John Steinbeck: Master of Terror
Robert Suggs
deserves to stand alongside The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men as
a true American classic. But did we get to chew on THIS one in ninth
grade English? Nay! High school lit seems dedicated to the proposition
of scaring people away from reading altogether. For example, Dickens
wrote one really flat novel, Hard Times. It's the least characteristic
of his works. So which novel is selected by the Miss Thistlebottoms of
the world? You guessed it. Now, I happen to love Of Mice and Men.
It inspired those classic MGM characters, George and Junior, and this
alone is enough to insure that John Steinbeck's name should be
hallowed forever. But in "The Affair at 7 Rue de M--"" we find genuine
literary art: a tale that has some pop! It's pliable, it must be
chewed upon thoughtfully, and it can be twisted in many directions
until it bubbles to the top of the subconcious. After it's consumed,
it really sticks to you. In this story, disturbingly autobiographical
as it would seem, an American author and his son John take residence
on the eponymous street in Paris. (Eponymous--have I got that right?
It means either "self-titled" or "a large, greasy and flatulent mammal
with tusks"; I always confuse the two). The author is often distracted
in his writing by his son's smacking of bubble gum. One day his son
won't heed his warnings to knock it off, for he snivels that the gum
is now chewing HIM. The night before, he affixed it under his pillow
and kept waking with the gum happily chomping under his incisors.
Terrifying stuff, huh? The father pries the gum from his kid's mouth,
places it on the table and the gum quiveringly climbs back toward
young John's toothy orifice. At this point, many things are tried. The
gum is tossed out the window; it's hurled into the Seine; it's even
abandoned way out in the country. But ultimately the diabolical candy
always returns. In the end (don't worry about spoilers; gum doesn't
spoil as far as I know), Dad places the gum under a bell jar and
cements the glass to its wooden base. In a pitiful scene reminiscent
of Lenny's death at the end of "Of Mice and Men," the gum wastes away
over a week. It turns rather pale, seems to expand and contract in a
belabored-huffing way, and briefly leaps in hope when young John
enters the room--only to fall back into despair as it realizes the
impenetrability of the walls which have taken it captive. Have some
Kleenex ready as you read this one. After the gum breathes its last,
it's buried deep in the back yard. Steinbeck concludes, "It is my hope
that this account will set straight some of the silly tales that are
being hawked in this neighborhood." Thanks, John. Miss Thistlebottom
has seen to that for us. Please choose one of the following topics for
your theme paper. It must be 500 words, not counting your name or
footnotes. Please use ink and double-space.
1) "The Id as Gum: Radical Freudianism in Steinbeck's 'The Affair at 7
Rue de M--'"
2) "Like Father, Like Gum: Male Castration Anxiety in a Suppressed
Steinbeckian Morality Play"
3) "Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble: Steinbeck's Biting Attack on
Post-Leninist Proletarian Labor Models"
4) "Bend Over, Junior: Rear Cheek Imagery in Tex Avery's MGM Cartoons"
r...@my-deja.com
37759140...@news.mindspring.com>,
bid...@mindspring.com wrote:
> 3) "Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble: Steinbeck's Biting Attack on
> Post-Leninist Proletarian Labor Models"
Shouldn't that be "Double Bubble, Toil and
Trouble"?
RN
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
rba...@hotmail.com
> Certainly Steinbeck's overlooked tale "The Affair at 7 Rue de M--"
> deserves to stand alongside The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men as
> a true American classic...
Rob has lost his mind, but that won't keep me from pointing out that
Steinbeck has at least two genuine tales of fantasy. There's 'The Elf In
Angiers' in PAUSE TO WONDER (Messner; NY, 1944), edited by Marjorie Fischer
and Rolfe Humphries. Yes, it features an elf. It's three pages long, so a
summary would vaporize it. Even an excerpt might puncture it, but here's a
snippet of dialogue:
'Saints of Galway,' said Reynolds. 'Do you see what I see?'
'Yes,' said Clark Lee.
'Well, do you believe it?'
'No,' said Lee, who is after all a realist and was at Corregidor.
But the one I recommend is 'Saint Katy The Virgin' from THE LONG VALLEY
(Viking; 1938), also in the Ray Bradbury-edited TIMELESS STORIES FOR TODAY
AND TOMORROW, a Bantam Giant from 1952. A plot summary would not do it
justice, but this is how it begins:
'In P--- (as the French say), in the year 13--, there lived a bad man who
kept a bad pig. He was a bad man because he laughed too much at the wrong
times and at the wrong people...when Brother Clement fell in the mill and
drowned because he would not drop the sack of salt he was carrying, the bad
man, Roark, laughed until he had to go to bed for it...'
That's Roark, the bad man. Here's his bad pig, Katy.
'... You should have seen the face of Katy. From the beginning it was a
wicked face. The evil yellow eyes of her would frighten you even if you had a
stick to knock her on the nose with... now and then even a child disappeared
and was heard of no more...'
A little later:
'... Well, Katy was a big pig now, and it came time to be bred. The boar
was sterile from that day on and went about with a sad suspicious look on his
face and was perplexed and distrustful. But Katy swelled up and swelled up
until one night she had her litter. She cleaned them all up and licked them
off the way you'd think motherhood had changed her ways. When she got them
all dry and clean, she placed them in a row and ate every one of them.'
The tale is only just getting rolling at this point and hasn't even reached
the fantasy part, but that's all you're getting from me. And if that's not
enough to send you scrambling for your LONG VALLEY or your TIMELESS STORIES
or a library copy of Steinbeck's Collected, you are truly dead. 'St. Katy' is
absolutely hilarious, and not to be missed.
rbadac
Robert Suggs
>Rob has lost his mind,
So what's your point?
but that won't keep me from pointing out that
>Steinbeck has at least two genuine tales of fantasy.
You don't count the gum story? I'm not making this up. It's available
for your inspection in the juvenile collection Horror Stories, edited
by Susan Price, published by Kingfisher in the Story Library. If
haunted gum isn't your idea of fantasy, I ain't got time fer ya.
Elves and pigs, pshaw. Ya gone daft?
Rob
(these young people today . . . hawwwk, spit)