Steinbeck understood how history plays out and repeats itself, or, in other words, he understood stories, and people, what they say and do, and the gulfs in between. He also loved language - which are all ingredients that, I reckon, a great novelist make. Alongside an exceptional ability to describe the terror and beauty of American landscapes and seasons, Steinbeck took human behaviours, all the motives and unspoken things that linger below the surface of our consciousness, and raised them into plain sight.
Steinbeck intended East of Eden to be his defining opus. In the book’s opening dedication, addressed to Pascal Covici (Pat), a book publisher and editor with whom he worked closely, he wrote: “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.”
In this box we have the world of the Salinas Valley, and two families therein; the Hamiltons and the Trasks. Samuel Hamilton, a kindly, inventive Irishman with a penchant for losing money, is based upon Steinbeck’s own maternal grandfather (Steinbeck himself even appears briefly in the novel as a small boy).
In East of Eden, then, Steinbeck presented us with a particular set of people, a time and place with which he was intimately familiar, while simultaneously inventing new worlds and characters with whom they interact. But the centrifugal concept on which this novel pivots is Steinbeck’s significant reinterpretation of a biblical Hebrew term, “Timshel”, which he translated to “thou mayest” rather than the traditional “thou shalt”, thus changing the onus entirely.
This, Steinbeck wanted to show us, means that we, like his characters, must choose to overcome our fates, rather than muddling through a perpetual present, forever making the same mistakes.
Now especially, with things as they are, it might be a thought to go back to East of Eden for a goodly, timely peruse.
