Of
Mice and Men
By
John Steinbeck
Directed by Joe Discher
Program
Notes
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Workers at
a Farm Security Administration Camp, Calipatria, Imperial
Valley, 1939. Photo by Dorothea Lange. |
Excerpted from
From Susan Shillinglaw's introduction to OF MICE AND MEN.
Sections of dialogue from the play inserted by Joe Discher.
John Steinbeck celebrated
friendship, both in his life and in his fiction…Friendship
is the most enduring relationship in his best work, a fact
that places him solidly in a long tradition of American writers
who send male duos into uncharted terrain. But Steinbeck's
vision of camaraderie is less markedly an escape from marriage,
home and commitment than an exploration of the parameters
of society and self. “In every bit of honest writing
in the world,” he noted in a 1938 journal entry, “there
is a base theme. Try to understand men. If you understand
each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well
never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There
are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting
social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration
of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand
each other.” Steinbeck's greatness as a writer lies
in his empathy for common people—their loneliness, joy,
anger, and strength, their connection to places and their
craving for land…
GEORGE. Some
day we're gonna get the jack together and we're gonna have
a little house, and a couple of acres and a cow and some pigs
and…
LENNIE. And live off the fat of the land!
OF MICE AND MEN and CANNERY ROW, arguably the best of his
short novels, owe much of their appeal to Steinbeck's ability
to orchestrate this thematic complexity within the context
of the abiding commitment between friends that is love at
its highest pitch…
LENNIE. I got you to look after me…and you got me
to look after you…
It is a parable about commitment, loneliness, hope and loss,
drawing its power from the fact that these universal truths
are grounded in the realistic context of friendship and a
shared dream…
GEORGE. We'd have a little house. And a room to ourselves…and
when we put in a crop, why we'd be there to take that crop
up. We'd know what come of our planting.
OF MICE AND MEN is the middle book in Steinbeck's trilogy
about agricultural labor in California. He began the manuscript
in the early months of 1936, shortly after completing his
impressive strike novel, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, and immediately
before beginning in the fall of 1936 the research that resulted
in the March 1939 publication of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, his
most enduring novel about the Dust Bowl migrants in California…From
1935 to 1940 exiles from the drought-plagued Southwest poured
into the Golden State, drawn by Americans' long-held conviction
that the West was the promised land—the place to begin
anew…
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Walking from
the mines to the lumber camps to the farms, the “bindlestiff”
had long formed the backbone of California’s migrant
work force. Napa Valley, 1938. Photo by Dorothea Lange. |
CROOKS. I seen
hundreds of men come by on the road and on the ranches, bindles
on their back and that same damn thing in their head. Hundreds
of 'em. They come and they quit and they go on. And never
a god- damn one of 'em gets it. Jus' like heaven. Everybody
wants a little piece of land. And nobody gets no land.
From the 1870s until about 1930, California's wheat and fruit
crops were harvested in large part by itinerant workers, mostly
single men for whom roving became habitual. Some toted blanket
rolls or bindles on their backs…wages were low, living
quarters were squalid, and opportunities for advancement practically
non-existent. Even the most resolute and ambitious worker
typically met with failure and perforce took to roving…to
be a farm worker was to be among California's dispossessed,
a powerless, degraded, ill-paid fraternity. “It is the
constant craving for human company, for friends, that is so
strong among the floating class,” noted researcher Frederick
C. Mills in a journal kept early in the century. “Denied
wives, or families, or circles of sympathetic friends, this
feeling can only be partially satisfied through the institution
of 'partners'. Most men hate to travel alone on the road.”
The isolated and rootless existence of the itinerant is the
historicity that Steinbeck represents…
GEORGE. Guys like us that work on ranches is the loneliest
guys in the world. They ain't got no family. They don't belong
no place.
Certainly he [John Steinbeck] would have been familiar with
the loneliness of the working stiff. Born in Salinas, California,
in 1902, Steinbeck grew up in one of the richest agricultural
valleys in California…In high school and college he
worked in the fields and packing plants, listening to the
stories and absorbing the speech of the working man. For nearly
two years in the early 1920s after dropping out of Stanford
Univeristy, he roved the California valleys, finding work
on ranches owned by Spreckels Sugar, a company that controlled
huge tracts throughout the Salinas Valley…indeed the
episode that inspired OF MICE AND MEN probably occurred on
one of these ranches. Working as a bindle stiff himself in
the early 1920s Steinbeck saw a huge and troubled man kill
a ranch foreman…
To hone in on the working man's plight, Steinbeck rewrote
the scene that he had witnessed years earlier. What he saw
was the clash between a troubled worker and his boss, between
the powerless and the elite…a world where personal interaction
was marked by instances of petty control, misunderstanding,
jealousy and callousness. The political reality Steinbeck
examined in OF MICE AND MEN, set 'a few miles south of Soledad'—Spanish
for 'solitude'—is the intense loneliness and anger engendered
by hopelessness…
GEORGE. I ain't got no people. I seen guys that go round
on the ranches alone. That ain't no good. After a while they
get mean. They get wantin' to fight all the time.
OF MICE AND MEN was the first book Steinbeck began with a
sense of artistic independence born of personal security.
It came after film rights were paid for the 1935 TORTILLA
FLAT and IN DUBIOUS BATTLE became a best-seller…for
OF MICE AND MEN he created his own genre, the play/novelette.
“The work I am doing now,” he wrote to his agents
in April 1936, “is neither a novel nor a play, but a
kind of playable novel. Written in a novel form but so scened
and set that it can be played as it stands…”
The title that Steinbeck finally selected underscores the
unpredictability of existence as well as its promise, Lennie
and George's blasted dream to “live off the fatta the
land.” Taken from a Robert Burns poem, the novel's title
suggests the transitory quality of even the “best laid
schemes.” The poem tells of an unfortunate field mouse
whose home is flattened by a plow…
Excerpts
from "To a Mouse, On Turning Her
Up in Her Nest, With the Plough"
By Robert Burns, Nov. 1785
...I'm truly sorry
Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!…
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
Proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!
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