The Grapes of Wrath revisited

In February, seven weeks before our first coronavirus lockdown, to while away the endless hours spent in the hospital bed as I was being administered long chemotherapy doses, I had a strong urge to read John Steinbeck’s 1939 award-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. I asked my husband to find it for me. He brought me his copy, which he had bought more than five decades ago in 1963, when he was a student at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.  He was obviously impressed by the prominent mention it had received in the previous year’s Nobel Literature Prize citation.

The book was (and still is) in a pitiable condition, with frayed, yellowing brittle pages, some of which have come loose from the binding. The compulsion to read was so great that I went at it with all my strength and finished it in three or four days.  We hold on to the book for dear life, like some heirloom, which it really is. Shreekant’s strenuous efforts to find another copy have so far not borne fruit.

When first published, critics rated it an angry book, I guess largely because of the author’s own title and related remarks, but I consider it now a deeply anguished cry for all the dispossessed, all the wretched of the earth.  The title is an obvious reference to the image of Jesus Christ working the winepress, an appeal for deliverance of the oppressed in the final judgement.

Tom Joad, an Oklahoma sharecropper, discovers when released on parole that his farm has been repossessed by the bank for non-payment of the loan during the famine in the Great Depression.  Like countless other Okies in the Dustbowl, his family — his parents, wife, children and son-in-law — is loading their car turned into a wagon for a trip to the promised land of California.  Theirs is a journey of human dignity and perseverance.  They are accompanied by Jim Casy, Tom’s friend and a former priest turned an agnostic (Steinbeck considered himself one as well).  They head west on the fabled Route 66 that slices through the American heartland, from Chicago to Santa Monica, traversing Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, before turning westward to New Mexico and Arizona.

The journey is fraught with grief and misery.  Their wagon breaks down several times.  A gallon of gasoline obtained by sometimes selling children’s toys or even a spare tyre, could take them to the next town, where some work could fetch them a precious few dollars to continue the journey.

Grampa Joad’s death en route is handled by the family without the help of an undertaker.  He would have had to report it to the county, which was more interested in the dead than the living.  That would hold up the journey, so a grave is dug hurriedly by the leafy-tree lined highway.  Route 66, immortalised in a Nat King Cole R&B song, later became a symbol of people seeking thrills through travel, but was in the 1930s a long graveyard of dreams and some of the dreamers.  The young learnt to fix their wheels along the way, or when that became impossible, simply abandoned them to hitch a ride or walk to the next town, hoping to find a job and another jalopy.

A resettlement camp on the outskirts of Southern California welcomed the Okies and other Rednecks.  Showers, community kitchens serving hot meals and schools for children seemed like heaven, but that turned to a mirage due to limited resources.  The larger farmers, themselves reeling under the Depression-era crashing prices, employed the immigrants for starvation wages.  Casy becomes a union organiser, calling a strike.  The Joads are strike-breakers who witness the merciless killing of their friend.  Tom is now radicalised, but is also afraid of the long arm of the law reaching him for parole violation when he bids goodbye to his family.

Steinbeck made no secret of why he wrote the book: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.  I’ve done my damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags,” he wrote.  He received both bouquets and brickbats.  The book was a huge success and has been the subject of countless studies and commentaries (many of these are available on the Net, but alas, not the book itself.)  It was made into a film in 1940 by John Ford with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.  Although the plot line differed somewhat, it was hailed as one of the few Great American Motion Pictures based on a Great American Novel. Fonda later thought that it was the best performance of his career.  He was nominated for an Oscar but did not win it.  

The novel has many allusions and parallels, starting with Moses leading the slaves out of Egypt all the way to the great southern migration of the destitute Chinese farmers in the early 20th century following the destruction of their farms by locusts, the subject of The Good Earth, a seminal novel by another Nobel Laureate Pearl S Buck. And now, a few days ago, Shreekant’s 90-year-old cousin recalled The Grapes of Wrath in the context of our own pandemic and lockdown-induced marches of the similarly-fated migrant workers.

We await someone to create our own version of The Grapes of Wrath, ca 2020. Are you listening, Ravish Kumar?

Pandemic Perusing is an occasional freewheeling column on books and reading by our writers and reviewer; mssriram@pm.me