Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Good and Evil)

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Four years ago, I wrote this post on Steinbeck’s flawed but compulsively compelling saga of good and evil. Now comes a Netflix adaptation penned by Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the director of the 1955 film version, Elia Kazan).

Network TV mini-series of the Seventies and Eighties tend to plunge down a rabbit hole of popular memory, and unfortunately the 1981 adaptation of the novel is no exception. I have not seen the new version starring Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, but it is hard to think of her topping Jane Seymour (pictured) in the role.

I understand that Zoe Kazan has added a scene (not in Steinbeck’s novel) to explain Cathy’s villainy. I’m not against such changes if employed logically and sparingly. But in some cases, evil is so radical that it may be beyond the ability of a “science” like psychiatry to explain it.

 It’s what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in remarks about Shakespeare’s villain Iago from Othello, termed “motiveless malignity”—the most chilling kind of evil.