Arts and Letters

John Steinbeck would not have liked this, for I want to speak of the man. "The fact that I have housemaid's knee," he once said to Lewis Gannett, "or fear of yellow gloves has little to do with The Grapes of Wrath." In the late thirties a librarian in the California State Library found the following autobiographical and autobibliographical notes by Steinbeck:

Name: John Ernst Alcibiades Socrates Steinbeck.
Born: Magna Graece, 1902.
Father: Herodotus Xenophon Steinbeck.
Mother: Chloe Mathilde Lopez.
Married: Jo Alfreda Jones, in Tia Juana.
Writings: The Unstrung Harpie. Donohue, 1906.
Taxgiversating Tehabedrous. MacDougall, 1927.
Barnacles. (Ballinadae). Monograph. 2 vols. Stanford University Press.
Bugs, a Critical Study. Morbide Press.

"Biography by its very nature," he said, "must be half fiction. Autobiography is all fiction." In those early days in his happy valley of Salinas, when he was so poor that he could write excitedly to a friend about being able to buy a kerosene stove for his workroom ("warm hands are fine") and when he traded a short story called "The Snake" to a stable that published a strange little sheet in exchange for six months' use of a bay hunter, he was suspicious of success. In his very first book, Cup of Gold, he wrote, perhaps in a shadow thrown by James Branch Cabell, of the sordid reality of what man achieves as opposed to what the boy before him has dreamed. He has Merlin, a Welsh bard, say to the boy Henry Morgan, who has been sent to him for counsel about his dreams of sailing to the Indies to become a buccaneer, "I think I understand. You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man—if only you remain a little child. All the world's great have been little boys who wanted the moon." And though the world envies the grown man's success, "he can only," says Merlin, "realize his true failure."

In the mid-nineteenth century two brothers named Grossteinbeck traveled from a small town near Düsseldorf to Jerusalem, where they met and married two sisters, the Misses Dixon, from Massachusetts. One of the brothers, John Adolf, later migrated to this country and eventually crossed the continent, taking a Florida-born son, John Ernst, with him, and established a flour mill in Hollister, California. In 1890 John Ernst, who became treasurer of Monterey County, married an Ulsterman's daughter, Olive Hamilton, a schoolteacher over the years in Salinas Valley public schools, in Peachtree, in Pleyto, in Big Sur. Their son John was born in 1902.

Salinas was where the boy John Steinbeck found his country and filmed the reels of his dreams. To the east were the Gabilan Mountains, "full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation," as he says on the first page of East of Eden; and to the west the Santa Lucia Mountains, "dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous," the Great Mountains suggesting death in The Red Pony. "The first book that was my own—my very own—" he wrote to C. V. Wicker in a later year, "was the Caxton Morte d'Arthur. I got it when I was nine years old. Over the years I have been more affected by it than by anything else except possibly the King James Version." John and his sister Mary would read passages of Malory together and then act them out. Before setting down The Red Pony, Steinbeck wrote Ben Abrahamson, "I want to recreate a child's world, not of fairies and giants but of colors more clear than they are to adults, of tastes more sharp and of queer heart-breaking feelings that overwhelm children in a moment. I want to put down the way 'afternoon felt'—and the feeling about a bird that sang in a tree in the evening."

Steinbeck later attended Stanford off and on for five years, dropping out from time to time to work in a haberdashery, on ranches, in a road gang, and as a chemist in a sugar-beet factory; and at last he dropped out of college for good.

In the fall of 1925, determined to be a writer, he arrived in New York with three dollars in his pocket, and his brother-in-law E. G. Ainsworth found him a job pushing wheelbarrows of concrete for the construction of the second Madison Square Garden. Later he worked as a reporter for the American but before long lost the job, and he fled home to California by way of the Panama Canal as a deck hand. Even fifteen years later, when the then famous writer went to New York, he went, he said, "as a Saint Anthony to temptation," and as soon as possible, "fled the whore of Babylon with relief and virtuous satisfaction."

In San Francisco, Monterey, Salinas, and Lake Tahoe, where through two winters he worked first as a caretaker of a lodge—he was fired because a tree fell on the building—and then as a laborer in a fish hatchery, he steadily wrote, and at last in 1929 McBride accepted Cup of Gold for publication.

The next year Steinbeck's father gave him a small house in Pacific Grove and a monthly allowance of $25, on which he mostly lived. Also that year Steinbeck met in a dentist's waiting room a man who was to be a close friend and vital influence—Edward Ricketts, the talkative and bibulous owner and operator of a small commercial biological laboratory on the waterfront of Monterey.

Now came to maturity the two strains that were to run through all of John Steinbeck's work: mythic and biological. For myths and legends he drew from the Arthurian cycle—the Holy Grail and the Fisher King; from the Bible—the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the story of Joseph, Exodus, Leviathan, the Passion, the Resurrection, the revolt of the angels; and from various myths of world-birth, city-founding, of dying gods, of Faust, of Troy, of the Virgin Whore. On the biological score he developed, in Ed Ricketts' company, an organismic theory of all life, and so of man. In Sea of Cortez he wrote:

There are colonies of pelagic tunicates which have taken a shape like the finger of a glove. Each member of the colony is an individual animal, but the colony is an animal, not at all like the sum of its individuals. Some of the colonists, girdling the open end, have developed the ability, one against the other, of making a pulsing movement very like muscular action. Others of the colonists collect the food and distribute it, and the outside of the glove is hardened and protected against contact. Here are two animals, and yet the same thing.

He saw the same phenomenon in looser groups, such as schools of fish:

The schools swam, marshaled, and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to direction and depth and speed. There must be some fallacy in our thinking of these fish as individuals. Their functions in the school are in some as yet unknown way as controlled as though the school were one unit. We cannot conceive of this intricacy until we are able to think of the school as an animal itself, reacting with all its cells to stimuli which might perhaps not influence one fish at all. And this larger animal, the school, seems to have a nature and drive and ends of its own.

And so up through the orders; the state is finally seen as but an organism in the larger conglomerate animal, the human kind.

Species are only commas in a sentence… Each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid… And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it.

So it was that Steinbeck—and through his eyes many of his characters—saw wars, unemployment, labor troubles, and mass follies as inherent afflictions and motions of the group animal. This led him to a moral bind—an acknowledgment, on the one hand, of a kind of social Darwinism, which saw the need for aggression, a "strong survival quotient" connected with "cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity"; yet an avowal, too, of a pan-psychic, organismic theory of a humankind-animal dependent for survival upon cooperation, upon "wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility." The worst of it, as he saw it, was that though men could admire the benign, could love Jesus, Augustine, and Socrates, they "would rather be successful than good." "Good qualities," he wrote in Cannery Row, "are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are cornerstones of success."

Steinbeck's early books—To a God Unknown, The Pastures of Heaven, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Grapes of Wrath—celebrated, on balance, the innocent, the better part of man. Colored by myths, romantic in an anti-romantic time, warm, simple, compassionate, and generous (as the better and bigger part of Steinbeck himself was), they led to the great sad irony of his life: that it was precisely this celebration of the good that led to what he saw as the bad, his own success.

When Of Mice and Men opened as a play in New York—it eventually won the Drama Critics' Circle Award—Steinbeck did not even stay for the opening. He bought a car in Detroit and drove to Oklahoma and joined a band of migrant workers on their western push, living with them in their Hoovervilles, working with them in the fields. In the autumn Pascal Covici flew to the coast to talk him out of accepting a six-weeks, thousand-dollar-a-week contract in Hollywood that he wanted so he could give two dollars apiece with his own hand to three thousand migrants. "I must go over into the interior valleys," he wrote his agent; for he wanted to be with, he wanted to be one of, those struggling, suffering, starving migrants. And he did go.

The public response to the book that came from these experiences, The Grapes of Wrath, wrenched John Steinbeck forever out of the privacy of his California workroom. "I'm so busy being a writer," he was soon to cry out, "that I haven't time to write. Ten thousand people have apparently put aside all other affairs to devote themselves to getting me to speak. And I'm so increasingly afraid in crowds that I do not talk comfortably to a pair of dice any more." And he wrote, "Everything the people admires, it destroys."

And so he began to wander, driven by the success he had wanted but had not wanted. He left California, returned to New York, the whore of Babylon. He wrote; he kept on writing; he was in every minute of every day a writer. The story of the ensuing successes, culminating in the most celebrated and enviable one of all, the Nobel Prize, was a story through which the words of the bard Merlin to the boy Morgan constantly reverberated. There were good and happy times, and he wrote, but he never went back to the sundrenched valley of his boyhood dreams. Once John Steinbeck said that all his work was meant to help people understand each other. His better part provided the backbone of his work—a celebration of enduring human virtues and simple human pleasures, and a decrying of the age-old sins. His finest novels, and especially The Grapes of Wrath, will survive because of this strong and generous vision of mankind.