Archives for February 2021

Exploring Cannery Row Along the Pacific Crest Trail

February 22, 2021 by 2 Comments

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John Steinbeck preferred coasts to mountains, but the opposite is true of Joshua Powell, the artist-author of an artful new book, The Pacific Crest Trail: A Visual Compendium. Quoted in a February 20, 2021 Spokesman-Review profile by Stephanie Hammett, the Washington State resident said that he picked up a copy of Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row while staying overnight with friends in Belton, California (pop. 22) in 2012. He kept the copy his hosts gave him in his knapsack, working his way along the 2,653-mile Pacific Crest Trail—and having an unexpected experience of discovery. “’I would pull it out and read it from time to time, maybe 10 minutes before going to sleep, but it ended up having a huge effect on my experience,’” Powell told Hammett, who added that Powell “started seeing connections between his hike and the plot surrounding the character of Doc in Cannery Row, an early thru-hiker of sorts himself.” John Steinbeck continues to sustain the young artist-author. “’That was kind of shocking to me, that this book I just randomly happened to find, by a very famous writer, actually had this direct connection to what I was doing,’ he said, explaining how he went from casually reading Cannery Row to tracking down every bit of Steinbeck he could find.”

Photo of Joshua Powell by Laura Goff courtesy of the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review.

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John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor Home on Sale for $18 Million

February 21, 2021 by 1 Comment

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According to a February 19, 2021 New York Times real estate item that quickly caught the attention of Travels with Charley fans, the modest home in Sag Harbor, New York from which John Steinbeck and his poodle started their 1960 road trip can be yours for just under $18 million—more than Steinbeck and his wife Elaine paid in 1955, but less than the price of comparable waterfront properties for sale in tonier Long Island communities like the Hamptons. Steinbeck’s lifelong attachment to small, secluded spaces extended to the tiny writing cabin that he built on the 1.8-acre site and named Joyous Garde, after the Arthurian legend he learned to love as a boy. The online version of the Times real estate story included this comment from Bill Steigerwald, the Pittsburgh journalist who visited Sag Harbor (the venue for Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent) before setting out to discover the actual the driving route—and expose the narrative liberties—taken by John Steinbeck on his unsentimental journey “in search of America.”

bill-steigerwald“In 2010, exactly 50 years after Steinbeck and dog Charley left on the road trip around the USA that became Travels with Charley, I left his Sag Harbor house and retraced his route for my 100 percent nonfiction road book/expose, Dogging Steinbeck. I was kindly allowed to trespass on the property by the man who took care of it and I shot some video. I’ve never been confused with Steven Spielberg, and Peter Coyote was otherwise engaged, and I had no sound man . . . .”

Photo of John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor property, by Gavin Zeigler for Sotheby’s International Realty, courtesy of the New York Times. Photo of Bill Steigerwald courtesy of truthaboutcharley.com.

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

Steinbeck’s Signet Ring Raises Question: What Happened to Mary Ardath?

February 8, 2021 by 5 Comments

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In a room on the main floor of the Steinbeck House in Salinas, California—formerly John Steinbeck’s bedroom, now known as the Blue Room—visitors can inspect a glass display case containing a signet ring that once belonged to the author. When I started volunteering at the Steinbeck House some years ago, I was told that he had given the ring to a girlfriend, but that no one knew her identity, or how old he was when the gift was made. People assumed that Steinbeck was still in high school at the time, that the ring was forgotten when the pair broke up, and that, decades later, the unidentified recipient—now an adult woman—must have come across it and donated it to the Steinbeck House.

Then, about a year ago, I was going through some papers that I found in the back of a file drawer when I discovered three letters written by a woman named Mary Ardath van Gorder. All were dated 1986 and addressed to the then-president of the Valley Guild, the nonprofit organization that has owned and operated the Steinbeck House since the mid-1970s. In the first letter, sent from a retirement home in La Jolla, California, Mary said that she had once been engaged to John and that she still owned the signet ring that his mother had given him before they met. Would we like to have the ring back, for display at the house where John lived until he left for Stanford in 1919?

My curiosity piqued, I found this passage about Mary Ardath in Jackson Benson’s great life of John Steinbeck. It told a remarkable story, about John’s brief romance with Mary when he was a struggling writer in New York during the winter of 1925-26:

Ardath was a statuesque beauty who worked at the Greenwich Village Follies as a showgirl for a hundred dollars a week—four times what Steinbeck was making as a reporter. After meeting Steinbeck, Mary seemed to cling to him like a safe harbor. . . . Every night he waited for her outside the stage door, and nearly every night she would take him to dinner and try to talk him into getting a better job. She finally gave up on him after several weeks of trying and did marry a banker. But that is not the real ending of the story: after having settled down and had her children, she couldn’t stand it and came looking for John in California—with children in tow.

Sixty years later, now in her 80s, Mary Ardath wrote three letters that I found at the back of a filing drawer, in the house where Olive presumably gave her son the signet ring that Mary received from John in New York in 1925-26—and eventually returned to the home where the Steinbeck story started.

Readers with information about Mary Ardath’s life after the affair with John Steinbeck are encouraged to leave a comment or email williamray@steinbecknow.com—Ed.

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

Cancel Culture Targets Of Mice and Men—Again

February 8, 2021 by 2 Comments

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America’s cancel-culture movement has caught up with the school district of Newfane, the rural community in upstate New York where a student named Madison Woodruff complained recently about having to read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the 1937 novella-play in which the writer explored racism, sexism, and ageism in rural California 100 years ago. A February 2, 2021 report in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal gives the 16-year-old’s reason for objecting to a book that might make her “uncomfortable”: “My main concern is that kids are feeling uncomfortable, and I feel uncomfortable, and I feel if you’re reading a book in school, where school is supposed to be a safe place, you can’t make kids feel uncomfortable because of a book we’re reading.” Citing the December 2020 decision by school district officials in Mendota Heights, Minnesota to remove Of Mice and Men (“the second most frequently banned book in the public school curriculum in the 1990s”), following complaints by parents and staff at Henry Sibley High School, the report quotes Newfane’s high school principal statement in response to Woodruff: “literature is a way to ‘confront’ bigotry.”

Like Shakespeare, John Steinbeck Can Create Discomfort

nick-taylorAlso quoted in the article is Nick Taylor, director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and professor of English at San Jose State University, who defended Steinbeck’s right to be candid and the reader’s right to be uncomfortable. “She’s absolutely justified in having these feelings,” said Taylor: “I think Steinbeck would’ve said she was completely justified, though he would’ve added, ‘And that’s entirely my point.” Two days after the report appeared, the paper published a letter from a former student who credited her Newfane English teacher with introducing her to another comfort-challenging author: “I always felt safe in school no matter what our assignment was. I had a brilliant English teacher and when I was Madison’s age he introduced us to Shakespeare, who wrote comedies, tragedies, sonnets and poems, and historical works. Shakespeare is the most-recognized playwright in the world. His works could make you feel uncomfortable if you chose to interpret them that way.”

Lead photo: Lon Cheney and Burgess Meredith as George and Lenny in Lewis Milestone’s 1939 film version of John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic. Photo of Nick Taylor courtesy Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

Filed Under: Justice, Politics & Religion Tagged With: