A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Like Salinas, Los Gatos is relatively close to the sea, twenty-five miles as the crow flies, but unlike Salinas, Los Gatos is cut off from the sea by the steep Santa Cruz Mountains. Thus, the marine influence that makes Salinas foggy and chilly for much of the summer does not affect Los Gatos. Many have been drawn there by its balmy weather. In 1905, the Lancet, an English medical journal, asserted that Los Gatos had one of the two “most equable climates in the world,” the other being Aswan, Egypt. Visitors came to sanatoriums scattered in the mountains. Horse trails wound through wooded slopes, through manzanita and oak and chaparral, and were used by San Franciscans who had summer homes in the mountains. The climate also drew Jesuits, who built the Sacred Heart Novitiate above the town, planted vineyards on the sunny foothills, and began harvesting fruit in 1888. By the early 1900s, the winery was the largest bonded ecclesiastical winery in the nation. Although Jesuit production ceased in 1985, wines are produced here today by Testarossa Vineyards, using the Jesuits’ stone vaults.

  Gwyn Conger

  Steinbeck met Gwyn Conger in the summer of 1939, when he went to Los Angeles to escape the publicity over The Grapes of Wrath. The attraction was electric and immediate. Nearly twenty years younger than Steinbeck, sensual and fun-loving, Gwyn seemed everything that tough, witty, hard-drinking, and pragmatic Carol was not. Gwyn was “luscious,” said one male friend, feminine, tractable, and witty. She shared John’s romanticism and his sense of the whimsical. When he first met her, she was a lounge singer in Los Angeles with a “very pretty, Irish kind of voice,” her voice teacher noted, but hardly an ambitious performer. Whenever he was in town—or when she spent a few weeks in San Francisco singing for the 1939 World’s Fair—Gwyn found plenty of time to cavort with Steinbeck.

  They married in 1943, and their marriage lasted five years. She proved to be less winsome and tractable than Steinbeck may have wished. When he went overseas as a war correspondent a few months after their marriage, Gwyn, who had not wanted him to leave, refused to write him letters for weeks. After the war, the two sons born to the couple brought tensions—Steinbeck had never been all that certain he wanted children. Gwyn’s temperament rankled—the hardworking Steinbeck complained that she coddled herself, stayed late in bed. He tried to build for himself the perfect soundproof room in his basement and experimented with writing in the dark—signs of a marriage gone awry. Gwyn drank heavily. Her flirtations with other men, and finally her acknowledged infidelity, brought about a split. In the terrible summer of 1948, Gwyn left him.

  Gwyn Conger.

  Gwyn and her mother at Gwyn’s wedding to John.

  ”Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

  When the Steinbecks moved to the area, the town still enjoyed its nineteenth-century prosperity and its strategic location as gateway to the mountains and the coast—gateway as well to the fragile beauty and fecundity of the Santa Clara Valley. A new four-lane highway to Santa Cruz (now Highway 17) was under construction; the grand opening celebration was held in July 1939. The “Suntan Special,” a Southern Pacific rail line connecting the Santa Clara Valley with Santa Cruz, was still running; it closed in 1940 because heavy winter rains caused frequent mud slides on the line. On Cannery Corner, at Santa Cruz Avenue and Saratoga Highway, stood the Hunt Brothers cannery, where clingstone peaches were canned. All over the Santa Clara Valley, apricots were grown, and farmers brought pits to what is now Vasona Park, where the kernels were dried, cracked, and processed and then shipped to European markets for pastry making. The Depression hardly touched the diverse local economy. The Steinbecks came to a town “free from social art dilettantes,” notes a 1936 article in the local paper, “without social art climbers and without the ballyhoo and noise of the most popular centers that use all art as background.” Los Gatos did not aim to be Carmel. It was a moderate sort of place—in climate, culture, building, and economy.

  Steinbeck’s Los Gatos Homes

  Although the town of Los Gatos lightly stamped Steinbeck’s novelistic sensibilities, place did matter in one important sense during those turbulent years of social engagement. He became a landowner. The serenity of his two Los Gatos homesteads countered the intensity of months spent writing The Grapes of Wrath; of imaginatively traveling with “my people,” as he called the migrants; of absorbing the outrage that the published novel sparked around the country. Homesteading—creating a place of rest for a weary gypsy—was a counterpoint to creative intensity.

  On May 16, 1936, a headline in the Los Gatos paper read, “Noted Author to Join Colony Here of Literary Folk.” Even while declaring itself free of “artistic dilettantes,” Los Gatos at the same time burnished its reputation for the sophisticated and discriminating: “The property is definitely not a subdivision,” read the article. “It merely affords a chance for a few select buyers to obtain a few select building sites.” The lot was a wooded hill about a mile from Los Gatos on Greenwood Lane. Secluded, lovely, quiet, it was a writer’s paradise. An eight-foot redwood-stake fence protected his privacy. Steinbeck carved a sign for the gate that read, “Steinbeckia”; he later changed this to read, “Arroyo del Ajo” or “Garlic Gulch,” since Italian neighbors made good wine and pasta. “The new house is fine,” he wrote his agents in the summer of 1936, “built on the plan of an old California ranch house…. It overlooks the Santa Clara Valley and it is hidden in an oak forest.”

  Initially, John and Carol were delighted to escape to their 1.6-acre lot and the 1,452-square-foot house they built on it. The house was snug, only four rooms, one a large living room with a fireplace for entertaining. Interior walls were paneled with hand-rubbed white pine. To play the jazz both of them loved, John had a fine phonographic system installed, built by the same electronic genius who developed a high-fidelity amplifier for Ed’s lab, Pol Verbek. Richard Albee made speaker cabinets that looked, Carol yelped, “like baby coffins.” She draped serapes over chairs, her color scheme the reds and whites of Mexico, where they’d traveled on their first trip out of the state a few months before the move. John’s workroom was “a little tiny room,” he wrote Elizabeth Otis: “Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and little book rack. I like to sleep in the room I work in.”

  The interior of the Greenwood Lane house.

  The Biddle Ranch.

  Yet the Greenwood Lane house, where he completed Of Mice and Men and wrote “The Harvest Gypsies” articles and The Grapes of Wrath, became an uncomfortable skin as he neared completion of the latter novel. He needed to slough it off, as he would slough off so much of his life in the months after finishing The Grapes of Wrath. The process was, however, gradual.

  When the Steinbecks found the Biddle Ranch off the Santa Cruz Highway in August 1938, he declared it “the most beautiful place I have ever seen.” Meanwhile, the novel he was completing took the Joads further into poverty. A little like Faulkner, who restored a southern mansion for himself as his writing deconstructed the Old South, Steinbeck lived, very briefly, in visionary California while he composed a grittier truth. When they moved to the mountain property in October 1938, he described it as “an estate … forty-seven acres and has a big spring,” in a letter to Carlton Sheffield. “It has forest and orchard and pasture and big trees. It is very old—was first taken up in 1847. The old ranch house was built in 1858 I think.” He hired “a staff of servants,” a Japanese gardener and cook and an “Okie boy” handyman because he “needs the money so dreadfully…. You see it really is an estate,” he concluded his letter. It was also home to a one-eyed pig named Connally, a cow, barrels of local wine for visitors to drink, and gardens planted and tended by Carol. They both loved it there—briefly.

  Some of Steinbeck’s letters read as if the Biddle Ranch is, indeed, the land that the Joads imagined California to be:

  It’s a beautiful morning and I am just sitting in it and enjoying it. Everything is ripe now apples, pears, grapes, walnuts. Carol has made pickles, and chutney, canned tomatoes. Prunes and raisins are on the drying trays. The
cellar smells of apples and wine. The madrone berries are ripe and every bird in the country is here—slightly tipsy and very noisy. The frogs are singing about a rain coming but they can be wrong. It’s nice.

  This was where Steinbeck recovered from his exhausting pull to write The Grapes of Wrath in five months. And it was where he met the fury that the book’s publication ignited.

  Book burning in Bakersfield.

  The vitriolic attacks unmoored Steinbeck. “Californians are wrathy over The Grapes of Wrath,” wrote publicist Frank J. Taylor for Forum. “By implication, it brands California farmers with unbelievable cruelty in their dealings with refugees from the ‘dust bowl.’” Meeting in San Francisco, the Associated Farmers considered a ban: “Although the Associated Farmers will not attempt to have the book banned or suppressed, we would not want our women and children to read so vulgar a book,” declared Executive Secretary Harold Pomery. On June 29, 1939, the local newspaper reported “Grapes of Wrath Under Library’s Ban at San Jose.” The paper explained that the book had been “ruled out as unfit for its patrons.” On August 21, the book was “banned from all libraries and schools in Kern County by action of the Board of Supervisors.” It was burned in his hometown of Salinas. “A lie, a damned infernal lie,” foamed Congressman Lyle Boren of Oklahoma on the floor of the senate. It was burned in Bakersfield, Saint Louis, Buffalo. The novel was read as fact, as historical record, and many Oklahomans and Californians went out of their way to prove Steinbeck wrong. Others attacked the book’s “filthy” language.

  Los Gatos Friends

  Although Steinbeck’s Los Gatos friends were not as intimate as his Monterey Peninsula buddies, he and Carol certainly discovered the more intriguing local personalities.

  Perhaps the most eccentric were Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his wife Sara Bard Field, residents of Los Gatos since 1919, who lived at 17533 Old Santa Cruz Highway. The two had moved to the area from Seattle when he was 67, she 37; he left behind fame and fortune, she left behind a Baptist minister husband and her children. Wood’s long career had sparkled: he had been a famous Indian fighter, a friend to Chief Joseph, and a renowned attorney in Seattle. Field was a staunch suffragette and lyric poet of some note. Their concrete mansion above Los Gatos, completed in 1925 for about $100,000, was a monument to his success as well as to their love and shared intellectual interests. He took to wearing a toga, as did she. They entertained guests with plays in their own outdoor amphitheater. Guests could hike on trails with benches strategically placed, carved with Field’s verses. Art graced the estate: sculptures by Benny Bufano and Robert Stackpole, and, most famously, two stone cats by Robert Trent Paine, completed in 1922, which guard the entrance near today’s The Cats Restaurant.

  Wood wrote four books during his time in Los Gatos, dialogues in which God, Satan, and Jesus converse with national and international figures. Many people made their way to the estate to discuss philosophy and liberal politics with him, including Lincoln Steffens, Robinson Jeffers, Fremont Older, William Rose Benét, Yehudi Menuhin, and Clarence Darrow. John and Carol, sometimes with Ed Ricketts in tow, went up to see the celebrated couple occasionally, and Ricketts sent Wood vials of shark’s liver oil to cure his arthritis.

  Charles Erskine Wood.

  Martin Ray was no less formidable in his own way. Opinionated, hardworking, and monomaniacal about fine wines, Ray purchased the Mountain Winery, at 14831 Pierce Road in nearby Saratoga, from Paul Masson and took it on himself to prove to the world that California’s wines could equal those of France. He urged all winemakers in California to do the same, to focus on “fine wines,” not always vin ordinaire. Ray had the manner of a bulldog, which seemed to suit Steinbeck just fine. The Steinbecks went to the Mountain Winery with some regularity during their Los Gatos years, he to drink good wine, enjoy heated conversations, and even work in the fields with his host or help in the winery itself. Carol probably came up with the title for The Grapes of Wrath after a visit to the winery; a card telling his agents of Carol’s suggestion is postmarked Saratoga. In 1958, the winery started hosting a concert series; today it is a popular venue for picnicking and enjoying music in a beautiful setting.

  Carol Steinbeck cavorting with Martin and Elsie Ray. “Steinbeck became interested in how we were doing things here,” Ray wrote a friend in 1940, “not that he knew much about wine but that we are making wines honestly, as they should be made.”

  For a few brief months in 1939, as protests and praise boiled around him, he enjoyed his “estate” and his many visitors—Lon Chaney Jr., Charlie Chaplin, George and Martha Ford, Joseph Henry Jackson, Burgess Meredith, Pare Lorentz, Ed Ricketts, Spencer Tracy—feeling expansive with the freedom money brought. He took flying lessons in Palo Alto, “an escape into something beautiful”; bought twin Packards for himself and Carol; installed a swimming pool; and bought her a star sapphire ring. But the two were arguing more regularly and drinking heavily. The friends whom he invited to the ranch began to irritate him; he called them “Carol’s set.” He felt buffeted from within and without. The land that he had relished so briefly was sold in August 1941.

  Steinbeck at Work

  Steinbeck posed for few photos. He granted few interviews, but here’s how he looked to one reporter: “He was dressed in gray sweatshirt, sailor-like wide bottomed blue jeans, and scarred moccasins…. Steinbeck poured a brown paper full of tobacco, and rolled a cigarette.”

  Steinbeck by the pool he had built for Carol at Biddle Ranch.

  Environs of Los Gatos

  Because the houses that Steinbeck owned are private and remote, it’s advisable to enjoy the town instead. Los Gatos living is California at its best, many claim. It’s one of the most sought-after residential areas in the Santa Clara Valley, largely because houses date to the nineteenth century, as so many houses elsewhere in the valley do not.

  At the corner of Santa Cruz and Main streets was once the Lyndon Hotel, now Lyndon Plaza, where Steinbeck frequently drank with friends—or so the locals who remember Steinbeck claim. Today you can enjoy a pizza or an ice-cream cone at Lyndon Plaza and consider Steinbeck’s preferences.

  At 75 Church Street is a Los Gatos landmark, the Forbes Mill Museum, site of the town’s first mill. On the other side of Main Street, next to the bridge, a splendid walking trail along Los Gatos Creek winds uphill to the Lexington Reservoir—a popular trail for mountain bikers, dogs, runners, and walkers. If you wish to absorb today’s Los Gatos, hike this trail on a balmy Sunday morning, heading to the downtown summer farmers’ market afterward.

  The Lyndon Hotel in the 1920s.

  The road running along the trail, Highway 17, winds to Santa Cruz and meets Highway 1, which runs south to Monterey. Steinbeck took this route when he went back to the peninsula to visit Ed Ricketts and other friends, retreating from the ranch he loved, the wife he would leave, the migrant material, the parties, and the wealth.

  Chapter 10

  Beyond California

  The Lure of Mexico

  A fishing village on the Baja coast—it can be approached only by sea.

  Perhaps California could never have contained restless John Steinbeck. Since his early twenties, he had dreamed of other places: his first trip out of the state was to New York City at age 23; his second was to Mexico City at age 33.

  Mexico long attracted Steinbeck, and from 1935 to 1949 he made repeated trips south—as tourist, as writer, as filmmaker. “There’s an illogic there I need,” he said in 1948, after Ed Ricketts’s death. For Steinbeck, Mexico seemed an objective correlative of his worldview, a place not primitive—a word having uncomfortable connotations—but primary, having a different set of values from those of his own nation, a simpler, seemingly kinder, more generous approach to life. More than a third of his work includes Mexican characters or focuses on Mexican culture—Tortilla Flat, Sea of Cortez, and The Pearl (1947); scripts for The Forgotten Village (1941), A Medal for Benny (1945), and Viva Zapata! (1952); and the short story, “The Miracle of Teh
epac.” He fully embraced the country’s history and culture.

  Steinbeck, circa 1960.

  Steinbeck in Mexico

  Steinbeck absorbed Mexico long before he went there. In Steinbeck’s California, the Spanish/Mexican presence was—and remains—everywhere: in Monterey adobes, in tamales sold in cafés, in a large Mexican-American population; in the lilt of Spanish heard and read; in Spanish place-names: Salinas, Soledad, San Juan Batista, Monterey, Corral de Tierra, the Santa Lucia Mountains, and the Gabilans. Young Steinbeck’s friends, the Wagners, had fled the Mexican revolution to live in Salinas. A sense of the exotic must have clung to things Mexican for young Steinbeck. In The Red Pony, Jody is fascinated with the old paisano’s rapier, a sword of dignity that intrigues Jody as much as does old Gitano himself.

  The idea of Mexico fired Steinbeck’s imagination, but it would take him years to actually visit the country. In 1932, he wrote to his agent Elizabeth Otis that he was going to Mazatlán,

  San Carlos, Sonora

  The Sea of Cortez as it looked to Steinbeck and Ricketts.