Archives for June 2018

May 1-3, 2019 Conference to Celebrate Steinbeck Now

June 25, 2018 by Leave a Comment

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In observance of the anniversary of John Steinbeck’s death on December 20, 1968, the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars invites proposals for papers exploring Steinbeck’s continued relevance, 50 years later, to be delivered at the organization’s May 1-3, 2019 conference at San Jose State University. “Steinbeck and the 21st Century: Identity, Influence, and Impact” is sponsored by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and will take place at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in downtown San Jose, California. According to Nick Taylor, the center’s director, proposals for papers are welcome from a wide variety of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies as well as ecology and pedagogy, and may encompass the comparative examination of Steinbeck and 21st century authors, issues surrounding the reception and translation of Steinbeck’s books in the 20th century, and commentary on Steinbeck’s writing from the perspective of movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and organized resistance to the mistreatment of migrants and refugees in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Also of interest is how classroom teachers today use Steinbeck to engage students on social issues, popular culture, and artistic expression. Travel funding is available for students whose papers are accepted. For details visit the conference web page.

As of today’s post we are temporarily suspending weekly posts at SteinbeckNow.com to pursue a print project requiring attention. We will continue to respond to email inquiries, curate comments, and post news about opportunities like this one, and we will review guest-author submissions in the order they are received when we resume weekly publication. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.—Ed.

Filed Under: Places & Events, Steinbeck Events Tagged With:

Road to Recovery for America and Americans Runs Through Alabama

June 19, 2018 by Leave a Comment

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John Steinbeck’s expression of ambivalence about America and Americans in Travels with Charley proved to be prophetic. In the presidential campaign of 1968, the year Steinbeck died, Richard Nixon co-opted Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace—Nixon’s rival for the Southern white vote—and embraced the anger exemplified by the screaming mothers blocking the path of African American girls on the way to school in Steinbeck’s story. Forging Nixon’s path to the White House through the heart of the Confederacy paved the way for Donald Trump, Wallace and Nixon’s political heir, in 2016. The spring issue of the scholarly journal Steinbeck Review suggests that the road to recovery from Trump began in 2017 with the defeat of Trump’s candidate Roy Moore by Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, and that John Steinbeck first diagnosed the condition of America and Americans in his 1938 novella-play Of Mice and Men.

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Driving Highway 31 Through George Wallace’s Alabama

Barbara Heavilin, the journal’s editor in chief, lives in northern Alabama and wrote a column recounting the race to replace Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s masochistic Mini-Me, as the junior U.S. Senator from the state. Moore, a Bible-spouting jurist, has an injudicious past, and opponents calling themselves Highway 31 organized money and volunteers around Jones, the federal attorney who prosecuted perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls less than a year after Travels with Charley was published. “They chose a good title for themselves, for Highway 31 is the old North-South route through the state before the advent of U.S. 65,” Heavilin wrote. “It winds through lovely little Gardendale with its neat rows of crepe myrtles down the center of the median, going through the middle of town, where I live and where the local high school is in pitted battle in the courts, demanding independence from Jefferson County [because it] would bring about a return to a type of segregation.”

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Scaling the “Wall of Understanding” in Of Mice and Men

The editor of Steinbeck Review knew her readers would enjoy the Steinbeck symbolism in her true-life story, which has the advantage over John Steinbeck’s fiction of featuring a known outcome with a happy ending. As shown by the ambiguous conclusions of In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was dubious about the outcome of political battles in his own day. Doug Jones may have reminded Alabama voters of Atticus Finch, the Alabama lawyer who defends the black man in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, but heroes and happy endings are sparse in Steinbeck’s fiction, and Of Mice and Men is typical. To the eternal edification of readers with inquiring minds and open hearts, it dramatizes the failings of America—and Americans victimized by poverty, disability, racism, ageism, and misogyny—against the backdrop of fascism, fake science, and the breakdown of world order. Steinbeck described this context as the “wall of understanding,” and the phrase fits perfectly.

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John Steinbeck’s Antidote for Donald Trump’s Toxicity

Conceived with a wall of understanding that encompassed cold war, public corruption, environmental degradation, and anti-immigrant hysteria, the books about America written by John Steinbeck in the 1960s—The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley, America and Americans—completed the catalog of outrage, abdication, and abuse personified by the cast of characters who animate Of Mice and Men. Our wall of understanding now includes real walls built to bar Mexicans, Canadians, and America’s European allies, adding urgency to our reading of Steinbeck, who saw a dictator when he looked at demagogues like Huey Long during the Depression and despaired when Richard Nixon won in 1968. Donald was around and dodging the draft at the time, but if Steinbeck imagined a disaster like Trump in America’s future before he died he didn’t say so. Instead, he concentrated on symptoms of decline and the curative power of empathy for America and Americans in any age. As Barbara Heavilin reminds us in her encouraging editorial, the road to recovery starts with understanding and runs through Alabama.

We are suspending weekly posts on a temporary basis to pursue a print project requiring our time and attention. We will continue to answer messages, curate comments, and post news of conferences, publications, and opportunities when brought to our attention. Guest-author submissions will be considered in the order they are received once we resume the weekly schedule maintained since SteinbeckNow.com began five years ago. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.—Ed.

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Susan Shillinglaw Leaving National Steinbeck Center

June 12, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Image of Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw

Susan Shillinglaw, a leading figure in Steinbeck studies for three decades, has resigned as Director of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, effective June 15. The Pacific Grove resident and San Jose State University English professor took over management of the organization three years ago, guiding the transition to a new landlord and reviving the annual Steinbeck Festival, an anticipated event in Steinbeck’s home town since 1981. Built on Main Street in downtown Salinas, the center contains an archival collection and space for exhibitions, meetings, and educational programs.

The author or editor of numerous books and articles—and an internationally acclaimed speaker known for style and substance—Susan Shillinglaw has co-directed six National Endowment for the Humanities interdisciplinary summer institutes for high school teachers in Pacific Grove, including one this summer. For 18 years she directed the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State, where she began her teaching career in 1984. She transitioned to half-time faculty status when she accepted the position in Salinas, and she will teach courses in Steinbeck and creative nonfiction in the fall.

Since opening its doors 20 years ago, the National Steinbeck Center has had to overcome challenges of staff turnover and financial troubles typical of small, non-urban museums burdened with start-up debt and dependent on local philanthropy and tourism for survival. The building was sold to California State University, Monterey Bay as a partial solution to the problem, but museums in this era must also offer new kinds of programs and shift the ways exhibits are structured—activities begun in earnest under Susan Shillinglaw’s leadership.

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Parallels Meet: Steinbeck, Moberg, and Two Migrations

June 7, 2018 by 10 Comments

Images from Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Steve Hauk, the author of Steinbeck: The Untold Stories, contributed to this account of an overlooked aspect of John Steinbeck’s life, writing, and reputation as a 20th century American internationalist: his association with the Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg, with whom he shared political sympathies, geographical proximity, and personal traits, including depression.—Ed. 

John Steinbeck and Vilhelm Moberg had more in common than literary greatness. Sensitive to the humble, powerless, and downtrodden, both writers documented social injustice with abiding sympathy and convincing clarity in works of fiction that became classics. Both wrote novelistic sagas of human migration that became major movies—Steinbeck’s 1930s protest novel The Grapes of Wrath and The Emigrants, the series of four novels in Swedish written by Moberg and made into a pair of feature films starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in the 1970s. Both men did some of their best writing on California’s Monterey Peninsula, though at different times, and may have met there in the late 1940s. “In one of his letters home, Moberg mentions having met Steinbeck,” notes Swedish scholar Jens Liljestrand, who speculates that the meeting must have been “brief and superficial,” given the barriers of language, age, and demeanor that separated them.

Both men did some of their best writing on California’s Monterey Peninsula, though at different times, and may have met there in the late 1940s.

Steinbeck died in 1968 at 66, and Moberg, who was born in 1898, committed suicide in 1973. But one thing is certain. If they were alive today both men would be deeply disturbed by the global refugee crisis and the resurgent nativism that has nurtured anti-immigration movements in Sweden, the United States, and across Europe. While Steinbeck focused on a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers driven west by natural catastrophe and Depression economics, Moberg followed a family of Swedish farmers who abandon the stony soil of Smaland in the 1800s for the promised land of rural Minnesota. Both took sides in parallel stories of epic struggle—for survival, dignity, and a place to call home. In each case, the dream of land and domicile motivated migration across states or seas by displaced souls, described most poignantly in the African American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.”

Both took sides in parallel stories of epic struggle—for survival, dignity, and a place to call home.

When Vilhelm Moberg came to California in 1948, the Monterey Peninsula was about to face its own disaster—the depletion of the sardine population through over-fishing predicted by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, who died the year Moberg arrived. Gustaf Lannestock, a Swede who had worked as a masseur at the Hotel Del Monte and moved to Carmel, met Moberg walking on the beach and became his friend and translator. In 1998, the late Monterey County Herald columnist Bonnie Gartshore described the fateful encounter: “One day in 1948, Vilhelm Moberg, Sweden’s foremost novelist, took a rest from writing “Utvandrana” (“The Emigrants”). He had come to the Monterey Peninsula after long months of research to write the book, first of a [quartet] about Swedish families . . . in the 1800s. One way of relaxing after intense writing stints was to plunge into the surf at Carmel Beach.’’

Moberg came to the Monterey Peninsula to write a book about Swedish families in the 1800s.

When Steinbeck lived in Pacific Grove in the 1930s he sought relief in the same fashion, exploring the tide pools with his friend Ricketts and gaining a sense of proportion. Lannestock and his wife Lucile enjoyed Swedish-style entertaining and their home attracted a party crowd, described by Liljestrand as the “cultural elite in Carmel,” that included Ricketts—who wrote of his friendship with Lannestock—and Steinbeck, as well as Robinson Jeffers. But according to Moberg, notes Liljestrand, the Lannestocks “didn’t socialize much with Steinbeck” because “they took his estranged wife’s side” when the Steinbecks moved to Los Gatos and their marriage collapsed. Steinbeck’s career eventually took him to Hollywood, Mexico, and Manhattan. He completed East of Eden, the California saga of his mother’s Irish-immigrant farm family, in New York. Moberg—who based his quartet of Swedish emigrant novels on the diaries of a Minnesota farmer—had finished the first two (shown here) in Carmel by 1952, the year East of Eden appeared.

Image of Vilhelm Moberg, author of The Emigrants

When war came, neither Moberg nor Steinbeck was afraid to speak out. Moberg was openly critical of Sweden’s attempt at neutrality, and his 1941 novel Ride This Night, though set in the 17th century, is clearly a commentary on Nazi aggression. Steinbeck’s 1942 novella The Moon Is Down is about the invasion of an unnamed town in Scandinavia by an unnamed army that is unmistakably German. The book was outlawed in occupied Sweden, where Steinbeck had friends, but contraband copies were passed by hand and Steinbeck’s contribution to European morale was cited when he received the Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy. The Steinbeck-Moberg connection can also be seen in Arvid and Robert, characters in The New Land who, as the film critic Terrence Rafferty observed, “have come to resemble Lennie and George, the wanderers of John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’” in the 1972 motion picture adaptation of the second novel in Moberg’s emigrant series. The movie’s director was Jan Troell, a Swede who shared Steinbeck and Moberg’s vision of the emigrant experience—and who came to the Monterey Peninsula in 1974 to shoot Zandy’s Bride, also starring Liv Ullman.

When war came, neither Moberg nor Steinbeck was afraid to speak out.

Swedes are supposed to be solitary types who wait for others to break the ice, a function frequently served by friends like Lannestock and Ricketts, Moberg’s likely entrée to Steinbeck’s world. “According to Lannestock’s memoir,” notes Liljestrand, “Moberg’s English wasn’t very good. He mostly hung out with just the Lannestocks, with whom he spoke Swedish.” If Bonnie Gartshore is correct, Moberg made his way despite that obstacle. In Monterey, she says, “he enjoyed talking to Sicilian Fishermen whom he met on Fisherman’s Wharf, and he wrote an article about them for a Stockholm newspaper.” Devastated by the death of Ricketts and a second failed marriage, Steinbeck returned to Pacific Grove in 1949 to recover. Given their habit of taking walks, a meeting with Moberg could have occurred by accident. Given their reticence, it might have needed help.

Lannestock and Ricketts were Moberg’s likely entrée to Steinbeck’s world.

Like Steinbeck, Moberg enjoys an enduring reputation in the homeland he both criticized and celebrated in his writing. His novels are required reading in Sweden, where he’s revered as a journalist, historian, and playwright with more than two dozen dramas to his credit. Also like Steinbeck, he experimented with literary forms. Steinbeck will always be associated with Okie migration and intercalary structure for The Grapes of Wrath. The author who called The Emigrants series his “documentary novels” became synonymous with Swedish immigration to the United States. Neither writer was satisfied by the celebrity. In a letter to Toby Street, Steinbeck talked about “a longing for extinction” caused by the conviction he “had no home, never did”—cruelly ironic from one who, like Moberg, wrote so memorably of people searching for a home.

Neither Steinbeck nor Moberg was satisfied by the celebrity they achieved.

Like Steinbeck, Moberg suffered from depression that grew worse with age. A radical democrat and political contrarian, he continued to speak out against monarchy, bureaucracy, and public corruption after he returned to Sweden. But he experienced writer’s block and his melancholy became despair. Early one morning in 1973 he left a letter of apology for his wife and drowned himself. “The time is twenty past seven; I go to search in the lake for eternal sleep. Forgive me, I could not endure,” he wrote her. He is frequently paired with his fellow Scandinavian O.E. Rolvaag, the author of Giants in the Earth. But he had much in common with his fellow Californian, John Steinbeck. The connection is overlooked, but it extended to war, depression, and epic protest against epic injustice. In light of current events, it’s worth remembering.

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