Somewhere in the second half of Burning Bright by John Steinbeck a woman tells a man, very coldly, that she will do anything at all to bring her husband contentment, and instructs him to remember that she said it.
She means it literally. She is already sure her husband can father no children, that the absence of one is killing him, and that the truth must be kept from him. So she will use the only man to hand, a vain young assistant who has lately tried to force himself on her, and present her husband with a son.
That is the engine of the book, and it will divide any room that reads it.
What a Group Takes On With Burning Bright
Burning Bright by John Steinbeck is short, roughly a hundred pages, and formally peculiar in a way worth knowing about in advance.
Four characters: Joe Saul, nearly fifty, the man without a child; Mordeen, his young second wife; Victor, his assistant; and Friend Ed. The story runs across three acts, and in each act the four of them have entirely different occupations. Circus performers, then farmers, then a ship’s captain, mate and departing seaman. Nobody comments on the change. The relationships and the crisis simply continue.
Steinbeck’s early working title was Everyman, which explains the device completely. The final scene is a hospital room belonging to none of the three worlds, so it closes all of them at once.
Why Friend Ed Matters More Than the Plot
Here is the thing a group should know before opening Burning Bright by John Steinbeck, because it changes the reading.
Steinbeck’s closest friend was the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, the model for Doc in Cannery Row and a man he had travelled, drunk, thought and written with for two decades. Ricketts was killed when a train hit his car in 1948. Burning Bright by John Steinbeck was written in the two years that followed, and the one wholly good character in it, the friend who refuses to let Joe Saul be small, is called Friend Ed.
The settings may belong to the same grief. Steinbeck was reportedly at a circus when the news of the death reached him, and Ricketts was buried beside the sea. A book that otherwise looks like a schematic exercise has a circus in its first act and the sea in its last.
Read that way, the speeches stop being decoration. Friend Ed tells Joe Saul that he has given him everything a friend can give, including contempt, which is the hardest of all, and then says he has sailing orders and must go.
The Burning Bright Argument to Put to the Table
Does Mordeen do the right thing? Everything in Burning Bright by John Steinbeck hangs off that.
The case for her is the one the book makes. Her husband is being destroyed by something that is nobody’s fault. The lie costs him nothing he can detect and gives him everything he wants. She is clear-eyed about it: she has done this not in weakness but as a decision, and she carries it alone.
The case against is not hard to assemble either. She makes a permanent choice about her husband’s life without consulting him. She uses a man she despises. And she assumes Joe Saul would rather be deceived than told, which is a judgement about him that he never gets to make.
And then the book takes the decision out of her hands, because he works it out anyway. What he does with it is the ending, and whether the ending is earned is the second argument.
Where Burning Bright Will Lose People
Be straight with a group before assigning Burning Bright by John Steinbeck:
The invented speech of Burning Bright by John Steinbeck is the real problem. Characters refer to wife-loss and friend-right, they lesson one another, they say see you remember that. It is deliberate, so that no line belongs to any region, and the result is that nobody sounds human.
The moral is stated rather than dramatised. Joe Saul spells out in the opening act that any man in any trade might be carrying the same wound, and the remainder of the book is an illustration of that remark.
The last scene is a long speech delivered to a woman who is barely conscious, and it explains its own meaning twice.
Victor is not a character but a mechanism, written as a man incapable of hearing anything correctly.
Reading It Alongside the Rest
The obvious companion to Burning Bright by John Steinbeck is our analysis of Of Mice and Men, the first time he tried this hybrid form and the time it worked perfectly. Two years after this failure he published the novel in our analysis of East of Eden, which gives six hundred pages to the question of how much a person is held by what was handed down, and the timshel debate is where we take apart the single word that decides it. The title comes from Blake’s The Tyger; Steinbeck wanted a longer phrase from the same stanza and his producers made him shorten it.
Questions for the Table
Was Mordeen right? Would you want to be told?
Steinbeck called this a play-novelette and meant it to be lifted straight onto a stage. Would Burning Bright by John Steinbeck play better than it reads?
Friend Ed sees Victor assault her and tells him to leave rather than letting Joe Saul find out. Is that friendship or cowardice?
Does the shifting of settings deepen the story or flatten it?
Joe Saul’s grief is for a bloodline rather than a baby. Is that a real feeling or an invented one?
The ending gives him a speech about the species instead of a scene. Could it have been staged instead?
Knowing Ed Ricketts had just died, does the book read differently?
Before You Assign It
A wife sets out to become pregnant by someone she holds in contempt, so that her husband can be kept from the truth. An attempted sexual assault, earlier, in the same act. A long and frightening labour. And a sustained treatment of male infertility as personal extinction, which some readers will find harder going than any of it.
Where It Leaves You
With more sympathy for the attempt than for the result, which is the usual verdict on Burning Bright by John Steinbeck and is not quite enough.
The production closed after thirteen performances, with Rodgers and Hammerstein producing and Barbara Bel Geddes as Mordeen, and the reviews of the book were no better. Steinbeck’s own account was that the whole company had been treated like stray animals, that he still meant to learn the theatre properly, and that persisting proved him simply stupid. He never wrote for the stage again.
What stays, though, is the shape of what he was reaching for in Burning Bright by John Steinbeck. A man believes his worth lies in his own blood continuing. He is wrong, and the correction has to come from a wife who lies to him and a friend who despises him for a while in order to save him. By the last page he has arrived at the idea that every man is father to all children, which is either the most generous thing in his work or the most strained, depending on the reader.
He wrote that in the two years after burying the person who had taught him most. It is not a good book. It is a legible one.