A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  “Certainly we Salinians never questioned it even when we were broke.” This had first been cattle country. But in the mid-1860s, herds were decimated by a year of flooding that drowned cattle, followed by two years of drought that starved them. Grains—mostly wheat—became increasingly lucrative, and with grains came settlers to the newly plotted town of Salinas City. When lots priced from $100 to $1,000 were first offered for sale in 1868, they sold at a good clip. Within a year, Salinas boasted 125 buildings. By the time the Southern Pacific Railroad came chugging through on November 7, 1872, the town’s fortunes were set. Ranching and farming, and later the Spreckels Sugar Factory, made it the economic hub of the valley. The “green gold” of the 1920s—lettuce shipped out of the valley—made the town even wealthier. When Steinbeck was growing up, Main Street stretched for three prosperous blocks.

  Cannery Row today. A parade in downtown Salinas, early 1900s.

  Although John Steinbeck loved the valley’s tawny hills and his own family, he didn’t embrace his birthplace. Indeed, much of his career can be defined as a rebellion against this prosperous town, smug with its successes. The same man who kept the tone of the Salinas Valley in his head throughout his life resisted the town’s perceived materialism, insularity, and snobbery. As a child, he relished the gossip he heard from his mother’s friends, and one of his earliest extant writings, a short poem, satirizes the women’s chatter. As a teenager, sensitive and awkward, he felt the sting of rejection when his father experienced business failures; townspeople, he later remarked, had been “merciless” toward his worried father. Asked to write a piece about his hometown for Holiday magazine in 1955, he noted that Salinas’s Beneath the smiling facyade of the social hierarchy, however, Steinbeck sensed an uncertainty and pain that tallied with his own, a “blackness—the feeling of violence just below the surface…. It was a blackness that seemed to rise out of the swamps, a kind of whispered brooding that never came into the open—a subsurface violence that bubbled silently like the decaying vegetation under the black water of the Tule Swamps.”

  The Salinas Rodeo

  Salinas, an agricultural town, was also a ranch town. Cattle roamed the valley in the nineteenth century, and still do today. Cowboys roped steers and branded calves in hill ranches, in Carmel Valley, and up the Old Stage Road—and still do today. Many of the area’s original Spanish and Mexican land grants were passed to ranching families; a few families still hold thousands of acres, running cattle as did their grandparents and great-grandparents.

  The California Rodeo, one of the biggest in the nation, honors that heritage. Held annually in mid-July, the rodeo (pronounced roh-DAY-oh) began as a horse race in 1897, was envisioned in 1909 as a “Wild West Show,” and in 1911 officially opened in its present location at Sherwood Park during what became known as the “Big Week.” It was “a kind of local competition,” Steinbeck wrote. “One’s uncles and even athletic aunts entered the roping contests. The ranchmen from the valley in the foothills rode in on saddles decorated with silver, and their sons demonstrated their skill with unbroken horses. Then gradually the professionals moved in and it became ‘show business.’”

  In 1912 Japanese lanterns were strung across Main Street for the festivities—Steinbeck was ten, and Japanese lanterns became a lifelong symbol of celebration for him. Four thousand people attended “Big Week” in 1913—it was standing room only from the first day. A popular “Big Hat” barbecue was introduced that year, as were the Saturday night parade and daily horse parades in the street. Years later, writing letters home from Lake Tahoe, Steinbeck longed to come home for the rodeo (although he could not make it home for his sister Mary’s spring wedding).

  “I can remember my mother sitting in our family box,” he wrote to a childhood friend, “with bull dust gradually settling over her and refusing to leave until the last of the wild horses crossed the finish line … she always seemed to me a little bit like Queen Victoria sitting in that box … Queen Victoria slightly dusted over with bull dust.”

  In March 1982, the community dedicated Hat in Three Stages of Landing, a sculpture of three hats flying through space by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The bright yellow hats, weighing 3,500 pounds each, are in Sherwood Park on North Main Street. At the dedication, it was reported that van Bruggen said, “My husband has read Steinbeck; his inspiration came from reading Steinbeck’s description of the farm-worker attire.”

  One of the hats by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen near the rodeo grounds.

  social structure was a strange and progressive one. First there were the Cattle People, the First Families of the Salinas Valley, gentry by right of being horsemen and dealing in gentry’s goods, land and cattle. Theirs was an unassailable position, a little like that of English royalty. Then Claus Spreckels came from Holland and built a Sugar Factory (in capitals) and the flatlands of the valley around Salinas were planted to sugar beets and the Sugar People prospered. They were upstarts, of course, but they were solvent. The Cattle People sneered at them, but learned as every aristocracy does that not blood but money is the final authority. Sugar People might never have got any place socially if lettuce had not become the green gold of the Valley. Now we had a new set of upstarts: Lettuce People. Sugar People joined Cattle People in looking down their noses. These Lettuce People had Carrot People to look down on and these in turn felt odd about associating with Cauliflower People.

  Salinas was a town of sloughs and dead-end streets, and for this sensitive young man, many residents’ lives seemed similarly mired, blocked, and dark. He empathized with their woes. Out of these feelings of oppression, both personal and environmental, he found his fictional voice. When questioned why he wrote so much about people’s loneliness and isolation and despair, Steinbeck responded that he wrote about everyone, not simply lonely and isolated people.

  Japanese Internment

  During World War II, the Salinas rodeo grounds were commandeered by the U.S. government. From April to July 1942, 3,856 Japanese Americans, or Nisei, were confined here before being sent to permanent internment camps. John Steinbeck was perhaps the first American writer to protest Japanese internment. Indeed, he went to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1941—before Pearl Harbor—and discussed the loyalty of California Japanese with Coordinator of Information director Bill Donovan. On December 15, 1941, Donovan sent a memorandum to President Roosevelt that summarized Steinbeck’s recommendations: the Nisei “have condemned the action of Japan and have reiterated their loyalty,’ Steinbeck had told Donovan. Steinbeck recommended that these Japanese citizens help keep local civilian-defense authorities posted on “unknown or strange Japanese.” Steinbeck noted that “such evidence of trust would be likely to cement the loyalty of inherently loyal citizens.” Although Steinbeck’s suggestions did, in effect, constitute a loyalty oath, nonetheless his was a far more humane solution than internment.

  In December 1942, Steinbeck began work on a film, A Medal for Benny (1943), which protested discrimination against a Hispanic war hero. Indirectly, that film may also protest treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

  Public orders, such as this one, posted on April 11, 1942, in San Francisco, directed the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry.

  The Steinbeck Family Home

  John Steinbeck grew up in an imposing house at 132 Central Avenue, on Salinas’s premier street. He had three sisters: taciturn Esther, ten years older; lively Beth, eight years older; and his favorite sister when growing up, Mary, three years younger, “a tough little monkey with wild eyes looking out of tangled yellow hair.”

  The family was close-knit and supportive. “He loved a sense of home,” said Steinbeck’s second wife, Gwyn. “He used to from his childhood … they were a very clannish family.”

  The sensibilities of Steinbeck’s family remained with him throughout his life. Although he resisted his mother’s bossiness and doting attention from his two older sisters, the firm contours of his family life provided life
long ballast. “I think no one ever had more loyalty than I had from my parents,” he told a biographer in 1953. He wrote his family long and regular letters. When he went to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in 1962, he bought each sister an engraved silver box. Lionized by the world, he remembered gifts for his family. Nearly all his books can be read in one sense as his characters’ searches for homes, however ragtag, or families, however stitched together.

  The Steinbecks’ house today.

  Much is known about Steinbeck’s parents, and the outlines seem to follow that of several other prominent twentieth-century authors (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, for example)—a silent, disappointed father and an engaged mother with intellectual pretensions. Steadiness of employment was not Mr. Steinbeck’s lot in life. Until 1911, he managed Salinas’s Sperry Flour Mill, the largest flour mill in Northern California and producer of some of the finest flour in the state, “Drifted Snow.” Although grains remained the valley’s major crop until 1920, sugar beets replaced much of the barley, alfalfa, and wheat, and mill operations gradually declined. “Wish I had a good farm and a sure crop every year,” a wistful Mr. Steinbeck wrote to one of his daughters as the mill business was failing. He then opened a feed and grain store, but that venture failed as well, and in 1918 he filed for bankruptcy. That same year a friend and fellow Mason found him steady employment with Spreckels Sugar Company as a bookkeeper. And on February 26, 1923, he was appointed Monterey County treasurer and was paid a steady salary of $250 per month. Re-elected in 1926, he held the position until January 1935, a few months before his death. Nonetheless, John Steinbeck would always remember the painful, cash-poor years of his adolescence.

  The experience of living with a father who had missed his calling shaped Steinbeck’s iron will to write. Indeed, his determination to be a writer was formed about the same time that his father’s grain store was going under.

  In my struggle to be a writer, it was he who supported and backed me and explained me—not my mother … my father wanted me to be myself…. He admired anyone who laid down his line and followed it undeflected to the end. I think this was because he abandoned his star in little duties and let his head go under in the swirl of family, money, and responsibility. To be anything pure requires an arrogance he did not have, and a selfishness he could not bring himself to assume.

  In many ways Mr. Steinbeck was the family’s bedrock. He was a thoughtful man—in 1888, before marrying Olive, he’d enrolled in the Home Library Association, something like a book-of-the-month club. Like Mr. Tiflin in The Red Pony, he was also stern and exacting: to teach John responsibility, he gave him chores such as stacking firewood in the wood box and sweeping the porch and steps. Mr. Steinbeck also loved gardening, and he grew vegetables at a lot near the mill, where he also raised chickens and boarded horses—his own, Doxology, as well as John’s and Mary’s ponies, Jill and Sperry. One of his chief hobbies was mending books in the basement. In the public sphere, he was committed to one group—the Masons—for fifty-two years.

  Olive and John Ernst Steinbeck at home, circa 1918.

  Olive Steinbeck joined the Eastern Star, the women’s Masonic club, and was no doubt one of its most indomitable members. She was a charter member of the first social club in Salinas, the Wanderers Club, a group of local women who met frequently to discuss travel books. She could be overbearing, far too busy with social matters, and “never knows when to quit,” as her husband wrote in a 1910 letter. She bossed Mr. Steinbeck, arranged his life, and helped out in his office when he was county treasurer.

  John and Mary in front of their house with the red pony, circa 1908.

  But her energy was also invigorating. “Mother stated to the skies,” Steinbeck wrote in a 1926 letter, “that she was glad of just twenty-six things in the space of a page and a half.” She had a fierce devotion to her own and her children’s betterment. Sensitive to art, she read aloud to her children and nurtured Steinbeck’s love of language with her Irish love of storytelling. She insisted that both John and Mary take piano lessons. She listened to opera on records and on the radio, and took the children on “enrichment trips” to the San Francisco Opera when Steinbeck was quite young. He remembered hearing Al Jolson sing “Mammy” in his first musical, which played at the Geary Theater. “I had a cloth hat and my shoes hurt because I thought my feet were too big and I bought shoes that were too small for me,” he wrote Esther years later. Olive loved staying at the Clift Hotel, loved being pampered in elegant San Francisco. She made sure all her children were educated: the two older sisters went to Mills College in Oakland, and John and Mary went to Stanford University.

  Mr. Steinbeck’s feed store.

  Today, Olive Steinbeck’s respectable air lingers about the imposing, Queen Anne-style family home, which has been the Steinbeck House restaurant since 1974. John’s grandparents purchased the home on March 28, 1901, three years after it was built, and John’s father was able to buy the home from his parents in 1908. Although the 4,000-square-foot dwelling suggests familial wealth, the Steinbecks were at best moderately prosperous.

  The home has been redecorated, yet retains its Victorian style, particularly the front parlor, where the family piano sat and where young Steinbeck pounded keys from fifth to twelfth grade (a very good piano player, his teacher reported). Family photos line the walls.

  Steinbeck’s two older sisters—one of whom dined at the restaurant regularly until the early 1990s—donated pieces of family china, John’s harmonica and baby cup, and Mrs. Steinbeck’s silver teapot, all of which are on display in a former bedroom. On weekdays, the Valley Guild, which operates the Steinbeck House restaurant, opens the ground floor for lunch. Proceeds are donated to charity.

  Although John left Salinas in 1919 to attend Stanford University, he made periodic visits home. In 1933, after his mother had a stroke, he and his first wife, Carol, returned to nurse her—and, as it turned out, to discover the power of his best fictional voice. In this, his childhood home, he wrote the first red pony stories about a child’s growing awareness of death. He also wrote parts of Tortilla Flat (1935) here, the rollicking stories cutting against the gloom of the house.

  Writing East of Eden

  When Steinbeck first mentioned writing “the novel of Salinas” in 1930, he said that it “should be left for a few years yet because I hate too many people there.”

  John Steinbeck in 1948, reading files of the Salinas Californian while doing research for East of Eden.

  The gestation of this “long slow piece of work” did take years. Prepared to begin in late 1947, he wrote to the editor of the Salinas newspaper, requesting old papers and historical records, and came to California early in 1948 to conduct research. His plan was to complete a first draft of “The Salinas Valley” and then accompany friend Edward F. Ricketts on a trip to the Vancouver Islands. The two would write a scientific book (on the model of Sea of Cortez and called “The Outer Shores”), while the “The Salinas Valley,” John said, would sink into his unconscious. Then he would rewrite. “The Outer Shores,” he stated, would be “practice poetry” for “The Salinas Valley.”

  That plan was crushed with the mid-1948 death of Ricketts and Steinbeck’s divorce from his second wife, Gwyn. Not until 1951 would he begin writing “The Salinas Valley,” a manuscript that contains the pain of a bitter divorce, fatherhood circumscribed, and friendship cut short. Published as East of Eden, this novel is tempered by woe.

  Family dynamics are a central concern in the novel—Steinbeck’s young sons, Thom and John, were very much on his mind as he began work. “[W]hile I am talking to the boys actually,” he wrote in his journal, “I am relating every reader to the story as though he were reading about his own background…. Everyone wants to have a family. Maybe I can create a universal family living next to a universal neighbor.”

  Old Town Salinas—Steinbeck’s Neighborhood

  The meaning of the town’s motto, “Salinas is,” may be as elusive as the soul of modern Salinas
, a town of enclaves. Although today’s Salinas lacks the polish of nearby peninsula towns, there’s a gritty energy to the place, a slight underdog edge that can be sensed while walking its streets, nosing out the charms of Old Town, walking to the First Mayor’s House by the railroad tracks (near where the Sperry Flour Mill once stood). Twenty-first-century Salinas, nearly 65 percent of its population Mexican, must meet the challenges of a socioeconomic spectrum ranging from growers with great wealth to impoverished migrant workers. Housing remains a pressing concern. Pride in traditions runs strong: Cinco de Mayo, July’s Rodeo week, the annual Steinbeck Festival. The first four blocks of Main Street, having resisted or been ignored by national chain stores, are lined with former banks turned into antique stalls, stately old movie theaters in need of renovation, cafés, a few boutiques, and enterprising secondhand stores. A strip mall off Highway 101 lures business away from downtown, the saga of countless American communities. On the east side of town, Market Street is lined with Mexican markets where Spanish is primarily spoken. The old Chinatown, Cal’s haunt in East of Eden—and young Steinbeck’s as well—sidestepped redevelopment until recently. Long a place of broken windows, abandoned buildings, and Dorothy’s Kitchen, which serves meals to the homeless, the area is now the focus of a group committed to rescuing the history of Salinas’s large Chinese community.

  To stroll the Salinas streets with Steinbeck’s books in mind—particularly the highly autobiographical East of Eden—is to feel cast back nearly one hundred years, to see the town and its denizens as Steinbeck saw them. The vulnerable, the revered, and the foolish appear in the pages of East of Eden, Steinbeck’s Vanity Fair. Steinbeck’s sprawling novel blends fact and fiction: vignettes of his mother’s family are true, and portraits of Salinas businessmen and brothel owners are accurate.