John Steinbeck © 1954 Yousuf Karsh
The July-December 2018 issue of Steinbeck Review, delayed in publication on a technicality, marked the 50th anniversary of John Steinbeck’s death with tributes from eminent Steinbeckians like Robert DeMott, who recalled in a personal essay written for the occasion that the first articles he wrote for publication “appeared the month Steinbeck died, in December 1968.” The contribution from Mimi Gladstein, the tenacious Texan who pioneered the comparative study of Steinbeck’s female characters, surveyed the women in Steinbeck’s fiction with a sympathetic eye, from the heroic mother-figure of Ma Joad to the friendly whores of Cannery Row. Assisted by Kathleen Hicks and Katharine Morsberger, the Californian who edited Steinbeck’s screenplay Viva Zapata!—Robert Morsberger—drilled down on the darkness at the core of Steinbeck country as depicted in The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown. Book reviews in the 50th anniversary issue included a sympathetic reading of The Way of Jesus, a spiritual memoir by Jay Parini, the Steinbeck biographer who teaches creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont. Like DeMott’s essay, Parini’s book suggests that living into one’s 70s puts new light on an ageless author who felt old at 60 and died at 66.
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I think an essential reason Steinbeck “felt old at sixty” is explained in the words he wrote to Toby Street, probably sround 1940, “…I have no home. Never did have but I always thought i might have and now I know I never will have, and that makes for a continued longing for extinction…” I don’t think he ever felt the East Coast was home to him, while Central California was often hostile. He felt without roots. I think that can age one.