“The Winter of Our Discontent” by John Steinbeck, 1961
(Spoilers Ahead)
This book helped Steinbeck earn the Nobel Prize for
Literature. It is not quite like his
class struggle novels, but it does reflect the role money plays in warping
people’s lives. Ethan Allen Hawley is
the central figure, a rock-ribbed former scion of a small whaling and fishing
town on far Long Island, but whose father lost everything except the house
Ethan and his family still live in. So he’s been reduced in class status, and
is pitied by the whole community.
Ethan is stuck working at a grocery store owned by a wealthy
Sicilian. His kids are irritated that they
don’t have a car or TV and his sweet wife wants a few nicer things in
life. Everyone he knows thinks his
famous honesty forbids him from getting ahead.
They cajole him into small versions of ‘normal’ dishonesty, as ‘everyone does it,’ including it seems
the town fathers and also the vastly wealthy.
His son tells him the same, and that gets the kid into trouble. Steinbeck notes that at the beginning of
every fortune there is a crime, riffing off an earlier statement by Balzac.
It is 1960. Ethan
finally gets the message. His plot to
become rich gestates as the book slowly rolls along, each twist falling into
place, but he has to hide his plan behind a screen of do-gooderism. He has a friend who works at the local bank
across the alley from his store, who tells him the fool-proof rules of bank-robbing
as an aside. The owner of the bank lets slip that the ruling elite in the town
are trying to buy a large plot of land for an airport, but his best, drunken
friend unfortunately owns it. It will make them all very rich if they can get
the property from him. His wealthy Sicilian boss berates him for not cutting
corners with the customers. The boss
doesn’t understand that people come to the store because they trust Ethan. A sexy neighbor and friend to his wife reads tarot
cards to her and predicts Ethan will be very rich - and soon. His wife believes her. At the same time, Ethan calls the tarot reader
a ‘witch’ because she seems to read his intentions. Later he rejects her sexual advances.
Ethan went to Harvard and is a very educated talker; a
joker and a rich quoter of literature in spite of being a grocery clerk. He
also has keen psychological insight into himself and others and Steinbeck
dwells on this inner monologue. Ethan is
sweet to his wife and sick of his son who is blasting pop tunes all day,
planning to get rich too. Ethan rejects
a bribe of 5% to switch to a new food supplier. This gesture gets around town. He refuses to use his wife’s inheritance of
$7,000 for investments recommended by the owner of the bank, including
participation in the real estate scheme.
His wife wants him to use the money somehow, but she has no idea of
finance. He always brings his teller
buddy a sandwich, who leaves the back door of the bank open. He visits his drunken friend and warns him to
hold on to his large farm after he hears the bank president tried to bribe him
to sign it over to the city bigwigs for the airport.
Ethan and his teller buddy mull over the mystery of his
Sicilian boss, who they think entered the U.S. after a federal block on
immigration from Italy. So he might be
‘illegal.’ After his boss hears about Ethan rejecting a kickback, his attitude
towards Ethan changes – as if he’s never met an honest man. He suddenly grows appreciative and even loans
Ethan his car for a rare vacation. Ethan
suggests his boss travel to Sicily to visit family, something he hasn’t ever
done. After all he’s getting old, has bad
arthritis and rarely visits the store, which is one of many businesses he owns.
Ethan visits his drunken friend again in his sea-side
shack, giving him $1,000 dollars of his wife’s money to get him to go clean at
a clinic. His friend agrees even though
he tells Ethan that drunks always lie.
You might be able to patch together the nefarious plans yourself.
Yeah, someone makes a phone call to the
FBI about an illegal immigrant. Someone
gets a signed affidavit and property transfer from a drunken friend, in
gratitude. The friend later dies in an
alcoholic stupor. The local
powers-that-be are investigated for various crimes, perhaps after a tip-off. An attempted bank robbery is interrupted
before it can begin because of a kindly FBI agent carrying a message from a now
kindly Sicilian boss. Ethan’s son wins a national contest about ‘Why I Love America,’ but it is later
discovered he plagiarized the essay from famous people like Henry Clay and Abe Lincoln.
Ethan Allen, the honest man, ends up wealthy, and it almost
kills him with guilt. He knows the witch
has figured out some of his secrets, and is threatening blackmail. As is
repeatedly said by the banker and others, it takes ‘money to make money.’ Ethan
only slowly accepts this mantra. It is
an argument for the continuation of a wealthy bourgeoisie and an immense amount
of borrowing, while bankers pick up the interest and continue to be rich.
The book is similar to Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” about a working class man who drowns his
girlfriend in order to get close to the bosses daughter, which to my mind IS
the ‘Great American Novel.’ This book
might be Steinbeck’s answer to “The Great
Gatsby,” also set on a watery part of Long Island. What money and class will do to people is
something we see every day, and not just in the U.S. It is a literary theme
that reappears consistently in class-conscious writing for obvious reasons.
A slow, creepy story set in a seaside village, haunted by
money and the past. Steinbeck knows that
‘the American Dream’ of gaining wealth by
any means necessary is key to understanding the U.S. This story buffers that contention.
Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box in an
upper left corner, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Steinbeck,” “Long Island,” “Gatsby.”
And I got it at the Library, but May Day carries classic Left-wing fiction. All you men who only read non-fiction, take note…
The Cultural Marxist / July 29, 2025
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