Burning Bright was Steinbeck’s 20th book and his
third attempt at writing what he called the PLAY-
NOVELETTE. OFMICE ANDMENand THE MOONIS
DOWN are the other two examples of this style.
Burning Bright was published in New York in 1950
by VIKINGPRESSand at the same time, produced as a play in New York. For the reading public, Stein- beck presented it as a novelette in three acts.
“It is a combination of many old forms,” he writes in his prologue, “a play that is easy to read or a short novel that can be played simply by lifting out the dialogue.” Steinbeck knew that the average person finds it difficult to read a play; the brief descriptions of scenes and characters intended for the guidance of producer and actor, the hints of changes in the mood or action, require an imagina- tive awareness that the reader may be incapable of giving, so that in many cases reading a play is like finding a path through a dark field.
After reading Burning Bright, it would appear that there is also something unsatisfactory in this play-novelette. The characters are vivid, the scenes sharp, but on the whole the book is a failure because the reader is often bewildered; Steinbeck’s four characters appear to be puppets moved by strings, using words put into their mouths by a ven- triloquist.
If the author were writing as a novelist and not primarily as a playwright, you might sense the back- ground for the motives of his people; you would certainly know them better, for the novelist is com- pelled to tell you a great deal more about them, how they live, where they came from, what their families and friends are like, something of their childhood and of their habits and tastes.
The novel was originally titled Everyman, and then Forests of the Night, before Steinbeck finally renamed it Burning Bright, from a line in a poem by
William Blake (“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ In the forests of the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”). A dense morality piece in three acts, Burning Bright is writ- ten in what Steinbeck called “universal language,” a curious style that he intended less to sound like realistic dialogue than to operate as a system of rhythm and sound that served to express his ideas. Each act of the novelette features the same charac- ters in a different setting: a circus, a farm, and a small freighter.
It tells the story of Joe Saul, a man who is obsessed with producing an heir to carry on his bloodline. Unknowingly, Joe Saul is sterile. Deter- mined to make Joe Saul happy, his young wife, Mordeen, sleeps with another man to get pregnant. Victor, the father of the child, declares his love to Mordeen and threatens to reveal the truth to Joe Saul, for which he is murdered by Joe Saul’s loyal friend, Friend Ed. Joe Saul eventually learns the truth. He also discovers that love transcends blood and that every child belongs to all men, for “it is the race, the species, that must go staggering on.”
Since he wrote this work during the cold war, critics have suggested that Steinbeck was influ- enced by the thought of world annihilation. Stein- beck’s position on that possibility is clearly reflected in the lines above. He believed that humankind was basically inextinguishable because it is always looking for ways—despite immense pressures—to continue on.
EARLY CRITICISM
Burning Bright is a play in story form. In one of its
first reviews, Harrison Smith calls readers’ attention to this new literary form of Steinbeck’s. Because of its unique format, Smith finds that there is “a feeling of unreality in Burning Bright that may come from his method of handling the story itself.” Smith notes that the four characters in the first act are circus people, three men and a woman, who are seen in the dressing room tent of Joe Saul and his beautiful young wife, Mordeen. In the second act the same characters are farmers in a midwestern farmhouse; in the third act they are in the captain’s cabin of a cargo ship docked in New York harbor. However, these three incarnations of the same people do not
change their way of speaking to suit the scene; they never speak as would sailors, farmers or, doubtless, circus performers. To Smith, the book is just a moral- ity play, and the characters can be labeled as if they were symbols of human virtues and vices. Yet, as Smith regrets, although symbolism in his characters and his plots may be vital to the growth or the decline of Steinbeck as a creative writer, the play- wright’s rudimentary philosophy, his feverish cli- maxes, and the story as he has told it, in whole or in part, are “neither credible to the reader nor success- ful as the elements of a short novel.”
Reviewer Norman Cousins provides a unique perspective, reading Burning Bright in light of Hem- ingway’s book Across the River and into the Trees (1950). Despite the fact that Steinbeck claimed that he had never read Hemingway, in an article titled “Hemingway and Steinbeck” in Saturday
Review, Cousins writes that Burning Bright seems to
have been written almost in direct refutation of Hemingway. Just like Hemingway’s Across the River
and into the Trees, Burning Bright is a philosophical
summation, but Steinbeck’s book is strong where Hemingway’s is weak. According to Cousins, Stein- beck reveals moral values where Hemingway reveals monomaniacal meanderings. Burning Bright tries to address deep inner conflicts instead of pam- pering them. The truculent, arrogant, prizefight- conscious, sperm-ridden, perennial soldier-boy of Hemingway’s book dies a heroic and glamorous death. The man who meets death in Steinbeck’s book is also a pompous and willful brute, but there is nothing heroic about him or his death. To Cousins, he is a pathetic and oafish stud whose twisted ego makes it impossible for him to under- stand that virility alone does not automatically entitle him to the love of a desirable and under- standing woman. However, Joe Saul becomes a real human being. He discovers that love has higher dimensions than he had realized, and that identifi- cation with the human family is purpose and fulfill- ment in life.
After Burning Bright was staged in New York, an article appeared in Theatre Arts 34 (December 1950), calling it a modern morality play. According to the critic, John Steinbeck not only took the title of his play from “The Tyger,” but like Blake, Stein-
beck was also commenting on man’s finiteness in a boundless universe and also on the creative rich- ness of love. In this sense Burning Bright is an affir- mation of faith in the human race, an avowal of belief in the dignity of man stated with unmistak- able sincerity.
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES
Most critics consider the work to be an inferior one by Steinbeck—noting that he had lost much of the subtlety of earlier works dealing with similar themes. Mimi Reisel Gladstein points out that the work suffers because it strains to be profound. She argues that in his earlier works, Steinbeck was able to address complex issues on a series of different planes and from different angles.
In a recent study of the story, which appears in Jackson Benson’s The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, critics Carroll Britch and Clifford Lewis reveal that the excruciating moral dilemma of the story draws inspiration from emotional crises in Steinbeck’s own life. According to the critics, Steinbeck suf- fered in 1948 when his wife Gwyn divorced him and claimed (falsely) that his second child, John IV, was not his. Although it was a lie, her claim both- ered him a great deal, which led to his breakdown. Steinbeck tried to heal his emotional injury in a series of letters to his editor, Pat Covici, who the critics argue may have been a model for Ed in the book. Britch and Lewis state that, regardless of the true source for the story, most scholars today agree that the play has a valuable point: that the family is a private unit, a tribal cell, whose main concern is and always has been its own welfare and survival. The play seems to argue that the evolutionary process has not changed.
SYNOPSIS
Act One: The Circus
Joe Saul, a lithe, middle-aged trapeze artist, sits in his dressing tent putting on his makeup for his upcoming performance. He is obviously unhappy. Joe Saul’s longtime friend, Friend Ed, enters the tent in his circus clown costume and asks Joe Saul what is wrong. Joe Saul explains that he does not like working with his new partner, Victor, a
stranger to him, unrelated by blood. Joe Saul explains to his friend the importance of bloodline and admits he is unhappy because he has been unable to have a child. He is afraid that he is ster- ile and fears that his bloodline will be extin- guished. His beautiful young wife, Mordeen, joins the two men in the tent and senses the source of her husband’s unhappiness.
Victor, Joe Saul’s new assistant, enters the tent. He has sprained his wrist and will not be able to perform for three days. Joe Saul angrily berates the young man, telling him that he does not have it in his blood to be a true acrobat. Victor laughs at him bitterly, telling him that he is a frustrated old man. Joe Saul slaps the petulant youth and walks angrily out of the tent. Victor tells Mordeen that he did not strike back because he is in love with her and did not want to anger her. Mordeen tells Victor that she will do anything to see her husband happy. Victor grabs her and tries to kiss her, but she goes limp in his arms, and avoids his lips. Friend Ed walks into the tent, witnesses the assault, and tells Victor to go away.
Friend Ed tells Mordeen that Joe Saul has gone to town to get drunk. He asks Mordeen if she is able to have a baby. She says that she can, that she was once pregnant. She admits that Joe Saul had rheumatic fever as a child and is probably sterile. Friend Ed says that they must not tell Joe Saul of his sterility, for she would lose him to his self-con- tempt. She admits to Friend Ed that she is thinking about going to another man to make herself preg- nant for Joe Saul. She tells Friend Ed to go find Joe Saul and to protect him in his drunkenness. When Ed is gone, Victor returns to the tent. She tells him she is sorry for what happened. She arranges to meet him in town at a Chinese restaurant. Joe Saul returns to the tent, ashamed in his drunkenness, and quietly goes to sleep.
Act Two: The Farm
Joe Saul, the farmer, sits at the table reviewing the farm’s books. He complains to Friend Ed about his assistant Victor, whom he feels that he constantly has to watch since he does not have the blood of a real farmer. He tells Friend Ed about a nightmare that he has in which his land is left fallow and the
wilderness creeps back in upon it. He is worried that he has no heir to continue his bloodline when he dies. Friend Ed asks after his wife, Mordeen. Joe Saul says that she has been sickly during the past weeks. Friend Ed asks if Victor holds a grudge toward Joe Saul for his mistreatment of him. Joe Saul admits that he is ashamed of himself for slap- ping the young man.
Mordeen enters the kitchen. She announces to her startled husband that she is pregnant. Joe Saul weeps with joy. He insists that they organize a party to celebrate. Victor enters the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Joe Saul proudly tells Victor the good news. Victor conceals his shock. He offers a malicious toast “to the father,” knowing full well that the father is he. Seeing the secret hatred on Mordeen’s face, he excuses himself from the kitchen. Joe Saul rushes off to town with Friend Ed to buy Mordeen a present. Victor confronts Mordeen about the child. She insists that the child is Joe Saul’s. Victor throws himself at Mordeen’s feet and declares that he loves her. She rejects his advances, asking him coldly to go away from the farm. Time passes but Victor refuses to relinquish his love for Mordeen and his claim on the child. Victor announces to Joe Saul that he is leaving the farm, that he cannot stand living in a place where he was hit in the face. Joe Saul decides that as a Christmas present for his coming child he will have a complete doctor’s examination to prove his health and the purity of the blood that he is passing on.
Act Three, Scene I: The Sea
Victor enters the tiny cabin of a freighter and asks to speak with Mordeen. She tells him that she is having pains, signs that she is about to go into labor. She begs Victor to go look for her husband, Joe Saul. Victor insists to Mordeen that she is his woman and that her child is his. He tells her that she must come away with him or he will tell Joe Saul the truth. She agrees to go with him but while he gathers her suitcase, she slips a short dagger into her coat.
Unbeknownst to Mordeen, Friend Ed has been watching from the door. He asks Victor to speak with him outside on the deck, where he kills the young man and throws him into the sea. Meanwhile,
Joe Saul returns to the ship in a rage. He has had his checkup, which he says revealed that he has a bad heart. Friend Ed accuses him of lying and insists that Joe Saul tell the truth about what the doctor told him. Joe Saul admits that he knows that he is sterile and that Mordeen’s baby could not possibly be his; his bloodline will die with him. He angrily decries his wife’s treachery. Friend Ed rebukes him for rejecting Mordeen’s sacrifice and leaves the ship in disgust. Mordeen cries out and collapses on the floor in pain.
Act Three, Scene II: The Child
Mordeen lies in the delivery room, her child beside her in a bundle. Joe Saul enters the room and approaches his wife. Mordeen, overcome with delirium, tells him that the baby is dead. He reas- sures his wife that the baby is alive and that he loves it. He has realized “that every man is father to all children and every child must have all men as father.”
CHARACTERS
Friend Ed A character in Burning Bright, Friend Ed is Joe Saul’s loyal friend. He is a broad, tall man, slow in motion and speech. In the three acts of the novelette, he is a circus clown, a farmer, and a ship’s captain. He murders Victor and throws him overboard so that Joe Saul will not learn that Vic- tor is the father of Mordeen’s baby. Steinbeck may have modeled Friend Ed on his close friend Ed Ricketts.
Mordeen A character in Burning Bright, Mordeen is Joe Saul’s beautiful, golden-haired young wife. In the three acts of the novelette, she is an acrobat, a farmer’s wife, and a ship’s captain’s wife. She sleeps with a man that she does not love to produce an heir for her sterile husband.
Saul, Joe A character in Burning Bright, Joe is a lithe and stringy middle-aged man with large, dark eyes and thick graying hair that he keeps carefully dyed. In the three acts of the novelette, he is a cir- cus acrobat, a farmer, and a ship’s captain. Unaware that he is sterile, he is obsessed with preserving his bloodline by producing an heir. Eventually, he
embraces a child that is not his, realizing that “it is the race, the species, that must go staggering on.”
Victor A character in Burning Bright, Victor is a strong, athletic young man with dark eyes. In the three acts of the novelette, he is alternately an apprentice acrobat, a farmer’s assistant, and a ship’s mate. Mordeen sleeps with him in order to produce an heir for her sterile husband Joe Saul. When he discovers that Mordeen is pregnant with his baby, he declares his love for her and insists that she leave with him. Friend Ed, who does not want him to reveal to Joe Saul that he is the real father of Mordeen’s baby, murders him.
FURTHER READING
Britch, Carroll, and Clifford Lewis. “Burning Bright: The Shining of Joe Saul.” In The Short Novels of
John Steinbeck, edited by Jackson Benson. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.
“Burning Bright.” Theatre Arts 34 (December 1950): 16.
Cousins, Norman. “Hemingway and Steinbeck.” Sat-
urday Review, October 28, 1950, pp. 26–27.
Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. “Straining for Profundity: Steinbeck’s Burning Bright and Sweet Thursday.” In
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, edited by Jack-
son Benson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.
Smith, Harrison. “A New Form of Literature.” Wash-
ington Post, October 22, 1950, 5B.
Steinbeck, John. Burning Bright. New York: Viking, 1950.