ENTRY #110
Milly. Russian-born Lewis Milestone (1895—1980) was one of Hollywood’s most respected directors and a winner of two Oscars (for Two Arabian Knights in 1928, and for All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930). His best films—he was especially good at adapting novels—were known for their vivid realism, sharp dialogue, and fluid camera technique, all exemplified in his masterful production of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck admired Milestone, who was considered something of a maverick in Hollywood, and interceded with Annie Laurie Williams (something he rarely did) so that Milestone could make The Red Pony. Production of the movie (Steinbeck wrote the script), however, was held up for many years and wasn’t released until 1949. Except for the buoyant musical score by Aaron Copland, the film was not very successful.
ENTRY #111
Pictures on Grapes. Twentieth Century-Fox mounted an enormous publicity campaign for the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, not an unusual thing to do considering the whopping price the company paid for the rights ($75,000). Steinbeck had in hand an advance copy of the January 22, 1940, issue of Life, with its three-page spread, featuring photographs by Horace Bristol, pointing out the veracity of director Darryl F. Zanuck’s film. Steinbeck, who had viewed the film a month earlier, wrote Elizabeth Otis: “Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring. No punches were pulled—in fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true.” In Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (p. 195). The movie was written by Nunnally Johnson and directed by John Ford; Tom Collins was hired as a technical assistant and advisor. Steinbeck was justly proud, for many critics consider it one of the best novel adaptations ever made by Hollywood. See Warren French, Filmguide to The Grapes of Wrath (1973), and Millichap, Steinbeck and Film (pp. 26-50).
ENTRY #112
Washington. Steinbeck made two trips to speak with President Roosevelt in the summer of 1940, both in the interest of national security. At the first—Wednesday, June 26—he discussed establishing a “propaganda office” using radio and motion pictures to combat distorted views of America that were circulating abroad. At the second—Thursday, September 12—Steinbeck and his friend, Professor Melvyn Knisely (see Entry #118 below), suggested flooding Germany and its occupied countries with counterfeit German paper money. During the 1944 presidential campaign Steinbeck worked as a speech writer for Roosevelt.
Paragraph my dialogue. Throughout the 1930s, in an effort to conserve paper, and to maintain a constant sense of intensity, Steinbeck eschewed traditional sentence and paragraph style, preferring instead to run together all of his exposition and dialogue into a compressed block form, using only the ¶ symbol to indicate breaks or shifts.
ENTRY # 113
Sandburg. Carl Sandburg (1878—1967), one of America’s most popular writers, was a man of kindred social and democratic tendencies, exemplified by his recent poetry, The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), and his monumental biography of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, two volumes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Abraham Lincoln: the War Years, four volumes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), both sets of which Steinbeck owned (the latter a Christmas gift from Carol). Steinbeck told his agents, “Carl Sandburg was here at the ranch last week and we had a very nice time and he got the pants beaten off him at horseshoes” (John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis and Mavis McIntosh, letter [August 9, 1940]; courtesy of Stanford University Library). During the visit Sandburg inscribed the first volume of the War Years set: “John Steinbeck, as between two soldier citizens and fellow strugglers—with affectionate good wishes.” See DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading (pp. 97—98).
ENTRY # 114
Military service. Congress passed The Burke-Wadsworth Selective Service Bill on September 14, 1940. Steinbeck was too old to be conscripted into active duty, and his “radical” past, which had become the subject of an extensive FBI file, repeatedly foiled his request for an Army officer’s commission. (“Do you suppose you could ask Edgar’s boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I’m an enemy alien. It’s getting tiresome,” Steinbeck told United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, who in turn forwarded Steinbeck’s note to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on May 11, 1942.) Eventually Steinbeck worked under the auspices of the Office of War Information, and the Air Force, for which he wrote—and John Swope photographed—Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: The Viking Press, 1942). In 1943 he was accredited as a war correspondent and spent June through October of that year writing dispatches from Europe and North Africa for the New York Herald Tribune, which were later collected as Once There Was a War (New York: The Viking Press, 1958). Jackson Benson, in True Adventures of John Steinbeck (pp. 485—541), is the first to establish the factual order and significance of Steinbeck’s World War II activities. At J. Edgar Hoover’s direction the FBI kept detailed files on American writers they considered subversive and dangerous. Steinbeck was no exception; the FBI monitored him from 1939, when The Grapes of Wrath first appeared, to March 1968, nine months before he died. The chilling story is evident in Jack Sirica, “FBI tracked Steinbeck’s travels and friendships for nearly 30 years,” San Jose Mercury News, June 14, 1984, pp. 1, 12A, and in Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988) pp. 71-79.
ENTRY #115
The Woods. Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944) was Steinbeck’s neighbor in Los Gatos. He was married to the poet and liberal activist Sara Bard Field (1883—1974). Wood had published numerous books, among them the satiric Heavenly Discourse (New York: Vanguard Press/The New Masses, 1927), and its sequel, Earthly Discourse (New York: Vanguard Press, 1937), both of which were in Ed Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Laboratory library. (See DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading, p. 120). Probably as a result of this visit with the Woods, Steinbeck heard his eyewitness account of the U. S. Army’s defeat of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Indians in 1877, recollected years later in Travels with Charley (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), pp. 143-44. Perhaps at this visit, too, Steinbeck inscribed a first edition of The Grapes of Wrath to “Sara and Cal Wood who are associated in their souls with this song.” See Morrow, John Steinbeck: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Formed by Harry Valentine (p. 30).
Decent letter. Steinbeck’s “decent” letter to Sheffield, written after this entry and full of exultant information about the Biddle “estate,” including news of Carol’s swimming pool, appears in Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, (pp. 207-209), but is misdated as July 9, 1940. See Riggs, ed., A Catalogue of the John Steinbeck Collection (p. 82).
Roll top Desk. The psychological symbolism of this purchase is nakedly apparent. “I have bought myself a lovely old roll top desk with sixty pigeonholes. When I file something now, it will never be found.” In Shasky and Riggs, eds., Letters to Elizabeth (p. 22).
ENTRY # 118
Nosler. Lloyd Nosler was Lorentz’s assistant editor on The Fight for Life.
Idell and Paul. The Budds, Carol Steinbeck’s sister and brother-in-law, just returned from Japan.
Japanese situation. Steinbeck was concerned about the growing “hysteria” toward the Japanese in California, and he feared a “witch hunt” conducted through “the formulated and calculated oppression of aliens by men of power, and ... the generalized hatred of uninstructed people who must have sacrificial victims” (John Steinbeck/Edward G. Robinson, letter, November 7, 1940; courtesy of Steinbeck Research Center, San Jose State University). Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, hysteria reigned: internment of the entire alien and nonalien Japanese population of the West Coast began the following April.
ENTRY # 119
Now comes. Plans for filming Steinbeck’s short story
, “Flight,” for which Pare Lorentz had written a treatment, were abandoned (Pare Lorentz/Robert DeMott, telephone interview, March 22, 1988). In 1961, with Steinbeck’s blessing, novelist Barnaby Conrad adapted and produced a film version. Steinbeck eventually drew on an introduction to the abandoned “San Francisco Bay Guidebook” for his Foreword to the second edition of Ricketts’s and Calvin’s Between Pacific Tides (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948), which reads in part: “This book then says: ‘There are good things to see in the tidepools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing’ ” (p. vi).
Much magic. Steinbeck had a pronounced mystical streak and was intrigued by fatalism, magic, superstitions, and totemic items. He returned from his film work in Mexico with presents for Gwyn, including a mummified bird of luck, like the one featured in The Forgotten Village (p. 15), and the “little bird in the black coffin,” referred to later in Entry #119. Both items seem to have been favorite mystical charms of Steinbeck’s: in Poem 6 of his love suite for Gwyn, he wrote, “And the bird of promise lies still in his casket”; and in Poem 9 he beseeched, “Pray for me a little on the bird / As I pray for you on the bird / On the colored bird who is life and death / And all desire and all fulfillment” (Halladay, ed., “ ‘The Closest Witness,’ ” pp. 43, 306, 309).
ENTRY #120
Quarrels with Herbert. Herbert Kline’s direction of the documentary film, Lights Out in Europe, about Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, led to his collaboration with Steinbeck on The Forgotten Village. Their quarrels stemmed from Steinbeck’s defensiveness—he didn’t want Kline, the director, or Alexander Hackensmid, the photographer, to tell him how to do his script-writing job. Kline’s reminiscence of the making of The Forgotten Village, which won First Prize as the Best Feature Documentary at the 1947 Brussels World Film Festival, is told in “On John Steinbeck,” Steinbeck Quarterly, 4 (Summer 1971), 80- 88. Valuable background on Steinbeck’s first meeting with Kline is recorded in Bosley Crowther’s “Steinbeck & Kline, Inc.,” New York Times, April 7, 1940, Section 9, p. 5x.
Esther’s house. Steinbeck’s older sister, Esther Steinbeck Rodgers (1892-1986), and her husband, Carrol (d. 1962), lived in Watsonville, but owned a small cabin near the beach in Pacific Grove. Shortly afterward, during Carol’s absence in Hawaii, Steinbeck bought himself a small house at 425 Eardley Avenue, Pacific Grove. In April it was the scene of the confrontation between Carol and Gwyn to decide which woman would claim Steinbeck. Gwyn eventually won out. See Benson, True Adventures of John Steinbeck (pp. 477-479).
ENTRY #121
Toby. Webster F. Street (1899-1984), World War I veteran, Stanford classmate (an unpublished play by Street provided the basis for Steinbeck’s 1933 novel To a God Unknown), boon companion (Steinbeck was best man at Street’s wedding in 1925), and lifelong friend had become a lawyer (LLB, Stanford, 1928) and moved from Palo Alto to Monterey in 1935. A prolific writer and specialist in maritime law, Street helped secure the Western Flyer charter, and later he handled Carol’s and John’s divorce. His colorful, but self-deprecating, reminiscences are available in Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds., Steinbeck: The Man and His Work (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 1971), pp. 35-41; and in an interview published in San Jose Studies, I (November 1975), 109-27. Steinbeck immortalized “The Webster F. Street Lay-Away Plan—a martini made with chartreuse instead of vermouth,” in Chapter 23 of Sweet Thursday, and the valorous fighting deeds of “Sir Tobinus Streat de Montroy” in The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (p. 61), the latter called to my attention by John Ditsky.
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