A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  After throwing himself into the jazzy turbulence of 1920s New York City, Steinbeck put himself to other tests at Tahoe: to “break … in the middle” his fear of being alone, for one, and to test the intensity of his commitment to writing. In frequent letters home—writing twice weekly most months—he reported on routines that must have helped shape his world. He scrupulously noted that he would repay his parents for hams and bacon they sometimes sent, for yellow writing paper, for eggs lovingly packed in handmade crates for the long train trips from Salinas to Tahoe City. His anxious mother sent him gifts of warm socks and sweaters. Although he accepted food, he vigorously resisted other gifts from Olive: his need for clear boundaries was strong. He set writing goals, reporting fifty pages written, seventy-five, one hundred. “I have my supper at five in the afternoon and get all done with it by six,” he wrote home in the fall of 1927:

  Fallen Leaf Lake today.

  From six to eleven I work constantly. At eleven I make some chocolate or some coffee and toast and have a little après-mint and then to bed and read for half an hour and to sleep. I sleep unusually well when I have worked about six hours with my hands and then about six with my head. In fact it gives me a sense of well being not often felt.

  The lodge at Fallen Leaf Lake.

  After being bruised by New York, such a routine must have soothed the young writer. Solitude allowed him to write and rewrite the novel he so hoped would find a publisher.

  During his two winters at Tahoe, Steinbeck disciplined himself with the same will that he would call forth when writing The Grapes of Wrath—hunkering down to push through to a goal. By April 1927, his novel, “written twice, once by hand and once with the typewriter,” was proceeding very well. “I have never been able to work so steadily nor so successfully before,” he wrote to his parents—surely craving their continued support for his choice of career. To others he admitted that he was less certain of his progress. He confided to Carlton Sheffield in February 1928 that Cup of Gold is, “as a whole, utterly worthless.” Steinbeck’s self-doubts were, for much of his early career, as relentless as was his will to produce fine work.

  Mainly, however, the Lake Tahoe years matured Steinbeck—they wore down his raw edges. He completed a novel that would be published. During the summer months, he cared for the children of the estate with cultivated enthusiasm. Both summer and winter, he worked hard outdoors, confronting is own tendencies toward indolence—chopping wood, for example, and one December cutting four hundred cakes of ice off the lake. These were invigorating years. He regularly plunged into the icy waters of Lake Tahoe with his dog Jerry, who loved an arctic swim. He skied at Emerald Bay; sketched a little play about a pleasant Christmas dinner; planted a garden that would be “eaten by vermin”; and tried to keep his two dogs, Omar and Jerry, from fighting constantly. His father visited in the fall and winter, cooking and cleaning for his son.

  Throughout the year, Steinbeck fished and hunted, pleased that he could eat what he gathered (duly reported to concerned parents, who wondered if he ate enough). And during the summer of 1928, he worked at a fish hatchery: “we are overcrowded with fishes and undercrowded with help,” he told Katherine Beswick, “so that some times we work far into the night.” But such things make adults of unsettled young writers.

  Lake Tahoe meant one more thing to Steinbeck—it was here that he found his “mentor,” his essential buffer to the world. In midsummer 1928, the woman who would become his first wife walked into the Lake Tahoe fish hatchery in Tahoe City. A sign over his door read “Piscatorial Obstetrician,” and perhaps Steinbeck’s wit appealed to her, a woman with the same offbeat sense of humor. It was love at first sight, reported Carol Henning’s sister Idell. During their first five days together, Carol typed Steinbeck’s manuscript of Cup of Gold. That exercise must have given her an idea of what she was getting into when she married John Steinbeck eighteen months later. “You are not as important as his work,” Toby Street would warn her. Carol already understood that. She willingly signed on to be muse, patron, critic, and editor during these early years—in short, his indispensable companion in his quest for writerly acclaim.

  Down South: Eagle Rock

  “It will be a long time until I go” to Los Angeles, Steinbeck wrote his mother in September 1927. “I dislike it very much.” But when he and Carol wanted to put distance between themselves and their parents, Southern California, in particular Eagle Rock, seemed an appealing place. College roommate Carlton Sheffield was living there with his wife, Maryon, and teaching English at Occidental College. Shortly after settling in with the Sheffields, in January 1930, John and Carol married.

  Life at Carlton Sheffield’s house in Eagle Rock was bohemian, raucous, and fun—a few months of revelry, an extended honeymoon, Steinbeck’s last hurrah before settling in to write full-time for the next decade. Others shared in the fun: Ritch and Tal Lovejoy (he was an artist and writer, she a blithe spirit and model for Mary Talbot in Cannery Row) and Tal’s sister Nadja were also living with the Sheffields. “In this community we make beer, much beer,” wrote Steinbeck (eighteen gallons every five days, reported Sheffield), “and it is both cheap and pleasant to induce a state of lassitude intershot with moments of unreal romance. I have only in the last two weeks been wooing that state. Before that some foolish asceticism kept me at the pad and pen.”

  Carol Henning, circa 1924.

  Drawings made by Carol when she and John lived in Eagle Rock.

  Steinbeck’s San Francisco

  For Steinbeck, San Francisco was always “the City.” From the gold rush through the mid-1960s, San Francisco meant sophisticated living in the West, the ladies always in gloves and hats, the restaurants always serving exotic fare, the lovely skyline delicate and unearthly in the fog. When he did his “tour of duty as an intellectual bohemian” in late 1928 and early 1929, San Francisco made a lasting impression—“How beautiful it was and I knew then how beautiful,” he wrote in a 1958 essay, “The Golden Handcuff,” written for the San Francisco Examiner. Both he and Carol were poor and meals were cheap; life was good, golden like the bridge built a few years later.

  Steinbeck came down from the mountains to be with Carol, who worked in advertising and circulation for the San Francisco Chronicle. To remain near her, he took a job at his brother-in-law’s company, Bemis Brothers Bag Company. He lived in tight rooms on Vallejo, Jackson, and Fillmore streets. “I am so much enjoying living here in the city,” he wrote Katherine Beswick. “I have practically nothing to live on but that doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

  He and Carol gloried briefly in city life. He courted her, read to her, and once, with his friend Carl Wilhelmson, stuck a herring on each spike of the fence around the apartment she shared with Idell. Living far from the East Coast cities that nurtured modernism and antic sensibilities, John and Carol sported a raw, western brand of rebellion. Young, hungry to succeed, unconventional, and restless, the two spent their early months together exhibiting the Lost Generation’s determination to experiment and “make it new.”

  Steinbeck stayed in San Francisco several times—seeing the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, most likely, and going again in 1939 to meet with his soon-to-be-second wife, Gwyn Conger. In the 1940s he sometimes was incognito, avoiding the likes of Herb Caen, who took San Francisco’s pulse in a daily column for half a century. In the 1950s he hosted his sisters at the Clift Hotel, his mother’s favorite.

  Herb Caen came to best represent Steinbeck’s San Francisco. Steinbeck wrote to a Salinas friend years later,

  The Caen type of gossip column, and you could with accuracy call it the Pepys type or the Defoe type or the Addison type, has a long and sometimes honorable history…. There is no question of the value of this form historically. Without Pepys and Evelyn we would know what happened in the 17th century but not what people thought about it. Herb has done a remarkable job. He has made a many faceted character of the city of San Francisco. It is very probable that Herb’s c
ity will be the one that is remembered. It is interesting to me that he has been able to do this without anger and without venom, and without being soft.

  Caen felt equal warmth for Steinbeck, devoting a “Crock of Chrysanthemums” to Steinbeck when he died.

  California Street in San Francisco, circa 1925.

  A Letter Writer

  Throughout his life, when at some distance from home, Steinbeck kept in regular contact with his family. In the 1920s he wrote “the regular Sunday letter”—addressed “Dear Folks” and intended for the family to share. This habit of contact as well as his steady friendships are qualities to bear in mind when considering Steinbeck’s early years. However much he was driven to roam, he always kept open lines of communication with family and close friends. Letter writing would be a lifelong practice, and Steinbeck’s letters are affectionate, witty, and often revealing epistles. Words were the stuff of his life.

  March 1926, New York City

  And do not be in the least doubt about my ultimate success. I am not. I am more convinced of it every day I spend here. I am brighter than most people and I can write better than most people and it is only a question of time until I can convince somebody of it and then I will go like wild fire. This may sound like the crackling of twigs under a kettle, but it is not enthusiasm. It is the result of my analysis of the conditions of this city. The first fetish is advertising. I will get it. The second is eccentricity, I can simulate it, and the third is delivery (this you notice is the least important) and I am fully capable of it.

  May 3, 1927, Camp Richardson on Lake Tahoe

  I have been able to jump in the lake every day. Wonderful what it does for your self-respect. Bathing in a bucket ain’t all it might be.

  August 24, 1927, Camp Richardson on Lake Tahoe

  I think I am going to have a launch this winter and that will cut out all that walking to the post office thank heaven. Then I can get the supplies I want without having to carry them home on my back, and then I could get to the Tavern and get a train if I wanted to. And then I could convey Dad to the cabin with ease and even with luxury: I am rooting for the launch.

  Thanksgiving 1927

  I have taken to writing with a steel pen. I do my first draft with a pen you know. It is the first time I have used a dip pen since I was in grammar school. And I like it. You can throw away the point if it doesn’t suit you and put in a new one.

  The seven concocted a zany venture. Ritch and Tal introduced the others to a Swiss product called Negacol, a plastic that could be used to make highly detailed casts from almost any surface. The plan was to experiment with Negacol’s amazing properties, a “vague but optimistic” agenda, Sheffield noted years later in his autobiography:

  We thought there should be a good market for personalized masks of individuals, made and finished to order like portraits or photographs, to hang on walls, to be mounted into bookends or plaques, to be poised on pedestals or to serve as paperweights. We could produce perfect casts of hands, arms, feet, or valued personal possessions…. John bubbled with ideas. There should be a fertile field in young movie stars—or would be stars—and perhaps we could work out a publicity tie-in by which heads of such hopefuls might be used in display windows to enhance the attractiveness of merchandise … And there was a tremendous potential field in supplying schools, museums, laboratories, and novelty shops with perfect reproductions of flowers, fruits, insects (large), animals (small), and marine specimens. The possibilities were limitless. We were very naïve.

  Carol in particular must have delighted in the possibilities, for she had an artistic bent and loved drawing and creating small figures out of clay. At first, enthusiasm for the project ran high, and they made casts of all seven of the faces in the household, but each cast demonstrated the unreliability of their artistic endeavors. Some facial types looked ghastly when duplicated with exacting fidelity. The business venture collapsed.

  John and Carol eventually settled nearby in Eagle Rock, but the Sheffield house remained a lively hub. Beautiful and offbeat Tal and Nadja, daughters of a Russian Orthodox priest living in Alaska, retold ghost stories from their childhood. With Maryon Sheffield, perhaps the least bookish of the crowd, the women formed the Eagle Rock Self-Expression Society. They went roller-skating for groceries. Carol and Maryon wrestled. They “initiated” the Sheffields’ new furniture by doing cartwheels over the divan and pouncing on chairs. At the “first annual cross-country hurdle race,” the women leapfrogged bushes and squeezed through hedges. Quieter hours were spent at the “sunbath,” a partially concealed and popular backyard retreat where the ladies and visitors of any gender lounged nude and consumed vast quantities of Carlton’s home brew. Nearly every one of Carol’s drawings of the group shows them clutching beers.

  Although John Steinbeck always loved inventions and projects, he soon tired of the antics that distracted him from writing. And Carol needed a paying job. “John and Carol,” reported Sheffield, “enjoyed participating when the party spirit was high, but were less inclined to make life a continuous fiesta.” In the fall of 1930, they retreated to the Monterey Peninsula for some peace. Married, 28, and supported in part by loyal parents, Steinbeck knew that, to become not just a published writer—which he was—but a writer of great import, he had to write with serious intention.

  The Negacol masks made by Steinbeck and friends in their failed business venture.

  Chapter 5

  Monterey Peninsula

  Circle of Enchantment

  John Steinbeck on 17-Mile Drive, 1960.

  Pebble Beach promotional brochure.

  John Steinbeck is associated almost as closely with the towns on the Monterey Peninsula as he is with his hometown of Salinas. A gentle rivalry between Salinas and the peninsula erupts at times. Is he a valley man or a coast man? After all, a street in New Monterey was renamed Cannery Row in 1957 because Steinbeck wrote a book about it. His best friend, Edward Flanders Ricketts, had a lab on Cannery Row, a weathered, beloved building that still stands. In Pacific Grove his family had a summer home, a tiny board-andbatten cottage where he and Carol lived during the 1930s. And, in Carmel, Steinbeck’s politics were forged. Each of these peninsula communities shaped this writer’s psyche during the 1930s, the decade when he wrote some of his best fiction.

  More broadly, the peninsula itself had left an imprint on Steinbeck’s sensibilities since childhood. The Monterey Peninsula exudes a more freewheeling air than inland Salinas, a town that is surely a part of the more conventional West, with its rodeo and hillside cattle ranches, its growers and crop rotation. Even the meteorological climate differs radically between the two places, though they are less than twenty miles apart. Whereas Salinas Valley farms depend on migrant labor, the peninsula draws fishermen, artists and artisans, immigrants, and tourists. During Steinbeck’s formative years, there were few radical changes in the Salinas status quo. The same was not true on the Monterey Peninsula. The peninsula is a dynamic place, perhaps best defined by the ecological notions of diversity, adaptation, and evolution.

  To appreciate fully John Steinbeck’s California fiction, one must recognize that the two ecosystems he knew best growing up, the fertile Salinas Valley and the splendid Monterey Peninsula, generated very different stories based on different histories. Anglo-Saxon, westering pioneers are the major players in Steinbeck’s valley fiction—Joseph Wayne in To a God Unknown, Jody’s grandfather in The Red Pony, the Joads, Adam Trask, and Sam Hamilton in East of Eden. They are empire builders—dreamers on the move. Historically, as in Steinbeck’s fiction, most mid-nineteenth-century farmers and ranchers came from the East to till soil and graze cattle in the inland valleys of California. Settlement on the Monterey Peninsula, on the other hand, was multidirectional and multiethnic, more accessible to ownership on small tracts. “Mongrel” Monterey, an 1887 article in Harper’s magazine quipped. It’s a fitting term. The peninsula’s layered settlement history drew a diverse and yeasty mix of peoples: Spanish padres and soldi
ers; Mexican settlers; Chinese and Japanese fishermen; Portuguese whalers in the 1850s; Italian and Sicilian fishermen; powerful Anglo railroad owners, fueling a development boom in the 1880s; and Scandinavian and Italian cannery owners in the early 1900s. Its human population, even today, is as diverse as the marine life in the two-mile deep canyon that bisects Monterey Bay, a canyon twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.

  Steinbeck captures the peninsula’s mix. What fascinated him was hardly noted in the clamor for the development of Pebble Beach properties, for ever-larger fishing boats and greater sardine catches, or for additional reduction plants to process sardines into highly profitable fish meal and fish oil. In a place where, by 1900, most land had been claimed by the church, the military, and the Pacific Improvement Company, ordinary folk inhabited the margins. Three of Steinbeck’s most endearing books, his Monterey trilogy, are about adapting to life on the edge: Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday.

  Highway 1: A Gateway to the Peninsula

  Approaching the Monterey Peninsula from the north on Highway 1, as many visitors do, is to first glimpse the bay as “a blue platter,” to feel the same thrill that overcomes Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby when he sees New York City from the Queensboro Bridge: “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” From Highway 1, Monterey Bay, whether sparkling blue in sunshine or gray with fog, beckons with similar allure. “Some time or other,” declared a 1928 pamphlet on the “Circle of Enchantment,” “someone, a pioneer ancestor of yours perhaps, looked upward and dreamed of this Peninsula.” One late-nineteenth-century brochure is named, succinctly and aptly, “Fulfillment.”