East Of Eden And The Annus Horribilis

As an Aristotelian, as I've said here, my job is to look for causes. The project I don't seem able to put down for the time being is to look for the causes of 2020, one of the chief features of which was the COVID crisis and what I think is an associated moral panic, which appears to me to far outwigh the actual medical issues of the disease.

The last clear moral panic, as far as I can see, was the Day Care Satanism panic of the 1980s, most clearly exemplified by the McMartin Preschool case in the Los Angeles area. I was prompted by an offhand remark in a recent TV special on the case that moral panics reflect underlying social tensions, and in that case, the real issue was changes in family life and child care caused by wives and mothers working outside the home. (Although this had become acceptable following World War II, it wasn't until the stagflation and fuel crises of the 1970s that it became economically much more essential.)

Then, for reasons I can't fully articulate, I began binge-watching YouTube lectures by Michael Neiberg, a Warld War I historian at the US Army War College. His overriding theme is that World War I had causes that the Versailles Peace Conference failed utterly to solve, and many of the unrealized solutions, like the disposition of the Ottoman Empire, remain urgently with us.

So in the middle of the night I sat up and said "There's a book that deals with the status of women and the family and World War I. It's Steinbeck's East of Eden." It deals, of course, with a great deal else, and I've read it carefully twice over the past 20 years or so. Elia Kazan saw a great deal in it for his 1955 movie version, but apparently Kazan said he understood the novel better than Steinbeck did, and he covered only the last secton of the book, which centers on Caleb Trask's discovery that his mother was not dead, but a madam in a nearby brothel.

For a time after my first reading, I tended to agree. But my wife and I were lucky enough to see an entirely new stage production of East of Eden by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2015. I assumed at first this would just be based on the Kazan film, but I was wrong -- it dealt much more with the middle section of the novel. the psychopathic woman Cathy's marriage to Adam Trask and her abandonment of the family. That made me see there's more to the book than what Kazan saw.

Like other broad-brush novels that treat of recent memory in their era, like Middlemarch, East of Eden speaks by implcation of other issues, like the causes of US entry into World War I -- Prof Neiberg would, I suspect, not disagree with Steinbeck's depiction -- and the decline of the brothel as an American institution. (By 1952, the year of the novel's publication, they were as much a period curiosity as ragtime or player pianos.) This has wide implications for the status and role of women and the maintenance of social order. The local sheriff, who knows the secrets, is a key figure throughout.

So the longer I live, the more I think East of Eden is an important book, in my increasing view up there with, say Moby Dick (John D Rockefeller, by the way, saved the whales), Middlemarch, and War and Peace. Steinbeck and another underrated 20th century author, Ferdinand Lundberg, are a path to understanding the underlying issues that led to our just-past Annus Horribilis.