East Of Eden: Why You Have To Read The Novel

Because I'd been thinking about East of Edem lately, my wife and I watched the 1956 Elia Kazan film on DVD over the weekend. It's unquestionably one of the greats, but because Kazan limited its scope to the last third of the novel, there's an enormous gap in the portrayal of Adam Trask, Caleb's father, that leaves an important issue unexplained.

As I've said, East of Eden covers a swath of what might be regarded as recent memory as of the early 1950s, much like Middlemarch in the early 1870s. a 65-year period between the Civil War and World War I, three generations of the Trask family. Kazan leaves the patriarch, Cyrus Trask, completely out.

The problem is that, like Middlemarch, East of Eden has secrets, and a key one is buried in Cyrus Trask's career as a professional Civil War veteran who becomes some sort of Washington, DC fixer -- exactly what he does isn't specified, except that although Cyrus loses track of his son Adam, he leaves both Adam and his brother a substantial inheritance.

Exactly where this money came from isn't explained, and it's likely a secret to everyone but Cyrus (and presumably those who paid him off). One problem is that Caleb's father, Adam, was a drifter who'd had problems with the law until the inheritance came along, when, just like that, he was able to buy a ranch in California and become a respectable gentleman farmer.

Although the film refers vaguely to the very brief marriage of the psychopathic itinerant prostitute Cathy Ames to Adam, the fact is that after Adam buys the ranch, he's been effectively living a fantasy, asking no serious questions about Cathy or what became of her, and certainly no questions about the inheritance that brought him prosperous respectability. In fact, it's implied that the ranch never paid off, and Adam's sale of it and the family's move to Salinas was probably a result.

The film covers none of this backstory. It provides context, though, to Adam's ill-conceived scheme to freeze lettuce and ship it back east, a bubble that bursts in a matter of hours when the shipment is delayed and the lettuce thaws. Caleb, holding his father in great respect, develops a scheme to speculate on the price of beans in the runup to the US entry into World War I and restore his father's wealth to him -- without understanding that the money his father had invested had itself come from a highly questionable source. Caleb's profit came much more honestly than his father's (and we can't completely ignore a context in the Parable of the Talents, either).

Poor Caleb. I've been there. But Kazan, for whatever reason, completely omits this irony.

So the central event of the film, the birthday party in which Adam rejects Caleb's gift as coming from war speculation, insisting Caleb return it, is actually a manifestation of Adam's general moral fog, refusing to recognize his wife is madam of a nearby brothel and refusing to recognize the source of his own wealth and respectability, insisting on his own moral purity in the face of ordinary conmmercial activity around him -- commercial activity at which he's been a failure, something even Caleb doesn't fully understand.

This isn't in the film, and you don't see it unless you've read the novel. In fact, maybe unless you've read it several times.

Steinbeck is a highly underrated writer.