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adequate. 15 What Steinbeck encountered in that sea of mud and debris was so devastating, so “heartbreaking” he told Elizabeth Otis, that he was utterly transfixed by the “staggering” conditions, and by “suffering” so great that objective reporting would only falsify the moment (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, pp. 159, 161).
    What Steinbeck witnessed at Visalia had a profound, if temporarily delayed, impact on his novel. From the outset in creating the Joad family to occupy the narrative chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck gave his novel a specific human context, a felt emotional quality, and a dramatic dimension all his earlier versions lacked: “Begin the detailed description of the family I am to live with. Must take time in the description, detail, detail, looks, clothes, gestures.... We have to know these people. Know their looks and their nature,” he reminded himself (Entry #17). Steinbeck’s symbolic portrayal of this universal human family brought the novel alive for him: “Make the people live. Make them live” (Entry #30). By conceiving the Joads as “an over-essence of people” (Entry #30), Steinbeck elevated the entire history of the migrant struggle into the ceremonial realm of art.
    Steinbeck’s mythology was one of endings as well as of beginnings. Like Ernest Hemingway, whose physical wounding at Fossalta, Italy, in 1918 became the generative event for a string of stories and novels (especially A Farewell to Arms ), Steinbeck’s internal wounding at Visalia marked him deeply, set him apart from his fellow travelers Tom Collins and Horace Bristol. Indeed, a somewhat mystified Tom Collins recalled a conversation with Steinbeck at Visalia in which the latter claimed: “ ‘... something hit me and hit me hard for it hurts inside clear to the back of my head. I got pains all over my head, hard pains. Have never had pains like this before....’ ” (Collins, “Bringing in the Sheaves,” p. 225). Clearly, Steinbeck’s experience opened the floodgates of his attention, created The Grapes of Wrath ’s compelling justification, provided its haunting spiritual urgency, and rooted it in the deepest wellsprings of democratic fellow-feeling. In the same way that the rain floods the novel’s concluding chapters, so the memory of Steinbeck’s cataclysmic experience, his recollection of futility and impotency at Visalia, pervades the ending of the book and charges its ominous emotional climate, relieved only by Rose of Sharon’s gratuitous act of sharing her breast with a starving man.
    Steinbeck’s deep participation in the events at Visalia also inspired his creation of Tom Joad, the slowly awakening disciple of Jim Casy, whose final acceptance of the preacher’s gospel of social action occurs just as the deluge is about to begin: “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes’ ” (Chapter 28). When the apocalypse occurs, everything becomes a fiction, Steinbeck suggests, and all gestures become symbolic. Futhermore, in one of those magical transferences artists are heir to in moments of extreme exhaustion or receptivity, Steinbeck believed that Tom Joad, his fictive alter ego, not only floats above The Grapes of Wrath ’s “last pages ... like a spirit” (Entry #87), he imagined that Joad actually entered the novelist’s work space, the private chamber of his soul: “ ”Tom! Tom! Tom!’ I know. It wasn’t him. Yes, I think I can go on now. In fact, I feel stronger. Much stronger. Funny