A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Steinbeck briefly owned one of Monterey’s adobes, the Lara-Soto Adobe at 460 Pierce Street. In 1945, after a stint overseas as a war correspondent, Steinbeck brought his second wife, Gwyn, and baby Thom to live here. He wrote The Pearl in the back garden. Steinbeck wrote to his editor, Pat Covici, on October 24, 1944:

  We bought a house in Monterey. You may think this precipitate but it is a house I have wanted since I was a little kid. It is one of the oldest and nicest adobes in town—with a huge garden—two blocks from the main street and yet unpaved and no traffic. Four blocks from the piers. It was built in the late thirties before the gold rush and is in perfect shape … it is a laughing house.

  Colton Hall, 351 Pacific Street.

  The Adobe at 500 Hartnell Street, behind the Monterey Public Library, was once the home of Hattie Gragg. Steinbeck loved talking to longtime residents of any community where he lived, and Hattie, one of the oldest in Monterey, loved telling stories. He visited her frequently. She told him the true story about Josh Billings, California humorist, who died at the Hotel Del Monte. Dr. J. P. Heintz from Luxembourg had an office near Hattie’s, as Steinbeck describes: “Where the new post office is, there used to be a deep gulch with water flowing in it and a little foot bridge over it. On one side of the gulch was a fine old adobe and on the other the house of the doctor who handled all the sickness, birth, and death in the town.”

  Pop Ernest’s menu.

  Across the street from the Monterey Public Library, at 351 Pacific Street (with its fine local archive housed in the California Room), is Colton Hall, where California’s first constitution was debated in 1848. Adjacent to Colton Hall is the old Monterey Jail, where Danny in Tortilla Flat languished for a month, smashing bedbugs on the wall.

  Old Fisherman’s Wharf, off Del Monte Boulevard, is a good place to stroll, see and hear begging sea lions, eat fried Monterey squid (a splendid snack), and take a short cruise out to see grey whales. Here “Pop” Ernest Doelter taught American diners how to eat abalone. He pounded the tough muscle into steaks for his restaurant on the Monterey wharf (and at the 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition in San Francisco). Suzy and Doc eat there in Sweet Thursday (“Pop” is Sonny Boy).

  A menu from about 1932 notes, “Nectar of Abalone” for twenty-five cents and “All fish (fresh daily) for $.50.” Lobsters were fifty cents, seventy-five cents, and one dollar.

  Steinbeck (third from left) and friends, Del Monte pier, circa 1910.

  Cannery Row: Fact or Fiction?

  When Cannery Row was published in 1945, Steinbeck’s friend Ritch Lovejoy wrote a review of the book for the Monterey Herald, claiming in his headline that “Cannery Row is Monterey’s.” “It may be that the dreamlike quality of Steinbeck’s writing, although vivid, just cannot strike even the remotest chord of reality in the mind of a city dweller or to go a step farther, anyone as far east as the Nevada border.”

  For proof of this all we have to do is to glance at the dust-cover of the book, which shows a cannery-row composed of New England landscape dotted with vague ash trees (or something) and some small skiffpiers over a lake or river where maybe men catch trout on strings with bent pin hooks, and process them in the little three story buildings along the banks.

  The eastern magazines suffer a little from the same—shall we call it malady? Time magazine shows a picture of fisherman’s wharf, with a strong indication that they believe this to be “cannery row.” Newsweek magazine says that the story is about a “snug little settlement on the coast of Monterey country… inhabited by a casual assortment of human beings such as only Steinbeck could create…

  You and I in Monterey… cannot well consider either fiction or fabrication Red Williams’s service station, Holman’s department story, Tom Work, Excelentisima Maria Antonia Field, Tiny Colletti (whose name is merely misspelled), “Sparky” Enea, and a few other people. In 1934, Red Williams opened a gas station at Lighthouse and

  Fountain in Pacific Grove, next to Holman’s department store. Tom Work owned a lumberyard as well as many other Monterey properties. Excelentisima Maria Antonio Field, daughter of a Mexican landowner, and her brother Stevie (a friend of Steinbeck’s, mentioned in Travels with Charley) inherited a rancho on the Monterey Salinas highway, the Laguna Seca section. Maria Antonio was recognized by the King of Spain in 1933 for her work perpetuating Spanish California history. And Tiny and Sparky, fishermen, went with Steinbeck on the Sea of Cortez voyage.

  Indeed, much in Cannery Row is thinly masked fact. In the novel, Dora Flood’s bouncer, William, commits suicide by plunging an ice pick through his chest. On March 6, 1933, a small piece ran in the Monterey Herald: “Self-Inflicted Wound Is Fatal.” “Plunging an ordinary ice pick into his chest just above the heart, Henry Wojciechowski, 45, former soldier, last night committed suicide at the home of Flora Woods, local night life figure.”

  In his manuscript, Steinbeck wrote much of Cannery Row in the present tense, changing it to past tense in the typescript. The place lived, vividly, in his mind and heart. After being sent to Monterey in 1945 to photograph the “real” Cannery Row, Peter Stackpole remarked to his editor at Life magazine, “But Steinbeck wrote the real Cannery Row.”

  Wharf #2 is the commercial wharf, where boats that were built when Steinbeck was in the area still unload their catches. Nearly at the end of the pier are two unloading stations for rock cod, sand dabs, or halibut, depending on the season. When Monterey Bay squid are in the area (hauls are irregular because squid numbers have decreased), they are unloaded at this pier, and early mornings reveal the operations that transfer tons of squid from the boats, through the weighing houses, and into waiting trucks.

  Near the wharf is the Municipal Beach, now Window on the Bay—locally known by its former name, Del Monte Beach—a wide sweep of sand where sandpipers run “as though on little wheels.” A wooden walk and then a bike path lead to the railroad stop for the Hotel Del Monte; only the platform remains. Where ladies once detrained, the descendents of Mack and the boys lounge on low walls.

  Across from Municipal Beach is peaceful El Estero Park and Dennis the Menace playground. Dennis’s creator, Hank Ketchum, was a member of the lab group from mid-century on.

  Many of Steinbeck’s friends and characters are buried at El Encinal Cemetery on 351 Fremont Street: Ed Ricketts, Flora Woods, Horace Bicknell (Mack), Tiny Colletto, paisanos Eduardo P. Martin (Danny) and Eduardo Romero (Pilon), Hattie Gragg, “Pop” Ernest Doelter, and Johnny Garcia.

  “Change was everywhere,” Steinbeck writes at the beginning of Sweet Thursday, a novel set immediately after World War II. But that melancholic strain is balanced by lighter notes; the book finds exuberance in adaptation. This is a good way to approach the Cannery Row that exists today: peel the veneer to glimpse the Cannery Row that existed for Steinbeck.

  Chapter 8

  Bohemian Carmel

  Modernism in the West

  Carmel in the 1930s.

  Hills covered with Monterey pine and live-oak forests, owned by the Del Monte Properties Company, stand between old Monterey and picturesque Carmel-by-the-Sea. A wall might as well separate these diverse communities. Spanish Monterey, site of the military presidio and Colton Hall, place of preserved adobes and fishing wharves, is layered with two and a half centuries of California history, whereas Carmel has been burnishing its charm only since 1903. The difference is also cultural. From its inception, Carmel was a mecca for artists and bohemians. However briefly, creative individualism was Carmel’s clarion call.

  Although Steinbeck maintained a wary distance from Carmel, the town affected him profoundly. Many like-minded peninsula liberals lived or worked in Carmel at some point, and Steinbeck’s career was shaped by the political radicalism and artistic ferment that was Carmel in the 1930s.

  Carmel in the Early Years

  In the late nineteenth century, attempts to create a town near the white Carmel Beach and its famous mission were blocked by the area’s inaccessibility. In 1888, developers envisioned a Ca
tholic retreat, Carmel City, similar to Pacific Grove’s Methodist enclave, but plots didn’t sell—even at twenty-five dollars—largely because the road to Carmel was a long and dusty hour from Monterey. Fifteen years later, however, two experienced visionaries, James Franklin Devendorf and Frank H. Powers (a real estate planner and a lawyer, respectively), were more successful. Carmel-by-the-Sea was marketed as an ecologically sensitive “village” designed to attract artists and writers, “Teachers and Brain Workers at Indoor Employment,” announced a 1903 brochure. “The settlement,” Devendorf wrote in 1913, “has been built on the theory that people of aesthetic (as broadly defined) taste would settle in a town of Carmel’s naturally aesthetic beauties provided all public enterprises were addressed toward preventing man and his civilized ways from unnecessarily marring the natural beauty so lavishly displayed here.” With better roads and better plans than those of Carmel City, Devendorf’s colony drew iconoclasts, creative spirits, liberals, Stanford professors, and the ecologically inclined.

  For a century, Carmel’s development has been marked by a fierce commitment to rusticity, intimacy, and the natural environment, sometimes to the point of arguable extremism. Carmel has prided itself on a low-key atmosphere, rather like Taos, New Mexico, or Woodstock, New York, where the arts are cultivated amid sylvan ease. The town had no electricity until 1914 and has never had a jail or cemetery. To this day, side streets do not have sidewalks or streetlights and many houses still lack house numbers. Only recently has mail been delivered to houses—not picked up at the post office. Carmel has banned neon signs, billboards, hotdog stands, and, briefly, ice cream cones. From its inception, Carmel defined itself against unsightly mainstream culture, against, noted the local paper during Steinbeck’s years on the peninsula, “thousands of standardized towns extending from coast to coast.”

  Statue of Father Serra by Jo Mora.

  Early on, many “brain workers” were indeed drawn to this idyll—”starving writers and unwanted painters,” Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley—and a few refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Jack London and his wife came for extended visits in 1906 and 1910, experiences that made their way into The Valley of the Moon. Writer Sinclair Lewis came in 1909 to serve as a secretary for two sisters. Upton Sinclair, muckraking novelist and, later, candidate for governor of California, moved to Carmel for a few months after his socialistic experiment, Helicon Hall in New Jersey, burned to the ground in 1907. Environmental writer Mary Austin discovered Carmel Bay in the summer of 1904 and returned in 1906 to write in her wickiup in a tree near the Pine Inn. Mecca was the Carmel house of lyric poet George Sterling, to which came satirist H. L. Mencken, novelist Theodore Dreiser, and critic and Stanford professor Van Wyck Brooks. Conversations there, reported Mary Austin, were “ambrosial.” Poet Robinson Jeffers, who arrived on the peninsula in 1914, would call those early years “The Carnival time when wine was as common as tears/The fabulous dawn….”

  John Steinbeck fell in love with his third wife, Elaine, in 1949 when they met for dinner at the Pine Inn, on Ocean Avenue between Lincoln and Monte Verde streets, up the street from the beach. Their connection was immediate, electric. When they finally returned to their respective rooms, neither could sleep.

  Mary Austin’s wikiup.

  Such early denizens were serious writers, and during their months or years in Carmel they relished their camaraderie and the region’s serene beauty. Their heightened sensibilities stamped Carmel as the ultimate western bohemian retreat. Sterling, Austin, and others would regularly picnic on the beach, feast on abalone chowder, and fashion new verses of the abalone song (“Oh! Some folks boast of quail on toast, /Because they think it’s tony. /But I’m content to owe my rent/And live on abalone”).

  From the earliest years, Carmel was plagued by a feeling of unreality. Self-conscious primitivism—life devoted to simplicity, health, and art—both attracted and repelled intellectuals. Critic and writer Van Wyck Brooks, for one, was uncomfortable in Carmel during his 1911 summer visit: residents were, in his eyes, artistic pretenders and idlers. Their existence ran counter to the prevailing American ideal of self-determination and energetic work habits. Brooks wrote,

  Others who had come from the East to write novels in this paradise found themselves there becalmed and supine. They gave themselves over to day-dreams while their minds ran down like clocks, as if they had lost the keys to wind them up with, and they turned into beachcombers, listlessly reading books they had read ten times before and searching the rocks for abalones. For this Arcadia lay, one felt, outside the world in which thought evolves and which came to seem insubstantial in the bland sunny air.

  I often felt in Carmel that I was immobilized … for there was something Theocritean, something Sicilian or Greek, in this afternoon land of olive trees, honey-bees and shepherds.

  This was also Steinbeck’s view. Life was simply too easy, the setting too beautiful, the literary output not chastened by suffering, struggle, and woe.

  Carmel in the 1930s

  By the 1930s, many thought that Carmel’s artistic identity was set: the place did not nourish serious work. In his 1930 survey of California writing, Carey McWilliams notes that “there are several volumes of ‘exquisite’ verse published annually in Carmel of which the least said the more charitable.” John and Carol Steinbeck agreed. She collected bad seagull poetry published in local papers. He wrote a friend in 1929 that he had seen a Carmel writer, “H. Pease, and his shopkeeper’s attitude—his wrapping up stories in butcher paper and delivering them to a hungry public—horrifies me.” To Steinbeck’s mind, literary pretenders lived in Carmel. “We have literary acquaintances in Carmel,” he wrote to a friend in 1931, “writers of paper pulp and juvenilia. They hate me, despise me because I can’t ‘sell’ anything.” He socialized with Jack Calvin, who had published a boy’s book on the salmon fishery of Alaska and had worked with Ricketts on the manuscript that became Between Pacific Tides. In another letter, Steinbeck describes a party that he and Carol attended shortly after settling on the peninsula.

  We went to a party at John Calvin’s in Carmel last week. These writers of juveniles … wring the English language, to squeeze pennies out of it. They don’t even pretend that there is any dignity in craftsmanship. A conversation with them sounds like an afternoon spent with a pawnbroker. Says John Calvin, “I long ago ceased to take anything I write seriously.” I retorted, “I take everything I write seriously; unless one does take his work seriously there is very little chance of its ever being good work.” And the whole company was a little ashamed of me as though I had three legs or was an albino.

  This was the face of Carmel that John and Carol emphatically and vocally rejected.

  Carmel-by-the-Sea on a sunny day.

  But another side to Carmel drew in the Steinbecks—and many other serious artists. Carmel fostered individualism. It was and still is artistically inclined. Although the town became more conservative in the 1930s, when real estate and business interests lobbied for control, Carmel continued to nurture a vigorous and outspoken liberal core. Local papers like the Carmel Pine Cone and the short-lived but sophisticated Carmel Cymbal give ample evidence of keen cultural awareness throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In a 1926 edition of the Cymbal, for example, poet and librarian Dora Hagemeyer reviewed Countee Cullen’s poems, discussed “The Trend of Modern Fiction,” and analyzed Bertrand Russell’s views on education. In the same year, the paper announced a series of lectures on “Five Approaches to Modern Music” and a talk on abstract painting. It reprinted Dorothy Parker’s poems from the New Yorker, Hayward Broun’s column from the New York World, and Ernest L. Blumenschein’s article on “The Taos Art Colony.” Wit marked each issue: a series on “Prominent Citizens of Carmel” featured pet dogs.

  From Lake Tahoe, Steinbeck wrote his parents in dismay when hearing of owner Bassett’s financial difficulties with the Cymbal: “It is the only paper of its kind, and a really interesting sheet with legitimate prete
nsions of individuality and cleverness…. Bassett says what he pleases, and that is a joy no matter how you may disagree with him.” In short, Carmel of the 1920s and 1930s was a sophisticated community.

  An Artists’ Enclave

  Throughout the years, many serious artists and intellectuals have gravitated to Carmel. In the 1930s, the community was remarkably varied. Joseph Campbell came through in 1932: “At last,” Campbell wrote “ … a world of my contemporaries. I don’t know why, but suddenly I felt that this was exactly what I had lacked—this being one of a world of my own age.” Ed Ricketts lived there in the early 1930s, as did Francis Whitaker, artist blacksmith and founder of the John Reed Club, and Mary Bulkley, feminist and poet, who lived on Casanova Street for twenty years. She often played music for Steinbeck when he came to her home to talk. “Miss hearing the music so much,” he wrote her from Los Gatos. “It was a good thing. I wish I could have some right now.” He inscribed a copy of Tortilla Flat to her: “To Miss Mary Bulkley: Pablo said—’Mrs. Palochico has given Danny a harmonica.’ ‘This may not be a good thing,’ Pilon observed. ‘For music brings more out of a man than was ever in him.’ JS” The man who wrote his books based on the “mathematics of music,” structured novels on Bach’s chords, and listened to Tchaikovsky must have found Mary Bulkley’s musical sensibilities soothing.

  Four Carmel artists and writers in particular helped shape Steinbeck’s art—two he knew well personally, two he knew through their work: Beth Ingels, journalist; Lincoln Steffens, journalist and muckraker; Edward Weston, photographer; and Robinson Jeffers, poet. All four were bound intimately to the landscape and sensibility of the region. Their clear-eyed and vivid sense of place and culture tallied with Steinbeck’s own.