Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):
Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eight-thirty he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair. Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.
First of the books that I acquired this summer from the old family home in Dublin, and what a start. It’s a grand generational story of Adam Trask, who moves from Connecticut to the Salinas Valley in California with his pregnant wife Cathy. After she gives birth to twins (it is implied that at least one of them is fathered by Adam’s brother), she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves, settling down discreetly to work at and then own the brothel in the next town over. The two boys, Aron and Caleb, grow up, and we move with deliberate and measured pace to a grand conclusion which I won’t spoil. The book was apparently Steinbeck’s favourite of his own writing and must have helped him get the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after it was published.
There’s also a very interesting character from Northern Ireland in the first part of the book, Sam Hamilton, based on Steinbeck’s own grandfather from Ballykelly, which is about 25 km from the home of my own ancestors in Aghadowey (where my distant cousins still farm the land and live in the house built by my 4x great-grandfather). The Irish Times summarises Steinbeck’s description of his own visit to Ballykelly in 1952 and you can read the original here. That must have been after he wrote the Hamilton parts of East of Eden though, as he says he went to Ireland in the summer and the book was published in September. It’s rare enough to find Northern Ireland intruding in classic literature, and his depiction of Sam Hamilton, his wife Liz and their many children is intense and sympathetic, even though the main thrust of the novel is the story of the Trasks. (Steinbeck even puts himself as a child into the novel, as a casual onlooker.)
There’s also the intriguing character of Lee, who starts as a Chinese servant in the Trasks’ house, but ends up as a family member, shifting from pidgin to standard American English and supplying Biblical exegesis and philosophy when it is needed; there’s a particularly effective moment of Marcus Aurelius at the end. The women fare less well; Cathy / Kate is meant to be the villain, and I found her just a bit too evil at a couple of key moments, and Aron’s girlfriend Abra was just a bit too virtuous to be real. Still, Steinbeck was trying, I think.
It’s a great book, all in all. You can get East of Eden here.
This was my top unread top non-genre book, my top unread book acquired this year and the top unreviewed book in my LibraryThing catalogue. Next on all three piles is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.
