Editor’s Column: Summoning the “Honest Spirit” of John Steinbeck: Back to Ireland

Abstract

Jay Parini proclaims that the purpose in writing his biography of John Steinbeck “has been to summon the honest spirit” of this writer. Recognizing Steinbeck’s own deep longing for home both in his own life and in many of his characters—such as the Joads and George and Lennie—Parini went in search of the writer’s essence by exploring both places where he had lived and those where his characters lived or quested for home. Parini writes:This motif of the impact of homes and family on this writer and his works carries throughout his biography. And his account begins with the enduring impression of the author’s childhood home:His major novels are about families and homes—the Joads’ futile search for a little white house among orange trees in The Grapes of Wrath; Adam Trask and his sons, Cal and Aron, in East of Eden; and Ethan Allen Hawley’s family in New Baytown in The Winter of Our Discontent. For Steinbeck, these families are the microcosm of his beloved America as it had faced hardship with fortitude during the Great Depression, as it became a wealthy world power after World War II, and as it lost ethical and moral moorings in the 1960s with the quiz show scandals.And Steinbeck writes about his own family: himself, his mother, grandmother, and grandfather in East of Eden—a sort of manners book written for his two sons, hoping that goodness would prevail in their lives. On his mother’s side, he has Irish forebears; from her he imbibed a love of homeland. And on January 31, 1953, in Collier’s Weekly, he publishes “I Go Back to Ireland,” telling of the Irishman’s quintessential longing and search for his forebears and their home in the Emerald Isle. Steinbeck writes lovingly of this place, this family:The Hamiltons, of course, are Steinbeck’s maternal forebears, featured prominently in the novel East of Eden.Commemorating this Irish connection, on November 27, 2021, a special Steinbeck Symposium was held at Drenagh Estate in Limavady, Ireland, and supported by the U.S. Embassy in London, the British Association of American Studies, and Ulster University. Willa Murphy of Ulster University and Philip McGowan of Queen’s University, Belfast, served as coordinators.Nick Taylor, former director of the Steinbeck Center at San José State University and executive editor of Steinbeck Review, attended and presented a paper, “Steinbeck’s Debt to Irish Humor.” Impressed by the variety and quality of the presentations, he suggested that we produce a special Irish edition of Steinbeck Review, bringing together a wide range of topics. And so we have done. And in these papers from Ireland, we discover some of the “honest spirit” of John Steinbeck of which biographer Parini writes.The articles section of this issue opens with Nick Taylor’s “Steinbeck’s Debt to Irish Humor,” in which he explains how Steinbeck “owed more than his sparkling eyes and red face to the Emerald Isle; his storytelling, too, owes a debt to Ireland.” Drawing on the writings of Don R. F. Nilsen and Brian Ó Conchubhair on the overarching theories of humor, Taylor maintains that Irish humor is largely informed by the themes of disparagement and superiority—not too surprising given Ireland’s history of British rule, famine, and “The Troubles.” Taylor particularly notes Steinbeck’s “Letters to Alicia” written from Ireland for Newsday and addressed to its publisher, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, before John and Elaine Steinbeck left for Vietnam to send another series of letters from Southeast Asia. Taylor states that Steinbeck’s Irish articles follow Nilsen’s observation on narrative structure that Irish short stories are essentially “elaborated jokes” whereby a “scrupulously engineered structure of expectations” evolves into a story with a “punchline.” A pair of Christmas stories provide amusing examples.Willa Murphy’s “Ulster in Steinbeck: Steinbeck in Ulster” follows with an exploration of Steinbeck’s “difficult relationship” with his Irish-based Presbyterian heritage and how its values “play out in an American context” throughout his writings. Murphy identifies a recurring conflict within Steinbeck’s works: an “impatience” with the “Calvinist strain in American culture that breeds intolerance, repression, humorlessness, and a lack of imagination” while at the same time embracing “Scots-Irish values—including mobility, ‘futurism,’ freedom, and iconoclasm.” This dichotomy is played out along the lines of gender. Female characters such as Grandmother Eliza Hamilton of East of Eden and Elisa Allen of “The Chrysanthemums” are associated with restrictive virtues of “tidiness and order, but not with intelligence, happiness, or freedom.” Conversely, East of Eden’s Samuel Hamilton, the narrator of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, and George Milton from Of Mice and Men speak and act out of “mobility and resourcefulness”—as George Milton tells Lenny Small, “We got a future.” Steinbeck elaborated on this conflict in the 1953 Collier’s Weekly article discussed above. Murphy describes the article’s portrayal as “romanticized vision . . . colliding with a shabbier reality. . . . He is disappointed and shocked to find Derry full of quiet, broken-down, gray people obeying too many rules, so that he can’t even get a drink on a Sunday evening.” He is also taken aback at the fact that his surviving relatives have not married, and hence will leave no legacy for the future which is so valued in Scots-Irish culture.Next, in comparison with the works of two Northern Ireland writers, poet Robert Dinsmoor and song collector/journalist Sam Henry, Frank Ferguson and Grainne Milner-McLoone’s “The Songs of a People: Steinbeck and Transatlantic Song” discusses the description of John Steinbeck’s 1952 trip to Ireland published in Collier’s one year later. Ferguson and Milner-McLoone state that the poetry of Dinsmoor, whose family migrated to America in the eighteenth century, celebrates “his country of origin.” Dinsmoor’s “use of Scots language . . . signifies a maintenance of linguistic links and knowledge of the Old World” which connects “the culture and identity of place and places” for those who took part in the diaspora. Henry’s extensive collection of Irish music, acquired through travel and competitions as reported in his column in the Northern Constitution, comprises songs sharing the themes of Dinsmoor’s verse: the “sorrow of leaving Ireland” balanced with “the expectation of new beginnings in a new country.” Ferguson points out that songs play a prominent role in both Steinbeck’s The Pearl and The Grapes of Wrath and that he was inspired by Scottish poet Robert Burns when selecting a title for Of Mice and Men. Yet Steinbeck’s Collier’s article, Ferguson believes, is devoid of the personal connection to Northern Ireland celebrated by the work of Dinsmoor and Henry. Instead of a personal response, the Collier’s article is literary, “bound up in the approach that employs, ultimately like East of Eden, a Timshel-like attitude to choosing between the evil of lost connections and the good of a perfect ending.”In the first intercalary piece, Steinbeck’s best-known novel is granted a fresh analysis by Grant Matthew Jenkins. His “Steinbeck, Race, and Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath” analyzes the absence of African-American migrants in Steinbeck’s 1939 novel despite their presence in this historic agrarian movement. Jenkins states that this omission is especially significant in light of the number of all-Black towns that existed along Route 66 and its side roads when the Joad family was traveling to California. In his review of the relevant criticism, Jenkins identifies three explanations for the absence of Blacks in The Grapes of Wrath: (1) rejection on the basis of Steinbeck’s “Nordicentrism,” (2) equivocation justified by his purported lack of ease in addressing the race issue, and (3) defense of the absence since The Grapes of Wrath is a “critique of White supremacist ideologies,” which would disqualify the author from being labeled as racist. In identifying the handful of racist/stereotypical references to Blacks in The Grapes of Wrath, Jenkins observes, the “examples, offensive as they are, may not necessarily give a fair and representative view of Steinbeck’s attitudes. . . . they do show that African Americans and the issue of race . . . were indeed within Steinbeck’s purview while writing the novel.”Following, Chris McGonigle’s “‘None of it is important or all of it is’: Steinbeck, Ricketts, Ecology, and Identity” reminisces on his own experiences at sea and with Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez. He concludes, “Ultimately, it is the bonds of human relations that get things done at sea just as anywhere else, a shared vision—a vision still tangible from the pages of the Sea of Cortez.”The final intercalary piece features the discussion of a student panel made up of six participants who read and discussed The Log in a weekly seminar in the months before the symposium. Representing majors in both the sciences and humanities, the students found much in the book to discuss. Their commentary on issues such as the treatment of animals, gendered language, and Steinbeck’s philosophy of the interdependency among nature’s creatures testify that the narrative of Steinbeck’s and Ed Ricketts’s excursion on the Western Flyer remains relevant yet today.In this issue’s “Steinbeck Today,” Kathleen Hicks, too, focuses on Steinbeck’s continued relevance in our turbulent world despite his membership in the club of “old dead white guys.” Citing his observations on the devastation of post–World War II Ukraine as published in A Russian Journal (1949), Hicks calls on us to pay attention, as Steinbeck would, to the current destruction of all that had been rebuilt in that country after World War II and to follow Steinbeck’s lead in “interrogating the truth and not . . . look[ing] away even when we are made very uncomfortable by what we see.” Another of Steinbeck’s political/historical works provided the basis for a fundraiser benefiting Ukraine. In late April, New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse produced a dramatic reading of The Moon Is Down (1942) for streaming, with proceeds assisting Ukraine through the charity Direct Relief. Steinbeck’s more familiar works continue to garner attention in diverse media. Also this past April, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet staged the world premiere of Of Mice and Men (1937) in dance, with Cathy Marston as choreographer and Thomas Newman as composer. Netflix has obtained the rights to produce a new version of East of Eden (1952) as a limited series. And in June, the Western Flyer, the expedition boat from which John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and crew conducted the research for The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), was launched into Puget Sound. After additional maintenance, it will head for Monterey where, according to John Gregg, founder of the Western Flyer Foundation, it will serve once again “as an environmental research vessel.”In his review of Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City by Carol Lynn McKibben, Kevin Hearle hails the volume as a “precious resource” for its coverage of a city long ignored in previous publications. Of particular interest to Steinbeck scholars will be the first six chapters of the book, which “cover the years during which Steinbeck was growing up in Salinas and writing about contemporary conflicts in rural California.” Hearle finds the book especially unique in its focus on how Salinas, a “self-consciously urban and agricultural city,” struggled “to grow and maintain a stable economy” while “negotiating between the competing needs and dreams of an elite white power structure and waves of immigrants from China, Japan, the Philippines, the Dust Bowl states, and Mexico.”And Peter Van Coutren provides an update from the Steinbeck Archives at San José State University. In a recent acquisition, the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies received thirty-six photographs and thirty-four pieces of correspondence (letters/postcards), donated by Brad Bennett. Bennett is the grandson of artists Jack and Daga Ramsey, who were neighbors of the Steinbecks when they lived in Sag Harbor, New York. An introductory “Statement on Art” written by Steinbeck was reproduced in at least three Ramsey exhibit catalogs.The donated correspondence indicates that the Ramseys and the Steinbecks were helpful neighbors who looked after each other’s houses and pets, including Charley of Travels with Charley fame. In one note, John and Elaine extend condolences to Jack and Daga on the passing of one of their dogs, Pia. Photographs from this donation have been added to the Steinbeck Center Photo Archive. In news of other acquisitions, photos purchased from the Curated Estates auction of 2020 are still being added to the Archive. These include images of John and Elaine as they traveled to Spain in 1952 and to Spain and Greece two years later.Daniel Rivers’s announcements importantly include a call for papers for the 2023 Steinbeck conference “Reading, Teaching, and Translating Steinbeck” at San José State University. Please see the announcements section for more information on abstract proposals, an undergraduate poster session, and more.We welcome Marie-Christine Lemardeley (née Cunci) as assistant editor and as a member of our editorial board. She is Professor Emerita of American Literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, where she served as President from 2008 to 2014. Since 2014 she has been Deputy Mayor of Paris (an elected office). She is currently editing a volume of Steinbeck’s novels translated into French for the prestigious Gallimard collection La Pléiade (more or less the equivalent of the Library of America).We regret to announce the retirement of John Timmerman from his position as assistant editor for Steinbeck Review. He served for many years with commitment, excellence, and goodwill. Willa Murphy, Lecturer in Irish Writing in English in the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University, Ireland, will assume this position. We welcome her to our editorial board. She also assisted in editing the Irish papers for this issue.We appreciate Kathleen Hicks, associate editor, for stepping in to write “Steinbeck Today” for this issue. And we applaud Will Ray’s fine work on this column for the past several years. Finally, we welcome Charles Etheridge as our new book review editor. Steinbeck Review also welcomes Aya Kubota to the position of assistant editor. She teaches American literature and English at Bunka Gakuen University, Tokyo. She is the research office head of Intercultural Studies, a board member of the Steinbeck Society of Japan, and has served as editor-in-chief of Steinbeck Studies, the peer-reviewed English-language journal of Japan.