Archives for August 2019

Cannery Row, Sea of Cortez Still Making Waves—On Both Sides of the Ocean—in 2019

August 28, 2019 by 5 Comments

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Anticipating the 80th anniversary of John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts’s expedition to the Sea of Cortez, and the 75th anniversary of the publication of Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row, new profiles by or about a pair of writers born in England brilliantly reflect the role played by Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their free-range relationship in marrying literary imagination with marine biology to create modern ecological consciousness.

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“John Steinbeck’s Epic Ocean Voyage Rewrote the Rules of Ecology”—a thoroughly researched and well-written feature by Richard Grant in the September 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine—recounts the 1940 journey that resulted in Sea of Cortez, the 1941 book co-authored by Steinbeck and Ricketts, and the ambitious project to restore The Western Flyer, the boat they used for their “voyage of discovery” to the waters and shores of Baja California. The fact-filled text by Grant, a British journalist based in Mississippi, is creatively complemented by photographs (like the one above) by Ian C. Bates, who lives near Port Townsend, Washington, where work on The Western Flyer continues, with an eye toward relaunch off Cannery Row in 2020.

How Cannery Row Became California

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The British literary naturalist and neurologist Oliver Sacks died from cancer in August of 2015, but the prolific polymath’s debt to Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, and the Steinbeck-Ricketts collaboration is detailed in a pair of books published in the first half of 2019. Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, the “final volume” of essays on life, death, and Planet Earth by Sacks (who published 15 books, including  Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) contains this paragraph about coming to Steinbeck country from Canada in 1960:

I was twenty-seven. I had arrived in North America a few months before and started out by hitchhiking across Canada, then down to California, which I had been in love with since I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in postwar London. California stood for John Muir, Muir Woods, Death Valley, Yosemite, the soaring landscapes of Ansel Adams, the lyrical paintings of Albert Bierstadt. It meant marine biology, Monterey, and “Doc,” the romantic marine biologist figure in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

How Melville and Steinbeck Became Bookends

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By 1982 Sacks had achieved fame as a medical renegade with literary genius for his book Awakenings, a suspenseful history of the set of post-encephalitic parkinsonian patients temporarily unfrozen by experimental L-dopa at the Bronx psychiatric hospital where Sacks worked, not without controversy, after he moved to New York. In 1982 Sacks was accompanied by the American journalist Lawrence Wechsler (at right in photo with Sacks) on a trip home to England for a New Yorker magazine profile of Sacks that never appeared. And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?—Wechsler’s memoir of the 35-year friendship that developed between the two men—records the following exchange, about influences, after a visit with Sacks’s 90-year-old father, a genial general practitioner in London who introduced his four precocious sons early (three became doctors) to the pleasures of science and reading:

Later, conversation with Oliver reverts to his childhood and school years. I ask him what sorts of books captivated him as a youth.
      “Moby-Dick,” he replies, without a moment’s hesitation. “What can you say about Moby-Dick? There’s Shakespeare and there’s Moby-Dick and that’s that.
      “We liked Cannery Row and Sea of Cortez, for the marine biology.” (Funny that, as bookends go: Moby-Dick and Cannery Row.)

Shakespeare, Melville, and marine biology also fired John Steinbeck’s mind. As bookends go, Oliver Sacks and Smithsonian Magazine make splendid specimens of the exultation expected in 2020 around Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, and the marriage of marine biology and literary imagination—on both sides of the Atlantic.

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The Ghost of John Steinbeck Inhabits The Dreamt Land

August 19, 2019 by Leave a Comment

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The spirit of John Steinbeck haunts the world of Mark Arax, the award-winning author and journalist from Fresno, California whose latest work—The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California—continues the investigation of land abuse and human tragedy in California’s Central Valley that began with The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003) and remains, like Steinbeck’s style of dudgeon in The Grapes of Wrath, both detached and intensely personal. A restless son of Fresno’s substantial Armenian community, Arax first reported on Central Valley life for the Los Angeles Times while pursuing the people behind his father’s 1972 murder in the 1996 memoir, In My Father’s Name, that made Fresno feel more like Blue Velvet, the 1986 movie by David Lynch, than The Human Comedy, the 1943 novel by Steinbeck’s contemporary and the Arax family’s neighbor William Saroyan. Like The King of California (co-authored with Times colleague Rick Wartzman), Arax’s third book—West of the West: Dreamers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009)—followed the founding crimes of overbuilding, exploitation, and genocide from their roots in Gold Rush greed to the case of “The Last Okie in Lamont,” the Central Valley town that stimulated Steinbeck’s spleen in The Grapes of Wrath. A splendid sequel to West of the West, The Dreamt Land is Arax’s longest book to date, and—for fans of Steinbeck’s ghost—his finest.

Filed Under: Books, Cultural History Tagged With:

John Steinbeck? Mais oui!

August 14, 2019 by 1 Comment

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As a humorist I’ve learned that the best gags come from listening to people. Recently I broke one of my rules and picked up a couple hitchhiking on U.S. Highway 1, near Carmel, California. It turned out they were French and out to see the world, two things John Steinbeck liked most about life. When I asked them if they had read anything he wrote, the woman said oui! In France we read the raisins of anger! I liked her answer so much I put them up for the night and used the idea for “Life in the Grove,” the weekly cartoon I write for my home town newspaper, the Cedar Street Times.

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Photo of Keith Larson at 2019 Steinbeck Festival by Elayne Azevedo

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With:

Dog Days Dampen Festival

August 9, 2019 by 2 Comments

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One spring morning at Alice’s Dog Park in Pasadena, a few of us dog owners were talking about traveling with your dog when a gentleman in his 80s, named Larry, mentioned Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck, a fellow dog-lover and former Californian. When I got home I ordered the book on Amazon and, a few days later, began reading. Several pages into the opening chapter of Steinbeck’s autumnal road trip story, I called to recommend it to my dog-obsessed mother back in Louisiana. At her local library she learned the state system appeared to have only one copy, which she would have to special-request. When I got to the section on school desegregation in New Orleans, near the end of Steinbeck’s narrative, I understood why.

I’d been assigned to read Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony in high school, and I was familiar with the classic films made from East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, so I knew John Steinbeck was an important writer who created robust settings and raw-hearted characters with whom, for whatever reason, I could easily identify. But I knew little about the causes of the author’s deeply held concern for the undervalued and marginalized, and the fraying of America’s moral fabric. Travels with Charley sparked my curiosity about this side of Steinbeck’s career.

An internet search for the whereabouts of Steinbeck’s custom 1960 GMC pickup truck, the Rocinante, led me to the National Steinbeck Center in his home town of Salinas, located five hours north of Pasadena. I was delighted to discover that the upcoming Steinbeck festival, the center’s annual event, would focus on Travels with Charley, and that attendees would have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to board the Rocinante. The theme of the 2019 festival was dogs, so I bought tickets and drove to Salinas on Saturday, August 3 with my mother, my wife, and three teenagers—our two sons and a neighbor’s—along for the ride.

Travel to Salinas in Search of John Steinbeck

We left early and arrived at 10:00 a.m. expecting crowds of Steinbeck fans, dog lovers, and social justice types, all eager to chat up strangers about Travels with Charley, like my friend Larry. Instead, a handful of early arrivals were milling about as staff members set up for the 10:30 tour of the Rocinante that had piqued my interest in the festival. While we waited I gave our neighbor’s son a rundown on John Steinbeck. The mention of The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden drew a blank stare. The clue about East of Eden—“You know, one of the three movies James Dean made before he died”—caused a response. “Who’s James Dean?”

The Rocinante tour, led by Tom Lorentzen (a.k.a. John Steinbeck), was educational and entertaining, and there was something for everyone on the schedule for the rest of the day: a dog show, a walking tour of downtown, a writers workshop, a scavenger hunt and games for kids, a road trip scene-painting booth, a staged reading of Travels with Charley, a food-and-beverage fundraiser, live music, and more. The highlight for me was author Peter Zheutlin’s talk about writing The Dog Went Over The Mountain—a Travels with Charley-inspired narrative comprised of events and encounters experienced by Zheutlin during his six-week cross-country journey, in a BMW convertible, with his dog Albie.

Unfortunately, none of the crowds for the day’s activities topped 50, and by my count there were no more than 150 people, total, in attendance on August 3, the first full day of the festival. A white poodle—the single entry for the dog show—won Best Charley Lookalike, Best Dressed, and Best Personality. Scheduled for an hour and a half, the canine contest was over in five minutes. The kids games had few players, or none, and the photo booth was quiet. The bookstore looked empty. The food and beer booths, set up to raise money, were also lonely.

I’d read about large crowds at past festivals when I was doing my research, so I wondered what could have caused the drop in this year’s attendance. Was the change in date from early May to the dog days of August at fault, or was it the ticket price of $50-$60 for a festival that used to be free? Could teachers be to blame for declining interest among teenagers (like our neighbor’s son), who never read Steinbeck because he wasn’t assigned? Disappointed by the trip, I headed back to home to Alice’s Dog Park—In Search of John Steinbeck.

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With:

John Steinbeck Inspires Rural Life Poem, Short Story

August 5, 2019 by 1 Comment

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Inspired by his reading of John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, Carter Johnson writes about the universal human condition, man’s relation to nature, and the texture of rural American life in “Dogwood Lullaby,” the collection of poems, essays, and short stories, centered around life in Appalachia, from which these examples are taken.—Ed.

Lore the Scrivener

The pond is dark below the rippling rings,
Where creeps the old and long forgotten Lore,
Who guards the mountain’s dreams under the shore,
A scrivener, noting what the warblers sing.
The civic fish know Lore and nothing more.
They learn the learnless lessons all must glean,
To swim and hunt and do what’s done before,
Beneath their rolling sky of milky green.
Lore keeps a book that counts the fish of God,
That live and die and feed the net of life.
Whose bones will sink into the mud or sod,
As water chases shore with endless strife.
Into this world we throw our hooks and wait,
And watch the ripples of our swallowed bait.

The Young Knights of Elliston

The dull hum of the lawnmower perturbed the evening. It was nearly six, but the July heat refused to relent. It clung to the ground and the trees and the mailbox. Everything was stuck in the clutch of the hot stickiness. Over the last week, there had been no rain, only waves of heat, rolling off the concrete and radiating into the atmosphere. The hot air rose, bounced off heaven, and blew back even hotter the next day.

Mr. Brewer jiggled on his riding mower. He was a big and hairy man. He had thick blonde hair covering his chest and back. You wouldn’t notice the coat from a distance, but when you got closer, the golden fur clung to him like moss on a rock. He was overweight, but his former-football-build held the extra hamburgers in a somewhat acceptable fashion. He had a gold coin on a chain around his neck. The little emblem was mostly concealed by the fur. As his mower spit grass into the street, his belly rattled with every bump. In his left hand, he held a Mountain Dew. With his right, he scratched his stomach. Little pieces of grass would kick up and get caught in the hairy net. He was covered in sweat. He wiped his face with a drenched bandana and stuffed it back into his pocket. He was happy.

As the grass fell under the blade, two shadows moved in the tree line. Only a flash of red could be seen through the dense bushes and tall grass. Mr. Brewer did not see the phantoms. He continued to cut the field with increasingly smaller NASCAR circles. He swatted a few gnats from his brow. The phantoms stalked closer.

Young Tom Sinclair crept barefoot. Tom was thirteen at the time, and his companion, Will, was fourteen. Will’s dark hair made him less visible behind the shrubs. Additionally, he liked to stay hidden behind Tom, who offered protection with his new BB-gun. Tom had green eyes and red hair, inherited from his great grandfather. He was afraid of two things: his older brother and leaving Elliston. The first fear was frequently faced if only to confirm predictions. Tom’s fear of his older brother Reggie was mostly out of respect for ability. It was a fear that prompted escapes from headlocks and mudballs. As he grew older, Tom prodded the bear more frequently and with greater force. Most of the time, Tom left with a scraped knee or a sore arm. Occasionally, he would leave a tearful and defeated antagonist. Yet, some attacks were unprovoked. These were the instances that created Tom’s true fear of Reggie. One night, while Tom was sleeping, Reggie blindfolded, hogtied, and gagged him. He carried Tom to the pig pen and threw him into the mud. When Tom finally wrestled himself free, he stormed into his brother’s room. Full of fury, Tom started throwing punches. Reggie tossed him into the dresser and the two rolled around on the floor. Tom was overmatched. Their father entered the room, concerned about a potential emergency. He quickly recognized the situation. The boys froze. His nightshirt was luminescent with anger. He grounded Reggie for two weeks and gave him extra chores, a soft punishment in Tom’s eyes. Tom got a stern conversation about revenge. It was drawn from the Sermon on the Mount and left Tom confused.

Tom’s second fear was more substantial. He loved his home. He loved the mountains. He loved the streams. It terrified Tom to think about moving away. Tom wanted to roam barefoot forever. Specifically, he wanted to roam with Will. Will followed Tom on every adventure. Whether passing notes in class or trying to get fishing line untangled, the boys were inseparable. When they played knights, Tom was always King Arthur and Will was Sir Lancelot. The roles were fitting, although the boys didn’t know about the end of the story. Plus, Sally Compson wasn’t as alluring as exploring a new trail.

Beneath the cover of the lawnmower’s monosyllabic song, the two boys hid behind a log. Tom’s steadied the BB-gun on a V-shaped branch.

“I don’t know about this.” Will looked over his shoulder into the woods behind them. “We could get in trouble.”

“Shut up, Will. You’re always scared of getting in trouble. It’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad?”

“No.” Tom looked down the sights.

“My Dad will give me the belt for this . . . Tom, are you even listening?” Will punched Tom in the arm. The BB-gun slid from its perch.

Tom punched back. “Geez, Will. Cut that out.” He cleared some leaves and twigs from his seat and placed the weapon back on the branch. “We aren’t going to get in trouble. Calm down.” Tom drew a bead on the albino sasquatch, following the target as the lawnmower carried it away. Tom lowered the BB-gun and wiped his nose. “We have to wait until he makes the turn near us.”

“Tom, I don’t like this.” Will looked over his shoulder again.

“What are you looking at?”

“Just checking.”

“There’s no one out here, Ok? Relax.”

Will rubbed his hands together. “Why can’t we shoot cans? That was fun.”

“Shooting cans is boring. This is . . . heroic.”

“What?”

“It’s saving the children he’ll eat this week.”

Will pushed Tom again.

“Quit it. Child lives are at stake.”

“I’m leaving.” Will stood up.

“Sit down! He’ll see you, stupid.”

Will quickly crouched behind the stump.

“Relax. Quit worrying.” Tom looked over the field. “He’s coming back.”

Mr. Brewer took a long draught of Mountain Dew. His shoulders were turning pink. Tom readied himself. He pressed the butt of the gun into his shoulder and squinted his eyes. Will watched the lawnmower creep forward.

“I’m aiming for the belly. It presents a large target.”

Will couldn’t help but giggle. For a brief moment, the humor bettered his worry. Then, his laughter mixed with his guilty conscience and made him feel worse.

Mr. Brewer made the turn. He was directly perpendicular to the boy’s position. Tom pulled the trigger. A small amount of compressed air propelled the pellet out of the muzzle. Its trajectory was precise and Tom’s aim was true. The BB hit the gelatinous fat three inches to the left of the naval. Mr. Brewer dropped his soda and gave a yelp. He couldn’t hear the BB-gun because of the lawnmower. He jumped off and examined the red welt, protruding from his pasty round stomach. After a cursing fit, he concluded that something stung him. The boys dashed into the woods. Tom grinned. Will couldn’t sleep for a week.

“East of Eden” photograph by David Laws

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Christopher Dickey Asks: Was John Steinbeck a CIA Informant in Paris in 1954?

August 3, 2019 by 1 Comment

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Was John Steinbeck acting as a CIA informant in Paris the summer he wrote the satirical short story for Le Figaro, published in English for the first time in the current issue of The Strand, about a haughty French chef and his hyper-finicky cat? That’s the question raised in a provocative Daily Beast piece by Christopher Dickey, the Daily Beast’s Paris-based world-news editor. Working his way to a firm maybe, Dickey quotes John Steinbeck’s contemporaneous correspondence with his New York agent, Elizabeth Otis, and Thom Steinbeck’s eye witness account—first cited by Brian Kannard in his 2013 book Steinbeck: Citizen Spy—of daily visits to the Steinbeck’s residence at 1 Avenue de Marigny by a man from the U.S. embassy with an attaché case. The son of a famous father, like Thom Steinbeck, Christopher Dickey is a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, France 24, BBC TV, and Al Jazeera.

Filed Under: Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With: