Wrapped & Shellacked

When he turned on the TV set to catch the latest Cuba bulletins before breakfast one morning last week, John Ernst Steinbeck had no inkling that he had won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature while he slept. At a press conference a few hours later, ruddy-faced, jug-eared and bearded, John Steinbeck muttered that he "got splintered this morning" and still felt "wrapped and shellacked." Later, with tongue in cheek, he explained that wrapping and shellacking is the standard formula for repairing a cracked goldfish bowl.

The award took another kind of shellacking from critics the world over, who have long since written off John Steinbeck's flawed talent. The author himself confessed that he was unable to explain his reasons for writing novels "because it is so long since I have wondered why." Steinbeck added: "I guess it's become like a nervous tic."

People as Pets. Born 60 years ago in northern California's lush, lettuce-growing Salinas valley, Steinbeck turned the area into a kind of strip-cartoon Yoknapatawpha County, where even the local Snopeses are kind to small animals. At times, the Salinas corn has been as high, if not as dry, as William Saroyan's young eye; at others, the view from Steinbeck's wayward literary bus has resembled Henry Miller's sex-sodden Tropics, minus the belly laughs.

His best-known work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the bitter saga of the Okies, was powerful as a tract but limited as fiction, scarcely able to survive its time and place. Even in less dated novels. Steinbeck's characters are not, as Edmund Wilson once wrote, "really quite human beings: they are cunning little living dolls that amuse us as we might be amused by pet guinea pigs, squirrels or rabbits."

The Nobel committee, which pronounced that the chronicler of Cannery Row "more than holds his own" with the "masters of modern American literature,"* cited Steinbeck's "humor and social perception," his sympathy for "the oppressed." Despite "certain signs of flagging powers" in Steinbeck, explained the Swedish Academy's secretary, Dr. Anders Osterling, his 1961 novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, was a return to "his towering standards."

Trito Travelogue. To U.S. critics, Winter, an allegory of the affluent society, seemed only a thin, high-pitched echo of the early and genuine social protest that filled The Grapes of Wrath. The judges' decision was also reportedly influenced by Steinbeck's latest, bestselling Travels with Charley, which manages to recapture the banality, mawkish sentiment and pseudo philosophy that have marked Steinbeck at his worst.

One possible reason for crowning Steinbeck was widespread criticism that the prize in recent years has often gone to authors little known outside their own lands. No such charge could be leveled against John Steinbeck, whose books have been translated into 33 foreign languages. Just possibly he reads better in some of them, but Dr. Uno Willers. secretary of the Nobel committee, admitted that criticism of the award had been even heavier this year than usual. Steinbeck himself, when asked if he thought he deserved the award, shrugged: "Frankly, no."

* Other U.S. winners: Sinclair Lewis. Eugene O'Neill, Pearl Buck, T. S. Eliot (a British citizen), William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway.

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