Literature Resource Center
Leaf, Jonathan."Of mice &melodrama."New Criterion. (Vol. 26). . 4 (Dec. 2007): p84.
Literature Resource Center. Gale.Nassau Community College Library - SUNY.14 Mar.
2010.http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=sunynassau
Title: Of mice
However much it may disappoint cynics, we must confess a hopeful fact: most
of the books assigned by high school English teachers in this country are
worth reading. Many of them may well be termed classics.
One recent study of what books were most often taught in American public
schools had these as the top ten: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Huckleberry
Finn, Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and
Men, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies. Although the order varied,
the list for private schools was identical but for one difference: The
Odyssey took Of Mice and Men's place. This is a powerful argument for
privatizing public education.
It is not that John Steinbeck's novel is of a slightly inferior quality
to the other books listed. Rather, it is that it would be like submitting
both Mother Teresa and Angelina Jolie to a Vatican orifice concerned with
beatification under the like principle that they had each taken in numerable
orphans and had publicly engaged in rituals involving the drinking of
blood--belief in transubstantiation being presumed to be not all so different
from having walked about with a sanguinary vial around one's neck taken
from a husband named Billy Bob.
Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird may not be works of the first
rank of literature, but they are intelligent, well-wrought and substantive
novels. Of Mice and Men, first published seventy years ago, is something else
entirely.
There can be no doubt of the book's and author's persistent appeal.
This popularity is by no means limited to secondary school teachers.
Steinbeck's total sales long ago passed the fifty million mark, and Mice
is his highest-selling work, available as a Penguin Classic and in many other
editions, including an annotated critical version edited by that ubiquitous
cultural arbiter, Harold Bloom. There have been at least three movies of the
book, all featuring famous casts. The 1939 film, for example, had Lon Chaney,
Jr. and Burgess Meredith, while the 1981 movie starred Randy Quaid and Robert
Blake, and a 1992 production included Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
Additionally, there have been two stage adaptations that reached Broadway,
and the first of these was even awarded the Drama Critics Circle Prize of
1937-1938 for Best Play--over and above Thornton Wilder's Our Town and
the far more popular adaptation by Erskine Caldwell of his novel, Tobacco
Road. There is also a widely produced Carlisle Floyd opera based upon it. We
must not neglect to mention, of course, that the author's recognition by
the Nobel Committee made particular mention of Steinbeck's facility for
showing "compassion," a skill nowhere so insistently displayed as
in Mice.
For those who have not read it, the story is easy enough to summarize. Two
men, George and Lennie, go to work as fieldhands on a small ranch in
California's central valley region. The ranch is nearest the town of
Soledad: solitude. Man's essential loneliness is omnipresent. But they
are bosom friends--companions who hunt, fish, and sleep next to one another.
Still, it is the 1930s, and jobs are hard to come by. George is a small,
canny man who fantasizes about owning his own plot of land in the area,
living on it and working it alongside Lennie. There they will raise alfalfa
and rabbits and profit by the sweat of their brows. Lennie, who is mentally
deficient, is enchanted by this dream of an independent existence with George
to keep him and watch over him.
But there is a problem. Lennie is a giant, and he does not know his own
strength. Unintentionally, he sometimes kills small creatures. And on the
ranch there is a spoiled and truculent being who is the embodiment of wealth
and privilege: Curley, the ranch owner's good-for-nothing son. Curley is
not a laboring man, not strong nor virile. As such, he fears, hates, and
despises the real workers. Newly wed to a shitty beauty, Curley picks a fight
with the easily cowed Lennie as he is determined to prove his mettle with
this larger and more authentic soul. Yet, in mere self-defense, Lennie hurts
Curley badly, and Curley's wife, when she learns of this, seeks Lennie
out. Accidentally--not from any sort of ill will--Lennie kills her. Out of
sheer mercy, George must then kill his boon companion.
It is beyond preposterous. Think how many absurdities it calls on us to
accept. There are mainly two reasons why modern men of vastly different
intellectual levels will travel with one another and live alongside one
another. The first is that they are lovers. This was not a subtext which
Steinbeck meant to imply. A second reason is that they are relatives. Surely
this is the most common reason that people devote themselves to retarded
people outside of institutional settings. But George and Lennie are only
brothers in a programmatic sense; it is the message of the book that all men
are brothers and that it is our duty to watch over our fellow men and be
their keepers.
With an equal adherence to the rules of logic and plausibility, the book also
asks us to believe that Lennie's murder by strangulation of
Curley's wife--a character so thinly rendered that she is never even
given a name--is without malice. Evidently, it is a perfectly normal thing
for a retarded person innocently to kill another person, so much so that we
cannot but be puzzled that this sort of slaying is not a major social
problem.
These problems with the book were and are by no means hard to detect, and
even at the time of the book's publication--when rapturous appreciation
of the common man and understanding for the struggles of labor were almost
universally recognized as religious impositions upon the righteous and
true-hearted among the intelligentsia--there were many who readily saw
through it.
Still, Steinbeck was not an untalented author, and many of his most notable
skills are on display in Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck frequently said that his
initial intention with the book was to tell it solely, or almost solely,
through dialogue, forming it up in the manner of a play. In this he said that
it was a "failure." After trying to write the book just through its
characters' speech, he added its narrative parts. Both the dialogue and
the narrative of the book are impressive. Although very much a product of the
upper class, Steinbeck had worked on a ranch and he had a good ear. The
speech in the book, if now dated, catches the idiosyncrasies of regional
dialect with great accuracy and flavor. Further, if Steinbeck was not a
stylist of the first rank, he had a good reporters sense for the selective
use of detail. At his best--as in the opening chapters of East of Eden--his
ability to describe the land and the countryside he grew up in can be touched
with a deep and intimate feeling of beauty.
But even by Steinbeck's own modest standards, Of Mice and Men is
melodramatic and contrived. In defending the book, Steinbeck told reporters
that the character of Lennie was based on an actual dimwitted farmhand he had
known who killed a foreman who had fired a friend of his. Such an act is not
surely innocent of intention, and Steinbeck's self-defense was an
admission of the extent to which he had warped a real story to fit his
personal philosophy and to manipulate compliant and unquestioning readers.
Equally revealing was Steinbeck's response when he was asked by a
reporter if the character of Lennie was symbolic. He answered: "[A]ll
fiction characters are symbolic in that they represent human needs and
desires, but that Lennie was no more symbolic than other characters in the
book."
Indeed, all the characters are crudely rendered and unbelievable. There is
also, for example, Slim, the superhuman embodiment of decency, manliness, and
labor who has "god-like eyes" and whose "ear heard more than
was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of
understanding beyond thought."
Moreover, none of the book's scenes is anything but contrived. Each is
one of rising conflict, and at the center of this struggle is the unnamed
woman. Here is how she is introduced:
She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her
fingernails were red. Her hair was in little rolled clusters, like
sausages. She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of
which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers. "I'm looking
for Curley," she said. Her voice had a nasal, brittle quality.
She is not, however, looking for Curley, her husband, but rather that manly
workman Slim, and, as Slim rightly avoids her, she spends most of the book
popping in and out, coming on to all the other workmen. By implication we are
led to believe that her husband, born into modest wealth, may be impotent. It
is the simplest left-wing cliché: the poor men are the real men and
sexually potent, and women married into a higher station are most often bad,
empty-headed, promiscuous, and full of desire for these true sons of the
earth.
In interviews, Steinbeck cited Hemingway as one of his two favorite authors
(the other was Faulkner), and it makes perfect sense. His books reveal no
understanding of sexually mature women but much fear of them, and they are
without complex or ambiguous social situations.
Upon its release, the book received enormous praise with more than a few
writers calling it a masterpiece. Among these admirers were many reviewers
for agit-prop publications like The San Francisco Call and fellow travelers
like the critic and Socialist political candidate Heywood Broun. Steinbecks
previous book, In Dubious Battle (1936), had provided a sympathetic if
unorthodox look at communist agitators, while his reputation as a socialist
polemicist would, of course, be further solidified with The Grapes of Wrath
(1940).
So it's no accident that there was a Left versus Right divide about Of
Mice and Men. Eleanor Roosevelt was strongly in favor of it, and she
befriended the author. By contrast, Time, still guided then by Henry Luce,
mocked the critic Christopher Morley for calling it a "masterpiece . . .
written in purest compassion and truth" and recommended Hans Christian
Andersen for those who liked fables.
Certainly, some of its appeal to high school teachers is that it is so
reductive: almost anyone can understand its lessons and its obvious symbolism
after a "helpful" in-class discussion. This partly also explains
the special popularity of vastly better books like Lord of the Flies, of
course.
Steinbeck had studied marine biology in college, and it was his principal
interest outside literature, so much so that he wrote several books, like
Cannery Row (1945), which feature the subject, and his best friend, Ed
Ricketts, was a marine biologist. Lennie, whose arms move like
"pendula," is a perfect literary specimen of the creature without
any control of his destiny, the proof that none of us is to blame for our
fate. Therefore, Lennie has a special appeal to all those who like to engage
in self-pity and to persuade themselves that they, too, are not responsible
for their unwelcome position, including that of guiding (or more often
baby-sitting) cliquish, self-obsessed teenagers.
Save for its reductive misogyny, the book has every message the contemporary
pseudo-intellectual requires: universal victimhood, the religious necessity
of considering all men as brothers, nature as the true divine, the inevitable
moral superiority of the worker class over the ownership class. There is even
a crippled, black stablehand in the book who is proud and wise, mistreated
and scorned though he is. For those who have neither religion nor sense, it
is both.
Leaf, Jonathan
Source Citation Leaf, Jonathan. "Of mice
Copyright and Terms of Use:
http://www.gale.com/epcopyright