New Video from San Jose State University on John Steinbeck: A Writer’s Vision

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San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies continues four decades of distinguished service to scholars, teachers, and students with John Steinbeck: A Writer’s Vision. The recently released video was written by Susan Shillinglaw and produced by the Center’s staff, led by Peter Van Coutren, the Center’s curator. Tracing Steinbeck’s life and work from Salinas, California to New York City and beyond, the 16-minute video uses photographs and recordings from the Center’s extensive collection—as well as voice over designed to sound as old as Steinbeck himself—to summon the period and personality that gave rise to Steinbeck’s greatest fiction. A follow up video is in preparation, about John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and The Grapes of Wrath.

Portrait photos of John Steinbeck by Yousuf Karsh courtesy of the Karsh Foundation.

A Chance Christmas Dinner with John Steinbeck in 1947

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A chance Christmas dinner with John Steinbeck helped set the course of a young man’s life as an adventurer and Pan American pilot who crisscrossed the world many times–and then wrote a book about it. Charles Cutting honored Steinbeck by using the year of their meeting in the title of his book, 1947 Europe from a Duffel Bag. The book, which is available on Amazon, also includes harrowing and insightful experiences as a pilot.

“I was born in Pacific Grove, California, February, 1930,” Cutting writes. “My father as a young man worked down on Cannery Row in Monterey near our home in Pacific Grove. These were the days when the author John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts were well known. Because of this connection, I heard stories of these two men and some of their life and times.”

Cutting’s father, F. Douglass Cutting, had gone through a divorce and died when Charles was 12, Charles’s daughter Susan said. Charles’s grandfather, Francis Cutting–a superb plein air artist and Impressionist of the period–stepped in to help raise Charles. Francis would often take the boy with him when painting scenes along the California coast. The boy would play while the grandfather painted the land and sea around them.

Charles’s favorite location was Point Lobos, now a state reserve south of Carmel, and thought by many to be the inspiration for another writer of note who had connections to the Monterey Peninsula–Robert Louis Stevenson. It has been said that a tale about a hidden treasure at Point Lobos led Stevenson to write Treasure Island. But Charles Cutting mainly remembers it for the time spent there with his artist grandfather. When Francis Cutting relocated his studio from Pacific Grove to Campbell, California, he brought Charles with him.

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“By 1946 I was attending high school in Campbell,” Cutting continued. “My girlfriend in those school days was a friend of one of John Steinbeck’s nieces. Through this connection in 1947 my girlfriend and I were invited for Christmas dinner at the home of Steinbeck’s sister [Beth Ainsworth, who ran a boarding house in Berkeley at the time].

“As it happened, John came in unexpectedly from his reporting job in Europe and joined us for dinner. We had a warm visit and discussion of his just completed life in Europe. I was intrigued with his description of current events and life on the continent.

“One year later, I graduated from high school. After completing a summer of work, I combined my summer’s pay with my life savings for a grand total of $400. I set out to see for myself what John Steinbeck had talked about during that Christmas dinner in 1947.”

So at the age of 18, with his possessions in a duffel bag, Charles Cutting was off to explore a continent still recovering from World War II. That exploration would continue through his long flying career, including tense times, such as this expressed in one of his poems as his jet begins its climb over the Outer Hebrides: “Still our four engines strained upward through the vast blue void/Sharp sudden spasm and this machine becomes a problem child . . . .”

A Chance Encounter with a Masterful Painting

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I met Charles Cutting by accident or, maybe I should say, by way of art. Driving home to Pacific Grove from San Francisco several decades ago, I stopped at the Red Barn weekend flea mart off Highway 101 to stretch my legs. I didn’t expect to find anything of interest; it was late Sunday afternoon and booths had been pretty well picked over. But in a large cardboard box I found an early 20th century oil painting of a cypress tree on dunes against a moody sky, likely painted in Pacific Grove’s Asilomar or at Point Pinos or nearby Pebble Beach. A beautiful painting, it was signed F.H. Cutting. Research showed that F.H. stood for Francis Harvey and that Cutting had exhibited prolifically, including the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Stanford Art Gallery, winning many awards in his lifetime.

Somehow, that led me to Charles Cutting. Or he contacted me when I inquired on the internet after his grandfather. Neither of us remembers exactly how it happened, but we got to know each other and Charles told me the Steinbeck story as well as stories of his career as a Pan Am pilot. Several years later, in 2007, he published 1947 Europe from a Duffel Bag. He once wrote me, “My encounter with Steinbeck was brief on that Christmas in 1947, but it did have an effect on my future life. I never forgot it.”

Photo Inspires Sumi Ink Portrait by Eugene Gregan

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Undated Sumi ink portrait of John Steinbeck by Eugene Gregan

A photograph Thom Steinbeck admired of his father inspired the expressive, high-energy Sumi ink brush painting of John Steinbeck seen here. It’s by the American artist Eugene Gregan and was done in the early 1980s. “Thom showed me the photograph and asked if I would do a drawing from it,” recalls Gregan. “Thom liked the drawing, and that led to a series of Sumi ink portraits.”

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Undated drawing of John Steinbeck by the same artist

Sumi ink is made from natural substances mixed with gelatin and is traditionally used by artists in China and Japan. One of Gregan’s spontaneous ink portraits, this one from life, was of Thom Steinbeck himself. As in the Sumi ink portrait of the elder Steinbeck, it exudes vitality and passion. (Note Thom’s approving inscription in the lower left corner: “Authorized: Thomas Steinbeck.”) Gregan, who knew Elaine Steinbeck but not John, is a student and teacher of Oriental brush painting. The portraits were created, he said, on specially ordered “beautiful handmade paper from China.”

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Gregan’s Sumi ink painting of Thom Steinbeck

Thom Steinbeck may have liked the photograph, the initial drawing, and the Sumi portraits because his father looks ready for battle in all of them, though much more so in the Sumi versions. This Steinbeckian force had already inspired Gregan. “I saw John Steinbeck introduce one of his movies on television a long time ago,” he says. I got more out of that than anything—his presence was monumental. He had that powerful voice and personality. And so did Johnny and Thom.”

Eugene Gregan and the Commune at Lookout Farm

eugene-greganGregan and Steinbeck’s sons, John Ernst Steinbeck IV (whom Gregan refers to as Johnny) and Thomas Myles Steinbeck, were friends for years. Gregan, who is 84, remained close to the brothers from just after the end of the Vietnam War until their deaths. He feels that both participated in the war to please their father. “We all lived in the same commune in the Catskills,” remembers Gregan. “A place we called Lookout Farm. I moved up from Brooklyn. There were a lot of interesting people in the area, including Ram Dass.” Adds Gregan: “Johnny built a sound studio there, and Thom, who was also a talented designer, designed a scale model of the Swiss Family Robinson house for Walt Disney—it was the model for the structure subsequently constructed at Disneyland.”

Energized by communal life, the three friends joined forces to try to make films of John Steinbeck stories. But they soon realized, after knocking on producers’ doors, that the project wouldn’t succeed without name directors or actors backing it. The Steinbeck name alone was not enough. So when Thom wrote a screenplay treatment of The Pearl, he managed to get it to a name director: Steven Spielberg. “The screenplay was absolutely fabulous,’’ Gregan recalls. “Spielberg liked it but said the young boy couldn’t die at the end in the film—typical Spielberg.’’ Thom Steinbeck wasn’t willing to compromise.

Johnny died in 1991, Thom in 2016. Gregan said he and Thom ”closed’’ a lot of New York bars over the years. “He could light up a place with his presence. He was a great story teller.’’

Eugene Gregan studied under Josef Albers and Norman Ives at Yale and taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited internationally. Collectors of his work have included Miles Davis, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Robert Mitchum, Ram Dass, Judd Hirsh, Julie Christie, and Calvin Klein. His home today is not far from the old commune in the mountains. There he continues to paint while work proceeds on a film documentary of his life. His wife Beverly keeps a famously beautiful garden known to inspire poets and painters—including, of course, Gregan. He has a saying: “Invest in beauty. It is a great antidote to fear.” That beauty can include Sumi ink brush paintings of gardens, landscapes, and people—including a couple of expressively energized Steinbecks.

Steinbeck’s History with Guns Post-Uvalde, Texas

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In May of 1942, three years after writing The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wanted to arm himself with a Colt automatic for “self-protection.’’ He was living in New York, and the State of New York said he must get a license—something the recent 18-year old elementary shooter in Uvalde, Texas didn’t have to do.

New York said Steinbeck needed four character witnesses to get his license. It didn’t matter that The Grapes of Wrath had won the Pulitzer Prize, or that its author was famous. And no making things up: each character reference, the state demanded, “must be personally signed.” The actor Burgess Meredith and the artist Henry Varnum Poor added their names to John Steinbeck’s New York application. A veterinarian named Morris Segal and actress Sally Bates Lorentz also signed. Doing so took some courage. Steinbeck wasn’t politically popular, and his character witnesses had their own public careers. Could the Uvalde, Texas killer have found four witnesses to vouch for his 18-year old character?

But New York wasn’t satisfied with willing or even well-known character witnesses. It had another question for John Steinbeck: “Have you ever had a pistol license?” Steinbeck replied that he had, in 1938. Presumably he obtained that license in California. And, came another query, had he ever had a license application disapproved? Steinbeck replied, “No.” Well then, the state continued, had he ever had a gun license revoked or cancelled? “No” again. Steinbeck was then “sworn” that all his statements were true and that “the photo attached hereto was taken within thirty days prior to the date of his application.”

In short, the State of New York in 1942 wanted to know just who in the hell they were allowing to carry a firearm within its borders. Now, 80 years later, should Texas and other states think seriously about doing what New York did then, particularly when it comes to military-style weapons like the ones used to kill 19 schoolchildren and two teachers?

The Winchester Rifle John Steinbeck Gave His First Wife

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I bring this up now because of the Uvalde, Texas massacre and the renewed debate about gun control in America, but also because I am looking at a rifle that John Steinbeck and his wife Carol owned and handled—another indicator that guns were a part of Steinbeck’s life from the 1930s to his death in 1968. The rifle is a Winchester Model 60-22, and Steinbeck gave it to Carol when they were married. Eventually it descended to Carol’s stepdaughter, Sharon Brown Bacon.

“I inherited the Steinbeck rifle from my father, William B. Brown, who was married to Carol Henning (Steinbeck) Brown for many years,” Bacon explains. “Carol, my stepmother, was John Steinbeck’s first wife and predeceased my father,” she continued. “I have always known the rifle to belong to Carol and that she was given it by John after they were married in 1930. At that time they were living in Los Gatos . . . . She used it, in her words, ‘for protection’ while alone there, and later at her home in Carmel Valley.”

Why did Steinbeck feel the need for a gun at all? A woman in Salinas told me years ago that she witnessed a man threatening Steinbeck with a gun in a Salinas park for what he was writing about their town in the run up to The Grapes of Wrath. The woman said she felt traumatized and thought Steinbeck probably did, too. This could be the origin story of the gun license Steinbeck obtained in 1938.

In 1946 and living in New York, Steinbeck wrote to a California friend, a motorcycle cop named George Dovolis, in care of the Monterey Police Department. He asked if Dovolis could ship him a “little thirty-eight,’’ which Steinbeck said he needed “for house protection.” We know Steinbeck had guns stowed away in Monterey or Pacific Grove because he wrote Dovolis, “I am very grateful to you for taking care of my guns while I have been away.” By 1948 Dovolis had transitioned to real estate, and Steinbeck wrote that he wanted to make him a gift of a gun in gratitude for past help.

In 1949 Dovolis, who would go on to found the still-flourishing Boys and Girls Club of Monterey County, returned the favor and shipped “1 box guns’’ to Steinbeck via Railway Express. So until May of that year, at least, guns were still on John Steinbeck’s mind—and about to arrive on his doorstep.

Thankfully, at least as far as we know, they were never used in self-defense. If one of them had been, it’s safe to assume it would have been properly licensed, including the signatures of character witnesses willing to testify that Steinbeck was a person who could be trusted to do the right thing. Perhaps it’s time for character witnesses to be brought back into America’s ongoing gun debate, post-Uvalde.

The Puma Story that Proved John Steinbeck Wasn’t Lyin’

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When John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, Jimmy Costello wrote his obituary for the newspaper that was then called the Monterey Peninsula Herald. Jimmy was the paper’s city editor at the time, so maybe he assigned himself to do the job.

In any case, it was a good choice. Jimmy knew John well. They had been friends. They had taken part together in at least two great adventures, one darkly tinged.

The first—the darkly tinged one—I heard directly from Jimmy. One night, after a drink at Gallatin’s, a restaurant-bar in downtown Monterey just a block or two from the Herald newsroom at that time, we took a walk and passed the old San Carlos Hotel, now gone.

It stirred memories in Jimmy. There was a Monterey party, he recalled, in the early 1930s, and John and his first wife Carol showed up at this party, celebrating something good that had happened with John’s writing. They were in a happy mood, but that changed when a young woman, perhaps impressed by Steinbeck’s growing fame, played up to John at the party. Carol unsurprisingly reacted negatively and began drinking. When she became what John judged as drunk, he found Jimmy and asked him to help take Carol away.

Jimmy agreed, assuming John would take Carol home to the Steinbecks’s Pacific Grove cottage. Instead, John said they would walk Carol to the Hotel San Carlos, get her a room, and let her sleep it off. Jimmy was a short man, 5’6” at most, and Steinbeck was a six-footer. To this day I imagine them supporting Carol while walking her down Calle Principal to the San Carlos, Carol tilting in Jimmy’s direction.

It was late and the hotel lobby was nearly empty, moths circling the lights, remembered Jimmy, who supported Carol while John got a room. Jimmy thought they would take Carol to the room and put her to bed, as John had said, but John had other ideas. After they got Carol onto the elevator, John pressed the room key into her hand, pushed the button for the second floor, then took Jimmy by the arm and, as the elevator doors closed behind them, left with Jimmy to return to the party.

Later Jimmy came back to the hotel alone, found Carol still on the elevator, passed out, and took her up and put her to bed. I can’t recall his saying either way, but I don’t think he went back to the party. Years later he remained perplexed by what happened. He liked Steinbeck very much, but not that night.

Puma Story Has Happier Ending than that Monterey Party

The other John Steinbeck incident involving Jimmy Costello that sticks in my mind was told to me not by Jimmy but by his son, also Jim Costello—historian, writer, school teacher, and former mayor of Pacific Grove. It happened years later, when Steinbeck had moved East and was traveling in Europe and the United Kingdom. After meeting members of the British Royal Navy, Steinbeck learned that the anti-aircraft vessel Puma did not have a mascot—in the case of other frigates, the mounted heads of the big cats the ships were named for. Steinbeck claimed Monterey County had plenty of pumas. If that were true, wouldn’t the Royal Navy rather have a whole stuffed puma than just a head—especially if the stuffed puma were accompanied by a live one?

Like the night of that party, John turned for help to Jimmy, who saw to it that a stuffed puma was found and flown to England, followed soon after by a live specimen picked up in Big Sur, put in a cage, and driven to the airport in the bed of a pickup truck. This led to various adventures and heartbreaking moments—the puma was given a name, Flora—and Jimmy took the cat’s welfare personally, just as he had Carol’s.

Years later, I wrote short stories about both incidents, of course inventing a bit along the way. But Jimmy’s son remembers other Steinbeck anecdotes as well. One involved coming home from Monterey High School one afternoon and finding an imperious-looking French poodle sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring at this kid carrying books coming through the front door. “It was Charley,” Jim recalls. “John was in Monterey researching what would be Travels with Charley. He was sitting at the dining room table with my parents. They were talking and having a good time. Charley seemed perfectly at home.”

Jimmy Costello had talked about writing a book on Steinbeck in retirement. But he was pushed into retirement before he was ready and it broke his heart and he died shortly thereafter. It would probably have been a hell of a book—likely anecdotal—and truthful. Jimmy always told the truth. His wife, Nancy, outlived him by many years and became a local legend. In an old pickup, she would collect food contributed by donors or thrown out by grocery stores, as well as clothing and other necessities, and drive into the Salinas Valley delivering to poor families, usually fieldworkers. Friends and supporters chipped in gas money and helped out with truck repairs. Nancy Costello did her important work almost to the day she died. Maybe this work was inspired in part by John’s writings. She was certainly worthy of one of his stories.

The Monterey Peninsula Herald is now the Monterey County Herald. Jimmy Costello’s son Jim visits Pacific Grove often from his retirement home up in Port Townsend, Washington. There the Western Flyer—the commercial fishing boat that Steinbeck made famous—is being refurbished for its own important work. When it returns to Monterey Bay as a floating ecology classroom, it will be coming home, too.

Archival photograph of Jimmy Costello (left) delivering stuffed puma courtesy Jim Costello.

Steinbeck Review Connects Life of Steinbeck, COVID-19

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Articles by several writers in the Spring 2021 issue of Steinbeck Review, the journal of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars, reconsider the life of Steinbeck from the point of view of a variety of contemporary concerns, including COVID-19. Stanford professor Gavin Jones headlines the issue with “Steinbeck in a Pandemic,” a survey of Steinbeck’s “biopolitical imagination” as seen in three very different works of fiction: The Grapes of Wrath, To a God Unknown, and The Pearl. Debra Cumberland compares “the themes of borders, migration, and displacement” in The Grapes of Wrath with Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, a novel by the 54-year-old German author Jenny Erpenbeck, while Fredrik Tydal “examines the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath in the Armed Services Editions, the book series that provided the American military with reading material during World War II.” Steinbeck’s World War II novella-play The Moon Is Down gets a fresh look from a textual-critical perspective in Tom Barden’s review of Bibliographia Dystopia, Volume I: John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, by Anthony Amelio, and Steinbeck’s “positive impact on Algerian culture” is traced in a timely piece co-authored by Chaker Mohamed Ben Ali and Cecelia Donahue. Other contributors include Susan Shillinglaw, Christopher Seiji Berardino, and Scott Pugh, whose review of William Souder’s life of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, challenges the conclusions of William Ray’s review of Souder’s book in an earlier issue of the journal.

Photo of John Steinbeck courtesy New York Public Library.

The Time of Their Lives: William Saroyan, Steinbeck, and the Dollar Short Story

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It was a time in the mid-1930s. The writer William Saroyan (in undated photo) was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles and, some miles down the road, decided he’d like to visit John Steinbeck in Pacific Grove. So he detoured. Steinbeck was busy writing but broke off to sit and talk with his fellow Californian.

It was a time in the mid-1930s and the writer William Saroyan decided he’d like to visit John Steinbeck.

Neither could know the coincidence and irony of what was coming. In 1940, both men would win the Pulitzer Prize: Steinbeck in literature for The Grapes of Wrath, Saroyan in drama for The Time of Your Life, an alarmingly original treatment of people waiting for something to happen, and a harbinger of plays like Waiting for Godot—except that in Saroyan’s piece something dramatic finally does happen. Really, what were the odds of a couple of guys sitting in a little room in Pacific Grove, California, each simultaneously nabbing a Pulitzer a few years later—though Saroyan would turn his Pulitzer down, saying he did not believe in awards in the arts. Steinbeck would be quoted as saying, “Bill knows what he wants to do and I don’t see that it is anybody’s business.” He said he felt better about his Pulitzer because Saroyan, though rejecting it, got one too.

Steinbeck said he felt better about his Pulitzer Prize because Saroyan, though rejecting it, got one too.

Of course Steinbeck had already shown what he could do, having written Tortilla Flat, his first popular novel—along with the stories later collected in The Long Valley—and likely at work on his 1937 hit, Of Mice and Men. When they met, however, Saroyan was simply the hottest short story author in America, closely identified with California’s Central Valley and the Armenian community around Fresno, much as Steinbeck came to be with the Salinas Valley and the characters around Monterey County. Known for writing quickly, Saroyan believed in spontaneity—which produced frequent masterpieces but also, now and then, a story that might need more work. But Saroyan was Saroyan, and The Time of Your Life, The Human Comedy, and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze would make him famous.

Saroyan was simply the hottest short story author in America, closely identified with California’s Central Valley.

Back in Pacific Grove, Steinbeck said he’d like Saroyan to meet Bruce and Jean Ariss, who lived nearby. Bruce was an artist and Jean was a writer whose novel The Shattered Glass was inspired in part by the Monterey of the 1930s and 1940s. Saroyan followed Steinbeck in his car to the young couple’s home, and the evening went well, with plenty of wine and lots of talk. Recalling the evening some years later, Jean said that eventually Steinbeck decided he had to go home and get back to writing. Jean and Bruce invited Saroyan to stay for more talk and another glass, and they mentioned that they had become involved with a local literary magazine. Saroyan found that interesting and asked for more information.

Back in Pacific Grove, Steinbeck said he’d like Saroyan to meet Bruce and Jean Ariss, and the evening went well.

Finally Saroyan said it was time for him to get going. But as he was leaving he changed his mind about trying to drive all the way to Los Angeles. “You know, it’s gotten late and I’m tired and have had too much wine,” he said. “Is there a hotel or inn nearby?” Bruce and Jean recommended one, then said goodbye to the hottest short story writer in America. The next morning they heard a knock on their door. A red-eyed Saroyan stood holding a thin, wrinkled manuscript—“A short story I just wrote. I hope you like it. That will be one dollar, please. And now I have to be on my way.”

The next morning a red-eyed Saroyan stood holding a thin, wrinkled manuscript. ‘That will be one dollar, please.’

“That was so wonderful of him—a William Saroyan short story for our magazine!” Jean told me many years later. “We loved him forever. John Steinbeck was a good friend, but he would never have done something like that for us.” Jean added that, while Steinbeck took time with his writing, spending too long on a short story might have been considered slothful by Saroyan. I don’t know the title of the story Saroyan wrote that night—if Jean told me I’ve forgotten—and I don’t even know if Bruce and Jean ever published it. But the episode meant enough to Jean to have created an indelible memory.

‘We loved him forever. John Steinbeck was a good friend, but he would never have done something like that for us.’

Saroyan first moved me when I did a scene from his sad and lovely play Hello Out There as a student at Los Angeles City College. In it, a young man passing through a small town is falsely accused of rape and jailed. As citizens gather to lynch him, he gives the jail’s shy and gentle young maid the money to get out of town and start a new life, urging her to leave the building before the lynching party arrives. As she exits, their eyes meet and you realize the young man and timid maid have fallen deeply in love. Then there was the inaugural art exhibit at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, which I co-curated with Patricia Leach more than 20 years ago. The morning after the opening, a young artist named Gailyn McClanahan walked into our Pacific Grove gallery, looked around, and said, “I have to go get my husband—be right back!” Her husband was William Saroyan’s son Aram, a writer, playwright, and poet. How ironic, I thought at the time: Steinbeck last night, Saroyan today.

Gailyn’s husband was Saroyan’s son Aram. How ironic, I thought at the time: Steinbeck last night, Saroyan today.

Nancy and I got to know and like Gailyn and Aram, and I thought of them when President Biden condemned Turkey for the Armenian genocide during World War I. This horror haunted William Saroyan, who expressed his feelings in the brilliant story-essay “Seventy-Thousand Assyrians.” And I knew that Aram could carry a similar heaviness. At dinner some years ago, the topic of the Armenian genocide came up in conversation and Aram seemed to slip into a dark mood. When he excused himself from the table, Gailyn explained that this happened occasionally, that what had haunted the father also haunted the son.

I thought of them when President Biden condemned Turkey for the Armenian genocide during World War I.

The other day I contacted Aram to ask him what his father would have thought about the President’s comments, and I was saddened to learn that Gailyn, like Nancy, had died. Of his father’s response to Biden’s censorship of Turkey, Aram said, “I certainly support your idea about my father’s no doubt very positive response to President Biden’s official recognition—that Ottoman Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians was an act of genocide.” He continued: “Virtually all Armenians, including hybrids like me, were/are deeply heartened by his act, which has been so long in coming.’’

Aram said, ‘I certainly support your idea about my father’s no doubt very positive response to President Biden’s recognition that Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians was an act of genocide.’

More than a century late! But President Biden deserves great credit for articulating what others thought but shrank from saying. Like William Saroyan, John Steinbeck would approve.

Stanford’s Gavin Jones Urges Publication of Steinbeck’s Mystery Novel

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John Steinbeck was a versatile writer whose portfolio includes at least one unpublished novel, Murder at Full Moon, described by the Stanford English professor and Steinbeck scholar Gavin Jones (photo) as a “horror potboiler” that deserves to see the light of day after 90 years because “It’s a whole new Steinbeck—one that predicts Californian noir detective fiction.” According to a May 22 report by Dalya Alberge in The Guardian, Jones has urged Steinbeck’s estate to permit publication of the 1930 manuscript, which Steinbeck submitted under the pen name Peter Pym before achieving success in 1935 with the publication of Tortilla Flat, the work of California fantasy fiction that finally made him famous. “Set in a fictional Californian coastal town [notes Alberge], Murder at Full Moon tells the story of a community gripped by fear after a series of gruesome murders takes place under a full moon. Investigators fear that a supernatural monster has emerged from the nearby marshes. Its characters include a cub reporter, a mysterious man who runs a local gun club and an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective fiction.”

Like John Steinbeck, Nick Taylor Heading for France

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Nick Taylor, the popular San Jose State University English professor and fiction writer who has served as director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies since 2011, recently announced that he will be leaving the position to become resident director of the California State University system’s international programs in Paris and Provence, France. On May 17 Taylor sent the following message to members of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars, the organization which is headquartered at San Jose State:

I am writing to let you know that this summer I will be stepping down as Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center. In my ten years in this role, I have had the privilege of meeting many of you at our international conferences in 2013, 2016, and 2019, and many more via email and phone. I continue to be impressed by the intelligence, creativity, and passion of Steinbeck scholars. I will miss working day-to-day to advance the mission of this vital institution, but I plan to remain on the Editorial Board of Steinbeck Review and to serve on the Advisory Board of the Center.

Two assistant professors at San Jose State will divide Taylor’s duties, which include management of the Steinbeck studies center—located in San Jose’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Library—and the Steinbeck writers’ fellowship program, which is funded by a bequest from the center’s founder, the late San Jose State English professor Martha Heasley Cox.

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Daniel Lanza Rivers

According to the announcement, Daniel Lanza Rivers will become the center’s director, “handling all scholarly and organizational duties, including Steinbeck Review. Daniel has a PhD in Cultural Studies and English from Claremont, an MA from NYU, and a BA from Sonoma State. He came to Steinbeck through his work in the environmental humanities. His current book project examines California’s ‘settler ecologies,’ with chapters on fire, grizzly bears, and other California touchstones. He also publishes on transnational American studies and gender and sexuality studies.”

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Keenan Norris

Keenan Norris will coordinate the Steinbeck Fellows program, which supports emerging talent through stipends, networking, and opportunities to showcase writing. According to the announcement, “Keenan is a novelist and essayist with a PhD in English from UC Riverside and an MFA from Mills College. His second novel, The Confession of Copeland Cane, will be published in June. Keenan has a strong network in the Bay Area writing community and years of mentorship experience. Both he and Daniel have served on the selection committee for the Steinbeck Fellows, so they are well acquainted with the program and its alumni.”

The Novel that Counters and Mirrors The Grapes of Wrath

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The California writer Ruth Comfort Mitchell had no desire for animosity to develop between herself and her Los Gatos neighbor John Steinbeck. To her mind Steinbeck was a “literary lion,” while she called herself a “little Los Gatos wildcat.” But proximity didn’t prevent her from criticizing The Grapes of Wrath when it appeared in 1939, or from responding with a counter-novel of her own the following year. She expressed regret that readers were taking Steinbeck’s migrant story as documented history because she knew better. She felt that Steinbeck’s bleak picture was unfair to Californians, so she did something about it.

Clearly Mitchell was throwing down the gauntlet to Steinbeck when she decided to broaden the conversation by taking an opposing perspective on the problems of the migrants descending on California, and their effect on the state and its citizens. She took it upon herself to get things right in every respect that mattered to her by writing her own book—one that would present an alternate narrative of what happens when political, social, and environmental forces collide. Basing her story on what she had experienced as a native, she titled her counter-novel Of Human Kindness.

Unfortunately, the received wisdom concerning Mitchell that appears in the myriad of books written about Steinbeck is mostly flawed. She is typically described in a few dismissive sentences, or a footnote, as a shallow romantic who was born into wealth—a San Francisco socialite incapable of deep thought or social sympathy. Worst of all, she wrote from a woman’s point of view. She couldn’t possibly have witnessed or understood what the migrants had been through in making the arduous journey from Dust Bowl states like Oklahoma to the Promised Land of California.

“That Ranch Never Provided Me a Set of Shoestrings!”

Born in 1882, Ruth grew up in a modest rented Victorian house on the edge of busy Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her father was a traveling liquor salesman and rarely at home. As an only daughter and older sister to three brothers, she undoubtedly spent a good deal of her time as a teenager helping with domestic duties that included managing mammoth heaps of the family’s laundry two days a week. Though the Mitchells had a “hired girl”—an Irish immigrant whose presence saved them from the shame of having no servants—they were at best middle class. Their neighbors were mostly blue-collar workers plus a few men with white-collar jobs.

Later Ruth’s father, John S. Mitchell, became the manager and then the owner of the Hollenbeck Hotel in Los Angeles. But he had been working since he was 11, and he was 55 when he finally achieved real success. Sanborn Young, the man to whom Ruth was wed on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon when she was 32, escaped to California after a bitter divorce in Illinois. Eventually Young inherited property from his family, and in 1926 he and Ruth bought undeveloped ranch land near Riverdale, in Fresno County. Far from living in the grand manner assumed by her detractors, Ruth was heard to say of this venture, “That ranch in the San Joaquin never provided me with a set of shoestrings!”

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Instead, Mitchell (shown in this undated archival photo) made her own success through a prodigious literary output spanning 40 years and including 16 novels, two exemplary poetry collections, a number of hit vaudeville plays and movie scripts, and countless short stories published in leading magazines of the day. When she died unexpectedly in 1954, at the age of 71, she left an estate valued at more than $300,000. Even her critics admitted that she was a decidedly clever woman who tackled subjects like “flapperdom” in a delightful manner, while also writing sensitive poetry denouncing inhumanity and war to devastating effect.

Like her friends Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Thompson Norris, Ruth Comfort Mitchell attracted an army of readers largely composed of women who loved her because she created female characters they recognized from their own lives. She understood domestic dynamics, and she displayed deep sympathy for the vulnerabilities and challenges faced by women in rural California between the two world wars. Her description of their lives is still interesting to read, and her young heroines—those who could find jobs— struggled to stay afloat in a world that seems incredibly male-centric today. Some of them marry too early and pay the price. Mary Banner, the heroine in Of Human Kindness, is one of these.

Banner is 17 when she marries a rancher named Ed, unaware that she will be living at close quarters with a fierce mother-in-law in a ramshackle house in the unbearably hot San Joaquin Valley. The family’s plight is typical of that of small farmers in the sagging economy of Depression-era California, struggling mightily to survive on an income that usually failed to meet expenses. They made do and did without. Daily life was hard, compounded by problems with pests and weather and cows that had to be milked 365 days a year if they weren’t down with the bloat. Making matters worse, Mary’s daughter elopes with an “Okie-Dokie-Boy” who has been fired by her husband, and her son is led astray by a Communist-inspired school teacher. Ed blames both calamities on Mary and says he regrets that he married her.

“They Reacted Perfectly Normally. They Became Angry.”

Mitchell resented the fact that Steinbeck ignored the travails of small family-farmers like Mary and Ed in his indictment of corporate agriculture in The Grapes of Wrath. Simply put, she knew that he had not told the whole story—and Steinbeck knew it too, as he admitted during a Voice of America radio interview in 1952. When the migrants were dusted out of their farms back east, Steinbeck said, “they met a people who were terrified, for number one, of the depression and were horrified at the idea that great numbers of indigent people were being poured on them, to be taken care of. They could only be taken care of by taxation, taxes were already high, and there wasn’t much money about. They reacted perfectly normally, they became angry.”

Like others at the time, Ruth felt that one of the biggest holes in Steinbeck’s story was its failure to acknowledge the measure of relief that was offered by local authorities to those newly arriving in California. Kern County, the end of the line for many migrants, provided a measure of free health care, supplementing the rations available from the Farm Security Administration. In emergencies, the FSA could also issue money for clothing, gasoline, and medicine. While some migrants refused help from the “damn government,” others gladly accepted what was offered.

At the end of Mitchell’s novel, Mary Banner turns down an opportunity for personal happiness in order to keep her family together. Like Steinbeck’s Ma Joad, who wields a jack handle to prevent the separation of her kinfolk, she sacrifices so that those who survive may endure. Steinbeck’s migrant mother is the heart her family’s story, like the self-sacrificing heroine in Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness. They are equally sympathetic figures, and their similarities, like their differences, are essential to the kind of understanding that Mitchell, like Steinbeck, hoped readers would gain from reading their books.

Anyone with information about Ruth Comfort Mitchell is encouraged to communicate with Peggy Conaway Bergtold at pcon@cruzio.com.