Books: Damnation of Ethan Hawley

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (311 pp.)—John Steinbeck—Viking ($4.50).

In the early, vigorous fiction that brought him fame, John Steinbeck wrote in the language of the outcast and sided with the outsiders. It was an ambiguous form of social protest, since Steinbeck sometimes seemed less at war with the unjust acts of society than with the fact of society. One never quite knew whether his heroes wanted to storm the barricades or take to the woods and play hooky from the machine age. In Dubious Battle found him siding with Communist labor organizers, but in Tortilla Flat he sided with an amorally jolly bunch of vagrants and winos. In The Grapes of Wrath he keened over the suffering Okies in their mass exodus, but in The Red Pony he celebrated the vernal innocence of a boy and a colt beyond the reach of civilization’s dust bowls. After the ’30s, this internal dramatic tension drained out of Steinbeck and his later novels are all rather like Hollywood sets, more to be looked at than lived in.

In The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck tries to recover his angry young manner with a blast at the affluent society. Unfortunately, the book contains more pose than passion, and the moral anathema sounds curiously like late-middle-aged petulance.

Totems of Status. The book’s hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, is a decent sort who loves his wife, has two teen-aged children and seems affably adjusted to failure. He clerks in a grocery store that he once owned for a Sicilian-born boss named Marullo. However, Ethan is haunted by totems of past status. The sleepy Long Island port of New Baytown in which he lives was once virtually the fief of his whaling-captain forebears. He carries one such captain’s narwhal stick and lives in his great-grandfather’s white shiplap house with its widow’s walk. It hurts Ethan when his son pipes up: “I’m going to buy you an automobile so you won’t feel so lousy when other people all got one.”

Almost black-magically, Ethan’s luck and character (but not his dialogue) do begin to change. He discovers that his boss Marullo entered the U.S. illegally, and he tips off the immigration authorities. The unsuspecting Marullo, who admires Ethan for his loyalty, gives him the store before he is deported. Author Steinbeck has other heavy ironies to put in the moral fire, and at book’s end, Ethan owns the world of New Baytown but he has, of course, lost his own soul. How does he learn that? He discovers that his son has cribbed from the speeches of Jefferson, Webster, Lincoln and Henry Clay to win a nationwide TV essay contest.

Everybody’s Crime. All of this might be funny in a macabre way if it were not so flatly incredible. The novel is not helped by an overworked style that always seems to be asking the reader to finger the rich material of the prose. In Steinbeck’s naively symbolic handling, the world of money and business is reduced to a branch of witchcraft, thus vitiating any valid point that Steinbeck might have hoped to make about the state of U.S. ethics. Asked to define business at one point, Ethan calls it “everybody’s crime.” The guilt for this novel is somewhat easier to localize.