It Started in a Garden

EAST OF EDEN (602 pp.)--John Stem-beck--Viking ($4.50).

John Steinbeck, now 50, has run a wobbly literary path for nearly a quarter of a century. Signposts along the way read: charming sentimentality (Tortilla Flat), left-wing melodrama (In Dubious Battle), maudlin blather (Of Mice and Men), tender innocence (The Red Pony), honest social indignation (Grapes of Wrath), meretricious sex (The Wayward Bus). His latest novel, East of Eden, comes under none of these labels, although it courts most of them for long stretches.

In 1938, while working on Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote in his journal: "I must one day write a book about my people [family]." He got around to it in 1951. Steinbeck's intention was to write a story that would tell his sons, now aged eight and six, about their forebears and the Salinas Valley in California where they settled. But on the way, fiction ran riot and took over from fact so brazenly that much of the story is hardly fit reading for moppets.

Gentlemen & Sluts. East of Eden is a 250,000-word whopper that slowly spreads from the Civil War to World War I. In form it is a two-family saga (with a double Cain & Abel theme) in which the family destinies brush each other so slightly as to make East of Eden two novels between the same set of boards. Adam Trask, the hero of one of the novels, was born in Connecticut in 1862. He did not reach California and meet the Hamiltons (Steinbeck's folks) until 1900, but he already had quite a story.

His father was a lazy farmer, a local heller who loved his booze and women. He was one of those Civil War vets who, as the years passed, made it plain that he had just about saved the Union singlehanded. Young Adam, a quiet, diffident kid, had a rough time of it. His father wanted him to be a soldier, and almost broke him down trying to toughen him. His jealous younger half-brother Charles bullied and beat him, once nearly killed him with a hatchet.

By the time Adam got to the Salinas Valley, he had done two hitches in the Army, bummed around the country as a tramp, escaped from a Florida chain gang. and picked up a lot of humility. He also brought to California half his father's considerable fortune and Cathy, a beautiful blonde wife.

Cathy was a vicious slut but Adam didn't know that. Steinbeck has made her a dish of distilled evil, one of the most implausible women in fiction's gallery. As a young, sweet-looking girl she had murdered her parents, burned the family home and skipped off to Boston. There she became the mistress of a man who ran a string of brothels, drove him mad with jealousy and was almost beaten to death by him. When she crawled to the

Trask farm, Adam took her in, fell in love with her and married her. But before they headed west, Cathy had drugged Adam into a deep sleep, then slipped into bed with brother Charles.

In California, Cathy behaved no better. She bore Adam twin sons, then shot him with his .44 and ran off to a nearby town and became a prostitute. Cathy was good at it, and Steinbeck seems to have a fine time explaining her trade. Naturally, Cathy poisoned the brothelkeeper. took over the place, and racked up a lot of money. But she got her comeuppance. Arthritis, and fear that her sins would be found out. broke her evil spirit and she died by her own hand. But not until her shocked, teen-age sons (the second Cain & Abel team) and gentle Adam have found out--a dozen years late--what she has been up to.

After Cathy and the Trasks, the Hamiltons are anticlimactically pleasant and folksy. Sam Hamilton was a big, kindly North-of-Ireland man with tenderness, blarney and wisdom in about equal proportions. His ranch was a failure, but he raised a big family of boys and girls who turned out pretty well. Any man would be lucky to have so lovable a grandfather as Novelist Steinbeck had.

Skill & Stickiness. Perhaps Steinbeck should have stuck to his original idea of telling just the family history. As it stands. East of Eden is a huge grab bag in which pointlessness and preposterous melodrama pop up as frequently as good storytelling and plausible conduct. Cathy's story, gamy, lurid, and told at tedious length, is all but meaningless. Almost as tiresome is the figure of Lee, the Trasks' trusted Chinese houseman, whose warmed-over Oriental wisdom and too gentle heart give the whole California story an overdose of stickiness.

Ironically. Novelist Steinbeck has done some of his best writing in East of Eden. As always, he describes his Salinas Valley with fidelity and charm. Moreover, individual scenes and yarns are frequently turned with great skill. But whether as a novel about pioneers in a new country or just men & women working out their private, earthly fates, East of Eden is too blundering and ill-defined to make its story point. That point, says Steinbeck, is "the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil." East of Eden has over-generous portions of both, but a novelist who knows what he wants channels them, he doesn't spill them.

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