East of Eden - Part One

Intro, and first 125 pages

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

Welcome to East of Eden! I hope you have enjoyed your first 11 chapters.

To begin, a note on the narrator and the author:

When I first read this novel (and again rereading) I found myself asking: who is the narrator? With first-person narratives (and especially after coming off of The Remains of the Day) this feels like an important question. Therefore, who is the narrator of East of Eden? The answer: the author.

This is somewhat unique in modern fiction. Up to the 19th century, it was normative for a work of fiction to be composed by an author without the filter of a narrator (i.e. Chaucer (14th century), Emma (1815), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), etc.). However, in the 19th century the opportunities found through creating a fictional, narrative mind through which to view the world became the rage (i.e. Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853), David Copperfield (1850), Dracula (1897), etc.), and continues to be a favored way of writing (i.e. My Name is Asher Lev (1972), Crossing to Safety (1987), The Remains of the Day (1989), etc.).

However, publishing this book in 1952, John Steinbeck effectively chose not to create a fictional character as his narrator, but instead made himself the narrator inside a fictional story. Flipped it, and got meta. Woah. Therefore, if my facts about John Steinbeck feel familiar from the novel, they should.

John Steinbeck was born in the Salinas Valley in 1902. He was the grandson of Samuel Hamilton, and the son of Olive Hamilton (1867-1934). He was 12-16 years old during WWI, and was in his mid-30’s and early-40’s during WWII. In 1943 he worked as a war correspondent, seeing and writing about the war first hand. Between wars, he weathered the Great Depression.

(The above family tree is NOT in correct birth order. But it’s a decent start.)

A note on who to pay attention to:

When I first read this novel, I was not sure who, in this ever-expanding Dickensian list of characters, actually mattered. While Steinbeck is our narrator and the first voice we hear, he is not our main character. Adam Trask is, mostly. And since it’s a multi-generational novel, keep your focus on that Adam Trask household, including his newly married, diabolical wife Cathy.

Now a list, in no particular order, of what I’m paying attention to:

• Names: Why people are named what, especially those with Biblical names. I’m looking at you Samuel and Adam (& maybe Cyrus if we consider the Persian King Cyrus (580-529 BC) who allowed the Jewish people to return from exile). And why others receive non-Biblical names: Charles and Cathy (though these are names with a long Christian history).

• Biblical Allusions:

  • storylines (i.e. Samuel as prophet, Adam as father);

  • broader themes (i.e. death & resurrection (63), life-giving properties of water, both physical and spiritual (4, 31));

  • the Mark of Cain (i.e. on the bartender called “Cat” (48), on Charles (47, 116), and on Cathy (111, 121)).

• Fatherhood: What are we to make of Cyrus Trask? He’s incredibly flawed, but when he gives advice before Adam enters the military (24-28), it feels as if Steinbeck allows him wisdom. Can you achieve wisdom despite flawed motives? The Introduction to the 1992 Penguin Classics edition says, “The Bible can be read as a book about the mystery of favorite children” (xxii), I disagree with their take, but find it a launching point for deeper reflection.

“When a child first catches adults out -when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety is gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. Adam found his father out” (19-20).

• Evil/Monsterness:

  • Charles almost killing his brother, Adam.

    “The footsteps came close, slowed, moved on a little, came back. From his hiding place Adam could see only a darkness in the dark. And then a sulphur match was struck and burned a tiny blue until the wood caught, lighting his brother’s face grotesquely from below. Charles raised the match and peered around, and Adam could see the hatchet in his right hand” (31).

  • Cathy using her sexuality to manipulate and gain power. (Her feet are described as hoof-like (73), a common way of identifying the devil in Medieval paintings!)

    “What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster” (75).

• Time: Below are two lovely passages on the subject:

  • “Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no post to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all” (55).

  • “Adam stood up and strode out of [Cathy’s] room. He went to the back door and looked out on the afternoon. Far off in the field his brother was lifting stones from a sled and piling them on the stone wall. Adam looked up at the sky. A blanket of herring clouds was rolling in from the east. He sighed deeply and his breath made a tickling, exciting feeling in his chest. His ears seemed suddenly clear, so that he heard chickens cackling and the east wind blowing over the ground…A flight of sparrows dropped into the dust and scrabbled for bits of food and then flew off like a gray scarf twisting in the light. Adam looked back at his brother. He had lost track of time and he did not know how long he had been standing in the doorway. No time had passed. Charles was still struggling with the same stone. And Adam had not released the full, held breath he had taken when time stopped” (119-120).

How this book (published in 1952) is like other books; or, how this book is in conversation with other books:

• “Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and dangle from his coattails” (12).

  Reminds me of (& perhaps is an antithesis to)…

  “A ‘great’ butler can only be, surely, one who can point to his years of service and say that he has applied his talents to serving a great gentleman - through the latter, to serving humanity” (The Remains of the Day, 117, published 1989).
  and…
  ”The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services” (The Remains of the Day, 244, published 1989).

• “The direction of a big act will war history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil” (34).

  Reminds me of…

  “As [the March 1923 conference at Darlington Hall] grew ever nearer, the pressures on myself, though of a humbler nature than those mounting on his lordship, were nevertheless not inconsequential. I was only too aware of the possibility that if any guest were to find his stay at Darlington Hall less than comfortable, this might have repercussions of unimaginable largeness” (The Remains of the Day, 76-77, published 1989).

  and…

  “I was in fact discussing the silver, and how Lord Halifax had been suitably impressed on the evening of his meeting with Herr Ribbentrop at Darlington Hall. Let me make clear, I was not for a moment suggesting that what had initially threatened to be a disappointing evening for my employer had turned into a triumphant on solely on account of the silver. But then, as I indicated, Lord Darlington himself suggested that the silver might have been at least a small factor in the change in his guest’s mood that evening, and it is perhaps not absurd to think back to such instances with a glow of satisfaction” (The Remains of the Day, 138, published 1989).

• “Little boys don’t want their fathers to be different from other men” (39).

  Reminds me of…

  Jem Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird (published 1960), wishing his father wasn’t so old so he could play football with the younger dads. (But thank goodness Jem saw his dad sharpshoot the rabid dog!)

• “Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms…He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day…And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended” (40).

  Reminds me of…
  "Anne flew to the door, face alight, eyes glowing. On the very threshold she stopped short, wheeled about, came back and sat down by the table, light and glow effectually blotted out as if someone had clapped an extinguisher on her” (Anne of Green Gables, 34, published 1908).

• “Lonely men, who wanted it that way” (56).
  Reminds me of…
  The wandering, homeless parents of the author of The Glass Castle (published 2005).

• “Everyone concealed that little hell in himself” (75).
  Reminds me of…
  ”A Hell within him, for within him Hell” (Paradise Lost, Book IV, 20, published 1667)

  (Shout out to the Paradise Lost section of The Good Good, the Good Bad, the Bad Good, and the Bad Bad)

Almost finished, now to do a Kelsie-thing, and list two beautiful and positive passages:

“I always found in myself a dread of the west and a love of the east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains” (3).

“They called [Samuel Hamilton] a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens” (10).

Last musing, and to end on a negative note: Steinbeck, not known for lighthearted writing, does not disappoint with the mic drop ending of Part One. Adam, drugged by Cathy on their wedding night, sleeps the sleep of death as Cathy consummates her marriage with her husband’s brother…it’s as twisted as some of the darker narratives of our own Biblical history (cough, cough, Judah and Tamar). Here’s to hoping for a savior within this narrative to redeem it too (a girl can dream!).

…And we didn’t even touch on Cyrus’ first wife & her death, Cyrus’ second wife & her death, Adam’s time in the army into his time as a vagrant, how Charles and Adam grew and changed, Cathy’s sadistically manipulative and murderous childhood, etc. Steinbeck packs too much plot into his paragraphs to permit us to pause at every pivotal plot point, so we must press on. Next musings on East of Eden will be:

June 26 - Part Two (~140 pgs)¹

July 3 - Part Three (~130 pgs)

July 10 - Part Four (~190pgs)

And here’s the schedule!

Podcasts

Kelsie Hartley

here for a quick second…There is a

Close Reads HQ

’s podcast for East of Eden, however it is behind their paywall. If you subscribe you get the whole backlog of episodes and you can be a subscriber for one month or forever. Here is the first podcast! I do subscribe and heartily recommend it in general, but specifically for East of Eden.

Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

In Case You Missed It

• The Remains of the Day-Final Thoughts (and discussion questions) by

  Kelsie Hartley

• Our first ever Reading Revisited Podcast with Hannah Suire interviewing Kelsie Hartley about her “Bookish Bio”

• Sin and the Gothic Novel by

  Kelsie Hartley

• May Bookshelf

A Few Reminders

• If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

• Here is the whole list of this years book selections

• Book lists from previous years can be found here.

• Instagram

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1. Part Two has a rather warped scene with Cathy on p. 236. You can plan accordingly.