East of Eden as a Letter

Sometimes when we read it's nice to hear what other people think about the book.  (No doubt you are familiar with things such as sparknotes, which summarizes books and points out the main themes.)  Literary Critics also write about books, but unlike sparknotes, they begin with the assumption that you have already read the book.  Their purpose is to engage in a discussion about the text.  They express opinions and defend them (sounds a bit like an essay, huh?)  I enjoy reading what the critics have to say because as I consider their reactions, I find myself internally debating with them, thus further formulating my own ideas.  I hope you find this article interesting.  I think it might be helpful for your in your "Deepening" work.

While reading East of Eden as a Letter, consider:
1) How does Steinbeck's choice of title support the overall novel?
2) Do you agree with Aubrey that the "A" characters share culpability with the "C" characters?  If so, is the culpability equal?  How does this relate to Steinbeck's comment about good and evil?

“East of Eden as a Letter”

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay Aubrey discusses East of Eden in the context of a series of letters Steinbeck wrote to his friend and editor Pascal Covici as he was writing the first draft of the novel.

Steinbeck labored long and hard on East of Eden, declaring it to be the most difficult book he had undertaken. For a long time he had wanted to be able to write such a book and had carefully prepared himself for the task. During the writing of the first draft, he wrote a remarkable series of letters to his friend and editor Pascal Covici. The letters were published as Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters in 1969, a year after Steinbeck’s death.

Steinbeck wrote one letter early each day from January to November 1951 as a way of limbering up for the writing task that lay ahead. The letters give a close-up view of the ups and downs of a novelist at work, his successful days as well as the days when nothing went right. One day he wonders whether the novel will be interesting to anyone other than himself. On another occasion he wonders whether his “devilish playing with the verities” (his metaphysical ideas) will put people off in an age when readers of novels want plot and action. Often, however, his enthusiasm for his task bubbles over, and he conveys how it feels to be a writer when the full rush of creativity sweeps through him. It is a very physical feeling for Steinbeck: “The joy comes in the words going down and the rhythms crowding in the chest and pulsing to get out.”

The East of Eden letters provide many fascinating details about the novel (all the anecdotes about the Hamilton family are true, for example) and leave no doubt about the primary significance Steinbeck attached to the Cain and Abel story. His first idea for the title of the novel was “Canable.” Then he thought of “Cain Sign” before settling on East of Eden, which is itself taken from the Cain and Abel story. Steinbeck thought the story of jealousy and strife between siblings lay at the basis of all neuroses, and he was thrilled by his interpretation of the Hebrew word timshel as “thou mayest.” He went to great trouble to be certain that his etymology was at least possible. He felt sure it would interest scholars and psychiatrists and provoke great argument and scholarly discussion (it did not).

Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from Steinbeck’s letters is his great affirmative vision of what the purpose of the writer should be. He comments on this in the context of his character Samuel Hamilton, a man of energy and vision who goes through life without being defeated. Steinbeck laments the fact that it has become fashionable amongst writers to show the destruction rather than the endurance of the human spirit. He argues that there have been a few men—he names Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, and Paul—who were not destroyed by life, and these are the men the world lives by. They are remembered not for negation and denial, but for affirmation. Steinbeck goes on to argue that “It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage.” Great writing must give out strength, courage, and wisdom rather than dwell on the weakness and ugliness that is also part of the human condition. Steinbeck believed he had achieved this affirmative vision in his novel. “Although East of Eden is not Eden,” he said in the same letter, “it is not insuperably far away.”
How far away from Eden is it? Some readers may feel that there are so many cruelties, vices, and tragedies in this novel, culminating in Aron’s unnecessary death and Adam’s devastating stroke, that if it is “not insuperably far away” from Eden, it is not far away from hell either. But that may be part of Steinbeck’s point. It is unlikely that he conceived the condition of Eden as one of perpetual bliss, but rather one of perpetual striving, because wherever there is good, there is also evil. In the interaction between the two lies the possibility of human growth and freedom. Steinbeck said as much in the letter he wrote to Covici on January 29, 1951, before he had written a single word of the novel. He wrote that the opposites of good and evil, strength and weakness, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, are inseparable: “neither can exist without the other.” Out of the interaction of these opposites, “creativeness is born.” This comment is the key to so much of what goes on in the novel. Although the idea that good and evil are mixed up together in most individuals is not an especially interesting or original one, there is a more subtle idea at work too: the fact that even those characters in the novel who are firmly in one or other of the opposing camps are drawn inexorably together. Each quality, good and evil, has a kind of gravitational pull for the other, which is beyond the control of either. So it is that the mysterious processes of life place Charles (a Cain character) in close proximity to Adam (an Abel character) and through their stormy interaction Adam is forced to seek his own destiny, away from his brother. But then in his turn, Adam cannot help but pull into his life Cathy, who has as little good in her as Adam has evil.

It is interesting to note that while Cathy is as close to pure evil as one is likely to get this side of hell, the “good” characters Adam and Aron share culpability for the bad things that happen to them. Their errors are failures of perception, knowledge, and imagination. They fail to understand that life must be grasped whole, that it is a mixed bag of good and evil. Adam, for example, never comes close to seeing Cathy as she really is. He idealizes her, projecting onto her an unreal image of sweetness that he never questions. When Cathy indicates that she does not want to move to California, Adam does not listen; he does not take her objections seriously. Nor does he notice her unhappiness in California. He is too busy creating his Eden in the Salinas Valley. But this manmade Eden is not built on solid foundations, so it is no surprise (except to Adam) when it crumbles. In a sense, he is just as much to blame as Cathy is for the bullet she fires into his shoulder.
It is the same with Aron. Steinbeck alerts his correspondent Covici to the importance of Aron, telling him to note the gradual, subtle development of Aron’s character. During his childhood, Aron’s simple goodness wins him the affection of everyone. As soon as he reaches adolescence, however, he starts to lose his innocence and his balance. He channels all his emerging passions into religion. Deciding to become a minister, he devotedly attends the Episcopal church and takes spiritual instruction from the clergyman. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, but Aron takes it to excess. He desperately needs (or thinks he needs) to shut out anything that seems to him impure. He soon reaches “a point of passionate purity that made everyone else foul.” When he learns from the clergyman that the owner of a brothel is starting to attend church services—he does not yet know this is his mother, Cathy—he tells Lee that he wants to go away, because Salinas is a “dirty” town. Lee tries to prod him into a more realistic view of life (“Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now”), but Aron does not have the maturity to grasp it. And when he goes off to Stanford, he shuts himself off from the life around him.

Aron’s biggest mistake is in his attitude to Abra, in which he replicates his father’s idealization of Cathy. Abra is mature enough to notice this. She says to Lee, of Aron, “He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up, and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that—not like the madeup one.” Aron wants a girl who is absolutely pure, with not a single bad thing about her. Abra knows that she can never live up to such an ideal. “He doesn’t know me,” she says. “He doesn’t even want to know me.” Like father, like son, and the outcome is inevitable. Abra and Aron drift apart.

The consequences for Aron of his refusal to accept life in its wholeness—the ugliness as well as the beauty—are dire. He is so devastated by his discovery that his mother runs a brothel that he literally runs away as far as he can go—to the battlefields of Europe, where he is killed. The false world in which he tried to wall himself off from the real one cannot stand the light of real experience.

If Aron and Adam are examples of the inadequacy of a one-dimensional view of reality, Steinbeck also offers many moments of illumination, when wisdom about life shines through. He poured himself into this novel with a passion, writing to Covici that it had to contain everything in the world he knew. Whether it is in the practical wisdom of Samuel, or the studious reflections of Lee, there are many such moments to savor. Each reader will find his or her favorite. The scene near the end of the novel, when Abra talks with Cal on their way home from school (chapter 52, section 3), is as good an example as any. Abra is only in her mid-teens, but she expresses a wisdom that others spend a lifetime missing. Steinbeck alerted Covici to Abra’s importance in the story (she is “the strong female principle of good”), and in this scene Abra is explaining to Cal that Aron never grew up. He lived in a story-world that he made up, and he refused to accept any outcome different from the one he wanted. But Abra’s attitude is different. Not only has she outgrown the story that she and Aron made up for themselves, she comments, “I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on.” Abra’s refusal to live in a fantasy world, her determination not to be trapped by fixed expectations, and her courageous desire to live fully in the present, without illusions, make her, like Lee and Samuel, a touchstone of how life can be lived truthfully and with integrity.

Works Cited

Aubrey, Bryan. “East of Eden as a Letter.” Critical Essay on East of Eden, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2004.