Archives for March 2020

John Steinbeck, COVID-19, And Facing Homelessness

March 31, 2020 by 13 Comments

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What would John Steinbeck have to say about the COVID-19 crisis? What would he focus on? I think it would be the plight of the homeless in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, teeming with people struggling to survive without shelter or support.

Sleepless in Los Angeles, Cold in San Francisco

I was “homeless” several times in Los Angeles. I don’t pretend it was a big deal. I was young. I could have returned to my family in the Midwest. And there wasn’t a virus on the loose threatening death. But I had a taste of what it was like to sleep on beaches and park benches on cold nights, amidst dangers real and imagined. One night I woke to a gang fight going on nearby and decided it would be just as easy to be homeless in San Francisco as Los Angeles. Putting everything I owned in a battered leather suitcase, I hitchhiked north toward San Francisco, stopping along the way in Monterey, a town I had never seen. It would be my first real exposure to John Steinbeck, beginning with the Monterey Public Library, a display of Steinbeck’s books in the window attracting me.

I had a taste of what it was like to sleep on beaches and park benches on cold nights, amidst dangers real and imagined.

I picked a copy of Of Mice and Men off the shelves. As the homeless do to this day—or once did, since libraries are currently closed across much of the country, making a huge difference in the lives of the homeless—I could get warm while reading. George and Lennie’s story is set in South Monterey County, which I had passed through that morning. I read till the library closed, lingering over passages as I do when something moves me. George and Lennie were, after all, in a way homeless too.

I picked a copy of Of Mice and Men off the shelves. I could get warm by reading.

Then I walked down a street called Calle Principal, leading to an old building with a sign reading “Hotel San Carlos.” I stood out front with my leather suitcase wishing I had enough money for a room. A man came along, and after talking he went into the hotel and convinced the desk clerk I should get a good deal on a room for the night. Decades later I would write a short story about John Steinbeck and his wife Carol and that raffish old hotel. Writing from my memories of that lonely evening in Monterey, it was easy to set the scene, back in the 1930s: “They made their way clumsily down Calle Principal toward the hotel . . . which was in the Spanish style with a plaza and fountain. In the lobby a moth flit from lamp to lamp . . . .“

I stood out front with my leather suitcase wishing I had enough money for a room.

The area intrigued me. In the morning I walked along the shoreline to the town of Pacific Grove, then hitchhiked the six or so miles to the Carmel Mission. The room at the San Carlos no longer available and having money for only food and cigarettes (yes, I smoked), I hitched on to San Francisco that evening. I learned The City is a harder place to be homeless than Los Angeles because it is colder, especially when the sea wind blows in from the bay. After several days meeting “partially homeless” people like myself, I hitched my way back to Los Angeles.

The City is a harder place to be homeless than Los Angeles because it is colder.

I was going to write about other homeless experiences in Los Angeles—having my clothes locked up because I owed rent at the Mark Twain hotel, which I chose because I’m from Missouri . . . sleeping at night under a golf course tree, caddying during the days to earn money . . . having a car for a time, parking it on Santa Monica beaches and bathing in the ocean . . . on a foggy night pulling over to sleep on Mulholland Drive, discovering at sunrise that only a few feet separated the car and me from a plunge into the San Fernando Valley . . . savoring the warmth of sitting in class at Los Angeles City College after cleaning up in the school’s lavatory.

What I Learned from Being (Briefly) Homeless

But when it comes down to it, I simply owe a lot to being briefly homeless. It introduced me to the Monterey Peninsula. John Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove eventually became my new home, the place where my wife Nancy and I raised our daughters Amy and Anne. I wrote for the Monterey Herald, learning more about Steinbeck from a soulful city editor named Jimmy Costello. Jimmy had been Steinbeck’s friend and told me of the incident at the Hotel San Carlos. He had been there. The Carmel Mission I’d hitchhiked to from Monterey became the site for the premiere of one of my plays. And I was honored to co-curate, with Patricia Leach, the inaugural art exhibition at the National Steinbeck Center in nearby Salinas. It was called This Side of Eden: Images of Steinbeck’s California, and the works on display included several depictions of homelessness, among them Maynard Dixon’s prophetically titled “No Place to Go.” Unfortunately, the subject of the painting is just as relevant today as it was in the 1930s.

I wrote for the Monterey Herald and learned more about Steinbeck from a soulful city editor named Jimmy Costello.

The greater irony for me is that the same Monterey Public Library which helped introduce me to the world of John Steinbeck recently asked if I would take part in a panel discussion on writing planned for late April. The event has been postponed, of course, because of the coronavirus. When it is rescheduled it will be a sign that that we have survived this latest test of our shared humanity—and that those living with homelessness can still count on libraries for warmth . . . as well as a good read.

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With:

What The Grapes of Wrath Warns Us About COVID-19

March 31, 2020 by 5 Comments

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A new report entitled “’The Grapes of Wrath,’ coronavirus edition” cites John Steinbeck’s classic to predict possible effects of the COVID-19 crisis on life in America if the current pandemic results in a second Great Depression. Writing in the March 28 edition of City & State New York, Zach Williams says that “An economic downturn, state border checkpoints and increasing desperation among people across the country suggest that as time goes by the story of coronavirus will only become more like a John Steinbeck novel whose ending no one can yet know.” Comparing New Yorkers today to the migrants in Steinbeck’s masterpiece, the online magazine article—illustrated with this photograph by Dorothea Lange—reminds contemporary readers that California subjected the “bum brigade” streaming into the state from Oklahoma and elsewhere to a Great Depression version of border-crossing stop-and-frisk. “After the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court,” writes one source quoted in the piece, “the ‘bum blockade’ ended. But the ‘anti-Okie’ sentiment continued.” Today, says Williams, “it is New Yorkers who are facing the wrath of their fellow Americans.”

Filed Under: Places & Events, Steinbeck's America Tagged With:

“Proems” by Robert DeMott Inspired by Birds of America

March 25, 2020 by Leave a Comment

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Up Late Reading Birds of America, a book of “proems” by Robert DeMott, is the latest link connecting John Steinbeck scholars with the life and times of John James Aubudon, the pioneering naturalist and painter whose Birds of America (1827) remains a classic of American ornithology and art history. The author of seminal studies including Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1990) and Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Art (1996), DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Ohio University, where he taught from 1969 to 2003. Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (2004), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was the first biography of a major figure written by William Souder, the journalist whose Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck is scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton in October.

Listen as Bob DeMott reads “proetry” from Birds of America:

 

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COVID-19 Claims Steinbeck Colleague Terrence McNally

March 25, 2020 by 4 Comments

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Terrence McNally, the Tony Award-winning playwright who taught and babysat John Steinbeck’s boys when they were hard-to-manage teenagers, has died in Sarasota, Florida from complications of the COVID-19 virus which shuttered Broadway and much of the world’s business after being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. A survivor of lung cancer, McNally, 81, was a 20-something graduate student at Columbia University when Steinbeck family friend Edward Albee recommended him as a tutor and companion for Steinbeck’s sons Thom and John IV during an extended tour of Europe taken by the Steinbeck family 60 years ago. As noted in a March 24, 2020 profile of the playwright published in The Guardian, “McNally’s long career began in 1961 when John Steinbeck asked him to work together on a number of projects, including a musical version of East of Eden” which, like other projects following the failure of the 1955 musical Pipe Dream, never materialized.

Composite image of Terrence McNally courtesy New York Post.

Filed Under: Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With:

Why The Grapes of Wrath Disappeared from Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt

March 6, 2020 by 2 Comments

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The Grapes of Wrath played a part in the monstrous promotional campaign that helped American Dirt become one of this year’s biggest best-sellers.

But John Steinbeck’s classic is no longer part of the controversy that has befallen Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her son who illegally cross the border into the United States. American Dirt was exuberantly plugged in January by Oprah Winfrey for her book club and praised by a score of book reviewers as heart-poundingly suspenseful, unforgettable, important and timely, realistic, moving, a future classic, etc. etc. etc. Stephen King and John Grisham raved about it in their blurbs, and a line on the original book cover touted it as a modern-day version of The Grapes of Wrath.

Then, after American Dirt sold upwards of 200,000 copies, it was slammed by a wave of criticism for its political incorrectness and its stereotypical portrayal of Latinos. Oprah took serious heat for plugging the novel. The publisher, Macmillan-owned Flatiron Books, apologized for the excessive promotional campaign and removed the Grapes of Wrath reference from the cover. Citing “specific threats to booksellers and the author,” Flatiron chose to cancel Cummins’s book tour. Laura Miller’s piece on the controversy at Slate sums up the problem pretty well, posing the question “Will the American Dirt Fiasco Change American Publishing?”

Note to Author: “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”

A reductive version of the complaints about American Dirt claims that the novel’s detractors believe a white woman shouldn’t write about the experiences of Latino migrants. In truth, nearly all of the considered criticism of the novel points out either inaccuracies or stereotypes which, according to “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”—Myriam Gurba’s widely shared review at Tropics of Meta—betray Cummins’s lack of knowledge about her subject matter and her attempt to render a complex situation and culture into “trauma porn” palatable to an American readership envisioned as primarily white. Slate says that American Dirt‘s publisher went wrong by enthusiastically hawking a commercial novel as if it made “a contribution to a vital understanding” of the immigration issue when in fact the migrant experience was merely used “as a backdrop for an entertaining suspense story.”

In other words, when it comes to promoting a serious political message or pushing for sociopolitical change, The Grapes of Wrath it ain’t.

The controversy over American Dirt isn’t over yet. Starting tonight at midnight, Apple TV+ will live-stream a discussion taped last month that features Oprah, Cummins, and three prominent critics of the novel. The show, as The Hollywood Reporter puts it, will be a “debate about the marginalization of Latino voices, the lack of diversity in publishing, and the question of who is best suited to tell a given story.”

Image courtesy Slate magazine.

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