John Steinbeck Haunts Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto

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John Steinbeck shadows the world of Palo Alto like a superannuated ghost. The subtitle of Malcolm Harris’s new nonfiction bestseller—A History of California, Capitalism, and the World—offers the first hint of the haunting, followed by references to the Joads in Harris’s text and criticism of Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam war in a testy footnote. Although Steinbeck rejected Marxist thinking, Harris doesn’t, and Harris’s critique of what Leland Stanford wrought in starting Steinbeck’s alma mater builds on Steinbeck’s version of the school’s spirit in East of Eden, where Aron, restless and unhappy, drops out of Stanford as Steinbeck did in real life.

Image of John Steinbeck IV, his father the author John Steinbeck, and President Lyndon JohnsonHarris’s note on Steinbeck’s non-pacifism about Vietnam is worth quoting, particularly in the context of Ukraine, where pacifism and progressives have parted ways:

Also presumed progressive based on his earlier work, Steinbeck was rabidly pro-war, and he turned himself into a military pundit. He even sent the White House a letter suggesting the Defense Department develop napalm grenades—American boys were already being trained to throw baseballs. He proposed to name the weapon the “Steinbeck super ball.” His letter was forwarded to the Department of Defense.

Malcolm Harris is young. So was John Steinbeck IV when he was presented by his father at the White House before being shipped out to Vietnam 60 years ago. Later the son slammed the father’s hypocrisy about drugs, on display during a 1966 visit, along with the hankering for high-tech weaponry cited by Harris. Unfair to Palo Alto’s superannuated ghost? When Steinbeck was young he might have made the same observation about the man he became.

A Steinbeck Vade Mecum by Steinbeck’s Great Evangelist

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The November 2022 publication of Steinbeck’s Imaginarium was propitious. Its publisher, the University of New Mexico Press, published Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years in 1957, when Steinbeck was still in touch with “Skunkfoot Hill,” his boyhood rival from Salinas, who chaired UNM’s department of anthropology. Its author, Robert DeMott, is Professor Emeritus of American literature and creative writing at Ohio University, and a major force in Steinbeck scholarship; Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is his valedictory to the community and field of study he helped create. Chapter subjects indicate the book’s range and variety (“Half a Century with Steinbeck,” the writing of Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s journals, Steinbeck and fly-fishing). But the subtitle (“Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters”) seriously understates the book’s importance to the future of Steinbeck studies. A deep dive into texts, contexts, and connections, Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is certain to become a vade mecum for serious students of Steinbeck in need of a friendly guide.

John Steinbeck’s Gravitational Pull

DeMott’s preface describes his sense of connection to Steinbeck’s life and writing, and his purpose in pursuing both as the chief work of a 50-year career:

For me, the Matter of Steinbeck—by which I mean not just his writings but the overall body of his work, the allied collection of diverse historical, personal, creative, and intellectual materials that make up his achievement and offered possibilities for sustain investigation into his life and career—was never solely a bloodless investigation into his life and career, nor a way to mark academic time and advancement . . . but an attempt to understand and communicate one writer’s important literary, social, and ecological vision that gathered strength, urgency, and relevance as the years went on. Steinbeck’s gravitational pull got stronger over the decades, not weaker.

steinbecks-imaginariumThe fruits of the author’s passion for the Matter of Steinbeck, in all its forms, have proven to be abundant. They include Steinbeck’s Reading and Steinbeck’s Typewriter, a pair of books that provide helpful lists and important insights into the process of Steinbeck’s reading and writing; After The Grapes of Wrath, a collection of essays with Donald Coers and Paul Ruffin; and critical editions of major works by Steinbeck for Penguin Books and the Library of America: To a God Unknown, Novels and Stories 1932-1937, Novels 1942-1952, The Grapes of Wrath, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962 (with Brian Railsback), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938-1941. Seminars taught and dissertations directed at Ohio University have produced stars like Railsback, founding dean of the honors college at Western Carolina University, and David M. Wrobel, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. DeMott’s directorship of San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Studies Center, early in the center’s development, resulted in the acquisition of one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts, including Steinbeck’s Hermes typewriter. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium builds on this history of scholarly energy, enterprise, and collaboration. But DeMott insists that there is still unfinished Steinbeck business to be done by a new generation. His to-do list for the future includes an unexpurgated edition of Steinbeck’s letters, collected  editions of Steinbeck’s journals and unpublished works, and a volume of Steinbeck iconography and artifacts, like the one on Ernest Hemingway organized by Michael Katakis, Hemingway’s literary executor, in 2018.

Student Scholars in Search of a Mission

But the data provided in DeMott’s survey of conferences devoted to Steinbeck, starting in 1969, raises a troubling issue: the decline in participation, and thus stature, at Steinbeck events. The first such conference, held at the University of Connecticut, celebrated The Grapes of Wrath and featured literary lights like Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, Hyatt Waggoner, Ted Hayashi, Peter Lisca, and Warren French. The Oregon State University conference of 1970, organized by Richard Astro, got the Steinbeck-ecology ball rolling, with Joel Hedgpeth, Jackson Benson, John Ditsky, Robert Morsberger, and Steinbeck’s pal Toby Street in attendance. “Steinbeck Country,” the 1971 conference at San Jose State University, attracted 800 attendees and spurred DeMott’s “fascination for visiting the physical places that inspire literary and artistic works.” Conferences held at San Jose State in 2013, 2016, and 2019 attracted far fewer, despite some effort to encourage student scholars. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium can help rectify this situation if it is taken to heart by this critical audience: young scholars looking for a mission, like Robert DeMott 50 years ago. His reading of Steinbeck texts and contexts—along with detailed notes, lists, and surveys of people, places, and events—provides the necessary information. His personal way of “being in the world” with John Steinbeck—a fellow fisherman, poet, and evangelist for human understanding—should provide the inspiration.

Why Harry Spared Steinbeck

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J.R. Moehringer was worth the million dollars he reportedly received for ghostwriting Spare, Prince Harry’s account of life in the House of Windsor as this generation’s prodigal son. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist knows all about books, and that’s good because Harry doesn’t. A self-styled non-reader, the 38-year-old royal spare asks, on page 13, “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?” Literary allusions abound on the path to page 407, most of them to names or sources—Ecclesiastes, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Ernest Henley—unlikely to have crossed the prince’s prior consciousness. Reviewing Spare for the January 23, 2023 New Yorker magazine, Rebecca Mead praises this “literary artifice,” and the “coherent narrative” created by Moehringer, who “bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon.”

Of Mice and Men and Brothers Who Fight

The American canon was another matter, and Harry approves of John Steinbeck. “The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring,” he recalls on page 49, “was a slender American novel,” Of Mice and Men. “Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator,” he explains. “He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.” But brevity isn’t the only reason Harry singles out Steinbeck. Unlike Who-the-fook-is-William-Faulkner, Steinbeck is found to be writing about the Windsor brothers in his classic novella. “A story about friendship, about brotherhood, it was filled with themes I found relatable,” says Harry. “George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back.” Steinbeck’s story of “two blokes . . . gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations” ends with a bullet in the back of the head, however. Did Harry miss the fratricidal point? For greater clarity, Moehringer might refer him to more Steinbeck: to East of Eden, where Cain almost kills Abel, or to Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s tale of bastardy, murder, and family forgiveness.

(Page numbers are given because Spare has no index. I owe the tip for this post to a literary-minded friend who left Florida about the same time I did, almost 20 years ago. Like Harry, we prefer gadding about California.)

Who Added the “SLUT” to The Grapes of Wrath?

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First, let me say that the recently released facsimile edition of John Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath is stunning. Published by SP books in France, it’s the same size as the original (an oversized journal), printed on fine paper, and boxed. It reproduces all the red editorial comments—including a puzzling addition to Steinbeck’s manuscript: the word “SLUT,” in block-cap letters, on the last page. Who wrote that?

I first learned of the pale red “SLUT” several years ago when I received a call from an archivist at the University of Virginia, where the manuscript is housed. He sent me the scanned image and asked what I thought of the “SLUT” at the end. But I had no idea. Perhaps a rogue scholar scrawled the word as a response to Steinbeck’s controversial closing scene, I suggested. Although I had examined the manuscript when I visited the University of Virginia, where my daughter went to college, I didn’t study it closely. So hearing about “SLUT” came as a surprise.

When the publisher of SP books, Editions des Saints Peres, wrote me last year with questions about the manuscript, I was asked about the final page. I still had no clue as to the origin of “SLUT,” nor did the other Steinbeck scholars I consulted at the time. The publisher reproduced the final page, “SLUT” included, in the facsimile edition that came out this fall.

The October 4, 2021 review of the facsimile edition in The Guardian speculated on the strange appearance of the word at the end of Steinbeck’s manuscript. I received an email from a Swedish scholar, and soon after emails from three other readers—one in Denmark and two in Sweden. All four noted that in Swedish and Danish the word “SLUT” (pronounced sloot) means End. I loved each email, all four adding a bit about the prevalence of “SLUT” in films and books, and what Steinbeck might have known about its meaning when he wrote the novel.

Carol and John Steinbeck Would Have Known the Swedish

carol-john-steinbeck-susan-shillinglawThe late English scholar Roy Simmonds failed to mention the “SLUT” mystery in a long article he wrote on the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath. (Perhaps it didn’t show up in his Xeroxed copy). As I told my email correspondents—and The Guardian, which did a follow-up piece— my guess is that Steinbeck’s wife Carol penciled it, perhaps when she finished typing the manuscript in the fall of 1938, perhaps after the couple’s acrimonious divorce in 1943, perhaps years later, in jest, before she sold the manuscript to a San Francisco book dealer. She and John must have known the meaning of “SLUT” in Swedish: they visited Sweden in 1937 and knew the Swedish artist Bo Beskow, whose mother was a children’s author. Carol loved word play, and the double meaning would have delighted her.

But it’s anyone’s guess.

Composite image of facsimile edition of John Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath courtesy of The Guardian. Cover image of Susan Shillinglaw’s Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage courtesy University of Nevada Press.

 

 

Gavin Jones: Reclaiming John Steinbeck for Our Time

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Another new book on John Steinbeck, the second published by a major press in less than a year, promises to turn the heads and hearts of scholars and fans alike by reassessing Steinbeck’s life and work from a radically contemporary point of view. Like Mad at the World, the widely praised life of Steinbeck written by the Minnesota journalist-biographer William Souder and published by W.W. Norton in 2020, Gavin Jones’s Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2021) seeks to rescue Steinbeck from canonical boredom by rebooting the controversy around an author who infuriated the establishment of his time by refusing to stay in a box of others’ making. Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford University without a degree in 1925 and frequently expressed impatience with academic critics and reviewers who tried to nail him to a particular philosophy, movement, or style. A popular Stanford University English professor with three previous books to his credit, Gavin Jones puts a deep reading of selected works, from Cup of Gold (1929) to Cannery Row (1945), to rigorous use in exploring Steinbeck’s treatment of such subjects as eugenics, racism, disability, and environmental degradation—issues that challenge the future of humanity in our time.

Image of Gavin Jones courtesy Cambridge University Press.

Christopher Hitchens Recalls John Steinbeck on Route 66

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The late, great Christopher Hitchens was both advocate and critic when it came to America. A self-styled Anglo-American best known for his robust defense of USA action in Iraq after 9/11—and for his decidedly un-American defense of atheism as an alternative to any and all religion—the British-born writer and speaker was an astute reader of poetry, politics, history, and fiction, and a powerful voice in defense of authors who combined two or more in their writing, like Orwell, Auden, and Nabokov. References to Steinbeck are relatively rare in the books for which Hitchens, who died in 2011, is best remembered. A passage from “The Ballad of Route 66,” an essay written in Steinbeck’s centennial year of 2002, shows why that’s a shame. Crediting Steinbeck for being the first to call Route 66 “the mother road,” Hitchens makes cross-cultural connections (Marx, Wordsworth) often missed when explaining why The Grapes of Wrath still resonates with readers, 80 years Steinbeck after wrote his fictional (and political) masterpiece:

The title of his 1939 classic—and just try imaging the novel under a different name—comes from the nation’s best-loved Civil War anthem. (It was Steinbeck’s wife Carol who came up with the refulgent idea.) When first published it carried both the verses of Julia Ward Howe and the sheet music on the end-papers in order to fend off accusations of unpatriotic Marxism. But really it succeeded because it contrived to pick up the strain of what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity.”

First published in the November 2002 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, “The Ballad of Route 66” can be found in Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, a collection of lesser-known Hitchens pieces published by Nation Books in 2004.

Photograph of Christopher Hitchens by Christian Witkin courtesy of Basic Books.

Wall Street Journal Review by Sam Sacks Draws Deeply on Life of John Steinbeck

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“Poison Cup of Gold”—the October 1, 2020 Wall Street Journal review of William Souder’s new life of John Steinbeck, by Sam Sacks—further escalated pre-publication enthusiasm for Mad at the World, the first full-length life of John Steinbeck since the biography by Jay Parini 25 years ago. Like other reviews of Souder’s book, Sacks’s Wall Street Journal essay heaps praise on its readable style, copious research, and psychological insight into a born writer at war with himself. “Some writers are content to write nothing until they have something they need to say,” says Sacks, who writes with wit in both senses of the term: “Steinbeck was the opposite.” Unlike other large-circulation reviews, Sacks’s extraordinarily perceptive account of Steinbeck’s career and Souder’s treatment draws on the work of literary scholars like Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson Benson. “Mr. Benson’s monumental 1984 biography, written across 15 years and nearing 1,200 pages, hangs over Mr. Souder’s endeavor,” notes Sacks, who also describes Steinbeck as “a world-class listener” and Travels with Charley as “a collection of stories masquerading as fiction.” The entire essay is worth reading, but a sample must suffice:

It’s common enough to read about authors whose lives are at odds with their work, but has there ever been one so profoundly in conflict with his own personality? Steinbeck is one of America’s few bona fide literary celebrities—perhaps only Twain and Hemingway enjoyed more international renown—yet he was horrified by public exposure and detested his fame, taking every opportunity to undermine it. Two clashing impulses provide the tension in Mr. Souder’s book: Steinbeck’s deep-seated distrust of success and the unyielding creative passion that brought his success about.

Sam Sacks is a literary critic and editor in New York. His literary criticism has appeared in Harper’s, London Review of Books, New Republic, Commentary, Weekly Standard, Prospect, Music and Literature, and The New Yorker. He has written the Fiction Chronicle column for the Wall Street Journal since 2010.

Illustration by Greg Newbold courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Praise for William Souder’s New Life of John Steinbeck from the Washington Post

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Mad at the World, the new life of John Steinbeck by biographer William Souder, continues to attract pre-publication praise, most recently in an October 1 Washington Post review by Alexander J. Kafka, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Describing Souder’s work as “painstakingly researched, psychologically nuanced, unshowy, lucid,” and perfectly fitted in style to its psychologically challenged subject, Kafka speculates that, while “Ernest Hemingway loomed large as a figure of comparison” with John Steinbeck when both writers were alive, “Steinbeck might be considered a more American-centered version of Hemingway” today, almost six decades later. Noting that Steinbeck’s “charming and bogus” 1962 travel book Travels with Charley “masqueraded as reporting but was mostly another reach of [Steinbeck’s] imagination,” the Washington Post review concludes that “Souder, in his own humble style, has brought a deeply human Steinbeck forth in all his flawed, melancholy, brilliant complication.”

nick-taylor-double-switchMad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck will be released by W.W. Norton and Company on October 13. Steinbeck Review subscribers are invited to register for an October 19 reading and conversation with William Souder led by Nicholas Taylor (left), professor of creative writing and director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

New Life of John Steinbeck for a New Age: Book Review

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What is there left to say about the complicated life of John Steinbeck? In a blurb for Jackson Benson’s magisterial 1984 biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck’s friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who became John Kennedy’s ambassador to India, claimed that “There will never be another book like it”—adding, “nor will we need one.” The first half Galbraith’s prediction proved to be accurate. Benson—now 90 and Professor Emeritus of English at San Diego State University—began his 16-year project of research and writing on Steinbeck’s life eight months before Steinbeck’s demise on December 20, 1968. In the aftermath of the author’s death, Benson had direct personal access to scores of Steinbeck’s friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, many of whom were dead by the time the next full-scale life of Steinbeck—John Steinbeck: A Biography, by the Middlebury College professor and poet Jay Parini—appeared in England in 1994 and in America in 1995. With its massive assemblage of meticulously researched primary material, Benson’s ambitious life of John Steinbeck is still the source no serious student of the author can afford to ignore.

With its massive assemblage of meticulously researched primary material, Benson’s ambitious 1984 life of John Steinbeck is still the source no serious student of the author can afford to ignore.

Given the scope, depth, and durability of Benson’s accomplishment—and the persistence of Galbraith’s doubt that another book like it was needed—the question of what’s left to say about Steinbeck, 36 years after the publication of The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, is deserving of an answer. Given the complex, controversial, and consequential character of Steinbeck’s life and reputation, the answer to the question is plenty. The reasons for this are both general to biography-writing and specific to Steinbeck studies. In addition to new material not previously available, newly important details may have been slighted or misinterpreted by previous biographers, and the passage of time typically requires a fresh perspective on familiar facts and old assumptions. Even when details of important events and relationships in a subject’s life story are already well-known—as they are with Steinbeck, thanks to Benson—there is the delight of anticipation in recalling them again in a new rendering, much like looking forward to a favorite passage of music when listening to a familiar piece played by a new performer. New biographers, having the advantage of time, can also address the question—especially thorny in the case of a figure like Steinbeck—of how the subject’s critical and popular reputation has fared through the years. Which works have endured and which have lost their relevance for readers?  What are the major reassessments, if any, of an author’s writing? Finally, there is the matter of accessibility and appeal in an age, like ours, of short attention spans. Benson’s biography of Steinbeck exceeds 1,100 pages. Parini’s is less than half as long. William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck totals 446 pages, revealing much that was unknown, or off limits, to Benson and Parini.

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To its credit, Jay Parini’s life of John Steinbeck included information which was unavailable to Benson or which Benson decided—or was advised—to leave out. Most notable, perhaps, was Parini’s revelation that Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, had an affair, or at least an intense infatuation, with the future mythologist Joseph Campbell. The beginning of the deterioration in the Steinbeck marriage coincided with Campbell’s 1932 move to Monterey, where the young Ivy League graduate became friendly with the Steinbecks, their boon companion Ed Ricketts, and the bohemian circle that gathered regularly at Ricketts’s marine lab on Cannery Row. Parini reports that Carol, at Steinbeck’s insistence, had a botched abortion that required a hysterectomy, further contributing to the breakdown that led to the Steinbecks’ divorce in 1942. Although the biography adds little to our understanding of Steinbeck’s involvement with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam in the 1960s, Parini reflects the tenor of the 1990s by offering a more critical appraisal (Steinbeck “fell hook, line, and sinker for an old-style patriotism”) than Benson did a decade earlier.

To its credit, Jay Parini’s 1994 life of Steinbeck included information which was unavailable to Benson or which Benson decided—or was advised—to leave out.

In keeping with greater gender-sensitivity, Parini is also less forgiving of Steinbeck’s treatment of women in the novels and stories, pointing, for example, to the stale stereotyping of women intruding upon an Edenic male world and contributing to its destruction, as Curley’s wife does in Of Mice and Men—stereotyping that was raising eyebrows even before Parini wrote. Without disparaging Benson, reviewers were generally positive about Parini’s book when it appeared, pointing out its appeal—especially to non-academic readers—and praising its economy, pacing, and novelistic approach to Steinbeck’s life. Despite Galbraith’s assessment of Americans’ reading stamina, it seems likely that more non-specialists have been introduced to Steinbeck through Parini’s short life than through Benson’s longer one—until now. Disproving Galbraith’s claim that no new life of Steinbeck would ever be needed, Mad at the World seems certain to join existing biographies on the bookshelves of present and future Steinbeck fans, especially in America, a country whose history pervades William Souder’s writing, as it did Steinbeck’s.

Despite Galbraith’s assessment, it seems likely that more non-specialists have been introduced to Steinbeck through Parini’s short life than through Benson’s longer one—until now.

pulitzer-prize-finalist-william-souderA 71-year-old resident of rural Minnesota who began his career as a journalist reporting on science for the Minnesota Daily, Souder later wrote for major publications including The Washington Post, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Harper’s. He is the author of three previous books that reflect his interest in science and its intersection with social justice, art, and culture: A Plague of Frogs (2000), Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (2004—one of only two Pulitzer Prize finalists for biography that year), and On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring (2012).

In a 2015 interview with Steinbeck Now Souder explained that he was conducting research on Ed Ricketts for his book about Rachel Carson when John Steinbeck “found” him while he was reading about the 1940 “voyage of discovery” made by Steinbeck and Ricketts to the Sea of Cortez. As he became more familiar with Steinbeck’s life, he was fascinated by the way Steinbeck’s career “cuts right across the headlong march of 20th century American history. . . . [He was] born just after the close of the Victorian era—and he dies a few months before Neil Armstrong steps onto the moon. So that was his material. I was hooked.” Steinbeck was personally attractive as a subject, says Souder, because he was “far from perfect—as a man, a husband, a writer, he had issues. . . .  He had a permanent chip on his shoulder. Some of his work is brilliant and some of it is awful. That’s what you want in a subject—a hero with flaws.” When asked “What does your biography bring to the table?” Souder responded, “My way of telling a story.”

When asked ‘What does your biography bring to the table?’ Souder responded, ‘My way of telling a story.’

a-plague-of-frogsLooking for what was causing grotesque deformities in frogs across areas of the northern United States and southern Canada in the mid-1990s, the investigators in A Plague of Frogs confront not only the challenges of ambiguous and contradictory scientific data, but also the roadblocks thrown up by government agencies fearful of the potential economic impact of their inquiry. As in a Steinbeck novel, the investigators are forced to deal with personal and professional conflicts that further complicate their relationship with power. Souder guides the reader through a maze of technical and scientific detail, evoking landscapes and bureaucratic imbroglios with equal drama and transforming what might have become a tedious head-scratcher into a page-turning “what dunnit.”

under-a-wild-skyIn Under a Wild Sky Souder gives contemporary readers a vivid sense of the pristine beauty of the late 18th and early 19th century American countryside—a world that was already vanishing during Audubon’s lifetime—along with a sense of the challenges of travel and communication in the vast and largely undeveloped American wilderness. Describing the distances between far-flung settlements like Louisville, and the effect of isolation on the domestic lives and the intellectual development of families like the Audubons, Souder helps us understand the lengthy, and to modern minds inexplicable, family separations that characterized the era.

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Souder’s attention to Audubon’s rival—a less accomplished artist whose well-connected friends protected his reputation at Audubon’s expense—serves to fill out Souder’s portrait of a rugged artistic genius determined (like Steinbeck) to do things his way and insisting, despite publishers and other doubters, on doing expensive life-sized color images for his magnum opus, Birds of America. Souder captures the contradictions and conflicts of a man who loved animals but shot them, often dozens at a time; who had no qualms about subjecting his dog Dash to an experiment he knew might prove fatal; who, despite his commitment to scientific inquiry, voiced dubious theories and made absurd claims to a prestigious and surprisingly credulous Scottish scientific society. The most ridiculous was a story about a rattlesnake chasing a squirrel up a tree, keeping pace with it as it leapt frantically from branch to branch, and finally catching and swallowing the exhausted critter.

on-a-farther-shoreOn a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson displays the same gift for psychological insight and dramatic presentation, in this case involving the challenges faced by a doggedly determined yet extremely sensitive scientist working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries during a time of gender inequality, social conformity, and widespread disregard for the dangers of industrial chemicals like DDT applied indiscriminately as pesticides. Rachel Carson was blessed, like John Steinbeck, with a talent for lucid scientific observation rendered in the language of poetry. A woman working in a field dominated by men, she encountered problems peculiar to her situation as an unmarried and unaffiliated agent of social and political change. Like Audubon and like Steinbeck, she was assertive and convincing enough to get her way. In her fashion she defied convention as dramatically as they did, spending the happiest days of her adult life in a long-lasting love affair with a married woman. A masterful blend of empathy and objectivity, Souder’s portrait of Carson foreshadows his psychologically astute treatment of Steinbeck—as an American individualist opposed to those in authority who abuse nature or other people in the name of power or greed.      

A Life-Sized Portrait of a Flawed Hero

salinas-valleyMad at the World opens with a lyrical description of the 90-mile-long coastal California valley between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains where, on February 27, 1902, Steinbeck was born to children of Scots-Irish and English-German immigrants in Salinas, the agricultural town he called home until he left for Stanford in 1919. It is a region remarkable for its sere, rolling hills, rugged mountain vistas, endless fields of lettuce, and pervasive morning fog—in the winter “so dense that you cannot see your feet on the ground,” in the summer a “sea-born fog [that] does not lie still on the land, but seeps over the folded hillsides, rising and falling along the river bottom.” It is country with a storied past, where nomadic Indians ranged for millennia before Spanish explorers arrived, early in the 17th century, in the name of their Christ and their King. When they reached the Salinas Valley they were unimpressed, reporting that its soil was “poor,” its pastures “scant,” and its footing “treacherous.” This proved to be a serious misapprehension about a land where later settlers said “almost anything would grow”—and where generations of agricultural wealth created the power structure Steinbeck complained about, often bitterly, in his writing.

Mad at the World opens with a lyrical description of the 90-mile-long coastal California valley between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains.

Many of the details of Steinbeck’s childhood are unusual, and Souder parses them carefully, peeling away layers of appearance to reveal how misleading mere facts can be. In his senior year of high school Steinbeck acted in a school play, served as associate editor of the yearbook, ran track, made the basketball team, and became class president. Despite the image of a popular all-American boy suggested by the official record, Steinbeck’s friends from that time remember him as shy, reclusive, and withdrawn. As Souder notes, his election as class president “astonished everyone,” and he never actually played in a basketball game. In fact, he “didn’t like going to ballgames.”

Many of the details of Steinbeck’s childhood are unusual, and Souder parses them carefully.

In his judicious selection of telling details, Souder benefits not only from his own research but also from Steinbeck scholarship in the quarter-century since Parini’s biography. Two books published in the last decade—Susan Shillinglaw’s insightful Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (2013) and former investigative reporter Bill Steigerwald’s incendiary Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley (2012)—have special bearing on Souder’s reassessment of Steinbeck’s character. Shillinglaw’s study suggests that Carol and John’s lives were even more transgressive and untraditional than previously thought—a view that also emerges in Souder’s portrait. Biographers are allowed to judge, and Souder seems at times to admit being disturbed by Steinbeck’s behavior. He reports “disconcertingly” on the sexual braggadocio regarding Steinbeck’s relations with Carol that Steinbeck employed in his letters to Kate Beswick, a friend and lover from Stanford days. Souder’s response to Steinbeck’s writing to Beswick that his looks were getting worse, but that “my body just now is nearly perfect” is—uncharacteristically—to throw up his hands. “Why Steinbeck kept telling Beswick things like this can’t be explained in any way that makes sense,” writes Souder. “It was simply in his nature.” One thing that can be explained by “things like this” is why Steinbeck didn’t want biographers “mucking around” in his personal life.

Biographers are allowed to judge, and Souder seems at times to admit being disturbed by Steinbeck’s behavior.

It is unlikely that some of the personal details revealed here could have been published earlier—certainly not by Benson and probably not by Parini—even if they were known. Mad at the World is the first major Steinbeck biography published since the death of two surviving members of the Steinbeck family: Steinbeck’s widow Elaine, who died in 2003, and his son Thomas, who died in 2016. Among other disturbing particulars, Souder reports that “Steinbeck forced [Steinbeck’s second wife, Gwyn] to have a number of abortions and had not wanted her to have John IV,” his other son; that John IV at age five got so drunk on champagne at a New Year’s Eve party that he blacked out and woke up the next day “in a little ring of vomit”; and that in his mid-teens John IV “loaded his .22 rifle and held it to the head of one of Gwyn’s boyfriends as they lay drunkenly asleep.” These are the kind of sordid and potentially hurtful details that Jackson Benson removed from the manuscript of his 16-years-in-the making biography, publication of which stalled while lawyers wrangled over objections and possible grounds for litigation raised with Viking Press, which in turn pressured Benson, who vented in his 1988 book Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, an account of the interference he encountered in the process of writing the biography that others—not he—claimed was “authorized” by Steinbeck’s family. Benson was understandably embittered by last-minute objections to events which were both true in the telling and, he believed, essential to a full understanding of just how low a point Steinbeck’s life had reached when they occurred.

It is unlikely that some of the personal details revealed here could have been published earlier—certainly not by Benson and probably not by Parini—even if they were known.

Souder devotes two full pages to facts about the writing of Travels with Charley discovered by Bill Steigerwald and revealed in Dogging Steinbeck. In the course of retracing Steinbeck’s 1960 road trip “In Search of America,” Steigerwald demonstrates pretty convincingly that at the very least Travels with Charley is not the nonfictional travel journal that it originally claimed to be. For example, he concludes that in fact Steinbeck “rarely camped in Rocinante, preferring comfortable motels, cozy country inns, and the occasional five-star hotel.” Moreover, he says that for 45 of Steinbeck’s 75 days on the road his wife Elaine accompanied him—decidedly not the impression a reader is left with by Travels with Charley. More troubling for Souder are Steigerwald’s suspicions, mostly buttressed by evidence, that conversations Steinbeck claimed he had with people he supposedly met at key points in the narrative were created from whole cloth—nicely woven, but fabricated from Steinbeck’s imagination.

Souder devotes two full pages to facts about the writing of Travels with Charley discovered by Bill Steigerwald and revealed in Dogging Steinbeck.

Perhaps with Steigerwald’s findings in mind, Souder gives more emphasis than Benson to the claim made by Steinbeck in another work of nonfiction, Sea of Cortez, that, while aboard their research vessel The Western Flyer, Ed Ricketts delivered a monologue on Easter morning which Steinbeck later inserted into Sea of Cortez as the “Easter Sermon.” Benson’s account of the “sermon” quotes a letter Steinbeck and Ricketts sent to Viking to explain the nature of their collaboration on the book they were co-authoring. The letter mentions matter-of-factly that “in one case [in Sea of Cortez] a large section was lifted verbatim from another unpublished work [an essay by Ricketts on nonteleological thinking].” Benson explains that the reference being made is to the “Easter Sermon.” Souder is blunter, calling Steinbeck out for making up facts to suit a fiction by noting that “there was no Easter Sunday Sermon. . . . Steinbeck invented this session, inspired by an unpublished essay by Ricketts on the subject of nonteleological thinking.” He questions other Steinbeck “inventions” as well, though usually in a spirit of sympathy for the creative types who do such things, and with the understanding that Steinbeck naturally inclined toward tall-tale prevarication and embroidery, often but not always in jest.  Writers of fiction do, of course “invent things,” but Souder defends Steigerwald, a fellow journalist, by insisting that the author of Dogging Steinbeck “could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.” His vindication of Steigerwald’s work notes that it mattered enough to Viking’s parent company, Penguin Group, to call for a caveat in Jay Parini’s introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Travels with Charley: Steinbeck “took liberties with the facts,” admitted Parini, and his book of nonfiction was “’true’ only in the way that a well-crafted novel is true.”

Perhaps with Steigerwald’s findings in mind, Souder gives more emphasis than Benson to a claim made by Steinbeck in another work of nonfiction, Sea of Cortez.

The economy of Souder’s biography in comparison with the books of Benson and Parini has another advantage: dramatic details of character and behavior stand in starker relief when they aren’t crowded by a plethora of other data, however engaging to specialists or essential to scholars of Steinbeck’s life and times. This is not to suggest that Souder is less than scholarly, or that his research was less than thorough. The helpful notes he provides for the 16 chapters in his book span 48 pages, and his index takes up another 15. His acknowledgement of sources is meticulous, his skepticism about received wisdom is healthy, and his interpretations and assessments of Steinbeck’s writings, where given, are sound. Unlike Benson and Parini, he includes a list of works cited—a scholarly desideratum inexplicably missing from their biographies of John Steinbeck.

Dramatic details of character and behavior stand in starker relief when they aren’t crowded by a plethora of other data, however engaging to specialists.

Souder’s treatment of Steinbeck’s character and conduct is sympathetic but not sugar-coated; admiring, but assuredly not adulatory. The portrait that emerges is that of a young boy raised in a proper post-Victorian household, a young church-going Episcopalian who loved his home but remained stubbornly unconventional, even when he behaved. A boy who loved nature and animals but remained aloof from his peers, few of whom could claim to have known him very well. A boy who, in the parlance of the day, would have been called peculiar; a self-styled outcast who preferred the company of other outsiders. A boy with an inner intensity betrayed by a “piercing gaze . . . [which] set him apart even more.” (In a 1981 interview with this reviewer, Steinbeck’s friend Bo Beskow, the renowned Swedish artist who painted three portraits of Steinbeck between 1937 and 1957, recalled his eyes as his most arresting feature.) The well-behaved albeit strange boy with the bright blue eyes developed into a young man whose bohemianism would put the Sixties to shame—a highly successful yet deeply troubled writer whose personal life was frequently in disarray; a deeply sensitive man who could be highly insensitive to others, including family and friends, beset with debilitating self-doubt and afflicted by celebrity which, like Kino’s pearl, proved both a blessing and a curse.

Souder’s treatment of Steinbeck’s character and conduct is sympathetic but not sugar-coated; admiring, but assuredly not adulatory.

Still, Souder’s emphasis on the virtues that attracted him to Steinbeck goes far in explaining why this “hero with flaws” remains more relevant than ever for audiences familiar with the vocabulary and values of environmentalism, equality, and the other causes espoused by Steinbeck in his life and writing. Among those virtues is the sheer variety of Steinbeck’s interests. More than any other major writer of fiction in English in the middle third of the 20th century, Steinbeck made science a pursuit and a cause—one that closely aligned with his phalanx theory of human behavior, developed by analogy with the behavior that he and Ed Ricketts observed in the intertidal organisms they collected and celebrated in the course of their collaboration. Their proto-ecology was prescient, anticipating by two decades the courageous pioneer who gave birth to the modern environmental movement—Rachel Carson. Thanks to their biographer, William Souder, Steinbeck and Carson can be seen as reverse images of one another: Steinbeck the professional writer with a serious interest in science, Carson the professional scientist with a gift for writing that made her a model of graceful style for generations of students versed in the profound simplicity of Silent Spring and Of Mice and Men.

Souder’s emphasis on the virtues that attracted him to Steinbeck goes far in explaining why this ‘hero with flaws’ remains more relevant than ever.

Steinbeck’s anger at social, environmental, and economic injustice resonates with fresh force in the age of COVID-19. As Souder notes in his splendid concluding chapter, a number of Steinbeck’s works are still very much alive today, thanks to their relevance and readability. The creation of memorable characters may be the single most important legacy any storyteller can leave. Whether Steinbeck deserves to be ranked in the company of Dickens, Twain, and Faulkner is a question of individual taste and perception. But like Pickwick, Tom Sawyer, and the Compson clan, Steinbeck’s characters have had a life of their own, beyond the pages of Cannery Row or The Grapes of Wrath. They have survived for the better part of a century and their health remains robust.

Steinbeck’s anger at social, environmental, and economic injustice resonates with fresh force in the age of COVID-19.

Mad at the World is a more than an addendum to the Steinbeck story, challenging Galbraith’s claim that nothing need be written or read after Benson with regard to the life and adventures of John Steinbeck, writer. A brisk and engaging account by a highly-regarded biographer whose estimation of Steinbeck’s importance a half-century after his death is itself testimony to his durability as a writer of fiction and critic of our world. Readers unfamiliar with Steinbeck’s story will come away from Souder’s rendering with a forceful first impression. Those who feel they already know the story well enough can anticipate the pleasure of traveling down a newly-opened road through one’s home town: the general landscape is familiar, but the perspective is novel and the trip its own reward.

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck will be released by W.W. Norton and Company on October 13.—Ed.

The Truth Behind Travels with Charley: “It’s More Like a Painting” Than a Snapshot

travels-with-charley-fremont-peak

Did John Steinbeck foreshadow the genre-bending literary movements now known as New Journalism and creative nonfiction when he wrote Travels with Charley, his semi-fictional account of the road trip he and his dog Charley took “In Search of America” in the fall of 1960? Published in 1962 as a book of travel, Steinbeck’s carefully crafted narrative resonated with mid-century readers who may or may not have felt differently if they had known Steinbeck was manipulating chronology and making up characters and conversations, like a novelist, to move his audience and fit his message.

When I first read Travels with Charley I had my doubts about several episodes in the book.

When I first read Travels with Charley, half a century after it was written, I had my doubts about several episodes in the book—encounters with Sunday preachers, Shakespearean actors, straight fathers and gay sons, Southerners with neatly divided views on race—that seemed uncharacteristically wooden for Steinbeck, too conveniently timed and too clearly contrived to prove the author’s point about the moral condition of America at the tail end of the Eisenhower era. By this time I was a frequent user of Jackson Benson’s magisterial biography, The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, but I hadn’t read Bill Steigerwald’s exposé, Dogging Steinbeck, and I didn’t become concerned with the choices Steinbeck made in Travels with Charley until I started my own research into the choices he confronted when he undertook the subject of religion in his writing.

Having failed to find the John Knox church in Vermont that Steinbeck says he attended, I turned for help to Dogging Steinbeck.

In 2014, having failed to find the John Knox church in Vermont that Steinbeck says he attended in Travels with Charley, I turned for help to Dogging Steinbeck and learned that, like other scenes, the churchgoing episode with the fire-and-brimstone preacher was a likely fabrication designed to further the persona and purpose Steinbeck set out to advance in his book. Steigerwald, a veteran Pittsburgh journalist, had retraced Steinbeck’s 10,000-mile road trip as faithfully as possible in 2010 for an online newspaper series and discovered proof that Travels with Charley was heavily fictionalized. Though the New York Times praised Steigerwald on its editorial page for blowing the literary whistle on Steinbeck’s iconic road book, he caught grief from scholars and fans alike when Dogging Steinbeck came out in 2012. But as the journalist and author William Souder notes in Mad at the World, the new life of Steinbeck scheduled for publication in October, “Steigerwald could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.”

Recently I caught grief of my own from a conscientious reader for appropriating the term creative nonfiction in a post about the sequel, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost.

Recently I caught grief of my own from a conscientious reader for appropriating the term creative nonfiction in a post about Steigerwald’s new e-book sequel, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost. I turned to Steigerwald and Souder for their advice on the subject, and both replied.

Bill Souder and Bill Steigerwald on a Sensitive Subject

Explained Souder, a literary expert whose 2004 biography of John James Audubon was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize: “The term ‘creative nonfiction’ has been muddied up in recent years, mainly, I think, by memoirists. But being the old school stick-in-the-mud that I am, I prefer the original definition: Creative nonfiction = The truth, well told. By that light, ‘creative’ does not nullify ‘nonfiction.’ It’s not a license to invent.

Creative nonfiction has roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Creative nonfiction has roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, et al made their reporting more dynamic and engaging by using the narrative and descriptive techniques of fiction writing . . . including, in many cases, becoming their own first-person narrators. But they didn’t make up what happened. They only made it more interesting. One of the archetypes of the genre is Capote’s In Cold Blood, a true story that reads like a thriller.

Travels with Charley is an inventive, incisive essay on America that, because Steinbeck made some of it up, can’t really be called a snapshot.

“I don’t think your readers will mind the term as you deploy it here, but if it were my call I’d use something different. Travels with Charley is an inventive, incisive essay on America that, because Steinbeck made some of it up, can’t really be called a snapshot. It’s more like a painting.”

I agree about creative fiction being ‘truth, well told.’ It’s really how I used to think of newspaper/magazine journalism.

Adds Steigerwald, a contrarian reporter with a libertarian perspective on Steinbeck’s politics: “I agree about creative nonfiction being ‘truth, well told.’ It’s really what I used to think was the purpose of newspaper/magazine journalism—presenting/deploying important or interesting facts in an entertaining, informative, fair-and-balanced narrative way without distorting the truth. The difficulty is/was that too many newspaper proles in my era—at the Los Angeles Times and two Pittsburgh dailies from 1977 to 2009—were better at gathering facts than presenting them in an interesting way on paper. Or the writers/reporters were too politically or culturally biased, deliberately or without even knowing it, to be able to stick to the ‘truth’ and balance of their story while they performed their creative tricks.”

Email your idea for a post of your own about the truth or falsity of creative nonfiction. It’s a surprisingly sensitive subject.

I can’t improve on either summary, but you’re invited to try. If you’re a protective fan of Steinbeck’s writing with something to say about the foreshadowing of New Journalism in Travels with Charley, please leave a comment on this post. Or email your idea for a post of your own about the truth or falsity of creative nonfiction. It’s a surprisingly sensitive subject.