A Journey into Steinbeck's California Read online

  Roaring Forties Press

  1053 Santa Fe Avenue

  Berkeley, California 94706

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2006, 2011 by Susan Shillinglaw

  Printed in China

  ISBN 978-0-9846239-1-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shillinglaw, Susan.

  A journey into Steinbeck’s California / Susan Shillinglaw ; with photographs by Nancy Burnett. -- 2nd ed.

  p. cm. -- (ArtPlace series) Includes index.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-9846239-1-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-9846254-6-8 (epub) -- ISBN 978-0-9846254-7-5 (kindle) -- ISBN 978-0-9846254-8-2 (pdf) 1. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968--Homes and haunts--California. 2. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968--Knowledge--California. 3. Novelists, American--Homes and haunts--California. 4. Novelists, American--20th century--Biography. 5. California--In literature. 6. California--Biography. I. Burnett, Nancy. II. Title.

  PS3537.T3234Z86646 2011

  813’.52--dc22

  [B]

  2011018233

  For Bill Gilly,

  who most certainly knows why

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1. Steinbeck’s California: The Valley of the World

  2. Salinas: A Remembered Symphony

  3. Beyond Salinas: Salad Bowl of the World

  4. Moving Around: A Restless Decade

  5. Monterey Peninsula: Circle of Enchantment

  6. Pacific Grove: The Writer’s Retreat

  7. New Monterey: Water-Gazers

  8. Bohemian Carmel: Modernism in the West

  9. Los Gatos: A Place to Write

  10. Beyond California: The Lure of Mexico

  Timeline

  For Further Reading

  Notes

  Index

  Credits

  About the Author

  About the Photographer

  About the ArtPlace Series

  Preface to the Second Edition

  John Steinbeck was a traveling man, restless and curious throughout his sixty-six years. Born in Salinas in 1902, he fled hometown proprieties as soon as he was able, enrolling in Stanford University at the age of seventeen—although he had scant interest in earning a degree. When his student budget permitted, he went to San Francisco, where “he savored his first independence … living where he chose, doing as he wanted, eating at random when and where and what he liked.” Still an undergraduate, he envisioned even greater freedom at sea, and planned a voyage to China on a merchant ship (nixed because he had no sailing experience), then considered riding horseback to Mexico, picking his way through the desert (no money for that). Distant horizons beckoned. When he left university in 1925—without a degree in hand—he sailed to New York City, expatriate from his own soil, yearning for cultural polish, determined to make it as a writer in the nation’s aesthetic hub. He lasted only a few months, the city having “beaten the pants off me.”

  But the itch to travel remained, marking his life and his work. While California remained his touchstone, the place he returned to, the place he yearned for, John Steinbeck had an equally urgent need to sally forth. In the 1930s, he and his wife drove to Mexico and then took a ship to Scandinavia and Russia, where, he bragged on his return, they didn’t meet a single “worthwhile” person. They went to Baja in 1940 with Steinbeck’s best friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, to collect invertebrates, and Steinbeck was planning another collecting trip with Ed the year Ed died, 1948. During World War II, Steinbeck was a war correspondent and after the war he covered wartorn Russia. The 1950s were a decade devoted to travel. He and his third wife, Elaine, would sail to Europe for the summer and fly to the Virgin Islands in the winter, he writing journalistic pieces along the way, published in popular magazines such as Collier’s, Holiday, and Esquire. And in the 1960s, he drove across America with his dog Charley, circling back to his roots.

  As he lived, so he wrote. Three of his most important books were travel narratives, Sea of Cortez (1941), A Russian Journal (1948), and Travels with Charley (1962). Several journalistic series focus on travel, in one way or another, from his first, “The Harvest Gypsies,” written in 1936, to his final series about Vietnam, “Letters to Alicia,” syndicated in American newspapers in 1966 and 1967. And many of his books are about characters as restless as he, Americans who look to California for the adventure and promise that he himself sought around the world: Lennie and George, Tom Joad, Adam Trask. Elaine Steinbeck reported to a friend that in 1958 John was putting the final touches on a new short novel, “The Marshal of Manchou,” a “Don Quixote-ish story of a man in a small western town who gets so enthralled in ‘adult westerns’ on TV that he goes out into the world to do Good. Very charming, funny, and touching.”

  That book was never published, but there surely was a bit of Steinbeck himself in the idealistic Marshal, out to “do Good,” to nudge readers into fuller understanding of others, whether fellow Americans or Mexican revolutionaries. Travelers like Steinbeck are adventurers. They are curious and some, like Steinbeck, want to burrow into the marrow of a place, to be an eyewitness to contemporary events. Some, like Steinbeck’s malcontents on The Wayward Bus, learn important lessons. And some, like Steinbeck, travel in order to better understand themselves as Citizens of the World, inhabitants of a region. For Steinbeck, to travel was to live fully, deeply, truly, also inhabiting a region.

  His personal stamp, which he settled on in the late 1930s, was a flying pig, “Pigasus,” and beneath he wrote his motto in Latin, “To the stars on the wings of a pig … in other words,” Elaine explained, “go as high as you can on the equipment you’ve got!” That phrase suggests both creative yearnings and his own wanderlust.

  But it’s also true that he was a homebody, and the paradox of flight from and return to California was the story of his life. Although he left his home state in the early 1940s, remarried in 1943, and settled in New York City in 1945, John Steinbeck never truly left California at all. “You look like a Californian,” an Okie boy told him in the 1930s—rugged, square-shouldered, intense, free-thinking, broad-humored. The West nurtured his soul, even when he was three thousand miles away, living in a New York apartment and finding watery solace at a weekend retreat in Sag Harbor, Long Island, a cottage by the sea not so very different from the one his father had built in Pacific Grove in 1904, two blocks from Monterey Bay.

  California was, quite simply, home. In 1948, for example, he was living in New York City with his second wife and his world was falling apart. His health was bad, nerves shredded, stomach tight. He was taking antidepressants and felt himself in a “kingdom of despondency” after the death of Ed Ricketts. His second marriage was crumbling. He was being sued for breach of contract on a film of Cannery Row. What buoyed him during these grim months were thoughts of the book he had intended to write since 1932, the opus to his birthplace, East of Eden. He decided he should live in the Salinas Valley and considered buying property in Corral di Tierra, where his beloved Aunt Mollie had lived: “My hunger for there is very great,” he wrote in his journal.

  That hunger was translated into story after story, from his college years at Stanford University through 1955, when a musical called Pipe Dream opened on Broadway. Based on a little-known sequel to Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, the musical was one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s few flops. Steinbeck complained that they didn’t understand the material, his own delicate touch that made brothels homelike, madams decent, a marine scientist a gentle sage, and bums endearingly rough-edged, lonely li
ke everyone else. Steinbeck’s West was an egalitarian place, where ordinary folks needed to be understood and heard. Steinbeck’s California fiction invites readers to the human carnival, where migrants and bums and bindlestiffs and farmers rub elbows, all yearning for something promised in the West, in California, the state where dreams are supposed to come true, where wanderlust is supposed to be satiated.

  Steinbeck’s final book, America and Americans (1966), is threaded with stories of his Salinas childhood and his California youth. Two years after that book was published, John Steinbeck died in New York City. He is buried in Salinas, at his insistence. There is only one home, he told his wife.

  Out from, return to. In Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck writes: “a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to the electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.”

  For “tide pool” read any place one examines with full participation. In this book, that place is California, Steinbeck’s California, rich with associations that are multilayered: personal, historical, cultural, and magical. This book captures Steinbeck’s ecological vision of the place that was always home, ALL of it.

  Acknowledgments

  My net of gratitude must be cast wide in the Steinbeck world. Without the steady and generous support of Robert DeMott and Jackson Benson for more than two decades, I would have stood in a dinghy, so to speak, without a line—both personally and professionally. My dissertation advisor, John Seelye, has been a model and a mentor for twenty-five years. For nearly that long, editor Michael Millman has supported my work on Steinbeck, as has Eugene Winick and as did kindly Evva Pryor, both of McIntosh & Otis. Elaine Steinbeck’s warmth, high spirits, and love of her husband’s writing sustained many projects—as did the gift of her friendship. My thanks also to Thom and Gail Steinbeck and to Kim Greer and Colleen Bailey of the National Steinbeck Center for camaraderie and professional guidance. And the scholarship and good cheer of many other Steinbeck scholars have been invaluable—particularly Louis Owens, John Ditsky, Warren French, Robert Morsberger, Brian Railsback, Mimi Gladstein, Donald Coers, David Wyatt, and Tetsumaro Hayashi.

  My thinking about Steinbeck has been greatly enriched by scholars and writers who helped me plan conferences and forums over the years: Susan Beegel and Wes Tiffney on Steinbeck and the environment; Steve Webster and Barry Lopez on writing about place; Michael Kowalewski on regionalism; and Ruth Prigozy, Jackson Bryer, and Harold Augenbraum on Steinbeck as an “engaged artist,” the theme of the 2002 Steinbeck Centennial. The notion for this book was hatched in the early 1990s when I prepared lectures for Stanford University’s Knight Fellows—my thanks to Jim Risser, Jim Bettinger, and Dawn Garcia for a decade of invitations to speak at Asilomar, that lovely seaside spot, on “Steinbeck and place.”

  Inspiration also came from my students. At San Jose State, discussions and ideas generated during twenty-two years of teaching Steinbeck classes have never failed to challenge my thinking. The scholarship of one former student, Katie Rodger—editor of Ed Ricketts’s letters and essays—informed my own chapter on Steinbeck and Ricketts. Since 2004, I have team-taught a course in biological holism every other year at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, and my fellow teachers Bill Gilly, Chuck Baxter, John Walton, John and Vicki Pearse, and Nancy Burnett have offered as much insight as have the students. This would not be the book it is without that holistic experience.

  Any author fishing around in archives must be in equal measure delighted by resources snagged and by the ever-cheerful assistance of librarians and volunteers. None of Melville’s sub-subs here. Many, many thanks for the guidance and invaluable resources provided by Maggie Kimball, Stanford University archivist; Dennis Copeland, director of the California Collection at the Monterey Public Library; Jim Conway, formerly Monterey’s beloved cultural historian and cultural attaché; Mary Thiele Fobian, volunteer at the Pacific Grove Heritage Society; Joe Wible, head librarian at Hopkins Marine Station’s Miller Library; Neal Hotelling at the Pebble Beach archives; and Pat Hathaway, whose photographic collection of the Monterey Peninsula is a local treasure. In Los Gatos, Peggy Conaway assisted with locating and scanning photos. Sstoz Tes, administrative assistant at the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University provided rare photographs and materials from the center’s superb collection, and Bob Bain of Photographic Services has long been indispensable. In Salinas, Herb Behrens, volunteer archivist at the National Steinbeck Center, and Charles Willis, Salinas resident and collector of photographs, provided photos of early Salinas as well as substantial assistance. And Dick Hayman’s enormous Steinbeck collection (which I moved from Salinas to San José State box by box in 2004, for Bob Harmon to catalogue with his own steady dedication) helped my research in ways that he can hardly know.

  Warm thanks to friends and associates who helped with some of the fine images in this book. Jim Johnson, bookseller, and Art Ring readily lent materials. Sharon Brown Bacon gave permission to use her stepmother’s (Carol Steinbeck Brown’s) photographs. David Heyler allowed us to photograph the inside of the 11th Street cottage, a rare afternoon of feeling Steinbeck’s spirit hovering over. David Ligare, Salinas artist, graciously offered one of his stunning Salinas Valley paintings for the cover of this book. And Nancy Burnett spent long and unforgettable days photographing Steinbeck country. Other support has been invaluable: the time to write, critical eyes to improve that writing, friends and family as ballast. Former provosts of San José State University, Marshall Goodman and Carmen Sigler gave me course releases to pursue research—warm thanks to both. Over the years the support of former Dean of Humanities Jack Crane has been significant. Others read drafts and made invaluable suggestions: Barbara Marinacci spent hours proofing; Carol Robles happily checked Salinas chapters; and ever-willing Jack Benson and Robert DeMott read portions of the book, as did Jim Conway, Herb Behrens, Ed Ricketts Jr., and Maggie Kimball. Without Bill Gilly’s fine-tuned editorial sensibilities—and love—this book never would have seen print.

  To friends who helped enhance factual accuracy for the second edition many thanks: Mary-Jean Gamble, Neal Hotelling, Carol Robles, John Sanders, Michael Hemp. Friendship, as Steinbeck knew, is a fine vintage.

  Finally, I thank those who listened and fully participated (Steinbeck’s word) in my frantic year writing the first edition and my more leisurely months implementing changes for the second. Colleagues Arlene Okerlund, Don Keesey, David Mesher, Marianina Olcott, and Chris Fink knew what I was up against, deadlines and all. Los Gatos friends eased tensions with lattes, fine wines, and inventive meals served up at Betsy and Whizzer White’s house of wonders. Distant friends and relatives cheered me on. My children—Ian and Nora—have lived with John Steinbeck all their lives and have forgiven my motherly lapses.

  From all of this, it should be clear that this was, indeed, a holistic venture. Beginning this book with the blithe notion that I could quickly write up years of slide presentations, nudged gently by publishers Deirdre Greene and Nigel Quinney throughout the year of writing the first edition and the months correcting the second, I am left with a profound sense of how research is a joint venture, calling on two decades of associations with Steinbeck scholars and readers. To those I mentioned and to those I didn’t (with apologies for any daft omissions) much gratitude is extended for this book and for a career spent walking with delight in Steinbeck’s long shadow.

  Chapter 1

  Steinbeck’s California

  The Valley of the World

  Near San Juan Grade Road, Salinas, California.

  In 1979, a U.S. postal stamp was issued in John Steinbeck’s honor.

  In 1951, when John Steinbeck had been a resident of New York City for about a year, he sat down at his desk to write East of Eden (1952), his ode to California. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had declared his intention to tell
“the story of this whole valley … so that it would be the valley of the world.” Epics take time to incubate. Certain forces coalesced when he moved East and ended a cycle of personal despair: a new marriage, a new home, distance from California. As he worked on his manuscript, he wrote in his journal, “My wish is that when my reader has finished with this book, he will have a sense of belonging in it. He will actually be a native of that Valley.” John Steinbeck was ready to unravel his intertwined heritage of place, history, and people—and to retie it with a knot of his own invention.

  Steinbeck’s “valley of the world” is an enticing notion, particularly irresistible for anyone concerned with marketing the pleasures of the Salinas Valley. But, for the writer, the words undoubtedly suggested something closer to what D. H. Lawrence proposed when he tackled the subject of American writing in 1923: “Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality,” he wrote in the introduction to Classic American Writers. John Steinbeck grew up sensing that spirit of place, feeling that the whole of Monterey County was in his blood. From age fourteen on, his passion was to set it down right and true. “My country is different from the rest of the world,” he wrote to his publisher in 1933.

  “On the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers.”

  It seems to be one of those pregnant places from which come wonders … I was born to it and my father was. Our bodies came from this soil—our bones came … from the limestone of our own mountains and our blood is distilled from the juices of this earth. I tell you now that my country—a hundred miles long and about fifty wide—is unique in the world.