By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Originally published on October 28, 2010, in my blog Draupadiarjun)
Lots of material may be found if you do a biographical dig into East of Eden, the 1952 novel by John Steinbeck (1902-1968). Also, the poignant title of the novel comes from the Bible. How can anyone be so ignorant as not to know all this? I was. A famous book travels the world, and is read by people in faraway countries, by people who may not follow Christianity as a faith. A long time ago, when you picked up a book, the book and the words in it and on it were all you had. Thus, in my teens, I’d read East of Eden oblivious of all extraneous information, as a work of fiction. And the book had exploded in my mind as a primordial and fatalistic story.
When I read it again recently, incredibly, despite all the background information I have now, it was still possible to read East of Eden as gripping fiction.
Interesting things happen if you free the book from the stranglehold of biographical and biblical tentacles, when you forget the top-of-the-head blurb: "a retelling of the Cain and Abel story”. What was it that Mr. B. once wrote? “It is precisely because I forget that I read.”
What we find is a lost place and a lost time -- California’s Salinas Valley at the turn of the twentieth century, where Samuel Hamilton brings his inventiveness and intentions to plant a family on rocky soil. Samuel is more than a character, being one of the main ideas of the novel, embodying the original, pristine, idealistic, enterprising, imaginative, and industrious soul of America. Samuel lives through most of the story and is remembered on its last page. The children he raises with his wife Liza are a special lot, poor through their wonder years, but gifted or determined or both. When Samuel’s daughter Dessie returns to the ranch, her memories reconstruct all the vitality that used to characterize the place. She and her brother Tom knock about the empty rooms like two pennies in a can. Tom himself is a memorable figure, Samuel the inventor’s true likeness, but without Samuel’s buoyancy of spirit (and most certainly without his anchor, the virtuous and pragmatic Liza) and someone whose sweetness the narrator, Tom’s nephew, remembers with aching affection. Will is the “successful” son, precursor of the typical American businessman.
Alongside the Hamiltons are the Trasks, beginning with the myth-making Cyrus, who (never a Salinas man) farmed a bit of land in Connecticut and, following a meteoric rise, dies a wealthy and influential man in Washington. Cyrus is obsessed with the techniques of warfare, but (alas!) his battle games do not yield happy exercise the way the “Siege of Namur” did on the Shandy bowling green. Cyrus’s strategies involve his two young sons, Adam and Charles, and have an effect on their characters and lives.
Dominating the book is a woman, Cathy. She is the taut string that holds in place the delicate loops, laces and fringes of the design. If, for a moment, we de-link the book from the legendary, Nobel and Pulitzer winning author Steinbeck and read East of Eden as just a magnificent story, Cathy can be seen as a serial criminal. We have met many fictional women who nudged men out of their various edens, from Sister Carrie to Daisy Buchanan to Brenda Last and Marnie Edgar, to name a few, and a legion of Cathys (since East of Eden) in countless crime novels, but no one was so primally dark. Still, it is a shock to see what the twenty years during which her twin sons grow up do to the steely and acute Cathy. She is in her forties when she sets up her final date with Alice, certain that in the safety of "the light filtering down through the cloverleaf”, "no door could close her out and no door could close her in.”
When Adam moves to Salinas Valley to build a setting worthy of his new wife, he acquires Lee, who proves that the worthwhile often have no possessions to speak of and create their own gardens. Lee is a unique creation, a Chinese American who enters the book spouting pidgin to meet expectations, and holds our hands till the end, through all the twists and turns of Adam’s interactions with the world. In his old age he finds all the love he has given away and calms himself with Samuel’s The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
East of Eden has conversations, people talk to each other in this book. Lee, who believes in “conversational therapy”, is a part of many of these conversations. Other exchanges are more complex, hiding intentions and revealing character, such as the talks between Adam and Charles, Aron and Abra, Cathy and Faye, Cathy and Sheriff Quinn and Cathy and Cal, Cathy and Adam and Cal and Will.
I wish the Cain and Abel angle was subtler, at least the second time round, and no one had to fall prey to a preordained doom. After all, choice was big in the novel. But, to tell the truth, I can read the novel again and again just for Adam, Cathy, Samuel, Liza, Tom, Lee, Cal and Abra. A feeling of sadness accompanies the reading, which is usual when people you have been following closely since their youth go. Cal and Abra do lift up your spirits the way Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton do in Wuthering Heights – but it is to Lee that we turn to deal.
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