East of Eden, John Steinbeck, 1952
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
(East of Eden, pp. 412-413)
If I had to point to one writerly accolade that sets East of Eden apart from other novels, it would be Steinbeck’s ability to write actually interesting dialogue. The dialogue works almost as a rhetorical device—to surprise us with its beauty, to pinch us in the gut, but also to drive the plot, with as much skill as the prose that follows and precedes it. It’s easy to do dialogue lazily or dialogue that hits on points too explicitly, but Steinbeck’s dialogue is, ultimately, delicious. There is an expert balance of exposition and context paragraphs that level the dialogue. Between the lines of dialogue are where we understand the characters’ perspectives, though through the passages of prose are where we understand their passions.
Another notable general compliment to East of Eden; novels with a dedication to its character’s interiority like in East of Eden are often told through an omniscient narrator, though East of Eden’s narrator is a lad of the Hamilton family’s third generation, no part of the active storyline and, by manner of his being a real person, not omniscient. He is reliant on the memory of stories told by family members. One of the novel’s many triumphs is its delicate balance of deep investment in the characters’ thoughts and trials, yet its healthy distance which allows for the narrator to speak with an edge without using a sardonic tone. The narrator, I hear, is actually intended to be Steinbeck himself, and criticism says he is far enough removed as to seem like an omniscient narrator, which betrays the significance of his identity (The Book Club Podcast); but I think the removal works, as it seems the narrator intends to be objective—there is almost a sense of restraint by way of the narrator like he has thoughts of his own but is meaning to stay objective. It would be an interesting paper to argue a claim assuming the narrator’s opinions using the evidence of which details he chose to curate the story from.
Summary:
The novel begins with the backgrounds of two unconnected families, the Trasks in Connecticut and the Hamiltons in California. The book is very interested in dualities, one of which is the distinction between a healthy family and an unhealthy one. The Hamiltons operate as a contrast to the Trasks. They are a family of four sons and five daughters. They are balanced in imagination, drive, intelligence, whim—even in beliefs, Samuel Hamilton as a secular man, his wife Liza as a devout Christian, and their children a grounded mix of both.
The Trasks on the other hand are a father and two sons. Cyrus is characterized to have a preoccupation with soldiers in war, which bleeds into the raising of his boys, who he sees as his soldiers. Love is synonymous with respect in the Trask home; there is no doting manner as is seen in the Hamilton home. Cyrus’ admiration for Adam over Charles is corroborated by his sending Adam to be a soldier—so, respected—in the American Indian Wars, while Charles will continue on with the ranch. Adam is known as the “softer” son, while Charles is the “aggressive” one, which leads to one of the novel’s primary questions—are they really different in nature? Is this their fate?
In the nuance of Cyrus’s characterization we understand that Cyrus’s rejection of Charles is not due to any fault by Charles, but by a fault in Cyrus as a father. Steinbeck is bold about the flaws of men in this way. It is easier for Cyrus to love Adam because it is easier to nurture the son who will be easier nurtured.
Steinbeck’s characters are so comprehensively made that it’s a piece of cake for our imaginations to conceive of them. When Steinbeck uses descriptors for Charles, we are told that he grew up with his father’s assertiveness, that he was a natural athlete with instinctive timing and a competitive will, and that he was never sorry—ever (pp 20-23). If we had no more than this, we could still glean his physical build and austere mannerisms. To pull randomly about Adam, we know that he was always an obedient child; that “something in him shrank from violence, from contention, from the silent shrieking tensions that can rip at a house” (p 20). Though these quotes are nothing about the brothers’ physical traits, a sense of their stark difference is naturally painted over them.
The exact sibling dynamic between Charles and Adam is repeated in the generation of Adam’s two sons, and will ultimately be Adam’s downfall. This is thus the critical question put differently—are our lives determined by the faults of our families? Do generational flaws pass over? The unanswerable question I am sitting with is, if Adam is “good,” which Steinbeck surely intends him to be, instead of “bad” as Cyrus was, why did the cycle of jealousy and sibling rivalry repeat? Steinbeck wants us to believe in choice, but his story arc defends against it.
Cathy Aimes:
Cathy Aimes grew up in Massachusetts. Her character drives the novel’s big discussion of good and evil. She is evil—she is also the novel’s most interesting character. The general favorite is either Sam Hamilton or the Trask’s servant Lee, but the most interesting is Cathy. She is evil, yet has an awareness of her brutality that evil people are not usually concerned with. She is a sociopath (though this isn’t termed yet in the 1900s). When she is witness to love (through Sam, Lee, and eventually her son Cal), she is threatened by it. By all except Adam, another of the loving sort, though Cathy does not believe is wise because he loves her. She is not intimidated by him, maybe until the near end when she understands how deeply he believes she is wicked.
Cathy meets Charles and Adam on their doorstep, having been beaten nearly to death by another character. Adam is immediately infatuated with her in her helpless state. Old novels tend to show romantic love in the consuming way Adam falls for Cathy, and as immediate and unrealistic as it is, we tend to accept it. Adam believes he loves Cathy, but to believe this would be to believe in an all-encompassing, blind, soul-connection kind of love.
Whatever Cathy may have been, she set off the glory in Adam. His spirit rose flying and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories…Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted she was by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious without thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam’s Cathy. (Page 132).
Adam’s love for Cathy is the highlight of the book for me; maybe the most terrifying and candid form of love there is. The imagination’s love—the most pure and imperturbable. Steinbeck’s novel is smart about how the love is shattered: After Cathy leaves Adam and their sons, Adam’s heartbreak becomes the book’s center without it becoming a mawkish focus on Cathy.
Central Theme:
East of Eden’s real love story is between brotherhoods. The boys have always argued over lifestyle—Adam working on the ranch for pleasure while Charles works for profit, which isn’t very much. The difference in generosity between the brothers is another stark divider through the characters. A google search tells me that it’s the Bible which says “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10), and as the characters’ relation to faith and humanity is the novel’s center piece, it seems Steinbeck knows this fact. Cyrus, Mr. Edwards (whoremaster), and Cathy, are “bad” characters, all of whom cheat for money and win. They are bad in other ways, but if money was Steinbeck’s litmus test, it would be an accurate one. The morally ambiguous characters are Charles, Will (Samuel’s son, who works in business and advises Cal with money), and Cal, who value money but work for it, and Steinbeck’s “good” characters are Sam, Lee, Adam, and Aron, all of whom (except Aron) actually reject money at some point.
Wisdom:
About Samuel Hamilton, he “had not only variability but was a man of ideas and innovations” (page 38). Steinbeck makes a rich distinction between the man of ideas and the man of business. This is another of the novel’s dualities. Sam and Lee (and eventually Aron) are settled as men of ideas (and interestingly they’re the more likable ones, though East of Eden is great at showing the varieties within normalcy—never categorizing one as superior to the other). The Hamilton family and the Trasks meet when Adam hires Sam to dig wells on his property, which Sam is ironically known for, despite being unlucky with water on his own.
Lee is Adam’s live-in servant on the ranch. Lee’s conversations with Samuel and Adam are the novel’s most powerful—though I’ll counter this with criticism I’ve heard regarding Lee’s character as being too preacher-like, and too cliché of the wise Asian teller (credit to Dominic Sandbrook of the Book Club podcast). Really what I think Lee does is run us into small philosophical tangents that are only semi related to the plot, and although they are always banger points, they can read easily as notions of Steinbeck’s that don’t fit but he couldn’t let go of. If Steinbeck were better at killing his darlings, one like Dominic Sandbrook may suppose he would have killed some of Lee’s conversations. I also have trouble killing darlings, and I think the novel would be missing so much life without Lee’s wisdom and manner of delivering it. There are conversations about one thing, and then in between there will be some lines about turning off a lamp, or something domestic of that sort which completes the human picture and gives dimension to the dialogue.
Example of Lee’s Wisdom:
In an early conversation between Lee and Samuel (pp 160-164), Samuel calls BS on the pidgin Lee speaks, and Lee drops his accent completely, admitting that he fakes speaking pidgin because Americans have preconceived ideas that bar them from listening to him if he is not what they expect him to be. Tonally, though, which critics may have problems with, is that “admitting” is not necessarily the correct verb, as Lee only ever speaks as if he is an all-knowing entity of humanity and good. Later in the novel, Lee’s pidgin is dropped completely, and this, too, I can imagine criticism for; though I actually enjoy the fact, as so many years pass in the novel that it is expected many things would dissolve. Anyway, it may be hard to trace the actual relevance to the story at large other than its manner of being philosophical.
Time Passing:
I commend Steinbeck on the beauty with which he passes time. Dispersed between the plot, the narrator returns to its place in history (the late 1800s, early 1900s). During these short chapters is typically when the narrator will remind us that he is a descendent of the family. At the start of the 1900s, Steinbeck gives a full recap of the 1800s—basically, that chivalry is dead—and the mass production of the 1900s. Steinbeck’s tangents, like Lee’s, are not directly relevant to the plot of the Hamiltons and Trasks, but, coded into the novel’s foundation, they add a profound reality to the book as an organism. Steinbeck (narrator)’s point about the threat to individualism with the onset of mass production (pp 130-131) is the background to why understanding the nuance of characters holds so much weight.
“When our food and clothing and housing are all born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. … Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man.”
Later, we get a sense of America’s hopelessness as America joins World War I: “I guess we were like a tough but inexperienced little boy who gets punched in the nose in the first flurry and it hurts and we wished it was over” (p 482). It would make sense that East of Eden is an antiwar novel as much as it is about the fight to be good.
Cathy to Kate Pipeline:
After Cathy’s escape from Adam (and I say escape with intention, as she leaves with antipathy and scorn), the novel flips between Adam’s story and Cathy’s. She stays in Salinas Valley, taking over one of the town’s three whorehouses in a gradual and criminal manner. East of Eden really is a mammoth of a novel, and it would not be such a masterpiece without its comprehensive picture of each characters’ situation. Firstly, there’s an incredible exposition paragraph at the start of chapter 19 which begins “The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously.” What a statement to be made. It is the passages like these that one reads voraciously and comes from the book remembering. What Steinbeck does is make a parallel of the two, but between the lines there is a wise implication about how restraint opens the door to indulgence.
There is also a full picture of the other whorehouses in town. One is for the sexual kinks, one is for the broken hearted, and Faye’s—where Cathy lands—is for the restrained. Cathy, who now goes by Kate, is loved dearly by Faye, becoming her madame-in-second and adopted daughter. Once Faye changes her will and leaves her fortune of the whorehouse to her lovely daughter Kate, she dies of natural causes.
Transition to the Next Generation:
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Adam and his two infant sons are abandoned by Cathy. There isn’t much that Steinbeck gives us about the heartache, but the loneliness is there. Something feels quieter—could be that we are only given one page of the direct aftermath, in which Adam gives up on his American dream of the wells. Samuel, essentially laid off, tells him, “Go through the motions Adam…You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow” (page 213), before there is a time jump in Adam’s storyline with Samuel’s absence.
A year and three months later (p 253), at a run-in with Samuel in town, Lee shares his worries about Adam, who has become “like a ghost” and has not yet named his sons. It is a small scene, but scenes between Lee and Samuel are always rich, resonant of the Gods in a meeting to discuss their subject. They often pull the strings for the opinions that are formed.
Samuel, a man of peace, arrives at Adam’s ranch and nearly murders him to kick some sense into him about being at such a distance from his sons. He sets Adam straight with the claim that Adam has no love, to which Adam says “I had—enough to kill me.” Samuel replies with one of his many bangers, “No one ever had enough. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much” (p 257). Samuel asks Adam to see his sons and remember “the cold at night of a lone child,” and then it is a quick switch in Adam. This is a tender moment, as the reader knows the loneliness of Adam’s childhood.
When naming his children, Adam has a fresh surge of energy, almost cutely. There is significance to the length of this scene—an homage to ancestry, identity, and destiny, the book’s pivotal themes. The men take the job of the naming seriously. They are like Danny Tanner, Uncle Jesse, and Joey, raising their sons motherless, except with a dark cloud of depth over them. It is during the naming ceremony that Steinbeck explicitly alludes to the story of Cain and Abel, which East of Eden is zealously resonant of (more directly in the dynamic between Charles and Adam than Adam’s boys, though I would be interested in reading an argument for that). The story of Cain and Abel is the ultimate story of good versus evil, as East of Eden is the ultimate novel of it.
The men admit it would be “tempting whatever fate there is” to name the boys Cain and Abel (p 264), but they do settle on Caleb, who made it to the promised land alongside Joshua, and Aaron, who did not. Caleb is the smart and dark one—the one who reminded Adam of Charles—and Aaron, who he spells Aron, is the joyful one.
About halfway through the novel is the start of Part 3, which details the Hamilton children as they become adults. They are much closer, much more domestic, and much less bitter than the Trasks. There is a beautiful show of teamwork, which is missing from the Trasks altogether, in which the siblings decide Samuel is too old to work on the farm. He will retire, hop between his children’s homes, and grow old and die. He accepts this, choosing to die with the force of his children’s love for him. This is eleven years after the previous chapter. We are in the year 1911.
In Samuel’s last chapter before his send off, he dines with the Trasks over pot roast. Samuel once again encourages Adam to pick up his dream of farming the land (with yet another banger that will stick with me): “‘Do you take pride in your hurt?’ … ‘Does it make you seem large and tragic?’” *jaw drop.* “‘Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience’” (p 293). Adam eventually has courage enough to seek out Cathy and take on a new business endeavor (in which he attempts to freeze and sell lettuce). But more importantly, this last impassioned conversation leads into the novel’s most critical conversation between Lee, Samuel, and Adam about the Hebrew word Timshel; Steinbeck’s entire point is that “in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother [man] has still [the glory of] choice” (page 301).
In the scene of Samuel’s goodbye, there is, as expected, a powerful show of humanity and friendship. Adam asks him, as he’s walking out the door, for “one last kindness,” to stay and to help him “make the garden [they] talked of” of “windmills and the wells and the flats of alfalfa” (p 296). Although Samuel rejects his offer, he says he’ll “see it in [his] mind when [he’s] in Salinas…And maybe [he’ll] get to believe it happened” (p 296). We cry at this, confronted with a sweeping acknowledgement that all things end, and reminded of the grandness of fantasy, memory, symbols, and hope that come with having a dream.
Adam’s Boys:
Before we are fully thrown into the next generation, we are again given over to Kate, Madame of Faye’s whorehouse. Adam confronts her to let her go (this is why we have a romantic idea of closure). Cathy intends to hurt him with the fact that the twins are not his, but because Adam is a good man, he doesn’t care. “Adam…I hate you I hate you now for the first time” (p 323). Though Adam does not act victoriously, this is a victorious moment. Earlier, Adam was broken at the discovery that Cathy felt nothing so strong as even hatred for him. Kate becomes relevant as the boys grow up curious about their mother.
At chapter 27, page 331, we are officially at the next generation. At the beginning of this chapter, my notes read “this is a shockingly great novel,” as we are introduced to Cal and Aron separate from Adam in a scene set up by narrating the movements of a rabbit—Cal’s prey—as it is shot and dies. Cal wants to give Aron the credit for the meal. We learn that Cal loves his brother; that he feels stronger than him, that he feels like his protector. They argue over the whereabouts of their mother, Aron on the side that she is in Heaven as Adam has told them, and Cal on the side that she ran away, which he heard men in town talking about. He finds this conversation to be a tool against his brother, which will become important later on.
Abra Bacon, a year younger, comes into the picture as a pretty and demure little girl. The scenes of youth are rejuvenating. Being that much of the content revolves around a cynical perspective and loneliness, the child’s perspective brings upon a new energy. Aron decides quickly—as Adam did with Cathy—that he loves Abra. Cal’s jealousy isn’t regarding a love that he may have for Abra himself, but an envy of Aron’s ability to love and beget love.
Steinbeck allows Cal a layer of sympathy that he did not allow Charles. When Cal overhears conversation between Adam and Lee that Charles died, leaving his fortune to Adam and, oddly, to Cathy, it is confirmed for Cal that his mother is alive and has left them. Cal prays, and he cries—for one of very few times in the novel—ruminating on whether or not he should break Aron’s heart with the news of their mother: “let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be” (p 377). When Aron wakes, Cal, still praying, tells Aron that his father plans to send a wreath to their mother’s grave, and that it will get there safely.
For me, this scene between Aron and Cal is the most tender in the novel. Children laying in the dark, one trusting the other, the other protecting the one, and both dream about their mother. This scene sets up the ache for the scenes that follow.
Aron and Abra play pretend in a garden as husband and wife, then Aron says, jarringly, “Maybe we could pretend like you’re my mother” (p 422). In this pinnacle of a moment, we see in full force the dichotomies that Steinbeck’s characters are—ignorance versus knowledge, imagination versus reality, agency versus complacency, how one determines another’s fate, how one is destined to fall.
The brother dynamic is discussed with consequence.
“From his first memory Cal had craved warmth and affection, just as everyone does. If he had been an only child or if Aron had been a different kind of boy, Cal might have achieved his relationship normally and easily. But from the very first people were won instantly to Aron by his beauty and simplicity. Cal very naturally competed for attention and affection in the only way he knew—by trying to imitate Aron. And what was charming in the blond ingenuousness of Aron became suspicious and unpleasant in the dark-faced, slit-eyed Cal. And since he was pretending, his performance was not convincing. Where Aron was received, Cal was rebuffed for doing or saying exactly the same thing.” (p 440).
It is not only that they are nearly foils of one another, but that one’s positive disposition causes the negativity of the other’s. It makes you think of balance, and repercussions when things fall off-kilter.
Mommy Issues/Daddy Issues:
When he finds Cathy at her whorehouse, Cal learns what it is to be good and to be bad. He has always believed he is bad, relative to Adam and Aron who are good, but there is no mistake after he meets his mother. He concludes that he has his own badness, and that it is nothing from Cathy. I think we sympathize with Cal more than we do with Aron at this point. Aron has his storyline too—he is unsure if he is good enough for Abra, he leaves her unsatisfied, takes a vow of celibacy, wants to join a priesthood, goes into academia, makes his father proud—but where his goodness is natural and easy, Cal’s is earnest and complex.
The generations repeat—this is Steinbeck’s unforgiving lesson. Cal wants to connect with his father, who he believes loves Aron more, as was the case between Adam, Charles, and Cyrus. Except Adam doesn’t love Aron more—or, there is nothing Steinbeck intentionally does to betray the fact that he does.
The idea of fondness for a parent, or the question of it, runs through the novel almost as a motif. Samuel’s son Will—atypical outcast, successful businessman under an inspired father—advises Cal with a business plan that would make money to gift his father. Will asks him “Are you fond of [your father]?” This question, which was asked by Charles to Adam earlier, is strange, is it not? It takes familial love and analyzes it, destructs it, and calls it out. It gives the reader the option not to be fond of their parent.
Steinbeck recurs Lee’s idea of Timshel through Adam, who works on the draft board, stuck in the nightmarish irony of sending boys to their deaths by taking away their ability to choose life.
In this essay I have overlooked some long bits about Kate and her sidekick Joe. Kate schemes to be rid of one of the ladies at the house purporting to have knowledge of Faye’s murder, while Joe schemes to be free of Kate. Every word and chapter of this novel is sewn with such intentful meaning that I can’t trust we’d know Kate as such a comprehensive character without these parts, but if I have any of my own criticism it would be that the Kate sections in this last portion of the novel were less engaging emotionally. They do work well, however, to show how Cathy has aged, has wondered about her sons, and in keeping us close to her for when the time comes that she interacts with her sons.
There is a memorable scene early in the novel about a gift that is rejected by Cyrus from Charles, and the violence directed at Adam. It is repeated powerfully in Adam’s rejection of Cal’s money. In Cal’s loss of control, which is almost unexpected being that the character up until this point has been stoic and restrained, he brings Aron to meet their mother.
Astoundingly, we do not get the details of what entails. Steinbeck is a genius in this way; he gives the climax no chance to be anticlimactic. But we do get that Cathy commits suicide, which makes us wonder about her and the question of redemption. And we get that Aron sends himself to war in the aftermath. Losing Aron is enough for Adam to fall paralyzed, leaving Cal with an insurmountable guilt that both his brother and his father have fallen as a direct response to his own pain. The remorse is incessant, making the point that Cal is good, even though he isn’t always morally right.
In my favorite line of the last chapter, “The light of the kitchen poured down on them” (p 597). The novel is at its center—domesticity, mealtime, survival, and leisure. On Adam’s sick bed, Lee mediates Cal’s forgiveness. Lee begs his friend to give Cal the chance to be forgiven, to let Cal be free. Adam makes an attempt to do so, to which Lee thanks him, and then the novel ends on Adam’s last word, “Timshel,” before he shuts his eyes and sleeps.
There is no more I can say than a 6 out of 5. This is a book that performs blessings. Through the documentation of Adam’s life—his parentage through his siblinghood and his sons—Steinbeck has created a masterful exploration of fatherhood, the nuance of brothers, the beauty of friendship, the search for self-acceptance, the struggle with illicit thoughts, and the relationship one’s imagination has on romance and reality.
