Estrategia de implementación

Elof Boodin, Brown was one of the essential pillars in constructing Steinbeck’s philoso- phies of humanity. Brown taught a course in the history of philosophy while Steinbeck attended Stanford University, and Stein- beck often spoke of this independent- minded professor in glowing terms. He made a point of attending all of Brown’s offered lectures, even when not enrolled in a course, and he also discussed issues pre- sented in class with Brown at his home. Brown emphasized openness to all experi- ence, and he suggested that modern philoso- phy and scientific law could work together simultaneously as integrated wholes. Utiliz- ing this concept, Steinbeck’s holistic style of writing often presents characters who fail because of their inability to incorporate phi- losophy and science and thus are defeated by their limited vision (e.g., Joy in In Dubious

Battle, Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men,

and Noah Joad in The Grapes of Wrath ).

Tracy Michaels

BROWNING, KIRK. Directed the Step- penwolf Theatre production of The Grapes

of Wrath for its television version on PBS’s

American Playhouse in March 1991.

BROWNING, ROBERT (1812–1891). Vic- torian poet whose influence perhaps is evi- dent in the structure of some Steinbeck works. In Steinbeck’s early experimental, unpublished work “Dissonant Sym-

phony,” he emulated the style Browning used in his famous poem “The Ring and the Book,” wherein the central character was never directly seen except through the eyes of characters around him. Each character then provides a new layer or dimension to the main character. This is particularly true of Steinbeck’s technique in The Pastures of

BUCK, BILLY. In all four of the stories that make up The Red Pony, Billy Buck, a ranch hand, serves as a mentor and surrogate father to Jody Tiflin. Acknowledged by all the people in the area as being an expert horseman, Billy Buck is key throughout

“The Gift” in educating Jody about the care and training of Gabilan. He proves fallible when he assures Jody that it will not rain and it does. Then he fails to save the ailing colt that falls ill from exposure to the weather. Billy attempts to make amends in

“The Promise.” After the pony dies, Jody’s father (Carl Tiflin) promises that if Jody will work all summer to pay for breeding of the mare, Nellie, and will take care of her during the long months following, Jody will have earned the colt. When the time for delivery arrives, Billy is obliged to kill the mare in order to save the colt. Despite the loss, Jody’s new colt is saved. In “The Great

Mountains,” Buck is the voice of compas- sion for the old paisano who visits the ranch. The contrast between Billy and Tiflin is brought out most clearly in “The Leader

of the People.” When Mr. Tiflin becomes impatient with his wife’s father’s frequently retold tale of leading the settlers across the continent, Billy patiently puts up with the disgruntled leader who no longer has fol- lowers. In return, Grandfather, even though he considers this middle-aged man a boy, acknowledges the quality of his char- acter and welcomes his respectful behavior toward an older man. Jody learns, too, to be compassionate toward his grandfather.

Mimi Reisel Gladstein

BUCKE, MRS. In Sweet Thursday, a first- grade teacher in Pacific Grove who stands accused by a student of giving him the dust cover of the Kinsey Report. Under question- ing, she reveals that in 1918 her father signed a petition for the release of the social- ist leader Eugene Debs. Through this inci- dent and some others in Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck lampoons the McCarthyism ram- pant at the time. Steinbeck thoroughly detested Senator McCarthy, whom he referred to as “Josephine” in his private cor-

respondence. He published a mocking essay called “How to Tell Good Guys from

Bad Guys” in The Reporter in 1950.

Bruce Ouderkirk

BUD. In The Wayward Bus, the man to whom Alice Chicoy lost her virginity when she was young. The memory surfaces when she starts drinking following the bus’s departure for San Juan de la Cruz. For Alice this is a bitter memory, for what had begun as a bucolic picnic ended with Bud’s cal- lousness following intercourse. In Alice’s view, Bud’s attitude foreshadows the gen- eral attitude of the men she will encounter in her life.

BUGLE, MILDRED. In Sweet Thursday, a precocious thirteen-year-old, discriminat- ing in botany, who discovers plants of Can-

nabis americana growing in the Los Angeles

Plaza where Joseph and Mary Rivas have cultivated them.

BULENE, PET. Taxi driver in Salinas in

East of Eden.

BULLITT, JESSIE. See Women’s Commit-

tee at the Weedpatch camp.

BUNYAN, JOHN (1628–1688). An English writer of allegorical fiction, Bunyan was the son of a tinker who had little schooling. During the English Civil War, while he served in the Parliamentary Army, he underwent a period of acute spiritual anxi- ety and finally became a lay preacher while earning his living as a tinker. His first sub- stantial work was an autobiography, Grace

Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. This was

followed by other works, of which the most read and most loved by far is his The Pil-

grim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, usually called Pilgrim’s Progress;

this work, which Steinbeck read, was likely an early influence. Steinbeck himself, par- ticularly in later works, delved into allegory (The Pearl, for example, or Burning Bright).

Burning Bright 41

Further Reading: DeMott, Robert. Steinbeck’s

Reading; A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed. New York: Garland, 1984.

BURGUNDIAN, THE. Pirate captain under

Henry Morgan’s command in the cam- paign against Panama in Cup of Gold. His first name is Emil, and he and The Other Burgundian, whose name is Antoine, are inseparable. The closeness of the two broth- ers is captured in Steinbeck’s portrayal of The Other Burgundian’s always having his one good arm placed protectively around the shoulders of his brother. As young men, they and two friends had all been in compe- tition for the love of the same young woman, named Delphine. The Burgundian won her love by giving her a single rose- colored pearl, and they were happily mar- ried even though she was the mistress to the three other friends. Eventually, when public opinion required a duel, Emil killed two friends and cut Antoine in defense of his wife’s honor. Antoine’s cut became infected, and the left arm had to be ampu- tated at the elbow. When Emil and Antoine were brought before Lieutenant Governor Henry Morgan to be tried for piracy, Henry reminisced with them about Panama, found them guilty, and sentenced them to be hanged. The Burgundian gave Henry Mor- gan the rose pearl to give to Henry’s wife.

Kevin Hearle.

BURGUNDIAN, THE OTHER.

See

BURKE. A strike leader in charge of camp security in In Dubious Battle, who supports

Dakin. During a confrontation in the strug- gle for power, he accuses London of selling out, and the short-tempered and powerful London breaks Burke’s jaw.

BURNING BRIGHT(1950). John Steinbeck’s

third and last experiment with his “play- novelette” form, it was performed as a play and produced as a book in October 1950. Both forms were panned by the critics, and

Steinbeck himself admitted later that Burn-

ing Bright did not work as a play. Unlike

other slight works in Steinbeck’s canon, such as Bombs Away or The Short Reign of

Pippin IV, Burning Bright is an admirable

attempt by the author to strive for some- thing important, and this slim work could be viewed as a spectacular failure.

Most readers would agree that Burning

Bright has been neglected for good reason.

Steinbeck’s attempt to make a play and book out of a philosophical treatise utterly fails to entertain. Set in three acts—“The Circus,” “The Farm,” and “The Sea”—Burn-

ing Bright concerns Joe Saul, a man nearing

fifty who suffers from sterility. Following the death of his first wife, Cathy, he has married a healthy young woman named

Mordeen. She surmises that an early bout with rheumatic fever has made Saul sterile, but he does not know about his condition.

Friend Ed, a protective companion, con- soles Saul and consults with Mordeen. Ten- sion mounts as Victor, a strong young man, senses Saul’s weakness and wants to have Mordeen for himself. Because Saul desper- ately wants children to continue his blood- line, Mordeen decides she will do anything to please him. Out of love for her husband, Mordeen lets Victor impregnate her, using him like a stud animal. Victor cannot stand to be used, however, and threatens to tell Saul how Mordeen became pregnant. She decides to kill Victor and, in a climactic scene, takes a knife to do the hapless man in. However, Friend Ed intervenes, crushing Victor’s skull and disposing of the body (this is softened in the play, in which Friend Ed arranges for Victor to be shanghaied). Meanwhile, Saul discovers he is sterile after a visit with Dr. Zorn. Saul confronts Mordeen but, with some mediation from Friend Ed, accepts her gift of great love. In the last scene, the Child is born and love conquers all. This odd tale suffers from strange dialogue, odd setting, and abstract characterization.

The dialogue is strained and highly artifi- cial because Steinbeck created “a kind of universal language” for his everyman char- acters. In a response to his critics, Steinbeck

noted that Burning Bright was an attempt to “lift the story to the parable expression of the morality plays.” This artistic aim results in lines like this one, when Ed is trying to help Saul: “Three years it is since Cathy died. You were strong in your wife-loss. You were not nervy then.” This universalized language annoyed critics, as evident by L. A. G. Strong’s parody of the work: “Have I, I wonder, the admirer-right to tell Mr. Stein- beck that this trick has set me screaming silently in my reader-loss?” Most literary critics, from Peter Lisca to Jay Parini, have echoed the laments of the contemporary reviewers. Steinbeck’s odd shifting of scene, as characters walk through circus, farm, and sea settings, also was an attempt to univer- salize the experience. Critics have generally dismissed this device as a highly artificial gimmick that confused readers and view- ers alike. Literary critic Howard Levant asserts that Steinbeck had been struggling with form, and the odd structure of the play-novelettes, Burning Bright in particu- lar, demonstrates Steinbeck’s tendency “to substitute mechanics and manipulation for organic form.”

Characterization also suffers from Stein- beck’s attempt to make Burning Bright a lofty, universal experience. Joe Saul, Friend Ed, and Mordeen are walking abstractions; ironically, Victor is the most dynamic char- acter in the work, and he shows some flashes of real humanity. Lisca wrote that with Burning Bright, Steinbeck was revert- ing to his earlier mode in To a God

Unknown, in which characters were over-

loaded with symbolism. John Ditsky summed up the combination of problems for this play-novelette, noting that “unreal dialogue is spoken by unreal characters in unreal settings.”

Burning Bright was published during a

turbulent time in Steinbeck’s personal life and artistic career. In 1948 he suffered an ugly separation from his second wife,

Gwyndolyn Conger Steinbeck, and the untimely death of his great friend and liter- ary muse Edward F. Ricketts. At the end of 1949, he married his third wife, Elaine Scott

Steinbeck, who had been a successful

Broadway stage manager and who assured that his residence would remain in New York rather than his native California. Stein- beck’s third play-novelette was inspired by meeting Elaine’s theater friends and being immersed in the Broadway scene; he wanted to create a vehicle for the theater. Given his recent personal traumas, moral issues came to the forefront of his writing as he moved away (but never completely) from the sweeping non-teleological ideas that he had worked out with Ricketts. This change of direction culminated in East of

Eden, but Burning Bright (as a modern morality play) represents a major artistic turning point for Steinbeck. It is difficult to believe that the allegorical play-novelette was written by the same man who wrote the cold, scientific In Dubious Battle. The diffi- culty for Burning Bright is the collision of Steinbeck’s objective, scientific direction (the realities of human animal/sexual nature) with higher notions of morality (the human ability to love deeply and forgive). Although Mordeen and Friend Ed conspire compassionately to give Saul his child, they have little trouble doing away with Victor when he gets in the way. Critic John S. Kennedy explained the problem thus: the “thoughtful reader is appalled by the com- plete severance of man from morality which the book’s argument represents.”

The biblical allegory is heavy-handed in

Burning Bright, but Steinbeck used the

most important stories of the western world to give his little play gravity. There are elements of several Bible stories, and Joe Saul’s name and the action of the story suggest the rivalry of King Saul and David (Victor) or Saul on the road to Damascus (as Old Saul drifts in darkness until he lit- erally is enlightened). However, as Lisca has observed, many elements in the play- novelette indicate the Christ story: Joe Saul’s first name (for Joseph), Mordeen’s blue gown (traditional for Mary), that Joe is not the father of the Child, and that the Child is born at Christmas. The scene changes are meaningful as Joe and Mordeen wander from place to place, in a sense searching for the inn (which becomes a

Burt, William C. 43 rather austere hospital room). But once

again, the allegory is undercut by unsavory realities: Victor is the father, Mordeen sug- gests an earlier career as a prostitute, and Joe Saul is a raging, impotent man.

Burning Bright, with its eccentricities of

language, setting, characters such as Mordeen or Friend Ed who oscillate unpre- dictably between good and evil, and odd biblical allusions, is ultimately a reflection of chaos. Steinbeck has created a dark little universe, and the central character—with one foot in hell and the other in heaven—is the human being: here is the “fearful sym- metry” referred to in William Blake’s poem “The Tiger,” from which Steinbeck’s title is derived. In a world of shifting scenes and moral conundrums, one cannot rely on old teleologies from a manufactured god; as Steinbeck noted in his Nobel Prize accep-

tance speech, “We must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some diety might have.”

The moral message of Steinbeck’s alle- gorical play-novelette is that humans are both animal and god; if humans would rec- ognize this chaotic existence, they might survive themselves. That Joe Saul and his family survive the convoluted mess that leads to the Child (a product of the best and worst of humanity) is the positive theme of

Burning Bright. Norman Cousins praised

the message of the Steinbeck’s book: “He has written his most mature book, a book which, if carefully and slowly read, can be as rewarding a literary experience as any of us is likely to have for a long time.” The form and execution of Burning Bright, how- ever, has made it difficult for readers to heed Cousins’s advice.

Further Reading: Cousins, Norman. “Hem-

ingway and Steinbeck,” Saturday Review of

Literature. October 28, 1950, 26–27; Kennedy,

John S. “John Steinbeck: Life Affirmed and Dissolved.” In Steinbeck and His Critics: A

Record of Twenty-Five Years. Ed. E. W. Tedlock

and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957; Lisca, Peter. John

Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York:

Crowell, 1978; Railsback, Brian. “The Bright

Failure: What Are We to Make of Chaos?” In

The Betrayal of Brotherhood in the Work of John Steinbeck. Ed. Michael J. Meyer. Lewiston, NY:

Mellen Press, 2000; Steinbeck, John. “Mr. Steinbeck’s Foreword to ‘Burning Bright,’”

New York Times. October 15, 1950, 1; ———.

“Critics, Critics, Burning Bright,” Saturday

Review of Literature. November 11, 1950, 20–21;

Strong, L. A. G. Rev. of Burning Bright, by John Steinbeck, Spectator. August 10, 1951, 196.

Brian Railsback