The Glory and Shame of Being Alive (According to John Steinbeck)
AKA: Further thoughts on duty and desire
John Steinbeck and I are kindred spirits, both of us being American writers from California obsessed with ancient meta-narratives. Since Steinbeck is one of the greatest novelists in American fiction, I admit that is where the similarities end. But his 1952 novel, East of Eden holds at its center one such meta-narrative: the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Steinbeck claimed the novel was the best thing he ever wrote, declaring “it has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” Shot through with the weighty quality of primeval legend, the sweeping, almost mythological-feeling story follows two American families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, whose intertwining relationships and circumstances mirror the book of Genesis, especially the bloody tale of Adam’s sons—one the world’s first victim and the other its first murderer. Through a series of Cain-like and Abel-like characters, the novel seems to posit that humans fall into two fundamental categories: intrinsically good, like Abel, and inherently evil, like Cain. To further complicate the contemplations, Steinbeck juxtaposes the responsibility of radical free will (timshel) with the reality of inherent goodness and wickedness at the core of each individual.
So the conventional interpretation goes.
But the categories of “good-like-Abel” and “evil-like-Cain” are insufficient to the complexity of the novel. Rather than good or evil, each character can be understood more accurately as duty-driven or desire-driven. The novel explores how each type of person chooses their path as they navigate the complexities of inherited circumstance and personal responsibility.
The first characters we meet are Cyrus Trask and his unnamed wife. Cyrus is “something of a devil” who revels in fighting, drinking, whoring, and gambling. A rebel bullet maims his leg in 1862, but he finds his wooden leg “jaunty and desirable.” His wife, on the other hand, is a “pale inside-herself woman.” She is deeply religious, and “no heat of sun ever reddened her cheeks, and no open laughter raised the corners of her mouth.” The contrast is clear: Cyrus’s wife balances his indulgent nature with her staunch one. But when she discovers that her husband gave her gonorrhea, she turns to “a god of vengeance” and spends two weeks composing a grammatically pristine suicide note before drowning herself in a shallow pond. Casting Cyrus as evil and his wife good is an inadequate interpretation, especially since all that comes later is defined by the absence of this unnamed wife, who so lacks any meaningful virtue that her last living thought as she drowns herself is not of the infant son she leaves behind, but of the mud they will find on her hand-made shroud. The spiraling fragmentation in the novel spreads from this fundamental crack, which both self-centered Cyrus and his self-righteous wife create.
Distinguishing between duty/desire and good/evil in the novel is essential, because it illustrates our tendency to elevate duty over desire. We often perceive desire as inherently wicked and duty as fundamentally righteous. Certainly this is a common perception, but it is flawed. In East of Eden, the duty-driven characters cause as much suffering as the desire-driven ones. Adam Trask, for instance, is conscientious and tender-hearted, but willfully blind and slothful. He and his dissipated brother Charles engage in brutal conflict. When they are young men, a badly beaten young woman appears on their doorstep begging for help, and Adam fails to notice that she is a sadistic sociopath on the hunt for a new victim to exploit. Charles, however, recognizes Cathy’s wickedness and warns Adam. “Won’t you get rid of her? Please, Adam. Throw her out. She’ll tear you to pieces. She’ll destroy you.” But Adam, a simple and dutiful man, cannot conceive of the depraved desires that motivate Cathy. Charles can see what Adam cannot, because Charles recognizes his own divided soul mirrored in Cathy. Adam refuses to listen. When Cathy later reveals her true self, abandoning Adam and their twin sons to preside over a sado-masochistic brothel in Salinas, Adam disappears into himself, leaving the care of his land, his home, and his sons to his servant, Lee. Both “Cain-ish” Charles and “Abel-ish” Adam are extreme personalities, one desiring and one dutiful, each lacking a fundamental aspect of the other’s humanity, and both leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.
This cycle of division repeats itself in the Trask family, manifesting again in the twin boys Cathy leaves behind. Desire-driven Cal and duty-driven Abel replay the inherited family struggle in their own ways.
But the novel does not leave us without hope, offering a meaningful remedy to the problem of the divided soul and two idealized characters who embody it. The solution is discovered in the Bible by Lee, Adam’s long-suffering Chinese servant who fills the gap left by Cathy in the Trask home. God speaks directly to Cain before the murder as his rage against his brother grows: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” Lee explains that the Hebrew word in the final phrase is timshel, which directly translated means “thou mayest.” Lee presents the significance of timshel.
“Thou mayest rule over sin….It might be the most important word in the world. That says that the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘thou mayest’ – it is also true that ‘thou mayest not.” Don’t you see?”
Timshel is the stark but healing power of radical choice. Through exercising timshel, we either heal or destroy ourselves. Despite our depraved desires or our distorted sense of duty or our difficult circumstances, we can choose to pursue the good. We mayest triumph over sin.
Two central characters manifest the healing of their divided souls through timshel. One is Samuel Hamilton, Adam Trask’s big-hearted, jovial neighbor. A man of prodigious appetites, he is “full-blown and hearty, full of inventions and energy.” Along the way Samuel learns to orient his appetites to their proper object: his family and relationships. “There was a whisper in my family that it was love that drove him.” Unlike Charles, Samuel channels his appetites into fruitfulness and stability rather than lust and slovenliness. For Samuel Hamilton, desire mingles with duty to create magnanimity, wisdom, courage, and mercy–virtues of the redeemed desiring soul who wrestles with himself and overcomes.
The other whole character of the novel is Lee, a dutiful man whose social status as an outsider keeps him from building an independent life of his own, but whose hard-fought prudence and humility make him the stabilizing anchor of the Trask family. Unlike Adam, Lee develops discernment rather than willful blindness. Instead of disappearing during seasons of suffering, he remains constant. At one time Lee leaves the Trasks to open a bookstore in Chinatown, but he soon returns, declaring “I am incomparably, incredibly, overwhelmingly glad to be home.” Lee has no family of his own, but he comes to love the Trasks and to choose them of his own free will, thus unifying his divided soul. Through choosing humanizing love and radical responsibility, Lee and Samuel Trask keep the novel from plunging into despair by modeling how timshel can heal.
In the end, timshel determines the ultimate destiny of the fractured and the whole characters of the novel. The sweeping landscape of East of Eden offers a myriad of opportunities to reflect on the complex reality of being human in all the glory and shame, conflict and resolution, healing and destruction, rage and forgiveness, fate and free will. East of Eden demonstrates how the divided souls of the dutiful and the desiring must encounter their own brokenness and choose their own paths.
I found the emphasis on the word timshel and Lee's discussion in East of Eden intriguing when I reread it a couple years ago. I found differing accounts on the internet (of course). But I wondered if you have any knowledge of the correct word and usage. Some say, John Steinbeck got it wrong: the Hebrew word is actually timshol, not timshel, and it means “thou shalt rule over” or “thou shalt control”—not “thou mayest.” I do believe we may choose to do good, so I am not questioning that, I just wondered if you know if timshel and Lee's discussion of it is something that Steinbeck created for his story.