The Winter of Our Discontent REVIEW
John Steinbeck has selected a perfect title for this novel. “Now is the winter of our discontent” is a line from Shakespeare’s play Richard III. It comes from a soliloquy given by Richard III, a scheming but physically deformed aspirant to the throne of England. Over the course of the play, he assassinates the king, his brothers, nephews, and anyone else who gets in his way. Throughout the play, Richard deftly manipulates even the play’s viewers, suggesting somehow that all his murder, deceit, and mayhem is somehow justified. Richard casts himself in many ways as the victim throughout.
In Steinbeck’s novel, the main character, Ethan Allen Hawley, attempts to do something similar. Manifesting himself as an upright and ethical man of honor, he orchestrates the downfall of his childhood friend, Danny Taylor, and his boss Marullo (to obtain a piece of valuable real estate and his boss’ store) all while planning to rob the bank across the street (owned by a former business partner of his grandfather). As with Richard III, the reader is tempted to “root” for Ethan’s success as he documents for us his own moral rectitude at every step. This is a story that seems to keep on working all the way from Shakespeare’s day to Breaking Bad.
“A crime is something someone else commits,” Ethan explains in his final confession. No one is ever the villain in their own story.
Shakespeare’s Richard III explores the rise and fall of Richard just as Steinbeck’s novel explores the rise and fall of Ethan Hawley.
Throughout the novel, Ethan Allen Hawley is making observations about his own temptation and fall. It is as though Adam has been mic’d up in the garden of Eden. Ethan comments on how we often make ethical decisions without engaging reason until it is time to justify those decisions, “The structure of my change was feeling, pressures from without, Mary’s wish, Allen’s desires, Ellen’s anger, Mr. Baker’s help.” He says, enumerating how his wife and son and daughter and banker” were the primary causes of everything he decides to do eventually. “Only at the last when the move is mounted and prepared,” he adds, “does thought place a roof on the building and bring in words to explain and to justify.”
Listen in as Ethan Hawley rationalizes his decision to rob a bank and defraud a friend and betray his boss:
“Suppose my humble and interminable clerkship was not virtue at all but a moral laziness? For any success, boldness is required. Perhaps I was simply timid, fearful of consequences—in a word, lazy. Successful business in our town is not complicated or obscure and it is not widely successful either, because its practitioners have set artificial limits for their activities. Their crimes are little crimes and so their success is small success. If the town government and the business complex of New Baytown were ever deeply investigated it would be found that a hundred legal and a thousand moral rules were broken, but they were small violations—petty larceny. They abolished part of the Decalogue and kept the rest.”
In the story of the temptation in the book of Genesis, Adam concludes his explanation to God with, The woman that you gave me did it first.” [My paraphrase].
After deflecting blame, Ethan minimizes the harm to be done. He reasons that he will only rob this one bank and this one bank once. After doing so, he will return to his regularly scheduled conventional morality.
“And when one of our successful men had what he needed or wanted, he reassumed his virtue as easily as changing his shirt, and for all one could see, he took no hurt from his derelictions, always assuming that he didn’t get caught. Did any of them think about this? I don’t know. And if small crimes could be condoned by self, why not a quick, harsh, brave one? Is murder by slow, steady pressure any less murder than a quick and merciful knife-thrust? I don’t feel guilt for the German lives I took in the war.”
“Suppose for a limited time I abolished all the rules, not just some of them. Once the objective was reached, could they not all be reassumed? There is no doubt that business is a kind of war. Why not, then, make it all-out war in pursuit of peace? Mr. Baker [banker and investment broker] and his friends did not shoot my father, but they advised him and when his structure collapsed they inherited. And isn’t that a kind of murder? Have any of the great fortunes we admire been put together without ruthlessness? I can’t think of any.”
“And if I should put the rules aside for a time, I knew I would wear scars, but would they be worse than the scars of failure I was wearing? To be alive at all is to have scars.”
“All this wondering was the weathervane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent,” he says. These thoughts are the incubating ground for his eventual crime. “It could be done because it had been done,” Ethan says, “But if I opened up that door, could I ever get it closed again? I did not know. I could not know until I had opened it. . . .”
He did not know until he had opened it. This too harkens back to the garden where we are told that the most tempting thing about the temptation was “knowledge.” Indeed, the very tree is called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Ethan ponders the nature of his fall from innocence.
“What was happening could be described as a great ship being turned and bunted and shoved about and pulled around by many small tugs. Once turned by tide and tugs, it must set a new course and start its engines turning. On the bridge which is the planning center, the question must be asked: All right, I know now where I want to go. How do I get there, and where are lurking rocks and what will the weather be?"
"One fatal reef I knew was talk. So many betray themselves before they are betrayed, with a kind of wistful hunger for glory, even the glory of punishment. Andersen’s Well is the only confidant to trust—Andersen’s Well."
[Anderson’s well is a reference to saying nothing to anyone about the unethical things you plan do. Just find an inanimate object to tell.]
We see Ethan appealing to some external conscience as his own conscience begins to weaken. He appeals to his dead grandfather to put an end to his dissent into criminality.
“I called out to old Cap’n [his dead grandfather]. “Shall I set the course, sir? Is it a good course? Will it get me there?”
And for the first time he denied me his command. “You’ll have to work it out yourself. What’s good for one is bad for another, and you won’t know till after.”
The old bastard might have helped me then, but perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference. No one wants advice—only corroboration.”
Ethan’s problem is his intelligence. He can see that the men around him who are succeeding financially are doing so through less than perfectly honest means. He can see that the men who succeed are the men who take risks (often with other people’s money). They are the men who get other good men to work for them. They are the men who see opportunities to make uneaned money and take them when they see them.
“Now that’s what I don’t understand,” Ethan’s banker tells him.
“Anybody can go broke. What I don’t see is why you stay broke, a man of your family and background and education. It doesn’t have to be permanent unless your blood has lost its guts. What knocked you out, Ethan? What kept you knocked out?”
One can hear the voice of the serpent in the garden speaking, “Why shouldn’t you have a taste of that apple too?”
“. . . Our people were daring men. You know it. They didn’t let themselves get nibbled to death. And now times are changing. There are opportunities our ancestors never dreamed of. And they’re being picked up by foreigners. Foreigners are taking us over. Wake up, Ethan. . . . “We’ll get that apron off you. You owe that to old Cap’n Hawley. He wouldn’t believe it.”
“I guess he wouldn’t.”
“That’s the way to talk. We’ll get that apron off.”
Ethan’s boss Marullo is also a corrupting influence. He attempts to explain to Ethan that Ethan's moral convictions are working like a business handicap on his profits. Marullo assures Ethan that no one makes money by acting like a Sunday School teacher.
“That’s nonsense, Marullo,” Ethan responds, “I know plenty of nice, friendly, honorable businessmen.”
“When not doing business, kid, yes,” Mariullo fires back.
“You going to find out. When you find out is too late. You keep store nice, kid, but if it’s your store you maybe go friendly broke. I’m teaching true lesson like school. Goo-by, kid.” Marullo flexed his arms and went quickly out the front door and snapped it after him, and Ethan felt darkness on the world.”
Not long after Marullo leaves, Ethan receives his first temptation. A retail sales rep comes in and offers Ethan a cut if he will go behind his boss’ back and put in some orders for produce.
“You want me to double-cross the man I work for?” Ethan whispers back to the offer?
“Who’s double-crossed? He don’t lose anything and you make a buck. Everybody’s got a right to make a buck. Margie said you were a smart cookie.”
“It’s a dark day,” Ethan said.
“No, it’s not. You got the shades pulled down. . . . Where money is concerned, the ordinary rules of conduct take a holiday.”
Ethan contemplates the irony. It would be so easy to cheat his boss in this situation. And after all, didn’t his boss just tell him that cheating was the only way to get ahead in business?”
Ethan Allen Hawley can feel the levies of his moral resistance eroding by the day. He begins to feel like he is losing his moral rudder. And then he has a short but serious intestinal pain that he speculates feels almost like a moment of demonic possession.
“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately. A flare of searing red pain formed in my bowels and moved upward until it speared and tore at the place just under my ribs. A great wind roared in my ears and drove me like a helpless ship, dismasted before it could shorten sail. I tasted bitter salt and I saw a pulsing, heaving room. Every warning signal screamed danger, screamed havoc, screamed shock. It caught me as I passed behind my ladies’ chairs and doubled me over in quaking agony, and just as suddenly it was gone. I straightened up and moved on and they didn’t even know it had happened. I understand how people once believed the devil could take possession. I’m not sure I don’t believe it. Possession! The seething birth of something foreign with every nerve resisting and losing the fight and settling back beaten to make peace with the invader. Violation—that’s the word, if you can think of the sound of a word edged with blue flame like a blowtorch.”
“Everyone else is doing it,” Ethan concludes. Unless they are happy being a store clerk.
“And surely I knew what was going on around me,” Ethan says,
“You can’t live in a town the size of New Baytown and not know. I didn’t think about it much. Judge Dorcas fixed traffic tickets for favors. It wasn’t even secret. And favors call for favors. The Town Manager, who was also Budd Building Supplies, sold equipment to the township at a high price, and some of it, not needed. If a new paved street went in, it usually turned out that Mr. Baker and Marullo and half a dozen other business leaders had bought up the lots before the plan was announced. These were just facts of nature, but I had always believed they weren’t facts of my nature. Marullo and Mr. Baker and the drummer and Margie Young-Hunt and Joey Morphy in a concentration had been nudging me and altogether it amounted to a push . . .”
“I had always believed that they were not facts of my nature Ethan says. That is all about to change.
Ethan begins to contemplate the fact that he and the banker come from similar heritage. Ethan’s father lost a lot of money and the result was that Ethan now works as a store clerk in a store owned by an immigrant. But Ethan knows that he should not be a store clerk. He notes that it is status more than money that he is being tempted by. “When my father lost our money,” he notes,
“I was not edged completely out. I am still acceptable as a Hawley to Bakers for perhaps my lifetime because they feel related to me. But I am a poor relation. Gentry without money gradually cease to be gentry. Without money, Allen, my son, will not know Bakers and his son will be an outsider, no matter what his name and antecedents. We have become ranchers without land, commanders without troops, horsemen on foot. We can’t survive. Perhaps that is one reason why the change was taking place in me. I do not want, never have wanted, money for itself. But money is necessary to keep my place in a category I am used to and comfortable in. All this must have worked itself out in the dark place below my thinking level. It emerged not as a thought but as a conviction.”
Ethan Allen Hawley’s integrity is dissolving before our very eyes, “Men can get used to anything, but it takes time,” he says,
“Once long ago I took a job wheeling nitroglycerin in a dynamite plant. The pay was high because the stuff is tricky. At first I worried with every step I took, but in a week or so it was only a job. Why, I’d even got used to being a grocery clerk. There’s something desirable about anything you’re used to as opposed to something you’re not. In the dark with the red spots swimming in my eyes, I inquired of myself concerning what they used to call matters of conscience, and I could find no wound. I asked whether, having set my course, I could change direction or even reverse the compass ninety degrees and I thought I could but I didn’t want to.”
“I had a new dimension, and I was fascinated with it. It was like discovering an unused set of muscles or having come true the child’s dream that I could fly.”
How ironic that falling should feel so much like flying.
Ethan begins to sketch out his plan for the bank robbery. Its just imagination at first. No one is being hurt. Just playing with an idea. John Steinbeck’s novel is starting to resemble C.S. Lewis’ the Screwtape Letters.
“Is there anyone who has not wondered about the decisions and acts and campaigns of the mighty of the earth? Are they born in reasoning and dictated by virtue or can some of them be the products of accidents, of daydreaming, of imagining, of the stories we tell ourselves? I know exactly how long I had been playing a game of imagining because I know it started with the Morph’s rules for successful bank robbery. I had gone over his words with a childish pleasure adults ordinarily will not admit. It was a play game that ran parallel with the store’s life and everything that happened seemed to fall into place in the game. The leaking toilet, the Mickey Mouse mask Allen wanted, the account of the opening of the safe. New curves and angles dropped into place, the Kleenex nudged in the door lock in the alley. Little by little the game grew, but entirely in the mind until this morning. Putting the scale weight on the toilet chain was the first physical contribution I had made to the mental ballet. Getting the old pistol out was the second. And now I began to wonder about the timing. The game was growing in precision.”
Ethan’s first moral collapse comes in the form of a betrayal. His childhood friend, Danny has a serious alcohol problem. But he also owns a piece of land that Ethan knows is necessary for a soon-to-be-proposed airport. If Ethan can convince Danny to sign over the land, he stands to make a lot of money. The problem is that Ethan knows that if Ethan gives Danny any amount of money, even if for the purposes of helping Danny get sober, Danny will just spend it on booze.
He decides that it is only a matter of time before Mr. Baker induces Danny to sign over the land and that he might as well strike first. This too has proven to be an effective maneuver in temptation. One does not simply say “everyone else is doing it.” One says, “And if you do not do it, someone else will.”
Ethan does what he can see “must be done” and wrestles back his conscience when the deed is done.
“Danny was gone. I knew Danny was gone. And I lay in the darkness and watched the little red and yellow spots swimming in the water of my eyes. I knew what I had done, and Danny knew it too. I thought of my small rabbit slaughter. Maybe it’s only the first time that’s miserable. It has to be faced. In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind—but he must get there first.”
He has not surrendered morality entirely here. Just misplaced it.
“New Baytown had slept for a long time. The men who governed it, politically, morally, economically, had so long continued that their ways were set. The Town Manager, the council, the judges, the police were eternal. The Town Manager sold equipment to the township, and the judges fixed traffic tickets as they had for so long that they did not remember it as illegal practice—at least the books said it was. Being normal men, they surely did not consider it immoral. All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.”
“Failure is a state of mind,” Ethan’s friend Joey at the bank tells him,
“Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it. You’ve got to make that jump, Eth. Once you get out, you’ll find success is a state of mind too.”
“Is it a trap too?”
“If it is—it’s a better kind.”
“Suppose a man makes the jump, and someone else gets tromped.”
“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.”
“I wish I knew what you’re trying to tell me to do.”
“I wish I did too. If I did, I might do it myself. Bank tellers don’t get to be president. A man with a fistful of stock does. I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”
“You’re a philosopher, Joey, a financial philosopher.”
This too comes right from the story of the temptation in Genesis where the serpent begins his pitch by inferring that God is a stingy being and that if a person is going to get what they want, they have to take measures to get it. Ethan’s son, Allen, we learn is putting together and essay for a contest. He asks his father about plagiarizing some material for it. “Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?” Ethan asks him, pondering his own moral dilemmas as well as his son’s.
“Heck, Dad, everybody does it.”
“Does that make it good?”
“Well, nobody’s knocking it except a few eggheads. I finished the essay.”
Ethan begins to discover that his plan to put his conscience in cold-storage for one day only is problematic. “I had thought I could put a process in motion and control it at every turn,” he says,
“—even stop it when I wanted to. And now the frightening conviction grew in me that such a process may become a thing in itself, a person almost, having its own ends and means and quite independent of its creator. And another troublesome thought came in. Did I really start it, or did I simply not resist it? I may have been the mover, but was I not also the moved? Once on the long street, there seemed to be no crossroads, no forked paths, no choice.
“Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honorable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonorable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Vichy collaborated for the good of France, and whatever else Stalin was, he was strong. Strength and success—they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught. In the move designed for New Baytown some men had to get hurt, some even destroyed, but this in no way deterred the movement."
"I could not call this a struggle with my conscience. Once I perceived the pattern and accepted it, the path was clearly marked and the dangers apparent. What amazed me most was that it seemed to plan itself; one thing grew out of another and everything fitted together. I watched it grow and only guided it with the lightest touch."
"What I had done and planned to do was undertaken with full knowledge that it was foreign to me, but necessary as a stirrup is to mount a tall horse. But once I had mounted, the stirrup would not be needed. Maybe I could not stop this process, but I need never start another. I did not need or want to be a citizen of this gray and dangerous country. I had nothing to do with the coming tragedy of July 7. It was not my process, but I could anticipate and I could use it.”
Ethan discovers that it is much easier to step into quicksand than out of it.
“Some outside force or design seemed to have taken control of events so that they were crowded close the way cattle are in a loading chute.”
With one anonymous phone call, Ethan has engaged the gears that will get his boss deported so that he can buy the store for almost nothing. With one envelope of money, Ethan has acquired the most valuable piece of real estate in town from his alcoholic friend, Danny. And now, the bank robbery.
“July first. It parts the year like the part in a head of hair. I had foreseen it as a boundary marker for me—yesterday one kind of me, tomorrow a different kind. I had made my moves that could not be recalled. Time and incidents had played along, had seemed to collaborate with me. I did not ever draw virtue down to hide what I was doing from myself. No one made me take the course I had chosen. Temporarily I traded a habit of conduct and attitude for comfort and dignity and a cushion of security. It would be too easy to agree that I did it for my family because I knew that in their comfort and security I would find my dignity. But my objective was limited and, once achieved, I could take back my habit of conduct. I knew I could. War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men. Sending out patrols, knowing some of the men would die, aroused no joy in sacrifice in me as it did in some, and I could never joy in what I had done, nor excuse or condone it. The main thing was to know the limited objective for what it was, and, once it was achieved, to stop the process in its tracks. But that could only be if I knew what I was doing and did not fool myself—security and dignity, and then stop the process in its tracks. . . . But Danny’s scribbled papers hurt like a sorrow, and Marullo’s grateful eyes.”
“If my plan had leaped up full-grown and deadly,” Ethan tells us,
“I would have rejected it as nonsense. People don’t do such things, but people play secret games. Mine began with Joey’s rules for robbing a bank. Against the boredom of my job I played with it and everything along the way fell into it—Allen and his mouse mask, leaking toilet, rusty pistol, holiday coming up, Joey wadding paper in the lock of the alley door. As a game I timed the process, enacted it, tested it. But gunmen shooting it out with cops—aren’t they the little boys who practiced quick draws with cap pistols until they got so good they had to use the skill?”
“I don’t know when my game stopped being a game. Perhaps when I knew I might buy the store and would need money to run it. For one thing, it is hard to throw away a perfect structure without testing it. And as for the dishonesty, the crime—it was not a crime against men, only against money. No one would get hurt. Money is insured. The real crimes were against men, against Danny and against Marullo. If I could do what I had done, theft was nothing. And all of it was temporary. None of it would ever have to be repeated. Actually, before I knew it was not a game, my procedure and equipment and timing were as near perfection as possible. The cap-pistol boy found a .45 in his hand.”
Marullo has given Ethan his store, thinking Ethan to be a an honest man. A week before, Ethan would have been overjoyed and grateful. Now, ownership of the store is just another reason why he has to rob the bank. And if he has to rob the bank, then the harm inflicted on others and on himself must be born and rationalized.
“I would still need money, and that money was waiting for me behind ticking steel doors. The process of getting it, designed as daydreams, stood up remarkably when inspected. That robbery was unlawful troubled me very little. Marullo was no problem. If he were not the victim he might have planned it himself. Danny was troubling, even though I could with perfect truth assume that he was finished anyway. Mr. Baker’s ineffectual attempt to do the same thing to Danny gave me more justification than most men need. But Danny remained a burning in my guts and I had to accept that as one accepts a wound in successful combat. I had to live with that, but maybe it would heal in time or be walled off with forgetfulness the way a shell fragment gets walled off with cartilage.
“The immediate was the money, and that move was as carefully prepared and timed as an electric circuit.”
Ethan knows just exactly when the bank is most vulnerable and when a heist would be most lucrative.
“Coat, mask, cakebox, gun, gloves. Cross the alley on the stroke of nine, shove open the back door, put on mask, enter just after timeclock buzzes and Joey swings open the door. Motion the three to lie down, with the gun. They’d give no trouble. As Joey said, the money was insured, he wasn’t. Pick up the money, put it in cakebox, cross alley, flush gloves and mask down toilet, put gun in can of oil, coat off. Apron down, money in hatbox, cake in cakebox, pick up broom, and go on sweeping sidewalk, available and visible when the alarm came. The whole thing one minute and forty seconds, timed, checked, and rechecked.”
The moment for the robbery has come. Ethan gives a speech to the drygoods in his store:
“The time approaches, my friends, the curtain rises—farewell.” And as I moved to the front doors with the broom, I heard my own voice cry, ‘Danny—Danny! Get out of my guts.’ A great shudder shook me so that I had to lean on the broom a moment before I opened up the doors.”
Ethan knows that he will suffer for what he is about to do. And yet, as he has said multiple times, he does it anyway.
I will let the novel tell the rest of the story when you read it. But Steinbeck concludes his analysis of how human beings fall from grace with this line:
“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
Question for Comment: What does this novel have to say about your own experiences with temptation? What advice does it give for the temptations that lie in your future?
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