Rant in D Minor: Righteous Wrath

It’s exactly 80 years since John Steinbeck began work on The Grapes Of Wrath, his masterpiece, and the novel he claimed damn near finished him as a writer (although later works like The Pearl, To A God Unknown and East Of Eden undermine that statement somewhat).

Like just about every major American novel, from Huckleberry Finn to Moby Dick, the book has its faults – occasionally creaky dialogue, the conspicuous novelist-as-puppet-master’s tugs on the heartstrings, its failure to acknowledge the similarly beleagured plight of the non-white migrants – but it still remains a mighty synthesis of story, character, Old Testament allegory, Okie vernacular, poetic landscape description and righteous anger.
The 200,000 word manuscript was completed in a hundred-day writing marathon, although not before Steinbeck had slogged his way through three years of false starts, abandoned projects and a seven-part series of articles for the San Francisco News that unearthed much of the research material for the story.
Steinbeck’s Dustbowl odyssey was an instant bestseller on publication, and became a cultural milestone that resonated with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, right up to Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Arcade Fire and the White Stripes’ ‘Icky Thump’ (“Well, Americans/What, nothin’ better to do?/Why don’t you kick yourself out?/You’re an immigrant too.”)
But the book’s most auspicious advocate is Bruce Springsteen. The John Ford film adaptation was an implicit influence on Nebraska (“I got debts no honest man can pay” is the recurring plea of the album’s many desperate men) and an explicit one on songs like ‘Seeds’ from the live box set, and of course The Ghost Of Tom Joad, a dense but compelling record that utilised a small library of social studies to update Steinbeck’s tale and incorporate modern Mexican migrant workers’ and poor whites’ experiences, with makeshift methamphetamine kitchens replacing bootleg whiskey stills.
Last Sunday week, Springsteen played the final show of his three-night stand in Dublin, a tour de force of big screen visions (‘The Promised Land’, ‘The Rising’) monochrome noir (‘Atlantic City’, ‘Radio Nowhere’), do-or-die romance (‘Because The Night’, ‘She’s The One’ ‘Born To Run’) and pure fun (‘Rosalita’).
But it was the penultimate tune, ‘American Land’, a Pogues-like come-all-ye from the Seeger Sessions record, that lodged in this reader’s head when he cracked open Steinbeck’s book again on the bus last week. Roosevelt’s New Deal-inspired Resettlement Administration, inaugurated to alleviate human displacement and natural erosion caused by the Dust Bowl and Mississippi valley floods, might have rendered The Grapes of Wrath a Depression-era document rather than an ongoing concern within a few years of its publication, but (im)migrant history seems doomed to repeat, from inner city Dublin to the outlying towns of Ireland, from floodswept New Orleans all along the Mexican border to California, a hard fact acknowledged by Bruce’s rogue patriot song:
“They died building the railroads, worked to bones and skin/They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind/They died to get here a hundred years ago, they’re dyin’ now/The hands that built the country we’re all trying to keep down.”