Robert DeMott
Steinbeck’s 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 Steinbeck’s 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). DeMott’s central tool is “the previously unknown Steinbeck, the Steinbeck of unpublished manuscripts, ledgers, and correspondence” (xiii).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The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and East of Eden (1952); and Part Three, entitled “Interior Dimensions,” gathers essays on unpublished love poems and the novel Sweet Thursday (1954) as well as on DeMott’s discovery of Stein­beck’s fiction. The three essays published in the first section attempt to point out intertextual influences in Steinbeck’s fiction. DeMott points out that “for Stein­beck, the world’s 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 Ste­inbeck’s sense of artistic place, as well as his creative and personal identity” (49). Much more convincing is DeMott’s 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 Steinbeck’s novel.

The book’s second section makes full use of DeMott’s 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 man’s brain working alone” (219). Tracing in detail Steinbeck’s indi­vidual development during the periods of composition, his habits, personal rela­tionships, and even the concerns he expressed in his diaries, DeMott concludes that “Steinbeck’s 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 author’s 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. De­Mott’s 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. Steinbeck’s Typewriter adds to our knowledge of Steinbeck’s 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.