103. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

Sadly, I never got to read this one in school because I was put in a higher set (through complete fortune and kindness) and studied Lord of the Flies by Golding instead (don’t worry that one I have reread recently and is on the way). I have been meaning to get some Steinbeck for a while but the opportunity just hasn’t arrived or it hadn’t until I decided to cross Of Mice and Men off of the ‘I want to read this’ list. There are so many things that I want to read that I often forget I want to read them, until the impulse returns and I am faced with the undeniable truth that now is the time. Usually I am stood in book shops and a title grabs me.

If you haven’t read it, Of Mice and Men is a story of two outsiders trying to make the best of it and it’s a relatively simple story. But their are tensions and boredom and people swinging dicks around to make life more difficult. And there is just one very innocent, sweet guy, who doesn’t know his own strength, and his name is Lennie Small.

Lennie, for me, is one of the most endearing things about this novel. It’s like he is the gentle giant that has been dropped in from space and doesn’t belong there. He confuses easily, he doesn’t grasp how easily he can hurt people, and mostly he just wants the story of where him and his best pal, George Milton tells him they will be. The story goes they get their own land and farm away from everyone else and live for themselves with no interference and no boss.

Lennie is the sort of character that can be really frustrating to read because he simply does not understand, and the characters around him sometimes make no allowances for that. It is one rule and one way and there is no air around him to be, well him. Society makes no allowances, and to paraphrase a conversation I had recently: if society broke down the day after he got to the ranch and ceased to be, Lennie would be fine in the wild making his own way as his disability isn’t a physical one. Society is his disability.

When he is quiet in his blunderingly clueless way he fades into the background and works harder then any other because of his enormous strength. But it is difficult for him to keep his head down because he is completely childlike and trusting and vulnerable and when he comes across small fury things he just wants to love them.

George is trying his best to look after him and keep a promise. George seems to play mediator for most of the novel, I get the sense that given the right opportunity if George’s sense of loyalty was lessened he would have ditched Lennie a long time ago. But instead George is a bit of a father figure and doing his best with a big guy who grasps the world like a child does. George is trying to do the right thing and to protect Lennie as best he can from the world.

The two of them drop lucky on a ranch that hasn’t heard of them. They’ve been on the road, run out of town because of rape accusations. (Lennie touched a woman’s dress and wouldn’t let go because it was soft and he loves soft things and as she was hysterical the town put the rest together without any other questions.) They get themselves settled into their beds and the next day fall straight into the middle of the ranch drama.

Of course we find other characters that share the dream George and Lennie have, and the ranch and it’s inhabitants become a sort of microcosm for American Underclass at the time.

In this despondent novel there is very little joy. Curley – the son of the farm owner – is having trouble with his unhappy wife who seems to be giving the eye to every man she comes across. He calls her a tart and seems possessive and jealous and is overcompensating for something.

Old Candy’s dog is taken out back and shot, because it is infirm and ill and at the end of it’s life. This is done in posturing and dick-swinging sort of contest, and the power play leads Old Candy very unhappy he hadn’t done the deed himself. And in itself it’s very sad.

Crooks, the stable buck and cripple, agrees to go in thirds with Lennie and George for a piece of land. He is at first distrusting but then seems to recognise something in Lennie that is within himself. Alienation and disconnectedness are big themes in the novel and I’d like to think that Crooks, recognises that in Lennie.

Of course these are tiny parts of the story that just amount to the vivid detail that Steinbeck builds the novel with. Unpretentious, naked, truthful writing that seems to follow the characters rather then push them towards the frying pan. This is a novel of destitute people lacking agency and it shook me awake at every turn with reality.

But this novel also had me convinced that maybe it would be a happy ending. Ha. Ha ha ha. (Laughing bitterly while crying) *Spoiler alert*

Lennie pets Curley’s wife’s (no she doesn’t have a name that I can remember other then tart?) hair and of course, she panics. In the struggle he kills her by accident and then runs away from a lynching mob. Perhaps luckily, or perhaps cruelly, George is the one that finds him and while lulling Lennie into a sense of false security (because he trusts him, HE TRUSTS HIM) he shoots Lennie in the back of the head. There is a part of me still mourning for Lennie because this novel executes (poor choice of words on my part) something very real and very stark and very unpredictable. And like Lennie, I was lulled into the false sense of security of hope that they would get out of this drifting life and buy their land and have a porch.

And Lennie would get his rabbits.

George doesn’t shoot Lennie out of rage or out of the hysteria of the mob. He shoots him to save him from being lynched. He shoots him to spare him (and probably them as he wouldn’t go down easily). It is the right thing, but it is the difficult terrible thing.

I regret that I didn’t read it when I was in school because this book makes a big impression and there is a lot to take away from it. I may never get over Lennie and George, and the gilded knot that lumps in my stomach whenever I think about them. But I will read this again at some point. Steinbeck demonstrates that a book doesn’t have to be loud or big or artful postures and a flourishing peacock to deliver some very real messages and morals. And as a result I don’t think I’m done with this one yet, I need to read it again. There is just so much more I could say.

74. Post Office

Picking up a cult classic is always a little bit of apprehensive for me. I had read a little of Bukowski’s poetry before reading this novel, one in particular kept me creatively driven through difficult circumstances. But from what I’d been told about Bukowski’s writing and reputation I expected machista, bold gritty machismo writing with a good helping of the lewd, depressing realism that comes from a cynic. I was pretty bang on if I do say so myself. (But don’t let that put you off)

Someone once told me this was a funny book. But I don’t agree. The protagonist Henry Chinaski is a chocolate teapot person. His biggest commitments are to alcoholism, gambling, and finding places to put his cock. He comes across depressed and downtrodden and seems to run on superficial quick fixes rather than addressing the real unhappiness in his life.

Post Office – Charles Bukowski

The actual Post Office is continually in the background, a monolithic structure that seems to be the only tangible thing in Chinaski’s life. But it breathes tainted air in the background, it fills the novel with dread by the end. The rest of Chinaski’s time is a blur that sometimes seems as mediocre and mundane as his job. Chinaski is an ordinary man, who flits from woman to woman and discovers his terrible capacity for grief when one of his ex’s dies. This is really a quite depressing novel when you take a glance at it from afar but close up it is more of a frank untucking of a shirt while the narrative wobbles drunkenly on a bar stool. It sways a little, it’s probably dribbling into an empty glass, but it certainly isn’t pretending that it isn’t drunk.

At the start of the novel Chinaski hears that the Post Office are throwing jobs at people and finds himself as a substitute mailman quicker than he can blink. His days are a little unbelievably, a little outrageous, like a comic he dodges dogs, butts heads with his petty boss and pursues horny housewives. Away from work he boozes with his girlfriend Betty but after two years delivering mail he packs it all into gamble at the races.

This first part of the novel still seems to have some sort of vague optimism. But that begins to change when another woman comes along and he gets married. Joyce is from a well-moneyed background but insists on them working and proving that they are self sufficient. Reluctantly Chinaski agrees and goes back to the Post Office as a Clerk and stays there for the next twelve years and from there everything seems to spiral downwards.

Bukowski’s writing is direct and casual, sometimes dry and tense but generally it can be described as abrasive. Often I wondered if I could light a match from the printed pages, as this novel sometimes seemed the antithesis of the deeply sensitive and touching. Because of that at times I felt it seemed a little two dimensional, a little too much surface without much underneath. But this is a novel that I think is supposed to hold you at arms length while it barks the story at you (well lubricated with spittle). It is a novel that wants to fight with you, it wants to argue it’s point and more than anything it tries to refuse your empathy.

I have been thinking about this novel for a while and I’m not entirely sure if I like it. Post Office has a brilliant advantage of being Bukowski’s semi autobiographical account of his life at the Post Office as a college drop out. Mostly it doesn’t feel elegant or fabricated to the point that outrageous details sometimes seemed dulled. Perhaps this is because the novel cuts quite close to the nerve of a working class life, that anything outrageous is tarnished and a little lost.

The mundanity and sometimes desperation was a little bit too relatable at times, certain moods, certain power trips, certain procedural nonsense seemed to be the bulk of what I related to in this novel. This is a common man in an ordinary job and the longer he stays within his sense of stasis, the more broken he seems to become. Perhaps this is the part of the novel I could find enjoyment in. If Henry is a chocolate teapot, the tea tray he spends most of his time sitting on is a stark and a desperate reality that anyone living pay check to pay check can potentially find themselves in. It doesn’t read like cathartic writing, but it does read as something cruelly honest that isn’t hiding it’s ugly side.

It reads easy enough, but on the hole I’m not altogether convinced by the Post Office. It strikes me as a novel that you either love or hate but I’m not sure where I fall. I think I need another Bukowski novel to make up my mind.