East of Eden Excerpt

Excerpt from "East of Eden"
by John Steinbeck (1902-2002)
Penguin Books

ISBN 0-14-200423-5

Chapter 19, pg. 216


A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers,
strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of
themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against
men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When
the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers
come in to help with the development - to solve problems of
ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And
finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out
of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.


The church and the wh@rehouse arrived in the Far West
simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a
different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended
to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of
the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did
the brothels. The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud
and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built
churches which couldn't be paid for in a hundred years. The sects
fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine
lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed
all the others were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its
bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which
our ethics, our art and poetry and our relationships are built. It took a
smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but
anyone could see what they had in common. And they brought music -
maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it. And they brought
conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not
pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And
any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself. True
enough, the Reverend Billing, when they caught up with him, turned
out to be a thief, an adulterer, a libertine, and a zoophilist, but that
didn't change the fact that he had communicated some good things to
a great number of receptive people. Billing went to jail, but no one
ever arrested the good things he had released. And it doesn't matter
much that his motive was impure. He used good material and some of
it stuck. I use Billing only as an outrageous example. The honest
preachers had energy and go. They fought the devil, no holds barred,
boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they
howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem
on a row of circus horns. But some of the truth and beauty remained,
and the anthem was recognizable. The sects did more than this,
though. They built the structure of social life in the Salinas Valley. The
church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the
Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the
little theatre.


While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul,
came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time,
the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in
silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.


You may have seen the spangled palaces of sin and fancy dancing in
the false West of the movies, and maybe some of them existed -- but
not in the Salinas Valley. The brothels were quiet, orderly, and
circumspect. Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic
conversation against the thumping beat of the melodeon you had
stood under the window of a wh@rehouse and listened to the low
decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities
of the two ministries. The brothel was accepted while it was not
admitted.