Great writing jumps from the page and bolts through the air, to resound in the mind and memory. This blog series is devoted to great lines that strike - in literature, speech, music and film.

John Steinbeck is - hands down - my favourite author, and his epic novel East of Eden (1952) has been my favourite book for over 20 years. While Steinbeck holds a prominent and respected place in the English literary canon as one of the great American writers, his works are not considered particularly highbrow - in that his writing is not attributed with same literary sophistication as the more experimental, modernist writers of his era, such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Steinbeck is best classified as a naturalist or realist writer, demonstrating faithfulness to natural and realistic portraits of life. Steinbeck’s style is uncomplicated and unadorned, but in these ways uncommonly clear and incisive, and evincing a deep love and empathy for the landscapes he describes, the narratives he weaves and the characters he crafts.

One of Steinbeck’s character descriptions has occupied a place in my mind for those two-plus decades. As Steinbeck’s self-proclaimed magnum opus, East of Eden is a sweeping saga with a biblical framework, spanning several generations of two intertwining families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons. In the early chapters, the family origins are established, and the Trask patriarch, Cyrus, is sketched as ‘something of a devil’ - a cowardly, lecherous, lying specimen of a man. In a shrewd depiction of the human tendency to self-style, Cyrus is shown to fashion himself as a noble veteran and military genius - despite a short-lived army stint in which ‘combat did not touch him’. Cyrus never actually sees battle, but instead catches a stray bullet in his right leg, which is subsequently amputated. With characteristic ‘vitality and swagger’, upon being discharged, Cyrus uses his wooden leg to forge a distinguished identity. Starting with his young wife, he manufactures his own glorious, soldierly history:

Timidly he began to tell Alice about his campaigns, but as his technique grew so did his battles. At the very first he knew he was lying, but it was not long before he was equally sure that every one of his stories was true. […] And from telling he became convinced that he had been there. […] There was one thing Cyrus did not do, and perhaps it was clever of him. He never once promoted himself to noncommissioned rank. Private Trask he began, and Private Trask he remained. In the total telling, it made him at once the most mobile and ubiquitous private in the history of warfare.

In these lines, Steinbeck does two skilful things. He crafts Cyrus as the archetypical miles gloriosus - the ‘swaggering’ or ‘vainglorious soldier’, characterised in classical drama by his boastful arrogance and claims of exploits. Steinbeck also manages to capture, more closely in recounting Cyrus’s storytelling, the human propensities for artifice and self-delusion. People are not only capable of lying, but of believing their own lies - even, or perhaps especially, the lies they tell about themselves. The studied and practiced identity of Private Trask is at once loathsome and humorous for being universally recognisable - an apt example of the underrated subtlety of Steinbeck’s own craft.

East of Eden (1952), first edition cover. — *East of Eden* (1952), first edition cover.