A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Memorial Church today.

  Under the genial, twenty-two-year leadership of President David Starr Jordan (“Naturalist, Teacher and a Minor Prophet of Democracy,” his autobiography is subtitled), the university developed an expansive and liberal mission. Rather than the traditional classical training so popular in the nineteenth century, Stanford offered a practical education in science and the humanities, a career-oriented course of study that was utilitarian, nonsectarian, and egalitarian. Students were to be scholars and to “have a sound practical idea of commonplace, everyday matters,” said Jordan on opening day, “a self-reliance that will fit them, in case of emergency, to earn their own livelihood in a humble as well as an exalted sphere.” Admission standards to this pastoral haven were liberal—only high school English composition was required—and older, working-class students without secondary education were admitted provisionally as “specials.” Through hard work, Jordan believed, specials could catch up and earn a place. About a third did. One was a close friend of Steinbeck’s, Carl Wilhelmson, a former sailor from Finland with a third-grade education and a zeal for writing.

  The Big Game

  U.C. Berkeley and Stanford have always been fierce football rivals—although fans suffered through a five-year hiatus from 1914 to 1919 as the schools quibbled over whether football or rugby should be the official field sport. In 1919, the annual “Big Game” was back with attendant antics. Stanford students painted Cal’s “C” red during Steinbeck’s years. Undergraduate humor ran high: “Between halves a special engagement has been secured,” announced the 1919 program. “The Alcatraz prison school will tackle the Milpitas night school in a game of American football.” When he could, Steinbeck attended these rousing standoffs: In 1922 he showed up in a large overcoat outfitted with vials of grain alcohol pinned to the lining (compliments of the Spreckels chemistry lab, where he was working at the time). Writing home from Lake Tahoe a few years later, he reported listening to the game on the radio, “thinking of the great crowds” and of his sister’s passion for the game: “Mary says her greatest thrill in life comes from football.”

  Even a recalcitrant student such as Steinbeck would have found it hard to dislike Stanford, a bucolic campus constructed on acres of grassy fields between San Jose and San Francisco, between the lifestyles of “polite” Menlo Park society and immigrant farmers of the Santa Clara Valley. The university would come to be called “the Farm,” its motto “the wind of freedom is blowing” (written in German on the campus seal). Then, as now, natural landscapes surround formal monumental quads graced with the non-denominational Memorial Church, built in 1903 and restored to its early glory after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The formal inner and outer quads were built with native sandstone blocks and incorporate graceful yet solid archways in the Mission style. Trees flourish: native oaks and the ancient redwood that gave Palo Alto its name and Stanford its logo were joined by an avenue of imported palms planted along the entrance drive from El Camino Real. When Steinbeck enrolled in Professor William Herbert Carruth’s class on verse writing and prosody, he was assigned verses on “The Coast Range, as Seen from Stanford”; “a Petrarchan Sonnet on the Memorial Church”; and couplets on “The Trees of the Santa Clara Valley.” A confident, optimistic atmosphere was cultivated from the beginning, “something in the pioneer tradition,” remarked a 1911 graduate, with “an emphasis on individual effort and the individual’s right to succeed on his own terms.”

  The Stanford logo, a centuries-old redwood near campus.

  William Herbert Carruth, one of Steinbeck’s Stanford professors.

  Encina Hall, circa 1890s, where Steinbeck lived when he first came to Stanford.

  Stanford Friends

  At Stanford, Steinbeck came to know the value of friendship, the relationship he would explore again and again in his fiction. His closest friends included Toby Street, who was also an English major with a keen interest in drama—he passed on to Steinbeck his attempt to write a play, and in Steinbeck’s hands the work became To a God Unknown. Street later became a lawyer in Monterey, handling Steinbeck’s divorce from Carol. After reading one of Steinbeck’s least successful novels, The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication in 1957, he wrote bluntly to John in New York City, “You’ll never find any stories at the Stork Club and 21. Why don’t you come home?” It was a feeling many Western friends shared. Another Stanford friend, Ted Miller, spent long hours in New York City as Steinbeck’s unofficial agent in 1930, hawking Steinbeck’s stories from publisher to publisher.

  Carlton Sheffield, roommate during Steinbeck’s second stint at Stanford, was a fellow English major with a wry sense of humor and broad tolerance: “Neither this person nor myself had a brother,” wrote Steinbeck in 1926 to “Sheff’s” new wife. “Because of these things, we went through our very young years lonely and seeking. We had no intimates, practically no friends. We made enemies readily because we were far above our immediate associates. In college we met, and at every point the one seemed to supplement and strengthen the other.” Steinbeck corresponsed with Sheffield all his life.

  Carl Wilhelmson, older than Steinbeck, worked on his own novel (eventually published as Midsummernight) when he was Steinbeck’s companion at Tahoe for weeks at a time. He was also Steinbeck’s toughest critic in those days, pointing out “innumerable foolishnesses in my work,” Steinbeck reported to his parents. Wilhelmson later suggested that Steinbeck contact literary agents McIntosh & Otis in New York City, who eventually became Steinbeck’s agents for life.

  Steinbeck’s first muse was probably Katherine Beswick, an early love from Stanford. He wrote her regular and heartfelt letters from Lake Tahoe and for years after, well after his first marriage. When she recommended wine as inspiration, however, he rejected her advice: “When drinking,” he wrote her, “my writing is invariably in bad taste, over-emotional and somewhat pornographic.”

  Steinbeck’s freshman roommate in 111 Encina Hall was a steady student from nearby Los Gatos, George Mors, a man with whom Steinbeck would stay in touch all his life. A 1964 letter to Mors captures the joie de vivre of those first quarters at Stanford:

  My tattoo stands up pretty well. At full moon it stands out right sharp. Maybe it’s because we didn’t sterilize the razor blade and I had a fine secondary infection. But it’s remarkably clear for such a bungling job…. I was remembering how I jumped school and hid out at your mother’s grocery. She must have hated it. And I remembered all the foolish lies I told … I don’t remember your telling things like that.

  John Steinbeck shortly before leaving for Stanford University, his eyes bandaged after an accident at Spreckels.

  Mors probably didn’t need to tell lies. He was busy attending classes. Steinbeck was sometimes doing so, but more often not. He was a shy, awkward, uncertain student who avoided fraternal life, perhaps fearing rejection. Illness sometimes kept him from full participation in sports, and he didn’t make the freshman football team. His first year was hardly remarkable: fall quarter he completed only two courses, earning a B in history, a C in English composition, and an incomplete in French. Winter quarter he completed only one course, English 2, earning a C minus. Spring quarter he took a leave. Although he returned in the fall of 1920, he was officially “disqualified” by December, having received a D in news writing, a C in philosophy, and a B in short-story writing. Years later, Steinbeck would write his son Thom that his first stint at university was dismal—he worked at school and at jobs, he had no suitable clothes for dating, he had no money to take girls out. Steinbeck did not adapt well to academic discipline and to the embarrassment of being an outsider—poor and ill at ease.

  From November 1920 to January 1923, he roamed, working most of the time at various ranches owned by the Spreckels Sugar Company. But he returned to Stanford in the winter quarter of 1923 and found his stride, at least for a couple of years. This time he focused on the things he loved, history and English, or what might help in the future—enrolling in a debate
class in 1923 “to develop some confidence when I stand on my feet before people.” He changed his major to journalism. He joined the English Club, where students met to read and discuss literature—he often read his own stories aloud to the assembled group. And he published his first work outside his high school yearbook: a satiric poem, “Atropos,” and two stories in 1924 issues of the Stanford Spectator, “Fingers of Cloud: A Satire on College Protervity” and “Adventures in Arcademy: A Journey into the Ridiculous.”

  Edith Mirrielees’s short-story classes would come to be Steinbeck’s favorites during his spotty years at Stanford. In 1919, she was newly returned to campus after a brave stint overseas as leader of the Stanford Women’s Unit for Relief Work in France, eighteen young women who served with the Red Cross. That gesture suggests both her passion for new experiences and the boundless energy that served her in thirty-five years teaching at Stanford. (“One should never miss a new experience,” she wrote, “even though tiresome in doing.”) Steinbeck counted her as one of three “real” teachers in his life (the others being his friend Ed Ricketts and a high school math teacher, Miss Cupp).

  The kindly Miss Mirrielees continued to read Steinbeck’s work even after he left Stanford; he sent her drafts of his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), from wintry Lake Tahoe. Steinbeck duly reported her assessment of his first fifty pages to his parents: “She says in part: ‘This is beautifully done. I read with increasing interest and increasing wonder at the way you have steadied and strengthened your writing, so that the beautiful pieces no longer stand out separate from the rest.’ And that from Miss Mirrielees is a bombshell of praise.”

  Steinbeck got what he wanted out of Stanford: writing instruction, greater knowledge of literature, and encouragement from teachers, particularly Mirrielees in writing, Margery Bailey—a specialist in Shakespeare and Dickens—in literature, William Herbert Carruth in verse writing, and Harold Chapman Brown in history. Steinbeck audited Brown’s world civilization class quarter after quarter and went to his house for further discussion—when his interest was sparked, he was hardly a retiring student. Undoubtedly Brown helped ignite Steinbeck’s keen interest in European and ancient history.

  Close friendships marked Steinbeck’s life, and many of these were with Stanford classmates who shared his passion for language and his off-kilter sensibilities. In the 1920s, most were trying to do pretty much the same thing he was—write and publish. The quirky, eccentric, but loyal and clearly gifted young writer drew equally independent souls to his side. This would be his gift throughout a life defined in good part by friendships made and kept.

  Steinbeck’s tribute to his Stanford education was to request in his will that his Nobel Prize be placed at the university after the death of his third wife, Elaine. His friends honored him by depositing their Steinbeck letters in the Stanford Special Collections and University Archives. The extensive Steinbeck archive—including letters written to his agent Elizabeth Otis, his friend Carlton Sheffield, his wife Elaine, and his family—is one of the richest in the world. The collection is open to researchers.

  Miss Mirrielees was the “best teacher of writing I have known,” Steinbeck observed, and she had “only two rules—know what you want to say … say it. Her only criticisms were in effectiveness … never in manner, style, subject, etc. But the others all tried in the name of literature to make us little counterparts of themselves.”

  A Sojourn Outside California: New York City in 1925

  During his college years, Steinbeck concocted plans to kick loose his California moorings. He considered a merchant ship to China, a trek to Mexico City with Carlton Sheffield, a foray to Nicaragua. He craved a horizon beyond the Pacific coast. A November 1925 steamer to New York City fit the bill. For a would-be writer, New York City was an essential destination.

  Steinbeck’s time in New York was brief, a mere six months, but it was vital to his education. For one, he came to know the sea. He sailed to and from New York, passing through the Panama Canal, and that experience gave him material for his first novel, Cup of Gold, the story of pirate Henry Morgan’s search for his ideal love.

  The city tested his mettle. While in New York, Steinbeck played out his scrappy gift for adaptability. In a marvelous little essay he wrote in 1953—”Autobiography: Making of a New Yorker”—he says that during his first visit, “monstrous” New York City “had beat the pants off me.” In the end, without steady employment and still unpublished, he was certainly disillusioned. Often he went hungry. No doubt he was lonely. And, as he admitted in 1935, “I was scared thoroughly. And I can’t forget the scare.” But however tough, these were invigorating months. He briefly worked construction at Madison Square Garden. A more important position—also brief—was a three-month stint as a journalist for the American, a Hearst newspaper, at what he called a “lilliputian” salary. But the exposure to newspaper work was invaluable. “Yesterday it was a story about the push cart peddlers in Orchard St. and the Ghetto,” he wrote home,

  and today it is Lord Rothmere the “Dictator of the British Press.” Tomorrow it may be a murder and the next day a divorce…. Believe me, if I ever had a fear of meeting people of all classes, it will be banished after a month of so of this.

  Also there is probably no job in the city whereby I could see more of all parts of New York, than this.

  Although he was soon laid off, “amputated” by budget cuts, the few months as a reporter toughened Steinbeck’s prose and his outlook.

  In New York, he witnessed the sharp distinction between rich and poor, images that reinforced his ingrained sympathies for those on the margins: “This place is swarming with the very poor,” he wrote his parents. “Then in my position at the Federal Courts [assigned by the American] there is a constant stream of people who have gotten into trouble, many through ignorance and many through plain poverty.” He wrote sketches about the things he saw. Like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane before him, he came away with the sense that the city was an impersonal force, shaping people’s destinies, drumming down those without the resources to fight back: “I find the city so absorbing, so fearsome, so dangerous and yet so blundering. If it hurts any person it is just because that person got in the way and was not noticed. It is like a great dragon with poor eyesight, trampling about. I am filled, not with the seriousness of my own and other people’s existence, but with the utter lack of seriousness of anything.” He would keep the detachment that he cultivated and utilize it in his 1930s prose.

  In the early summer of 1926, having lost both his job and his exotic girlfriend of a few weeks—a dancer with a good salary—twenty-four-year-old Steinbeck returned home. “I have learned a couple of things about myself,” he wrote after he left New York City. “I cannot take care of myself. I need a mentor.” He could indeed take care of himself—but to be a writer, he needed a buffer to keep the wider world at bay.

  Lower East Side tenements.

  Tahoe

  If New York City had indeed “beat the pants off” him, Steinbeck might have abandoned his dream of being a writer. Instead, his instincts led him home to California, back to his roots. He traded a perilous existence in New York for the safety of a writerly retreat: a 1926 summer job at Stanford University’s Fallen Leaf Lake community near Lake Tahoe followed by two years along the south shore of pristine Lake Tahoe as a winter caretaker and the summer companion of children at the lakeshore Brigham estate. Steinbeck’s Tahoe winters were particularly valuable: he hibernated, crafting sentences, writing and rewriting what would become his first novel. “I drive people crazy with singing my sentences, but I find it necessary for the sake of rhythm,” he wrote to Katherine Beswick. It was best to be alone in a small cabin.

  The Sierra Nevadas are forbidding mountains from October until May. Blizzards hit. Visibility is cut to a few feet. In the 1920s, life ground to a halt. The area was relatively isolated, connected to the Bay Area not by smooth Interstate 80 but by tortuous Highway 40 over Donner Pass. Another option was the Sou
thern Pacific rail line that stopped in Truckee, a raucous little western town about twenty miles from the lake—and where, in the summer months, Steinbeck sometimes took dates to drink and dance. From there, a narrow-gauge spur ran to North Lake Tahoe, where the rustic elegance of the Tahoe Tavern attracted tourists and residents alike: “Things happen there,” Steinbeck wrote home in February 1928, “and there are electric lights and things.” Intrepid guests came for “winter sports.” A community store, Richardson’s, remained open until mid-November. “I do not patronize them,” Steinbeck wrote. “They take too much of advantage of us in their prices. We can do better sending out.” “Sending out” meant relying on the narrow-gauge train that ran only twice a week from October to May and brought supplies to the caretakers and settlers braving the Lake Tahoe winter. During Steinbeck’s two winters as a caretaker on the sparsely populated south shore, a highlight of his week was the mail delivery at Camp Richardson, a two-mile walk from his cabin. Snowstorms were frequent, and the winter of 1926-7 was the worst in twenty years.