A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  We had a whole lot of fun. We pretty well drinking wine. In Iris Canyon, across the highway from the cemetery. We lived in a box in Iris Canyon behind the willows. A big box. Like a coffin. Make out of tin. We used to get in there to drink wine. Especially when raining.

  In 1940, Fortune magazine located “John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat” off Highway 1 on a hillside near the Carpenter Street exit. That Carmel location is roughly verified by Emil White in Circle of Enchantment: a broad field “bounded by First and Third Avenue, Carpenter Street and the boundary of the Hatton Ranch had been named Tortilla Flat by the mail stage drivers. The Gomez house, at Santa Rita and First, which stood until September 1941, is reported to have provided the setting for Steinbeck in Tortilla Flat.” And Bruce Ariss, friend of John Steinbeck, concurs in his book Inside Cannery Row.

  It is likely that they are all right. Steinbeck loved composite locales—and he loved to keep people guessing.

  In 1936, the Del Monte Hotel published Famous Recipes by Famous People, and John Steinbeck contributed a recipe, “Tortilla Flat.” “Soak beef four hours in vinegar and drain. Cook in one can of tomato sauce and mushrooms in a good-sized casserole. Remove from fire and add a cup of rich cream.”

  House on Tortilla Flat, circa 1939.

  Parties at the Del Monte Were Legendary

  On December 9, 1933, “Repeal Night” was held in the Bali Room, a room painted with Balinese dancers. Samuel Morse was no teetotaler. “Baccus, the god of wine, will preside at Court in all his pomp and glory … after a drought of 15 years.” The $2.50 cost included dinner and a dance. The Carmel Art Association’s Bal Masques were held in 1934, 1935, and 1936, the first invitation graced with a flying pig, later Steinbeck’s personal symbol (“To the stars on the wings of a pig” he inscribed under a stamp he had made). On July 7, 1939, a Tortilla Flat theme dance was held at the Del Monte.

  But all other parties were eclipsed by Salvador Dali’s “party of the century” on September 2, 1941—a party, Samuel Morse told Dali when the idea was hatched, “such as has never been given on the Monterey Peninsula.” “Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest” was a benefit, proceeds going to European refugee artists. On paper, all seemed promising: the cost was $4.00 with dinner, $2.50 without. “It is requested that you come in costume, preferably in a costume copied after your dream, or in a costume of a primitive animal or of the people of the forest,” reads the invitation.

  To create the effect of a grotto (and “depress the guests,” reported the newspaper the next morning), four thousand gunnysacks filled with two tons of paper were suspended from the ceiling. Two thousand pine trees were brought in, twenty-four animal heads, twenty-four store window mannequins, and dozens of animals from the zoo in San Francisco—monkeys, a lion cub, and a giraffe. A wrecked car sat in one corner, and beside it, a nude model who had been drugged for the evening (to keep her immobile). Dali’s wife, Gala, “Princess of the Forest,” sported a unicorn’s head and reclined on a huge bed throughout dinner, cavorting with a tiger cub. A long table extending from the bed was decorated with squash, pumpkins, dried corn, melons, and fruit; along it strolled” an impassive porcupine.” The planners wanted diners to feel like they were feasting in bed with Gala. “We will startle everybody,” said the planners. That they probably did. Bob Hope attended, as did Robinson Jeffers, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Vanderbilts.

  The headline in the Monterey Peninsula Herald the next day read, “Dali Baffles Best People.” Alas, since excessive funds were spend on decorations and preparations, little money was raised for refugees. As history would have it, that was the Del Monte’s last gala. The war forced it to close its doors.

  Bob Hope and Jackie Coogan at Dali’s Surrealistic Night Party.

  Drugged model near wrecked car.

  Although the Hotel Del Monte is hardly mentioned in Steinbeck’s books, save through parody or in an ironic, irreverent aside, each reference reminds readers of the cultural gaps in Monterey: “Through the streets of the town, fat ladies, in whose eyes lay the weariness and the wisdom one sees so often in the eyes of pigs, were trundled in overpowered motorcars toward tea and gin fizzes at the Hotel Del Monte,” he writes in Tortilla Flat. The paisanos steal vegetables from Del Monte gardens to feed the hungry children of Teresina Cortez. In Cannery Row, the famous humorist Josh Billings dies in the Hotel Del Monte.

  Steinbeck has fun with these cultural gaps. Mack and the boys model their first party for Doc on Del Monte glitz. In their pre-party imaginations “the place has got the hell decorated out of it. There’s crepe paper and there’s favors and a big cake … and it wouldn’t be no little mouse fart party neither.” Indeed, “In their minds the decorated laboratory looked like the conservatory at the Hotel Del Monte.” The wild masquerade in Sweet Thursday was probably modeled on Salvador Dali’s equally fantastic gala in 1941.

  Fisherman’s Wharf, circa 1930.

  Steinbeck’s Peninsula: Change and Adaptation

  Steinbeck’s peninsula fiction is about those who make do, those who could not pay the toll on 17-Mile Drive, those who could not afford a room at the Hotel Del Monte. To read his Monterey fiction in order—from 1935’s Tortilla Flat to 1945’s Cannery Row to 1954’s Sweet Thursday—is to trace a rough arc of the peninsula’s economic and social transformation as told in tall tales of barter and exploitation, of destruction and gritty survival. Each is a parable of adaptation, initiated by the upheaval of war. If Anglo development is about creating wealth, owning land, and controlling resources, Steinbeck’s ne’er-do-wells survive by another pattern—adaptation, niche survival, and tribal bonding.

  Driving the Peninsula: 17-Mile Drive

  The Monterey Peninsula’s famed beauty is on full display along 17-Mile Drive, most easily accessed from Highway 1 via the Highway 68 exit.

  In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt rode a horse along roughly the same terrain: “splendid gallops,” he wrote to his daughter. Most nineteenth-century guests at the Hotel Del Monte, however, left in a “tally ho,” a carriage seating six to eight people pulled by four to six horses. At one point, the hotel owned fifty of these carriages, each of which made the trip along one of the state’s first paved roads up to three times a day. Clearly 17-Mile Drive was one of the peninsula’s top attractions. Since 1901 it has been a toll road, costing twenty-five cents per person originally (free to hotel guests) and twenty-five cents for a two- to three-seat car in 1913.

  The Crocker House on 17-Mile Drive.

  The “grandest drive on the continent,” an 1892 flyer boasted. The original drive left the hotel and went first to Monterey adobes, to the Chinese fishing village (now Hopkins Marine Station), through Pacific Grove, along sand dunes near what is now Spanish Bay, and then along coastal land of disputed title—”Pescadero Beach, long and sandy; then Chinese Cove, small cozy and sheltered; then Pebble Beach,” originally covered with pebbles. At Carmel Bay, the road looped back.

  Sentinel Point (then Midway Point, now the Lone Cypress) became the most celebrated spot on the drive. For Mary Austin, writing about the peninsula in 1914, the cypress trees “might have grown in Dante’s Purgatorio, or in the imagined forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake.”

  Where the beach and tennis club is now located—Stillwater Cove—was once a Chinese fishing village where children sold abalone shells—the first souvenir stalls on the peninsula.

  The Crocker Irwin House, perhaps the most elegant house on the peninsula, is just north of Pescadero Point. In 1952, the sale price was $350,000; in 1999 it sold for $13.2 million. Originally built for Mrs. Templeton Crocker, the house, called the “Crocker Marble Palace,” cost more than $2 million to build and decorate between 1926 and 1931. The cost was inflated by gold bathroom fixtures, black marble bathtubs, and travertine walls. The stone is reputedly from Mt. Vesuvius. In 1947, the Byzantine-style mansion was featured in My Favorite Brunette, starring Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour; it was also featured in the 1975
movie Escape from Witch Mountain.

  Any tour of the peninsula should end in fine dining, perhaps at The Lodge at Pebble Beach or Roy’s at Spanish Bay. Elaine Scott stayed at The Lodge in 1949, when she was dating Steinbeck and she and Joan Crawford came to visit. Crawford covered for Steinbeck and Scott’s rather scandalous relationship—Elaine was a married woman.

  Steinbeck, on the path to the Lone Cypress on 17-Mile Drive in 1960. He was filming an introduction to Barnaby Conrad’s film Flight, based on Steinbeck’s short story of the same name.

  The Lone Cypress.

  Hotel Del Monte burns in 1924.

  “In 1936, Ed Ricketts’s lab burned, and he escaped with only clothes and typewriter.”

  In Tortilla Flat, the region’s sustainable economies are contained in the paisanos’ ongoing efforts to finagle wine from the Italians or “in desperation,” working “a whole day cleaning squids for Chin Kee” to make two dollars. Land use is a leitmotif in all three peninsula books. The paisanos of Tortilla Flat inherit houses. One burns down, and who then owns that land? (Mexican land rights were, in fact, contested by whites well into the twentieth century.) In Cannery Row, the wily Mack cuts a fair real estate deal at the beginning of the book—“renting” the Palace Flophouse from Lee Chong and then creating a decent life by nibbling on the peninsula’s economic and ecological bounties. In the same novel, the Malloys stake out a vacant lot as their own, renting abandoned cannery pipes to the less fortunate and complaining as upward mobility bruises their contentment. In Sweet Thursday, the new owner of Lee Chong’s Market, a streetwise Los Angeles-raised Mexican, moves to the peninsula for money and then is duped out of Palace House ownership by the equally manipulative Mack. The books can be read as ironic commentaries on documented histories of peninsula land use.

  Tortilla Flat concludes with Danny’s house burning: “Better that this symbol of holy friendship, this good house of parties and fights, of love and comfort, should die as Danny died, in one last glorious, hopeless assault on the gods.” Steinbeck’s fictional fire mimics scores of peninsula conflagrations, many with special significance. In 1906, the Alones Point Chinese settlement burned down. In 1909, the Mammoth Stables in Pacific Grove, reputed to be the largest in the west, burned to the ground—as did the Hotel Del Monte in 1887 and the new main building in 1924. The original Pebble Beach Lodge burned in 1917. The Del Monte Bathhouse went up in flames in 1930. Ed Ricketts’s lab was destroyed in 1936, one of many fires on Cannery Row. Fires suggest something about the peninsula’s dynamism: Change is endemic here.

  In 1930, Steinbeck and his wife Carol, newly arrived on the peninsula, watched the Del Monte Bathhouse burn:

  There was a great fire last night. The Del Monte bathhouse burned to the ground. We got up and went to it and stood in the light and heat and gloried in the destruction. When Cato was shouting in the Roman Senate “Carthago delenda est,” I wondered whether in his mind there was not a vision of the glorious fire it would make. Precious things make beautiful flames.

  In 1906, four-year-old John Steinbeck probably did not witness the conflagration that destroyed the Chinese settlement on Point Alones. Nor would he have understood the consequences of this fire for the Chinese in the area, relocated to Monterey’s McAbee Beach. But he probably saw the ashes, only a few blocks from his family’s summer home. These fires are emblematic of something deep in Steinbeck’s psyche—awareness of devastation and the need for adaptation.

  Many plant species depend on fire for their propagation. Fires favor the fringe dwellers, giving them a new foothold while in the same stroke making way for new develop-ment that will repeat the displacement cycle.

  John Steinbeck located his peninsula novels within the flux of experience that fires represent.

  A 1951 Turkish edition of Tortilla Flat.

  Chapter 6

  Pacific Grove

  The Writer’s Retreat

  Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific Grove, circa 1910–15.

  Carol and John in the 1930s.

  After months of living hand-to-mouth as newlyweds in Eagle Rock, John and Carol headed north to familiar Pacific Grove, where they would live for six years. Steinbeck’s parents gave them twenty-five dollars a month and the family’s three-room summer cottage that his father had built early in the century.

  While Carol combed the peninsula for jobs, John wrote daily—determined, as he had been since he was a teenager, to find an audience for his prose. “I expect to give myself until I’m forty,” he wrote a friend. “That will be twenty-five years of trying.” In Carol, he found a woman who endorsed his steely determination. Throughout the Pacific Grove years, she was his ready companion, muse, editor, and typist. Theirs was a collaborative marriage, happy, stormy, and committed.

  During the Great Depression, Pacific Grove was an ideal spot for an artist or a visionary. Founded as a Methodist retreat in 1875, the town was quiet, affordable, often surprisingly progressive, and dry—alcohol consumption was banned until 1969. Steinbeck needed solitude; he needed Carol to buffer him from the world; he needed a familiar setting, a tiny workroom, friends and family close by, a garden, and a dog. During the six years in Pacific Grove, Steinbeck went from being an unknown writer with one book to his name—Cup of Gold, which appeared in 1929 to scant reviews—to an accomplished author with five published works of fiction.

  In Pacific Grove, John Steinbeck found his authorial voice. “I must have at least one book a year from now on if I can manage it,” he wrote in 1930, shortly before moving to Pacific Grove. During the 1930s, he almost reached his target.

  Pacific Grove Cottage, circa 1908.

  “Such a nice little place. And once there were good times there.”

  The Writing Life

  In their tiny cottage two blocks from Monterey Bay, John and Carol Steinbeck were as financially and ideologically detached from the Pacific Improvement Company and Del Monte revelers as Steinbeck had been from the growers of the Salinas Valley. During their Pacific Grove years, John and Carol were comrades, a team, themselves against the world. They were unconventional, plucky, and resolute. Both delighted in the unexpected: Once they took friend Ed Ricketts’s iguana, strapped it to a roller skate, hooked a leash to the skate, and walked nonchalantly down Cannery Row. Like Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in 1920s Paris, John and Carol dressed alike, both in rough garb, pants, and slouchy jackets. Together they caught fish in the bay in their small boat—rockfish and salmon. “Sometimes I catch eels and sea trout and the Italian fishermen take us fishing in their boats,” he wrote a friend. At times, they got their food from the welfare office—two cans of peaches, one pound of cheese, and a can of corned beef, according to Carol. And they both loved their large backyard garden. At one low point in 1931, starved for amusement, John and Carol bought two ducks for the garden pond and named them Aqua and Vita. (The birds proved to be too expensive and too noisy, however, and had to go after a couple of weeks.) Neither John nor Carol was afraid of hard work. What sustained Steinbeck during those rocky years in Pacific Grove, when he had so little money or critical acclaim, was the writing itself and a wife who shared his passion for language and believed with unswerving conviction in his ultimate success.

  Two Iconoclasts

  Carol Henning Steinbeck shared her husband’s Bohemian tastes. Like Grampa and Granma Joad, John and Carol “fought over everything, and loved and needed the fighting.” Carol was Steinbeck’s unflinching critic. She was also creative and iconoclastic herself—not a fan of the ladies who stayed at the Hotel Del Monte. She sketched a series of pink nude sportswomen. She wrote “feelty verse,” as she told a reporter. She gave her self-published 1933 volume, A Slim Volume to End Slim Volumes, to John for Christmas. Here is one of her poems:

  I Don’t Like Mr. Hearst

  Mr. Hearst has no soul

  I hope he falls down into a hole

  I wouldn’t touch Mr. Hearst with a ten-foot pole.

  He makes me sick. I’ve got no use for this cheap skater<
br />
  I hope he breaks his neck on a potater,

  And nobody finds it out until nine months later,

  Or never.

  From Carol’s series on nude sportswomen.

  John and Carol with duck in photo booth.

  Steinbeck in the 1930s.

  Joseph Campbell, who came to the peninsula in 1932, thought Carol got a raw deal in this marriage contract: no children, a preoccupied husband. But Carol was committed to John. “Nothing mattered but John,” she would say later, “I put all there was of me into his life.”

  Carol worked at odd jobs on the peninsula. In 1931, shortly after arriving, she and a friend created the first directory of Carmel residents; she worked as Ricketts’s secretary; and she worked for State Employment Relief. For his part, Steinbeck wrote daily, usually until late afternoon. He mentally composed stories, seemingly, and wrote out clean copies rapidly, often in his father’s used ledger books in order to save money on paper. The act of writing obsessed and haunted him, consumed and transformed him. As completely as was possible, he merged self with work. To write, he went into a trance of sorts—a “work dream” he called it in a 1948 ledger: “almost an unconscious state when one feels the story all over one’s body and the details come flooding in like water and the story trudges by like many children.” There is a physicality to his discussions of work that testify to its hold on him: “when there is no writing in progress, I feel like an uninhabited body,” he wrote to one friend. Creative products became offspring. He described one work as a “literary foetus.” Characters, he said, “are my own children.” Writing books gave him “satisfaction … much like that of a father who sees his son succeed where he has failed.” Letters repeat this refrain—books, not children, were his progeny, his destiny. Carol may well have wanted children—she probably was pregnant and had an abortion at some point in the 1930s—but she knew that he didn’t and wouldn’t.