The Winter of Our Discontent

I fondly recall the tour I took of Hearst’s Castle on the California coast. I hadn’t planned on it, but when I saw how the woman at the welcome center, after I told her I had just watched Citizen Kane, huffed about how the movie was NOT a fair representation of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’ life, I couldn’t resist. I have to admit I was not disappointed. The tour was quite interesting. I entered the hallowed bedrooms where the rich and famous slept, gazed at magnificent works of art and statuary, and learned that Hearst finally resorted to cutting off David Niven from the bar. Apparently he was a lush.

The most striking part of the tour for me though came at the end when we were herded into Hearst’s film room where he would do private, first-run showings of Hollywood films. Our guide stated Hearst invited and entertained a wide breadth of stars and artists. All were welcome except one.

“Who do you think it was?” he asked offhandedly.

Stirred from my reverie, I clicked around on my heels and without hesitation said, “John Steinbeck.”

I was both right and delighted not because I knew that factoid but because it wasn’t hard to surmise. Steinbeck was brutally cutting toward the mega-rich, especially Hearst, and Hearst hated him passionately.

It’s not hard to imagine why: Steinbeck ripped away the veneer Hearst and many of the uber-wealthy of that time cloaked themselves with and hid behind. In so doing, he exposed not only them but also us in our complicity by venerating them and allowing them to get away with pretty much anything they want. He laid bare the corruption in their souls and the proclivity for it in ours. For then as it is now, it was about strength and success, success defined by wealth, power, and status.

If you’re looking for adventure or romance in a novel or getting lost in a whodunit, John Steinbeck is not your author. But if you dare take a peek into an unsettling side of the human soul, he’s your guy guide. And there’s no place better to start with than The Winter of Our Discontent.

As he watches the drama unfold he’s the center of, it slowly dawns on Ethan Allen Hawley, the story’s protagonist, that strength and success are seemingly above reproach, above morality and criticism. He wonders though if there is a “check in men” that “stops or punishes” but concludes there isn’t and that the only punishment meted out in that moral universe is for failure.

It’s a pathetic ethical and moral code, but it is quintessentially American, encoded in the American ethos by Hearst and his uber-wealthy contemporaries, the so-called Titans of Industry. Success at all cost or else you’re fired. And not only literally, but figuratively in your private life because it’ll be well known that you’re a loser.

Wanting to be careful with a spoiler alert for those who haven’t read the novel, I won’t provide the context of the following. But I hope if you read or reread the book, you’ll take your time, slow-read, and highlight the exchange Ethan has toward the end of the story.

After surveying the ruin that has transpired, Ethan wryly observes what’s covered up, for the perps and their solicitous followers and acolytes, doesn’t exist. Hide it, ignore it, talk over or away from it, and poof, it’s gone, it never happened.

Ethan is disgusted and deeply shaken by the rot, the moral dissoluteness that solidified in those around him, including the ones he loves most. But he’s more unnerved by how he, after the seed was planted, allowed it to fester and grow within himself. Alluding to the biblical admonition about the wages of sin, Ethan plaintively asks, “Has sin gone on strike for a wage raise?” Sin being the unethical, immoral, unbridled pursuit of success, power, and status.

While reconnecting with his Moral North Star, Ethan remembers that in the end all anyone has and leaves as a legacy is their integrity, dignity, and reputation, which, as Ben Franklin reminded us, is like glass: easily cracked and never well mended.

Despaired, Ethan must decide what to do about his moral quandary. What action does he take? Read the book in this, the winter of our discontent, and thou shalt knowest the answer.