Appunti

«Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
Try to understand each other» ¹

Is a short novel by Jhon Steinbeck published in 1937.

The title refers to a poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns and suggests that the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry: no matter how hard or well we plan for something, our plans can often fail to become reality…or worse, they can end up going terribly wrong.
The original title was «Something That Happened» but Steinbeck changed it after reading Burn’s poem To a Mouse.

Telling the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, the novel faces the condition of the itinerant farm workers during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
These men were forced to move across the States wandering from ranch to ranch seeking temporary employment.

SUMMARY

The novel begins beside the Salinas River near Soledad, where Lennie and George stop off for the night before going to a ranch where they’ve been hired to work.
George is described as a small and quick man, dark of face and cleaver.
Lennie is his opposite, a huge simple-minded man with a herculean strength.The two men talk about their problems in the past and their plans for the future.

They have recently escaped from a farm near Weed where Lennie was wrongly accused of rape when he touched a woman to feel her soft dress (because Lennie likes to touch soft things).
They share a dream of having a small piece of land someday and Lennie is obsessed with one aspect of this dream: having a small rabbit hutch where he can tend soft rabbits and he never tires of hearing George describe this story.

«Please George, tell about how it’s gonna be!»

«Why’n't you do it yourself? You know all of it»

«No… you tell it. It ain’t the same if I tell it. I forget some things»

«An’ live off the fatta the lan’»

When they arrive at the ranch their hopes are at the first raised, when the aged Candy (one-handed ranch-hand) offers Lennie and George money in order to buy a piece of land with them.
But then two murders are committed; one of a puppy, the other of Curley’s wife, who Lennie accidentally kills while trying to stroke her hair.

While Curley and the farm hands begin their search for the killer, George realizing that he is doomed to a life of loneliness and despair like the rest of the migrant workers, and wanting to spare his friend a painful death at the hands of the vengeful and violent Curley, finds Lennie and gently recites with him their dreams of owning their own land just before shooting him in the back of the head.

THEMES

Steinbeck depicts George and Lennie as two innocents whose dream conflicts with the realities of a world dominated by materialism and greed. Their extraordinary friendship distinguishes them from other hopeless and lonely migrant farm workers. The novel portrays a class of ranch workers in California whose plight had been previously ignored in the early decades of the twentieth century. In fact, George and Lennie are like mice in the maze of modern life.
The great friendship they share does not prove sufficient to allow them to realize their dream.

This novel deals with a lot of different themes such as dreams, loneliness, weakness, man’s cruelty, violence, friendship, justice, prejudice, and uncertainty of the future.

Dreams, hopes, and plans are not about realistic ambitions, but about finding a way to survive the Depression, even if it’s just filling your mind with visions that may not come true. Dreams don’t escape the general unhappy futility that seems to characterize this era of American history.

Also it argues that there is no single America. Rather, there are many different groups (women, blacks, farm workers, others), each with its own unique struggle.
The novel thrives on the notion that everyone is isolated, and everyone seems to get along quite well together by talking about how isolated they are.
Loneliness is a significant factor in several characters’ lives.
The author further reinforces this theme through subtle methods by situating the story near the town of Soledad, which means «solitude» in Spanish.

CENSURE

Of Mice and Men was the first work to bring John Steinbeck national recognition as a writer.
Critical response to the novel was generally positive. There were, however, critics who were offended by the rough earthiness of the characters and their lives.

Indeed it’s a frequently banned book.
Teachers, parents, and school board members have often taken this novella off the required reading list. Because there’s a considerable amount of killing and violence (died mice, puppies, a dog and Curley’s wife).
The characters all swear a lot, talk about sex, and go to brothels once a week. Many characters are racist, ageist and sexist. The book’s ending is beyond sad, and might be considered an endorsement of euthanasia.
Not to mention, its message isn’t exactly praiseworthy of the American way of life.

MORE

Division into acts
The action of the novel occurs over the course of three days.
Each chapter is arranged as a scene, and each scene is confined to a single space: a secluded grove, a bunkhouse, and a barn.

Realistic or symbolic?
«Readers continue to strap Steinbeck to be the procrustean bed² of realism, he simply will not fit. All his text are in fact far more consciously symbolic than historic».

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in California, in 1902 and grew up in Salinas, one of the richest agricultural valleys in California.
During his childhood Steinbeck spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrants on a huge ranch. He became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life in the region and of the darker side of human nature – material which was to be exploited in such works as Of Mice and Men.
Indeed, the episode that inspired the novel probably occurred on one of these ranches.

Working as a blinde stidd himself in the early 1920s, Steinbeck saw a huge and troubled man kill a ranch foreman. «Lenny was a real person» he said once time «I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman».
Many of his works, including The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947) and East of Eden (1952), went on to become Hollywood films and Steinbeck also achieved success as a Hollywood writer, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Story in 1944 for Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.
In 1962 Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He died in New York City four years later.

NOTE

1. John Steinbeck in his 1938 journal entry.

2. The procrustean bed is a figure from Greek mythology, he had an iron bed into which he invited every passerby to lie down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length.
A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.
Con la locuzione “letto di Procuste” o “letto di Damaste”, derivata da questo mito, si indica il tentativo di ridurre le persone a un solo modello, un solo modo di pensare e di agire, o più genericamente una situazione difficile e intollerabile o una condizione di spirito tormentosa.

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