Sweet Thursday Read Online Free PDF Page A

Steinbeck’s postwar change of aesthetic sensibility made all the difference between his treatment of Doc, whose “transcendent sadness” and essential loneliness closed Cannery Row , and this portrayal, which ends with the partially incapacitated but romantically redeemed Doc riding off with the no less reformed and eager Suzy (she is driving) into the sunset of a day that is “of purple and gold, the proud colors of the Salinas High School.” Steinbeck continues, “A squadron of baby angels maneuvered at twelve hundred feet, holding a pink cloud on which the word J-O-Y flashed on and off. A seagull with a broken wing took off and flew straight up into the air, squawking, ‘Joy! Joy!’” That over-the-top moment gives Sweet Thursday the same fanciful, buoyant quality Steinbeck found in The World of Li’l Abner : “such effective good nature that we seem to have thought of it ourselves.” Inevitably, Doc and Suzy’s fairy-tale relationship is not so much a smarmy act of denouement as it is a proof of Steinbeck’s belief in the necessity for human beings to willingly open themselves to the demands of mutual love, and his abiding sense of the “joy” of creative drives to address human desire. Sweet Thursday conjoins writing and sexuality, which creates an exquisite “satisfaction” that comes when “words and sentences” and “good and shared love” combine, as he announced in a short essay called “Rationale.” “Believe me, I have nothing against fairy tales,” he told Otis and his drama agent Annie Laurie Williams on April 7, 1962. “God knows I’ve written enough of them. My point is that no fairy tale is acceptable unless it is based on some truth about something. You can make it as light and airy and full of whimsy as you wish but down underneath there has to be a true thing.” Love, considered emotionally, physically, and as a form of creativity, Steinbeck suggests, is the “true thing” that has the potential to heal the split between man and woman, self and world, language and life, text and audience. The pejorative Time magazine review was only partly—and unintentionally—correct in its assessment of Sweet Thursday. Steinbeck did “comic-strip” his characters of reality, but that was his desire; far from being proof of his decline into an undifferentiated Saroyanesque landscape, his appropriation of Al Capp’s free-form inventiveness, vivid technique, exaggerated scenarios, and “dreadful folk poetry” helped further in the novel what Steinbeck saw in Li’l Abner : a “hilarious picture of our ridiculous selves.”
    Thus “Sweet Thursday” functions as a double signifier—at once private and public utterance, reference and object, process and product. The name refers to a “magic kind of day” when all manner of unanticipated, random events occur on Cannery Row (to which Steinbeck devotes three contiguous, titled chapters—19, 20, 21—at the midpoint of his novel, and one—39—at the very end). Then, refracted, “Sweet Thursday” (a time, a place in the mind, a historical context) becomes, like Hawthorne’s symbolic “Scarlet Letter” or Melville’s multimeaning “Moby-Dick,” the title of the book Steinbeck brings into being. The title operates in turn as a looking glass, a hole in reality, that reflects, distorts, enlarges, and/or magnifies the implicit ethereality and quantum activities of the “magic day” by borrowing a sense of its own disruptive form from the uninhibited carnival quality of life on the Row and from a number of literary texts that play into the mix. That inherent duality and fluid interchangeability of word and world and fiction and fact symbolizes Steinbeck’s imaginative concerns and method. When in chapter 20 Fauna tells Joe Elegant, “When a man