[In the following essay, Watkins contends that Steinbeck made many errors in his depiction of Oklahomans in The Grapes of Wrath.]

A character in fiction is known in part by his relationship with things; he is defined by the clutter of his world. If the things are vague or false, the character is unlikely to be genuine. In a novel with sparse details, the people usually share the vagueness of the environment. Nature may be a large part of the raw materials of fiction. When an author does not know the natural objects of the world he is writing about, then he also gets the manufactured products and the people wrong. A skyscraper or a horse trough or a churn helps to make characters what they are. A writer who does not know a world well should not write about it. But that is precisely what Californian John Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath when he wrote about Okies, a people he did not know.

The effect on fiction of an author's ignorance is difficult to measure. It may also be difficult for a critic who is ignorant of a culture to try to interpret fiction about it. One who knows a country or small-town culture can perhaps understand the mores of another country people better than he can understand his own city kinsmen. A rural southerner might read a novel about a Pueblo Indian with more comprehension, for example, than he would have of the urban world of Herzog. Can a critic who does not know the culture of the people discussed by an author tell whether or not the author knows that culture? What can he measure by? Some critics presume to judge the truth of fiction when they do not know its background. Reviewers of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, thought it was “true”—“great art” and “great sociology.”¹ Can a critic or a reader who is well acquainted with a folk culture of his own measure a writer's accuracy when the writer treats a culture foreign to the critic? How long must a writer study an alien culture before he can write about it? Can he acquire such knowledge merely from books? These questions, of course, can be only pondered, not answered.

“Genuine history,” Hippolyte Taine has written, “is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street.”² The novelist and the critic after him may have to cross a barrier of place or culture instead of time as the historian does, but the distance may be just about as great. The novelist is as subject to error as the historian. Hawthorne maintains that a romance must be true to the human heart. Likewise, a social novelist must be true to the cultural as well as to the human. Steinbeck has written what poses as a study in fiction of social reality, but the facts are wrong. Can a credible truth of the heart be embodied in cultural untruth? As The Grapes of Wrath is often false and vague, so the characters are false also.

People in a small town or the country are never truly pleased to be the subject of fiction. Mountaineers have objected to James Dickey and Thomas Wolfe, Mississippians to William Faulkner, Indians to Scott Momaday. Many Oklahomans have been infuriated by what they regarded as the insult of The Grapes of Wrath. They attacked it on social, factual, and moral grounds, but most of them did not point out many of the specific errors. Lyle H. Boren used the Congressional Record to object to the facts: Steinbeck “had tractors plowing land of the Cookson Hills country where there are not 40 acres practical for tractor cultivation. He had baptisms taking place in the irrigation ditches in country near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, where an irrigation ditch has not run in the history of the world.” But the congressman did not consider his people exposed with justification. “The truth is,” he said, “this book exposes nothing but the total depravity, vulgarity, and degraded mentality of the author.”³ Grampa longs to go to California, where he can have enough “grapes to squish all over his face” while in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, he already lives “in one of the greatest grape growing regions in the nation.”⁴ Frank J. Taylor has disputed almost all the social details about the lives of the migrant workers in The Grapes of Wrath—their food, shelter, medical treatment, wages. His bias seems as strong as Steinbeck's when he defends California businesses and governments.⁵ Carey McWilliams, on the other hand, writes that “the LaFollette Committee came along in 1939 and verified the general picture of conditions in the state as set forth in The Grapes of Wrath.”⁶

Most of Steinbeck's errors about Oklahoma and country people like the Joads have never been pointed out. Some of the mistakes are entirely factual; that is, they can be proved wrong without involving any critical judgment. Including the three errors above, The Grapes of Wrath contains nearly twenty plain linguistic and factual inaccuracies:

In the dust bowl “ant lions started small avalanches.”⁷ Native Oklahomans do not know what ant lions are. Like southerners instead of Californians, they call them doodlebugs.

The famous old “land turtle” (p. 21) which crosses the highway early in the novel is also not native to Oklahoma. The Joads would have called him a terrapin.

Steinbeck's “land turtle” has an armored tail, a biological impossibility. Armadillos have armored tails, but not “land turtles.”

Steinbeck's vocabulary is sometimes wrong. By a far stretch of the imagination, a coyote might squawk (p. 31). But flies do not roar (p. 8).

Tom Joad would not speak of a “leg” of pork, a wrong term for the meat. It should be ham or shoulder.

Ma Joad says salting down meat is woman's work (p. 146), but that task belongs to men on an Oklahoma farm.

Muley eats prairie dogs in eastern Oklahoma, where prairie dogs have never lived.

Tom Joad wears a coat as he walks on the highway in hot weather (p. 9), and Muley wears “an old black suit coat” over his “blue jeans” (p. 61), which he would call overalls or overhalls. The dress is authentic, but not in this season. Two Oklahomans told me that no one would wear such clothing except a preacher or an idiot.

The driver of a truck looks out at cornfields and sees that “little flints shoved through the dusty soil” (p. 12). First, the perspective is wrong. The driver could not see them from a truck moving on the road. Furthermore, small flints are not visible through plowed and dusty earth. I have hunted arrowheads in plowed fields in Oklahoma. They are not visible until after a rain, and obviously there had been no rain in the dust bowl in The Grapes of Wrath.

The truck driver has had a course in mind-training. After he passes someone on the road, he tries to remember “ever'thing about him, … how he walked an' maybe how tall an' what weight an' any scars” (p. 16). Scars would not be visible from a passing truck.

When Muley comes toward Tom Joad and Casy, they “can't see 'im for the dust he raises” (p. 61). Oklahomans who remember dust bowl storms say that you could hardly see a man for the dust, but Muley is not in a storm, and a walking man did not raise that much dust.

Wages are wrong. Tractor drivers in the novel were paid ＄3.00 a day (p. 50). Actually, ＄1.50 would have been good pay for the time.

The Joads have chopped cotton for “fifty cents a clean acre” (p. 63), but that is not the custom. People chopped by the day rather than by the acre.

After Uncle John is baptized, he “jumped over a feeny bush as big as a piana” (p. 39). Feeny bushes are not known to Oklahomans, and I have not been able to find out what one is. Raymond John Taylor, an Oklahoman and a biologist, tells me that a typical bush at a creek where a baptizing occurred would be a button bush. A novelist writing authentically about a region would use a bush common to the area but unknown to many other places and then make it visual. Steinbeck does not do that.

Oklahoma has no lobo wolves.⁸

Besides the factual errors, there are a number of improbable occurrences in The Grapes of Wrath. An ant runs “into the soft skin inside the shell” of the “land turtle,” and the terrapin crushes it (p. 21). It would be close in there, but not insecticidal. The Joads' house is pushed down by a tractor (pp. 54, 62, 70). I learned of one such occurrence near Caddo, Oklahoma, in the 1940s, but again the event was not sufficiently representative for Steinbeck to use it in fiction aiming at social truth.

The variety of geography and the diversity of cultures in the United States make a single national literature impossible. In a sense there is no national literary history in America, but there are many different ones. Certain things are nationwide; I believe doves appear all over the country. When a novelist uses only objects that are as universal as the dove, he does not describe a region. Steinbeck did not know Oklahoma well enough to attempt to write a novel about it. The particulars he uses are either from California, or universal, or wrong. The Joads are a kind of people that Steinbeck did not know very well; they have individual identities, but they are not peculiarly Oklahoman. Such things as scissortails and horned toads are not found in The Grapes of Wrath. Nor are Indians, and it is impossible to travel far in Oklahoma without seeing some of them. The novel here is incomplete if not erroneous. On one occasion Steinbeck publishes his ignorance of his subject. Casy and Tom Joad see a “dry watering trough, and the proper weeds that should grow under a trough were gone” (p. 55). Now Faulkner would know what kind of weeds were there. The botanical life of Yoknapatawpha County is lush with honeysuckle, heaven trees, dog fennel, jimson weeds, wistaria, verbena, and many other particular plants. “Proper weeds” is plain bad writing. In this case Steinbeck did not even provide a dove, much less a scissortail.

The Grapes of Wrath is sometimes wrong and often vague, but many details also ring true. Much of the nature is right. Water did have “surface dust” after a storm (p. 6). Jackrabbits do have boils (p. 67). A hungry man could eat skunk meat after washing the musk off the fur (p. 66). The anatomy of the hog-killing is right (p. 143). The gophers (p. 3) and wild oats (p. 21) and the big owl with a “white underside” (p. 70) are natives of Oklahoma. Some unusual customs in the novel were practiced by the poor people during the Depression. Farmers lashed barbed wire to fence posts with baling wire because they had no money to buy nails or staples (p. 24). Urine is used as a medicine by Oklahomans. Farmers have urinated on animals to stop bleeding, rubbed urine as a cure on horses' sores, and used urine as a medicine for earache (p. 235). That “picture of an Indian girl in color, labeled Red Wing,” is on a can of Calumet Baking Powder, an item once found in every farm kitchen.

So what if the facts are wrong and omitted? Does that make the fiction bad? In a way it does because it becomes allegorical, invented. It is fantasy, and it is false. The people are usually wrong in much the same way the facts are. They live in a flat universality instead of among the clutter of their daily lives. Poverty is not an absence of things in the daily world. The poor have different kinds of things from those who are more fortunate, but they may be surrounded with objects which depict them, as in homes in a junkyard. But Steinbeck's Okies are too much without objects.

A comparison of Steinbeck's journeying Joads with Faulkner's journeying Bundrens in As I Lay Dying shows the emptiness of the world of The Grapes of Wrath. The Bundrens are relatively poor, but they are culturally rich. During Addie's illness and her death and her funeral she is surrounded by children, her husband, neighbors, a doctor, and a minister—all functioning in their personal and ministering roles with the tools and the clothes and the objects that belong to their characters. The long and almost ridiculous cortege moves through the cultural world of Yoknapatawpha County. Grampa and Granma Joad die outside society and their familial cultures. They have been uprooted. They have no funerals, no neighbors, no ritual, no chance to love. This is an essential difference between the life of a yeoman society still functioning in its tradition and the life of an uprooted society thrown out into a world where all the forms are dead and past. In part, the cultural vacuum of the Joads is a thematic representation of the life of migrants. But they had no cultural richness in their life before they left, as the Bundrens did. They live in a void not so much because Oklahomans left their ways at home as because Steinbeck did not know them well in the first place. The Bundrens and Eudora Welty's poor people and Robert Penn Warren's yeoman farmers have more folk manners than a middle-class society. And wandering peoples take their traditions with them. Country people such as the Joads must be given credit in fiction for the gentility they do have. Without all their trappings, they are reduced to caricatures and buffoons. They may also be made ridiculous even when the author is trying to portray them favorably. As Sinclair Lewis, another writer about the ways of the little man, said, “Steinbeck did not quite get those Okies. … He got so lousy sentimental he read sounds into their mouths they could never have uttered.”⁹

When The Grapes of Wrath violates the mores of people like the Joads, the result almost every time is a reduction of the humanity of the characters. Grampa's leaving his underwear unbuttoned and his fly open is a violation of conventions in the rural Protestant ethic, and even if he is “lecherous as always” (p. 105) his misbehavior would not have been tolerated by members of his family, especially the females. Pa's language before his wife and daughter seems incredibly exaggerated when he refers to his lecherous son's “nuts just a-eggin' him on” (p. 112). Grampa calls a brother, a daughter, and a grandson “sons-a-bitches,” and that cuss-word is almost never taken lightly by people of his class and place. Except in foolish and drunken situations, such name-calling usually has dire consequences (as is potentially true in Light in August and As I Lay Dying). But Grampa's language provokes not even a shrug. For the sake of sensationalism, perhaps, Steinbeck momentarily forgets the abstract philosophical goodness he attributes to most of the migrants, and he does not even allow them the dignity they do possess. Granma has “survived only because she was as mean as her husband” (p. 105). She opposes him “with a shrill ferocious religiosity that was as lecherous and as savage as anything Grampa could offer.” After she rips “one of his buttocks nearly off” with a shotgun blast, he admires her. Grampa and Granma “both sleeps in the barn” (p. 102). The humanity of these characters is so utterly destroyed by Steinbeck's treatment of them that no dignity can survive even when they die. They are ruined by a tone of amused tolerance of near-murder with a shotgun. And their manners at the table leave them with no measure of dignity.

Granma said proudly, “A wicketer, cussin'er man never lived. He's goin' to hell on a poker, praise Gawd! Wants to drive the truck!” she said spitefully. “Well, he ain't goin' ta.”

Grampa choked, and a mouthful of paste [pork, biscuit, thick gravy] sprayed into his lap, and he coughed weakly.

Granma smiled up at Tom. “Messy, ain't he?” she observed brightly.

(p. 108)

Actually Steinbeck is demeaning his own characters whom he presumably pities and loves. He is condemning them on social grounds even though the book thematically protests economic abuse of them. At times Steinbeck's amused treatment of them is as inhumane or inhuman as the capitalists are to the migrants. Tom Joad's family are as unloving as they are illiterate when he spends four years in jail and his mother writes him only a postcard after two years and then granny sends him a Christmas card a year later. Yet the Joads should be a writing family. Witness the extensive correspondence between uneducated soldiers and their families during the Civil War. In other incidents caricature occurs because Steinbeck, unintentionally perhaps, reveals how his poor people are unfeeling. The truck they travel on is crowded, no doubt. Yet it is implausible to take all the mattresses and barrels of pork and cooking utensils yet to be unable to find a place for the single stationery box of letters and pictures which Ma burns before she leaves (p. 148). Surely she could sew the most precious into the mattresses.

That pig that “got in over to the Jacobs' an' et the baby” (p. 56) becomes a curious social and cultural generalization about poor Oklahomans instead of being merely a statement of the hardships of their life and the animalism of pigs. The author may intend no slur on the nature of the human beings here, but it is conveyed nevertheless. Pigs do not break into houses and eat babies except in situations too extraordinary for the author to select as representative details. The reason is that families guard their houses too well to admit hogs. Basically the episode attacks the humanity of the people by reflecting on their care of their children. Even if there is a factual precedent, the atrocity is so unrepresentative that it is too sensational for fiction which intends to be socially true. Here the novel is more like lurid journalism than fiction intending to depict the character of a people.

The same anecdote in two different contexts may produce entirely different effects. In Old Southwest humor like that written by George Washington Harris or Johnson Jones Hooper, cruel jokes and brutal fights are more slapstick comedy than social generalizations. Steinbeck writes tall tales in The Grapes of Wrath, but the overriding social theme cannot be detached from them. The integrity of the characters is affected and even destroyed. Steinbeck exaggerates absurdity in supposedly good people as much as Faulkner does in the evil Snopeses. Worse, he assigns the absurdities to all the people, creating a wide social generalization, and even the good people threaten violence. Albert, for example, visits the city and returns to find that the folks decided that he had “moved away without sayin' nothin'” (pp. 58-59). They stole the stove, beds, window frames, “eight feet of plankin' … from the south side of the house.” When he returns “Muley Graves was goin' away with the doors an' the well pump.” Albert collected his stuff from the neighbors, but not the pillow stolen by Grampa, who said he would “blow his goddamn stinkin' head off if he comes messin' aroun' my pilla” (p. 59).

Steinbeck denies the Joads and their kind the dignity of their religion, and he does it for a social cause. Casy, the approved philosopher and prophet of the novel, believes in a religion of man which permits meaningless sexual promiscuity. Walter Fuller Taylor has argued that “A reader who really ‘buys’ The Grapes of Wrath has bought … an elaborately illustrated and reiterated philosophy of casual sexual indulgence.”¹⁰ In the Bible belt and among southern yeoman whites their education as well as their religious beliefs derive from the close and intimate knowledge many of them had of the Bible. Steinbeck ridicules this knowledge. Tom Joad does not know whether the Bible is the origin of a country saying: “Don't roust your faith bird-high an' you won't do no crawlin' with the worms.” Grampa Joad gets the Bible and Dr. Miles' Almanac all “mixed up” (p. 123). Granma has a “ferocious religiosity” (p. 105), yet her ecstatic pentecostal experience, “speaking in tongues,” is still going on when she shoots her husband's buttocks nearly off. Religion is thus associated with humorous violence. She ardently desires a blessing at the table, but she has not “listened to or wondered at the words used” for years (p. 109). Despite a Christ figure or two, every Christian in The Grapes of Wrath is belittled. Steinbeck's animosity to Christianity shows clearly through once when he writes that they “had been trained like dogs to rise at the ‘amen’ signal” (p. 110). Why dogs instead of monarchs or holy men? How else should they rise and at what other time? There are no alternatives. Steinbeck is objecting to their Christianity rather than the method or time of rising. He attempts to demean it by comparing them to dogs, and yet he has diminished the presumably good people who are his admired and suffering souls.

Steinbeck's derogatory views of fundamental religionists are presented extensively in the novel. The woman religious fanatic at the government camp in California is nearly as evil and destructive as the agents of the large landowners who wish to use the migrants and to destroy those who object. A preacher virtually makes war on his congregation when he preaches near an irrigation ditch. He “paced like a tiger, whipping the people with his voice, and they groveled and whined on the ground.” He shouted, “Take 'em, Christ! and threw each one in the water” (p. 450). All Steinbeck's Christians are attacked; the only religion he respects is one like his own belief in the “one big soul ever'body's part of” (pp. 570-572).

Fundamentalists and Christians in fiction do not all deserve contempt. The Reverend Shegog's sermon in The Sound and the Fury is probably the best example in fiction of admirable uneducated Christianity, and other such sermons appear in Mosquitoes and Moby-Dick. James Weldon Johnson, Robert Penn Warren, and Scott Momaday have also created good but plain ministers. Steinbeck uses the rule passed against taking up collections in camp to suggest that all ministers in the camp are interested only in money. Casy's religion of man is more in harmony with Steinbeck's social views. To substitute a kind of biological transcendentalism like that in this novel for religion is not true to the Protestant ways of the characters. Orthodoxy and tradition in Oklahoma are a part of the way of life. There are many irreligious souls, but most of them are skeptics or hell-raising unbelievers or the indifferent. Casy must surely be the only uneducated rural minister converted to Emersonianism who ever lived in Bible-belt areas like the South and Oklahoma. Tradition, experience, and culture make preachers in these areas fall to the flesh or to the demon rum, not to free-thinking. If a preacher did fall as Casy does among a people like the Joads, their own religion would damn him more than one who fell to the flesh.

It seems strange that a novelist of the stature, talent, and humanity of Steinbeck should get the culture, the facts, and the religion as wrong as he did in The Grapes of Wrath. The reason may be simple. The tragedies of the dust bowl and the migrant workers grabbed his interest. He set out to write about them with humanity and for a social purpose, but he was too ignorant of his characters' ways. In this book Steinbeck is what Robert Penn Warren has called a “doctrinaire; that is, he appreciated a work of art to the degree in which it supported his especial theory.”¹¹ Mildly, Steinbeck has allowed social purpose to control him as it has some Russian authors and critics, who, naturally enough, admire this novel especially. He was not a great enough artist to be able to put aside his social beliefs and prejudices. The theme and the practice of the novel show that he could not lift himself to that level. The Grapes of Wrath resembles those novels which make all good characters white and all bad ones black or vice versa. But Steinbeck does worse than categorize characters by whether they are good migrants or bad capitalists. He did “conspicuous violence to his laborers” because he tried to blend “left-wing … dialectics and the country people together.”¹² Communal and biological forms of a unified society do not conform to the fiercely Anglo-American culture which has been established in farming areas like eastern Oklahoma.

Notes

1. Quoted in “Red Meat and Red Herrings,” Commonweal 30 (October 13, 1939): 562.

2. H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun (New York, 1879), pp. 17-18.

3. Remarks by Hon. Lyle H. Boren, Congressional Record, Appendix 86, part 13 (1940), 140.

4. County Agent Houston B. Ward, quoted by Martin Staples Shockley, “The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma,” American Literature 15 (1944): 353.

5. Frank J. Taylor, “California's ‘Grapes of Wrath,’” Forum 102 (November 1939): 232-238.

6. Carey McWilliams, “California Pastoral,” Antioch Review 2 (Spring 1942): 104.

7. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 3. All parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

8. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 231; H. Kelly Crockett, “The Bible and The Grapes of Wrath,” College English 24 (December 1962): 193.

9. Frederick F. Manfred, “Sinclair Lewis: A Portrait,” American Scholar 23 (Spring 1954): 180.

10. Walter Fuller Taylor, “The Grapes of Wrath Reconsidered,” Mississippi Quarterly 12 (Summer 1959): 139.

11. Robert Penn Warren, “The Blind Poet: Sidney Lanier,” American Review 2 (November 1933): 37.

12. Quoted in “Red Meat and Red Herrings,” p. 563.