A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Steinbeck’s appreciation for New York City would grow slowly. Becoming an urbanite was “rough,” he admitted in a 1953 essay, “Making of a New Yorker.” And it may be true that the transformation from man of the soil and sea to man of the streets was never quite realized. Certainly the city chastened him on his first trip when he worked as a cub reporter. Returning nearly twenty-five years later, he embraced city life with gusto: “New York is the only city I have ever lived in. It is true I have had apartments in San Francisco, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Paris, and sometimes have stayed for months, but that is a very different thing. As far as homes go, there is only a small California town and New York.” He loved his East 72nd Street house—and the apartment he and Elaine moved to across the street, with its commanding view of the skyline. He loved New York neighborhoods—”villages” really—the city’s energy, its theaters and nights at the “21 Club.”

  During the last eighteen years of his life, Steinbeck was sustained by a solid marriage, money to travel as widely as his restless soul craved, urbane friends, and a little cottage that he and Elaine purchased on the Long Island Sound in Sag Harbor in 1953. Once again he returned to the sea, an essential place of his heart. “One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it,” he writes in Sea of Cortez, “cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long.”

  John IV, Thom, John and Elaine.

  John Steinbeck and his dog Charley, 1961. Photo by Hans Namuth.

  Critic upon critic has asserted that when Steinbeck left California, he abandoned his subject, the rich soil of the Salinas Valley, the fine clear water of Monterey Bay. In truth, he didn’t—he spent much of the 1950s writing about his past. But it also might be said that Steinbeck’s last loop from West Coast to East was to another frontier, a kind of psychic West that sustained and engaged him as fully as had California. In Sag Harbor, he could once again cast down his anchor, throw out his line, dream his dreams, and sing out his prose to the fishes. And in alluring and elusive New York City, married to a Texan, he could relish once again the swirl of a diverse population and soaring concrete cliffs. If his best fiction did not come from this completion of self, some of his boldest and most inventive works did. John Steinbeck, writer to the end, grasped life and art with the full-bodied grip of a westerner.

  Timeline

  1902 — John Steinbeck is born on February 27 in Salinas, a Northern California agricultural town. On his bedroom wall his mother hangs a picture of George Washington so that her only son might “catch” a bit of presidential greatness.

  1919-25 — John enrolls at Stanford University, 100 miles north of Salinas. Away from strict parents and his hometown, John enjoys what Stanford has to offer—freedom, friends, and writing instruction—and, in ROTC training, the opportunity to ride a horse regularly. He drops in and out of university.

  1925 — John hops a freighter to New York City, determined to break into the world of published writers.

  1926-28 — Unpublished, discouraged, and broke, John returns home and finds a job as caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, spending two long winters holed up in a cabin honing his craft. “No, I am not becoming handsomer… My face,” Steinbeck admitted to a college friend, “gets more and more Irish looking, and I have never heard anyone say that the Irish are a handsome race.”

  John Steinbeck as a teenager. He wrote in later years, “You must know that the story cycle of King Arthur and his knights, particularly in the Malory version, has been my passion since my ninth birthday, when I was given a copy of the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ Then my little sister, Mary, and I became knight and squire, and we even used the archaic and obsolete middle English words as a secret language.”

  1929 — Steinbeck’s swashbuckling first novel, Cup of Gold—A Life of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History, is published to scant reviews.

  1930 — John marries Carol Henning of San Jose, a feisty, witty woman and John’s faithful in-house editor during their decade of marriage.

  1931 — With the help of college friends, John finds a New York literary agency, McIntosh & Otis, to help place his fiction. The women running the firm become his lifelong friends.

  1932 — The Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck’s first California fiction, is published. It is a collection of short stories about a meddlesome family who move into what seems an edenic valley.

  1933 — In To a God Unknown, a novel he had wrestled with for years, Steinbeck writes through his metaphysical notions about humans and place, pantheism, and mysticism. Steinbeck’s thinking is profoundly influenced by Joseph Campbell and Robinson Jeffers.

  1935 — With Tortilla Flat, a wry tale about the paisanos of Monterey, Steinbeck hits pay dirt. Using royalty income, John and Carol visit Mexico; he later writes that he feels “related to Spanish people much more than to Anglo-Saxons.”

  1936 — In Dubious Battle, one of the best strike novels of the twentieth century, is published. His growing reputation as a socially engaged writer catches the attention of the editor of the San Francisco News, who sends Steinbeck on a journalistic assignment—to report on the plight of the Okies in California. Steinbeck’s hard-hitting articles, “The Harvest Gypsies,” are published in October.

  1937 — Of Mice and Men, one of Steinbeck’s finest novels, is published to a widely admiring audience. A few months later, on November 23, George Kaufman opens the play Of Mice and Men in New York City. To Kaufman’s disappointment, John never comes East to see the play, which wins the New York Drama Critics Circle award the following year.

  1938 — Steinbeck’s editor, Pascal Covici, brings out a collection of Steinbeck’s short stories for Viking Press, The Long Valley. Viking remains Steinbeck’s publisher for the rest of his career.

  1939 — Viking Press spends more on the publicity campaign for The Grapes of Wrath than for any other book in its history. But, at the height of his fame, lionized and criticized, Steinbeck wants only to escape the publicity. In Los Angeles he meets Gwyn Conger, who will become his second wife four years later.

  1940 — John Steinbeck is a “household name,” declares publicity for two superb films: Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men, released in December 1939, and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, released in January 1940. The Grapes of Wrath is awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

  John escapes to the sea in March 1940 on a voyage of discovery with his wife, Carol, and his friend Edward F. Ricketts.

  Tortilla Flat, a painting by Penny Worthington.

  1941 — Sea of Cortez, cowritten by Steinbeck and Ricketts, is published a few days before Pearl Harbor. Steinbeck’s best work of nonfiction initially receives little notice and less appreciation. The Forgotten Village, a documentary film, is released.

  The Grapes of Wrath was published to worldwide acclaim and controversy in 1939. This is a later Spanish edition.

  Steinbeck depicted writing Sea of Cortez in a painting by Judith Diem. Notice how he holds his pencil; he had such large calluses from spending so much time writing that he had to hold his pencil awkwardly.

  1942 — Steinbeck is passionately committed to helping the war effort. In The Moon Is Down (a book and a play) he imagines what it must be like to live in an occupied northern European village. He is attacked as being unpatriotic and “soft” on Nazis. In November, Bombs Away, a book about training bomber teams, is published.

  1943 — Steinbeck’s divorce from Carol is finalized in March and a few days later he marries Gwyn Conger in New Orleans. Weeks after the wedding, the restless and committed patriot goes overseas as a war correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune, determined to witness action at the front. He wires eighty-six dispatches to newspapers in the United States and London.

  1944 — Son Thom is born on August 2. Steinbeck and Gwyn briefly move back to his home turf, the Monterey Peninsula, where the world-famous author feels out of place: “If I bring good whiskey to a party, I’m elitist; if I bring Dago Red I’m cheap,” he reportedly sa
id. Local business interests give this “communist” writer the cold shoulder.

  1945 — Steinbeck’s nostalgic, humorous, and complex novel about Monterey, Cannery Row, is published. Ricketts writes to a friend that the book was written “as an essay on loneliness.” Steinbeck returns to New York with Gwyn.

  1946 — Son John IV is born on June 12 in New York City. John’s marriage to Gwyn is troubled by her suspected infidelity and her taunts—all untrue—that his younger son is not his own.

  1947 — The Wayward Bus is published. Steinbeck goes to Russia with photographer Robert Capa to interview the people living in postwar Russia—his focus is solidly on people, not politics, he declares. In November The Pearl is published, a parable about temptation and power set in Mexico (released as a film the same year).

  1948 — A Russian Journal is published. This year proves to be one of the writer’s worst. His best friend, Ed Ricketts, dies in May, after being hit by a train. Gwyn and John part ways in August.

  1950 — John releases some of the rancor he feels toward his divorce and fatherhood in his third and final play-novelette, Burning Bright. He marries for the third time, this a happy and stable union with Elaine Anderson Scott, once an assistant stage manager on Broadway. They settle into an apartment on 72nd Street in New York City.

  1952 — Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! is released in March. Steinbeck’s novel about Salinas, East of Eden, is published in September. Steinbeck and Elaine take off for Europe, where they will spend many happy months over the years satisfying his wanderlust and her love of exotic locales. He writes journalistic pieces for various magazines.

  1954 — Sweet Thursday, a frothy sequel to Cannery Row written for the musical theater, is published, a book about “what might have happened” to Ed Ricketts.

  1955 — East of Eden, featuring James Dean in his first starring role, hits the theaters. John and Elaine buy a summerhouse in Sag Harbor, New York, and begin to split their time between that house and their apartment in Manhattan. The musical Pipe Dream by Rodgers and Hammerstein, based on Sweet Thursday, opens on Broadway.

  1957 — The Short Reign of Pippin IV, a satire on French politics, is published. Steinbeck begins research on a beloved project, a modern translation of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. (Never completed, his draft was published posthumously as The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights in 1976.)

  1958 — Once There Was a War, a collection of his war journalism, is published.

  1960 — After fainting spells that signal a weak heart, John plans a trip across America with the poodle Charley as his only companion. Charley is Elaine’s dog, and she urges John to take Charley for protection, to bark for help if he is ill. John tells Elaine that he’s “taking Charley, not Lassie!” Travels with Charley is published in1962.

  John Steinbeck, the year he died.

  1961 — John publishes his twelfth and final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, which is the occasion for his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1962.

  1963 — John, Elaine, and Edward Albee travel with the U.S. State Department to Scandinavia, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

  1966 — Steinbeck’s last book, America and Americans, a jeremiad about the country’s wavering morality, ecological waste, and ethnic distrust, is published. He travels on assignment with Newsday to Vietnam. His admiration for the U.S. soldiers’ dedication and his hatred of communism make many think that he supports the unpopular war—in fact, he has grave doubts about Lyndon Johnson’s policies. “Letters to Alicia” run in papers around the country.

  1968 — John Steinbeck dies of heart failure in New York City, December 20.

  For Further Reading

  Richard Astro, John Steinbeck, and Edward F. Ricketts, The Shaping of a Novelist (University of Minnesota Press, 1973; Hemet, CA: Western Flyer Publishing, 2002).

  Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).

  Jackson J. Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).

  _______, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York: Viking, 1984).

  Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

  Thomas Fensch, Conversations with John Steinbeck (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988).

  Albert Gelpi, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  Harold Gilliam and Ann Gilliam, Creating Carmel: The Enduring Vision (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992).

  Charlotte Cook Hadella, Of Mice and Men: A Kinship of Powerlessness (New York: Twayne, 1995).

  Michael Kenneth Hemp, Cannery Row: The History of Old Ocean View Avenue (Pacific Grove, CA: History Company Publishers, 1986).

  Neal Hotelling, Pebble Beach Golf Links: The Official History (Chelsea, MI, Sleeping Bear Press, 1999).

  Anne Loftis, Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998).

  A. L. “Scrap” Lundy, Real Life on Cannery Row: Real People, Places and Events that Inspired John Steinbeck (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2008).

  Sandy Lydon, Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region (Capitola, CA: Capitola Book Company, 1985).

  _______, The Japanese in the Monterey Bay Region: A Brief History (Capitola, CA: Capitola Book Company, 1997).

  Tom Mangelsdorf, A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (Santa Cruz, CA: Western Tanager Press, 1986).

  Carol McKibben, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey California 1915-1999 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

  Martha K. Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

  Louis Owens, John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

  Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1994).

  Katherine A. Rodger, Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).

  _______, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).

  Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987).

  Carlton Sheffield, Steinbeck: The Good Companion (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 2002).

  Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (New York: Viking Press, 2002).

  Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking Penguin, 1975).

  John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (New York: Viking Press, 1969).

  _______, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, edited by Robert DeMott (New York: Viking Press, 1989).

  Eric Enno Tamm, Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004).

  Jennie Dennis Verardo and Denzil Verardo, Salinas Valley: An Illustrated History (Eugene, OR: Windsor Publications, 1989).

  Franklin Walker, The Seacoast of Bohemia (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith, 1973).

  John Walton, Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001).

  Rick Wartzman, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).

  WPA Guide to the Monterey Peninsula: Compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in Northern California (Stanford, CA: James Ladd Delkin, 1946; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989).

  David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  _______, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997).

  Notes

  Preface

  vii: “he savored … “ Author interview with Elaine Steinbeck, 1998

  vii: “beat the pants … “ in Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson Benson (eds.), America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (New York: Viking, 2002), p 36.

  vii: “a Don-Quixote-ish … “: Elaine Steinbeck to John P. McKnight, 1958, University of Virginia, Folder 6239 V.

  vii: “To the stars … “: Elaine Steinbeck letter, Center for Steinbeck Studies.

  ix: “But it’s also true … “: Shillinglaw and Benson, America and Americans, p. 324.

  ix: “California was, quite simply … “: 1948 Ledger, Pierpont Morgan Library.

  Chapter 1

  3: “the story of this whole valley …”: Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (Life in Letters) (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 73.

  3: “My wish is …”: John Steinbeck (JS), Journal of a Novel (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 61.

  3: D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 4–5.

  4: “On the level vegetable lands …”: JS, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992).

  4: “My country is different …”: JS to Robert O. Ballou, 1933, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (University of Texas).