A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  “I think flowers’ colors are brighter here than any place on earth and I don’t know whether it is the light that makes them seem so or whether they really are.”

  Wall opposite fireplace at 147 11th Street.

  In those Pacific Grove years, secure in familiar surroundings and married to a supportive woman, Steinbeck contracted both his penmanship and his world to the demands of his own imagination. Moods blended with the foggy coastal weather, as he wrote a friend: “It is a gloomy day; low gray fog and a wet wind contribute to my own gloominess. Whether the fog has escaped from my soul like ectoplasm to envelop the peninsula, or whether it has seeped in through my nose and eyes to create the gloom, I don’t know.” Many of the stories he wrote during those first raw years in Pacific Grove (published in 1938 in The Long Valley) are about people living sheltered, often desperate, and lonely lives. Steinbeck, unhappy in his own fictional progress, struck tones of defeat and ostracism and rejection, emotions he knew so intimately. In Pacific Grove, this intensely private, unsettled young man, familiar with the demons of loneliness and despair, created fictions that reflect his own psychic complexity.

  The loneliness of unsheathed self is one fictional chord struck by this burgeoning writer in his beloved Pacific Grove retreat. Home as a haven is another.

  “The little Pacific Grove house is many things to me”

  The unassuming red cottage at 147 11th Street, where John and Carol Steinbeck came to live in the fall of 1930, represents something essential to both of them, something at the core of Steinbeck’s fictional vision. Steinbeck made simple living his personal and fictional terrain. Throughout his life, he wrote about ordinary people; he, for the most part, had Spartan tastes. Even when fame came to him in the 1940s and 1950s, he never purchased houses that flaunted wealth. His house in Sag Harbor, where he spent summers from 1955 to 1968, was an East Coast version of the 11th Street home, a tiny cottage perched near the sea. Travels with Charley is a narrative about his own traveling house—a compact and simple camper on top of a pickup truck that protected his anonymity as he drove across America. He wanted the same in 1930s Pacific Grove: “Must have anonymity…. Unless I can stand in a crowd without any self-consciousness and watch things from an uneditorialized point of view, I’m going to have a hell of a hard time,” he wrote his agents in 1937. The Pacific Grove cottage sheltered his identity and his spirit.

  John built the fireplace at the 11th Street house in 1930; the turtle is probably from the Sea of Cortez trip.

  “We went to PG and closed the little house for the duration of the war. Wish we could have stayed. It was so pleasant and quiet. I would have liked to just sink into it. The garden was so quiet and nice and the ocean just the same as always.”

  “The White Quail,” a 1933 story, begins with a description of a view similar to that out of Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove window: “small diamond panes set in lead. From the window … you could see across the garden.”

  Steinbeck’s Gardens

  Steinbeck’s lineage was in the soil. Grandfather Sam Hamilton was a rancher. Grandfather Steinbeck dried and shipped apricots and plums from his Hollister orchard. At age 90, Grandmother Steinbeck was still making jams and jellies from their fruit. At the Pacific Grove cottage, Mr. Steinbeck cultivated vines and flowers in the yard as early as 1905 and worried often about the upkeep of the flowers in later years.

  John Steinbeck carried the hoe, so to speak. At age three, he made a garden for Grandmother Steinbeck, “and planted me radishes and lettuce,” wrote a delighted grandmother. He dug in the wet soil at Lake Tahoe in the mid-1920s and sent his parents a box of scarlet snowflower sprouts by mail, with detailed instructions for their propagation; they, in turn, sent him nasturtium seeds. And he shared with his father a warm connection to the Pacific Grove lot, the “wonderful” garden, “very wild and full of weeds and the flowers bloom among the weeds. I detest formal gardens.” He would write about that garden often: “My garden is so lovely that I shall hate ever to leave it,” he wrote a friend in 1931. “I have turtles in the pond now and water grasses. You would love the yard. We have a vine house in back with ferns and tuberous begonias. We have a large cineraria bed in bloom and the whole yard is alive with nasturtiums.”

  Site of the pond in the garden of the 11th Street house.

  The Town of Pacific Grove

  Pacific Grove and Monterey sit side by side on a hill bordering the bay. The two towns touch shoulders but they are not alike. Whereas Monterey was founded a long time ago by foreigners, Indians and Spaniards and such, and the town grew up higgledy-piggledy without plan or purpose, Pacific Grove sprang full blown from the iron heart of a psycho-ideo-legal religion.

  Few places in California could have better sustained this young writer than the conservative, neatly planned enclave of Pacific Grove—quiet, orderly, a “city of homes,” declared promotional brochures, with “saloonless streets.” From its inception, Pacific Grove was the most subdued of the three peninsula towns, the starchiest, a place of “deep quiet,” wrote Steinbeck. The location of Pacific Grove was “so healthy that doctors scarcely make a living,” promised an 1875 pamphlet. Summer fogs keep Pacific Grove cool. It was a town perfect for a writer who craved solitude.

  The town’s moral sensibility was set by Methodists, who in 1875 announced plans to found a seaside retreat in Pacific Grove. The Pacific Grove Retreat Association formed an agreement with wily David Jacks for the “purchase, improvement and control” of 100 acres of beachside property. Lots were drawn out—thirty-by-sixty-foot “tenting lots”—to accommodate some four hundred people, and on August 9, 1876, the first camp meeting was held at the Grand Avenue open air temple, lasting three weeks.

  To attract additional visitors, an Assembly and Summer School of Science was instituted in 1879 under the umbrella of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. Summer residents from the hot Central Valley were promised a series of edifying lectures and courses. Across America, Chautauqua Circles were popular for nearly half a century, offering adult education for the masses. By the 1890s, more than fifty such summer assemblies could be found in the United States, five on the West Coast. “It took the whole intellectual product of the period, decanted and distributed it with sincerity and skill,” wrote Mary Austin in a 1926 issue of the Carmel Cymbal. She added, “There can be no doubt that a vast majority of Americans, particularly American women, sincerely suppose that ‘culture’ is generated in ‘courses,’ and proceeds as by nature from the lecture platform.” Indeed, Austen’s assessment has merit. But, for nearly fifty years in Pacific Grove, many families found the sea and intellectual dabbling a fine mix. A 1,500-seat Chautauqua Hall was built in 1881 and still stands. Here, attendees listened to lectures by ministers, scholars, and scientists or attended talks on cooking, music, and art. The 1892 session promised, for example, David Starr Jordan, then president of Stanford University, lecturing on the “Passion Play at Oberammergau” with stereopticon illustrations, as well as a “charming astronomical” lecture. A season pass that year cost three dollars, and daily tickets cost fifty cents. The Chautauqua was a profoundly egalitarian movement.

  Cover of 1892 Chautauqua program.

  Steinbeck’s Dogs

  All his life, Steinbeck needed a garden and a dog, sources of creative fulfillment. After all, without ambassador Charley, what spark would his travels have ignited? A dog was family. When he lived alone at Tahoe, he shared the cabin with Airedales Omar and Jerry.

  When they were first married, John and Carol rented and fixed up a house in Eagle Rock and bought their first family dog, Bruga, a “Belgian shepherd puppy, pure black, which is going to be a monster.” A few months later, in May 1930, Bruga “died in convulsions which seemed to be the result of poison.” Steinbeck wrote, “Carol is well but very much broken up about Bruga. She never had a dog of her own before and she had become horribly fond of the little wretch.” Dogs were emotional outlets for both of them, sources of humor and despair. In Carol’
s 1930s scrapbooks, photos of dogs are carefully labeled. People are rarely identified.

  “Joggi, 14 months.”

  An Airedale named Tillie replaced Bruga in 1931, and she had puppies, “as sinful a crew as ever ruined rugs…. At present they are out eating each other…. They are eating the fence now. The appetite of a puppy ranks with the Grand Canyon for pure stupendousness.” Alas, Tillie got distemper, and Steinbeck—in a fit of odd temper himself—pulled out the dog’s whiskers “to strengthen their growth.” Tillie, “who had the most poignant capacity for interest and enjoyment in the world,” lived only eighteen months with the Steinbecks and then died, leaving Steinbeck bereft: “I need a dog pretty badly,” he wrote to his publisher a few weeks later. “I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.” In Tortilla Flat, Pirate’s dogs also sit in a circle and gaze at him with devotion. The dog Darling in Cannery Row is undoubtedly as spoiled as Steinbeck’s many pooches were.

  “It wasn’t all fun and parties,” Steinbeck wrote in an essay about the 1930s. “When my Airedale got sick, the veterinary said she could be cured and it would cost twenty-five dollars. We just couldn’t raise it, and Tillie took about two weeks to die. If people sitting up with her and holding her head could have saved her, she would have got well. Things like that made us feel angry and helpless.” Helplessness was always, for Steinbeck, leavened by a quirky humor that never failed him: he rounds this paragraph with a characteristic grace note: “When WPA came, we were delighted because it offered work. There were even writers’ projects. I couldn’t get on one, but a lot of very fine people did. I was given the project of taking a census of all the dogs on the Monterey Peninsula, their breeds, weight and characters.” (That was not his job but it was Frances Whitaker’s, who took a census of dogs and cats in Carmel for the WPA, a short-lived position.)

  Steinbeck had to rewrite Of Mice and Men, the last book started in the Pacific Grove house, because a ravenous young Toby, their new puppy in early 1936, ate the first part of the manuscript. “John went completely berserk and had to be locked up,” said friend Marjory Lloyd. In a more temperate mood a few days later he wrote, “Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half my ms. book. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms.”

  Tent cabins in Pacific Grove, circa 1882.

  Pacific Grove houses today.

  In 1880, David Jacks sold his ranchos, including the retreat land, to the Pacific Improvement Company, which had a greater interest in selling lots quickly than the Methodists had. Even after the Methodists lost control of land sales, the retreat association continued to guard the Pacific Grove image zealously. It was one of the first gated communities in the state; the gates closed at 9:00 every evening. The governing body, “patriarchal and unique,” according to the association, kept “without the borders of the town all disreputable, unruly and boisterous characters, and all unwholesome and demoralizing sports and pastimes.”

  Undoubtedly it was climate, location, and moral uplift that drew the Steinbeck family to the town in the early twentieth century. Mr. Steinbeck’s deed, like all in Pacific Grove, included a clause prohibiting the sale of liquor on the premises—a fact Steinbeck notes in Sweet Thursday. Well into the twentieth century, moral living was Pacific Grove’s iron core, and it remained a “unique resort where culture, refinement, and morality are the prevailing attributes,” as a 1928 pamphlet declared.

  When Steinbeck moved to Pacific Grove in 1930, the hot local topics were paving and widening the streets and opening a road between Pacific Grove and Carmel, which became the Holman Highway. After forty years of business, Holman’s Department Store was adding another story. The city council was trying to condemn the popular but decrepit bathhouse at Lovers Point (the city putting a value of $30,000 on the land, the owner $175,000). The paper noted regular lapses during Prohibition: “Abbott nabs brewery at Local ranch: Sheriff Seeks Salinas’ ‘Al Capone’ With his Gang fellows.” On the first page of the paper was a little column devoted to “brief items of things that make Pacific Grove a brighter and better place in which to live.” On the second page ran a “Come to Church” section. In 1932, a front page article sternly noted a man’s twin lapses: “D. A. Florey of Pacific Grove, said to be a communist organizer, is in the Monterey county jail in Salinas today pending his hearing on charges of wifely non-support.” It was a very small town.

  The “city of homes” has remained just that—a pleasant community. The nineteenth-century sense of purpose, orderliness, and uplift is evident in contemporary Pacific Grove—streets numbered, the town in a grid, Victorian houses tidy, many still framed by board-andbatten construction. On little lots that once sold for fifty dollars, tiny houses—some tent structures later framed—have been restored, many decorated with monarch butterflies (Pacific Grove is “Butterfly Town USA”) or strung with Chinese lanterns in mid-July.

  John and Mary. A neighbor recalled, “A man came every summer and rented a donkey cart for 25 cents per hour. On 17th and 18th streets. The block was all wooded at that time. Tents went up every summer.”

  Monarch Butterflies in Pacific Grove

  Environmental awareness came early to Pacific Grove. The yearly migration of butterflies to trees off Lighthouse Road was sharply watched, and in 1938, a fine of $500 was imposed for harm to any butterfly. Each October, butterflies from northern climes fly forty to fifty miles a day to arrive by the thousands, pile on branches, and settle in for the winter. In Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck has them as spring butterflies, “like twinkling aery fields of flowers” landing on pine branches, getting drunk on “thick resinous” pine juice, falling to the ground and “waving their inebriate legs in the air and giving off butterfly shouts of celebration, while their places on the twigs are taken by new, thirsty millions.” If not quite accurate, this is certainly a lovely notion and a nice way to perceive butterflies. Each year, as Steinbeck notes, the town does indeed host butterfly festivities.

  “City of Homes”

  In time, Steinbeck would own two homes in Pacific Grove; Grandmother Hamilton briefly lived in another; and John stayed for a few weeks at his sister’s cottage at Asilomar, writing Sea of Cortez. All of these homes still stand and are relatively unchanged. In a short drive around Pacific Grove, one can visit each little house—respecting, as Steinbeck fiercely guarded for himself, residents’ privacy.

  In 1941, shortly before their marriage ended, John and Carol purchased a small house with a large garden at 425 Eardley Street. This was an odd little house—haunted, John would claim—with a living room ceiling curved like a tent and carved birds perched around the ceiling. Rooms in the house were lined up like a freight train, his second wife Gwyn, would complain. When he lived there, a Mexican bell hung at the gate. This house is the scene for what is, perhaps, his worst recorded moment, that of a man torn between two women—Carol, his wife of eleven years, and, Gwyn, whom he’d met shortly after publication of The Grapes of Wrath. When Gwyn came to visit in 1941, he left Gwyn and Carol alone in the house, saying on the way out that he couldn’t decide between them, that “the one who feels she really wants me the most, gets me.” Although Carol won that round—Gwyn left that day—Gwyn captured the man in the end. In April 1941 John and Carol separated.

  425 Eardley Street.

  The houses around Central and Lighthouse avenues, the main streets in Pacific Grove, are little changed from Steinbeck’s time.

  Holman’s Department Store, 542 Lighthouse Avenue.

  John’s Grandmother Hamilton—Liza Hamilton in East of Eden—lived at 222 Central Avenue from 1914 to 1918. Steinbeck never lived here; however, Carol’s sister and brother-in-law, Idell and Paul Budd, rented this house while Paul worked briefly at the Hopkins Marine Station. In 1936, Steinbeck and Paul bui
lt a small workroom for the house.

  Holman’s Department Store, at 542 Lighthouse Avenue, was founded in 1891 and boasted forty-six departments when Steinbeck moved to the area: “Known far and wide as the biggest small town store in this part of the state,” ads read. It had a grocerteria and a beauty shoppe and sold tires and home furnishings. Ritch Lovejoy, one of Steinbeck’s friends, drew ads for Holman’s. In 1932, Holman’s sponsored a “sky skater,” just like the one mentioned in Cannery Row. The sky skater is a “mysterious marvel who will thrill and entertain spectators,” reported the local paper, “by gyrating on a tiny platform far above the top of Holman’s department store.” A Steinbeck fan wrote in the 1950s asking if his model for old Doctor Merrivale, who shoots at the skater with an air rifle in Cannery Row, might be a Fresno dentist who purchased an air rifle to shoot construction workers. Steinbeck answered,