A Journey into Steinbeck's California, A Journey into Steinbeck's California and A Journey into Steinbeck's California

Abstract

It is hard to overstate the impact Susan Shillinglaw has had on Steinbeck studies. For her long-term tenure as the director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University, her subsequent role as the director of the National Steinbeck Center, and her numerous books and articles on a wide variety of Steinbeckian topics, the Monterey Herald dubbed her “the queen of Steinbeck studies” (Marcos Cabrera, “With Susan Shillinglaw, Steinbeck Center Starts New Chapter,” 17 June 2015).Two of the most important themes in Shillinglaw's Steinbeck scholarship have been environmental issues and fleshing out aspects of the author's biography, particularly as it was affected by significant women—especially Carol Brown Steinbeck and Elaine Scott Steinbeck. These themes are present throughout her work, and are particularly evident in the groundbreaking 1997 tome Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches—coedited with Susan F. Beegal and Wesley N. Tiffney Jr.—and her numerous biographical/critical publications on aspects of his life, particularly his relationship with Carol, Steinbeck's first wife. Taken as a whole, Shillinglaw's career amounts to a continuous challenge to reread and reexamine Steinbeck's life and work within the context of his complex relationships with his native land, California's Salinas Valley, and surrounding environs.Viewed from this perspective, A Journey Into Steinbeck's California (now in its third edition) explores Steinbeck's “holistic sense of place,” a multilayered vision which encompasses a place's current appearance (the surface), its people (human interactions), its history, and the interconnectedness of all living things. For the purposes of clarity, I will deal with each edition in chronological order of publication, starting with the first.Chapter 1, “Steinbeck's California: The Valley of the World,” outlines the sense of place and concludes, “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” (11). Each chapter is interspersed with photos and images illustrating the location under focus. Photographed by Nancy Burnett, the majority of these photos are landscapes, panoramic full-color shots which resemble landscape descriptions in Steinbeck's own work. Some have simple captions identifying locations, but many others are captioned with excerpts from Steinbeck's work or, in some cases, with historical explanations (such as the discussion of the impact that the opening of Highway 1 had on both Steinbeck and on California in general). Other, smaller black-and-white photos are historical pictures showing Steinbeck himself at various ages of his life, or members of his family, or specific locations as they looked back in Steinbeck's day.Shillinglaw's skillful combination of environmental analysis and biography work with Burnett's photographs to create an immersive experience for the reader who would understand John Steinbeck's world. Shillinglaw's comments examine the implications of Steinbeck's sense of place; Burnett's photos illustrate that sense of place. The result is a whole greater than the sum of its parts; taken separately, it's a thoughtful analysis and some nice pictures; taken together, text and photos offer unique insights that would not be possible without the presence of both.The rest of the book is divided into specific California locations connected to Steinbeck—places where he lived and places depicted in his fiction. The chapters are arranged in the order in which Steinbeck lived in that place, and the chapters form a rough biography (that is far more than biography) of his California years, although Shillinglaw does not confine herself to strict chronology when it does not suit her purposes. Chapter 2, “Salinas: A Remembered Symphony,” details Steinbeck's Salinas, exploring locations important to the author's childhood and youth, the neighborhood where he grew up, and his gravesite. Events of cultural and historical significance are highlighted, including events as diverse as the Salinas rodeo and the Japanese internment during World War II. Included are excerpts from and brief discussions of a number of works, particularly East of Eden, historical pictures, together with Burnett's landscape photos. The chapter also includes a discussion of Steinbeck's uneasy relationship with his hometown; although he is, by far, Salinas's most famous native son, his sometimes less than flattering portrayal of his hometown and his social activism made many residents in this conservative area uncomfortable. Chapter 3, “Beyond Salinas: The Salad Bowl of the World,” explores the rest of the Salinas Valley, including the Red Pony Ranch, agriculture and migrant labor, the sugar industry, and the ranch owned by the Hamiltons, Steinbeck's maternal grandparents. The origins of stories in The Pastures of Heaven¸ Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden are explored.“Moving Around: A Restless Decade” is the topic of Chapter 4, which details Steinbeck's seminomadic post–high school career. This period included Steinbeck's erratic six years at Stanford between 1919 and 1925; his friendships made in college, including Toby Street and Carlton “Dook” Sheffield, both of whom became lifelong friends; and his literary apprenticeship under writing professor Edith Mirrielees, who would continue to read and comment on his work long after he left the university. The chapter chronicles Steinbeck's important sojourn in New York City in 1925–26, where he traveled via boat through the Panama Canal, an episode which gave him much material for Cup of Gold, his first novel, and which exposed him to the grinding poverty that can shape peoples' destinies. Shillinglaw draws useful comparisons between Steinbeck's time in New York and the formative years of both Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. This chapter also chronicles Steinbeck's two winters in primitive conditions on Lake Tahoe, where he explored nature, focused on his writing, and developed the work habits that would serve him well in later years, particularly during the composition of The Grapes of Wrath.Chapters 5–8 examine Steinbeck's time on the Monterey Peninsula and his relationship with this place where he wrote the works that became his first popular successes. Tortilla Flat was set there, and Steinbeck's fiction would continually return to the peninsula long after he left California. Chapter 5, titled “Monterey Peninsula: Circle of Enchantment,” offers an analysis of Steinbeck's development, noting that the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Peninsula were the “two ecosystems he knew best growing up” (66). The descriptions contrast the “Anglo-Saxon, westering pioneers who are the major players” in the author's “valley fiction”—To a God Unknown, The Red Pony, and parts of East of Eden—with the “multidirectional and multiethnic” Monterey, the source for works such as Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and other parts of East of Eden (68). This chapter and the following three are particularly useful for students, scholars, and readers of Steinbeck. For, virtually uniquely among white male canonical American authors of his generation, one of Steinbeck's strengths as an author is that he sees that the land has always been occupied, that others came before we did, that a place may have many histories, and that, in the future, others will likely occupy the land (possibly by replacing its current occupants). As one trained in marine biology and in ecosystems, he not only acknowledges the possibility of change, but he also celebrates these continuous changes as part of the never-ending motion that characterizes every living system.Chapter 5 discusses the many peoples who have inhabited the Monterey Peninsula, examining the relationship between the “Native Californians of Monterey,” or paisanos, and other residents, concluding with a discussion of Tortilla Flat and the events that Steinbeck used imaginatively in that novel. “Pacific Grove: A Writer's Retreat,” Chapter 6, explores Steinbeck's time in that city, his growing awareness of marine biology, his long-term relationship with the Hopkins Marine Station, his growing friendship with Ed Ricketts, and how these elements shaped his growing understanding of the world, of the natural environment, and of how to depict these things in narrative art. Chapter 7, titled “New Monterey: Water Gazers,” describes the city as “liminal space on the peninsula” (107), a place where “fishermen and immigrants” were able to take hold. Ed Ricketts's life and scientific views are explored, along with the friendship among Steinbeck, Ricketts, and scholar of myth Joseph Campbell. Possible real-life models for characters in Cannery Row are discussed, including Ricketts as a stand-in for Doc and Flora Woods, the model for Dora Flood in Cannery Row and Fauna in Sweet Thursday. Throughout the book, Shillinglaw and Burnett provide maps describing the location the chapter depicts. All of these maps are useful, and the map of Monterey, with its correlations among various settings in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, provides a richer understanding of both books.The final chapter on the Monterey Peninsula, “Bohemian Carmel: Modernism in the West,” explores the artists' enclave in that city and the influence that four of its residents—Beth Ingels, Lincoln Steffens, Edward Weston, and Robinson Jeffers—had on Steinbeck's artistic development. This chapter illustrates another strength of this book: through photos, commentary, and excerpts, Shillinglaw contextualizes Steinbeck in context with other authors, most of whose work is infused with a strong sense of social justice.Following after the Monterey Peninsula, Chapter 9 moves to the subject of “Los Gatos: A Place to Write.” As she does in other sections, Shillinglaw explores the places where Steinbeck lived, the friendships he made, and the events that influenced his writing. Appropriately, this section is the longest because Los Gatos is where Steinbeck wrote what are arguably his most important works, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.Shillinglaw chronicles Steinbeck's trips throughout the labor-strife-torn rural areas as well as the nonfiction he wrote as he began to chronicle the plight of migrant workers, which resulted in Their Blood Is Strong and The Harvest Gypsies, and which provided grist for The Grapes of Wrath. The photographic curation is masterful in this chapter; Shillinglaw and Burnett provide contemporary photos, graphics, and print images from the 1930s, and historical photos to illustrate the cultural context that gave birth to Grapes as well as the ongoing relevance of Steinbeck's fiction. A photo of migrant workers being teargassed in 1936 seems remarkably prescient today.The final chapter is “Beyond California: The Lure of Mexico,” which explores Steinbeck's ongoing fascination with that country, the trip he and Ricketts took on the Western Flyer, and the collecting voyage that resulted in Sea of Cortez. The book concludes with a “Coda” discussing Steinbeck's move to New York in 1942, where he lived most of the rest of his life.The second edition of A Journey into Steinbeck's California, published in 2011, begins with an added preface that explores a paradoxical nature of Steinbeck's character: he was both a “homebody” and a wanderer. Steinbeck's “creative yearnings” and “wanderlust” are, Shillinglaw maintains, expressed in Pigasus, Steinbeck's personal stamp, which is an image of a flying pig. The preface concludes with a quotation from Sea of Cortez introducing Steinbeck's “tide pool” theory: that if one stretches beyond one's “own limitations,” one can look into a tide pool, see its connections with all things, then “leap out into the universe and … out of the moment into non-conceptual time.” When one can do that, “ecology has a synonym, which is all” (x). Steinbeck argues that California was Steinbeck's “tide pool.” This new introduction explicitly frames the book in terms of environmental and ecological terms, providing a nice setup for the work that will follow. The text has some minor revisions from the first edition but is largely unchanged; a few new photos are added. All told, the new preface and the added photographs fine-tune an already well-done work.The third edition has a different cover from the first two. It also revises the preface from the second edition and concludes with a paragraph worth quoting in its entirety: For “tide pool,” read any place one examines with full participation. In this book, that place is largely focused on Steinbeck's California, rich with associations that are multilayered: personal, historical, economical, cultural, and spiritual. This book captures Steinbeck's holistic vision of the place that was always the place of his heart, Central California, his home—all of it. (x) A mandala by Ray Troll, with “From the tide pool to the stars” at the top and “All things are one thing, one thing is all things” at the bottom, quotes from Sea of Cortez. Like the changes from the first edition to the second, the changes from the second edition to the third constitute a fine-tuning. This preface to the third edition constitutes Shillinglaw's clearest articulation to date of the relationship among Steinbeck's ecological views, the physical spaces in which he lived, and his fiction. This edition also breaks out the “Coda” from Chapter 10, chronicling Steinbeck's time in New York, to a separate chapter.In each of the three editions of A Journey into Steinbeck's California, Shillinglaw's thoughtful writing, Burnett's visually stunning landscape photos, and the curation of pictures and other images provide deep insight into Steinbeck's life and works. Each edition is a slight refinement of the previous one. The third edition represents a kind of culmination of Shillinglaw's thinking, a coming together of the various strands from Steinbeck scholars and work on other figures in American literature. A Journey into Steinbeck's California is a journey well worth taking.