The Winter of Our Discontent Read Online Free PDF Page A

he wrote to his agent about the importance of dramatic speech: “They say that a life is written in the face but now it seems to me, after listening, that it is even more written in the speech. The background is all there and the fears, the nature of the man in his speech.” In the novel that came five years later, Ethan’s speeches convey all shades of dramatic intensity.
    Steinbeck wrapped his novel around the plot of these two drafts and a story that was published out of them, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank,” appearing in the March 1956 Atlantic Monthly. In this sly tale, Steinbeck’s touch is light—a “comedy,” notes the header, careful guidelines concerning a bank robbery. “How” in the title is thus central, since for a year Mr. Hogan meticulously plans his robbery and executes it with aplomb: “Mr. Hogan was a man who noticed things, and when it came to robbing a bank, this trait stood him in good stead.” His strategy is Ethan’s in the novel. Both depend on the world at large paying little attention to the unexpected. On a Saturday before Labor Day, Mr. Hogan opens the grocery store where he is clerk at 9:00 A.M., and at 9:04 he grabs an Iver Johnson .38 pistol (Steinbeck loved weapons of all kinds, the more unusual the better), shoves a Mickey Mouse mask under his coat, and walks out the door. Whereas Ethan’s planned robbery is foiled, Mr. Hogan’s is not, and at 9:07 ½ he finishes tucking the stolen money under the top tray of the cash register. That night he comes home to dinner and calmly hands each of his children one of the pilfered bills, five dollars each. “What a fine family!” he declares, the word “fine” used three times in the final paragraph. Mr. Hogan’s fine world remains intact.
    In Winter, however, bank robbery is no laughing matter but rather the novel’s moral fulcrum; the modern Everyman, Ethan, first abandons righteousness in a willed act of transgression. The bank-robbery scheme is the supreme fiction, a radical reordering of consciousness that makes possible a newly hatched man. Ethan’s “immorality” turns on his own gamesmanship, his technique, his solipsism—seemingly with the ghost of Ayn Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged in the background of Ethan’s single-minded quest. He determines that he will be a contestant in a game of chance—not so very unlike participation on rigged quiz shows that pitted apprised and unapprised contestants against one another. Can Ethan win the jackpot, come what may? His willed depravity is, in this most self-reflective of novels, a work of art. In a long passage in the manuscript of Winter, omitted in the final text, Steinbeck sets forth Ethan’s “reordering,” the mental process that prepares him to rob a bank, act immorally, and do so without blinders. It is worth including the omitted passage in full to understand how Ethan’s plan is linked to the power of language to shape and reshape experience. Ethan addresses his canned goods:
     
Our subject this morning is morality. What is it, and where can it. be found? I know as well as you that any inspection or discussion of morals, except in vague and general terms, is considered immoral and cynical. But since I don’t see how a tinned tomato can sin even if so inclined, perhaps I do no harm.
    Let us start by agreeing that people must feel moral and virtuous, and they do. In this field words are very important. What a thing is called determines what it is. Even to indicate that philanthropy grows out of fear or egotism is to be cynical. Even to suggest that leaders of our community, in secretly buying available property, have any other purpose than to benefit the townships is to be almost sacrilegious. When Mr. Baker, my friend and tutor, took a bottle of whisky to Danny, he had the future of Bay [New Baytown], the progress of Wessex County, the glory of the American Way in mind. When in 1812 my ancestors fired on rich merchant ships, they were patriotically motivated. In