"East of Eden", by John Steinbeck

(A post by Classic Bookworm seen on their Facebook wall on 12th October)

John Steinbeck published this novel in September 1952. He was fifty years old. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath thirteen years earlier, but his recent books had been dismissed by critics, and he was worried that his best work was behind him. He wrote East of Eden as a comeback. In a letter to his editor, he said, "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this." He believed it was the book he had been preparing to write his entire life. And then the critics hated it.

The story spans two generations of two families in California's Salinas Valley, from the Civil War to the end of World War I. It is a retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, set in the farmland Steinbeck grew up in. The first generation is Adam Trask and his brother Charles, who grow up on a farm in Connecticut with a father who favors Adam and a mother who died young. The second generation is Adam's twin sons, Cal and Aron, who grow up in Salinas Valley with a father who is distant, grieving, and incapable of showing love. And binding the whole thing together is Cathy Ames, a woman so purely, incomprehensibly evil that she almost stops being a character and becomes a force of nature.

Cathy is one of the most terrifying creations in American literature. Steinbeck tells you from the beginning that she was "not like other people, never was from birth." She kills her parents. She becomes a prostitute. She marries Adam, bears his children, shoots him, and leaves him to run a brothel where she blackmails the most powerful men in town. She feels no guilt, no love, no remorse. She is not a villain in the conventional sense. She is a void. And Steinbeck uses her to explore the novel's central question: are we born evil, or do we choose to be?

The answer, he decides, is in a single Hebrew word. Timshel. When God speaks to Cain in Genesis, the King James Bible translates the word as "thou shalt" thou shalt rule over sin. But the Hebrew, Steinbeck argues, actually means "thou mayest." Not a command. A choice. "That gives a choice," Steinbeck writes. "It might be the most important word in the world." That is the heart of the book. You are not doomed to be your father. You are not doomed to be your mother. You are not doomed to be the person you were yesterday. You may choose. You may rule over sin. You may be something else.

The novel's third major figure is Lee, the Trask family's Chinese cook. Lee is not a servant. He is the moral center of the book. He speaks in pidgin English as a mask, a way of surviving in a world that refuses to hear him otherwise. When he finally drops the mask and speaks to Samuel Hamilton, he reveals himself as one of the most educated and philosophical men in the valley. Together, Lee and Samuel — the Irish immigrant and the Chinese immigrant, the two outsiders — debate the meaning of timshel and arrive at the novel's deepest insight. They are the ones who teach Cal that he is not his mother's son. He is his own man.

Steinbeck wrote East of Eden while going through a painful divorce and struggling with the knowledge that his own sons were growing up without him. The Hamilton family in the novel is based on his own maternal grandparents, and Samuel Hamilton is a loving portrait of his grandfather. He wrote it as a letter to his sons, trying to explain to them something he could not say in person. It was, he said, "a fantasia of history and myth." It was also a confession. A father trying to tell his children that he loved them, and that he was sorry, and that they were free.