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Tortilla Flat: the Shape of John Steinbeck's Career

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Howard Levant
Howard Levant*
Affiliation:
Hartwick College Oneonta, N. Y.
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Abstract

Tortilla Flat (1935) was John Steinbeck's first artistic and commercial success. The novel's promise was dimmed by Steinbeck's evident inability to understand his real success. His continued insistence that a parallel to Malory's Morte d'Arthur does control the novel, and his reliance in later work on predetermined, external, and arbitrary ordering devices, make it sadly apparent that he did not learn much about structural harmony from Tortilla Flat. For, in fact, the novel is loose and episodic, and a sophisticated comic irony is used to locate socioeconomic and Catholic values in a colorful paisano community. In short, there is very little of Morte d'Arthur in Tortilla Flat. Moreover, the somewhat ugly commercial success of Tortilla Flat turned Steinbeck against the novel as it really is. Apparently he felt that he had structured the novel rigidly; that this was a good way to achieve structure; that only the stupidity of a mass audience obscured the issue. All of this appears to have had grave consequences in a good deal of Steinbeck's later work. The entire matter illuminates the failure of a greatly talented writer to develop into a major novelist—a failure that has puzzled many Steinbeck readers.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 5 , October 1970 , pp. 1087 - 1095
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 1087 Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 72–73.

Note 2 in page 1087 John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (New York: Covici-Friede, 1935), p. 11.

Note 3 in page 1087 The sisters are, of course, paisanos. See Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck (Chicago: Normandie House, 1939), p. 20.

Note 4 in page 1087 Lisca, pp. 76–79; Joseph Fontenrose, John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), pp. 36–41.

Note 6 in page 1087 Joseph Henry Jackson accepts too uncritically Steinbeck's assertion that a clear and operative parallel does exist between Morte d'Arthur and Tortilla Flat. See p. viii of Jackson's Introduction to The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (New York: Viking Press, 1953). Joseph Fontenrose provides a labored reading to demonstrate that “Malory's Arthur story did in fact determine the narrative sequence and pervade the whole content” (p. 36). “Based on” is probably a larger claim than “pervade”; and Fontenrose's method will serve any cause. Indeed, Fontenrose's ingenuity is so terribly strained in Steinbeck's defense as to demonstrate the nearly invisible operative quality of the asserted parallel for any possible “common reader.”

Note 10 in page 1091 Claude-Edmonde Magny, “Steinbeck, or the Limits of the Impersonal Novel,” in Steinbeck and His Critics, ed. E. W. Tedlock, Jr., and C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1957), p. 227.

Note 11 in page 1091 Forster, pp. 144–45.

Note 12 in page 1094 Lisca, pp. 74–76.

Note 13 in page 1094 Lewis Gannett, “Introduction: John Steinbeck's Way of Writing,” The Viking Portable Steinbeck (New York: Viking Press, 1946), p. xiv.

Note 14 in page 1094 Tortilla Flat (New York: Modern Library, 1937), pp. i-iii.

Note 15 in page 1094 American Fiction, 1920–1940 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1942), p. 319. 16 Gannett, pp. xxi-xxiv.

Note 17 in page 1095 I am indebted to E. W. Tedlock, Jr., for the observation that the interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath are also examples of Steinbeck's tendency toward external structuring, and, as such, they have bothered a good many Steinbeck critics.

Note 18 in page 1095 Lisca, p. 108.

Note 19 in page 1095 Gannett and Lisca establish the basic time sequence. Steinbeck was working on a biographical sketch of a Communist district organizer in 1934, as well as the second draft of In Dubious Battle; in 1936 Steinbeck wrote several articles about California's labor problems; he collected new materials concerning migrant workers from the middle of 1937, completed The Grapes of Wrath—it exhausted him—late in 1938, and, after publication in April 1939, its enormous success created public demands on Steinbeck that made writing impossible for some time.

Note 20 in page 1095 Freeman Champney, “John Steinbeck, Californian,” Antioch Review, 7 (Fall 1947), 345–62.

Note 21 in page 1095 Gannett, p. xxiii.

Note 22 in page 1095 Gannett, p. xiv.

Note 23 in page 1095 P. 78.

Note 24 in page 1095 Lisca, pp. 78–79.