The preface tells you the whole design before a character speaks. Danny’s house, it says, is not a structure of wood and old whitewash, and Danny’s friends are not unlike the knights of the Round Table. Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck then adds a joke at the expense of future academics who might one day declare that Danny was only a nature god and his friends symbols of wind and sun.
That is the machine. A 1935 novel about unemployed men drinking wine in the hills above Monterey, built on the frame of medieval romance, and entirely open about it.
How the Arthurian Frame of Tortilla Flat Works
The structure of Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck is applied with more rigour than its casual tone suggests.
Danny comes home from the war to find he has inherited two houses from his grandfather, which makes him a man of property and gives the group somewhere to gather. Pilon moves in, then Pablo, then Jesus Maria Corcoran, then the Pirate, then Big Joe Portagee. The fellowship assembles exactly as a romance fellowship assembles: by arrival, one at a time, each with a defining attribute.
Every chapter carries a heading in the old style. “How Danny’s Friends became a force for Good. How they succored the poor Pirate.” The headings are not decoration. They force each episode into the shape of a knightly deed, and the comedy comes from the gap between the announced virtue and the actual behaviour, which is usually theft, arson by negligence, or an elaborate moral argument constructed to justify drinking somebody else’s wine.
The borrowing is from Malory and the broader Arthurian tradition, and Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck follows that tradition to its proper conclusion: the fellowship forms, flourishes, and then comes apart.
What works
- The self-justification scenes are superb. Pilon can reason his way from an unattended jug of wine to a moral obligation in four moves, and the prose follows each step with a completely straight face.
- The Pirate is the real achievement. A huge bearded man who sleeps with five dogs and has been saving quarters for years to buy a gold candlestick for Saint Francis, promised when one of his dogs was sick. The dog recovered and was later run over by a truck. He tells this without self-pity and the book does not reach for the obvious pathos.
- The ending is genuinely good. Danny dies, the house burns, and the final sentence has the friends walking away into the dark with the observation that no two walked together. For a comic novel it closes very cold.
- It is short and it moves. Seventeen episodes, no padding, a structure that tells you where you are at all times.
Where Tortilla Flat Gives Ground
- The portrayal of the paisanos is the problem in Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, and it is not a small one. The preface describes them as clean of commercialism and untouched by American business, which sounds generous and functions as a cage. They are permitted to be joyous, cunning and devout, and almost never to be competent, ambitious or bored.
- The comedy requires them not to change. Any of these men acquiring a job or a plan would break the book, so none of them does.
- The women barely register. They appear as objects of pursuit or as sources of food and wine, and leave no mark.
- The Arthurian joke wears out before the book does. By the tenth chapter heading the device is doing less work than it did at the third, and the middle section sags where the episodes stop building on each other.
What the Pirate Is Doing in a Comic Novel
One character in Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck sits outside the joke, and he is the reason the book survives rereading.
The Pirate is enormous, bearded, frightened of adults, and lives in a chicken house in the woods
with five dogs. He sells kindling in Monterey for twenty-five cents a day and has never spent a
coin of it. Danny’s friends take him in, having first worked out among themselves that his
savings must be substantial and that charity is the efficient route to it.
What they find is a sack of quarters and a promise: a thousand of them, to buy a gold candlestick
for Saint Francis, pledged when one of his dogs fell ill. The dog recovered. It was killed by a
truck shortly afterwards. He mentions this as a matter of record.
The scene is funny and then stops being funny, and the men who came to rob him end up guarding
his money. It is the one episode where the Arthurian frame is not ironic. A vow is made, kept at
real cost, and honoured by people who had intended otherwise, which is precisely what a romance
is supposed to be about.
Read it if
- You want Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck for what it is: the place his career actually started, and what a formal experiment looks like from him.
- You enjoy comic logic: characters talking themselves into things with impeccable reasoning.
- You liked Cannery Row and want the earlier, rougher version of the same idea.
Skip it if
- Affectionate ethnic caricature is something you would rather not spend two hundred pages inside.
- You need characters capable of changing.
- You are looking for the social anger of the books that came next.
Where Tortilla Flat Sits in the Backlist
This was the fourth book and the first that sold. Cup of Gold, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown had all failed commercially, and Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck arrived in 1935 to win a California gold medal and fund the writing of what came after.
What came after is the point. Within a year he published In Dubious Battle, within two Of Mice and Men, within four The Grapes of Wrath. The same valley, the same class of men, and none of the whimsy. Reading this book against those is the clearest illustration available of how fast a writer can change his mind about what he is for.
He returned to the mode once more, in Cannery Row ten years later, with better prose and the same blind spot.
Read these next
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. The same project, a decade on, warmer and better written.
- A Literary Analysis of Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Two years later, the identical subject handled without a single joke.
- A Literary Analysis of East of Eden by John Steinbeck. The late book where he finally builds a structure that can carry the weight he keeps putting on it.
If you are starting Steinbeck here because it is short, our guide to reading classics without feeling intimidated makes the case for picking your entry point deliberately rather than by page count.
The Verdict
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck is a clever book with a problem at its centre, and the cleverness does not solve the problem.
The Arthurian frame is a real formal achievement and the last page is the best thing in it. But the frame only works because the men inside it have been fixed in place, and the fixing is done with a fondness that is harder to forgive than hostility would be. Read it for the Pirate, who escapes the scheme entirely, and for the sentence about no two of them walking together.
