East of Eden - and the hidden urge to write

In the summer of 1979, my friend Neil and I travelled around Canada and America on Greyhound busses, hitching rides, and pitching our two-man tent on KOA sites. The sun shone. 

Looking back at student days, I realise that more time was spent reading good literature than studying for my degree in Chemistry. There was the alternative holy trinity: Tolkien, Solzhenitsyn, and John Steinbeck on my bookshelf pored over with more dedication than my Inorganic Chemistry textbook. 

And I’d stumbled across Steinbeck’s ‘Journal of a Novel’; a collection of letters he wrote to his editor and friend (in pencil) on one side of the large notebook used to write East of Eden. The letters were written as warm-up exercises before writing just two more pages of the novel each day. I read Journal of a Novel as we piled up the thousands of miles travelling from Vancouver to the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Austin, Philadelphia, and Niagara Falls.

I am now 66, the same age as Steinbeck when his life was cut short after a lifetime of excessive smoking. Perhaps it is a good time to re-read Journal of a Novel and the entry on April 4th, the day I am writing this MTW blog. And to pick out some lines that serve more as a poignant push forward rather than simply to reminisce:

I am at work early today and that is a good thing

That works for me. Writing or attempting anything much past 2 pm is asking for trouble. Evenings are good as well.

I think my eyes need a check. Little headaches…

In 1979 I had 20:20 vision. Thank God for Asda reading glasses 1.5

(The part about Cathy) should have a shivering effect and perhaps it does…this is a brutal chronicle but necessary

East of Eden is an allegorical version of the first four chapters of Genesis. The title takes its reference point as Gen 4v16 after Cain, having murdered Abel, is exiled to the land of Nod ‘east of Eden’. It doesn’t hold back in its brilliantly written description of human failing and sin.

The only way to do that well is to make it seem so ordinary that it creeps in on you…that is what I’m trying to do with this whole book – to keep it in an extremely low pitch and to let the reader furnish the emotion

Perhaps this is what I am also attempting as a writer and a Christian? Using everyday ordinariness as the deceptive backdrop to the real story; not too obscure that the reader is left merely with journalism and not too prominent that the narrative becomes superfluous. And what is the real story? Surely, not just the tragic consequences of moral failure, as in East of Eden, but also the return journey back to Eden made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection.

I wonder to what extent we allow our readers to ‘furnish the emotion’; including the yearning to find our way home?