Early in Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, Pilon finds a jug of wine that does not belong to him and reasons his way toward it in four unhurried steps. It would be wrong to drink it. It would also be wrong to let it spoil. The owner would surely wish it enjoyed. And is a gift not improved by being received gladly? By the end of the paragraph the wine is gone and no commandment has been broken, and the prose has kept an entirely straight face throughout.
That is Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck working at its best. The question a reading group will end up on is whether the joke is being shared with these men or made at their expense.
Tortilla Flat Declares Its Frame Before the Story Starts
Steinbeck opens with a preface explaining that Danny’s house is a Round Table and Danny’s friends are its knights, and that the whole thing is being written down so future scholars cannot dismiss Danny as a nature god.
The device is then maintained with real discipline. Each of the seventeen chapters carries a mock-medieval heading announcing the virtue about to be displayed, and the episode beneath it almost always delivers theft, drunkenness or an accidental fire. Danny inherits two houses from his grandfather, which gives the group a hall. Men arrive one at a time, each reduced to a single attribute, as knights do. At the close the lord dies, the hall burns, and the fellowship disperses.
Readers who know the Arthurian material will find the parallels tighter than the loose comic surface suggests. The novel is doing something formally serious while pretending not to.
The Problem a Group Will Reach by Chapter Four
The men of Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck are paisanos, descendants of the Spanish and Mexican and Indigenous populations of the California coast, and the preface characterises them as clean of commercialism, outside the systems of American business, possessing nothing that can be stolen or mortgaged.
Read quickly, that is a compliment. Read slowly, it is a fence. These characters are not permitted ambition, boredom, competence or a plan, because any of those things would stop the comedy working. The engine of nearly every chapter is that nobody in it can hold a job, keep money, or think past the afternoon, and the warmth of the telling depends on this being their nature rather than their circumstance.
What makes it uncomfortable rather than simply dated is that Steinbeck plainly likes them. There is no contempt here. But affection that requires its object to stay small is doing something, and a group that talks only about whether the book is funny will miss it.
Worth putting to the table: the same author, writing the same coastal poor one year later in In Dubious Battle, gave them organisation, strategy and rage. The incapacity in Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck was a choice, not a limit.
The Pirate Escapes the Design of Tortilla Flat
One figure refuses to stay inside the scheme, and he is where Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck becomes something better than clever.
The Pirate is enormous and heavily bearded, and five dogs share his quarters, which are a disused hen coop among the pines. His trade is kindling, which brings in a quarter on a good day, and none of it has ever been spent. Danny’s friends take him in after calculating what his savings might come to and deciding that charity is the most efficient approach.
What they uncover is a sack of silver and an obligation. At a thousand coins he will commission a gold candlestick for San Francisco de Assisi, which he swore to do while one of the dogs lay ill. The animal pulled through, then went under a truck some weeks later. He states both facts in the same tone, asking nothing.
The men who came to take his money end up guarding it. For one chapter nobody is being laughed at, a promise is kept at genuine cost, and the romance frame stops being ironic. A group looking for the book’s defence should start here and not with the jokes.
The Ending Does Not Behave Like the Rest of the Book
Nothing in the preceding two hundred pages prepares a reader for the last two.
Danny, who has spent the novel being carried by his own legend, goes out to meet whatever is coming and does not come back. The house that gave the group its name and its hall catches fire while the friends sit inside it, and they watch the flame climb the wall and go through the roof before any of them stands up. Pilon, who learns from everything, takes the remaining wine with him on the way out.
Then the fire brigade arrives, the crowd disperses, and the men stand looking at the cinders. The final sentence of Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck has them turning away, and notes that no two of them walked together.
After seventeen chapters of comic fellowship, that is a cold close, and it is the strongest evidence that the Arthurian frame was never only a joke. Romances end this way. The hall falls, the company scatters, and the thing that held them is gone before anyone has worked out what it was.
What a Discussion Should Cover
- Is the preface’s description of the paisanos admiring or confining, and does Steinbeck know the difference?
- The comedy depends on these men never improving. What would the novel lose if one of them did?
- The Pirate is treated with complete seriousness. Why him and nobody else?
- The last line has the friends walking away separately. Is that earned, or borrowed from a form the book has mostly mocked?
- Does a book written in 1935 get read on its own terms, and what would that actually mean here?
Reading Tortilla Flat Alongside the Rest
This was his fourth book and his first success; three commercial failures came before it. The acceleration afterwards is startling. In Dubious Battle followed in 1936, Of Mice and Men in 1937, The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, all of them about the same coastal poor and none of them remotely charmed by poverty.
Groups that want the comparison should read this against our analysis of Of Mice and Men, written two years later about men just as broke and played entirely without jokes, or against East of Eden, where the structural ambition finally has something heavy enough to carry. Readers who enjoy the mosaic shape more than the subject will get on well with Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
Final Thoughts
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck is a small book that is cleverer than it looks and more compromised than its fans admit. The Arthurian scaffolding is real craft, the self-justification scenes are among the funniest things he wrote, and the ending is colder than anything in the hundred pages before it.
It is also a novel whose charm is built on holding its characters still. A group can enjoy it and say so, and should still be able to name what the enjoyment costs. Both things are true at once, which is a better outcome for an evening than agreeing.