Robert DeMott
Steinbecks Typewriter: Essays on His Art
Troy, NY: Whitston, 1996. Pp. 353. $35.00
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel
Developments in literary theory notwithstanding, biographical criticism is still alive and well. That is at least the impression one gets from reading Steinbecks Typewriter, a collection of essays on the author of The Grapes of Wrath and other American classics. For his book, longtime Steinbeck critic Robert DeMott revised nine pieces on the Nobel laureate that were published between 1979 and 1992.
Much has been written about the works of John Steinbeck, an author integral to the canon of American literature in the twentieth century. Therefore, DeMott concentrates less on the published works than on their development into their eventual form. From the beginning DeMott makes clear that he ascribes the central authority regarding texts and meanings to John Steinbeck: I am attempting to portray his scriptive authority, his authorship (xix). DeMotts central tool is the previously unknown Steinbeck, the Steinbeck of unpublished manuscripts, ledgers, and correspondence (xiii).
DeMott divides his collection into three major parts. Part One, Creative Reading/Creative Writing, attempts to place Steinbeck and his works in a literary context; Part Two, Negotiating Texts, charts the composition of To a God Unknown (1933), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and East of Eden (1952); and Part Three, entitled Interior Dimensions, gathers essays on unpublished love poems and the novel Sweet Thursday (1954) as well as on DeMotts discovery of Steinbecks fiction. The three essays published in the first section attempt to point out intertextual influences in Steinbecks fiction. DeMott points out that for Steinbeck, the worlds novels were benchmarks for his own fictional concerns, primary signposts in the inexhaustible multiplicity of the textual universe (15). Consequently, DeMott attempts to discover what Steinbeck was reading prior to and during the composition of his major texts. The not particularly surprising conclusion is that the poetics of reading significantly shaped and enhanced Steinbecks sense of artistic place, as well as his creative and personal identity (49). Much more convincing is DeMotts exploration of the contexts of East of Eden. In particular, the definition of Moby-Dick as more than a mere literary influence, a spiritual forerunner, a fountain of right knowledge, an enabling text and a continuing reference point (100) opens interesting perspectives on Steinbecks novel.
The books second section makes full use of DeMotts access to earlier versions of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. DeMott consistently presents Steinbeck as a creator of texts who also determines their significance and meanings, citing Steinbeck as an authority for the perspective that all creation is the product of one mans brain working alone (219). Tracing in detail Steinbecks individual development during the periods of composition, his habits, personal relationships, and even the concerns he expressed in his diaries, DeMott concludes that Steinbecks novel belongs to that vital class of fictions whose shape issues not from an ideal blueprint of aesthetic or ideological propriety, but from the generative urgency of its authors experience in history (176). DeMott even goes so far as to identify the intersection of novel and journal where writer and text not only merge but interpenetrate (186). From the perspective of biographical criticism, This Book is My Life: Creating The Grapes of Wrath is a masterpiece.
While the concluding essay of the second section, which charts the critical response to East of Eden from early reviews through to contemporary opinions, provides interesting glimpses on the changing currents of literary criticism, the final section is mostly a curiosity show. Neither the story of the unpublished and-admittedly-bad love poems Steinbeck wrote for his second wife nor the attempt to salvage the 1954 novel Sweet Thursday as an early example of American metafiction are convincing.
The uneven quality of the essays is matched by their internal organization. All have been published previously, although in slightly different versions. DeMotts warning to his readers, that several of these pieces are more akin to an acrobatic seminar presentation (xvii) than to a scholarly essay, leaves much to be resolved. Steinbecks Typewriter adds to our knowledge of Steinbecks novels by describing their literary and biographical contexts, but it seems unlikely that the study has much to offer to those readers who are not Steinbeck aficionados.