5. Steinbeck’s disillusion with his marriage to Carol is graphically revealed in two sources (both so full of venom and convenient lapses that they need to be employed judiciously): a series of confessional letters to his agent Mavis McIntosh, written between May and September 1941, now at the University of Virginia Library; and his second wife’s recollections, “ ‘The Closest Witness’: The Autobiographical Reminiscences of Gwyndolyn Conger Steinbeck,” a 1979 MA thesis at Stephen F. Austin State University, transcribed and edited by Terry G. Halladay from original audio tapes recorded by Gwyn. (NOTE: In late 1941 or early 1942 Gwendolyn changed the spelling of her name to Gwyndolyn; except for those instances where Steinbeck uses the earlier spelling, all references to her in Working Days will be spelled with a y, as she preferred.) See also Benson, True Adventures of John Steinbeck (p. 460), who writes that Steinbeck “... perceived Carol as the cause of his malaise and Gwyn as the one person who could give him peace.”
6. For background on the Depression, the migrant labor issue and its historical evolvement, the Farm Security Administration programs and/or Tom Collins’s pivotal role as a camp manager, the following are recommended: Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), still the most telling testimony and companion to the veracity of The Grapes of Wrath (Chapters XVI and XVII of McWilliams’s sociological study cover ground plowed by Steinbeck’s novel, including Collins’s reports, and the disaster at Nipomo); Sidney Baldwin’s detailed but long-winded Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Walter J. Stein’s eminently readable California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); and Dick Meister and Anne Loftis’s excellent A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers (New York: Macmillan, 1977), to which I am indebted at the end of my Introduction for information about the “resolution” of the Dust Bowl Refugees’ plight. Although he has updated it twice (once for True Adventures of John Steinbeck, and once for inclusion in Ditsky’s anthology on The Grapes of Wrath), the most informative, best-illustrated study ever done on Collins is still Jackson J. Benson’s original version: “ To Tom, Who Lived It’: John Steinbeck and the Man from Weedpatch,” Journal of Modern Literature, 5 (April 1976), 151-210. In unpublished correspondence, written ca. January 20, 1939, Steinbeck told Annie Laurie Williams: “Letter from Tom. He’s sneaking a new camp into the pea picking district and has to do it at night.... When he gets a fence and a flag up they don’t dare bother him because he’s on government land then—so he gets his fence and his flag up at night. It’s very melodramatic but the only way. The Associated Farmers would kill him if they could.” (Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)
7. Annie Laurie Williams to John Steinbeck, Letter, July 2, 1938. Benson gives no indication that an edition of Collins’s reports went beyond the stage of being rejected by Covici-Friede, who thought the reports too sectional for wide interest (an odd decision for such a socially minded house). In breaking news of Pat Covici’s decision, Steinbeck wrote Collins in the spring (?) of 1937 (not, I suggest, as Benson dates it, in 1938): “The only thing left to do that I can think of is to utilize the material in other forms. You know of course my plans for the long novel dealing with the migrant [Ed.—probably ”The Oklahomans“]. I can use the great gobs of information. But the thing that hurts me is that I had hoped that from this piece of work which I still think is the finest social study I have ever seen, you could make a little money to carry on with....” Quoted in Benson, “ To Tom, Who Lived It’ ” (p. 205), and in more truncated form in True Adventures of John Steinbeck (p. 376). In constructing my version of events I have also relied on unpublished letters by Annie Laurie Williams to Steinbeck on January 4, 1937, and November 18, 1937. The latter concludes: “... Tom’s new material is fine. Mavis has it out with a publisher now. I just had a nice letter from Tom and am answering it right away. I sure do like that man and think it is a privilege to have him for a friend. Know you must have enjoyed your days with him.” (Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)
8. For the background of Collins’s memoir, variously called “They Die to Live,” and “Bringing in the Sheaves,” consult Benson’s 1976 Journal of Modern Literature essay, “ ‘To Tom, Who Lived It’ ” (pp. 206-10). Benson’s piece concludes with an appendix which reproduces Steinbeck’s “Foreword,” and prints those sections of “Bringing in the Sheaves” in which Steinbeck appears (pp. 211—32). Hereafter entered in the text of my Introduction.
9. John Steinbeck, interview with Herbert Kretzmer, London Daily Express, January 15, 1965. “What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft ... a kind of breaking through to glory,” Steinbeck added.
10. John Steinbeck, “California’s Harvest Gypsies,” Chapter 1, San Francisco News, October 5, 1936, p. 3. Uniformly referred to as “The Harvest Gypsies,” Steinbeck’s series, with minor alterations in the text, and with the addition of a piece that appeared first on April 15, 1938, in The Monterey Trader, was reprinted as a pamphlet, Their Blood Is Strong (San Francisco: Simon J. Lubin Society, 1938). The text of this booklet is available in French, ed., A Companion to The Grapes of Wrath (pp. 53—92). The whitewashed answer to “shiftless Okies” of Their Blood Is Strong and The Grapes of Wrath appeared from Frank J. Taylor in Forum, CII (November 1939), reprinted in Peter Lisca’s convenient The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism (pp. 643-56). It was one of many unsuccessful knee-jerk attempts to discredit the accuracy of Steinbeck’s charges. Benson, True Adventures of John Steinbeck (pp. 418-25), is especially informative about various responses to Steinbeck’s portrait of California migrant conditions.
11. Louis Walther, “Oklahomans Steinbeck’s Theme,” San Jose Mercury Herald, January 8, 1938, p. 12. Obviously in The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck did not abandon the land-hunger theme or his belief that the migrants represented a specific phalanx group within the large mass movement the nation was experiencing in the 1930s. They would change California, Steinbeck later said in a self-created interview, because “... they are brave, because although the technique of their life is difficult and complicated, they meet it with increasing strength, because they are kind, humorous and wise, because their speech has the metaphor and flavor and imagery of poetry, because they can resist and fight back and because I believe that out of those qualities will grow a new system and a new life which will be better than anything we have had before.” Quoted in Lisca, ed., The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism (p. 862).
12. John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, May 1938. In Florian J. Shasky and Susan F. Riggs, eds., Letters to Elizabeth: A Selection of Letters from John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1978), p. 7. Steinbeck was “treasonable enough” to believe that California subverted human liberty with its own brand of fascism. For a long time after the lettuce strike, he feared that vigilantism in Salinas would continue to suppress workers’ democratic rights. In this statement, written in November 1937, and published in May 1938, he established a telling connection between tyranny at home and abroad: “Just returned from a little tour in the agricultural fields of California. We have our own fascist groups out here. They haven’t bombed open towns yet but in Salinas last year tear gas was thrown in a Union Hall and through the windows of workingmen’s houses. That’s rather close, isn’t it? Your question as to whether I am for Franco is rather insulting. Have you seen anyone not actuated by greed who was for Franco? No, I’m not for Franco and his Moors and Italians and Germans. But some Americans are. Some Americans were for the Hessians England sent against our own revolutionary army. They were for Hessians because they were selling things to them. The descendants of some of these Americans are still very rich and still touchy concerning the American Way, and our ‘ancient liberties.’ I am treasonable enough not to b
elieve in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions.” In Writers Take Sides: Letters about the war in Spain from 418 American authors (New York: The League of American Writers, 1938), pp. 56—57.
13. Letter in the Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
14. An uncut version of Steinbeck’s letter can be found in Lewis Gannett, “Steinbeck’s Way of Writing,” which served as his Introduction to Pascal Covici’s enlarged second edition of The Portable Steinbeck (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), pp. xxi-xxiii, and in Tedlock and Wicker, eds., Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-five Years (pp. 32—34). Until now little has been known about New York’s response. On May 24, 1938, Annie Laurie Williams replied: “I admire you for having the courage of your convictions and know you would feel better if you could have heard what Elizabeth and Pat both said when they read your letter ... [W]e all admire you more than ever for sticking by your instincts about your work.” (Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)
15. Years later, Steinbeck told a British interviewer that, following his experiences at Visalia, he had written The Grapes of Wrath “protesting at what I had seen ... during the migration of thousands of dispossessed families. I saw people starve to death. That’s not just a resounding phrase. They starved to death. They dropped dead.” Quoted in “The wrath hasn’t left Steinbeck,” London Daily Mail, September 18, 1961, p. 8. Furthermore, Steinbeck had apparently agreed to collaborate with Horace Bristol, not simply on a piece for Life magazine, which has commonly been supposed (in his letters to Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck talked only of invited assignments for Life, which he agreed to, and for Fortune, which he rejected as being the wrong audience for his efforts), but on an entire book devoted to the Okies’ travail. The book would incorporate Steinbeck’s text and Bristol’s photographs, in the manner of Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s 1937 book, You Have Seen Their Faces (Horace Bristol/Robert DeMott, letter, April 26, 1988). After his traumatic encounter at Visalia, however, Steinbeck knew he had witnessed the stuff of tragedy, and he decided once again to terminate a proposed collaboration. Some of his sentences from The Grapes of Wrath were later chosen to accompany Bristol’s photographs of Visalia, published in Life, June 5, 1939 (pp. 66-67). Bristol’s photographs appeared a second time in Life, on February 19, 1940 (pp. 10-11), in order to prove the authenticity of John Ford’s movie version: “These photographs, here republished, were taken by Life Photographer Horace Bristol in March 1938, when he and Author John Steinbeck toured the Okie camps in search of material for a picture book and a story for Life. The picture book was dropped to make way for the best-selling novel called The Grapes of Wrath. Never before had the facts behind a great work of fiction been so carefully researched by the newscamera.” Although Bristol and Steinbeck participated in the same devastating events at Visalia, they “saw” things far differently (despite Life’s contentions), and ultimately used their experiences in wholly opposite ways. Bristol’s photographs speak for themselves; Steinbeck’s visual realism became a means to a symbolic end. Bristol’s brilliant photograph of a young mother nursing her child was obviously the prototype for maternal Rose of Sharon, but Steinbeck’s “use” of that image, by having her give her breast to a total stranger, represented a leap beyond facticity, a leap Bristol himself admitted he did not fully understand: “So far as I know, this event was a figment of Steinbeck’s imagination. I won’t say it didn’t happen—just that it didn’t happen in my presence. I still look with compassion at the print of the young mother who was Rose of Sharon’s prototype, her breasts swollen with milk, but nursing a young infant instead of an old man. My impression was that Steinbeck wrote this episode to shock and titillate his readers....” See “Faces of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” Photographs and story by Horace Bristol, photo captions by John Steinbeck, This World (San Francisco Examiner Magazine), October 25, 1987, p. 14, and a glossier portfolio in his “Documenting The Grapes of Wrath,” The Californians, January/February 1988, pp. 40-47. Also consult Carol Shloss, In Visible Light, Photography and the American Writer: 1840-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 201-29, for an intriguing look at Steinbeck’s relatedness to documentary photography, especially Dorothea Lange’s.
16. Letter, December 1950, in the Pascal Covici Archive at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. A stenographer at The Viking Press transcribed Steinbeck’s handwritten journal manuscript, but then destroyed or lost the original holograph version (all efforts to locate it have failed). Although Steinbeck might have reviewed—perhaps even reread—the typed version, he apparently did not make any corrections in it. This present edition (with Steinbeck’s entry numbers normalized) provides an unexcised readable text of the typed journal. Annotations and explanatory notes (indicated by asterisks in the text) appear at the end of the book where they will not impede the narrative flow of Steinbeck’s entries. Grammatical/spelling regularizations have been kept to a silent minimum, a pleasurable result of having a substantially clear and intelligible typescript to work with in the first place.
“’You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’ ”
The Eagles, “Hotel California”
PART I:
Prelude
(February 1938)
For the moment now the financial burdens have been removed. But it is not permanent. I was not made for success. I find myself now with a growing reputation. In many ways it is a terrible thing.... Among other things I feel that I have put something over. That this little success of mine is cheating.
—Steinbeck, in a 1936 entry in his Long Valley/Of Mice and Men ledger book. (Courtesy of Steinbeck Research Center, San Jose State University)
Commentary
Steinbeck composed his first journal entry on or about February 7, 1938, shortly after the death of his brother-in-law, and just prior to at least two separate field trips (in February, and again in early March) to observe the horrid conditions at Visalia. He had recently abandoned “The Oklahomans” and in its place had begun “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” an incendiary tract that occupied his attention until May 1938, when—in disgust at having compromised his own ability—he destroyed the 70,000-word manuscript.
The winter of 1938 was a period of intense activity and vexation for Steinbeck. In January and February California was being inundated by torrential rains (“This is the 19th day of rain,” Steinbeck wrote Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent and confidante, on February 14); the deluge provided a symbolic backdrop for Steinbeck’s pessimism. He would be thirty-six years old on February 27, but he hardly felt like celebrating. His growing sense of anger about the plight of Visalia’s starving migrants colored nearly everything in his life, including, temporarily, his will to write. “Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies,” he confessed to his agent. As if that weren’t enough to undercut his emotional equilibrium, several other personal disturbances occurred in February, including a trumped-up paternity charge (which was eventually dropped), and the dissolution of an intimate friendship with George Albee, a fellow novelist who had become jealous of Steinbeck’s artistic achievements. “I’ve needed help and trust and the benefit of the doubt,” Steinbeck told Albee in his characteristically frank way, “because I’ve tried to beat the system which destroys every writer, and from you have come only wounds and kicks in the face” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 157).
Privately, Steinbeck was contending with the ironic fruits of his public success. Deeper yet, he struggled with the paralyzing fear that his talent was inadequate for the writing task at hand. His success had been honorably earned, but Steinbeck, ever his own harshest critic, remained unconvinced. In fact, self-denunciation became a repeated theme throughout the entire jour
nal. His brilliant novella, Of Mice and Men, published by Covici-Friede a year earlier, had sold well over 120,000 copies, thanks in part to its being a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. More immediately, the play version (directed by George S. Kauf man, and starring Wallace Ford, Broderick Crawford, and Clare Luce), which had opened at New York’s Music Box Theatre on November 23, 1937, was still packing the house three months later. It eventually ran for 207 performances and won, that April, the prestigious New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award. In addition, Pare Lorentz, whom Steinbeck had been expecting in Los Gatos since January (he finally showed up around February 13), wanted to discuss filming In Dubious Battle. And later in the month both Fortune and Life magazines wanted Steinbeck to write essays on migrant conditions. His name had suddenly become a hot property, with all the attendant traps, seductions, and demands that accompany rapid fame. (As bad as things seemed in the winter of 1938, they were only a minor rehearsal for the turbulent drama to come during the next few years.) A month or so before his opening journal entry, Steinbeck complained to Joseph and Charlotte Jackson:
I get sadder and sadder. The requests and demands for money pour in. It is perfectly awful. WPA worker in pencil from Illinois—“you have got luck and I got no luck. My boy needs a hundderd dollar operation. Please send a hundderd dollars. I will pay it back.” That sort of thing. Getting worse every day.... Someone told a Salinas ladies’ club that I had made three hundred thousand dollars this year. That’s the sort of thing. It is driving me crazy. “If you will just send me a railroad ticket to Boise I can come to California and get rid of my rheumatism.” They’re nightmarish. Some may be phonys but so damned many of them aren’t.... The damned things haunt me. There’s no way of getting over the truth . . . that we have very little money.... Its nibbling me to death (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 153).
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