Sun 22 Dec 2019
JOHN STEINBECK – East of Eden. Viking Press, hardcover, September 1952. Bantam F1267, paperback, 1954. Many later reprint editions. Film: Warner Brothers, 1955. With James Dean, Julie Harris, Richard Davalos, Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet, and Burl Ives. Director: Elia Kazan.
I recently picked up East of Eden and had a go at it, and I can recommend it highly to anyone who loves that feeling of getting deeply immersed in a great trashy novel.
Eden has it all: Sex, God, Violence, Love, Hate, Money … everything you look for in a trashy book, and so seldom find in a great one, put across with some of John Steinbeck’s finest prose, and that’s some of the best there is.
There’s also something that appealed to me personally: late in he book there’s a brief fugue with a character named Joe Venuto, a cat-house ramrod — who would have been played in the 30s by Jack LaRue or in the 40s by Dan Duryea — who gets sent out by the Madame to round up a whore-errant.
This leads to a passage like something out of a Gold Medal Original, with Joe haunting the shabby underworlds o nearby towns, than holing up in a sleazy hotel room with a pint of whiskey as he tries to figure out the angles.
It’s classic hard-boiled stuff, and though this is just a minor bit in a panorama novel, I get the feeling if Ace or Avon had published East of Eden in the 50s, Joe would have been on the cover.
December 22nd, 2019 at 1:39 pm
Neither Ace nor Avon did the paperback, Dan,but Bantam did, and I’d have to say that they missed their chance. They went with a long-haired temptress, instead. Who’d have thought that would have sold a book like this on the newsstand?
December 22nd, 2019 at 9:36 pm
That hard-boiled voice and atmosphere appears in Hemingway, O’Hara, and even Fitzgerald. It was becoming the American voice in literature out of Twain and Jack London, and even Hemingway recognized it in the work of Hammett and Chandler.
EAST OF EDEN has a bit of everything, plus a reminder that great literature doesn’t have to read high minded, it can be about real people living lives very close to the bone, sex, violence, and noirish darkness.