EAST OF EDEN (602 pp.)—John Stem-beck—Viking ($4.50).
John Steinbeck, now 50, has run a wobbly literary path for nearly a quarter of a century. Signposts along the way read: charming sentimentality (Tortilla Flat), left-wing melodrama (In Dubious Battle), maudlin blather (Of Mice and Men), tender innocence (The Red Pony), honest social indignation (Grapes of Wrath), meretricious sex (The Wayward Bus). His latest novel, East of Eden, comes under none of these labels, although it courts most of them for long stretches.
In 1938, while working on Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote in his journal: "I must one day write a book about my people [family]." He got around to it in 1951. Steinbeck's intention was to write a story that would tell his sons, now aged eight and six, about their forebears and the Salinas Valley in California where they settled. But on the way, fiction ran riot and took over from fact so brazenly that much of the story is hardly fit reading for moppets.
Gentlemen & Sluts. East of Eden is a 250,000-word whopper that slowly spreads from the Civil War to World War I. In form it is a two-family saga (with a double Cain & Abel theme) in which the family destinies brush each other so slightly as to make East of Eden two novels between the same set of boards. Adam Trask, the hero of one of the novels, was born in Connecticut in 1862. He did not reach California and meet the Hamiltons (Steinbeck's folks) until 1900, but he already had quite a story.
His father was a lazy farmer, a local heller who loved his booze and women. He was one of those Civil War vets who, as the years passed, made it plain that he had just about saved the Union singlehanded. Young Adam, a quiet, diffident kid, had a rough time of it. His father wanted him to be a soldier, and almost broke him down trying to toughen him. His jealous younger half-brother Charles bullied and beat him, once nearly killed him with a hatchet.
By the time Adam got to the Salinas Valley, he had done two hitches in the Army, bummed around the country as a tramp, escaped from a Florida chain gang. and picked up a lot of humility. He also brought to California half his father's considerable fortune and Cathy, a beautiful blonde wife.
Cathy was a vicious slut but Adam didn't know that. Steinbeck has made her a dish of distilled evil, one of the most implausible women in fiction's gallery. As a young, sweet-looking girl she had murdered her parents, burned the family home and skipped off to Boston. There she became the mistress of a man who ran a string of brothels, drove him mad with jealousy and was almost beaten to death by him. When she crawled to the
Trask farm, Adam took her in, fell in love with her and married her. But before they headed west, Cathy had drugged Adam into a deep sleep, then slipped into bed with brother Charles.