May 20, 2009
Washington, DC

The highlights of English class the spring semester of my senior year of high school: I wrote the best English paper I’ve ever written (a conversation between Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, and the unnamed narrator from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man); I saw The Graduate for the first time (“Plastics Benjamin!”); and I read The Grapes of Wrath followed by an incredible couple of days watching John Ford’s atmospheric translation of Steinbeck’s epic. I remember that the black-and-white film didn’t seem old-fashioned, but rather it was fitting that the Joads’ story had seemingly leached all of the color out of the film stock the way the Dust Bowl had leached all of the color out of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and — of course — Oklahoma.

As many of you may have noticed reading the blog, Big Read cheer-person David Kipen knows a thing or two about film and contributed the essay “The Novel at the Movies” to The Grapes of Wrath Reader’s Guide. Kipen writes, “Of [The Grapes of Wrath], John Steinbeck himself claimed that, ‘[Producer Darryl] Zanuck has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring . . . it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true.’” Kipen goes onto call the film “a starkly beautiful movie, suffused in every scene with the intensity of craftsmen working on what even they must have suspected was the most important picture they might ever make.”

But don’t take Kipen’s (or my) word for it. If you’re in the DC area, check out the 1934 Film Series, hosted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “in the spirit of the museum’s current exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for Artists.” The museum will screen The Grapes of Wrath — clocking in at a little more than two hours — Thursday, May 21 at 6:00 pm. Check SAAM’s Web site for more info.

February 27, 2009
Washington, DC

“…it will all boil down to work. If I can write again then I can be happy again. I know I will put off doing it for fear it has all been drained out of me, although I don’t for a moment believe that. Indeed, I feel the stirring of some power.” — John Steinbeck to his friend Bo Beskow, Pacific Grove, CA, Sept. 19, 1948

“If I can write again then I can be happy again.”

Today, February 27 — what would have been John Steinbeck’s 107th birthday — I catch myself falling for the man all over again. Reread that sentence of Steinbeck’s, and listen to how it inverts all the conventional wisdom about writers and depression. He doesn’t say, “If I can be happy again then I can write again.” No, he puts the writing first, where I suspect it belongs. “If I can write again then I can be happy again.”

Society has brainwashed us into thinking that writer’s block is a symptom, not a cause. We look at the interrupted arc of, say, Dashiell Hammett’s career — the decade of apprenticeship, the five years of intense productivity, the long decades of sodden silence — and we know the question we’re supposed to ask. After The Thin Man, what kept him from finishing anything?

It was the drink. It was the success. It was New York. It was that mean Lillian.

It was all of that. It was none of that. Or was it depression? His father always was a little aloof…

Can I possibly be the first to ask whether we don’t have it all exactly backwards? What if, one day, Hammett stopped writing for the most ridiculously trivial of reasons? Maybe he ran out of ribbon, and his motor wouldn’t start. Could be. It doesn’t really matter, because he wasn’t lost yet. He could always just take the car into the shop tomorrow, and buy fresh ribbons by the cartonload.

No, I’m betting what killed him was the next day, when he fixed his Nash and got the ribbon home and then just idly wondered, innocent as a powderburn, what he should have written the day before. And later, if only to stop himself from wondering, that’s when he took the drink. And got depressed, and went to New York, and all the rest of it.

Steinbeck understood this. He didn’t believe that writer’s block was a symptom of depression, any more than the flu is a symptom of sneezing. On the contrary, writer’s block invites depression, at least for a writer, just as surely as sloth invites bedsores. And writing well isn’t a byproduct of happiness, but a spell to summon it, and an amulet against its loss. “If I can write again then I can be happy again.”

So here’s mud, on his birthday, in John Steinbeck’s undeceived eye. Like most writers, he could be streaky in both output and quality. But he never kidded himself that writing was anything other than what it is: a daily prayer for the ability to do it well.