2 Views by Steinbeck
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, by John Steinbeck. Bantam, 60 cents.
SWEET THURSDAY, by John Steinbeck, Bantam Classics, 50 cents.
The mood of these novels by John Steinbeck, the first written in 1936, the second in 1954, couldn't be much different. "In Dubious Battle" is a harsh, brutal story of a strike in a California apple orchard in depression days. "Sweet Thursday" is a fanciful tale of the people of Cannery Row and their efforts to marry off Doc, the marine biologist, to Suzy, a prostitute.
But underneath lies the basic love for the little people that has made Steinbeck such a popular novelist. "Sweet Thursday" is almost Saroyanish, and "In Dubious Battle" is almost as naturalistically objective as "U.S.A." But there still are similarities.
"IN DUBIOUS BATTLE" DEALS CHIEFLY WITH MAC and Jim, two idealistic young Communists who go into the fruit-growing country to exploit trouble and discontent. Their task is a difficult one, for the valley is over-organized and many of the strikers are not ready for the sacrifices a strike will entail.
Running through the novel is a kind of dialectic between Mac, the Communist, and Doc Burton, the idealist who takes care of wounded and sick strikers. Doc believes not in the cause, but in men. "I just believe they're men, and not animals. Maybe if I went into a kennel and the dogs were hungry and sick and dirty, and maybe if I could help those dogs, I would. Wouldn't be their fault if they were that way... I have some skill in helping men, and when I see some who need help, I just do it. I don't think about it much."
But Jim has dreams. He loves the earth and the soil, and he'd like to be able to spend a day and do nothing but watch insects. He has not yet been brutalized by circumstances.
WHERE "IN DUBIOUS BATTLE" WAS A STERN PROLETarian novel, "Sweet Thursday" is an amusing glorification of flophouse bums, prostitutes, con men and morons. Though one may grow tired of Steinbeck's Monterey area low types, he can be amused by some of the incidents in this novel.
This does not trouble Mac. He will settle for men stirred up enough so that they will be ready to fight when the next battle comes along. Despite his toughness, he is not as direct nor as dedicated as Jim, his disciple.
Take Hazel, for instance. Hazel is an ex-GI, a four-year veteran of grammar school and a four-year veteran of reform school. When Fauna, the madame of the Bear Flag, reads Hazel's horoscope, she finds that Hazel is going to become president of the United States. This is a job Hazel doesn't want; he doesn't know anybody in Washington.
There's also a lovable racketeer type named Joseph and Mary Rivas who is quite annoyed and puzzled by Doc's view that you can't cheat at chess. Joseph and Mary thinks you can cheat at anything.
"Sweet Thursday," by the way, became the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical comedy "Pipe Dream."
MODERN AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE, by Sam Hunter. Dell, 95 cents.
U.S. Painting In New Book
Friday, April 20, 1962 University Daily Kansan
Why, that is, does Mr. Hunter, so distinguished a gentleman that he now is the acting director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (which he presumably is filling with modern paintings, which he happens to like—or says he likes), give us a chapter on Mr. Pollock in which he glowingly describes theserarish linoleum patterns?
One hesitates to get into such a book review. For there is a gnawing question, one that persists after a long indoctrination in art history and a sincere effort to learn:
"Have we been bad by the art critics? Does anyone really believe that the works of Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and their Grand High Panjandrum, Jackson Pollock, are here to stay, or that they really are art?"
**THIS IS GETTING too complicated, and someone is sure to start choking in wrath (as an art professor did oh so many years ago when I a student editor, informed the world that I preferred George Petty to Cezanne; I have since made a slight shift, by the way). But here we have a striking paperback—an original, too—which asks us to pay serious attention to these palette-splattering geniuses.**
Are the critics repeating formulas? Is the earnest young man with the long hair and the black sweater, explaining to a guard that so-and-so paints the world as he sees it, merely saying what someone else said to him?
Is it just a matter of favoring either Norman Rockwell or Jackson Pollock? I don't think so. A good friend of mine, Miss Marilyn Stokstad, has promised to give me the message, and I'll sure appreciate getting it. Till then I'll admire my bookstore prints of Renoir and a seascape of Homer that we got by sending a coupon and 50 cents in the mail.-CMP.
Look at Soviet Work
By Safynaz Kazem
Cairo, Egypt, graduate student
THE YEAR OF PROTEST 1956, by Hugh McLean and Walter N. Vickery. Vintage Books, $1.45.
This anthology of Soviet literary materials is one of the most interesting books I happened to read the last six months. In the rather long Introduction, (about 34 pages, the whole book is 269 pages) the editors say: "Until the appearance of "Doctor Zhivago" and the international drama that followed, it had been a long time since the Western World paid much attention to Russian literary developments. By a curious paradox, the more immediate and pressing our concern with Russia as a political phenomenon, the more our interest in Russian literature has declined... Our object in this anthology has been to let the English speaking reader see for himself what this Soviet "literary protest" of 1956 amounted to."
TO FULFILL that object of giving the reader some notion of the "feel" of Soviet art, and of Soviet life as well, the editors have presented translations of some of the works which evoked the angiest buzzing in official quarters, partly from Novy Mir magazine, partly from the second volume of Literaturnaya Moskva.
All the major literary genres are represented except full length novels. In the first part you will find the Drama Section, a four act play with eight scenes and fourteen characters. The title of this play is "Alone," by S. Olyoshin. It was the sensation of the theatrical season of 1956. According to reports, Soviet audiences—predominantly female—came away profoundly moved by the action and passionately partisan in their judgments of the play's moral dilemma.
THE STORY GOES like this: a successful middle-aged, upright, vigorous, likable, and idealistic communist engineer, after seventeen years of happy married life, falls in love with a younger woman. She too is a "good" Soviet figure, intelligent, etc., and also an engineer. She too is married! Her husband, though something of a weakling, is certainly not a villain. Finally, the lonely heroine, the engineer's wife, is also "good," a devoted, beloved school teacher and a loving wife and mother. The engineer and his wife have an affectionate teen-age daughter, and there is a good, kind old grandmother around too. Everybody is "good" but still there is this troublesome love affair. It exists. What should be done about it? The author does not answer the question. The problem is left open.
The second section is thirty-five pages of verses by different poets mostly born after 1930. I tried to quote three or four lines to give you short examples of how these verses sound, but I found it hard. Every piece is built in the one unit form and one cannot pick some lines and leave the other parts.
The third section is criticism and speeches. The fourth is the last part of this important book and it represents some fiction and short stories. The most interesting one is a short story by D. Granin. It is called "One's Own Opinion."
"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more." WILLIAM COWPER. Book IV. Line 96. Winter Walk at Noon
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