The Winter of Our Discontent by Steinbeck

Ref: John Steinbeck (1961). The Winter of Our Discontent. Viking.

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Summary

• A 1950’s-1960’s American fiction novel based on the life of Ethan Hawley, a WWII military veteran, father of two, and a store clerk, in New Baytown, Long Island, NY. Although Ethan’s family comes from generational wealth made from privateering and the whaling industry, his father’s bad investments led to his family’s financial demise. Now a lowly store clerk, Ethan is confronted with the choice of easy success through dishonesty (cutbacks, bribery, theft) and honesty. Although he openly admonishes the dishonest route, he secretly plans for it, hiding behind legacy and family as excuses to restore his family’s fortunes. Ethan’s dishonest scheming, which he continually justifies throughout the novel, leads to the downfall of several friends that conversely raise his fortunes. His money, prestige, and position are all nearly restored, until Ethan learns that his son has plagiarized an essay in order to win prize money and esteem. When Ethan confronts his son, he realizes that he has failed as a father and ultimately decides to take his own life; dishonesty and the lives hurt by it are not worth the price it exacts on the people you use to obtain it.

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Misc Quotes

• “Men don’t get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure.”

• “The threshold of insult is in direct relation to intelligence and security. The words “son of a bitch” are only an insult to a man who isn’t quite sure of his mother.”

• “Can a man think out his life, or must he just tag along?”

• “Even if I hadn’t wanted to marry Mary, here constancy would have forced me to for the perpetuation of the world dream of fair and faithful women.”

• “She doesn’t listen to me because I am not talking to her, but to some dark listener within myself.”

• “Never take the first offer…if somebody wants to sell, he’s got a reason…a thing is only as valuable as who wants it…money gets money.”

• “They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That's for civilians.”

• "Only in a single man alone-only in one man alone. There's the only power-one man alone. Can't depend on anything else."

• “A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it.”

• “So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic, because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.”

• (On PTSD) “Trouble is, a guy tries to shove it out of his head. That don’t work. What you got to do is kind of welcome it…Take it’s something kind of long- you can start at the beginning and remember everything you can, right to the end. Every time it comes back you do that, from the first right through the finish. Pretty soon it’ll get tired and pieces of it will go, and before long the whole thing will go.”

• “Only at the last when the move is mounted and prepared does thought place a roof on the building and bring in words to explain and to justify.”

• “And if I should put the rules aside for a time, I knew I would wear the scars but would they be worse than the scares of failure I was wearing?”

• “One fatal reef I knew was talk. So many betrayed 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.”

• “No one wants advice- only corroboration.”

• “Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it?”

• “Ellen, only last night, asked, ‘Daddy, when will we be rich?’ But I did not say to her what I know: ‘We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly’. And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.”

• “There must be ritual preliminaries to a serious discussion or action, and the sharper the matter is, the longer and lighter must the singing be. Each person must add a bit of feather or a colored patch.”

• “Let even your defense have the appearance of attack.”

• “There is no such thing as just enough money. Only two measures: No Money and Not Enough Money.”

• “Squirrels bank ten times as many hickory nuts as they can ever use. The pocket gopher, with a stomach full to bursting, still loads his cheeks like sacks. And how much of the honey the clever bees collect do the clever bees eat?”

• “Here’s a grocery store clerk without a bean worried about how bad it will be when he’s rich.”

• “The what’s-he-getting-out-of-it attitude must be particularly strong in men who play their own lives like a poker hand.”

• “When you become too sure, you’re usually wrong. I think, from habit and practice, Marullo had reduced his approaches to men to three: command, flattery, and purchase. And the three must have worked often enough to allow him to depend on them. Somewhere in his dealing with me he had lost the first.”

• “If you want to keep a friend, never test them.”

• “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 king- but he must get there first.”

• “Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”

• “All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.”

• “Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding bac. 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…I suppose a man makes the jump, and someone else gets tromped.” 

• “A woman must have a showcase in which to grow old, lights, props, black velvet, children, graying and fattening, snickering and pilfering, love, protection, and small change, a serene and undemanding husband or his even more serene and less demanding will and trust fund. A woman growing old alone is useless cast-off trash, a wrinkled obscenity with no hobbled retainers to cluck and mutter over her aches and to rub her pains.”

• “You know Margie, no one ever believes the truth…The whole truth? When you carve a chicken, Eth, it’s all chicken, but some is dark meat and some white.”

• “If you think this dollar gives you the right to preach to me-here! Take it back."

• “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 knew from combat that casualties are the victims of a process, not of anger nor of hate or cruelty. And I believe that in the moment of acceptance, between winner and loser, between killer and killed, there is love.”

• “If I tell you (the answer to something), your half attention will only half learn. Look it up.”

• “For the most part people are not curious except about themselves…You wouldn’t be so worried with what folks think about you if you knew how seldom they do.”

• “I hope that Joey never discovered that he was the best teacher I had ever had. He not only informed, he demonstrated and, without knowing it, prepared a way for me.”

• “The Appian Way of bankruptcy is lined with the graves of unprotected ventures. I have one grave there already. The silliest soldier would not throw his whole strength at a break-through without mortars or reserves or replacements, but many an upcoming business doest just that.”

• “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.”

• “Morphy’s Laws stood up well…First Law: Have no past record. Second Law: No accomplices or confidants. Third Law: No dames. Fourth Law: Don’t splurge. Final Law: Don’t be a pig…Bylaw: In case of accident, change your plan- instantly.”

• “This year of 1960…Presidential nominations would be coming up soon and in the air the discontent was changing to anger and with the excitement anger brings. And it wasn’t only the nation; the whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as discontent moved to anger and anger tried to find an outlet in action, any action so long as it was violent.”

• “My light is out. There’s nothing blacker than a wick…It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. The world is full of dark derelicts.” 

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