East of Eden by John Steinbeck

22:39And then, you know, he eventually became a writer. Cup of Gold was his first book. It sold pretty well. And then followed that with Tortilla Flat, which is really the one that got him going, 1935. That is a story of sailors mucking around in the honky tonk part. I don't know if it's Salinas itself, but some town, maybe it's Monterey. Actually, I think it's Monterey. I don't have it in the notes here. But one of these California towns and then it's off to the races uh what a run 1937 of mice of men grapes of wrath 1939 canary row 1945 um and then east of eden seven years later there wrote wrote for film a lot by the time of i think it was canary row his stuff was getting optioned for hollywood before it was available like the scott rudin kind of thing we heard of the 90s and 2000s scott rudin who who's persona non grata now, but is famous for bird-dogging these books and getting a hold of them earlier.

23:38But he was an old-school lefty, but not a dogmatist. He was a member of the Writers of America, I think is the name, but it was a communist organization for writers. I mean, Grapes of Wrath is one of the great anti-capitalist novels, but then he also volunteered to spy for the CIA and came out in favor of Vietnam. So kind of hard to pin down, Rebecca. Complicated dude. What is your sense of Steinbeck as a person?

24:02Jeff:I mean, first, you breezed right by, offered to spy for the CIA. I actually had that later, but we'll come back to that. Well, we don't know. I'll come back to that. Yeah. It seems like he did do some spy work, but of course, the details have not been disclosed. This portrait of him, I didn't know a whole lot about him either. I read Grapes of Wrath and of Mice and Men in school. I've read Travels of Charlie. And I'm sure that my teachers gave me some Steinbeck biography. But what I could really tell you is Monterey, California. And that guy has thoughts about families and manifest destiny and the complexities of the American identity and economy, which I think that all comes out here, but seems complicated, interesting.

24:50Jeff:His friendship with Ed Ricketts is particularly interesting to me that Ricketts was something of a polymath. He was really knowledgeable about biology and philosophy in a wide array of subjects. I think that maps into the characters of Samuel Hamilton and Lee in the text that Steinbeck liked to be around these people who were interested in all kinds of things in the world. And he seems to have been a person who was interested in being in the world and being of the world. I also, I just need to get this into the record. After Cup of Gold came out in 1929, he wrote a werewolf novel called Murder at Full Moon.

25:28Jeff:That's one does. Yeah, never saw the light of day because he didn't think it was good enough, but release the tapes. I want to see Murder at Full Moon. Do you think that's in an archive somewhere, Murder at Full Moon? I hope so. What about a shadow pod that is the books that authors wrote that they've distanced and stuff from, like the Delillo hockey romance? I mean, that's coming back in print in November. I'm just saying that there are these books, there are these, they all have their canes that have been cast out of their literary Edens of what they associate with. I see what you're doing there.

26:00Great point here from the Nobel. Why don't you take this?

26:02Jeff:Yeah, I mean, Steinbeck was not here for the I just want to read a good story flavor of writing. He really believed that writing and art had a higher purpose. And in his Nobel speech, he says, the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light and dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit, for gallantry and defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation.

26:42Jeff:so a real like man it's tough to be a human and art is the way to get through it and writers have a big job you know i have never seen it put quite this way but i think i have i don't call it weakness but i am over indexed on caring being moved by stories of gallantry and defeat this is why i love the great don quixote so much this is why i'm a hamlet guy right of like I cannot control this it's all going to go down in flames but in the midst of that I am going to try to behave well or be heroic or be noble or engage with it and really wrestle and not give in um the great line in the winter and the line in winter is like uh one character asks how why if why does it matter how a man falls and the other character says when the fall is all that it's left that's why it matters here in our in our failure and in our weakness how do we to quote Edna St.

27:39Vincent de Malay rage rage against the dying of the light even if that light is the vision of ourself as a good person at the same time yeah I think a tangly complex

27:51Jeff:view of humanity as well and that's evident in even just that one paragraph from his Nobel speech that there is darkness, there are terrible things, and we create art. Yeah. And I think that that shows up in the figure of Kathy Ames. And I think her representation here, presence and representation hand in hand, confound any of the 10th rate moral philosophizing things. Because she is not beyond good and evil, but he is very interested in what she represents and how to deal with a figure like that, right? And it's gendered for sure, but it's also non-gendered in a macro way, right? These people exist in all kinds of forms, but it's particularly interesting to see how he constructs and sees her gets trapped.

28:41The combination of her nature and her circumstance lead to a really bad thing. And nature and circumstance, that's all over this in all kinds of stories. And by the way, 10th Right, philosophizing New York Times editor. We certainly have figured that out, right? We figured out nature versus nurture. We've got it all handled, right? We got it all handled.

28:59Jeff:Tenth-rate philosophizing is such a burn. It's really got me bothered. I saw it in the notes and now I'm really bothered by it. I'm so sorry I did that to you. Okay, I get it. It's not Heidegger, cool, who was also a real piece of work. Anyway, Anyway, Rebecca, having said all that, the most important background for our conversation is that you had no background with this particular work. Did you have any Steinbeck? Oh, you had to hear. Yeah, yeah. I had read Grapes of Wrath. I had read Of Mice and Men in high school. I've read Travels with Charlie on my own. That's a book about taking road trips with his dog.

29:33Jeff:Highly recommend. It's really fun. It's great. And I was just waiting for a time to pick this up. Like, over the years, you have mentioned East of Eden. I know that you really love and care about this book. I knew we would get there. This is one of the books, like, we had to invent the project of zero to well read to give ourselves space in our professional reading lives to read a 600 page novel like this. I'm so glad. I think also there's something about reading it for me from this moment of being like middle aged and being able to have lived some life and have some perspective on humanity. I think that's a very interesting point.

30:12Jeff:that it would be I'm very curious about your experiences with it here because you read it the first time in high school right yeah I mean I don't want to do TMI here but like I am a son and a brother so there you go um I think if you have siblings if you have parents I mean it's so much about that I think the thing it has an all-time ending and we're not going to we're going to talk about it but I that's the thing that really moved me initially and that's kind of, I don't know, reading 101 to be moved by the end of East of Eden. But over time, I think it has grown in my estimation because of its recognition and even valorization or even to hold sacred the complexity of these relationships, right?

31:00It is not suggesting, well, here's your moralizing story. And if you just did it this way, it'd all be figured out. We have moralizing evangelist people who have it all figured out and they're uninteresting inside characters and frankly get satirized more than they get included in the story. What Steinbeck cares about is something I care about, which is how do you deal with the problem of we all have angels and demons with us? Maybe there are some that don't. Maybe some have more of one or the other, but those are not the interesting people. The interesting people is the people in the middle who are wrestling with their own shit and the shit of others in trying in that great shit wrestling to come out clean at a moment or for a little while or to stand outside of it or to figure out some way of getting the laundry done that doesn't require everyone to be rolling around and shit all the time.

31:47And his own life story, you can see, you don't have four marriages and think you have it all figured out. I cannot believe at the end of Steinbeck's life, you know what, I'm really figuring, this is the time. He knows of what he speaks when it comes to the complexity. And one of the things that really spoke to me at this point, and this will segue into what it's like to read this, is I've never really articulated or thought about it in this way, though I felt it in my bones. There is no one moment in your life where you're like, now I can articulate how I feel. Yeah. Right? It begins before you're aware of awareness.

32:20Mm-hmm. And it accrues, and it accrues, and it accrues. And maybe at some point you realize there's something there that needs to be said or you could say to someone. Well, have fun with that. Right? Have fun with that. Yeah. And then finally, he recognizes all that, and yet the effort is still worth it. It doesn't go great all the time, but there's something on the other side of that. I know one of our favorite lines we've rediscovered together is, we must have it out, Joe, from Little Women. There's a lot of we must have it out, Joes, here. There is. And sometimes Rebecca goes well and sometimes it doesn't, but it's the saying of the thing that matters and that that is a heroic act.

33:00Jeff:Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that it's not necessarily the outcome of those conversations that is important. It's what having had the conversation does for you as a person who needed to say the thing. I thought a lot about that because there are multiple moments of estrangement, of like brothers being estranged from each other or husbands and wives not speaking for a while, where Steinbeck is looking at the ways we respond to conflict and to difficulty in our relationships and estrangement or like what the kids would call going no contact is today. Like that is an option that's available to you. It's not as clean and easy as it sounds.

33:39Jeff:That causes its own kind of pain. And Steinbeck gets into that. And there's I think he does place a real value and even a moral valence on that should be like the last ditch ripcord that the work of being a person is finding a way to say the thing to the people in your life that you wish to be in relationships with or that because of their family and you don't have a choice. Like you want to find a way to be in relationships with them. And I think he would hold that there are reasons to maybe just cut someone purely out. Like Kathy leaves and nobody goes chasing after her trying to bring her home.

34:19Jeff:You know, he lets that stand. But that in these central connections of our lives, there's no way to have those without having conflict, without having difficulty. And so what do you do? Like, why should we have the conflict instead of just bailing? I think he's deeply interested in that. And it goes all kinds of ways for these people, which feels alive and true for what it is to be a person. Yeah, and the reason that happens is because the world falls on us all differently. We're born with different biology, but we're also born with different social circumstances and family systems we're born into.

34:59Even being born into the same family system, you are different, and then your parents and the circumstance, you may be treated differently. And that goes back to the Cain and Abel thing. It's like, you know, maybe God liked lambs more than vegetables. Okay. I mean, we don't really know, you know, how bad was God's like, you know, nice try Cain, but come back and try again. Like nice job. But I really liked this other stuff. It was like, I can't believe that you have done this. That is the worst crap we've ever done. And we see versions of those kinds of stories where one son does not get what they want from their father specifically and then stews on it.

35:34and ultimately the book comes to the point where there's a lesson for the sons or the siblings or the children or for all of us who do not get what we thought we wanted but also for the givers right and that's one of the great grace notes at the end of this i'll say is that adam trask tries in not wanting a gift that his son gives him to be honest about not wanting it not to lie but then also say why but to not be cruel but not to be cruel and he says the great gift you could be is to live a happy life. And Cal even then has to wrestle with it at the same time. But so I think that's something that stuck with me over and over again.

36:10Even if you have the courage to say the thing you need to say and say it, it doesn't always mean people are, it's not always going to go great, Rebecca. That is not a skeleton key to a cheat code to figuring the world out, but it's all that you've got.

36:24Jeff:Yeah. And then you become the kind of person who says the thing And that's valuable. And then maybe you can grow up to be the kind of person that hears the difficult thing and deals with it something like grace at the same time. I'm glad that you brought the word grace into the conversation. I think it's really critical for this book. I don't think that word is mentioned in this book. It's not. Not Methodist. They're Episcopalians, not Methodist. So that's important. That's a real deep cut for all my promises. It's in the water. That's the sound of a bunch of listeners Googling difference between Methodists and Episcopals.

36:59Jeff:So what is it like to read the book? It's epic in every sense. There's a lot of characters. It telescopes between intimate details of family life and relationships out to really big questions, declarations, philosophizing, delivery of wisdom happens on the page. It's also deeply grounded. Like the story is deeply grounded in the place of the Salinas Valley. And that groundedness, I think, gives us solid ground to stand on while we're doing all this big work with Steinbeck. But he's interested in how much control do we have over our behavior, over our fate? He has ideas about morality and masculinity and sexuality and family and about the military and war, just all the big shit.

37:51Jeff:Yeah, it really does. A bingo card of the biggest stuff we worry about as people. And I found it to have that he had a real grasp and a real perspective on human nature that is, it seems to me, clear eyed, but generous, like aware of. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. There's a phrase I have down below. Dreadful beauty comes up. There's a couple of permutations of it. And I think he thinks of humans as beautiful and dreadful and dreadful and beautiful kind of hand in glove. Yeah. Also deeply concerned with truth, with our responsibility for our actions, our responsibility to the truth and with lies that we tell ourselves in order to maintain an illusion of goodness to ourselves or to others.

38:36Jeff:And there's a big moment that you will feel in the text around the Hebrew word timshil, which is translated to mean thou mayest. And this is the free will, real or no moment. um it's also apparently a mistranslation um it might be artistic license um but that i mean that in itself is really interesting but when you hit tim shell in the reading you'll know really you'll know it really means something um we need to talk as a reading as we walk through this and how to deal with the racial stereotypes um gender as well and then we get the the n-word um thrown about uh quite a bit. And then the character of Lee, which is a wonderful character, but also is trafficking in some, didn't have the language of the day, of model minority stereotypes that go along with Asian people and Asian characters.

39:32It's there, Rebecca. And I don't know, this is one thing where you don't want to use the this isn't Steinbeck himself writing as a get out of jail free card. I think you just have to look squarely at it and think of it both as a representation of the biases of the day, of Steinbeck's day, but also the days he's representing at the same time. You don't have to choose one or the other. I think it is more than okay to be offended. And it is, I think, probably the rational response. I think it's also okay to hold that and then continue to engage with the text at the same time. So I'm not sure what else we can say, except to note it.

40:08I think the character of Lee, I'll be fascinated to see how that's handled in the modern adaptation. Alexander Chee, who is a great novelist in his own right, was brought on, it looks like, or you say explicitly, you sent me the vanity of your piece, to write an episode dedicated to Lee. And it's there in the text. We get a Lee family history in SideQuest and his own story. A complicated figure that himself is a representation of racism in the story, right? It's explicitly talked about how Lee has navigated racism, Rebecca. So I think to do the negative capability thing that John Keats and Shakespeare said have two opposite ideas at the same time and not go nuts, there are racist representations here and racist representations are part of the story and being thought about at the same time.

40:56Yeah, that's right.

40:58Jeff:And also a tough look for women, too. You mentioned Steinbeck was married and divorced four times. The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden are both written on the cusp of divorce. And they both, especially this book, have some things to say about women and how they can be to be married to, to deal with, how they can be when they're angry. I think Steinbeck projected a lot onto women and is interested in the things that men project onto women. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. In the intro to the terms. Yeah. I read the Penguin Classics edition and it has a great intro from David Wyatt.

41:37Jeff:And he even says just point blank that East of Eden can be read as a study of male projection of the ways in which its author and its men create women out of all they wish to be or to disavow. But it can also be read more powerfully as a book about making in an enabling sense. So multiple layers of things happening here. But what is Steinbeck saying about women? And what do the men in the book think about the women that they are dealing with? And where do those things meet? And where do they diverge is an interesting question to hold. And also a thing we'll never be able to answer for ourselves.

42:10And there's some direct discussion in the book of like, you know, he's someone says about Adam, he saw Kathy, but didn't see her. Like the talking about projecting and not seeing people for who they really are, especially when it comes to gender, is in the text. It doesn't mean it gets outside of it or around it, but it's in there.

42:26Jeff:And it happens with Aaron and Abra in the younger generation where he like concocts this whole idea of her as this like perfect, pure person that she knows he's concocting. and she can't live under that projection. And it's like, you know, I'm not perfect. Like, I can't be this thing that you've imagined me to be. And that projection is the source of a lot of tension. Fathers and sons? Fathers and sons, man. Fathers and sons goes all the way back to the very beginning. I also am encouraged as someone who has teenagers in my house that there is backtalk in Genesis of, what, am I my brother's keeper?

43:05Right from the beginning, there was talk back. Mm-hmm. Teenagers. Yeah. I mean, I think if you know that Cain and Abel doesn't go great for people, that foreknowledge, you don't need foreshadowing. He hasn't do a lot of foreshadowing work there. But we also know that the sort of Damocles hanging over the whole story is the truth about Kathy, what she's done and who she is that her sons don't know about is fascinating. um what do you what should we say about kathy here this is a this was a flashpoint at the time my sense and tell me what your sense is that in a post gone girl world kathy aims seems more interesting than probably people were giving her credit for at the time is that your sense of it

43:49Jeff:i agree i thought about gone girl and amy dunn so much while i was reading this um that you know Kathy starts off as a kind of one-dimensional monster, and Steinbeck presents her to us that way. But she becomes complex and even sympathetic at points where we get to see that she understands herself as having something more than other people have. While the people around her think of her as having a missing piece or being less than human in some way. And that really makes me want to go back and read this again and just really get into the Kathy stuff to look at what is it? Where does that tip happen from this is a one-dimensional monster to this is a full human person who is a product of both nature and nurture.

44:46Jeff:and it's impossible to know the degree to which each of those things created her. But as we talked about in the Gone Girl episode, like some women are evil. Some women are crazy. And the question is like, are they is not an interesting question, but what makes them that way is. And what makes Kathy the way she is is right there on the page for us. She is worthy of a lot of attention and investigation. I don't know that Steinbeck was interested or would have had the ability to wield the idea of patriarchy. But Kathy's origin story, to use a modern parlance, is when she's young, she basically tells her parents, I don't want to do this.

45:27Yeah. Right. And they say, you're going to do this. And they punish her for not doing it. And then she, you know, her origin story there is that she then pretends to play the good girl like Amy Dunn does. and spoiler alert, spoiler alert, fast forward, fast forward, maybe beyond now you really should fast forward this first 40 minutes here. She sets the house on fire and kills them so she can get out of that, right? That's her move is to, I don't want to be subject to this bullshit constrained way of the world. And that is constant throughout. When she gets into this marriage, her escape with Adam to the West is to get out of like the pickle she finds herself in this.

46:06She is bruised and battered and literally has nowhere else to go. And then, but also doesn't what's available to her there. And so she makes some decisions. It's all about freedom and control for her. Yes, it is. And for a woman at this point, this is the one, she rises to the one place where she has maximal freedom and control of her life. And that's to be the madam of a brothel.

46:28Jeff:Yeah, and she shoots Adam to get out of his house. Yes. Like when she tries to end her pregnancy, which is a brutal scene. Oh, God. I did not remember that at all. I was completely taken aback by that. That is a difficult scene to read for how she suffers in that moment. She doesn't want to have kids. And, you know, like abortion's not legal yet. Birth control is not like birth control is decades away. She's blackmailed into not trying to get an abortion by the doctor who says, if you try this again, I'm going to say all the shit about you. Right. There's like she has no control over her body and she tells Adam she does not want these kids and she doesn't want the life that he has created for them.

47:13Jeff:And he doesn't believe her. And so she shoots him to get out of his house. Yeah.

47:48Jeff:the public domain, we will get a Kathy flipped POV retelling, I'm sure of it. And it'll be super interesting. Can we sign Gillian Flynn up for that right now? Well, I'm not, I mean, yes, absolutely. But I'm not so sure that what I'm seeing out of the Pew Kazan, Zoe Kazan isn't doing a little of that to the beginning. It may be not flipping, but re-centering. Something you don't, you just said triggered something for me, and I don't exactly remember the phrase, but I want to give you credit for it, is if we don't have Kathy in this book, And it's way, it's just Cain and Abel stuff. Yep. It's way less interesting if there's no Kathy.

48:25In fact, if you think about it, her name Kathy Ames has the C and the A, right? But she eventually renames herself Kate, that's a K. So that is outside of this Cain and Abel dialectic, right? But she's so important to Steinbeck's own worldview and his own questions, his own uncertainty. And then the characters, they become, her legacy is something they have to wrestle with both explicitly in the form of a will, but also, did I inherit that stuff? Maybe I did when I didn't. But the most interesting characters have inherited something where the good wrestling of their own virtue is part of it. And her presence is really like the world doesn't always work out great.

49:05Like it's not a beautiful world. And shit happens. And then what do you do?

49:10Jeff:Then what do you do? You know, Adam is explicitly named Adam, so it's clear who he is. He is Adam from the Bible. But Kathy is the Eve character who, you know, tempts Adam into the fall biblically. But I think that what if Adam refused to fall is not a terrible way to read the long arc of this book. And is Kathy fallen? Right. Is an interesting question. Well, and then, you know, what the apple represents, which is knowledge, right? And the thing, and it's explicitly in this text that Steinbeck in the form of Samuel Hamilton says, you know, it's our knowledge of sexuality and our ability to control or not control our sexuality, which means it's human.

49:48Like that is the origin of free will to say, I've got this thing in me. If I just followed my, again, if I just followed my id, I would be a sexual criminal essentially. And I wouldn't even know I'm a crime because animals don't have this really. They just don't have this. The thing that makes us different, and it's narrativized and metaphorized in Genesis, is we know what the apple is. We've got this apple. What do we do with this? And on the one hand, it gives us sin. But I think on the other hand, it gives us the thing that Steinbeck cares about the most, which is individual human creativity and imagination.

50:26Had we not the apple, we would not have art. We would not have music. We would not have invention or beauty or the ability to think about ourselves outside of ourselves because we only know what we don't know. And in certain degree, Kathy represents a misuse of that apple or a use of that apple under extraordinary circumstances that I think I ultimately come to see her as being subject to. She was doing what she had. She could have done something differently, I guess. But it's the system. But she used what she had to get out of it. And the world paid, but maybe the world deserved it.

51:06Jeff:Yeah, I think that's one of the key distinctions between what Steinbeck does and what happens on the page in Genesis is like that Eve just gets blamed for the whole thing. If she hadn't eaten the apple, if she hadn't tempted the man. And a simple reading of East of Eden is this woman is the problem. Like she shoots her husband, she leaves her kids, she goes and becomes a madam. So she's also enabling the sexual downfall of other people. She's supporting that and she's profiting off of it. But Steinbeck does see her existing inside a system. And I think the novel benefits, at least in a 2026 reading, from him not using that kind of language.

51:48Jeff:Like there is not critical, like gender critical language on the page or systems of patriarchy written into it. But it's all there if you understand to look for it. Yeah. And I don't think that the complexity of Kathy makes up for the relatively lack of complexity amongst other women characters. Like, they're people of virtue and value, but they're not really all that complicated. This one's not passing the Bechdel test. No, probably Desi's shop is an interesting space. Like, there are some things you can look for, but they certainly don't get the kinds of moral philosophizing and discussion with each other about the big ideas that the men get.

52:28though they do get moments, but there are more moments than major stories. Yeah, this is a man's world in this book. It's a man's world. I really was thinking about the idea of the garden versus the natural world, right? Oh, cultivation. Cultivation. You know, it's called the Garden of Good and Evil, but before then, before the fall, before the apple, it was just gardened for them. But, you know, you shall cultivate the lands and make it bear fruit. Think about that and colonialism in the West and like manifest destiny. And Steinbeck doesn't dwell on it, but I think there's enough there that I think that's something he's thinking about at the same time.

53:04The garden is the creation of human ingenuity and understanding and manipulation of the natural world. It is not the natural world. And where do those things? Weirdly, Adam is a bad farmer. Like the original Adam didn't care. He's like, everything is taken care of for me, so I don't need to farm.

53:20Jeff:Yeah, and Samuel Hamilton can find water on everyone's land but his own. And he has bad land, but he can farm. It's weird. there's a lot of stories in storytelling, people telling each other stories, thinking about stories, using them, abusing them. Cyrus and Samuel, especially Cyrus Trask, who is a fraud, a winning fraud, a rogue and a raconteur who lies about his own experience in the Civil War to become somewhat of a, would you call him a talking head of the day? What was your understanding of Cyrus' Trask position, where he would advise the military, but he was not of the government. It was weird.

53:59Jeff:Yeah, he's weaseled himself into the tightest circles in Washington and presented himself. Stolen valor is the phrase, that he's presented himself as a veteran of battles he never saw. Yes. And managed to profit off of it quite significantly, but to go unsuspected that all of the men in those circles of power respected him, called him for advice, and, you know, never had any idea that he was not who he said he was. So I was like, this is a recurring figure in the world, but especially a recurring figure in American identity and politics that you can make yourself whoever you wish to be. And a wild thing to realize, really, how recently it was that it became harder to perpetuate that kind of fraud or to get away with it.

54:52Jeff:Like Kathy moves like 10 miles away to become a madam and it takes them years to figure out that's where she is. Like over the county line might as well have been darkest night of wherever in Venezuela though you really couldn't get it's like just over the county line I just need to get Ethel out of the county and everything's going to be fine. Cyrus also that that fraud personally became a financial fraud and was the first of many ill-gotten fortunes. You know what? You couldn't trip over a dead cat in this world and not have a misbegotten fortune land in your lap and be like, oh, great. What am I going to do with this?

55:28It was all over the place.

55:29Jeff:You just get a letter one day that's like somebody died and you've got 100 grand now. How do you feel about it? Oh, and by the way, it was criminally acquired. So you got to do that. And speaking of that, lots of pretending and performance. Who gets to pretend? Who knows about pretending and who can't pretend, right? Yeah. For example, Adam is, Adam can't pretend. He can't be anything other than he is. So he's morally uninteresting because he is just, he just behaves well because that's what he is. Yeah. There's even a line, I can't remember if it's about him or about Samuel Hamilton because they're both like very upstanding men.

56:03But it was like, he was basically, I think it's Samuel Hamilton because he's got 10 kids.

56:08Jeff:And it's like, he's tired all the time. And the line is something like, he's good, but probably for lack of energy. Like he just didn't have time to get up to shenanigans. To scheme. Yeah. Time to scheme. He wanted to patent stuff the whole time. Also about the bargain of greatness as a superlative, not as a moral judgment. Hard, if not impossible, to be both good and great is a quote. All great and precious things are lonely. It reminds me a little bit of not the only, unlike the old biblical phrase of like, it's harder for a camel. It's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to pass the needle's eye.

56:42There's something about being moral and a striving for to be a world transformer that do not go hand in hand.

56:49Jeff:What is the right size of ambition is a real question here. Like what to do with ambition. How much is it okay to want? How hard can you work to get those things that you want? And then when do you tip into being corrupt or bad? An exploiter, right? Or being a thief. Right, interested in the wrong things. To go back to the note about performance, I was so surprised and delighted and just electrified by the discovery that Lee is performing, that he's speaking pigeon, that when we meet Lee, he is doing a stereotyped Asian accent. And then he pivots and is speaking in standard, educated English. And he tells the people around him, oh, it's because that's what people expect from me.

57:39Jeff:That's what people expect a Chinese immigrant to sound like. And it upsets them. And it rang all my bells for Percival Everett's James of this marginalized person who is in a dangerous position in some ways where it could be harmful in some circles for them to reveal how much they know, how smart they are, how much power they do actually have. But that Steinbeck was playing with that 74 years ago, really interesting. Well, and that Lee's own investigation into the book of Genesis and the story of Cain and Abel is the inciting, the catalyst that gets us to our climax, which is very, the last phrase is the climax of the book in which Cal in a fit of frustration and jealousy of his brother tells him the thing that he knows will hurt her the most of who Kathy is, what she has become.

58:37And Aaron then goes to enlist and is killed in the war. And they get a note. There's a harrowing scene of Lee knowing what the envelope on the porch is. Yeah.

58:48Jeff:It's like the four words, the deep breath yeah yeah and it's like he says and he takes it in and he tells cal and he gives it to adam and adam essentially has a stroke um and hearing it and cal as you might imagine is devastated because he understands that the thing that led his brother to enlist is this running away from this information essentially not being able to deal with it and he knows it and adam knows it and everybody knows this is what's happened. And Lee is exhorting him, you've got to go talk to your father before he dies. He could die any moment. You've got to go talk to him. And Lee helps him, but also Cal does it.

59:28And Lee is really imploring Adam say something to the boy, even just say his name, right? Just give us some sense of your hearing. And Adam says, Timshel, which is this translation is the Almeas, and that's the end of the book. So Lee is critical into this investigation, into the scholarliness, into this moral interpretation. But the denouement, or not the denouement, the climax of the book is Adam mustering everything he has to say to his son, it's more complicated than yes or no. Go forth. Whatever your life is going to be, my judgment of you is not the end of your story. And I'm not even going to judge you in this moment.

1:00:10Go forth, and thou mayest be a good person from here on out. This is not the end of your story. Thou mayest do something with this. This is not the end. And I guess he sleeps then. I think we're supposed to understand he's going to die. You can't really go on from there.

1:00:22Jeff:Closes his eyes, and he sleeps. I had the full text of the Timschul, like the first time Timschul comes up. Oh, cool, yeah. Saved for notable quotes, but I'll do it here. That's great. Where it's kind of in the middle of the book, Lee is talking with Adam, and he says, Don't you see? The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in thou shalt, meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word temshel, thou mayest, that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world.

1:00:57Jeff:That says the way is open. That throws it right back on man. For if thou mayest, it is also true that thou mayest not. Free will, Jeff O 'Neill. real or no yeah I mean Yes. Or maybe. I mean, it's to say is if you will, maybe is kind of saying yes. As I've said before, and like when my kids have asked me about my own free will, something I think I stole from somebody, I don't remember who. It's like, I don't know about free will, but we have to act as if we do have free will. and so that Adam is saying to Kyle, yeah, you sinned here, but thou mayest triumph over it. And I believe that you can. And what else do we want from the people who we've wronged than that?

1:01:41Better than forgiveness. Yeah. Better than forgiveness.

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1:03:47Sense and Sensibility. The man who loves me must burn with it. If such a man exists. Come be the man I need. From the producers of Pride and Prejudice, experience Jane Austen's iconic masterpiece. Perhaps we ought to dance. And feel everything you've been yearning for. Does it not move you? Excite your senses, stir your soul. Sense and Sensibility. Rated PG. Parental guidance suggested. Only in theaters October 16th. All right. our favorite part of the episode in many ways, because it's, it's tries to contain the uncontainable experience of reading complicated text by like, what else did you notice, Rebecca, where would you like to begin?

1:04:24You mentioned James already and Everett, do you want to say anything else about that?

1:04:27Jeff:Yeah, I mean, I did wonder, Percival Everett is such a wide reader that I wondered if Lee was a partial inspiration for James's code switching in the book James. And I think Lee is one of the all time great candidates for a switched POV novel when the book hits public domain. I would also like a genre retelling that has Kathy as a vampire. I think that would be super fun. There was something in one of the moments that I was like, oh, that would just be interesting to present. Well, she's like dyed her hair black and she's wearing gloves and like she's very arch and like there's something there's something vampires, you know, the one dimensional reading of vampires is that they're evil, but all the good vampire stories are multidimensional and they complicate all of that.

1:05:09Jeff:And I just think that would be that would be really fun. The organization of the book is masterful, that it moves between the narrative strands that kind of leave you hanging, that it keeps the tension up, it keeps the pages turning. I think we talked about this some in the intro episode for the read-along participants, that something really big will happen in one of the stories in the book, and then the next chapter is like Steinbeck doing some philosophizing, and you got to wait a while before you come back to the story. Also, I am dying to know the backstory of the madam named Fartin' Ginny.

1:05:44Absolutely. I had a question about the economics of brothels in Salinas, California, because there are three brothels that seem to do wonderful trade. But how many people do we think live in this town? It's a great question. And when did it stop being a case where everyone knew where the brothel was? Or maybe I've just been like, did you know where the brothel was in your town? Like, when did we just stop? Was it what? I don't understand. Like, how many dollars were spent through this?

1:06:10Jeff:I think that, I mean, maybe some of this too is this is early 20th century, like late 19th, early 20th century when this is happening and that it's still socially acceptable without being acknowledged as socially acceptable for men, especially young unmarried men who have the sexual urges that people have to go to a brothel to, you know, handle that rather than contaminate one of the young girls. And so, like, that's just the men sort of refer to this with each other. And there's even a subplot where Kathy's got blackmail material on a bunch of the important men in town. And one of them figures it out and burns all the letters and tells one of the men that he had photos of, like, I took care of this for you.

1:06:58Jeff:And it's a moment of both like Steinbeck acknowledging the structural ways that men will protect each other and justify it as, well, if all of this came out, it would ruin the town. But like that there were so many of them that like most of the powerful men were going to these brothels and Kathy had dirt on them. I think maybe it was just more woven into the social fabric than we understand now. Men just have needs and they either don't want to subject their wives to them or their wives won't do it or these men aren't married yet. And the good girls won't go there with you. So the brothel exists.

1:07:36Jeff:It's not the oldest profession in the world for no reason. No, I believe it. It seems to be a pretty bright line between this kind of story where there's like three brothels and everyone knows it until like 30 years later. Yeah. Right. Or like, and where do they exist later? That they meet these different needs that Kate, Faye, Faye's house where Kate eventually takes over becomes like the place where if you've got fetish or like kink that you want to get into. The circus. Yes. A sexual circus. Did you, I don't want to describe, I don't, my Puritan brain just says, my Puritan brain could not conjure what the sexual circus like.

1:08:10I have no idea what I'm dealing with.

1:08:12Jeff:like the kinds of shows you could get tickets to in the red light district in Amsterdam, something like that. There's a reference to one of the girls being the one who smokes the cigarette and like it ain't with her mouth, friends. I do think that the suppression and the consequence of suppression of sexuality is a major theme of this book for both men and women, mostly for men, but certainly for women too. No transition to the horse names here, Rebecca, that I can think of, at least not. That's going to be cool for everyone. What do you think it works? Samuel Hamilton's horse is named doxology, and that's just incredible shit.

1:08:51Jeff:Again, back to the church things. Praise him to all who blessings flow. So for the unchurched among us. Praise him all creatures here below, including horses. The doxology is the blessing that is sung at the end of a church service. Oh, sorry, I should have said that. In most Protestant circles. Classic pastor's kid over there, Jeff. You're just acting out while I'm trying to get this on here. Is there only just one doxology? Is that the doxology? Because that was our doxology. No, I think the doxology is just the thing that goes at the end. It's just the thing that goes at the end. But the Methodists, like we do have a particular one.

1:09:21Jeff:But great horse name. I see you, John Steinbeck, and I appreciate it. And I also just, again, like wild that people could keep the kinds of secrets that they're able to keep in this book in such geographic proximity to each other. because technology isn't a thing. Really amazing. All right, I'll do a few of mine. So there's an early dismissal of Native peoples as being an inferior breed who is lazy. That's extraordinarily tough to take. It's tough, yeah. And I am not here to explain it or dismiss it or otherwise sweep it under the rug. I want to sort of hold it. But I was also connecting it to Adam's PTSD.

1:09:58He joins the cavalry and is largely working in the Indian wars to kill Native peoples to take their land. That's what's happening. But he can't ever talk about it. And he thinks it was horrible. And I think the original sin of America is the two apples of slavery and the taking of lands. And I think there's a version of me, there's also a version of me that's just mortified, and is always mortified by this and this representation. But maybe that dismissal and added PTSD and this this cod of ill-begotten gains and what do you do with it love this might be there might be something there again I think I want to hold a couple possibilities but it's there and this was stolen land and it's not talked about except that it is but in order to rationalize that theft you have to say well the people weren't worth they didn't deserve they were they were inferior breed.

1:10:57Um, so that's there.

1:10:58Jeff:Like it seems dehumanizing because it is dehumanizing. Yeah, it is dehumanizing. Um, the scene situation of the brothel in relation to the town and law enforcement, like the sheriff knows and kind of works hand in hand with the madams, the courtesans, um, to keep the peace. And the sheriff's recognition that were we to get rid of this, we'd have more problems than we have now. So there is no squaring the circle of sin, but even sexuality may not be a sin. It's just something we have. Right. And the way that it has to flow. But we don't know what to do with it. We don't know what to do with it.

1:11:28Also, the guy should masturbate more. I think that's something that we really needed to talk about. It's fine, guys. It's better than getting old Joe at Fart and Jenny's.

1:11:36Jeff:Yeah, this is like the moment in American history where there are brothels, but there's not like any widely distributed porn. We're still decades away from like kids just discovering porn in the woods, which is maybe maybe that's the tipping point. Maybe it's the like playboy. Porn and contraception and we didn't need brothels anymore. Yeah. Maybe something like that. I don't know. I was thinking about Desi, Olive, and Una, three of the Hamilton women. Una who died young and sort of became the angel figure. Olive who is the matriarch of what would become the Steinbeck family tree. A hardworking, if not especially gifted teacher who goes forth to teach and take one of the few available professions for women at the time.

1:12:21and then Desi, the entrepreneur. So there's the angel, the teacher, and the entrepreneur at the same time. Desi, the tragedy of Desi and Tom, who reconnect later in life and who are going to live as brother and sister on the ranch, and they're so thrilled. There's this wonderful scene when Desi's going to move to the ranch because her life has not worked out exactly the way she wanted to, neither has Tom's, but they find in each other a kind of sibling fellowship that we don't see represented in any kind of other way. And she's moving back to the ranch. And the scene I was shocked I found so moving where Tom is sort of the stereotypical bachelor has gone to the trouble of setting up a bunch of signs on the road of welcome home.

1:13:05Yeah, it's really sweet. It's so beautiful and tender. I love that. But I found myself really moved by that. And then she dies. She gets some disease, sure, whatever, and dies. It's so sad. There's a mini tragedy within the great epic here, as often happens in epics, that we get these mini tragedies alongside of them.

1:13:25Jeff:Yeah, and Tom feels partially responsible for her death, and he can't live with that guilt. Like Steinbeck, talk about biblical stuff, deeply concerned with guilt and with how we carry guilt. How to move through the world after it is not easy, man. A genuinely funny scene of trying to learn how to operate a modern sea. This is the thing I had never thought about before. Like how hard was it to drive the very first cars? It sounds rough. Yeah. It's kind of like imagining teaching your grandparent or your parents about like how to check their spam or something like that. Like it's really like, you know, restart the hard drive.

1:14:01Like this happens. This new technology enters into the world. And the arrogance of this kid who went to Chicago for three months to learn mechanical school.

1:14:09Jeff:And he's like, it's really easy. You just need to repeat out loud these 25 steps. Yeah, it really is. As they're trying to crank the car, like they're all in it together, chanting, like switch to bat. Do this. Do this next step. Do this. Have we done it all? Is it going to work? And then like the cars are overheated and they're ticking. And like there's a description of it at one point of breathing that the car has been overheated and is still like respiring. It's like a dragon or a beast of some kind. And I really hope we get a scene like that in the seven-part series for levity. A good comic relief.

1:14:45I think that would be really fun.

1:14:46Jeff:Yeah. I'm glad you called that out. That was a fun bit of reading. I don't remember this at all from my first reading, but Kathy's reading of Alice in Wonderland as a sustaining narrative or whatever it is, is genuinely frightening, Rebecca. Yeah. I'm not sure what else to say about it. Read it when you get there. essentially she reads alice in wonderland what she kid and i think in the teaser for the pew um kazan i don't know who the director is i'm calling it the pew kazan thing because kazan wrote it so he wrote and directed it yeah um but that i want to make myself small where no one can find me was the opening clip of that so they're centering this piece and essentially what happens is that Kate now Kathy now Kate commits suicide with whatever she's been wearing this thing around her neck like a spy who has the arsenic tooth for years she's had suicide every night she's kind of deciding not to kill herself yeah and like she's using other substances so the eat me drink me of it all from Alice is really present but it's some way of dealing with the world.

1:15:57Well, I'll get so small where no one can find me. It's a response to the terror of the world and the world. And now, especially after she burns the house and kills her parents, and then kills Faye, the brothel before, who apparently is going to be played by Martha Plimpton, which I'm super excited about. But that's also her escape clause, because what she doesn't want to do is be found out and sort of be hung or put in jail. If Kathy, He's number one fear is not to be controlled. It's prison. It's her ultimate nightmare, like actual prison. I kind of wanted the Great Acorn Contest to happen. Say more about what the Great Acorn Contest is.

1:16:43This is really deep in the weeds here, but Will Hamilton, one of Samuel Hamilton's sons, is approached by Caleb because he's trying to rebuild the family fortune, right, that's been stupidly lost. And they're like, well, Will's like, I've got this idea about cows and acorns. And it's like, we just need a bunch of acorns. Men are just out here doing things. Yeah. No, I'm sorry. It's Desi and Tom. I'm sorry. I've got this confused, I think. Anyway, long story short, there's this idea to have this great acorn contest to get the children of the valley to collect acorns for a prize so they'll have a bunch of acorns to have a business built around it.

1:17:21They don't do it. But I'm like, I kind of want the great acorn contest. I wanted that. Okay. It would have been wholesome. I also love this idea that Liza Hamilton, she's so virtuous that even the singing in heaven makes her nervous. Like that's maybe a little bit too much. Then also she's worried about the idleness. Like, aren't we going to get bored? And I love this idea that God would have not solved for boredom in heaven. Right? And here's a quote. She would find something to do in heaven. There must be something to take up one's time. Some clouds to darn. Some weary wings to rub with liniment.

1:17:54Maybe the collars of the robes needed turning now and again. And when you come right down to it, she couldn't believe that even heaven, there would not be cobwebs in some corner to be knocked down with a cloth. So like she, and I know people like this that cannot sit still, that they even when the house is clean and the to-do list is done, they are uneasy. So even for these virtuous people, I think Steinbeck's got a little sadderist for the great virtuous here.

1:18:19Jeff:There are a couple of women like that in this story who are just like so pious and Steinbeck skewers them and their husbands find them to be kind of frustrating and a little boring. And that's it's tough as it's tough in context where most of the women don't really get to be like fully realized in the book. But that bit of satire is really accurate and pointed and funny because we do all know these people that whether they're really pious religious people and their piety makes them boring or they just can't handle not being industrious all the time or those two things are connected as they are for Liza.

1:18:58Jeff:I had marked that same passage in my book like she would find something to do in heaven is just good stuff. It's good stuff. tough uh cal um does in fact come up with 15k to help replenish the the family fortune that his father has not squandered exactly but treated pretty lightly um and he when it is rejected he burns it and i i kind of skipped over this and reading it but i found myself my brain returning to it i don't know what to do with that um that burning it doesn't do much for him what was he supposed to do this is not a moralizing tale in this regard like you're supposed to like do the virtuous thing, except, say, tell the hard truth to somebody.

1:19:37But I found that was a meaningful moment in a world where there's a lot of people that don't have money, that he burned it, and that kind of burnt offering sacrifice still did not appease the God of his father. Where do we ever land on divining rods? Well, I think we've landed on their nonsense, haven't we?

1:19:58Jeff:Okay. Dousing is It's not a thing. In this text, it works. In the text, it works. And this got me thinking about water. And I'll do two minutes on this. Let's do it. I know you have a thesis on water here. Well, so Samuel Hamilton, he's inherited a piece of land that does not have water on it. But he can find a well on anybody else's land. But he can find water, which I think is Samuel Hamilton in a nutshell. He was not born with a fortune, but what he was born with was craft and enterprise. And that is the thing that was sustaining. He could find water for other people and find himself, but just enough.

1:20:30But also you think about irrigation and what water is and the control of water versus the natural flow of water. And even in our own time, right? California specifically. Every three days, I'm like, the Colorado River is gone. There's no water here. And it's the abuse of the natural hydraulic cycles in a way that's unsustainable that causes drought. And Steinbeck has in the text, every 30 years we get a good rain year, but people would forget the drought. A little bit of the ant and the caterpillar time at the same time. But thinking of Samuel Hamilton's divination technique, that he had the ability to find water.

1:21:06Adam Trask had the amount of money where he could just go buy wherever water was, right? He was just sort of born with the ability. but then you have to dig and find and go forth into the earth and get through layers of shit and a crude material to get to water at the same time and that is the stuff that Samuel Hamilton can do of all the cards he's been dealt the thing he's trying to do is through his industry through his good nature and through his connection to the spiritual or like the agnostic greater than us, he can have enough to survive, but he also doesn't exploit it, right? He's not trying to build the Aswan High Dam or the Hoover Dam or redirect rivers.

1:21:45I think as a representation of like a Johnny Appleseed sort of proto-sustainability, who uses water and what? And then the ultimate abuse of it, the thing that causes the family fortune to fall apart is Adam Trask thinking he can freeze water and transport it to where it's not supposed to be, right? That's the thing that brings the house down at the same time. So I thought that was really interesting. And then The Winning of Barbara Wirth, which is a book that Kate's sort of sergeant-at-arms at the brothel is reading at one point. I'm like, what is that book? That is a story of someone accidentally flooding a valley by trying to control the river.

1:22:24Jeff:Interesting. So even if you step bigger than the water stuff, questions about nature? Yes. Like man versus nature, trying to control nature, the costs and benefits of exerting control over nature. Adam and Eve naming the animals, like all of that. And then floods as being purifying, right? Like where you don't have to go that far in Genesis to get to other stories about floods and what that is representing at the same time. So anyway, those are my straight thoughts. Notable quotes, Rebecca. I will say this. This set the new record for me. I had 186 individual highlights in my text. Oh my gosh.

1:23:00Jeff:I underlined something on almost every page I noted when I was going back there. There's just good stuff. This is the real shit. I think we just need to say that. Like, they don't make them like this anymore. No. Which is a reading I really try to resist. But sometimes it's real. Sometimes it's true. The number one quote from this on Goodreads is, and now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. which is from Aaron and Abra and Abra rejecting Aaron's image of her as perfect. That's not a bad job, Goodreads. No. It's maybe not the most interesting. I think it's more sophisticated than normal laugh, love, live stuff, right?

1:23:46Yeah. They made me perfect, but I just want it to be me. That you can be good is different than I'm just going to be myself. Yes. Because yourself could be terrible. That's like Steinbeck's big concern. Like if you're just left to your own device of what you want to do, we're going to be terrible to each other.

1:23:58Jeff:Yeah, down at the brothel, getting drunk on the weekends, keeping all the money to yourself. Right. I Believe There Are Monsters Born in the World to Human Parents opens a chapter where we meet Kathy. It's the opening line of the big East of Eden trailer for Netflix. That's a guiding idea and question of the book. I just wanted to get some of Steinbeck's writing. I love this. Into the show here. This is a description of Tom Hamilton. He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong. Tattoo it on my face. Right? Yes. He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Like that is punk as fuck.

1:24:37Jeff:Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people. He created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture. And when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire. And when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through in and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow. So that when his dog died, the world ended.

1:25:16That's amazing. Also this.

1:25:19Jeff:And this I believe, that the free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for, the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes undirected. And this I must fight against, any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from uncreative beasts.

1:25:56Jeff:If the glory can be killed, we are lost. I mean, it's right to the road. It's right to the road of like we carry the fire, right? Like the fire and the glory and the sound and the fury. Like it's all Faulkner being one of, you know, one of two main tributaries that Steinbeck sorts. I'll do a couple, then I'll kick it back to you just to mix it up a little bit. this is a very Jeff coded idea at the beginning of this sentence that I found in uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved indeed most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love you could do a lot worse than that this is Desi talking to Tom I believe she says dear brother she said please let let me decide.

1:26:44How simple of a realization that so much of our interpersonal storm and drang is caused by someone really not letting you, being able to let you to decide for yourself how you want your life to turn out. That's Kathy's origin story, right? No one would let her even decide. Even among the meager choices offered and available to her, no one let her decide. Also Steinbeck's just funny. Yes. This is a nature versus nurture discussion. You can't make a racehorse out of a pig. No, said Samuel, but you can make a very fast pig. And I think that might be a metaphor for Steinbeck's UnSense of Our Own Morality.

1:27:22We're not going to be angels, but we're going to be fast pigs at our very best.

1:27:27Jeff:I love that. Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. That's amazing. Right? The Hamilton kids have all conspired to get their parents to come stay with them successively so they can keep an eye on their parents because they're aging. And Samuel knows that's what the kids are doing and he's letting it go over because he knows they need that. That's a wonderful sequence. I forgot about that, Rebecca. I'm so glad you brought that up. He knows that they, Samuel knows that he and Liza are old and he knows that they need help. And he also knows that they're never going to admit it to themselves and that their kids are not going to like, interesting coming off of the corrections recently, like the kids aren't going to confront them and be like, we've got to do something about this.

1:28:10Jeff:So the kids have concocted a plan and the parents know what's going on and they're just going to let it happen. Because sometimes a man wants to be stupid. If it lets him do a thing, his cleverness forbids. Just so good. Like Steinbeck really did see humans. A miser is a frightened man hiding in a fortress of money. That's good. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. There it is. there it is um let's see the best known story in the world because it is everybody's stories i think it is the symbol story of the human soul i'm feeling my way now don't jump on me if i'm not clear the greatest terror a child can have is he is not loved and rejection is the hell he fears all right um one more for me uh this is him describing desi's shop her shop was a unique institution in solenus it was a woman's world here all the rules and the fears that created the iron rules went down the door was closed to mend it was a sanctuary women could be themselves smelly wanted mystic conceited truthful and interested it's pretty interesting yeah i wanted to hang out in desi's shop yeah yeah um there's too many the yeah there's There's too many.

1:29:32The tattoo is, it's Tim Schill, right?

1:29:34Jeff:Yes. You get one tattoo, you obviously get Tim Schill. But I agree with you here in the notes. Born and Fury, Live in Lightning is pretty good as a third. Yeah. Born and Fury, Lived in Lightning. Like, can we put that on my headstone? Yes. Really good stuff. I'm also introducing a new category for us this week. I love this. It's called AI Could Never. And in the AI could never moment, we're just going to highlight sentences, ideas, elements from the text that are too interesting, inventive, creative, strange for AI to have gotten. East of Eden is a particularly rich text for this. But there's a moment where Kathy is pulling the string for a light switch that's just like stuck in the ceiling.

1:30:20Jeff:And the description is that she's holding the string for the light switch in the crotch between her thumb and her forefinger. And I was like, that is interesting word choice. I snagged on it. And then I thought Steinbeck, you genius bastard. You devious bastard. Yeah. There's a moment describing the routines of military life as a ballet of business for men who aren't doing anything. Like all the gun polishing and the, you know, hospital corners, bed making. All the things they have to do to stay busy in between battles, but a ballet of business for men who aren't doing anything. And then Lee tells a story about getting drunk and breaking into a church bell tower because he knows that bats are really fast.

1:31:09Jeff:and he thinks that his tennis in his drunkenness he thinks that tennis his tennis skills will improve if he can hit really fast things so the police come and they're like what are you doing and he's like i'm practicing my tennis skills on these bats in this bell tower and just weird it is it's too weird ai could never what about what do you have i went i went with just like little insights into how what how people feel about themselves so this is lee talking to caleb you're pretty full of yourself you're marveling at the tragic spectacle of caleb trask caleb the magnificent the unique caleb whose suffering should have its homer um and this oh i i forgot that i put this here this is the desi tom minute where tom has had built this uh parade of signs welcome her home every 50 yards there was another card sticking on a bush or hanging from the branches of a madrone or tacked to the trunk of a buckeye and all of them said welcome home desi squealed with delight over each one yeah just it's just so small and human i just don't think we're gonna do that yeah all right rebecca is it for you i don't know how we can make it for we've done it we've done it all at this point but let's sum up i guess i mean if you're down for a wild strange messy ride that asks literally all the immortal questions that art asks like if that's your jam you're in for this i think um maybe not if you know sexual violence is a deal breaker the traumatic childbirth scenes are really gnarly um and this is definitely one of those that like if you need to read characters through the lens of today's morality yes um or you need people to be like likable or clearly good or bad um everyone here is complex and human yeah yeah um the immortal questions are asked.

1:32:57This is hilarious. Well, then we have to do the two, the Mount Rushmore. What are the two or three? What is a good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I? Who are my people? And what is the nature of justice?

1:33:17Jeff:Free will, real or no is the biggie. That's the Tim Shell of it all. Like, is it that you're destined to do something or can you make a different choice? And in that final moment of grace on the last page, it's Adam, you know, responding to Cal differently than Adam's own father responded to him and telling Cal that he can do something different and that this pattern does not have to continue. So free will, real or no, biggest one. I think yoked to it is that what's the deal with good and evil? Because if free will does exist, then good and evil exist. or they exist differently in the world. Like the deal with good and evil hinges upon the outcome of the if we have free will question.

1:34:00Jeff:And all the rest of them are here. What is the good life? What do I want? What do we owe the people around us? So many of these characters are interested in knowledge and reading and seeking education and trying to understand the world. Like how do I know what I know is there? Is this all there is? Is there? people striking out away from the life that they've had, rejecting what's at home and going to try to find something different. Steinbeck really went for it, swung for the fences. He did. Pillars of the earth kind of discussions. Is it also about art and writing, Rebecca? Oh, boy, is it. There's so much.

1:34:41Jeff:You mentioned all the stories and storytelling that happen on the page. There's so much of that. But also this key quote from Steinbeck's Nobel speech. We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken God-like power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.

1:35:25Good Lord. Right?

1:35:28Jeff:So both a paraphrasing of the very first line of the first book of the Bible. And in the Bible, the word is God, eventually Jesus. But word here is actually also words and language and art and writing. And that's where redemption exists for Steinbeck. Yeah. And I mean, again, I want to put a double asterisk on whatever salvation there is to be found in this book comes through study, comes through taking a story seriously, interpreting it and finding an interpretation of that story that has a little light in it that you can take forward and make a fire out of. and so by extension that is possible right if it is done then it is possible for other people to write stories and interpret stories and learn from them and move forward where you know we come out of whatever it was before the word and to wield the world with to wield the word with grace and forbearance and beauty and truth and justice and everything else that can go along with it In the end is the word and the word is man and the word is with men.

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1:38:03Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and, of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation? There is one and another forthcometh, Rebecca, an interesting moment and interesting division between them.

1:38:23Jeff:And a really interesting connection between them, too. So the 1955 adaptation was by legendary filmmaker Ilya Kazan. It was well received. It's credited with making James Dean a movie star. But it's only an adaptation of the fourth book, which is really the last third page wise of the story. And it omits Lee altogether, which that means I'm going to say no. You cannot get the gist of this without Lee. Just the worst. Yeah. He's so critical. So Ilia Kazan's granddaughter, Zoe, is the one who has adapted it for Netflix, starring Florence Pugh. And as you mentioned earlier, the novelist Alexander Chee came in to write an episode that's focused on Lee.

1:39:04Jeff:So at least a more complete representation of the characters we meet on the page. And we will see if you can get the gist from that. But I have high hopes. Seven hours seems closer to me to what you need to try to tell this story than a two hour movie. Yeah, I have down below. The ideal version might be something like three two-hour movies, the Hamilton Trask first generation, then Adam and Charles and Kathy, then Cal and Aaron and Abra. Will never happen, I think, a seven-episode miniatur, I guess, is the next best thing. But I want giant IMAX vistas and John Ford valleys and planes and trains and wars and burning houses.

1:39:42It looks like we're going to get some spectacle, but people are watching Netflix at home. So even if you shot it in IMAX or something else at the same time, you have one of the great Muppet notes here, Rebecca. I won't take it from you.

1:39:55Jeff:This is where we usually ask, would we make this into an adaptation as a movie, musical, TV series or the Muppets? And Miss Piggy as Kathy is just diabolical. I'm going to surprise you with a new variation on this as we've been looking for Muppets supplements and replacements. How excited would you be for a Baz Luhrmann version of this text? that's just something we could ask of any of these yeah for this one in particular i don't know about that it's i guess moulin rouge we've already got the great brothel yeah that's smorgasbord from bad lerman or i guess like a much that and it's so this story is so earthy yeah it's and and lorman is not uh well he did australia which was really bad but um well there you go maybe well how about this what if we did we need it it's because it's a kelly reichert baz lerman or christopher nolan version of this story we could or we could there's something there of like a couple different flavors of yeah i would go i would take chris nolan for something as epic as east of eden there's not enough machinery like think of how much he would linger on the trains that just sort of paul thomas anderson do with east of eden oh let me enter that into the record like think about jenkins barry jenkins is east of eden um anyway let's see we're moving on we got to keep the train rolling such as it is miscellaneous trivia adaptations rumors misattributed quotes and more uh the book of the month club refused to adopt east of eden because of the content mostly the stuff around kathy uh terrible look for book of the month club bad horrible i mentioned already that both of steinbeck's big books this and grapes of wrath were written on the cusp of different divorces.

1:41:36Jeff:Alternate working titles, the Salinas Valley, my Valley, Valley to the Sea, and Kane sign. So he made the right choice with East of Eden. There's no question. There's no question. There were two print runs, one regular and one of 1 ,500 signed copies. So the marketing element of get a signed edition, first edition is at least this old. I am still looking for patient zero and get a signed first edition as part of the marketing. This is the earliest I can remember hearing of. At this point, I am always going to mention when Ilya Kazan comes up. I don't ever have occasions. It might be one that he squealed before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

1:42:13He named names and you shouldn't have done that. And nope. Yeah. Steinbeck publicly supported Arthur Miller when he did not squeal. Arthur Miller, not squeal. Interestingly, Steinbeck was never called, though he was explicitly had been a member of a communist organization. As I said, the American League of Writers. And also by writing the possibly the most famous critique of capitalism of all time, maybe not the best or the most sort of incisive, but it's the most well-known, which Grapes of Wrath is. Perhaps coincidentally, there are rumors he offered did spy for the CIA while he traveled abroad and explicitly when he was visiting Russia.

1:42:51Russia invited him because they thought he might be a fellow traveler. So a lot good in there. I don't know. Maybe a deal was struck, but I do wonder about Zoe Kazan's own relationship to Ilya's squealing. And is there some making of amends or something going on here?

1:43:07Jeff:Correcting generational wrongs. Fathers and daughters and parents and children. Who knows? I don't have it here, but I meant to. There was one Academy Award given for that Kazan version of East of Eden. And it was awarded to Julie Harris for the role of Abra Bacon. And if you would ask me blind, going into East of Eden saying, you know what? There's a movie made of this and someone wins an Academy Award for the role. Who is it? But Abra Bacon would have been like 28th on my list. It's an interesting character. It becomes more interesting by the end. But I would not have guessed that at the time.

1:43:40Jeff:Okay. Hot takes? Time for hot takes. It's not really a hot take. This is just in the short list of books I'm willing to consider for the thing I don't think should be awarded. The sort of great American novel, the G-A-N. This is one of my candidates. If I have to pick four or five, it makes the short list. I offered this unto you, Rebecca, considering the place, the location, the subject matter. Is this the best book title of all time? It is a hell of a book title. I am hard pressed to think of a better one off the dome. Yeah, it would be better for Steinbeck's point of view if the original was West of Eden, just because where California is.

1:44:24Jeff:But East of Eden, and that's the direct quote. Yeah. And it sounds like it sounds like what the story is. Like it sounds epic and biblical. But also just offset from the epic, like just on the other side of the epic. This is a thought. And this goes back to the Steinbeck was bestselling and he was popular at the time. And the Nobel Committee and I think the American critics of his award. I think we discount current popularity too much or even to the fact where we ding people for being popular. But sometimes good stuff is good and we know it in the time and there's a reason sometimes you get. I'm not saying it's the ultimate sign and sacrifice to like, well, they're popular.

1:45:07That means they can't be smarter. I want someone under known. And I think there's something to that for sure. But sometimes Cormac McCarthy writes the road. Sometimes John Stenwick writes East of Eden and that is popular and people respond to it. shouldn't automatically be gimlet-eyed suspicion-inducing.

1:45:27Jeff:That's a good point. Those are my hot takes. Further reading, Wrecked for Read-A-Likes, books inspired by this one, et cetera. Grapes of Wrath, obviously. Steinbeck's other big epic book. You have Pachinko here by Min Jin Lee. Are we just getting into multi-generational family stuff? I think so. I think so in the difficulty and also like the role of, I was thinking of the boarding house early in Pachinko as being like a place that women could have some agency, right? And then what happens over time to that? I'm thinking of similar dynamics. And I think Pachinko is interested in different things and use different metaphors in different places.

1:46:04But, you know, Thou Mayest and The Wool of White Rice sort of live alongside my heart of like really moving small moments.

1:46:11Jeff:You and that bowl of white rice. I can't shake it, man. I can't shake it. I can't shake it. Song of Solomon by Tony Morrison. Oh, these are all mine. You don't have to speak for me. Yeah, these are yours. yeah um so complicated moms mother son relationships for sure but also like a this ending of release it's true it's a beautiful flying and then there's all sorts of stuff about going out and finding and dealing with identity and a family history done in different ways different registers but maybe flowing from similar fonts and then something that's more in the same line this is an under known book i think i've mentioned a few times over the years in the br pod beyond the bedroom wall by larry why woody i think it's even out of print at this point maybe to go to Thrift Books to find a copy, but multi-generation.

1:46:52No, actually, it's one generation, but told from multiple perspectives of many people in this family system in South Dakota. So it has this West thing going on at the same time. I was thinking of, at some point, our beloved A River Runs Through It. It's sort of like if you put East of Eden in a reduction and let it simmer for a while, you might be left with A River Runs Through It.

1:47:14Jeff:Someday we'll do A River Runs Through It on here and that'll be a day we cry a lot yes um i think this is telling that we have a whole bunch of books that the other zero to well-read titles that it connects yeah i think gilead by maryland robinson is an obvious one fathers and sons spirituality family legacy morality wisdom all of it um we name checked gone girl by gillian flynn already um i don't think there is an amy done without a Kathy Ames first, like a monstrous woman on the page. Hamlet for the fathers and sons of it all. Oedipus Rex, like 100 years of solitude for generations repeating the things and having the same names.

1:47:58Jeff:Like it's even more confusing than 100 years of solitude. I thought about the corrections a couple of times in this reading, but most specifically because Abra's mother gets mad at her dad and makes what is basically a dinner of revenge. It's amazing. Abra's dad hates turnips. I think I'm going to just enter the dinner of revenge into my personal archive. This is a move people pull. I also thought about the Odyssey a surprising amount because there are all these moments where people show up and get fed. And the expectation is like, of course, you're going to stay for dinner. or you're here and you've brought some food to contribute to the meal.

1:48:40Jeff:And really, like, what I thought about the most was how recent in our history it is that that stopped being a thing. That, like, travel was hard. Like, before cars and really before airplanes, travel was hard. And if you went to visit somebody, you were going to end up having to have a meal with them because also, like, restaurants aren't that prevalent. There wasn't a McDonald's around the corner. Yeah, right. Fast food's not a thing. Like the world was not set up in a way to be eating on the go and just taking care of your basic needs as a human. So you had to rely on the people that you were visiting or like the house that you went to to do your work that day as a repairman or whatever to feed you.

1:49:19And you might have to stay the night because it's going to get dark and I'm a six hour horse right away from home.

1:49:24Jeff:Yeah. And so it's like, well, we got to make up a bed for this guy. And look, he brought us a leg of lamb to contribute to the meal. And that was still happening in American culture like 100 years ago, less than 100 years ago, and has almost completely fallen out of the way that we do things. It makes all of that stuff of the Odyssey feel like not so far away that really maybe we're the weirdos like modernity. Contemporary times are weird. This is the way that humans have acted for centuries is you just happen to be here. Let me feed you. Yeah. Like, should I be making a sandwich for the plumber when he comes?

1:50:05Well, I mean, I think we could think about the I mean, in my town where I live, people that don't have places to stay, they're all around. And I'm not sure that Zeus, the god of hospitality, would be super thrilled with how we behave towards folks with less than we have. I was thinking about Junghee and the vegetarian a lot here, where she has been subject to her specific condition. And we get a sense that, or at least I was making the argument of vegetarian, if you remember, is there a version of this story where if we just let her be, cover herself in paint and eat vegetables? Stand by the window.

1:50:43Stand by the window. The let me decide. Okay, this is weird. This is not a model of femininity or being in the world that you have available to you. Can you just let me decide? Let me decide. Like Kathy Ames, I don't want to be a school teacher. I don't want to go back. I want to let me decide.

1:51:02Jeff:I don't want to have these kids. And is that maybe the central crime of the patriarchy is just not letting women decide? Yes. Yeah. That's all it comes down to is let me decide. Yeah. Taking your agency from you. And part of that is not even amongst available choices. is it's like let me be weird if weird is my reaction and my response to my circumstance not hurting anybody yeah um anyway i love that connection uh cocktail party crib sheet three to five takeaways um i again remind you of some of the things we could say the book steinbeck said he was born to write i think that's very important to coming to this um two you can be better usually yep you me all of us all the time yep and east of eden is better than grapes of wrath and i like absolutely yeah this was a like kind of an all-timer reading experience i was talking to a friend about it last night and there have been a couple of books in the last year of doing the show that have made me feel like oh my god i can't believe i get to do this for work But this was one where, like, oh, my God, I can't believe I get to do this.

1:52:09Jeff:And I'm so glad that we invented this show as an excuse to get some more backlist into our lives. The water divining rod we constructed to get this. It is for me, too. The great books are great for a reason. The stuff that has lasted and gets held up, even when it's imperfect and all of it's imperfect in some way or another, have, they all have something to say. And I just, I feel like so grateful that we got to bring this out. I had to go take a walk around the block and like recover from it. I had to plan for the last 50 pages. Like, okay. Yeah. You knew what was coming. I knew it was coming.

1:52:50And I'm so glad it resonated at the same time. I wouldn't have bet many things on a particular reaction you would have to a book, but I would have bet a large amount of money that this one is something. You know, we didn't have, I mean, we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the Gilead of it all, but like old man Caleb and Reverend Ames, if we ever got an old man, they would have some things to talk about at the same time. And it's an epic not of action, but of the human heart. In a lot of ways, the inverse of the epics, like the Odyssey, as is, not like a Nolan version or some subsequent thing where we don't have a lot of interiority or moral conflict within that person's soul, and it gets manifested in all these exterior ways.

1:53:35There are some moments here that are as moving as anything. I didn't have this. I want to get this in the air, too. The one that struck me this time that I didn't remember at all is when Charles, so Adam's brother, Charles, dies in a heartbreaking scene where he doesn't know it and he finds out from a lawyer, and he's left his fortune to Adam and Kathy because he thinks they're still together. They haven't spoken in 10 years. And Adam is offered a choice to like cut her out or not let her know what happens because she's living outside of the law. So she doesn't have the protection of it in that regard where no one would come looking because they would expose some things about her.

1:54:14But he goes and says, I mean, it's not, I'm even going to give it to you. It's yours. It's not even mine to give. It's just yours. And she essentially short circuits. Her world starts unraveling because she cannot process someone doing the right thing without an ulterior motive. Yeah. And that leads her to do her Alice in Wonderland thing. And really her house burns down. She like kills her other person and like exposes a bunch of people. Like she has to burn the world in response to this thing that doesn't fit her idea of how the universe is put together. and her own inability to see what she can't see is the same thing that got her into that in the first place but on someone else's point of view and i kept thinking about that at the end i wanted to note that steinbeck gives us this the way to defeat evil if that's what even if that evil has been created or or is a response to something real is simple goodness unthinking it's not even generosity.

1:55:17It's like beyond generosity. It's just, that's it. That just, I just did the right thing. And I don't even know if it's the right thing to do necessarily, but it feels like this is the thing to do. And the tyranny or whatever brokenness, I guess maybe is a better way of putting it. Whatever brokenness in Amy that's led her to be where she is comes tumbling. What did I say, Amy? Now I'm really doing it. Now I'm really confusing the two.

1:55:42Jeff:It's a Freudian slip. Yeah. Anyway, so that's my last thing I wanted to get out. That was more of a cocktail party crib sheet. I didn't really put that very well, but there is a simplicity and purity. And it's not saying it's not difficult. You know when the right thing to do is the right thing to do. You just kind of do it, right? Yeah. Simple but not easy in one of our favorite constructions. Simple but not easy. Yeah. The truth is really pure and never easy. That is Oscar Wilde. So we could do that at the same time to get us out. Our final beat, our Gilles to Well-Read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest.

1:56:18Historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor. Huh.

1:56:25Jeff:Yeah, historical importance is stickier than I... Our problem here is probably Grapes of Wrath is more historically important. And that Of Mice and Men gets read so often because it's short and assigned in school. So this is the Steinbeck I think that most people, if they read it, have to come to as adults on their own. So like a six? So yeah, like a six or seven is probably as well we can do there. Readability, it is long. But it's high. It's a high one. But that's really the only demerit to me is that it's long. Nine? I think an eight. Eight or nine? Sure. 8.5. We'll split the difference there.

1:57:00Current relevance of central question.

1:57:03Jeff:Definitely a 10. Yeah. Yes. Yes. What do you make a book nerd read, Rebecca? I think this is pretty high because it is the one that's less assigned in school and because it's a big undertaking and it wrestles with so many things. It's not reading Ulysses on your own. Eight? Yeah, I think if you're, you may peak at eight, there may be a dip in the read cred as the new adaptation comes out. So he'll come back eventually. oh damn factor this is a nine for me yeah it's high i'm not sure why a 10 i think i have to reserve i do think the thing i withhold just a little just a little bit is the morrison shakespeare stopper level of invention yeah that feels right to me that like i was very moved by the artistry here but there is it's not quite to that level of not quite the marquez nothing nothing blew my mind yeah but i was really really moved in total like the the whole is greater than the sum of its parts maybe is a good way to put it in that reaction okay rebecca we did it uh less emotionally fraught than i thought but maybe we came in guarded um you can go to patreon.com slash you to all read for guided read-alongs including the one we did for this book and other membership options.

1:58:34It includes free, ad-free episodes and bonus content. Follow us on our social Zero to Well Read podcast. You can shoot us an email zero to wellread at bookriot.com. Fascinated. If you are inspired by this episode or the adaptation to take a crack at EOE, let us know. The mailbag is there ready for you. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca. Jeff. Thou mayest get on with your day at this point. Talk to y 'all later.