John Steinbeck – The Master
The first time I drove through California and laid my eyes on the Pacific Ocean, I had one destination–Monterrey Bay–the oceanside harbor and once-upon-a-time canning district immortalized by John Steinbeck.
Cannery Row (1945) is the story of a wayward, wine-drinking vagabond, who takes up residence in the discarded hulk of a boiler, and the generous, learned Doctor, who attends to the sick in their homes. Steinbeck’s descriptions of the old wharf town left an indelible impression. At 20, I vowed that I’d go one day to California and hunt down Steinbeck’s old haunts. I’d be the casual traveler in his novel.
Standing on the doorstep five years later, I knocked on the door of Steinbeck’s old tenement house. The door was locked, but a kind woman saw me looking into the window, so she invited me inside. We spoke at length about Monterrey Bay and how the place had informed his social sensibilities. She gave me a copy of his letters — Journal of a Novel: East of Eden (1969). I promised I’d study his work.
John Steinbeck’s literary success wasn’t a given He was born to middle class German and Irish ancestry, on the Pacific Coast, some distance removed from the agricultural valley that pinned the place setting in Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937). During the summers he’d till earth and plow fields and pick tomatoes, before enrolling in Stanford which he left without a degree. He moved to New York to make it there in literary society. He came back empty-handed.
Steinbeck was a war reporter–in both WWII and Vietnam. By the time of the conflict on the Vietnamese peninsula his political viewes had changed. Some say he turned his back on social liberal principles. To my mind, they had evolved to see the excesses of communism as a great threat to liberty. For supporting the war, he was known as a hawk to his contemporaries. Late in middle age, he traveled across America with his poodle named Charley. Some said he was setting out to dicover America. He wasn’t. He was going to tell it goodbye. For a life-long smoker, A stroke at 59 had heightened his sense of mortality. He’d write East of Eden (1952) for his sons, so they’d know where they come from and what they had meant to him.
A Master is in for the long haul — he published screen plays and novels at length during a publishing history of fifty years. To seek perspectives external to America, he traveled abroad to Mexico and the Soviet Union. About the latter he wrote A Russian Journal (1948). When he accepted the Nobel Prize he’d say, “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” This faith in mankind’s perpetual self-improvement is a virtue of a Master.
The controversy he stoked with businessmen and bankers over the publication of Grapes of Wrath was more than compensated by the equality of assignment he gave to each in his society:
Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.
