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Bert Cardullo
On the Road to Tragedy: Mice, Candy, and
Land in Of Mice and Men
I
t has often been suggested that the Candy-and-his-dog subplot in Of Mice and Men (1937) is too much, that it is a typical example of Steinbeck's heavyhandedness ot ovetfondness fot parallels.' In fact, some student and 'wotkshop productions of the play omit the dog entirely. But Candy and the dog are very important to the action. The point of Carlson's shooting of the dog—who is old and blind and smells—is not to make an easy parallel with George's shooting of Lennie, as Peter Lisca and Harry T. Moore seem to think.^ It is not so much the dog who is in the same position as the imbecilic Lennie; it is the shooting of the dog that places Candy in the same position. Once he does not have his dog to look after any- more, Candy realizes the precariousness of his own posi- tion on the ranch: he is without one hand and therefore only able to "swamp out" bunkhouses, and he is fast approaching senility. To stress the similarity between Candy's position and Lennie's, Steinbeck has Candy, and no other charac- ter in the play, treat Lennie as his mental equal. Furthermore, George never explains Lennie's condition to Candy as he does, say, to Slim. Not accidentally, it is to Lennie that Candy describes the "figuring" he has been doing, describing how, if they go about it right, they can make some money on the rabbits they propose to have on their farm (even if Lennie, for his part, can think of noth-
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-ing except petting the rabbits). Candy sounds like Lennie when he says, "We gonna have a room to ourselves. We gonna have a dog and chickens. We gonna have green corn and maybe a cow."^ Furthermore, he acts like Lennie when he comes into Crooks's room in the barn, saying only, "This is the first time I ever been in [Crooks's} room"; he seems honestly not to realize that the rea- son for this is that, as Crooks declares, "Guys don't come in a col- ored man's room" (128). Yet Candy has been on the ranch for a long time, just as Crooks has. Like Lennie, Candy needs someone to run his affairs, to make the rest of his life easier and more congenial. He needs George. Slim promises Candy a puppy from his bitch Lulu's litter to compensate for the shooting of his sheep dog, but Candy never gets that puppy, and he never asks for it. Lennie can attempt to look after a pup, because he has George to look after him. Candy is in search of a home for himself; he cannot afford, at this point, to give one to a dog. But Candy, finally, is not Lennie, and George will not team up with him after Lennie is gone. Candy does not accompany the men in their hunt for Lennie after Curley's wife is found dead in the barn. He stays all alone on the ranch, deserted by everyone, as it were, even as he will be by George after Lennie has been shot. Candy's "Poor bastard" (I6l), spoken to Curley's dead wife (lying in the hay) once the men have left, could just as well be applied to himself as to Lennie or Curley's wife. There is tragedy in Of Mice and Men, then, despite Stanley Kauffmann's (among others) suggestion to the contrary." That is why Candy is in the play. The tragedy is so understated, however, that one barely notices it. This tragedy really has nothing to do with George's shooting of Lennie, per se. As the film critic Otis Ferguson once remarked, "I have never been quite sure that George shouldn't have shot [Lennie] before the story began" (Ferguson 285). Ferguson was not trying to be funny. His mean- ing was that Lennie is a "case" on the loose, and that his killing of Cutley's wife, and being shot for it by George, could just as easi- ly have happened before or after the play as during it. Steinbeck
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become tragically aware of how he really lost his land—not by losing Lennie, but by rejecting Candy—and how he will never be given the chance to get it again. Like Othello, he will have loved not wisely but too well. Like any other tragic hero's, his awareness will be one of self-acceptance more than self-reproach. So while the play underlines the bond of friendship—and loneliness—that exists between George and Lennie (a bond diffi- cult for some in today's audiences to accept on any but homosex- ual grounds), it also makes that bond responsible for George's rash decision not to buy the small farm with Candy's financial assis- tance. We are in full sympathy with George when he makes this decision; still, we cannot help but feel at the same time that he is making a mistake, that he is doing something noble yet horrible and wasteful (of Candy's life as well as his own). Candy's "Poor bastard" this time applies to George, whom we leave alone, with the dead Lennie, at the end of the play. George, it must be said, is not especially articulate or self-examining. He has never married; Lennie is instead his emo- tional attachment. He does not make many friends or ask many questions. Candy is his only "attachment" to the ranch. Candy first fills him in about the Boss, then about Curley and his wife. Crooks, and Slim. Candy, with his life savings, becomes George's way out of the ranch life. With Lennie dead, he potentially becomes George's emotional attachment. He is, in the end, the embodiment or articulation of all the aims and emotions that George in his sorrow is oblivious to, but which will live to haunt him again. That is why Steinbeck ends scenes one and two of Act III with Candy and George in the same position: hunching over dead bodies. They are in the same position, in need of each other but inalterably separated. Finally they are silent, one seemingly in memory of the other. Like George, the play's tragedy is quiet. Like George, the play seems to focus more on Lennie that its own life. That simi- larity, more than anything else, shows the play's identification with George. The play sacrifices attention to him for attention to
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Lennie. That is the way George would have wanted it, and that is why, unfairly. Of Mice and Men has too often been called nothing more than a work of sentiment.' Sentimentality is usually accounted a vice, because it bespeaks a propensity to express a greater degree of feeling than a specific situation warrants. But sentimentality need not be a vital Haw; it isn't in Of Mice and Men, where Steinbeck controls it. Much more than a work of sentiment. Of Mice and Men comes to George's tragedy the long way around, through Candy. Lennie is not diminished by this; rather, George and Candy are elevated. One of the ways in which George in particular is elevat- ed is through Steinbeck's thorough weaving of the seemingly throwaway, sentimental symbol of the mouse into the fabric of the play's action. We see that symbol first in the play's title, which Steinbeck took from the well-known Robert Burns poem "To a Mouse" containing the line "The best-laid schemes o'mice and men, / Gang aft agley [go oft astray}." It is clear why the drama- tist so borrowed the phrase "of mice and men," for George and Lennie's plan to get a small place of their own goes astray once Lennie kills Curley's wife. But there is another, less immediately apparent reason, for Steinbeck uses the dead mouse to symbolize the past and to foreshadow the future. To wit, Lennie always killed the mice that his Aunt Clara gave him to play with by pinching their heads; he could have killed the girl in the town of Weed when he tried to feel her dress (as if she were a mouse) and she strongly resisted. He and George were chased out of Weed because of this incident, and, at the start of the play, they are on their way to a ranch job in the Salinas Valley when they stop for the night in a small clearing. George throws into the brush the dead mouse that Lennie has been secret- ly petting during their journey, but Lennie retrieves it when he goes for firewood. George then takes it from him again and toss- es it as far away as he can. George's action is symbolic, for he is removing from his sight an omen of the future. After they go to work, Lennie kills
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feelings. But Steinbeck does not. This fact, more specifically, is why the novel, together with its extension as a play, has often struck readers overwhelmihgly as a work of sentiment. By docu- menting the story of George and Lennie without fully accounting for George's role in events and the full effect of events on him, the novel seems if not thereby to glorify George's suffering, then to martyr Lennie. The play doesn't have this problem, or shouldn't to the attentive reader or spectator.' It has no narrator, obviously, so we don't expect anyone to speak for George. We therefore accept his muteness more easily, and we look for the materials of the drama itself to speak for him. Because of the necessary condensation of the dramatic form, we see more distinctly the choice he has, after Lennie's death, between life alone on the road and life on a farm with Candy. We see all the more powerfully, because they are embodied on stage, the love and compassion George has for Lennie. Hence the drama is ideally suited to the portrayal of George Milton's tragedy, because, even as his actions speak for themselves, so too does the drama's action—or imitation of an action—speak for itself This drama, like most drama, has no nar- rator, and George is unable or unwilling to "narrate" his deepest feelings and sorrows. Quietly, through the strategic placement of Candy in the action. Of Mice and Men dramatizes George's tragedy. Quietly, through his automatic rejection of life on the farm with Candy, George conveys to us, perhaps better than the words of a more articulate man ever could, the depth of his love for Lennie and the extent to which he is willing to—and can do nothing but—suffer for that love. In the end, Steinbeck touched some deep American themes in Of Mice and Men: the great myth of the road and two male companions, of our hunger for "brotherhood"—a feeling enhanced by the seeming loneliness of all Americans during the Great Depression. For this reason, perhaps, the thirties were years when the theater, along with the other arts, rediscovered America. Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), one of several of Lynn Riggs's
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Oklahoma plays, Erskine Calduell's Tobacco Road(1933), and Paul Osborn's Morning's at Seven (1939) are among the works that in one way or another perform a function similar to that of Steinbeck's play. Of Mice and Men, unlike the many (New York) city plays from the 1930s, for its part naturalistically concentrates on the unemployed of the farm lands—the itinerants and ranch workers—while it also alludes to the bus and truck drivers whose travels through the country permitted them to observe the state of the nation in its broad horizon. A strong residue of nineteenth-century feeling about the land persists in Of Mice and Men —that working on the land is the basic good while owning some of it is salvation. There exists no other successful American drama since the mid-to-late thirties with that feeling (except peripherally, as in the case of the itiner- ant actor James Tyrone's obsession with land-ownership in Long Day's Journey into Night (1941)), or even one centered on rural work. Steinbeck knows our erstwhile longing for a home on the range, not a mere feeding place. He has the same genuine sympa- thy for the lonesome devil whose sole companion is a mangy old dog as for the black American cut off from his fellow workers because of his skin color. Indeed, Steinbeck uses something like an austere sorrow, as opposed to the radical politics of John Howard Lawson, Clifford Odets, or his own novels In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), to suggest that none of America's "underprivileged" will ever reach the home they crave until they arrive at a greater social consciousness. Because of what has hap- pened since it was written — the rapid decline of family farming, the relentless burgeoning of mechanized agribusiness — Of Mice and Men has come to be a play about the end not only of George and Lennie, but also of something in America, in American drama, and in the American dream.
NOTES
1 See Robert Murray Davis's introduction to Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical
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tragedy, which comes out of character. Even if we slur over the criticism that Lennie is a poor choice for a central fig- ure in the story because from the start the odds against him are too great—even if we get beyond this and admit George as the true protagonist, we still don't find tragedy. George is no mote than pathetic. He attracts sympathy because he has to lose his friend Lennie, to whom he has been so loyal, and whom he has to kill at the last in order to save him from the others. But because this isn't gen- uine tragedy, it gives the reader a brutal shock when George kills Lennie, and it cannot be anything else... (qtd. from Harry T. Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study 50-52.) Howard Levant, for his part, criticizes Of Mice and Men for what he believes to be its split focus: The secondary hero is subordinate in Steinbeck's fiction— except in Of Mice and Men. There, Lennie's murder propels George into a sudden prominence that has no structural basis. Is the novel concerned with Lennie's innocence or George's guilt? The formal requirements of a play-novel- ette mandate a structural refocus. Steinbeck needs a high point to ring down the curtain. With Lennie dead, Steinbeck must use and emhasize George's guilt. The close is formulated—the result of a hasty switch—not struc- tured from preceding events, so it produces an inconclu- sive ending in view of what has happened previously. And the ideal of the farm vanishes with Lennie's death, when George tells Candy the plan is off (qtd. from Howard Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study 143.) 5 See especially Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study, p. l 4 l. 6 See, for example, Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study, p. 51; Kauffmann, Persons oftheDrama, p. 157; and Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature , p. 398. 7 In On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin claims that Of Mice and Men is "openly written fot the stage" (p. 399), and Harry T. Moore elaborates: Structurally, the novel was from the first a play: it is divided into six parts, each part a scene—the reader may observe that the action nevet moves away from a central point in each of these units. Steinbeck's manner of writing was coming over quite firmly to the dramatic.... After Of Mice and Men was published and the suggestion was made that it be prepared for the stage, Steinbeck said it could be produced directly from the book, as the earliest
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moving pictures had been produced. It was staged in almost exactly this way in the spring of 1937 by a labor- theater group in San Ftancisco... When Steinbeck trans- ferred the story into final dramatic form for the New York stage he took 85% of his lines bodily from the novel. A few incidents needed juggling, one or two minor new ones were introduced, and some (such as Lennie's imagi- nary speech with his Aunt Clara at the end of the novel) were omitted. A Hollywood studio bought the film rights to Of Mice and Men, but the picture has not been made yet (qtd. from Harry T. Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study, 48-49). Moore was writing in 1939; the Lewis Milestone-directed film of Of Mice and Men was released in 1940, to be followed over half a century later by Gary Sinise's film of the play, with a screenplay by the dramatist Horton Foote.) For the opposite view—that, because Steinbeck structured the novel of Of Mice and Men as a play, he restricted his narrative to visible action and thus was unable fully to explore complex human motives and relationships-—see Howard Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study, p. 134-135.
WORKS CITED
Davis, Robert Murray. Introduction. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Ferguson, Otis. The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson. Philadelphia: Temple UP,
Kauffmann, Stanley. Persons of the Drama. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literatttre. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942. Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study. Columbia: U Of Missouri P, 1974. Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
Moore, Harry T. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study. 1939. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1968. Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Covici-Friede,
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