Steinbeck Today

Abstract

Has John Steinbeck's popularity with readers hurt his standing among scholars? The so-called Steinbeck Question, first raised at a conference in 1989, seems more relevant today than ever before. While the volume of scholarly submissions to Steinbeck Review and blog posts submitted to SteinbeckNow.com continues to encourage editors, books about Steinbeck reviewed in the journal and posts published by the website increasingly reflect existential issues of personal concern to authors, and the first life of Steinbeck in twenty years is being written not by a college professor, but by a popular journalist from what might be described as an experiential point of view. Of the two university events related to Steinbeck reported to this column since the last issue—both at San José State University—one focused on Susan Shillinglaw's recent experience at an international festival in Russia and the other honored the cultural contributions of Francisco Jimenez, the Mexican immigrant who received the Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award given by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies to artists and activists whose work in the world advances the values that Steinbeck advocated in his writing.A survey of Steinbeck content in college courses and graduate research would help answer the Steinbeck Question as it pertains to universities. Meanwhile, the picture outside the academy is positive. References to Steinbeck's writing in mass media accelerated during the recent presidential campaign, and commentators increasingly turned to incidents and characters in his fiction to explain contentious issues: the death penalty (Of Mice and Men), labor unrest (In Dubious Battle), refugee resettlement (The Grapes of Wrath), climate change and resource depletion (Sea of Cortez and Cannery Row), fascist behavior (The Moon Is Down), cultural identity and influence (East of Eden), public corruption and xenophobia (The Winter of Our Discontent), resurgent racism (Travels with Charley), and U.S.-Russia relations (A Russian Journal). Among other modern writers associated with these burning issues, only George Orwell attracted a similar level of attention from journalists, poets, and entertainers looking for literary references to explain threatening developments on the global scene.Events around Steinbeck in California highlighted the personal and political nature of interest in his role as internationalist and native son. Two in San Jose have already been mentioned. Farther south, in Salinas, the National Steinbeck Center celebrated Mexican Independence Day with music, food, and book discussions led by Susan Shillinglaw, the organization's peripatetic director. In Monterey, the Cannery Row Foundation honored Frank Wright, the last living member of the local group that purchased Doc's Lab after Ed Ricketts died, preserving and promoting the shrine to Steinbeck's friend and collaborator as a place where pilgrims to Cannery Row could come individually, or in groups, to see and learn. In Pacific Grove, the Sacramento artist Greg Kondos presented the painting he created of the Steinbeck family cottage to the recently completed art gallery at the Pacific Grove Library, named for the late Nancy Hauk, co-owner with her husband, Steve, of the nearby Ricketts family home. Half a world away, Steinbeck's Irish heritage was celebrated in County Derry and on Northern Ireland's BBC.The cultural context and political point of Steinbeck's writing are two reasons, among others, that commentators continue to find characters and incidents from his fiction so useful as a form of shorthand for social ideas. Following publication of The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads became a metaphor for families displaced by apocalyptic disaster. Now, eighty years after Of Mice and Men, Lennie Small has become an equally potent symbol in public debate about the justifiability of capital punishment. After visiting the National Steinbeck Center last summer, Stephen Cooper, an attorney and blogger, published a series of posts accusing death-penalty defenders of misappropriating Steinbeck's character and misreading the meaning of Steinbeck's ending. Following the election of Donald Trump, he blogged about Trump's addiction to television and tweeting, contrasting Trump's impulsiveness with Steinbeck's self-discipline and devotion to editing. The post was picked up by news outlets throughout America, with a catchy title criticizing Trump's claim to be the Hemingway of Twitter.It's a safe bet that Steinbeck would dislike any medium with a 140-character limit, but he understood film and television, the new media of his era, and in 2016 both paid Steinbeck homage in projects involving James Franco, Steinbeck's best-known celebrity fan. In the spring the thirty-eight-year-old actor starred in a TV miniseries based on 11/22/63, a dystopian alternate history of modern America by the novelist Stephen King, another famous follower. In the course of King's rewrite of the JFK assassination, Franco's character teaches and directs a Texas high school performance of Of Mice and Men, with particularly poignant overtones for those familiar with Steinbeck's connection to Kennedy. In the Fall Franco's motion picture adaptation of In Dubious Battle, the only feature film to date of Steinbeck's first labor novel, premiered to mixed reviews at film festivals in Europe and North America. The movie had not been released to theaters at the time of this writing. Even if it goes directly to DVD, however, online and at-home viewership for Franco's film worldwide will eventually be larger than the audience for the award-winning film adaptation of Of Mice and Men when it was released in 1939.Like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, the cinematic version of East of Eden has become an American classic with global appeal. The international influence of the novel was reconfirmed in August when a BBC crew from Northern Ireland traveled to California to trace the life and times of Sam Hamilton, the Irish-immigrant grandfather semi-fictionalized by Steinbeck in East of Eden. William Crawley, writer and host for the BBC Two series Brave New World, interviewed Carol Robles, a local expert on Steinbeck, at the Steinbeck House on Central Avenue during a swing through Steinbeck's California, with stops at King City and other Steinbeck Country venues. Sadly, Carol Robles died before the series—a celebration of the contributions made to America by immigrants from Northern Ireland—aired. Her death at Salinas Valley Hospital on October 28 was like a third shoe dropping for the Steinbeck community of California. The deaths of Nancy Hauk in July and Thom Steinbeck in August were reported in the previous issue of Steinbeck Review. Like them, she made a permanent contribution to our understanding of John Steinbeck that deserves to be noted here.A retired Sears human relations manager in Salinas, Carol was a relentless advocate for getting the facts straight about Steinbeck and preserving his legacy. She was present at the creation of the National Steinbeck Center, participating in Steinbeck festivals from the beginning, training docents, and conducting local tours for visitors, researchers, and conference attendees. She was a fixture at the Steinbeck House, which is where I met her when I began my research on Steinbeck's religion several years ago. I treasure the time I spent with her exploring Central Avenue, Corral de Tierra, and the cemetery in suburban Salinas where Steinbeck is buried with his wife, Elaine, whom she knew. As we picked our way through the maze of Hamilton, Murphy, and Williams graves after the service at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Sunday, she provided a priceless commentary on family members, friends, and enemies who figured prominently in Steinbeck's childhood and imagination. She expressed concern about the neglected condition of several grave sites, and she complained to management the next day. She was the institutional memory and prickly conscience of the Steinbeck community in Salinas, and when she spoke most people listened.A longtime widow with a far-flung network of grandchildren and friends, Carol was honored at an SRO event at the National Steinbeck Center in November, and her contribution to the center will be celebrated in a program of Dixieland jazz, her favorite kind of music, during the Steinbeck Festival in May. She was an energetic collector of books and ephemera related to Steinbeck, and she guided me to the Salinas Public Library, where dropping her name was like having a card. I wonder what she would make of the recent report from East Lake County, Florida, where librarians invented a fake patron named Chuck Finley, a Steinbeck fan with a hyperactive checkout habit, to protect books no longer popular with real readers from being pulped—or the fan from Worcester, Massachusetts, who wrote in an op-ed that “the forces who hate change are building wedges between people, building walls and registries and stirring hate, fear and suspicion,” today as in The Grapes of Wrath. I can predict her reaction to the recent report that officials in Monterey plan to put plaques honoring Steinbeck, Ricketts, and other famous folk along historic Alvarado Street: if she were alive and she were asked for her opinion (and she would be), she would politely withhold her approval until she proofed the list.Carol could be stubborn. She enjoyed challenging common assumptions about Steinbeck and Salinas, and she refused to believe that The Grapes of Wrath was ever burned there, testimony to the contrary notwithstanding. Like Steinbeck, she had a soft spot for the underdog, expressing deep hurt about the mistreatment of Japanese internees and Chinese laborers while pointing out the part of town inhabited by Chinese workers in East of Eden. If she were still with us, I think she would be tickled to see Steinbeck's name cropping up in newspapers from other small towns, in editorials about local water problems (Manteca, California), the meaning of socialism (Martinsville, Virginia), and who should be remembered as a village icon (Sag Harbor, New York, which she toured when she visited Steinbeck's final home). Like Steinbeck, she seemed skeptical about religion, but I think she would relish the diversity of recent references to Steinbeck in the Christian Science Monitor on topics ranging from climate change to taking a road trip. A self-described Idaho farm girl, she earned a business degree from Hartnell College, not far from the Steinbeck House, and her response to academic pretension, like Steinbeck's, could be robust. With regard to the Steinbeck Question that continues to separate scholars and readers, I think she would consider the tradeoff between Steinbeck's reputation and relevance a buyer's bargain.