Florence Pugh naked in episode 2 of East of Eden

New on Netflix today in seven parts, this American mini-series is the latest interpretation of the noted Steinbeck novel.

Steinbeck originally addressed the novel to his young sons, Thom and John (then 6 1⁄2 and 4 1⁄2 years old, respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the sights, sounds, smells, and colors of the Salinas Valley for them in detail.

Given that The Salinas Valley is such a powerful presence in the book, I doubt that Steinbeck would approve of filming the story anywhere else, but this series was filmed in New Zealand!

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There is additional nudity in later episodes as well. More from this series.

I don’t think I have ever read any of Steinbeck’s books voluntarily, but as a baby boomer who went to a prep school and then majored in literature, I found him inevitable. I must have read a shitload of his books for classes: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath, Travels With Charlie, etc. I have not read East of Eden because it was never required, and because I am no fan of magna opera. To be candid, I have never even made it all the way through the James Dean film, although I have probably watched the entire film if one adds together all the snippets in all the years.

I never found Steinbeck much better than competent as a wordsmith. He was not a graceful stylist like Thomas Wolfe or a daring innovator like Faulker. But if he had written like them, he would have destroyed the simple sincerity of his gritty, working-class tales. He was a voice for the downtrodden and an articulate critic of the abuses of capitalism in the depression years, and as such, his work from the 30s tends to exalt him as a spokesman for a generation of ordinary Americans, making him a sort of guitar-free version of Woody Guthrie.

I think it was Steinbeck who first taught me about the harsh realities of capitalism, and shook me out of the innocence of childhood. The passage below is from The Grapes of Wrath. Its simple, direct eloquence moved me and awakened my social consciousness when I was a young teen. I remember being horrified by a reality I had never imagined in my Howdy Doody childhood, and thinking that there was something deeply wrong with any system that allows some men to engage in the wanton destruction of food while their countrymen are starving.

“The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

I asked my parents whether that really happened, whereupon they just shrugged their shoulders with heavy resignation, for they had chosen to ignore the parts of that time that they preferred to forget. In my experience, the people of The Greatest Generation had a very selective memory of their youth, choosing to bathe it all in the glow of hardships survived, a common enemy vanquished, and a better world passed on to posterity. They generally preferred to recall their victories rather than to chronicle the ugly specifics of the deprivation they endured, the enemies they faced, or the ideologies they may have embraced during desperate times. So perhaps Steinbeck deserved that Nobel Prize for passing on to subsequent generations a sense of the outrage that people felt in real time, and helping those of us born into cozy post-war prosperity to understand – viscerally – the sort of world our parents and grandparents had endured and, if among the fortunate, had survived.