Halfway through Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, a man called Hazel, who is kind and not clever, sits in the Monterey jail beside a vagrant fortune teller and asks what he insists is only a hypothetical question. Suppose a man is in trouble. Suppose there is one way out and he cannot take it himself. Should his friend do it for him, even if it hurts, even if it might not work?
The seer tells him yes. He tells him that if he loves the man he must do anything at all, and that he must accept beforehand that he will be punished, and that his friend may never speak to him again. Then he tells Hazel that he can see he loves him that much.
That night Hazel lies on the ground under a cypress tree and weeps, and at three in the morning he picks up an indoor-ball bat and goes to break Doc’s arm.
What a Group Picks Up With Sweet Thursday
Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck is the sequel to Cannery Row, published in 1954, nine years later, and set in a Monterey the war has emptied.
Almost everyone has moved or died or changed trade. The fishery has collapsed, which is real history and not a device. The grocer has gone to sea. The brothel has a new proprietor who teaches her girls table manners and reads their stars. Doc is home from the army to a laboratory with rusted instruments and empty cages, and cannot say what ails him.
Into that comes Suzy, down from the Greyhound with eighty-five cents, no folding money and a comb missing two teeth. On the surface Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck is simply the question of whether she and Doc will manage it. A group will find the surface is the least of it.
The Two Women Are Why Sweet Thursday Is Worth It
Suzy arrives and is immediately read, twice, by two people who are very good at their jobs.
First by Joe Blaikey, the constable, who sits down beside her at a lunch counter and has her whole situation inside a minute without appearing to ask. Steinbeck gives him a page of introduction worth the chapter by itself. A good constable can tell a genuine break-in from a rat in the dining room before he arrives, and when parents push a child forward with something taken from the Five-and-Dime, he finds a way to be merciful inside the law without making the law look foolish.
Then by Fauna, who declines to be told a hard-luck story and reconstructs one instead. Bad home, constant fighting, married at fifteen or sixteen to get out of it, pregnant at once, husband gone, baby lost. Suzy says nothing at all, and Fauna looks away so as not to watch her hands grip each other.
What a group should notice is that neither woman is doing anything a plot requires. They are simply competent, and the book is better in those pages than anywhere else.
The Argument About Hazel
Here is the evening’s discussion of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, and it is a real one.
Hazel’s logic is that Doc will not take what he needs, that Suzy will not come to him unless he needs her, and that a broken arm will create the need. He is right. It works. Doc asks her to drive him to La Jolla for the spring tides, she says yes, and the book ends happily.
But consider what has actually happened. A man has been maimed by a friend in order to be manoeuvred into a relationship, and the woman has been handed him by a conspiracy she only joins afterwards, when the boys teach her to drive using a kitchen chair, two bricks and a mop handle for a gear lever.
Is that love or is it management? The chapter is titled with the words from the cross, and Hazel’s night under the tree is written as a genuine agony. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck is entirely serious about the sacrifice. Whether the thing sacrificed for is worth it is the part a table has to settle.
Where It Will Lose People
- The love plot of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck is machinery. Fauna arranges a fortune, stages a party and sets a deadline, and the couple are finally joined by an assault.
- Doc has been reduced. In the first book he was a contented man; here he cannot be complete without a woman, which is a smaller proposition.
- The book asks us to let Suzy’s goodness wipe out where she has been, and that shortcut is what the 1954 notices went for.
- Chinese and Mexican characters attract the vocabulary of the era, and it is not confined to dialogue.
Reading It With the Rest
Worth knowing that Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck arrived two years after the novel covered in our analysis of East of Eden, and that he described it to his agent as the light counterweight to that book’s weight. For the Monterey country people written without any softness at all, there is our analysis of Of Mice and Men; for the late short book with a hard ending, our analysis of The Pearl. Groups interested in how he thought about moral choice should look at the timshel debate, since Hazel in that cell is given precisely such a choice. The street itself is Cannery Row in Monterey, and the collapse described here is real history.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About Sweet Thursday
He wrote Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck hoping it would be made into a musical, and it was.
Rodgers and Hammerstein produced Pipe Dream, which opened in November 1955 and became the biggest financial failure of their career together. Hammerstein, uncomfortable with a prostitute as his female lead and a bordello as a setting, revised through the tryouts until Suzy’s profession was merely implied and Fauna’s house was left vague.
So a novel written for the stage reached the stage with its subject removed. It has almost never been revived.
Questions for the Table
- Was Hazel right? Would you forgive a friend who did that to you?
- The constable and Fauna both read Suzy in a page. Why are those scenes better than the romance they set up?
- Is Doc’s discontent convincingly drawn, or is it a man being given a problem so the plot has somewhere to go?
- Fauna, a madam, is the book’s moral centre. Does that work?
- At the end the boys give Doc a telescope he never wanted. What is that gift for?
- Does a sequel have an obligation to the first book?
Before You Assign It
Sex work is a running joke rather than a subject. One character’s history, a beaten childhood, a marriage at fifteen, a dead infant, is raised in half a page and dropped. A friend is crippled on purpose, after a night of deliberation. And the era’s racial vocabulary turns up in the narrator’s mouth as well as the characters’.
What It Leaves Behind
A better book than 1954 decided, and not for its jokes.
The thing underneath is grief. Ed Ricketts, the man Doc was made from, had been killed by a train on that street six years before this was written, and Steinbeck’s second marriage had collapsed soon after. For a long stretch afterwards he could not settle to any project at all.
What that produced, inside a comic sequel written to order, is a long and exact passage about a man who finds he has started keeping score against himself. Has he worked enough, eaten enough, loved enough. And why has beer stopped tasting of anything. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck gives that man his dead friend’s name and surrounds him with people who love him badly and completely, and the final image is their gift arriving: a telescope strong enough to bring down the moon, bought for a man who spends his life looking into tide pools.
Doc’s response is that the direction of looking is not the point, only the looking. Then Suzy lets in the clutch, the car climbs straight over the kerb, takes the laboratory steps with it, and is round the warehouse and gone before the sun has finished setting.