John Steinbeck’s great gift is to be able to wrench the guts out of you and leave you moved, to near speechlessness. And he does that so powerfully that he is an almost incomparable writer. Have another look at his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, if you don’t believe me.
But his best known novel, in the UK anyway, is Of Mice and Men (1937), probably because it was once studied by 90 per cent of GCSE students. Take the 20-something chap who delivered my groceries the other day, for example, He spotted my half-reread copy lying on the table (it’s yet another novel germane to my current writing project) and told me that he had “done” it at school. He was of Afro-Caribbean descent, apparently unabashed – and that fact is relevant in this instance.
Of Mice and Men, which I have taught to many classes, is now falling out of favour because it contains racial slurs. Well of course it does. It contains slurs against disability (mental and physical) and women too. That’s the whole point. But John Steinbeck is testingly putting these prejudices into the thoughts and mouths of his characters. He isn’t condoning or agreeing with them – or expecting the reader to. That’s why it’s such a fine starting point for discussion. It works powerfully against racism, misogyny and “ableism”. Sadly it has now been dropped from the curriculum in Wales, and it won’t be long, I suspect, before it slides away from young people elsewhere too at the behest of ignorant, blinkered adults who really should know better. All the best fiction makes the reader think and that often means feeling uncomfortable. It’s one of the ways in which understanding is built and prejudice broken down. That’s the purpose of literature.
We’re on a ranch in California in the Depression of the nineteen thirties. The main crop is barley and most of the labour force is itinerant. George and Lennie arrive there, having have to leave their last job in a hurry. Lennie has severe learning difficulties and phenomenal physical strength which he doesn’t understand how to control. George, who isn’t related to him, is a quasi fraternal carer who loves him and tries to keep him out of trouble, despite the frustrations. On the ranch they meet, Candy, a former labourer who now does the cleaning because he lost his hand in a farming machine. Another misfit, is Crooks, a black, disabled stable hand who lives separately from the other man. George and Lennie dream about getting a small holding of their own and Candy offers to contribute his compensation money so, briefly, it looks like a serious possibility, perhaps with Crooks also on board. Then the boss’s daughter-in-law “Curly’s wife” (another pitifully unhappy person) saunters in and the whole thing ends in searing tragedy. As Burns put it: “The best laid schemes o’mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley”.
Along the way, there’s the euthanasia of Candy’s old dog – a symbol of social “uselessness” – various small animals which Lennie loves too much and some wonderful characters. Slim, for instance, works permanently on the ranch as the jerkline skinner, a mule driver who can control a line of animals with great skill. He is sensitive, watchful and intelligent unlike Carlson who doesn’t do empathy or subtlety. Even Curly, the boss’s son, is a man full of insecurities which he conceals behind aggression. There are no “baddies” or “goodies” in this superb novel – just a cast of struggling people and Steinbeck evinces sympathy at some level for every one of them.
Indeed they do casually refer to Crooks (nicknamed for his back which is bent by injury) as the “stable buck” and the words nigger and negro are bandied about, even by Crooks himself. This is, after all the 1930s and men on a ranch like this wouldn’t have thought twice about the language they used. But we indentify with his loneliness just as we do with elderly Candy who knows he’ll be thrown on the scrap heap as soon as he can no longer sweep floors. And as for Lennie, every offensive name imaginable is used to describe him, “dum-dum” being one of the politer terms. Slim, however, recognises him for the gentle giant he is, and is the only person who understands George’s anguish at the end.
This remains one of the most humane novels I have ever read. If I were in charge of anything these days, I’d be compelling young people to read it rather than shielding them from it.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak
