Archives for March 2023

John Steinbeck Haunts Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto

March 28, 2023 by 2 Comments

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John Steinbeck shadows the world of Palo Alto like a superannuated ghost. The subtitle of Malcolm Harris’s new nonfiction bestseller—A History of California, Capitalism, and the World—offers the first hint of the haunting, followed by references to the Joads in Harris’s text and criticism of Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam war in a testy footnote. Although Steinbeck rejected Marxist thinking, Harris doesn’t, and Harris’s critique of what Leland Stanford wrought in starting Steinbeck’s alma mater builds on Steinbeck’s version of the school’s spirit in East of Eden, where Aron, restless and unhappy, drops out of Stanford as Steinbeck did in real life.

Image of John Steinbeck IV, his father the author John Steinbeck, and President Lyndon JohnsonHarris’s note on Steinbeck’s non-pacifism about Vietnam is worth quoting, particularly in the context of Ukraine, where pacifism and progressives have parted ways:

Also presumed progressive based on his earlier work, Steinbeck was rabidly pro-war, and he turned himself into a military pundit. He even sent the White House a letter suggesting the Defense Department develop napalm grenades—American boys were already being trained to throw baseballs. He proposed to name the weapon the “Steinbeck super ball.” His letter was forwarded to the Department of Defense.

Malcolm Harris is young. So was John Steinbeck IV when he was presented by his father at the White House before being shipped out to Vietnam 60 years ago. Later the son slammed the father’s hypocrisy about drugs, on display during a 1966 visit, along with the hankering for high-tech weaponry cited by Harris. Unfair to Palo Alto’s superannuated ghost? When Steinbeck was young he might have made the same observation about the man he became.

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San Jose State Hosts Steinbeck Conference

March 27, 2023 by Leave a Comment

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Reading, teaching, and translating Steinbeck, the subject of San Jose State University’s first Steinbeck conference since 2019, attracted a reported 30 attendees to the downtown San Jose, California campus, March 22-24, 2023. Many if not most papers and panelists were virtual, and at least one speaker was pre-recorded, giving the gathering a sketchy, spare feel. But a pair of in-person presentations, accessed by jockeying between two concurrent sessions, stimulated conversation and served as a reminder of conferences past to those who remembered 2013 and 2016. Susan Shillnglaw (in photo) profiled Toni Jackson, Ed Ricketts’s live-in partner and a familiar figure around 1930s and ’40s Pacific Grove who, like Steinbeck’s spouse Carol Henning, served as frequent typist and sometimes-editor in the relationship. Carrying on the tradition of research on Steinbeck by readers outside the academy, Daniel Levin—a chemist by training—traced the literary and theological lineage of timshel, the free-will-vs.-fate concept borrowed by Steinbeck from Talmudic Judaism in East of Eden.

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For John Steinbeck, the Rains in Pajaro Hit Home

March 22, 2023 by 3 Comments

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The word pajaro means bird in Spanish, and Central California’s Pajaro Valley may have inspired the setting of John Steinbeck’s 1936 American strike novel, In Dubious Battle. But the town of Pajaro, California, in Monterey County—the setting of so much great literature by Steinbeck—seems closer in spirit these days to the rained out world of the Joads at the end of The Grapes of Wrath.

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In these tough times for Pajaro, it’s good to remember that the artist who painted the cover image of Steinbeck’s 1939 novel was born there in 1889. His name was Elmer Stanley Hader, and, like Steinbeck, he knew hard times in California. He survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and he was alert to the field labor strife dramatized in Steinbeck’s fiction. His portrait of the Joad family—tired and tattered, overlooking California for the first time—takes its power, like Steinbeck’s masterpiece, from its empathy.

elmer-stanley-hader-berthaLike Steinbeck, Hader moved on from Monterey County. He pursued his art career, first in San Francisco, then in Paris and New York. His illustrations appeared in national magazines including Cosmopolitan, and he collaborated with his wife Berta in creating more than 30 children’s books and in illustrating many others. Together they won the coveted Caldecott Medal for their 1949 children’s picture book, The Big Snow. His painting for the Grapes of Wrath cover eventually sold for more than $60,000. He died five years after Steinbeck, in 1973. Both men passed away in New York, but neither forgot his California roots. Each would have profound sympathy for Pajaro today, flooded out by The Big Rain of 2023.

Lead image courtesy Los Angeles Times. For more on the subject, read “How a long history of racism and neglect set the stage for Pajaro flooding” in the paper’s March 20, 2023 edition.

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