, but I know now—you were fighting for your love.” (71)
“Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.” (73)
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. 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. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ” (131)
“There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea of God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.” (131)
“What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?”
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.” (132)
“I came out of the army like dragging myself muddy out of a swamp, I wandered for a long time before going home to a remembered place I did not love.” (170)
“In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method, he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry, or fear. Very few people learn this.” (240)
“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back a truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion. I haven’t the courage for that.” (264)
“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel it in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have! ”
“Well every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.” (269)
“This is our father. Some of our guilt is absorbed in our ancestry. What chance did we have? We are the children of our father. It means we aren’t the first. It’s an excuse and there aren’t enough excuses in the world.” (269)
“If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule— a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and the foreign are not interesting— only the deeply personal and familiar. (270)
“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt— and this is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there—the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved, and a third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul—the secret, rejected, guilty soul. ” (270)
“Maybe you’ve tumbled a world for me. And I don’t know what I can build in my world’s place.”
“I’m always afraid of the simple things.” (271)
“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic?” (295)
“Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.” (295)
“And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow?” (295)
“I know it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world.” (296)
“Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars. You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.” (304)
“I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because ‘Thou mayest.”
“There’s a death all around you. It shines from you.” (308)
“I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected, or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the results of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.” (327)
“What you will do is written— written in every breath you’ve ever taken. (379)
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . 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. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?” (413)
“Was his life good or evil?…..Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?” (414)
“In uncertianity I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and they want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. ”
“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” (415)
“Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.” (434)
“I think in him kindness and conscience are so large that they are almost faults. They trip him and hinder him.” (448)
“His body was rearranging itself toward manhood, and he was shaken by the veering winds of adolescence. One moment he was dedicated and pure and devoted; the next he wallowed in filth; and the next he groveled in shame and merged rededicated.” (450)
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
Has this persuaded you to pick up the book? Let me know what you think of it if you do!