A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Steinbeck spent a long career shaping the contours of that unique land in words. His Monterey County is not Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, more fabricated than real, but the landscape of his childhood, often more real than fabricated. His valley of the world is historically rich, beautiful, and peopled with migrants. Steinbeck wanted to carve prose so exacting that the places of his heart—the bronze hills of the Salinas Valley and the churning Pacific Ocean nearby—would be fully rendered for any reader. But it’s not just his descriptions that bring forth the spirit of place. His authorial grasp was ambitious and holistic. He wrote about nature’s impact on the eye and the heart.

  John Adolph Steinbeck, Steinbeck’s grandfather, in 1906 in his orchards in Hollister, California.

  He wrote about the history and geography of place. He wrote about the people who lived in the towns and valleys of Monterey County. He showed how each place he loved—Jolon, Soledad, Pacific Grove, Monterey, Salinas—had a different energy. Steinbeck’s fiction is a rich tapestry of land, history, and human experience.

  East of Eden, part autobiography, part myth, part historical survey, part anecdote, part pure creation, was the “big book” that would strike the symphonic chords of Steinbeck’s life. He considered the novel his War and Peace, written with “the great word sounds of speech not writing,” with “song” in it. “I will make my country as great in the literature of the world as any place in existence,” he wrote.

  A Journey into Steinbeck’s California is about John Steinbeck’s country, its landscapes and towns. Its intent is akin to Steinbeck’s own—to capture the whole picture, the intersection of land and people. Human history and natural history were never separate subjects for Steinbeck. Each place where he lived and wrote shaped him differently because each place had its own “vibration.” He in turn shaped those places: visitors to Cannery Row today expect to see Mack and the boys and are disappointed to find curio shops. Time alters a street like Cannery Row. But its vibration persists.

  A Holistic Sense of Place

  John Steinbeck said repeatedly that his books were written in layers: The Grapes of Wrath (1939) has five, Cannery Row (1945) has four, and Sea of Cortez (1941) has four, “and I think very few will follow it down to the fourth,” he wrote his editor. That notion of layers is perplexing because Steinbeck, like most writers, resisted textual explications. Although his comments on layers provide no keys, they do suggest that each book may be approached from different perspectives. And, in fact, holism begins here, understanding the importance of several perspectives, multiple layers, different “peepholes” as he notes in Cannery Row. To appreciate Steinbeck’s spirit of place—as well as his holistic sensibilities—is to consider what layering might mean for him (although this book is hardly concerned with strict constructions): first is the wonder of the surface; second, human interactions; third, historical shadows; and fourth, the universality of life.

  For John Steinbeck, surface texture encompasses the names of things, human eccentricities, and the physicality of a place. He asks readers to see with precision. Numerous examples could be given of his rapt attention to the external world. In a tide pool, “orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.” Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath looks “frawny” when mournful. Salinas hills are “gold and saffron and red” in June and, as summer wears on, become “umber.” California poppies are “a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies,” he writes in East of Eden, and deep purple lupins have petals “edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.” Steinbeck’s prose gives readers a human heart in contact with the land, to paraphrase nature writer Barry Lopez.

  “The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea.”

  Steinbeck’s holistic sweep includes human interaction with nature, as he declared in a notebook while writing To a God Unknown (1933): “Each figure is a population, and the stones, the trees, the muscled mountains are the world—but not the world apart from man—the world and man—the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know.” In Steinbeck’s hands, the Salinas Valley becomes a template for human struggles. As the opening chapter of East of Eden shows, the valley is a land of contrasts seen and felt: drought and rain; rich years and scrappy years; aching natural beauty—tawny or bright green hills, swaths of mustard or lupin in the spring, “round comfortable oaks”—colliding with menacing shadows—“high grey fog,” afternoon winds, dark blue mountains to the West, and turbulent waters on the Big Sur coast (and these days, unavoidable traffic). Chiaroscuro of the land tallies with his characters’ own light and shadow.

  Perhaps the mountain ranges bordering the Salinas Valley shouted “contrast” to Steinbeck most loudly—and those contrasts mean things deep in the psyche. The Gabilan Mountains to the East are “light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation,” he writes in East of Eden. In The Red Pony (1937), the Gabilans are “jolly mountains, with hill ranches in their creases, and with pine trees growing on the crests. People lived there, and battles had been fought against the Mexicans on the slopes.” But to the West lay the Santa Lucias, coastal mountains with stands of redwoods, deep ravines, hot springs, and scrub-covered hills. These are the unexplored, mysterious places in Steinbeck’s fiction. Like Jody, his protagonist in The Red Pony, the young Steinbeck must have wondered about these “curious secret mountains” to the West and thought how “little he knew about them.” Jody’s father tells him that “I’ve read there’s more unexplored country in the mountains of Monterey County than any place in the United States,” a snippet of dialogue that might well have come from Steinbeck’s own father.

  California poppies.

  Lupins in the San Antonio Valley.

  A California oak, depicted in Ann B. Fisher’s The Salinas, Upside-Down River.

  These landscapes, resonant with human energies, are quite different from those of another renowned Californian, John Muir. Whereas Muir’s is a triumphant wilderness, Steinbeck’s is a peopled land, space with a human imprint. Even at its darkest, Steinbeck’s nature is a place where people experience joy as well as pain. Nature offers a refuge. In Of Mice and Men (1937), George and Lennie find a protective clearing by the Salinas River; in The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad hides from pursuers in a cave; Jody in The Red Pony finds comfort in a grassy spot near the water tank. In Cannery Row, Mack and the boys’ home is under the protective shadow of a black cypress tree whose “limbs folded down and made a canopy under which a man could lie and look out at the flow and vitality of Cannery Row.” Land is home to restless spirits.

  A Sense of History

  Steinbeck’s holism also embraces what he called a necessary “wall of background” in each work. That meant getting the atmosphere right for each story. History and culture are as much a part of place in Steinbeck’s work as is nature, carefully rendered and symbolically evoked.

  Dark Watchers

  To the Spanish, Big Sur was “El Pais Grande del Sur,” or “the big land to the south.” For Steinbeck, as for his Carmel neighbor Robinson Jeffers, the Big Sur coast was a land of mystery: dark mountains, churning sea, silent redwood groves. Perhaps his 1920 stint on a road construction crew in the area stamped him with the region’s dark appeal.

  Highway 1 along the wild coast opened to much fanfare on June 27, 1937; it has been compared to two of the loveliest and most precipitous drives in the western world, the Cornich in France and the Amalfi Coast in Italy.

  One of Steinbeck’s most anthologized stories, “Flight,” is set in this region: “About 15 miles below Monterey, the Torres family had their farm, a few sloping acres above a cliff that dropped to the b
rown reefs and to the hissing white waters.” When young Pepe Torres must flee into the mountains, “Dark watchers” haunt him—as they seem to haunt the gnarly mountains today. “I don’t know who the dark watchers are,” Steinbeck responded to a 1953 query about the meaning of the story, “but I know they are there. I’ve seen them and felt them. I guess they are whatever you want them to be.”

  Human histories crowd California. Settlement came from all directions: Spaniards and Mexicans from the south; Chinese and Japanese by sea from the west; and German, Swedish, and English pioneers from the prairie or seaboard of the eastern United States. Steinbeck includes this historical diversity. His Salinas Valley is, in fact, a region roughly outlined by Spanish missions: Mission San Juan Bautista in the north, Missions Soledad and San Antonio de Padua to the south, the Carmel Mission to the west. These romantic, brooding ruins and restored churches stand sentry over Steinbeck Country and serve as fitting symbols of his holistic sensibility, for the history of the Salinas Valley shaped Steinbeck’s prose as fully as did the valley’s natural features. That rugged history is etched in mission grounds, where from the 1770s to the 1830s padres converted Indian souls and cultivated rich soils—slowly eroding the native people’s sovereignty. It is apparent in adobes that “seemed to have grown out of the earth,” Steinbeck wrote, built on Spanish and Mexican land grants, many melting back into the ground during Steinbeck’s childhood. It is recorded in the Spanish and English names of places Steinbeck knew well:

  After the valleys were settled the names of places refer more to things which happened there, and these to me are the most fascinating of all names because each name suggests a story that has been forgotten. I think of Bolsa Nueva, a new purse; Morocojo, a lame Moor (who was he and how did he get there?); Wild Horse Canyon and Mustang Grade and Shirt Tail Canyon. The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them, reverent or irreverent, descriptive, either poetic or disparaging.

  Working on irrigation in the Salinas Valley near Spreckels, circa 1908.

  That history is also Chinese Lee’s mother in East of Eden, brutally raped in a Sierra gold camp, or the Japanese boy who is teased in The Pastures of Heaven (1932), or the rough Filipino migrant workers in “Fingers of Cloud,” one of Steinbeck’s first stories, written when he was at Stanford.

  Chinatown in Pacific Grove, early 1900s.

  Borderland

  Steinbeck’s West is also a borderland, something first identified by Wilbur Needham, reviewing the 1938 collection of stories, The Long Valley, for the Los Angeles Times. “Behind each story, inside it, and surrounding it, there is a presence … a fragile presence but with surprising strength in that borderland story of this world and the mind’s world and maybe another world.” Steinbeck crosses borders between place and spirit.

  Appreciating what he calls “ALL” in Sea of Cortez is recognizing that humans are indeed connected to the land and its creatures, to other human histories—and to something larger than any particular place or vibration or historical moment: “Most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.” Steinbeck said this when he noted that his was a valley “from which come wonders.” He said it when he tried to explain moments of full connection in his life:

  You know the big pine tree beside this house [in Pacific Grove]? I planted it when it and I were very little; I’ve watched it grow. It has always been known as “John’s tree.” Years ago, in mental playfulness I used to think of it as my brother and then later, still playfully, I thought of it as something rather closer, a kind of repository of my destiny … if the tree should die, I am pretty sure I should be ill. This feeling I have planted in myself and quite deliberately I guess, but it is none the less strong for all that.

  Cannery Row today.

  For Steinbeck, “ALL” is also suggested in what he called a “child’s vision,” a sense he wanted to achieve in East of Eden, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, even the stately Sea of Cortez. “Adults haven’t the clean fine judgment of children,” he wrote to a friend. In Of Mice and Men he wanted “colors more clear than they are to adults, of tastes more sharp. I want to put down the way ‘afternoon felt’ and of the feeling about a bird that sang in a tree in the evening.” Children see the world unmitigated. They participate fully. The child’s vision of nature—universal, sharply observed, deeply felt, and complete—is Steinbeck’s legacy. As an adult, he wrote down the awe of his childhood spent in the lovely Salinas Valley and on the shore of the sweeping Pacific coast.

  Another Peephole

  The heart of the man John Steinbeck beats steadily in Travels with Charley (1962), a book not about California but about a quest for something broader: America itself. This late book says something about Steinbeck’s holistic sensibilities. In it, most certainly, is Steinbeck the man—charming, curious, affable, lifelong dog owner, lover of all things mechanical, creator of gadgets. In 1960 Steinbeck decided to drive a camper truck around America from his home in Sag Harbor, New York, to California and back. Long road trips are taken by restless souls—and that Steinbeck was. Books about road trips are often written by optimists and dreamers—and John Steinbeck had long studied that part of the human spirit. Like the Joads, Lennie and George, Joseph Wayne, and the grandfather in The Red Pony, Steinbeck was “westering,” chasing an idea. Steinbeck’s idea was America as a place. His goal was, as he says in Travels with Charley, to rediscover this “monster land” by understanding a country made up as much by place as by people.

  When he reached California, at the midpoint of the book, Steinbeck was coming home—as Thomas Wolfe says we must not and cannot. He looked mournfully at places altered—Monterey, Cannery Row, Salinas. But he ended his stay in Monterey County on top of his beloved Fremont Peak, with an elegy to what that panorama still held: his roots. Roll back the years and the fields still spread out, and his father is still carving his mother’s name on a tree near Big Sur. As Steinbeck left Monterey County, he rediscovered his own sense of place in a vista that still gives tourists and natives alike something akin to a chill: the sight of California’s gentle golden hills, groomed valleys, and the sea beyond. In that panorama, Steinbeck may have found the America he was seeking. For him, America is a place in the heart, a deep connection to the land and to the traditions of one’s people. Steinbeck Country is indeed the valley of the world if we look at it with Steinbeck’s holistic sensibilities—the place, the people, the history, the spirit.

  John Steinbeck, 1961. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

  A Journey into Steinbeck’s California assumes another road trip—the reader’s own—to discover some of what Steinbeck was after: the “exhalation” and “vibration” of California. With Steinbeck, we can pay attention to the slant of afternoon light, catch some of the region’s layered past, and get a glimpse of small human stories tucked into inland valleys. These elements are essential to Steinbeck’s sense of place, a panorama of human histories played out on California’s inland mountains and Pacific coast.

  Chapter 2

  Salinas

  A Remembered Symphony

  Mural in downtown Salinas.

  “Strange how I keep the tone of Salinas in my head like a remembered symphony.”

  —Steinbeck, journal entry, 1948

  John Steinbeck as a high school senior, June 1919.

  When John Steinbeck was born there in 1902, Salinas was a bustling town of 3,300, the county seat of Monterey County, “a true, enterprising, progressive, permanent American city,” declared an 1881 promotional brochure. The rich land supported ranchers and farmers, attracting “Portuguese and Swiss and Scandinavians,” said Steinbeck, and Germans and English and Irish. Ranches were often large, the California pattern since Spanish and Mexican land grants broke much of the nascent state into gigantic plots
. By the mid-1930s, the entrepreneurial Shippers and Growers Association controlled agribusiness in a valley whose population had grown rapidly since World War I. “It was the biggest town between San Jose and San Luis Obispo,” Steinbeck writes in East of Eden, “and everyone felt that a brilliant future was in store for it.”

  The same would not have been said of young John Steinbeck, a restless and often indolent child. His parents were not farmers or ranchers—the Salinas elite—but middle class, with a respectable standing in town. His father was a businessman. His mother, a former schoolteacher, firmly guided her four children—three girls and John—toward promising futures. As often as not, John resisted her firm control. He was an uneven, mostly uninspired student and a loving, if not always dutiful, son. He was something of a rebel, with a gang of three or four friends who joined him in childhood mischief: Mr. Steinbeck apparently asked nine-year-old John daily if he’d been whipped at school. And he was something of a loner as well, feeling since his first birthday, he once wrote, that he didn’t fit in with stolid hometown ways. At age fourteen he decided that he would be a writer, a calling that would shape his adolescence and define his life.

  Independence of thought, restlessness of spirit, empathy for those who, like him, had felt socially marginalized, and a deep, abiding love of the land would define Steinbeck’s life and art. That was his Salinas heritage and, more broadly, the heritage of the American West.

  Steinbeck’s Salinas

  Incorporated on March 4, 1874, Salinas is a western boomtown that never went bust. The land created great wealth, “the richest community per capita, we were told, in the entire world,” writes Steinbeck.