The Winter of Our Discontent Read Online Free PDF

fact, my canned and bottled friends, an acceptable strong motivation releases one from any restriction.
    . . . Is truthfulness permitted in our society[?] I’m afraid not, not even, particularly not even to ones self [ sic ].
    . . . It has occurred to me that the moral bangles and tassels a man wears to convince himself that his immorality is moral, his criminality lawful in a larger sense, that his leching is love, his larceny is philanthropic, may not all these dangling, brocaded and stiff vestments impede his movement and his thinking. Suppose a man did a thing because he did it. Would he not then be able to center his attention and his abilities more on his activities and less on his reasons however handsome and spurious? . . . The question is—can the human stand honesty within himself. This has not been tested in so far as I know.
     
Here Steinbeck strips behavior as he strips language of its vestments: Is it possible, Ethan asks, to act immorally with searing honesty, a seeming oxymoron? But it is that quandary that gives Winter its edge: “I had thought I could put a process in motion and control it at every turn,” he muses late in the book. Some critics have called Steinbeck to task for the bank-robbery plot, since the robbery does not occur and seems unnecessary after Ethan “falls” to a quartet of temptations offered in the first chapter by the banker Mr. Baker, Margie Young-Hunt, store owner Marullo (“look out for number one”), and salesman Biggers. But the essential questions in the novel hinge on that scripted transgression: Does honesty to self, lucidly articulated, trump self-aggrandizement?
    Indeed, Ethan’s plunge from observer to player energizes him. Drawing from yet another text, Steinbeck alludes to Ed Ricketts’s and his own notions of the survivability of a species. Both men frequently discussed the fact that adversity strengthened a species’ survival quotient. In the 1930s Ricketts wrote an essay entitled “Wave Shock,” arguing that the toughest and most resilient animals are those battered most severely by waves. That concept provided Steinbeck with a metaphor for human existence in a Darwinian world. In another deleted passage from the novel, Ethan muses on his new stance as wily competitor: “I knew I would win and I felt kindly not only toward Marullo but toward the others I knew now I could beat. I felt related to them, a powerful brotherness. . . . Business is combat,” Ethan continues in the manuscript: “Someone must win and someone must lose. Even if there were enough of everything for everyone, and probably there is, the winners would take it away from the losers.” In becoming a player, the Harvard-educated Ethan is bound to prevail in his highly polished, well-considered, and fully articulated matches with the clueless. Ethan is Van Doren, masterful contestant.
    Drawing from the world’s library, Steinbeck composed this story with his father as his imagined audience, a quiet, bookish man who had died twenty-five years before. In addressing this manuscript to his father, Steinbeck wrote to a man of absolute integrity—and also a man who had failed at business and was, finally, appointed as treasurer of Monterey County after corrupt actions by a former treasurer. During Steinbeck’s adolescence his father had faltered, the family’s finances darkened. Perhaps Steinbeck’s own filial infidelities are written into this plot: Ethan’s and his own waywardness blend with the manuscript’s “willfulness” so that each sentence is addressed to the man who had taught him what integrity meant. Ethan’s surrogate fathers—Marullo, his boss; Baker, his banker; and old Cap’n, his grandfather—give him questionable ethical advice and act inconsistently, yet Ethan embraces their energy rather than his father’s torpor. In this book the actions of fathers and sons, their integrity and their lapses, signal some kind of patriarchal, cultural collapse.
    Finally, the book