A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Why Pixie Houses?

  Carmel’s most beloved bungalow is the Tuck Box Tearoom on Dolores Street between Ocean and Seventh avenues, a shop designed by Hugh W. Comstock. The story behind this and other Comstock houses in the town is as charming as the cottages themselves.

  In the 1920s, Carmel resident Mayotta Brown made popular felt and rag dolls, “Otsy Totsys.” When she married Hugh W. Comstock, a Midwestern farmer’s son with no training in architecture, he built in their backyard (on Torres near Sixth Avenue) a doll house showroom that he called “Gretel” for the Otsy Totsys. The next year he built “Hansel.” Demand ran high for “fairy tale houses,” as the Comstock cottages were first called. They were constructed of chalk rock, bent pitched roofs, and whimsical leaded glass windows. He built with native materials—rock from the Carmel Valley, hand-carved timbers, hand-cut redwood shingles, and hand-forged fixtures. Built between 1924 and 1930, the little houses were originally painted grey with olive trim.

  The Tuck Box Tearoom.

  Breaking Through: Robinson Jeffers

  Robinson Jeffers wrote “the most powerful, the most challenging poetry in this generation,” declared the New York Herald Tribune in 1928. Four years later, he was on the cover of Time magazine. That same year, Edward Ricketts, John and Carol Steinbeck, and Joseph Campbell pored over Jeffers’s poetry. According to Campbell, Carol came into the lab one day exclaiming, “Really, I’ve got the message of ‘Roan Stallion’—and she recited parts.”

  … Humanity is the start of the race; I say

  Humanity is the mold to break away from, the crust to break

  through, the coal to break into fire,

  The atom to be split.

  Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white

  fire flies out of it; vision that fools him

  Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits…

  For Ricketts, the Steinbecks, and Campbell, a poet who talked about breaking cultural and humanitarian boundaries was a revolutionary voice, a kindred soul. This poet of “inhumanism” wrote about a world that was not man-centered. In his verse, Jeffers cultivated what he called a “reasonable detachment” that allowed for “transhuman magnificence.” His ideas certainly made their way into the book Steinbeck was writing at the time, To a God Unknown. “The whole book was an attempt to get away from the particular form of fantasy which goes by the name of realism,” Steinbeck wrote a friend in 1933. Campbell reported that he read and reread lines from “The Roan Stallion” on his 1932 collecting trip with Ricketts. And Ricketts used Jeffers’s poem to articulate his notions of transcendence: “modern soul movements,” he wrote, see “not dirt for dirt’s sake, or grief merely for the sake of grief, but dirt and grief wholly accepted if necessary as struggle vehicles of an emergent joy—achieving things which are not transient by means of things which are.”

  Jeffers’s “inhumanism” is closely aligned with what Steinbeck was getting at in his own fictional stance—to see humans as part of a larger whole. In 1936, Jeffers said in an interview: “People have always taken themselves too seriously. They don’t realize what a tremendous lot there is outside themselves. After all, man is just an animal which has developed.”

  Robinson Jeffers near Tor House, looking at a hawk statue.

  Oddly enough, for all their appreciation, neither John nor Carol Steinbeck met Jeffers during their peninsula years. In 1938, when they were living in Los Gatos, the Steinbecks were finally introduced to Jeffers by Bennet Cerf. Jeffers’s reclusive lifestyle reflected his fierce individualism. Sculptor Gordon Newell tells of offering to help Jeffers build Tor House, at 26304 Ocean View Avenue, on the Carmel coast. Jeffers refused Newell’s assistance: “He wanted to do it himself,” Newell reflected. His wife, Una, concurred: “I think he realized some kinship with [the granite] and became aware of strengths in himself unknown before.” This insularity kept him aloof from many in the town—literally up in his “hawk tower,” built in the early 1920s and modeled on Yeats’s tower in Ireland.

  Although Tor House is now surrounded by houses worth millions of dollars, it retains a feeling of isolation and independence. Jeffers’s granite presence remains in rooms furnished as he left them.

  Robinson Jeffers.

  Regionalism: Beth Ingels

  Beth Ingels was Carol’s staunch buddy. She read several books nightly, and, like Carol, had a dry wit and an unconventional manner. Beth became friends with John as well, and she was a more significant influence on his prose than anyone might guess. Like John, she loved local history and stories. Beth and Carol helped turn Steinbeck’s gaze from the mythic to the regional.

  In 1930, Beth penned a column for the Carmel Pine Cone, “Carmel’s Beginnings.” One piece that year concerned the “hiding place” of bandit Tiburcio Vasquez in Corral de Tierra. “Cabins still stand there that were occupied by him and his men,” she wrote—a historical note that makes its way into Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven. Indeed, it was Beth who told Steinbeck the family stories of Corral de Tierra, her childhood home. She had considered writing a book about the area herself: in one of her notebooks is a list of possible tales about Corral de Tierra, her outline for a novel. Another notebook page lists stories entitled “Romance on Tortilla Flat”—including a reference to “the Pirate.” Beth’s unpublished stories and proposals are eerily close to Steinbeck’s own. She kept a dog notebook in order to write “a parody of serious dog books, with photos of dogs doing things they shouldn’t.” And she completed a manuscript titled “Cannery Row” about women cannery workers. Beth Ingels mined the local terrain in which Steinbeck would strike pay dirt.

  Carol and Beth created Carmel’s first directory in 1930.

  Modernism: Edward Weston

  To many critics of twentieth-century literature, John Steinbeck is hardly a modernist writer. For them, he is not experimental (“make it new” is one modernist cry) but a man working consciously in a realistic mode. Others see him as a naturalist, a writer who insists that human lives are shaped by forces outside human control, or as a regionalist, a writer recording the disharmonies, traditions, and patterns of a specific place and time. But Steinbeck can also be understood as a modernist, a man of the West experimenting with unfettered language, photo-sharp realism, and an unsentimental, scientifically detached view of human lives. “The only advantage I can see about writing at all,” he wrote to a friend in 1931, “is to try to overturn precedent. All of my work has been built on plans more or less unused…. Personally I think publishers never give the reader credit for enough intelligence.” Steinbeck shared with other modernists a distrust of realism. If his prose is often journalistic in its precision, it is also suggestive, layered. Perhaps the vision of Edward Weston, modernist photographer, was closest to Steinbeck’s own.

  Certainly Weston was an acquaintance of Steinbeck’s; in the late 1930s, Weston’s assistant took one of the only formal photographs Steinbeck permitted during the decade. And Steinbeck would have known Weston’s photographs, mostly landscapes with a close eye for natural objects. Rejecting the sentimental photography known as pictorialism, the f.64 group, which Weston helped organize in 1932, advocated sharp realism in treatment of commonplace subjects and precise rendering of detail. The f.64 photographers imposed no “qualities foreign to the actual quality of the subject” in order to capture “the life force within the form.” Their photographs were a visual rendering of Steinbeck’s nonteleological acceptance of what “is.” Equally committed to natural expression, Steinbeck spent the early 1930s mastering the taut sentence, stripping his prose of archaic and Latinate words, ornate phrases, and heavy symbolism. Weston’s art, like Steinbeck’s until 1935, was staunchly apolitical, focusing instead on the California landscape. For Weston, beauty was itself an end.

  Weston and Steinbeck suffered at the hands of the East Coast establishment that hardly recognized the modernity of works that seemed to self-proclaimed avant-garde critics mere vestiges of realism, harking more to
a rural past than to a complex future. The Weston Gallery is on Sixth Avenue between Dolores and Lincoln. It carries the work of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and other photographers.

  Edward Weston at the camera, with sons (l-r) Cole, Neill, and Chan building Weston’s adobe house on Wildcat Hill, Carmel Highlands, 1948.

  Political Activism: Lincoln Steffens

  “In the 1930s if you weren’t a radical, you were a hunk of protoplasm.”—Caroline Decker, labor organizer

  Not all who came to Lincoln Steffens’s home at Ocean Avenue and San Antonio Street between 1927 and 1936 agreed with the politics of the ailing muckraker: “they came because there was greatness, kindliness, wit, knowledge, rich experience and sympathy in Lincoln Steffens,” reported the Monterey Peninsula Herald when he died on October 8, 1936. They came because Steffens, like Arthur Miller decades later, stood for something essential to the liberal tradition: the free exchange of ideas, sympathy for the underdog, and scorn for rigid ideologies. “A lot of social things were happening,” observed 1930s activist Richard Criley, “currents that centered on Steffens’s household.” His Carmel home was a beacon for young journalism students from Stanford, radical politicians, actors, artists, scholars, and writers.

  In 1931, Steffens had published Autobiography, and his fame grew with its wide reception: there was a long waiting list for the book at the Carmel library. He became Carmel’s liberal conscience, a public defender of communism, the presence behind—if not a member of—the local John Reed Club, a few liberal spirits who would gather to discuss socialism and communism. “I am not a Communist,” he explained to a Harvard undergraduate. “I merely think that the next order of society will be socialist and that the Communists will bring it in and lead it.” From 1932 on, California liberals became more deeply involved with labor situations, largely because of the widely publicized 1933 cotton strike, the 1934 waterfront strike, and the 1936 Salinas lettuce strike. Steffens and his spirited wife, Ella Winter, hosted radicals and communists at their home, donated to striking workers, and sheltered fugitive organizers. Steinbeck’s political radicalism took root in Steffens’s home.

  Lincoln Steffens.

  Initially reluctant to take sides in the labor dispute, Steinbeck attended a few meetings of the John Reed Club—just watching—and was then urged by Carol, Steffens, and Winter to interview strike organizers hiding out in Seaside, a few miles up the coast. Steinbeck began with the idea of writing a biography of an organizer; he ended up writing In Dubious Battle, a novel, wrote Steffens, that was a “stunning, straight, correct narrative about things as they happen.” Without Steffens and Winter, Steinbeck may never have written his labor trilogy of the late 1930s: In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. Steffens, wrote Martin Flavin Jr., “made people believe not in ideas but in themselves, and that is why they came to him.”

  Lincoln Steffens’s home, Ocean Avenue and San Antonio Street.

  Chapter 9

  Los Gatos

  A Place to Write

  In May 1936, John and Carol Steinbeck left the Monterey Peninsula for Los Gatos, a small town at the southern end of the Santa Clara Valley, sixty miles north of Monterey. Settled in the nineteenth century by Italians, Yugoslavs, and Anglos, this warm valley, with its mild, Mediterranean climate, was ideal for growing apricots and almonds and plums. By the 1930s it was the “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” carpeted by orchard blossoms in early March. “There is no fruit that surpasses that which is grown along our foothills for fineness of grain, flavor, and amount of sugar,” declared the Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce in the early 1900s. Plums dried to prunes in the sun. Apricots and peaches were canned in Los Gatos and throughout the valley. John and Carol purchased a hillside lot above town, one and a half acres covered with oaks that provided a sweeping view of the valley. In Los Gatos, the Steinbecks met creative and forceful people: a winemaker, a socialist, an artist. For Carol, perhaps, it was paradise—she had hated the Pacific Grove summer fog. For John, it was simply a place to write.

  During his Los Gatos years, Steinbeck’s imagination was on the road, restlessly absent from home. Sometimes with Carol, sometimes alone, he drove south on Highway 99 into Kern County to interview farmworkers, southwestern migrants, and the men and women who tried to help them. He worked with these people. He may well have traveled Route 66 with them. In those four Los Gatos years, he wrote his signature works—Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath—and published his first significant journalistic essays, “The Harvest Gypsies.” During his first year there, 1936, he conceived all three projects, and that one year may well be his annus mirabilis. In Los Gatos, John Steinbeck found his stride as an engaged artist, a man who recorded the fervor of the times. Ten years later, he recalled those months working on The Grapes of Wrath: “A few times I have in work heard the thundering and seen the flash which must have been the universe at work. In that participation there was a glory that shadows everything else.”

  Los Gatos today.

  For Steinbeck, Los Gatos was primarily a tiny, square workroom, six feet on a side, with a cot, gun rack, window, and desk. Detaching himself from the places of his heart—the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Peninsula—may have freed his imagination to merge fully with his new subject, migrant woe, and his new characters, the dispossessed.

  An Engaged Artist

  With the publication of In Dubious Battle in 1936, Steinbeck cemented his reputation as proletarian writer. This label stuck with him throughout the Depression, indeed throughout his career. From the 1930s on, many critics, book reviewers, and a worldwide reading public—certainly those with liberal or socialist leanings—wanted this 1930s spokesman for the plight of working people to continue publishing a certain kind of fiction, novels of social protest. Steinbeck strenuously resisted consistency in his career and would not be placed on a procrustean bed of artistic partisanship. Even when writing his labor trilogy in the last half of the 1930s, he often said that his role was that of the detached observer. The “intent of the book” In Dubious Battle, he wrote his agent, was to present “an unbiased picture.” To his mind, any writer of social commentary must “stand clear”: “I haven’t gone proletarian or anything else,” he wrote to his first biographer, Harry Thornton Moore, in 1936. In Dubious Battle

  is just a story and an attempt to do the thing honestly … [and] to make some kind of pattern out of the half articulate men … I tried to have little sympathy if anything … but if you know enough about any man you like him … I have no position … I am like the doctor—I want to see. One cannot see very much if he looks through the narrow glass of political or economic preconceptions.

  The book remains one of the most searing accounts of a labor strike in American literature and raises the question of workers’ rights—when will field-workers get a fair shake? In spite of his reluctance to be tagged a proletarian writer, Steinbeck is America’s troubadour of the common man and woman.

  The late 1930s found Steinbeck in full-throated outrage. Though he stood a firmly “detached” observer of California’s uneasy labor situation when he moved to Los Gatos, during his four years there he would become the voice for suffering humanity more fully than he likely thought possible. Two years after asserting his detachment, he replied vehemently to an invitation to appear at a local “nonpartisan” forum:

  “Woman at the Dump,” by Dorothea Lange.

  Your card alarms me … I am afraid of that word non-partisan…. The Associated Farmers are non-partisan. In fact, the word non-partisan describes one of two kinds of people: 1. Those who through lack of understanding or interest have not taken a side, and 2. those who use the term to conceal a malevolent partisanship. I am completely partisan. Every effort I can bring to bear is and has been the call of the common working people to the end that they may have what they raise, wear what they weave, use what they produce and in every way and in completeness share in the works of their hands and heads. And the reverse is true. I am actively opposed to
any man or group who, through financial or political control of means of production and distribution, is able to control and dominate the lives of workers. I hope this statement is complete enough so that my position is not equivocal…. I am writing this once formally to put an end to any supposition that I am non-partisan.

  With a world at war against fascism, John Steinbeck waged his campaign in California, using the pen as his weapon of choice.

  Of Mice and Men

  Of Mice and Men, the novella Steinbeck had partially written before moving to Los Gatos, is a partisan novel. George and Lennie hardly have a chance, controlled by ranch owners, scant wages, sexuality—even bus drivers who “Didn’t wanta stop at the ranch gate” and “kicks us out” miles from their destination. George’s angry outburst at the beginning of this novel defines their place on the American landscape: these two are riffraff. The bus driver doesn’t want to be seen carrying such men, invisible American workers. Steinbeck’s partisanship is evident in his ability to make readers see Lennie and George’s huddled stature. Their simple story of friendship, of dreams made and lost, wins hearts. It is, perhaps, the book that makes readers out of more high school students than any other American novel. And it is the book more frequently censored than nearly any other because the brutal language of the working class offends many. Written in an experimental form that Steinbeck created for this story, the “play-novelette,” the text serving as both story and script, the work cracks open the fissure between power and powerlessness at the core of American culture.