In the Steinbeck 99th Birthday Write-off: We are still engaged IN DUBIOUS BATTLE.
Written: Feb 27 '01 (Updated Apr 13 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A harsh, brilliant early Steinbeck novel of fruit pickers in 1930's California.
Cons: Steinbeck's raw passion not so refined as it becomes in Of Mice and Men, etc.
The Bottom Line: IN DUBIOUS BATTLE is an early statement of the humanistic view which made John Steinbeck famous, and eventually won him the Nobel Prize.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: John Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle |
Every year, somewhere in America, an idealistic or at least unsuspecting teacher gets challenged, sometimes brought up on charges, occasionally fired, for having a sophomore or junior English class (usually in a rural school district) read John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937). For a book often called the finest short novel in American Literature, made a number of times into distinguished movies or above average TV productions, it is difficult to see why a simple story of two "buddy" farm workers who get their dreams crushed should raise such rancor.
Usually, a "bad word" on a certain page, and/or another "bad word" on another page, is cited as the reason. A close study of each case, more often than not, reveals another reason, a confusion that goes back to the beginnings of the American Republic. In crafting The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson changed a phrase in an essay, The Rights of Man by English Philosopher John Locke, from "life, liberty and property" to the inalienable right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," setting up a muddy conflict which exists down to this moment in American Society.
I want to look briefly at a Steinbeck novel, of which "Of Mice and Men" is something of a revision -- namely, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE.
Published a year earlier than Of Mice and Men [following, The Cup of Gold (romantic adventure), The Pastures of Heaven (related short stories), The Red Pony (coming of age), To a God Unknown (religious symbolism) and Tortilla Flat (bucolic humor), etc], IN DUBIOUS BATTLE marked Steinbeck's real entry into that category of Naturalism known then as The Proletarian Novel. From it flows much of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), as well as Of Mice and Men.
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE concerns the relationship of two men, counterparts of George and Lenny in the shorter novel. Early in 1930's, Jim Nolan, a well read young innocent, orphaned three years earlier by the murder of his father, wants to help the underdog. Mac McLeod, a hard bitten old veteran, is an organizer for a radical outfit which seeks to unionize apple pickers around Watsonville, in the Salinas Valley, south of San Francisco. When Jim applies for membership in the Communist Party, a coordinator, Harry Nilson, introduces him to Mac. The two become partners, pupil and mentor, and in time Mac, for all his Marxian rhetoric and strategy, comes to feel responsible for Jim.
Steinbeck grew into his Naturalism (in several senses) by bent and training. Born and raised in the agricultural Salinas Valley of California, Steinbeck, between jobs in department stores, farming, ranching, and factories, studied Marine Biology at Stanford. He became a best friend of biologist Ed "Doc" Ricketts (who figures in this novel and others), thought responsible for the eventual realization of the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium. Steinbeck readily saw that, whatever pretensions Man has, it is the Elementals which drives his life: the need for water, food, shelter, and procreation. While this philosophy is more artistically worked out in Of Mice and Men, it is also clearly a part of IN DUBIOUS BATTLE.
The key to the novel (and all of Steinbeck's best work) is the application to the Elementals of biological symbiosis: the interdependence of one species with another.
In the aftermath of World War I, Jim, who knows little more about the real world than his stint in a department store, wants to be "a soldier." Mac needs "soldiers" and inculcates in him a dialectic that workers are like soldiers in a war. Every strike (or battle) is important but only in relation to the next strike/battle until the war itself is won (and as George or Lenny might say, "Then, we'll live on the fat of the land").
After learning that the apple workers are having their pitiful wages cut (and that the sector organizer, a crazy character named Joy, has been arrested), Mac and Jim hop a freight train in San Francisco for the Salinas Valley, where they soon find themselves organizing "a jungle" of near starving farm workers.
Like most male novelists in the first 200 years or so of the Republic, Steinbeck does not handle women terribly well, but they are important to his view of the elementals. Women as sisters, daughters, girlfriends, wives, and especially Mothers are everywhere in his novels and stories.
Mac further impresses Jim when he ingratiates himself with the leader of the jungle, London, by delivering the child of London's young daughter-in-law, Lisa, on newspapers laid over a dirt floor. Jim is even more impressed when he learns that it is the first time that Mac has played this kind of doctor. Lisa floats through the rest of the novel like a benign version of Curly's wife in Of Mice and Men.
As IN DUBIOUS BATTLE progresses, the action really does become more like that of a war. London goes with Mac and Jim to the Hunter farm to parley with Dakin, leader of the pickers, about wages and conditions. After a checker tries to bribe them, and the Orchard superintendent threatens them, Mac encourages London and Dakin to unite in preparation for a strike. A camp is constructed, men are trained, food supplies are procured. Mac's reasoning is simple: if the apples are not picked they will rot on the trees. The apples will be the elemental objects around which the strike is organized.
Throughout the novel, the workers whom Mac is organizing think inordinately of food and drink: of apples (to eat), baked potatoes, beans, soup, water, coffee, etc. These are the prizes for which the men and their families are willing sacrifice. Battles are fought, workers are hurt and killed, and the weather begins to break and surround them with rain and mud, as if they were in the trenches. It is the Elementals at nearly their nadir.
Doc Burton, a volunteer health officer for the camp, an incarnation of Doc Ricketts, arrives from the north, and he acts as Mac's philosophical adversary. In a series of bull sessions, Doc lays out an imperative that violent beginnings lead to violent ends. He points out that men look forward to war, for whatever their motives, and they look back later with regret, but they cannot remember the blood and excrement of the war itself. And that, Doc suggests, is why war (and labor strife) will always exist in our greedy world. It is Mac's position that only the struggle matters.
There is much more to the struggle, and the innocents are sacrificed, and the war goes on -- to what dubious ends we can only guess. Unlike Mac who sees all struggle as an opportunity, Doc sees it a matter of tending the wounded and giving himself over to helping Humanity. One man's "pursuit of happiness" will always come into conflict with another's, especially where Property is involved. Those of us with scruples can only be there to help those who cannot help themselves.
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, then, reveals an early statement by Steinbeck of the similar but more desperate philosophy Tom Joad expresses at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. In the earlier novel, the philosophy is raw and ambivalent, without the humanistic and artistic mastery which Steinbeck brought to his magnum opus. But before Steinbeck's name became better known, it was IN DUBIOUS BATTLE which first enraged right wing elements around the country, including the people of his home town Salinas, where his father had been County Treasurer and his mother a school teacher. Although great numbers of people loved his story-telling, small town and rural elements -- and big business, especially what became known as Agribusiness -- never forgave him for betraying the class from which he came. For political and economic, as well elemental reasons, it would be nearly 40 years before there was a recognized Farm Workers Union in the United States.
And these are really the factors why, long after the cause is forgotten, some teachers are still being fired for "the bad word on page 48" in Of Mice and Men.
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE has never been made into a motion picture, and I doubt many school districts, inherently conservative, have ever approved it for student class reading.
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I should like to thank Stephen Murray for organizing this write-off in commemoration of the 99th Birthday of the renowned, sometimes maligned, American Novelist, John Steinbeck.
Please read the reviews of other Steinbeck books (and the movies adapted from them) listed below.
Participants in the writeoff marking Steinbeck’s 99th birthday are:
Stephen_Murray, Frazzledspice, Jiahong, Caravan70, Macresarf1, Skygirl,
Murasaki, NFP, Ladydagney1, Howard Creech, Gabriella, Nathanael73, Kchowell,
gracef, Isinga, Ed_Grover, Panthera_Leo, and Eplovejoy.
URLs:
The National Steinbeck Center --
http://www.epinions.com/content_11003465348
In Dubious Battle --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10949398148
Of Mice and Men --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10913484420
The Red Pony --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10911452804
Grapes of Wrath --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10881109636
http://www.epinions.com/content_10897559172
The Moon Is Down --
http://www.epinions.com/content_11001564804
Cannery Row --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10961063556
http://www.epinions.com/content_11016769156
East of Eden --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10881109636
Once There Was a War --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10907061892
Sweet Thursday --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10908503684
M0VIES:
Overview --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10914205316
Grapes of Wrath --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10916695684
The Pearl --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10924625540
Of Mice and Men (1992) --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10635087492
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Recommended:
Yes
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macresarf1
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Location: San Francisco, Ca.
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