In Dubious Battle
Authors: John Steinbeck
PENGUIN BOOKS
In Dubious Battle
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast - and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions,
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), and worked on short stories later collected in
The Long Valley
(1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village
(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez
(1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing
Bombs Away
(1942) and the controversial play-novelette
The Moon is Down
(1942).
Cannery Row
(1945),
The Wayward Bus
(1947),
The Pearl
(1947),
A Russian Journal
(1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright
(1950), and
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
(1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden
(1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday
(1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication
(1957),
Once There Was a War
(1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962),
America and Americans
(1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters
(1969),
Viva Zapata!
(1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976), and
Working Days: The Journals of The
Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
Warren French has been Honorary Professor of American Studies at the University College of Swansea, Wales, since retiring from Indiana University. He has published several books on John Steinbeck, including
John Steinbeck Revisited, A Companion to ‘The Grapes of Wrath’
and
A Filmguide to ’The Grapes of Wrath’.
He has also written
The Social Novel at the End of an Era
and
The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,
as well as essays on American literature and popular culture. He was awarded a D.H.L. from Ohio University.
JOHN STEINBECK
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Covici, Friede, Inc. 1936
Published by The Viking Press 1938
Published in Penguin Books 1979
This edition with an Introduction and Notes by Warren French published in Penguin Books 1992
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
6
Copyright © John Steinbeck, 1936
Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1964
Introduction and Notes copyright © Warren French, 1992
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Suggestions for Further Reading
I
THOUGH he detested publicity, John Steinbeck became one of the most controversial American writers from the Depression of the 1930s until his death in 1968, at the height of American involvement in Vietnam.
In Dubious Battle,
generally regarded as his first major novel, was the first to stir up the kind of controversy that his fiction would subsequently arouse over serious social and political issues. Because the background for this fifth published novel was a strike of migrant pickers in California’s apple orchards, it was assumed to be one of the “proletarian” novels of the period supporting radical causes if not actually promoting the changing line of the Communist Party. The powerful California growers’ associations that he attacked suspected him of being a card-carrying contributor to the “red conspiracy” that had been viewed as a threat to American traditions since World War I.
Steinbeck wrote to a friend, however, just after completing the novel, “I don’t like communists, either. I mean I dislike them as people. I rather imagine the apostles had the same waspish qualities and the New Testament is proof that they had equally bad manners"—an attitude that he maintained throughout his life.
*
Earlier he had written to another struggling
novelist, George Albee; “I’m not interested in strikes as a means of raising men’s wages, and I’m not interested in ranting about justice and oppression, mere outcroppings which indicate the condition.… The book is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing.” Readers will discover that he could not maintain such a detached perspective; yet at a time when the world raged with fanatical struggles between “true believers,” he was successful in refusing to serve any organized party or special interest group and becoming an ideologue.
Ironically, the first controversy over
In Dubious Battle
was generated not by conservative critics who would later be outraged by
The Grapes of Wrath
but by a radical sympathizer in New York who almost destroyed the rewarding association that Steinbeck had just begun to enjoy with publisher Pascal Covici. Their collaboration looked to promise Steinbeck the security and recognition that he had been seeking since 1929.
Steinbeck had decided to become a professional writer when he entered high school at the age of fifteen in his home town of Salinas, California; but before he emerged from obscurity and attained international celebrity, he had to survive a long, frustrating apprenticeship. His first novel,
Cup of Gold,
a swashbuckling tale of the Spanish Main, was not published until he was twenty-seven—in October 1929, just weeks before the stock market crash brought on the Great Depression. Written in an affected style influenced by such now-forgotten favorites of the flamboyant 1920s as Donn-Byrne’s
Messer Marco Polo,
Rafael Sabatini’s
Captain Blood
and James Branch Cabell’s scandalous
Jurgen,
this historical romance enjoyed a modest, short-lived run, but it quickly disappeared from the market when the publisher became one of the many bankruptcy
victims of the time. Steinbeck’s next two works—
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932), a story-cycle set in his native region of contemporary California, and a mystical fantasy called
To a God Unknown
(1933)—followed the same route, along with their publishers.
Steinbeck had completed a fourth novel,
Tortilla Flat,
which was circulating among publishers without success, and was already deeply engaged on another, which would become
In Dubious Battle,
when late in 1933, Ben Abramson, proprietor of Chicago’s Argus Bookshop and an enthusiastic advocate of Steinbeck’s work, pressed a copy of
The Pastures of Heaven
on Pascal Covici, partner in the New York publishing firm Covici-Friede, Inc. Covici, who had never before heard of Steinbeck, shared Abramson’s enthusiasm and sat up all night reading the ironic short-story cycle. He had Steinbeck’s agent send him the manuscript of
Tortilla Flat
and at once offered to publish this droll cycle of stories about Mexican-Americans leading a scandalously marginal life in the semi-wooded outskirts of Monterey, California. Covici took an option on Steinbeck’s future works and promised to reissue the earlier novels. At last, things seemed to have turned around for Steinbeck.
Unfortunately, the manuscript of
In Dubious Battle
arrived at Covici’s office while the publisher was out of town promoting
Tortilla Flat.
The manuscript fell into the hands of an editor with communist sympathies who rejected it because he considered the marxist ideology of the strike organizers inaccurate. He felt that Steinbeck did not know what he was talking about and that the novel would offend people at both ends of the political spectrum.
The rejection invalidated Steinbeck’s contract with Covici and infuriated the author, who wrote to his agent:
Between you and me I suspect a strong communist bias in that office, since the reasons given against the book are all those I have heard from communists of the intellectual bent and of the Jewish race.… My information for this book came mostly from Irish and Italian communists whose training was in the field, not in the drawing room. They don’t believe in ideologies and ideal tactics.
While Steinbeck felt only contempt for those he called New York “parlor pinks,”
In Dubious Battle
attracted a number of bids from other publishers. When an outraged Covici learned what had happened, he fired the editor and wrote to Steinbeck offering to publish the novel at once. The author decided to stay with Covici, and they worked together for the rest of Steinbeck’s life.
Steinbeck placed such great emphasis on his sources and the accuracy of their firsthand information because he had originally planned this book, based on the experiences of strike leader Pat Chambers, to be a first-person diary of a labor organizer working in the field. His literary agents, however, suggested that he use the material as the basis for a novel instead, as it would probably prove more popular with his new audience, as well as less likely to cause trouble with possibly offended parties on both sides of the disputes. Excited about the project, Steinbeck turned out 120,000 words in five months, beginning early in September 1934, only weeks after the notorious Bloody Thursday (mentioned several times in the text), July 5, 1934, when San Francisco police made international headlines by shooting two people and wounding many others in an effort to break up a longshoremen’s strike. The eyes of the world were on the turbulent scene in California
for another reason: social-protest novelist Upton Sinclair was conducting a strident campaign for the state’s governorship based on his EPIC (End Poverty in California) share-the-wealth plan.