It was hard not to feel a pang for the younger man who would have enjoyed staying up all night with Steinbeck’s paisanos – and who also would have been as receptive to the pleasures of the world. Through such concerns, I realised that the book held up a mirror to my own ageing. But I also worried about the dust in the house and the fact that the woman still had to tidy by hand. I took Steinbeck’s point about the absurdity of overvaluing material possessions. I enjoyed the eventual revelation that the machine didn’t even have a motor. I still laughed at the episode where a woman proudly pushes around a vacuum cleaner that isn’t attached to any electrical circuits.
This time around, I found myself worrying about their hygiene and their livers and how they were going to support themselves in retirement. I remember delighting in the paisanos’ ignorance of the scourge of work, their heroic dedication to sharing ever more wine together, and their ability to live under the same roof in simple harmony. These weren’t such big concerns for me when I first read the book in my early 20s. Like other “literary slummers” before me, I worried about those innocent and honest saints, their strange moral code and their lack of ambition. His upset seemed strange to me when I read Tortilla Flat last week. It will not happen again.” Perhaps mindful of drawing even more attention to the paisanos, Steinbeck soon withdrew that foreword. If I have done them any harm by telling a few of their stories, I am sorry. But I shall never again subject to the vulgar touch of the decent these good people of laughter and kindness, of honest lusts and direct eyes, of courtesy beyond politeness. These stories are out, and I cannot recall them. But literary slummers have taken these people up with the vulgarity of duchesses who are amused by and sorry for a peasantry. Steinbeck continued: “I wrote these stories because they were true stories and because I liked them. The problem was that the paisano inhabitants were, as Thomas Fensch explains in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition, judged “to be bums – colourful perhaps, eccentric yes, but bums nonetheless”. “Had I known that these stories and these people would be considered quaint, I think I never should have written them.” They are people whom I know and like, people who merge successfully with their habitat,” he wrote in a 1937 edition foreword. “When this book was written it did not occur to me that paisanos were curious or quaint, dispossessed or underdoggish. Surprisingly, he was also soon regretting writing the story of central character Danny and his bibulous housemates. Soon he would produce classics including Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. The book sold in huge quantities, the film rights were bought and Steinbeck was properly launched.
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