John Steinbeck Explains Marco Rubio on Global Warming in Sea of Cortez

May 16, 2014 by 6 Comments

Image of Marco Rubio live on ABC

This week the issue of global warming caused embarrassing problems for Marco Rubio as the Republican Senator from Miami rolled out his unofficial entry into the 2016 presidential race. Sorry, but I couldn’t help noticing. Although I am not a Republican and no longer live in Florida, I once owned a home on the Intracoastal Waterway near Palm Beach. During hurricanes, our little beach disappeared along with half of our yard. A two-foot sea rise will leave storm water at the new owner’s front door. Another two feet will make the house, along with thousands of other coastal homes, uninhabitable. So I’ve been scratching my head over the confused case Marco Rubio tried to articulate for doing nothing to mitigate global warming—an odd position for any elected official from South Florida to take. Oops! There goes Miami Beach!

I’ve been scratching my head over the confused case Marco Rubio tried to articulate for doing nothing to mitigate global warming. Oops! There goes Miami Beach!

As usual, John Steinbeck helped me think. Because his science book Sea of Cortez is also political and philosophical, I turned to the writer’s “Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research” in the Gulf of California to help me understand politicians like Marco Rubio who (1) deride global warming data, (2) deny that fossil-fuel use is a factor, or (3) insist that it’s too late to turn back, so what the hell! During the course of speeches and interviews in New Hampshire and elsewhere, Marco Rubio denied global warming so often and so recklessly that he became the butt of a Wednesday night Stephen Colbert Show “F*ck It!” segment. What part of Rubio’s brain shut down when he opened his campaign for president? Three observations made by John Steinbeck on the biology of belief and behavior in Chapter 14 of Sea of Cortez provided clarity, but little comfort, about Marco Rubio’s recent statements regarding global warming. Hold the applause. They are nothing to laugh about.

1. Forget simplistic causation. Find provable relationships and prepare for complexity.

Sea of Cortez starts with first principles. From microbes to mankind, variation in nature is a universal principle; causative relationships are complex and outcomes aren’t always predictable. But worldwide climate disruption is a particularly violent variation with measurable relationships and very clear consequences. Denying the significance of man-made carbon emissions in accelerating global warming by implying, as Marco Rubio and others do, that . . . well, shit happens . . . is like letting a drunk drive on the theory that other things can go wrong too, so what’s the big deal? Ignition failure, bad brakes, lousy weather, all contribute to accidents on the road. But driving while drunk, like loading the atmosphere with pollutants, foolishly increases the severity and consequences of co-contributing factors.

Driving while drunk, like loading the atmosphere with pollutants, foolishly increases the severity and consequences of co-contributing factors.

“Sometimes,” John Steinbeck would have agreed, “shit just happens.” But try taking that excuse to court and see what happens there—if you survive the wreck you caused. Steinbeck was a Darwinian who tried not to judge, but deadly driving while drunk has been described by those who are less forgiving as a form of natural self-selection for stupid individuals. Unlike solitary drinking, however, global warming denial is a social disease. Following the dimwitted herd of reality-deniers, like lemmings, over the looming climate cliff? That takes systematic self-delusion and self-styled leaders like Marco Rubio. How do they operate? John Steinbeck had a theory.

2. Reality-denial is a form of adolescent wish-fulfillment. It’s most dangerous in a mob motivated by a self-appointed leader.

Sea of Cortez—co-authored with Steinbeck’s friend and collaborator, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts—develops many of the ideas Steinbeck expressed in the fiction he wrote before 1940. His 1936 novel In Dubious Battle, for example, dramatized the murderous behavior of opposing mobs, behavior worse than anything within the capacity of their individual constituents. Steinbeck’s characterization of politically-driven leaders like Mac, the novel’s Communist labor-organizer, is particularly disturbing, even today. Sea of Cortez develops both of these core ideas—the behavior of mob members and the psychology of mob leaders—using biological terms that help explain Marco Rubio and his position on global warming.

Sea of Cortez develops both of these core ideas—the behavior of mob members and the psychology of mob leaders—using biological terms that help explain Marco Rubio and his position on global warming.

Like Steinbeck’s metaphorical ameba in Sea of Cortez, Mac the Communist and Marco Rubio the Republican are political pseudo-pods who detect a mass-wish within their followers and press toward its fulfillment: “We are directly leading this great procession, our leadership ‘causes’ all the rest of the population to move this way, the mass follows the path we blaze.”  But one difference between Mac and Marco Rubio, worth noting, was apparent in this week’s events. Steinbeck’s labor agitator was a tough guy with street smarts who stayed on-message; Marco Rubio manages to look as unfixed and immature as he sounds. In right-wing global warming politics, Rick Perry—no George Bush, and take that as a compliment—seems statesmanlike by comparison. Oops! I meant Department of Education!

3. Extinction is possible. Double extinction.

John Steinbeck read encyclopedically, and in Sea of Cortez he explains what he calls “the criterion of validity in the handling of data” by citing an example from an article on ecology in the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It concerns the extermination of a certain species of hawk that preyed on the willow grouse, a game bird in Norway. Failing to note the presence of the parasitical disease coccidiosis in the country’s grouse population, the Norwegians systematically eradicated the predator that kept the infection under control by killing off weaker birds affected by the disease. The result was double extinction—hawk and grouse—caused by uninformed human behavior.

The Norwegians systematically eradicated the predator that kept the infection under control by killing off weaker birds affected by the disease. The result was double extinction—hawk and grouse—caused by unintelligent human behavior.

Like Steinbeck, I loved college biology, and the biology department at Wake Forest was very good. My freshman professor, a John Steinbeck-Ed Ricketts type named Ralph Amen, introduced us to an idea that makes Marco Rubio’s anti-global warming demagoguery more than a little scary 50 years later. “Imagine,” Dr. Amen suggested, “that the earth is an organism, Gaia, with a cancer—the human species, overpopulating and over-polluting its host. What is the likely outcome of this infection for Gaia and for mankind?” A question in the spirit of Sea of Cortez, which on reflection I’m certain he had read.

‘Imagine,’ Dr. Amen suggested, ‘that the earth is an organism, Gaia, with a cancer—the human species, overpopulating and over-polluting its host. What is the likely outcome of this infection for Gaia and for mankind?’

John Steinbeck, a one-world ecologist even further ahead of his time than my old teacher, would have answered, “things could go either way.” The cancer might kill the host or the host eradicate the cancer. But global warming presents a third possibility—double extinction. Now imagine that Marco Rubio is a soft, squishy symptom of global warming denial, a terminal disease. Then reread John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez as I just did. Reality-based thinking is our first step toward a cure, although under a president like Marco Rubio it could also be our last. Oops! There we go—along with the planet! How in the world did we let that happen?

Filed Under: Ecology, Featured, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

My Grandpa Was a Beekeeper: Sketch

May 16, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of Alan Brasington's upstate New York ancestorsMy Grandpa was a beekeeper. He kept bees in little white bungalows with a drawer at the bottom for wax combs and honey. Grandpa searched out bees in hollow trees and when he found them, dipped a roll of damp newspaper in gasoline and set it on fire to smoking. He put the paper inside the hollow tree and it confused the bees. They didn’t know what to do. We could see them flying in circles before they lit on Grandpa. They covered his head and arms, like a crawling long-sleeve shirt and hat. His eyes peeped through a mask that kissed his face. For the bees didn’t sting, Grandpa said, “because I’m not afraid.

“And smoke makes bees calm,” he said. “It bee-wilders them.”

They buzzed when Grandpa reached his arm into the hollow tree. His hand came out with the Queen in his palm. She was long and waxy-white. I knew if bees could scream that hive of bees were for they circled Grandpa’s head before they sat on him again. I could hear them crying: “Oh Man, you touched our Queen!”

Grandpa drove their Queen home on the seat of his Plymouth car. When he got there, he set her inside an empty white bee bungalow. And all the other bees flew off Grandpa and settled about their Queen. “Anyplace their Queen is, is home,” said Grandpa. “An’ there’s no place like home.”

“Stop playing around with those damn bees!” Grandma shouted through her kitchen window over the sink. “You hafta be crazy doin’ with those creatures,” she said, but Grandpa, who loved his bees, kept on.

The day after, a bee stung my father on the hand. His eyes swelled way up and so did his throat. He fell down on the ground and couldn’t breathe, hardly, so Grandpa took him to the hospital in the very car that had carried his Queen-of-Bees. The doctors said my father was allergic and gave him a shot of something so he could breathe again. And when he could see, they sent him home.

When they reached Grandpa’s field of bees there was only a black patch where the village used to be, because before my eyes, Grandma burned Bee Town to the ground in a great conflagration.

“My bees!” Grandpa cried as he ran from the car. “You murdered my bees!”

“About time, too,” called Grandma from her window.

A few months later my father was called into the Army. He was stationed in Georgia and got poison ivy. He wrote from the hospital to tell us he was allergic. So the Army sent him to Texas.
He telephoned to say he was in the hospital again. “I’ve come down with poison oak,” he said.

So the Army sent him in Hawaii, where he developed jungle rot. He was in the hospital for a very long time after, and when he was cured, the government sent him home. I thought maybe they’d heard about Grandma’s murder of the bees.

My father and mother went shopping the day after he arrived. And when they came back my father carried a box into the house.

“You can’t look yet,” said my mother. “Close your eyes.”

When she said, “Open now!” my parents were looking at me hard as they pointed to two new shirts on hangers over our living room door.

The one on the right was light green to represent the sea. There were puckering white waves with black fish swimming below them. Men in fishing boats, with creels beside them, held onto fishing poles. One man in a red shirt, his fishing line taut, his pole bent like a hunting bow, was pulling a huge swordfish toward the boat.

The shirt on the left was bright yellow. It had coconut buttons and large white Hawaiian flowers like those you’d see in a Tarzan movie.

“Which one do you like the best?” my father asked. My parents’ eyes looked deep into me as if his question was the most important one any person had ever asked.

It really made no difference to me, but I pointed to the yellow shirt. And from that day my father was allergic to me. Following in the footsteps of his mother, he burned me to the ground every time our eyes met.

“My bees!” my Grandpa cried at Grandma. “You murdered my bees!” And in that very same way my father continually murdered me.

Filed Under: Anthology, Featured Tagged With:

Poem by Roy Bentley: James Dean Commemorative Mug

May 16, 2014 by 1 Comment

Image of James Dean, start of the movie East of Eden

James Dean was driving his new Porsche to a car race when he crashed—literally East of Eden—on a back road to Salinas, California, site of the 1955 movie that made him famous and the weekend event that made him dead. Sixty years later, Roy Bentley ponders the irony of Dean’s death and its aftermath in a poem that suits the East of Eden star to a made-in-China T.

James Dean Commemorative Mug

I’d begin with the stamped instruction not to microwave
and the all-caps MADE IN CHINA messaging,

the glaze over the decal of the brooding movie star
who shot a Public Service Announcement

for safe driving then ended up a traffic statistic.
The cup makes me ask what else is detritus

bobbing against the current. Holding the gift-mug,
I consider the difference between the doomed—

those who climb into the Spyder Porsche death car
with a wish to flame to ash—and the vanishing

and coming back to vanish at last that is a life. Time
is cenotaph and memorial for a soil scent

that rises, post-rainfall, in the dark before morning
on summer farms in Salinas, California—

the image on the mug is from East of Eden, Dean
in a sweater on a boxcar roof, huddled,

shivering against the chill. Because, face it,
when are we ever in the right clothes?

 

Filed Under: Anthology, Featured Tagged With:

Tips from John Steinbeck on How to Write Well

May 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of John Steinbeck at his typewriterHow to write well? Some writing tips enter our consciousness formally, through the classroom door. Others arrive surreptitiously, as editors unseen hover over our hands on the keyboard. But writing tips also slip through a half-open window of the struggling writer’s mind, appearing as a bright passage in a book or needed words of encouragement from a colleague that learning how to write well is a craft worth pursuing for yet another day. John Steinbeck’s writing tips took the second and third forms.

For writers like me, Steinbeck’s books and letters are a window on how to write better that never closes.

For writers like me, Steinbeck’s books and letters are a window on how to write better that never closes. Like us, he understood that every lesson on how to write more effectively, however small, is a gift for today and for tomorrow. As Jay Parini notes in John Steinbeck: A Biography, “[John Steinbeck’s] didacticism would become an integral part of his profile as a man and writer . . . .” His lessons on how to write, whatever the context or occasion, remain a source of inspiration, instruction, and delight in my life as a writer.

The Steinbeck Model in Writing Tips from Roy Peter Clark

In the opening pages of Writing Tools, a book of writing tips by Roy Peter Clark that I highly recommend, John Steinbeck appears as a model of how to write well. Clark quotes this passage from Cannery Row as an example of the way master writers like Steinbeck “can craft page after page of sentences” by relying on simple constructions of subject and verb:

He didn’t need a clock. He had been working in a tidal pattern . . . . In the dawn he had awakened . . . . He drank some hot coffee, ate three sandwiches, and had a quart of beer.

Clark notes that “Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence” in the example offered:

Clarity and narrative energy flow through the passage, as one sentence builds on another. He avoids monotony by including the brief introductory phrase  . . .  and by varying the lengths of sentences, a writing tool we will consider later.

Clark notes that ‘Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence’ . . . .

A respected resource at The Poynter Institute on how to write better journalism, Clark returns to John Steinbeck in his list of writing tips, noting that in Travels With Charley Steinbeck uses passive verbs “to call attention to the receiver of the action” at just the right time.

“The best writers make the best choices between active and passive,” explains Clark:

Steinbeck wrote, “The night was loaded with omens.” Steinbeck could have written, “Omens loaded the night,” but in that case the active would have been unfair to both the night and the omens, the meaning and the music of the sentence.

John Steinbeck’s Advice to Hugh Mulligan on How to Write

A journalist for much of his life, Steinbeck sometimes applied sideways humor to prop open the how-to-write window, a trait noted by the late Hugh Mulligan, a veteran reporter covering the war in Vietnam when Steinbeck was there. In his book The Journalist’s Craft, Mulligan states that he is writing “a nuts-and-bolts book about writing, but before I attempt to get down to the basic hardware, I should note that history is rife with confusion on this subject.” Enter Steinbeck, laughing.

Later in his collection of writing tips Mulligan quotes Somerset Maugham, the English writer who was born 28 years before John Steinbeck but died only 12 months earlier than his celebrated American counterpart:

[T]hat elegant master of the Queen’s English . . . told a BBC interviewer: “There are three basic rules to good writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are” . . . . I mentioned this to John Steinbeck one night in Saigon during the Vietnam War . . . . The Nobel laureate took a stab at filling in the blanks for Maugham: “Never make excuses. Never let them see you bleed. Never get separated from your luggage.” He then added a fourth: “Find out when the bar opens and when the laundry comes back.”

Speaking as a writer who has lost his notes, a bit of his virtue, and a sport coat or two on reporting assignments, I find practical wisdom woven into Steinbeck’s mordant wit. If you write for a living and don’t find yourself grinning at this advice, you might consider taking up another profession. Your absence may be missed, but not by other writers.

Maria Povova’s “6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck”

Fifty years after their conversation, the Internet has expedited and amplified the writing tips shared by John Steinbeck with Hugh Mulligan in Saigon. While roaming the digital byways recently, I came across Maria Povova’s “6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck,” a set of principles on how to write well gleaned from her reading of a 1975 Paris Review article and recent Atlantic magazine blog.

Call my online discovery software-supported serendipity if you like. But Steinbeck’s advice has outlasted the manual typewriter and will no doubt survive smartphones as well.

Steinbeck’s advice has outlasted the manual typewriter and will no doubt survive smartphones as well.

Here are my favorite writing tips from Povova’s piece:

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one.

When he talked about how to write, John Steinbeck always addressed other writers—even if he was the imagined writer he had in mind.

When he talked about how to write, John Steinbeck always addressed other writers—even if he was the imagined writer he had in mind. The process could be painful, and Steinbeck sometimes had to remind himself to follow his own advice. After the announcement in 1962 that he had won the Nobel Prize, he admitted how hard it was to write his acceptance speech in a letter to Dook Sheffield, a college friend and fellow writer:

I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times . . . .  Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me.

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Academic Stars Illuminate The Grapes of Wrath

May 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CaliforniaOn May 3 experts from the University of Virginia, San Jose State University, and Claremont Graduate University enlightened 350 attendees of the 34th Steinbeck Festival—held at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California—about The Grapes of Wrath. As different in style as The Grapes of Wrath is from Gone With the Wind, each of the speakers—Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University; Stephen Railton, Professor of American Literature and Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia; Rick Wartzman, the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University—aligned Steinbeck’s masterpiece with matters of abiding importance, illuminating aspects of an enduring novel that still shocks and surprises.

Image of Susan Shillinglaw at San Jose State University

San Jose State University’s Susan Shillinglaw on Teaching

The author of two books in one year—John and Carol Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage and On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath”—Susan Shillinglaw has taught, written, and organized around Steinbeck at San Jose University for 25 years. So familiar with her subject that she can speak flawlessly without notes, the San Jose State University President’s Scholar and National Steinbeck Center Scholar-in-Residence traced the roots of The Grapes of Wrath back to rural Oklahoma, the home of a real-life migrant family named Joat, and connected it to the contemporary concept of one-world ecology, first explored by Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts in the 1930s.

Susan Shillinglaw has taught, written, and organized around Steinbeck at San Jose University for 25 years.

Shillinglaw’s deft description of the four levels of meaning in Steinbeck’s novel unified by this concept seemed perfectly designed to make the long book easier to embrace for classroom teachers, a significant percentage of her audience. The San Jose State University veteran explained why reading long books is still important for students with an apt analogy from personal experience. Earlier in the week, she said, she had attended the stage version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in New York. She noted that Hilton Als, the New Yorker magazine drama critic, panned the production for depending on celebrity casting to draw young viewers to an old play.

Shillinglaw’s deft description of the four levels of meaning in Steinbeck’s novel seemed perfectly designed to make the long book easier to embrace for classroom teachers.

Shillinglaw stated that it was the first time she ever saw a New York audience stand and clap so quickly at the end of a show. If it takes a James Franco to get youngsters to attend live theater, she wondered, what’s the harm? They were there, they were moved, and they loved what they saw. If it takes a teacher’s prodding to induce kids to read The Grapes of Wrath, that’s worth the time and effort, too, she added. Although her students at San Jose State University “self-select” by enrolling in her Steinbeck course, she noted that frequent quizzes are necessary to keep them on track, particularly with long books like The Grapes of Wrath.

Image of Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia

The University of Virginia’s Stephen Railton on Reading

Like me, Susan Shillinglaw attended graduate school at the University of Virginia’s rival, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Noting that at one time the Department of English was the University of Virginia’s largest department, she provided a smooth transition for the speaker who came next, the University of Virginia English professor Stephen Railton. Shillinglaw’s focus on Steinbeck is singular: her knowledge of the writer’s life is encyclopedic, and her observations about his work are splendidly spontaneous. Railton’s style is more structured and his scope more synoptic, placing Steinbeck in the broader context of American literary history. Unlike Shillinglaw, Railton delivered his remarks from a prepared script, but that didn’t slow him down. Could it be that he speaks so brilliantly in public because he comes from the University of Virginia, an institution founded by Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. President who wrote effortlessly but had to work hard to project his voice?

Railton’s style is more structured and his scope more synoptic, placing Steinbeck in the broader context of American literary history.

In Chapel Hill we complained that the University of Virginia seemed set on cornering the American literature market. Railton’s presentation suggested that our concern was justified. The editor of works by and about Cooper, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain, Railton has developed digital libraries of Twain, Faulkner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the other great protest novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As amply demonstrated in his comments about The Grapes of Wrath, this makes Railton a kind of humanities engineer, a new and interesting breed on campus. He certainly knows where the connecting lines lie under the surface of American writing from 19th century Transcendentalism to Naturalism and Modernism, mapping the convergence of these movements in John Steinbeck with ease and connecting The Grapes of Wrath with equal precision to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to The Wasteland. Consider the relationship of three “Tom’s,” he suggested: Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, and the Wasteland poet from St. Louis, Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Image of the 75th Anniversary edition of The Grapes of Wrath

A thought that profound is a paper in itself, but Railton moved right on, connecting Steinbeck to other writers in ways equally ingenious. For example, he noted that the author of the  “sentimental” novel The Grapes of Wrath was at heart a literary modernist who heeded Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” in his writing. But Steinbeck differed fundamentally from Pound, Eliot, and Faulkner, modern writers whose dislike of sentiment created “a kind of gated community of aesthetics” in their work. Unlike his more detached contemporaries, Steinbeck was emotionally engaged, writing “not out of curiosity but impatience, even anger”  and creating in Tom Joad “an existential member of the Lost Generation.” Steinbeck also differed from Naturalists such as Dreiser, Norris, and Crane, students of social Darwinism who wrote about individuals victimized by power in the shadow of the Panic of 1893. The author of The Grapes of Wrath was a meliorist who believed in the possibility of progress. Writing in the deeper shadow of the Great Depression, Steinbeck felt that the natural order for humanity was “evolutionary change, not just unremitting struggle.”

The author of The Grapes of Wrath was a meliorist who believed in the possibility of progress.

So satisfying an insight offers a tempting place to stop, but Railton also looked closely at Steinbeck’s text, observing that The Grapes of Wrath opens on a wasteland, like Eliot’s poem, and that the journey of Tom Joad parallels that of Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Rose of Sharon loses her baby and her brother never becomes an uncle, but unlike Stowe’s protagonist—whose hope is for Heaven—Joad’s breakthrough is post-Christian, an updated version of Emerson’s Over-Soul in which all people participate. Tom learns this religion from the ex-preacher Casy, but unlike Casy, Tom fights back rather than forgiving, “a warrior convert” to the new gospel of social justice. The Grapes of Wrath, Railton concluded, is John Steinbeck’s “Newer Testament.” As if in benediction, the University of Virginia professor sang Casy’s “Yessir, that’s my Savior” to the tune Steinbeck had in mind: “Yessir, that’s my baby.” Like Thomas Jefferson, the self-described “aging hippie” from the University of Virginia has an educated ear.

Image of Rick Wartzman at Claremont Graduate University

Claremont Graduate University’s Rick Wartzman on the Burning and Banning of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

Susan Shillinglaw extemporized without notes. Stephen Railton performed from a script. Rick Wartzman, the third speaker of the day, projected images from his laptop. It was an appropriate medium for the executive director of Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute—described by Time.com as “a social enterprise whose mission is strengthening organizations to strengthen society.” A former writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, Wartzman is the author of award-winning investigations of political power in California—The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (with Mark Arax) and Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Each of these books explores an archetypal conflict: the price in individual liberty paid to oligarchic greed, the story at the heart of Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Shillinglaw and Railton illuminated the novel’s narrative, context, and connections. Wartzman detailed its aftermath.

Shillinglaw and Railton illuminated the novel’s narrative, context, and connections. Wartzman detailed its aftermath.

Prior to The Grapes of Wrath, a pair of California writer-activists admired by Steinbeck—Jack London and Sinclair Lewis—published prescient novels about a future United States under fascism. George Orwell cited the influence of London’s book on the writing of 1984, the British bestseller that continues to rival The Grapes of Wrath in global popularity. Neither of the earlier novels—London’s The Iron Heel (1902),  Lewis’s It Can Happen Here (1935)—is read much anymore, but Steinbeck would have been familiar with both. If he voted in the general election of 1934, he likely voted for the writer-activist Upton Sinclair, the Democratic candidate for Governor of California. A celebrity socialist with popular appeal, Sinclair was defeated by the well-funded campaign of disinformation waged by California’s corporate elite—including Wartzman’s former employer, the Los Angeles Times. Frank Merriam, the establishment candidate, won the Governor’s seat.

Image of The King of California, co-authored by Rick Wartzman

Sinclair’s populist policies prevailed four years later, when Culbert Olson beat Merriam to become California’s first Democratic Governor since 1895. As Wartzman observed, the state’s corporate interests were understandably alarmed. A Mormon atheist from Utah, Olson had campaigned for Sinclair in 1934 and supported President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Remarkably, Olson refused to say “so help me God” when his oath of office was administered by a California Supreme Court Justice with the name William Waste. Olson dared to challenge the influence of the Catholic Church in California’s system of public education, provoking the wrath of John Cantwell, the archbishop of Los Angeles, and Archbishop John Mitty of San Francisco. Virtually alone among elected officials in the country’s most geographically exposed state, Olson opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. In 1942 he lost to the Republican Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Olson opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. In 1942 he lost to the Republican Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

When Olson took office on January 2, 1939, California’s power structure shook, setting the stage for the burning and banning of The Grapes of Wrath. Wartzman’s narrative of events between April and August 1939 was dramatic. During that turbulent time, Carey McWilliams—a Los Angeles writer-activist allied with Sinclair and employed by Olson—published Factories in the Field, a survey of migrant worker conditions in California caused by the rapacity of the state’s corporate landowners. McWilliams’ dry statistics vindicated Steinbeck’s angry book, blunting the impact of counter-Grapes of Wrath efforts by writers such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s summer neighbor in genteel Los Gatos.

McWilliams’ dry statistics vindicated Steinbeck’s angry book, blunting the impact of counter-Grapes of Wrath efforts by writers such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s summer neighbor in genteel Los Gatos.

Mitchell may not have been related to the Georgia author of the same name who wrote Gone With the Wind, the 1936 bestseller that became an award-winning film the year The Grapes of Wrath was published. But in the context of Stephen Railton’s remarks, Margaret Mitchell’s pro-Confederacy fantasy can be read as a work of delayed anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin fiction; Wartzman noted that two-dozen anti-Uncle Tom books appeared during Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lifetime. Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness, a polite work written to counter the perceived obscenity of The Grapes of Wrath, was quickly forgotten. Gone With the Wind remains second only to the Bible in continuing U.S. sales, far ahead of The Grapes of Wrath, its spiritual opposite.

Image of Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Who burned The Grapes of Wrath when it first appeared? In Bakersfield, California, Clell Pruett—a man who hadn’t read the book—posed for the camera as he lit the match. Pruett’s employer was Bill Camp, head of the anti-labor, anti-Grapes of Wrath Associated Farmers organization in Kern County; Camp enlisted Pruett for the photo-op to prove that real farm workers didn’t appreciate how Steinbeck had portrayed them. Following Pearl Harbor, Pruett left California and returned to Missouri to mine lead. That is where Rick Wartzman interviewed Pruett not long before he died. Pruett still hadn’t read The Grapes of Wrath but promised Wartzman that he would. When he did, he told Wartzman that reading hadn’t changed his mind.

In Bakersfield, California, Clell Pruett—a man who hadn’t read the book—posed for the camera as he lit the match.

Pruett’s feelings about The Grapes of Wrath were shared by people in Steinbeck’s hometown, where a 1936 strike by lettuce-packers was suppressed and The Grapes of Wrath was later burned. Like Jack London and Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck feared fascism in America and thought he recognized its signs in California. A dramatic instance involved Salinas and the violent reaction of the town’s citizens to the 1936 lettuce strike. Steinbeck’s response was L’Affaire Lettuceburg,  a vigorous denunciation of local power brokers in short-fiction form. The piece was so scathing that Steinbeck—on the advice of his wife and in the interest of his safety—retracted the manuscript and refused to let it be published, proactively burning his own book. As I sat in the National Steinbeck Center audience listening to the stellar speakers who had come to Salinas from San Jose State University, the University of Virginia, and Claremont Graduate University, I pondered the remark about John Steinbeck made by the town’s former mayor in his morning introduction: “He used us in life; we use him in death.”

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John Steinbeck’s Signature Festival in Salinas, California

May 2, 2014 by 1 Comment

Image of John Steinbeck's signature with Salinas, California farm fieldsWhen the National Steinbeck Center presents the 34th Steinbeck Festival on May 2-4, the annual celebration will honor the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath. But as readers of John Steinbeck are aware, what went before is as important as the now in any story. This is part of the story behind the John Steinbeck festival begun in the writer’s hometown in 1980.

Image of the Salinas, California city library

A Festival for John Steinbeck in the Writer’s Hometown

The first Steinbeck Festival was held in Salinas, California, a small city with a significant agricultural industry, in June of 1980. Labeled a literary festival by its founders—John Gross, the Salinas, California librarian, and David Aguilar, a teacher at Hartnell College—the modest event was cosponsored by the library and the college, a community college with a reputation for civic outreach. Along with artifacts from John Steinbeck’s life, there were films, lectures, panel discussions, and a stage play. Some participants got college credit for attending, but the three-day event was open to anyone. Best yet, it was free—bus tours included. People in Salinas, California came together to honor a celebrated son, and the annual Steinbeck Festival was on its way.

The first Steinbeck Festival was held in Salinas, California, a small city with a significant agricultural industry, in June of 1980.

The 1981 festival was even bigger than the first. A 13-day event featuring 23 speakers, 10 films, seven stage performances, seven bus tours, and several ambitious exhibits, its keynote speaker was the award-winning actor Burgess Meredith, John Steinbeck’s longtime friend. The educational mission and academic connection remained strong, coordinated by Hartnell College and the Salinas, California library and advised by Jackson Benson, the San Diego State University professor who was writing John Steinbeck’s official biography.

The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Arrives

Image from cover of John Steinbeck's biography by Jackson BensonLike Hartnell College, San Diego State is a public school with community spirit, and the festival’s academic ties attracted government support. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the 1982 festival moved to the first weekend in August, with public readings from John Steinbeck’s books, a pair of well-attended panel discussions, 18 lectures, 15 film showings, and four tours. As in 1980 and 1981, the 1982 festival was free.

The fourth festival included the first book publication event held anywhere to launch Jackson Benson’s definitive life of John Steinbeck.

It was also a prelude to 1983, when the fourth Steinbeck Festival opened with a premiere: the first publication event held anywhere to launch Benson’s The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, still the definitive life of John Steinbeck.  Although college credit continued to be available and literature remained foremost, the new venue chosen for the festival—Salinas, California’s Community Center—reflected the dramatic growth in attendance and the increasing importance of local volunteers, including tour guides who received special training in advance.

From Russia to Hartnell College with Love—For Reading

Image from cover of John Steinbeck's book A Russian JournalThe 1984 festival went global. Although centered in Salinas, California, it was augmented by the presence of the Second International Steinbeck Congress, bringing together authorities on John Steinbeck from throughout the world. Among the 34 featured speakers were scholars from India, Japan, and Korea; other events included 10 bus tours, 16 films, and four plays. Among the funders was the California Council for the Humanities—like the National Endowment for the Arts grant, an enviable “good housekeeping seal of approval” for a community event begun and staffed by volunteers.

John Steinbeck’s hopes for international cooperation were coming to fruition in Salinas, California.

Until recently, the annual festival continued to occur during the first week in August, running 4-5 days and attracting a variety of Steinbeck scholars, fans, and visitors to Salinas, California. Bus tours and films remained popular. But 1989 was a really big year. The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath drew international attention and became the inevitable focus of the festival. Glasnost was in the air, and scholars from the Soviet Union even came. John Steinbeck’s hopes for international cooperation—expressed 40 years earlier in A Russian Journal—were coming to fruition in Salinas, California.

 

A Son and Spouse of John Steinbeck Participate in Person

john-steinbeck-lettersThe festival’s 50th-anniverary focus on The Grapes of Wrath set the pattern for the future, and festivals in the 1990s frequently highlighted single books, including East of Eden, The Red Pony, America and Americans, and Cannery Row. The annual event continued to take place the first weekend in August so that educators from across the country—a mainstay of the audience—could attend.

When offered accommodations elsewhere, the writer’s widow insisted on staying in the same Salinas, California hotel where the festival’s speakers were lodged.

However, the speakers weren’t always academicians. John Steinbeck IV, the writer’s younger son, was among the notable speakers with a personal connection. Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s third wife, also attended one year. When offered accommodations elsewhere, the writer’s widow insisted on staying in the same Salinas, California hotel where the festival’s speakers were lodged.

National Steinbeck Center Calls Salinas, California Home

Image of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CaliforniaMore and more volunteers were needed to make the annual event successful, and eventually it seemed that everyone got involved. If you lived in Salinas, California, then you—or someone you knew—was already pitching in when the Steinbeck Festival celebrated its 15h anniversary in 1996. Banners were hung across Main Street. The water company used their Pitney Bowles machine to promote the festival on customer-billing envelopes. Local companies donated printing and other essential services. Festival posters showed up in storefront windows all over town.

By the time the National Steinbeck Center opened in downtown Salinas, California, and took over event management in 1998, the literary festival devoted to the city’s greatest celebrity and dedicated to public education was well-established, well-attended, and well-respected.

By the time the National Steinbeck Center opened in downtown Salinas, California, and took over event management in 1998, the literary festival devoted to the city’s greatest celebrity and dedicated to public education was well-established, well-attended, and well-respected.

Pre-festival activities this year included events in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. May 2-4 activities include bus tours to familiar places in Steinbeck’s fiction—the Hamilton Ranch near King City, the historic Spreckels site near Salinas, and Ed Ricketts’ lab in Monterey—plus a number of evening surprises.

But that’s where we began: the foreground of a story with a background in Salinas, California volunteerism, public spirit, and community pride.

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Hear Grapes of Wrath Opera at San Jose State University

May 2, 2014 by 1 Comment

Image of Grapes of Wrath poster and song collectionAs interim director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, I have been particularly gratified by the university’s 75th anniversary celebration of The Grapes of Wrath. Ongoing events open to the public began with a colorful exhibition of book covers from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath, which has been translated into 45 languages since it was first published. As noted in my earlier post, the exhibition was created by Peter Van Coutren, the Steinbeck Studies Center’s archivist, and features little-known information about the novel’s history. (If you are visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on the San Jose State University campus this month, check out the exhibition on the fifth floor. It ends soon.)

Image from Grapes of Wrath play production at San Jose State University

The Dust Bowl and Great Depression Take Center Stage

San Jose State University’s celebration of The Grapes of Wrath continued last month with a staging of Frank Galati’s award-winning 1989 dramatic adaptation by the Department of Television, Radio, Film, and Theatre Arts in collaboration with the Steinbeck Studies Center. The well-attended run of this play, directed by Laura Long and supported by Professors David Kahn and Barbaby Dalls, included a gala reception starring Susan Shillinglaw, the former director of the Steinbeck Studies Center, Professor of English and President’s Scholar at San Jose State University, and Scholar in Residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Shillinglaw’s new book On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” was recently published by Penguin, and she signed copies for an enthusiastic crowd. Other San Jose State University faculty members led by Scot Guenter helped develop a Grapes of Wrath “readathon” sponsored by the SJSU Campus Reading Program—a 24-hour public reading of the entire book, also performed in April.

Image of the San Jose State University campus

The Music of The Grapes of Wrath in Concert on Campus

When Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath on April 14, 1939, John Steinbeck became both famous and infamous for his sympathetic portrayal of the Joads, a symbolic Dust Bowl migrant family from Oklahoma whose trials and tribulations in California made the author deeply unpopular with American Agribusiness. But the book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and John Ford’s movie adaptation starring Henry Fonda is now part of our picture of life during the Great Depression. Steinbeck said that he wrote the novel with the structure of music in mind. Its operatic overtones inspired composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Michael Korie to create a new opera based on the novel, first staged by the Minnesota Opera. The work will be performed in an unstaged concert version by San Jose State University’s music department on May 9 and 11. The speaking role of narrator will be filled by a pair of famous playwrights: Octavio Solis and Luis Valdez. A painting by Ron Clavier donated by the artist and inspired by the novel will be on display in the lobby.

ricky-ian-gordon

Bravo! Ricky Ian Gordon and His Grapes of Wrath Opera

Ricky Ian Gordon (shown here) was born in 1956. Since its Minnesota premiere in 2007, his operatic treatment of The Grapes of Wrath has been performed in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles, among other cities. Of the Los Angeles production, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote that “the greatest glory of the opera is Gordon’s ability to musically flesh out the entire eleven-member Joad clan,” praising the composer for successfully merging Broadway musical theater with classical opera in the work. Writing in The New Yorker, Alex Ross compared it to “American popular music of the twenties and thirties: Gershwinesque song-and-dance numbers, a few sweetly soaring love songs in the manner of Jerome Kern, banjo-twanging ballads, saxed-up jazz choruses, even a barbershop quartet.”  A two-act concert version of the opera directed by Eric Simonson and narrated by Jane Fonda was performed at Carnegie Hall in 2010. This version will be used for the San Jose State University production in a pair of performances beginning at 7:00 p.m. on May 9, and at 2:00 p.m. on May 11, both in the Hal Todd Theater on the San Jose State University campus. The musical production will also be directed by Laura Long.

San Jose State University Professor Sings Pittsburgh Role

Image of Joseph Frank, director of music at San Jose State UniversityThe tenor Joseph Frank, director of the San Jose State University School of Music, sang the role of Grampa Joad for the Pittsburgh Opera’s production of Gordon’s Grapes of Wrath in 2008. The complete opera, recorded live by the Minnesota Opera, is available in a three-CD set with libretto liner notes on the PS Classics label. The vocal score and a selection of arias are available from Carl Fischer.

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Party! Susan Shillinglaw on Reading The Grapes of Wrath

April 18, 2014 by 8 Comments

Image of Susan Shillinglaw and her new book, On Reading The Grapes of WrathGreat books about great books are cause for celebration anytime. Thanks to the pressure of a 75th anniversary deadline—and the prodding of the people at Penguin Books—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath now has a perfect companion in On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath”  by Susan Shillinglaw, professor of English at San Jose State University. Recently published by Penguin Books as an attractive, affordable paperback, her new book is an essential guide to a novel that was written in nine months in 1938 and still sells in six figures—further evidence, if needed, that deadlines are enlivening. A compact work of 200 pages divided into engaging topics, the project was suggested by Penguin Books and completed by Shillinglaw in 90 days. Written in clear prose for a general audience, it will still be read when The Grapes of Wrath turns 100.

Susan Shillinglaw’s new book is an essential guide to a novel that was written in nine months in 1938 and still sells in six figures.

San Jose State University’s reputation for Steinbeck studies rests largely on Shillinglaw’s 25-year record of teaching, writing, and organizing around California’s greatest author of all time; in international Steinbeck circles, perhaps three other scholars in America come to mind as quickly as she does when Steinbeck studies are mentioned. The late Peter Lisca unlocked the structure of Steinbeck’s fiction using the tools of formal analysis. Jackson Benson, another Californian, wrote the definitive biography. Robert DeMott—the first director of San Jose State University’s center for Steinbeck studies—continues to explore the sources, texts, and processes of Steinbeck’s writing with the care of a scientist and the soul of a poet.

San Jose State University’s reputation for Steinbeck studies rests largely on Shillinglaw’s 25-year record.

Shillinglaw builds on all three in her new book, combining structural, biographical, and textual approaches with features that have become her signature as a writer about Steinbeck. As in her previous publications, she brings Steinbeck out of the past into the present, connecting the context, content, and impact of The Grapes of Wrath to urgent issues of contemporary life. As she has done in essays and conferences, she brings Steinbeck’s ecology into existential focus through the writer’s relationship with Ed Ricketts, connecting The Grapes of Wrath to Sea of Cortez, their collaborative work, in what she describes as a “diptych” of two books with one theme. Most important for most readers, she brings a graceful style of expression to an author who cared more about being read than being written about. In this she emulates her subject; On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” is further evidence of the all-too-rare virtue of readability.

Shillinglaw brings a graceful style of expression to an author who cared more about being read than being written about.

For such a book the highest praise may be the briefest: On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” is a one-volume course in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, efficiently organized, elegantly presented, and easily assimilated in a matter of hours. Wherever you’re headed in this summer of Steinbeck, don’t leave home without it. (Future party alert! This advice will still apply when The Grapes of Wrath celebrates its centennial. Like Steinbeck’s fiction, Penguin Books and On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” are certain to be around for a very long time.)

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Was John Steinbeck the First Social Ecologist?

April 11, 2014 by 15 Comments

Image of jackrabbits fleeing Dust Bowl conditions described in The Grapes of WrathIn The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck explores social ecology—how individuals interact with each other within their natural, adopted, and built environments—in the crisis created by the Great Depression Dust Bowl. Social ecology recognizes the holistic connection of all elements and influences and how each affects the other in a social complex. Reading The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, and The Grapes of Wrath helped me discover how the principles of social ecology can be applied in practice.

Steinbeck’s depiction of the Dust Bowl and its impact in The Grapes of Wrath clearly demonstrates his familiarity with the ecological disaster resulting from the failure to shift to dry land farming methods before drought conditions overtook large areas of America’s heartland in the 1930s. What is less apparent is the other side of the story, the social ecology disaster that occurred when Dust Bowl migrants tried to find paying work and a new home in California. In The Grapes of Wrath the author adroitly brings together both kinds of environment, social and physical.

The Phalanx in The Moon Is Down and on Cannery Row

My first exposure to John Steinbeck’s understanding of social ecology occurred when I read The Moon Is Down, the play-novelette he wrote for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942. This work—which Steinbeck is believed to have based on the Nazi occupation of Norway—exerted significant influence on the development of my thinking about social ecology. Steinbeck’s story concerns the resistance by the residents of an unnamed coastal village in northern Europe to foreign-army occupiers who invade the town in order to seize its harbor and coal mine.

Their resistance through non-compliance rests on the concept of the informal network, an element of the broader idea behind Steinbeck’s phalanx theory. The phalanx encompasses the entire environment and includes driving forces, unconscious influences, and factors that are physical, social, and cultural; informal networks are the means by which information is disseminated, issues are resolved, and environments are managed in a particular community without using formal systems.

The phalanx encompasses the entire environment and includes driving forces, unconscious influences, and factors that are physical, social, and cultural.

A later example of the function of an informal network within a specific group occurs in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row reprise Sweet Thursday, where Doc’s Western Biological Laboratories, Lee Chong’s Heavenly Flower Grocery, and Ida’s Bear Flag bordello are “bound by gossamer threads of steel to all the others—hurt one, and you aroused vengeance in all. Let sadness come to one, and all wept.” Here Steinbeck’s dramatization of human interconnectedness represents much more than the dynamics between these network nodes or the individuals who comprise them. Rather, it depicts a powerful unconscious influence on the life of the community that functions as its own entity—the phalanx.

(Interestingly, the writer Malcolm Gladwell alludes to the same concept in his 2008 book about super-achievers titled Outliers: The Story of Success.  In his introductory chapter Gladwell discusses the people of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a community settled in the late 19th century by immigrants from the town of Roseto Valfortore in Italy. Noting a study 50 years earlier of the low incidence of illness in Roseto—where residents had fewer heart problems than those in towns nearby, no suicides, no alcoholism or drug addiction, little crime, and no one on welfare—Gladwell notes that ”these people were dying of old age, that is it.” When Dr. Stewart Wolfe, the author of this research, studied the health of the people of Roseto, he concluded that the “secret of Roseto was not diet or exercise or genes or location. It was Roseto itself.”)

How Owning The Moon Is Down Became a Capital Crime

In The Moon Is Down John Steinbeck describes his fictional town’s informal network system, the characters in that system and the roles they play, and the bewilderment and frustration of the invaders with the villagers, who don’t behave as expected. The following passage reflects the dramatic difference between a top-down authoritarian type in a position of power, Colonel Lanser, and the informal horizontal system represented by Mayor Orden, a community that is supposedly powerless:

Lanser: “Please co-operate with us for the good of all.” When Mayor Orden made no reply, “For the good of all,” Lanser repeated. “Will you?”
Orden:  “This is a little town. I don’t know. The people are confused and so am I.”
Lanser: “But will you try to co-operate?”
Orden shook his head. “I don’t know. When the town makes up its mind what it wants to do, I’ll probably do that.”
Lanser: “But you are the authority.”
Orden smiled. “You won’t believe this, but it is true: authority is in the town. I don’t know how or why, but it is so. This means we cannot act as quickly as you can, but when a direction is set, we all act together.  I am confused.  I don’t know yet.”
Lanser said wearily, “I hope we can get along together. It will be so much easier for everyone. I hope we can trust you. I don’t like to think of the means the military will take to keep order.”
Orden was silent.
“I hope we can trust you,” Lanser repeated.
Orden put his finger in his ear and wiggled his hand. “I don’t know,” he said.

Steinbeck’s statement about the “authority being in the town” is profound. To Lanser’s amazement, power resides not in a person but in the phalanx. Without analyzing its nature or origin, Orden articulates the insight that something beyond himself exists in the community that would make the silent decision to resist rather than capitulate. Steinbeck’s fictional representation of the power of the phalanx had political consequences. European translations of The Moon Is Down ultimately became operational handbooks for French, Italian, Norwegian, and other resistance movements during World War II. The Germans understood the book’s power. Possessing a copy was punishable by death.

“Threads of Steel” in Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath

The use of such informal networks—“the gossamer threads of steel”—as a means of empowerment and survival occurs in other works by Steinbeck as well. As noted, Mack and the Boys in Cannery Row provide a good example. So do Danny and his paisanos in Tortilla Flat. In The Grapes of Wrath the power of informal networks is described by Tom Joad’s speech about injustice in the work camps and the need to build a movement—a phalanx—that is as invisible to the formal powers that control the field workers as that of the occupied villagers in The Moon Is Down. Tom expresses this promise to his mother:

“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.”

Here Steinbeck defines what we now call a community organizer, a person using informal networks to mobilize people in the worlds of social welfare, social justice, political empowerment, and institutional change. But Tom is also referring to a power beyond himself. Even when he could no longer “be around,” his influence would continue in the power of the phalanx of which he had become a part.

Migrant Camp and Cannery Row “Gathering Places”

As far as I am concerned, John Steinbeck was our first social ecologist. In addition to understanding the power of informal networks, the writer realized that an informal network needs somewhere to call home—and that home is found in “gathering places” like Danny’s house in Tortilla Flat and Doc’s lab in Cannery Row, where Mack and the Boys drop in and out at will, reinforcing the importance of having a place where everyone is equal, humor presides, information changes hands, and issues are discussed and resolved in a safe setting. Steinbeck’s relationship with the real-life marine biologist Ed Ricketts, with whom the writer learned to view the world through the lens of ecology, provided the inspiration for Mack and the vocabulary for the writer to translate the principles of marine ecology into the framework of social ecology—but that is a story for another time.

For now it is important to remember that in writing The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck knew he had to learn through observation and experience about the challenges faced by Dust Bowl migrants, how they dealt with these issues, and how they related to the new environment in which found themselves. In other words, Steinbeck needed a “discovery process”—yet  another aspect of social ecology.

In addition to understanding the power of informal networks, the writer realized that an informal network needs somewhere to call home.

The writer’s mentor and guide in this process was Tom Collins, the administrator of Weedpatch, the model migrant camp built by the Farm Security Administration to which Steinbeck gained access. Here and in other outposts where migrants clustered, Steinbeck was seeking more than setting and background for his story; he became intimately involved in understanding the social organization of the people he was writing about. In the process he discovered their survival mechanisms: how they communicated, took care of one other, and managed conflicts internally, even as they appeared powerless to the outside world—like the townspeople in The Moon Is Down.

Steinbeck transforms this knowledge into a fictional migrant labor camp managed by the non-fictional Federal Resettlement Administration. This imaginary camp provides readers of The Grapes of Wrath with an opportunity to observe the migrants’ progression from the social-ecological chaos perpetrated by the Associated Farmers to the creation of social harmony, however fleeting, for families like the Joads. The camp becomes a haven where the Joads and their fellow migrants can predict, participate in, and control their environment in a way that offers stability and protection, however temporary.

Visiting Cannery Row and Applying Social Ecology

In classic “us-versus-them” tradition, Steinbeck uses the camp boundary as a way to illustrate the concept of internal control versus external threat.  Inside the camp the migrants are empowered to make decisions about how it is operated. As demonstrated when outside goons try to create a disturbance at a dance, the camp’s residents understand the importance of maintaining and protecting the camp’s boundary. Outside the perimeter they are threatened, exploited, and without power. Inside they exercise control. Preventing or absorbing boundary intrusion is essential to maintaining predictability and control of one’s environment.

Image of Joan Rensick, James Kent, and Kevin visiting Cannery RowAs with The Moon Is Down, reading The Grapes of Wrath nudged me down the path of social ecology, leading me to discover the role of “gathering places” and the importance of creating human geographic boundaries. Both concepts reflect the human need to feel secure; the recognition of how boundaries function, where they are placed, and what they mean in everyday life has become a key element of my writing about social ecology and my work as a consultant. The connection has also occasioned several visits to the current Cannery Row. (On one trip, shown here, I was photographed standing between Joan Resnick and Kevin Preister, director of the Center for Ecology and Public Policy.)

As noted, Steinbeck used the concepts of phalanx, “gathering place,” and boundaries—physical, social, and psychological—in books from Tortilla Flat to Sweet Thursday, a space of 20 years. In each he examines and employs the most basic elements of the human condition to make great stories from which I built the framework of a social ecology theory of my own: the human desire to gather together, to communicate, to feel safe, to care for one another, and to be empowered by using one’s environment creatively. This alone is sufficient cause for me to celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath.

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At San Jose State University, April’s John Steinbeck Month

April 4, 2014 by 2 Comments

Image of portion of San Jose State University's Grapes of Wrath posterThis is the year of The Grapes of Wrath—its 75th anniversary—and the cause for self-reflection for readers of John Steinbeck, including me. My version is both personal and professional. I teach at San Jose State University, one of the world’s top centers of John Steinbeck research, and for the second time I am serving as interim director of the University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies while Nicholas Taylor, the permanent director, is on leave.

John Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University

When I accepted the same post on a permanent basis in 2005, I was—to be frank—wet behind the ears, despite my apprenticeship 10 years earlier filling in for Susan Shillinglaw, the Steinbeck Studies Center director, during her sabbatical. I had a solid enough background teaching and writing about American Modernism, the era that includes John Steinbeck, although too often Steinbeck is ignored in academic discussion of his less popularly-read contemporaries such as Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot. But I made some embarrassing errors anyway—like revealing my lack of familiarity with the 1950 stage production of Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s third, last, and least-successful experiment with the play-novella form following Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down.

Of course, I had huge shoes to fill when I became the permanent director in 2005. Susan Shillinglaw’s stature as a John Steinbeck scholar was enormous when she stepped down as director of the Center at San Jose State University, where she continues to teach, and it has continued to grow. Part of my learning curve in her footsteps was to deepen my knowledge of John Steinbeck’s life and work, particularly the agony and transcendence embodied in The Grapes of Wrath—a book that continues to create more heat than light for certain readers in Oklahoma and California, and the excuse for latter-day book-banning in places where controversial classics such as Huckleberry Finn are deemed morally unwise or politically incorrect.

Image of poster featuring cover from Russian edition of The Grapes of WrathCelebrating The Grapes of Wrath in Pictures and in Words

When Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath on April 14, 1939, John Steinbeck became a national celebrity. The following year his book won the Pulitzer Prize, John Ford made the movie starring Henry Fonda, and Steinbeck’s notoriety spread throughout a world already at war. To mark the 75th anniversary of the novel’s debut on the international stage this month, San Jose State University will sponsor a series of celebrations in honor of Steinbeck’s masterpiece—a work that is integral to California history, relevant to American society, and as well known as Huckleberry Finn to readers as far away as Russia and Japan.

As noted in an earlier post, an exhibition of colorful covers selected from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath is currently on display at the Center for Steinbeck Studies. The exhibit, assembled by Archivist Peter Van Coutren, is accompanied by information about the novel and its background. I recommend it to anyone visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on the San Jose State University campus.

Thanks to the efforts of San Jose State University faculty members such as Scot Guenter, the SJSU Campus Reading Program will sponsor a Grapes of Wrath “readathon”—a public performance of the entire novel, starting at 6:00 p.m. on April 16 and ending 24 hours later, more or less. Individuals who participate as readers will receive a gift, along with listing on the Spartans Care Read-a-thon Honor Roll. (In case you’re wondering, “Spartans” is the designation for San Jose State University’s sports teams.) Signing up is easy.

Image of poster from San Jose State University's production of The Grapes of WrathReprising the Stage Version of Steinbeck’s Masterpiece

Thanks to the hard work of David Kahn, the chair of San Jose State University’s Department of TV, Radio, Film and Theater Arts, and his colleague Barnaby Dallas, the Coordinator of Productions, a main attraction will be the stage production of The Grapes of Wrath at the Hal Todd Theatre on the San Jose State University campus. The play—Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel—is directed by Laura Long and runs April 11-12 and April 15-19. The April 16 performance features a pre-performance reception and a post-play “talkback” with Susan Shillinglaw about her new book On Reading The Grapes of Wrath. Tickets can be purchased online.

Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 1988 and ran for three years. It also traveled to London and New York, where it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of 1991. Galati received two 1990 Tony Awards—Best Play and Best Direction—for his work, which also garnered a half-dozen acting award nominations for cast members Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, and Lois Smith. Galati, a former professor at Northwestern University, was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2004. San Jose State University produced his Grapes of Wrath in the 1990s, so this month’s run is a celebratory reprise.

In May there will be more—but I’ll save that for another time. Who said April was the cruelest month? At San Jose State University, it’s the coolest—thanks to John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath.

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