“Suddenly Samuel laughed. ‘In two minutes,’ he said, ‘and after a waterfall of words. Caleb and Aaron-- now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.’”
As the resident John Steinbeck expert on this blog (by which I mean that when I was in tenth grade I read nearly all of his books, so, yeah, I’m pretty qualified), East of Eden has long been one of my favorite books. Novels about multiple generations of the same family fascinate me, and Steinbeck’s brand of this story stands a good chance, in my opinion, of contending for the great American novel. Since the story is long and complicated, the only thing I’ll say by way of a synopsis is that this is a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel through three generations of the same family. What is perhaps most exceptional about it is that it shows the grand scope of love, death and greatness equally as well as the everydayness of living with other human beings. This is the book that, when I first read it at fourteen, taught me that great books are great because they show human experience, and not because professors and reviewers pick only the driest, most difficult books to force on the portion of the population who want to be well-read.
I read this book every couple of years, and each time the depth of it swallows me up and spits me out at the end, usually crying, trying to figure out how something can be so moving and encompass so much without actually even telling me anything.
Loving other people is hard. The concrete wall that every character in East of Eden eventually runs into is that no matter how much you love another person and work to show them your love, it won’t always end well. Pain, abandonment, rejection and death: Adam loves his wife blindly, and she shoots him and leaves rather than live with him and her sons. Cal, the “dark twin,” sacrifices all he can for his brother and father, bears their burdens willingly, and suffers arguably more than anyone else for his goodness, because despite his intentions, the fruit of his actions cost his father’s respect and his brother’s life.
Now, probably the most well-known theme of this book is choice. There’s an oft-quoted section where Adam and his two closest friends try to puzzle out the meaning of the phrase at the end of the story of Cain and Abel, when God tells Cain that sin will crouch at the door and, depending on the translation, he must/he will rule over it. The famous timshel story, as told to Adam by his friend Lee:
“Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest!’ Why, that makes a man great, that gives a man stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he still has the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”
A beautiful and powerful idea, to be sure, but not one that comes to fruition in any obvious way in the course of the novel. The only man who achieves the kind of greatness that earns him fame, power and respect is Adam’s father, who turns out to be a liar and probably a thief. This is not the kind of greatness Adam and his friends are trying to get at with their study. Cal’s story is left unfinished, however, and if its trajectory is to be continued, his greatness will be a result of his choice to love despite his flaws and his failures.
After my most recent reading, I’m left with this: We’re not promised that our best will be good enough. We’re not promised that only good will come from our efforts to love one another. What we are promised is that, when whatever is going to go wrong goes wrong, we’re left with a choice. What we choose is what defines our greatness.
-Lemon
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