William Ray, John Steinbeck & Episcopal Church Scholar

Winston Churchill Rolls, George Orwell Rejoices: American Authors Banished from Schools in Great Britain

May 30, 2014 by William Ray 6 Comments

Winston Churchill is turning in his grave as George Orwell rejoices. John Steinbeck and other American authors, a group deeply disliked by George Orwell, are about to be dropped from Great Britain’s school curriculum. According to “Syal but no Steinbeck in English GSCE,” a BBC news report, English education bureaucrats expressed dismay at discovering that Of Mice and Men remains the most frequently read novel by British middle-school pupils. Henceforth, it is decreed, only British authors can be “taught-to-test” in government-supported schools throughout England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

As an ex-English teacher and Anglophile, I have good cause for hating edicts by education bureaucrats, American or British. Here are 10 reasons why I despise this one with a passion:

1. Winston Churchill’s mother was an American, and America came to England’s aid in its darkest hour, inspired by Winston Churchill’s Anglo-American fortitude and friendship.

2. Most of my ancestors were English immigrants. My father, an Army corporal, was stationed in England. After the war my parents named my brother David Winston (for Winston Churchill, not George Orwell’s Winston Smith). I studied a pair of British authors for my PhD degree and consider George Orwell John Steinbeck’s equal as a writer, a compliment to George Orwell.

3. A disaffected Communist who disdained American authors and refused to visit the United States, George Orwell accused John Steinbeck of being a Soviet sympathizer as the Cold War heated up. Such calumny is to be expected from right-wing British authors who came, saw, and ranted—Evelyn Waugh, for example—but it’s unforgivable in a left-wing journalist like George Orwell who never crossed the Atlantic or questioned Steinbeck to find out for himself.

4. John Steinbeck loved and lauded England and had cherished English roots on his Dickson grandmother’s side. He was a war correspondent in London in 1943 and spent much of 1958 in Somerset, the period his widow Elaine said was the happiest time in their marriage.

5. Steinbeck mined British authors from Thomas Mallory to John Milton in his writing. Unlike George Orwell, he declined to criticize other American authors, at least in public, and as far as I know he gave George Orwell a pass when Orwell said nasty things about the United States.

6. Two classics by George Orwell will be spared in the impending purge of American authors, along with British authors considered too old-fashioned, from English schools; both George Orwell books—1984 and Animal Farm—continue to be taught in American schools, along with masterpieces by older British authors from Shakespeare to Dickens.

7. Winston Churchill, a world-class writer, understood the connection between what one reads and how one thinks. So did George Orwell, despite his parochialism. English students who never read Steinbeck will be as uninformed about the Dust Bowl and Depression as young Americans who never read British authors are about, say, Winston Churchill and World War II.

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Arthur Miller are also Out in English, Welsh, and Irish schools. Henceforth, ideas about America will come from Hollywood, hip hop, and other sources unpolluted by American authors. Future generations in Great Britain can be expected to care as little about our cultural heritage as most Americans care about that of England.

9. Instead, Sherlock Holmes and Meera Syal, the British screenwriter of Bollywood Carmen Live, are now In. This switch is the English equivalent of replacing American authors like Steinbeck and Faulkner with Jerry Seinfeld in American public schools.

10. AQA—the educational bureaucracy that wants to banish American authors from British schools—is short for “Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.” The English equivalent of our SAT Educational Testing Service, the organization frames its ponderous pronouncements in the educational equivalent of George Orwell’s Doublespeak, a sin against meaning in every sense of the word.

In my court, that last offense may be the worst. If you can’t express yourself as clearly as Winston Churchill or George Orwell, you probably aren’t thinking straight. Notwithstanding those British authors unmolested by the ACA, the bureaucrats in Manchester aren’t qualified to banish American authors from any country, least of all Winston Churchill’s glorious land.

Readers are encouraged to submit their own reasons to dislike the idea of dropping John Steinbeck and other American authors from schools in Great Britain. Personal or professional, silly or same—feel free to express your opinion in the Comment space below.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: Latest News

King Arthur Quest: Search Used Book Stores for Fine John Steinbeck Books

May 23, 2014 by William Ray Leave a Comment

Although Steinbeck claimed that he didn’t collect books as a habit, almost every John Steinbeck biography notes the writer’s enduring attachment to books on such subjects as King Arthur. Like King Arthur’s Roundtable, Steinbeck and his circle have become legend; like the author who loved King Arthur, readers who are passionate about John Steinbeck biography will find searching for John Steinbeck books at used book stores adventurous.

Book Stores Are Best for Collecting John Steinbeck Books

In Search of Steinbeck, a privately printed book by the late Anne-Marie Schmitz of Los Altos, California, is a case in point. On a recent shopping trip to Monterey area book stores, I found a copy of her limited-edition work, intact in its slip-case, signed, and priced to sell. Like other John Steinbeck books written by amateur enthusiasts, In Search of Steinbeck represents a labor of love. Using photographs by Richard S. Mayer and drawings by Wayne Garcia, Mrs. Schmitz pursues an aspect of John Steinbeck biography of particular interest to Californians: the houses that Steinbeck owned or occupied in Monterey, Los Gatos, and Pacific Grove—homes where the most memorable John Steinbeck books of the 1930s and early 1940s were written.

Mrs. Schmitz pursues an aspect of John Steinbeck biography of particular interest to Californians: the houses that Steinbeck owned or occupied in Monterey, Los Gatos, and Pacific Grove—homes where the most memorable John Steinbeck books of the 1930s and early 1940s were written.

I recommend In Search of Steinbeck to anyone, anywhere, who is serious about John Steinbeck biography and books. Reasonably-priced copies are available from booksellers online, but book stores are always more fun than Google, in part because you meet people in book stores who know things about John Steinbeck books that a computer can’t tell you. Sometimes personal connections made in book stores last a lifetime—or remind us too late what we missed along the way. Curious about Mrs. Schmitz, for example, I discovered that she was born in 1925, died in 2011, and had a happy marriage with Edwin Schmitz, the owner of the Book Nest in Los Altos, one of several bygone Bay Area book stores that I enjoyed frequenting before they closed.

Sometimes personal connections made in book stores last a lifetime—or remind us too late what we missed along the way.

Like Steinbeck in search of King Arthur, I was preoccupied by a particular quest that prevented me from asking the right question when I stopped in Los Altos to visit the Book Nest. I wasn’t interested in John Steinbeck books at the time; I was looking instead for works by Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and historian who taught creative writing at Stanford, John Steinbeck’s on-and-off-again alma mater in nearby Palo Alto. Jackson Benson, the author of the most detailed John Steinbeck biography published to date, also wrote a big book about Wallace Stegner; my transition to Steinbeck occurred when I moved from Benson’s life of Stegner to his superb John Steinbeck biography. Regrettably, by then it was too late to meet Mrs. Schmitz.

My transition to Steinbeck occurred when I moved from Benson’s life of Stegner to his superb John Steinbeck biography. Regrettably, by then it was too late to meet Mrs. Schmitz.

Like the path to King Arthur’s Avalon, the little Los Altos book store’s doors closed long ago, and that’s a shame. If I had turned from Stegner to Steinbeck a year or so sooner, I could have asked Edwin Schmitz the right question when I visited the Book Nest: not Did you know Wallace Stegner? (he did), but Do you know anyone who has written creatively about John Steinbeck biography? Hermes Publications, the publisher of Mrs. Schmitz’s book, was no doubt Mr. Schmitz’s enterprise. If so, the result of their collaboration reveals their eye for visual design, paper quality, and packaging and their love of fine books.

Like King Arthur, John Steinbeck Biography Never Ends

In Search of Steinbeck also reminds readers of three truths about John Steinbeck books:

(1) Book stores are better than computers for finding John Steinbeck books worth collecting . . . but hurry—they’re closing fast.

(2) Interesting avenues to John Steinbeck biography, such as the houses where he wrote, remain open for exploration by enthusiasts.

(3) Worthy John Steinbeck books continue to be written by educated amateurs, like Mrs. Schmitz, who fall in love with Steinbeck in unexpected ways.

Anne-Marie Schmitz—reared in France and trained as a social worker—describes the beginning of her affair with John Steinbeck books in her preface to In Search of Steinbeck. The passage is a remarkable reminder of the role played by serendipity when certain people discover John Steinbeck books for the first time:

Next door to us in Los Altos lived Karl and Florence Steinbeck. They had two miniature french poodles that always managed to get lost. One morning in 1962, Karl came near our garden where one of them had wandered. I heard him tell my father that his cousin, John Steinbeck, had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature. . . .

Two years later, a friend came to visit us with her husband. We had known them in England and they had met John Steinbeck in Stockholm during the presentation of the prizes . . . . The Grapes of Wrath had deeply moved them. Soon after they left, I bought a copy of it. It kept me spellbound. It was like a great wave taking me along, away from the selfishness of everyday life, back to the wartimes when the refugees from the north covered the roads of France, when babies were born in barns along the way, and dead folks were buried in ditches. It took me back to the days when pain, poverty, and tragedy were all around us. It renewed an acute awareness of the wrongs of this world and a desire to do something about them.

Engaged from boyhood by Thomas Malory’s King Arthur, John Steinbeck encouraged readers of every age to participate imaginatively in the books he wrote as an adult. Wonderfully prepared by personal experience, Mrs. Schmitz took Steinbeck up on the invitation to enter his world and learn about his life. Thanks to her and her husband’s hard work, John Steinbeck biography gained an elegant emblem in 1978 with the appearance of In Search of Steinbeck, the fruit of careful, loving labor.

Engaged from boyhood by Thomas Malory’s King Arthur, John Steinbeck encouraged readers of every age to participate imaginatively in the books he wrote as an adult.

Take my word for it—In Search of Steinbeck is a jewel of a book worth having whether or not you are possessed by the collecting habit. If book stores in your area have gone the way of King Arthur’s court and the Book Nest, Google the title and treat yourself to one of the copies on sale online for less than the book’s original $35 publication price. Who knows? Perhaps you too will be inspired to open a new path in John Steinbeck biography, as Anne-Marie Schmitz did 35 years ago.

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

John Steinbeck Explains Marco Rubio on Global Warming in Sea of Cortez

May 16, 2014 by William Ray 6 Comments

This week the issue of global warming caused embarrassing problems for Marco Rubio as the Republican Senator from Miami rolled out his unofficial entry into the 2016 presidential race. Sorry, but I couldn’t help noticing. Although I am not a Republican and no longer live in Florida, I once owned a home on the Intracoastal Waterway near Palm Beach. During hurricanes, our little beach disappeared along with half of our yard. A two-foot sea rise will leave storm water at the new owner’s front door. Another two feet will make the house, along with thousands of other coastal homes, uninhabitable. So I’ve been scratching my head over the confused case Marco Rubio tried to articulate for doing nothing to mitigate global warming—an odd position for any elected official from South Florida to take. Oops! There goes Miami Beach!

I’ve been scratching my head over the confused case Marco Rubio tried to articulate for doing nothing to mitigate global warming. Oops! There goes Miami Beach!

As usual, John Steinbeck helped me think. Because his science book Sea of Cortez is also political and philosophical, I turned to the writer’s “Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research” in the Gulf of California to help me understand politicians like Marco Rubio who (1) deride global warming data, (2) deny that fossil-fuel use is a factor, or (3) insist that it’s too late to turn back, so what the hell! During the course of speeches and interviews in New Hampshire and elsewhere, Marco Rubio denied global warming so often and so recklessly that he became the butt of a Wednesday night Stephen Colbert Show “F*ck It!” segment. What part of Rubio’s brain shut down when he opened his campaign for president? Three observations made by John Steinbeck on the biology of belief and behavior in Chapter 14 of Sea of Cortez provided clarity, but little comfort, about Marco Rubio’s recent statements regarding global warming. Hold the applause. They are nothing to laugh about.

1. Forget simplistic causation. Find provable relationships and prepare for complexity.

Sea of Cortez starts with first principles. From microbes to mankind, variation in nature is a universal principle; causative relationships are complex and outcomes aren’t always predictable. But worldwide climate disruption is a particularly violent variation with measurable relationships and very clear consequences. Denying the significance of man-made carbon emissions in accelerating global warming by implying, as Marco Rubio and others do, that . . . well, shit happens . . . is like letting a drunk drive on the theory that other things can go wrong too, so what’s the big deal? Ignition failure, bad brakes, lousy weather, all contribute to accidents on the road. But driving while drunk, like loading the atmosphere with pollutants, foolishly increases the severity and consequences of co-contributing factors.

Driving while drunk, like loading the atmosphere with pollutants, foolishly increases the severity and consequences of co-contributing factors.

“Sometimes,” John Steinbeck would have agreed, “shit just happens.” But try taking that excuse to court and see what happens there—if you survive the wreck you caused. Steinbeck was a Darwinian who tried not to judge, but deadly driving while drunk has been described by those who are less forgiving as a form of natural self-selection for stupid individuals. Unlike solitary drinking, however, global warming denial is a social disease. Following the dimwitted herd of reality-deniers, like lemmings, over the looming climate cliff? That takes systematic self-delusion and self-styled leaders like Marco Rubio. How do they operate? John Steinbeck had a theory.

2. Reality-denial is a form of adolescent wish-fulfillment. It’s most dangerous in a mob motivated by a self-appointed leader.

Sea of Cortez—co-authored with Steinbeck’s friend and collaborator, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts—develops many of the ideas Steinbeck expressed in the fiction he wrote before 1940. His 1936 novel In Dubious Battle, for example, dramatized the murderous behavior of opposing mobs, behavior worse than anything within the capacity of their individual constituents. Steinbeck’s characterization of politically-driven leaders like Mac, the novel’s Communist labor-organizer, is particularly disturbing, even today. Sea of Cortez develops both of these core ideas—the behavior of mob members and the psychology of mob leaders—using biological terms that help explain Marco Rubio and his position on global warming.

Sea of Cortez develops both of these core ideas—the behavior of mob members and the psychology of mob leaders—using biological terms that help explain Marco Rubio and his position on global warming.

Like Steinbeck’s metaphorical ameba in Sea of Cortez, Mac the Communist and Marco Rubio the Republican are political pseudo-pods who detect a mass-wish within their followers and press toward its fulfillment: “We are directly leading this great procession, our leadership ‘causes’ all the rest of the population to move this way, the mass follows the path we blaze.” But one difference between Mac and Marco Rubio, worth noting, was apparent in this week’s events. Steinbeck’s labor agitator was a tough guy with street smarts who stayed on-message; Marco Rubio manages to look as unfixed and immature as he sounds. In right-wing global warming politics, Rick Perry—no George Bush, and take that as a compliment—seems statesmanlike by comparison. Oops! I meant Department of Education!

3. Extinction is possible. Double extinction.

John Steinbeck read encyclopedically, and in Sea of Cortez he explains what he calls “the criterion of validity in the handling of data” by citing an example from an article on ecology in the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It concerns the extermination of a certain species of hawk that preyed on the willow grouse, a game bird in Norway. Failing to note the presence of the parasitical disease coccidiosis in the country’s grouse population, the Norwegians systematically eradicated the predator that kept the infection under control by killing off weaker birds affected by the disease. The result was double extinction—hawk and grouse—caused by uninformed human behavior.

The Norwegians systematically eradicated the predator that kept the infection under control by killing off weaker birds affected by the disease. The result was double extinction—hawk and grouse—caused by unintelligent human behavior.

Like Steinbeck, I loved college biology, and the biology department at Wake Forest was very good. My freshman professor, a John Steinbeck-Ed Ricketts type named Ralph Amen, introduced us to an idea that makes Marco Rubio’s anti-global warming demagoguery more than a little scary 50 years later. “Imagine,” Dr. Amen suggested, “that the earth is an organism, Gaia, with a cancer—the human species, overpopulating and over-polluting its host. What is the likely outcome of this infection for Gaia and for mankind?” A question in the spirit of Sea of Cortez, which on reflection I’m certain he had read.

‘Imagine,’ Dr. Amen suggested, ‘that the earth is an organism, Gaia, with a cancer—the human species, overpopulating and over-polluting its host. What is the likely outcome of this infection for Gaia and for mankind?’

John Steinbeck, a one-world ecologist even further ahead of his time than my old teacher, would have answered, “things could go either way.” The cancer might kill the host or the host eradicate the cancer. But global warming presents a third possibility—double extinction. Now imagine that Marco Rubio is a soft, squishy symptom of global warming denial, a terminal disease. Then reread John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez as I just did. Reality-based thinking is our first step toward a cure, although under a president like Marco Rubio it could also be our last. Oops! There we go—along with the planet! How in the world did we let that happen?

Filed Under: Ecology, Featured, Politics & Religion Tagged With: Ideas

Academic Stars Illuminate The Grapes of Wrath

May 9, 2014 by William Ray Leave a Comment

On May 3 experts from the University of Virginia, San Jose State University, and Claremont Graduate University enlightened 350 attendees of the 34th Steinbeck Festival—held at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California—about The Grapes of Wrath. As different in style as The Grapes of Wrath is from Gone With the Wind, each of the speakers—Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University; Stephen Railton, Professor of American Literature and Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia; Rick Wartzman, the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University—aligned Steinbeck’s masterpiece with matters of abiding importance, illuminating aspects of an enduring novel that still shocks and surprises.

San Jose State University’s Susan Shillinglaw on Teaching

The author of two books in one year—John and Carol Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage and On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath”—Susan Shillinglaw has taught, written, and organized around Steinbeck at San Jose University for 25 years. So familiar with her subject that she can speak flawlessly without notes, the San Jose State University President’s Scholar and National Steinbeck Center Scholar-in-Residence traced the roots of The Grapes of Wrath back to rural Oklahoma, the home of a real-life migrant family named Joat, and connected it to the contemporary concept of one-world ecology, first explored by Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts in the 1930s.

Susan Shillinglaw has taught, written, and organized around Steinbeck at San Jose University for 25 years.

Shillinglaw’s deft description of the four levels of meaning in Steinbeck’s novel unified by this concept seemed perfectly designed to make the long book easier to embrace for classroom teachers, a significant percentage of her audience. The San Jose State University veteran explained why reading long books is still important for students with an apt analogy from personal experience. Earlier in the week, she said, she had attended the stage version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in New York. She noted that Hilton Als, the New Yorker magazine drama critic, panned the production for depending on celebrity casting to draw young viewers to an old play.

Shillinglaw’s deft description of the four levels of meaning in Steinbeck’s novel seemed perfectly designed to make the long book easier to embrace for classroom teachers.

Shillinglaw stated that it was the first time she ever saw a New York audience stand and clap so quickly at the end of a show. If it takes a James Franco to get youngsters to attend live theater, she wondered, what’s the harm? They were there, they were moved, and they loved what they saw. If it takes a teacher’s prodding to induce kids to read The Grapes of Wrath, that’s worth the time and effort, too, she added. Although her students at San Jose State University “self-select” by enrolling in her Steinbeck course, she noted that frequent quizzes are necessary to keep them on track, particularly with long books like The Grapes of Wrath.

The University of Virginia’s Stephen Railton on Reading

Like me, Susan Shillinglaw attended graduate school at the University of Virginia’s rival, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Noting that at one time the Department of English was the University of Virginia’s largest department, she provided a smooth transition for the speaker who came next, the University of Virginia English professor Stephen Railton. Shillinglaw’s focus on Steinbeck is singular: her knowledge of the writer’s life is encyclopedic, and her observations about his work are splendidly spontaneous. Railton’s style is more structured and his scope more synoptic, placing Steinbeck in the broader context of American literary history. Unlike Shillinglaw, Railton delivered his remarks from a prepared script, but that didn’t slow him down. Could it be that he speaks so brilliantly in public because he comes from the University of Virginia, an institution founded by Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. President who wrote effortlessly but had to work hard to project his voice?

Railton’s style is more structured and his scope more synoptic, placing Steinbeck in the broader context of American literary history.

In Chapel Hill we complained that the University of Virginia seemed set on cornering the American literature market. Railton’s presentation suggested that our concern was justified. The editor of works by and about Cooper, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain, Railton has developed digital libraries of Twain, Faulkner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the other great protest novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As amply demonstrated in his comments about The Grapes of Wrath, this makes Railton a kind of humanities engineer, a new and interesting breed on campus. He certainly knows where the connecting lines lie under the surface of American writing from 19th century Transcendentalism to Naturalism and Modernism, mapping the convergence of these movements in John Steinbeck with ease and connecting The Grapes of Wrath with equal precision to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to The Wasteland. Consider the relationship of three “Tom’s,” he suggested: Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, and the Wasteland poet from St. Louis, Thomas Stearns Eliot.

A thought that profound is a paper in itself, but Railton moved right on, connecting Steinbeck to other writers in ways equally ingenious. For example, he noted that the author of the “sentimental” novel The Grapes of Wrath was at heart a literary modernist who heeded Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” in his writing. But Steinbeck differed fundamentally from Pound, Eliot, and Faulkner, modern writers whose dislike of sentiment created “a kind of gated community of aesthetics” in their work. Unlike his more detached contemporaries, Steinbeck was emotionally engaged, writing “not out of curiosity but impatience, even anger” and creating in Tom Joad “an existential member of the Lost Generation.” Steinbeck also differed from Naturalists such as Dreiser, Norris, and Crane, students of social Darwinism who wrote about individuals victimized by power in the shadow of the Panic of 1893. The author of The Grapes of Wrath was a meliorist who believed in the possibility of progress. Writing in the deeper shadow of the Great Depression, Steinbeck felt that the natural order for humanity was “evolutionary change, not just unremitting struggle.”

The author of The Grapes of Wrath was a meliorist who believed in the possibility of progress.

So satisfying an insight offers a tempting place to stop, but Railton also looked closely at Steinbeck’s text, observing that The Grapes of Wrath opens on a wasteland, like Eliot’s poem, and that the journey of Tom Joad parallels that of Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Rose of Sharon loses her baby and her brother never becomes an uncle, but unlike Stowe’s protagonist—whose hope is for Heaven—Joad’s breakthrough is post-Christian, an updated version of Emerson’s Over-Soul in which all people participate. Tom learns this religion from the ex-preacher Casy, but unlike Casy, Tom fights back rather than forgiving, “a warrior convert” to the new gospel of social justice. The Grapes of Wrath, Railton concluded, is John Steinbeck’s “Newer Testament.” As if in benediction, the University of Virginia professor sang Casy’s “Yessir, that’s my Savior” to the tune Steinbeck had in mind: “Yessir, that’s my baby.” Like Thomas Jefferson, the self-described “aging hippie” from the University of Virginia has an educated ear.

Claremont Graduate University’s Rick Wartzman on the Burning and Banning of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

Susan Shillinglaw extemporized without notes. Stephen Railton performed from a script. Rick Wartzman, the third speaker of the day, projected images from his laptop. It was an appropriate medium for the executive director of Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute—described by Time.com as “a social enterprise whose mission is strengthening organizations to strengthen society.” A former writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, Wartzman is the author of award-winning investigations of political power in California—The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (with Mark Arax) and Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Each of these books explores an archetypal conflict: the price in individual liberty paid to oligarchic greed, the story at the heart of Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Shillinglaw and Railton illuminated the novel’s narrative, context, and connections. Wartzman detailed its aftermath.

Shillinglaw and Railton illuminated the novel’s narrative, context, and connections. Wartzman detailed its aftermath.

Prior to The Grapes of Wrath, a pair of California writer-activists admired by Steinbeck—Jack London and Sinclair Lewis—published prescient novels about a future United States under fascism. George Orwell cited the influence of London’s book on the writing of 1984, the British bestseller that continues to rival The Grapes of Wrath in global popularity. Neither of the earlier novels—London’s The Iron Heel (1902), Lewis’s It Can Happen Here (1935)—is read much anymore, but Steinbeck would have been familiar with both. If he voted in the general election of 1934, he likely voted for the writer-activist Upton Sinclair, the Democratic candidate for Governor of California. A celebrity socialist with popular appeal, Sinclair was defeated by the well-funded campaign of disinformation waged by California’s corporate elite—including Wartzman’s former employer, the Los Angeles Times. Frank Merriam, the establishment candidate, won the Governor’s seat.

Sinclair’s populist policies prevailed four years later, when Culbert Olson beat Merriam to become California’s first Democratic Governor since 1895. As Wartzman observed, the state’s corporate interests were understandably alarmed. A Mormon atheist from Utah, Olson had campaigned for Sinclair in 1934 and supported President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Remarkably, Olson refused to say “so help me God” when his oath of office was administered by a California Supreme Court Justice with the name William Waste. Olson dared to challenge the influence of the Catholic Church in California’s system of public education, provoking the wrath of John Cantwell, the archbishop of Los Angeles, and Archbishop John Mitty of San Francisco. Virtually alone among elected officials in the country’s most geographically exposed state, Olson opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. In 1942 he lost to the Republican Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Olson opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. In 1942 he lost to the Republican Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

When Olson took office on January 2, 1939, California’s power structure shook, setting the stage for the burning and banning of The Grapes of Wrath. Wartzman’s narrative of events between April and August 1939 was dramatic. During that turbulent time, Carey McWilliams—a Los Angeles writer-activist allied with Sinclair and employed by Olson—published Factories in the Field, a survey of migrant worker conditions in California caused by the rapacity of the state’s corporate landowners. McWilliams’ dry statistics vindicated Steinbeck’s angry book, blunting the impact of counter-Grapes of Wrath efforts by writers such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s summer neighbor in genteel Los Gatos.

McWilliams’ dry statistics vindicated Steinbeck’s angry book, blunting the impact of counter-Grapes of Wrath efforts by writers such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s summer neighbor in genteel Los Gatos.

Mitchell may not have been related to the Georgia author of the same name who wrote Gone With the Wind, the 1936 bestseller that became an award-winning film the year The Grapes of Wrath was published. But in the context of Stephen Railton’s remarks, Margaret Mitchell’s pro-Confederacy fantasy can be read as a work of delayed anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin fiction; Wartzman noted that two-dozen anti-Uncle Tom books appeared during Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lifetime. Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness, a polite work written to counter the perceived obscenity of The Grapes of Wrath, was quickly forgotten. Gone With the Wind remains second only to the Bible in continuing U.S. sales, far ahead of The Grapes of Wrath, its spiritual opposite.

Who burned The Grapes of Wrath when it first appeared? In Bakersfield, California, Clell Pruett—a man who hadn’t read the book—posed for the camera as he lit the match. Pruett’s employer was Bill Camp, head of the anti-labor, anti-Grapes of Wrath Associated Farmers organization in Kern County; Camp enlisted Pruett for the photo-op to prove that real farm workers didn’t appreciate how Steinbeck had portrayed them. Following Pearl Harbor, Pruett left California and returned to Missouri to mine lead. That is where Rick Wartzman interviewed Pruett not long before he died. Pruett still hadn’t read The Grapes of Wrath but promised Wartzman that he would. When he did, he told Wartzman that reading hadn’t changed his mind.

In Bakersfield, California, Clell Pruett—a man who hadn’t read the book—posed for the camera as he lit the match.

Pruett’s feelings about The Grapes of Wrath were shared by people in Steinbeck’s hometown, where a 1936 strike by lettuce-packers was suppressed and The Grapes of Wrath was later burned. Like Jack London and Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck feared fascism in America and thought he recognized its signs in California. A dramatic instance involved Salinas and the violent reaction of the town’s citizens to the 1936 lettuce strike. Steinbeck’s response was L’Affaire Lettuceburg, a vigorous denunciation of local power brokers in short-fiction form. The piece was so scathing that Steinbeck—on the advice of his wife and in the interest of his safety—retracted the manuscript and refused to let it be published, proactively burning his own book. As I sat in the National Steinbeck Center audience listening to the stellar speakers who had come to Salinas from San Jose State University, the University of Virginia, and Claremont Graduate University, I pondered the remark about John Steinbeck made by the town’s former mayor in his morning introduction: “He used us in life; we use him in death.”

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

Party! Susan Shillinglaw on Reading The Grapes of Wrath

April 18, 2014 by William Ray 8 Comments

Great books about great books are cause for celebration anytime. Thanks to the pressure of a 75th anniversary deadline—and the prodding of the people at Penguin Books—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath now has a perfect companion in On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” by Susan Shillinglaw, professor of English at San Jose State University. Recently published by Penguin Books as an attractive, affordable paperback, her new book is an essential guide to a novel that was written in nine months in 1938 and still sells in six figures—further evidence, if needed, that deadlines are enlivening. A compact work of 200 pages divided into engaging topics, the project was suggested by Penguin Books and completed by Shillinglaw in 90 days. Written in clear prose for a general audience, it will still be read when The Grapes of Wrath turns 100.

Susan Shillinglaw’s new book is an essential guide to a novel that was written in nine months in 1938 and still sells in six figures.

San Jose State University’s reputation for Steinbeck studies rests largely on Shillinglaw’s 25-year record of teaching, writing, and organizing around California’s greatest author of all time; in international Steinbeck circles, perhaps three other scholars in America come to mind as quickly as she does when Steinbeck studies are mentioned. The late Peter Lisca unlocked the structure of Steinbeck’s fiction using the tools of formal analysis. Jackson Benson, another Californian, wrote the definitive biography. Robert DeMott—the first director of San Jose State University’s center for Steinbeck studies—continues to explore the sources, texts, and processes of Steinbeck’s writing with the care of a scientist and the soul of a poet.

San Jose State University’s reputation for Steinbeck studies rests largely on Shillinglaw’s 25-year record.

Shillinglaw builds on all three in her new book, combining structural, biographical, and textual approaches with features that have become her signature as a writer about Steinbeck. As in her previous publications, she brings Steinbeck out of the past into the present, connecting the context, content, and impact of The Grapes of Wrath to urgent issues of contemporary life. As she has done in essays and conferences, she brings Steinbeck’s ecology into existential focus through the writer’s relationship with Ed Ricketts, connecting The Grapes of Wrath to Sea of Cortez, their collaborative work, in what she describes as a “diptych” of two books with one theme. Most important for most readers, she brings a graceful style of expression to an author who cared more about being read than being written about. In this she emulates her subject; On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” is further evidence of the all-too-rare virtue of readability.

Shillinglaw brings a graceful style of expression to an author who cared more about being read than being written about.

For such a book the highest praise may be the briefest: On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” is a one-volume course in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, efficiently organized, elegantly presented, and easily assimilated in a matter of hours. Wherever you’re headed in this summer of Steinbeck, don’t leave home without it. (Future party alert! This advice will still apply when The Grapes of Wrath celebrates its centennial. Like Steinbeck’s fiction, Penguin Books and On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” are certain to be around for a very long time.)

Filed Under: Books, Featured, Steinbeck's Work Tagged With: Book Reviews

Does John Steinbeck Belong to English Literature?

February 27, 2014 by William Ray 4 Comments

Does John Steinbeck belong to English literature? Peter Ackroyd, one of Great Britain’s most prolific living writers, raised this question in my mind when I read Albion: The Invention of the English Imagination, a survey of the arts of the British Isles from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. Unlike Henry James and T.S. Eliot, native writers who defined themselves as Anglo-Americans, Steinbeck never claimed to be anything but an American author influenced by the English literature of the past. But Steinbeck’s ties to Great Britain were strong, his fiction flows from the well of English literature, and his temperament mirrored many of the English characteristics explored in Albion: The Invention of the English Imagination.

King Arthur: John Steinbeck’s Magnificent Obsession

Thomas Malory’s King Arthur captured Steinbeck’s boyhood imagination and obsessed him throughout his life. In pursuit of this passion, Steinbeck traveled more extensively in Great Britain than anywhere outside the United States except Mexico and expended greater time and effort researching King Arthur than he did on any other project.

Steinbeck also loved English music. From the Tudor anthems of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd to the sea-sodden songs and symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the music of the British Isles inspired him when he wrote his novels and consoled him when he contemplated death. Although Steinbeck’s attempt to transpose the music of Malory’s Mort D’Arthur into modern English collapsed, King Arthur’s Round Table served as inspiration for some of his best writing, starting with Tortilla Flat, and Ackroyd includes Steinbeck in his short list of English writers most influenced by Malory and the King Arthur legend. (Ironically, Ackroyd’s adaptation of Malory’s King Arthur succeeds where Steinbeck failed. The opening sentence of The Death of King Arthur suggests why: “In the old wild days of the world there was a king of England known as Uther Pendragon; he was a dragon in wrath as well as in power.”)

It seems particularly appropriate to reflect on John Steinbeck’s Englishness today, his birthday.

But there is more to Steinbeck’s connection with Great Britain than love of King Arthur, English landscape, or the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Great Britain was in his blood, and it seems particularly appropriate to reflect on John Steinbeck’s Englishness today, his birthday.

The Invention of Steinbeck’s English Imagination

As indicated by the titles of In Dubious Battle and The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck was inspired by English literature beyond Malory. Along with Shakespeare and Milton. John Bunyon and William Blake are notable influences, as well as the language of the King James Bible and the novels of Charles Dickens. But this obvious observation begs an interesting if unanswerable question. Was Steinbeck’s affinity for the British Isles, King Arthur, and English literature the root or the result of his Englishness? Was Great Britain in his blood before it was in his mind?

Was Steinbeck’s affinity for the British Isles, King Arthur, and English literature the root or the result of his Englishness? Was Great Britain in his blood before it was in his mind?

Steinbeck’s maternal grandparents were Scots-Irish immigrants, and his paternal grandmother was a Dickson from New England. He inherited his mother’s fascination with Celtic myth and magic. He dramatized his grandparents’ Calvinism and its conflicts in East of Eden. Whether inborn or acquired, the characteristics of Englishness described in Albion: The Invention of the English Imagination were present in Steinbeck’s thought and temperament and in his writing, from Cup of Gold to The Winter of Our Discontent, shaping his imagination and suggesting that he belongs to the tradition of English literature that began with Malory and Chaucer.

Were Steinbeck’s English traits the product or the source of his lifelong attraction to English writers and music?

Here are a few of the English traits identified by Ackroyd and shared by Steinbeck:

–A love of landscape and an attraction to the sea
–Antiquarianism, independence, and insularity
–Melancholy, fatalism, and the profession (if not the fact) of modesty
–Practicality, invention, and a love of science and experiment
–An insistence on privacy, solitude, and having a place of one’s own
–An instinctive belief in cultural continuity and “the presence of the past”
–A distrust of theology, abstraction, and fixed ideologies
–Creative translation, assimilation, and adaptation of earlier art
–A belief in ghosts, fairies, and magic (the Celts were British before they were Irish)
–A passion for home gardening, tinkering, and domestic self-help devices
–A penchant for portraiture in painting and an preference for character over plot in writing
–Making art organically, by accretion, rather than structurally by system, theory, or plan
–Moving between fiction and fact, history and fantasy, when telling a story

Were Steinbeck’s English traits the product or the source of his lifelong attraction to English writers and music? Two examples may help answer the question.

Steinbeck, Vaughan Williams, and Blake

Although Ackroyd mentions Steinbeck only in connection with Malory’s King Arthur, the nature of Steinbeck’s Englishness can be deduced from the chapter Ackroyd devotes to Ralph Vaughan Williams, Great Britain’s most popular modern composer, and from Ackroyd’s book-length biography of William Blake, the early English Romantic poet and artist. First Vaughan Williams, then Blake:

–Like Steinbeck, Vaughan Williams displayed a characteristically English “detachment and reticence” about explaining himself or the meaning of his work: “He was not given to ‘probing into himself and his thoughts or his own music. We may say the same of other English artists who have prided themselves on their technical skills and are decidedly reluctant to discuss the ‘meaning’ of their productions. . . . It is, once more, a question of English embarrassment.”

–Like Steinbeck, Vaughan Williams was moved by the early English music of Tallis, Byrd, and Henry Purcell. Noting the “plangent sadness” of Great Britain’s national music since their time, Ackroyd describes the songs and symphonies of Vaughan Williams as, like The Grapes of Wrath, “comparable to ‘the eternal note of sadness’ which Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach. . . . [a] note of quietly and insistently ‘throbbing melancholy’. . . .”

–Like Steinbeck, Vaughan Williams discovered universal meaning in local sources: “He believed that ‘if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own souls.”

Like Steinbeck, Vaughan Williams discovered universal meaning in local sources.

–Although Steinbeck, like Blake, was baptized in the Episcopal church, his family’s religious roots were Lutheran, Calvinist, and—like those of Blake—Separatist. Jim Casy echoes Blake’s language (“Everything that lives is holy”) in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck reflected Blake’s radical Protestant politics in his life: “The nature of Blake’s radicalism was perhaps not clear even to Blake himself . . . . But the fact that he never joined any particular group or society suggests that his was, from the beginning, an internal politics both self-willed and self-created.” Like Steinbeck, Blake “managed to combine an intense visionary belief in brotherhood and the human community with that robust and almost anarchic individualism so characteristic of London artisans” of his day.

Like Steinbeck, Blake ‘managed to combine an intense visionary belief in brotherhood and the human community with that robust and almost anarchic individualism so characteristic of London artisans’ of his day.

–Steinbeck and Blake shared a view of Mob Man as both infernal and godlike in power. A handbill for the Gordon Riots of 1780, which Blake experienced firsthand, “depicted the mob as ‘persevering and being united in One Man against the infernal designs of the Ministry.'” In Dubious Battle presents Steinbeck’s version of Group Man in Doc Burton’s observation that “[a] man in a group isn’t himself at all; he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you.” Like Blake, Steinbeck’s character concludes that Group Man can ultimately be perceived as God.

Like Blake, Steinbeck’s character concludes that Group Man can ultimately be perceived as God.

–Steinbeck and Blake shared the ability to transmute moral indignation into poetry. As Ackroyd notes, the chimney sweeps in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience reflected contemporary reality: “They finished their work at noon, at which time they were turned upon the streets—all of them in rags (some of them, it seems, without any clothing at all), all of them unwashed, poor, hungry.” The starving children of The Grapes of Wrath were equally real; Steinbeck reported their plight in a San Francisco newspaper series before rendering them unforgettably in his novel. English child indenture was ended by an act of Parliament. California migrant starvation was alleviated by federal relief. But Steinbeck’s children, like those of Dickens and Blake, continue to haunt and horrify to this day. Among American writers since Harriet Beecher Stowe, it might be added, only Steinbeck possessed the power to change society by opening hearts, a defining characteristic of English literature since Blake and Dickens.

Steinbeck and Blake shared the ability to transmute moral indignation into poetry. . . . Among American writers since Harriet Beecher Stowe, it might be added, only Steinbeck possessed the power to change society by opening hearts, a defining characteristic of English literature since Blake and Dickens.

In a forgotten episode of literary history, certain late-19th century professors of English literature at American colleges such as the University of North Carolina, where I studied, advocated that the United States rejoin Great Britain to form a cultural, if not political, affiliation. Their heads were in Chapel Hill, but their hearts were in Chaucer. Yet in their time it could be argued that American writing remained subservient to English literature. While reading Peter Ackroyd, it pleased me to consider that John Steinbeck, the most American of American writers since their era, may have fulfilled their desire more convincingly than James, Eliot, and other American-Anglophile authors. Like the music of Vaughan Williams and the art of William Blake, Steinbeck’s writing expresses Englishness authentically, by staying rooted, looking inward, and achieving universality in a diversity of modes, from mythic to melancholy. These artists are, one notes, always sad, and the sea is always at their side.

Filed Under: Books, Cultural History Tagged With: Book Reviews

On the Road to America’s Heart of Darkness with Roy Bentley in Starlight Taxi

January 24, 2014 by William Ray 3 Comments

I’ve gotten off on poems often, transported to the heart of darkness or fields of light by great writers long departed from the living road. William Blake always topped my list of visionary favorites. Until I read Roy Bentley, however, I never encountered a living poet with a valid license driving far enough into the American interior to satisfy an anxious hitchhiker like me.

As a professional word-dealer I’ve been on the road with some of the best. Old William Blake; odd Emily of the New England Dickinsons; Yeats with his Anglo-Irish outrage and old-man monkey glands; Auden, mon semblable, mon frère! I was 24 when I got my doctorate in English with a dissertation on William Blake, but I didn’t know shit about life outside. The schoolboy prose I produced about dead poets with dead voices was all for show—and for the committee that now pronounced me man and Ph.D. Later of course I was forced to live and learn for real. Emily Dickinson said a poem should take off the top of your head. But what I needed after life hit was a heart job. Not Conrad’s un-particularized heart of darkness, no. My personal heart, which hurt.

The William Blake-John Steinbeck-Roy Bentley Connection

Thanks to two fine folks named John Steinbeck and Kate Fox, a writer and editor, I was finally introduced to Roy Bentley, the very poet my insistent inner doctor had been ordering. First came Roy’s emails, offering poems inspired by John Steinbeck for publication at SteinbeckNow.com. The voice I heard through the screen as I read sounded familiar—Southern, sensitive, sardonic, snotty when a subject deserved scorn, childlike when an experience was an epiphany. I saw lines I would write if I had Roy’s skill, which I don’t. I recognized the vision behind the voice, surreal yet familiar, like William Blake and his friendly angels.

I published Roy’s poems and asked for a meeting. A phone call had to do. As I was learning from reading his work, being on the road with Roy Bentley isn’t physical. It’s a mind-trip. If I could hear him, I could see him. A phone call would suffice.

Being on the road with Roy Bentley isn’t physical. It’s a mind-trip.

John Steinbeck didn’t like telephones, but Southerners generally do, and getting to know Roy long distance was like catching up with a high school friend. A self-exiled son of the border South like me, he now lives in Ohio, where I grew up, not far from his home state of Kentucky. Like William Blake’s village of Felpham in Sussex, England, however, Roy’s point of origin is more memorable than mine—a town named Neon in a county called Letcher—and his father actually split from his mother, something my dad contemplated but never accomplished. Roy liked girls and cars with the same Southern passion my country-boy father never outgrew. This was the first five minutes.

Like William Blake, Roy got married and (unlike William Blake) raised a family. Not a conversation-stopper, although I’ve always played for the other team. After all, John Steinbeck —also a William Blake fan and sexual frequent-flyer—was married repeatedly, and that hasn’t prevented Steinbeck from setting up residence in my sexually unorthodox soul. The image I got of Roy in our second five minutes is exactly what I saw in his poems: a man just like me, driving a lonely lane on the road to his heart of darkness destination. I was sure we’d be finishing each other’s sentences within an hour. But it happened in the five minutes that followed—and I talk fast.

The image I got of Roy in our second five minutes is exactly what I saw in his poems: a man just like me, driving a lonely lane on the road to his heart of darkness destination.

We played the Southern geography game: “Sure, Cincinnati, that’s not far.” “On yeah, that’s what I hate about the South too.” “No shit, I knew a guy exactly like that. Drugs and alcohol and the Army, Jeez!” “This job market sucks, and no, I wasn’t a great student either. You can probably guess why.” Hanging up, like breaking up, became hard to do. William Blake had his angels, John Steinbeck talked to his dogs. I have both and suspect that Roy does too. But we’re Southern boys who prefer two legs with a real mouth when it comes to human intercourse, and solitary driving on the road to the heart of darkness gets lonely with angels and dogs. We would need to talk some more, and probably again. Pissed off at the redneck revolution (“That’s why we left the South!”), we shoved Mom’s be-nice rule and discussed politics and religion—social no-no’s of Old South civility— before finally saying goodbye.

Starlight Taxi: High-Flying Poetry Printed with Style

Roy and I had clicked. As we clicked off, I suggested—and sent—the book I was reading, a prophetic novel written by Jack London in 1906 about a future fascist America. John Steinbeck, who grew up in London’s shadow, loved London’s work and probably read The Iron Heel before writing his wartime play-novella The Moon Is Down, set abroad rather than in the United States at the government’s insistence. George Orwell—John Steinbeck’s contemporary and another Jack London admirer—took the title of 1984 from The Iron Heel. Jack Kerouac, the On the Road prophet of the Beat Generation’s heart of darkness, was a later fan. Clearly Roy was ripe for Jack London. But I had my own reason for recommending The Iron Heel.

You see, Roy is a cosmic poet in the William Blake sense of the word. Big ideas pulse in tiny, telling details—what William Blake called “minute particulars”—in every poem, and one kind of apocalypse or another is always around the corner. As with Emily Dickinson, no word seems wasted; as with John Steinbeck at his best, no word seems wrong. So Roy’s work is here to stay, and I enjoyed the prospect of stumbling on the Jack London reference in a future poem by Roy Bentley, knowing secretly that our conversation was the source. My ancient William Blake dissertation collects dust, deservedly unpublished and ignored. A footnote explaining Roy’s artful Iron Heel allusion in a future anthology of American poets would make me feel what Roy calls “justified.”

I enjoyed the prospect of stumbling on the Jack London reference in a future poem by Roy Bentley, knowing secretly that our conversation was the source.

But Roy’s parting gift was much better than mine. The week after we talked I received an autographed copy of Starlight Taxi, his prize-winning collection of 65 tight poems printed by Lynx House Press on 95 thick pages the way fine poetry should be: surrounded by white space and unencumbered by prose. In top manic form, I tripped out as I read Starlight Taxi, Roy’s telephone voice still running in my head. I’m no Emerson, but I think I know how Emerson felt when he first read Walt Whitman, greeting the author of America’s “on the road” meme as a poetic original at the dawn of a great career.

I tripped out as I read Starlight Taxi, Roy’s telephone voice still running in my head.

Like John Steinbeck, my genetic code is programmed for English mountains and Celtic seas. Like William Blake, my angels always look British. Though he downplayed his non-Irish heritage, however, Steinbeck was German on his father’s side, and Sussex, despite Blake’s Englishness, seems as distant as Dusseldorf. But Roy Bentley is just like me: an Appalachian exile of uneasy English extraction, fully alive but moving with increasing anxiety on the road to America’s looming heart of darkness. Thanks to John Steinbeck and Kate Fox, I have found my living William Blake. He’s chosen the solo lane. But he likes company and he’s a skillful driver.

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

Mission Santa Clara Premiere of Steinbeck Suite for Organ Kicks Off 75th Anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath

January 17, 2014 by William Ray 5 Comments

Santa Clara University, located in the heart of California Steinbeck Country, kick starts the 75th birthday of The Grapes of Wrath on February 16 with the premiere of Steinbeck Suite, a dramatic piece of pipe organ music by the American composer Franklin D. Ashdown. Like James Welch, the pipe organ virtuoso (shown here) who will perform the premiere, Frank is a sensitive Steinbeck lover as well as a leading light in the world of organ music.

Mission Santa Clara: Perfect for Artful Organ Music

The February 16 concert will start at 2:00 p.m. in Mission Santa Clara on the Santa Clara University campus near downtown San Jose. Mission Santa Clara is one of 21 ecclesiastical outposts established by early Spanish missionaries between San Diego and Sonoma and noted by Steinbeck in his travels throughout his native state. Like Monterey’s historic Carmel Mission, a place Steinbeck knew well, Mission Santa Clara is famous for its architecture, art, and acoustics. The February 16 Mission Santa Clara concert is part of Santa Clara University’s 2014 Festival of American Music, the kind of academic activity that appealed to the author.

Steinbeck and Pipe Organs: Music for Life and for Death

Steinbeck heard organ music growing up in Salinas, a town 60 miles south of Santa Clara, where he studied piano, sang in the church choir, and became a lifelong fan of opera, jazz, and the organ music of Bach. His first novel, Cup of Gold, ends with the sound of an organ chord reverberating in the mind of its dying protagonist, the pirate Henry Morgan. Organ music was played at John and Elaine Steinbeck’s 1950 wedding and at the writer’s funeral in 1968. With Steinbeck’s love of organ music, musicians, and theatrical effect in mind, Steinbeck Suite was commissioned by the former organist of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the Salinas church depicted operatically in East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent, and Steinbeck’s “Letters to Alicia.”

Familiar Organ Music Inspired by Nights in Monterey

Frank Ashdown will be present for the February 16 world premiere of his new work by Santa Clara University Organist Jim Welch, California’s most celebrated concert organist and an alumnus of Stanford, the school Steinbeck attended sporadically before devoting himself to his writing. The February 16 program played on Mission Santa Clara’s classic pipe organ will also feature organ music by Richard Purvis, the subject of a recent biography by Jim Welch and the organist at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral following World War II. Purvis’s “Nights in Monterey,” a favorite piece of organ music for lovers of colorful sound, was inspired by camping trips made by the composer to the Monterey Peninsula at the time Steinbeck was writing East of Eden. It is possible that Steinbeck heard Purvis play the pipe organ at Grace.

Organ Music Written to be Heard, Like Steinbeck’s Fiction

A widely published composer of choral and organ music, Frank Ashdown has had his works performed at Grace, Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and churches and concert halls throughout the world. A perceptive student of Steinbeck’s fiction, he writes as Steinbeck did: to be heard and appreciated by average people, not specialists. Jim Welch, who recommended Frank for the commission celebrating Steinbeck’s anniversary, comments: “From the opening movement, an homage to the humanity of The Grapes of Wrath, to the fiery closing toccata depicting the conflagration of Danny’s house in Tortilla Flat, Frank’s Steinbeck-inspired organ music will keep listeners on the edge of their seats. Mission Santa Clara’s reverberant sound, reverent atmosphere, and visual splendor are perfect for Frank’s Steinbeckian sense of acoustical theater and spiritual transcendence.”

The February 16 concert of organ music at Mission Santa Clara is open to the public. For tickets, see the Santa Clara University performing arts series website. Santa Clara University is located at 500 El Camino Real in Santa Clara, California, 10 minutes from San Jose International Airport and five minutes from Interstate 880. Take the Alameda Exit north and follow the curve in the road right as The Alameda becomes El Camino Real. The Santa Clara University campus entrance is on the left. Free parking is available in the new Santa Clara University garage near the campus entrance, and Mission Santa Clara is a two-minute walk from the garage. February 16 is a Sunday, but Californians dress casually. If this is your first visit, come early and drink in the beauty. Like The Grapes of Wrath, Mission Santa Clara is breathtaking. So are the organ music of Frank Ashdown and the organ virtuosity of Jim Welch, artists who love Steinbeck the way Steinbeck loved Bach.

Filed Under: Places & Events, Your Events Tagged With: Musicians

Still More to Doubt than Do in John Steinbeck’s Salinas

December 28, 2013 by William Ray 2 Comments

Salinas on Highway 101 in Monterey County is a piece of prose, an almost-odor, an unheard sound, a shade of gray, a pause, a reaction, an amnesia, dreaming of someplace else. Salinas is the have’s and have not’s, wood and brick and river and filled-in slough, cracked pavement and seedy lots and cemeteries, concrete buildings and rotting houses, churches, taco shops, and homeless shelters, and big empty box stores, and doctors’ offices and lawyers. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “Rotarians, Republicans, growers and shopkeepers,” by which he meant Somebodies. When the man looked through another peephole he said, “Sinners and vigilantes and racists and hypocrites,” and meant the same thing.

Salinas from Highway 101 Before Reading John Steinbeck

The August afternoon was hot and sticky when I took the Salinas exit from Highway 101 with my oldest college friend, an economics professor and Episcopal priest and gourmet cook from New York visiting Los Gatos, my new home 60 miles north of Salinas. I was a recent Florida transplant, and it was my first trip south on Highway 101 to Steinbeck Country. We knew Steinbeck was born in Salinas, but we weren’t looking for Steinbeck’s ghost. We weren’t even interested in Salinas. We were searching for the perfect artichoke, and the pilgrimage to Castroville and Watsonville—the heart of Salinas Valley’s artichoke industry—takes you through Salinas if you follow Highway 101, the safest route for the uninitiated.

I didn’t know it then, but later I would make the Highway 101 trek south to Salinas every Sunday to play the historic Aeolian-Skinner organ at John Steinbeck’s childhood Episcopal church. Retired from my day job in Silicon Valley and immersed in John Steinbeck’s writing, I decided to discover something new about John Steinbeck’s life in Salinas whenever I was in town. After researching church and town records of John Steinbeck’s upbringing, visiting his home and burial place, and interviewing Salinas residents about their town’s most famous son, I’ve learned a lot and formed an opinion. John Steinbeck was right: there wasn’t much to do in Salinas when he was growing up, and that hasn’t changed. But there is a great deal to doubt in Salinas about the legend of John Steinbeck perpetuated by local interests.

John Steinbeck’s View: Always Something to Do in Salinas

“Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley, cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful, but Salinas was not and we knew it. Perhaps that is why a kind of violent assertiveness, an energy like the compensation for sin grew up in the town. The town motto, given by a reporter ahead of his time, was: ‘Salinas is.’ I don’t know what that means, but there is no doubt of its compelling tone.”
—John Steinbeck, “Always Something to Do in Salinas”

John Steinbeck pondered the Salinas paradox wickedly in “Always Something to Do in Salinas,” a travel piece he wrote for Holiday magazine in 1955. By then Steinbeck had been a non-citizen of Salinas for 35 years—first as a college student at Stanford, later as a struggling writer in nearby Pacific Grove, finally as an international celebrity with homes in Manhattan and Long Island and instant recognition wherever he traveled. But John Steinbeck never forgot Salinas. And Salinas, I found, never forgot or forgave John Steinbeck for what he wrote about the town.

I learned for myself that, as Steinbeck joked, Salinas just is. But the Salinas that is isn’t the town I thought I was seeing when Allen and I passed through on our Highway 101 artichoke pilgrimage seven years ago. Normal Salinas weather is, as Steinbeck noted, not sunny, but high gray fog. Even in summer the gloom is damp and dark, enveloping Salinas like a shroud delivered from the angry sea. Robert Louis Stevenson, the first literary tourist who recorded what Salinas was before John Steinbeck described what Salinas is, compared the newly named Salinas City unfavorably with coastal Monterey, a Catholic enclave with European roots and old world ways. Stevenson, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian engineer, described Salinas City as an isolated Protestant village dredged from the Salinas River wetlands by sharp-elbowed Yankees, ex-Confederate Southerners, and ambitious immigrants who connived to make upstart Salinas—not established Monterey—the new county seat. Government and agriculture are still the main business of Salinas. Tourists still favor Monterey.

Highway 101: Escape Route from Salinas to High Culture

“People wanted wealth and got it and sat on it and it seemed to me that when they had it, and had bought the best automobile and had taken the hated but necessary trip to Europe, they were disappointed and sad that it was over. There was nothing left but to make more money. Theater came to Monterey and even opera. Writers and painters and poets rioted in Carmel, but no of these things came to Salinas. For pure culture we had Chautauqua in the summer—William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, The World of Art, with slides in a big tent with wooden benches. Everyone bought tickets for the whole course, but Billy Sunday in boxing gloves fighting the devil in the squared ring was easily the most popular.”
—John Steinbeck, “Always Something to Do in Salinas”

According to the Salinas historian Robert Johnson, Salinas had 3,300 residents when John Steinbeck was born in 1902 at his parents’ home on upscale Central Avenue. Despite its modest size, Johnson says that Salinas boasted six or seven churches when the town was officially incorporated in 1874. The most prestigious house of worship in Salinas was always St. Paul’s, the Episcopal church chosen by John Steinbeck’s ambitious mother Olive when the family moved to town in 1900 or 1901. But the high-grade culture John Steinbeck said Olive craved for her children was in San Francisco, a serious schlep by horse, train, or Model-T before Highway 101 finally reached Salinas. San Francisco, not Salinas, was The City for young John Steinbeck, as it continues to be for high-minded Californians like Olive today.

Not that the Salinas churches didn’t have culture of a sort in Steinbeck’s time. St. Paul’s in particular was a social center for the Salinas upper crust, with Sunday services featuring organ music, choirs, soloists, and a string orchestra for special occasions. Local land money built an opera house, and a grant from Andrew Carnegie helped pay for a public library. Parks, pleasure gardens, and cemeteries abounded in and around Salinas for citizens in good standing. But the fading names I deciphered on the crumbling headstones at the Garden of Memories are defintely “whites-only,” and the handful of Japanese and Filipinos who managed to buy land kept to themselves. John Steinbeck’s description of the evangelist Billy Sunday boxing with the devil at a Salinas Chautauqua event suggests that Protestant frontier spectacle, like Salinas society, was viewed through the rose-colored glasses of race-and-class certitude.

Artists and writers of the period colonized Carmel, not Salinas. They included literary socialists like Jack London and Lincoln Steffens and poets as divergent in style and stature as George Sterling and Robinson Jeffers. The Pacific Grove-Carmel-Monterey cultural axis, not Salinas, was John Steinbeck’s future, and he didn’t fight the call. Like St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in East of Eden, Salinas was a place sensitive souls like John Steinbeck and his character Aron Trask fled from, not to. Years later, when Steinbeck was too important to ignore, a faction in Salinas tried to name a road in his honor. Steinbeck insisted on a bowling alley instead. He won the battle but lost the war. The public library in Salinas is now the John Steinbeck Library. The massive museum on Main Street is the National Steinbeck Center. A dozen businesses with no connection to members of John Steinbeck’s family—all of whom departed Salinas by death or by choice—dot lower Main Street and the strip malls between downtown Salinas and Highway 101. The St. Paul’s parsonage described in East of Eden is now a law office. The church where Steinbeck played, prayed, and acted out in as a boy was torn down for a parking lot, usually empty.

Steinbeck-Denial and the Name-Game in Salinas Today

    “We had excitements in Salinas besides revivals and circuses, and now and then a murder. And we must have had despair, too, as when a lonely man who lived in a tiny house on Castroville Street put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toes. That morning Andy was the first in the schoolyard, but when he arrived he had the most exciting article any Salinas kid had ever possessed. He had it in one of those little striped bags candy came in. He put it on the teacher’s desk as a present. That’s how much he loved her.
    “I remember how she opened the bag and shook out on her desk a human ear, but I don’t remember what happened thereafter. I have a memory block perhaps produced by violence. The teacher seemed to have an aversion for Andy after that and it broke his heart. He had given her the only ear he or any other kid was ever likely to possess.”
                —John Steinbeck, “Always Something to Do in Salinas”

John Steinbeck’s ashes reside not far from the new St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, occupied the same year Steinbeck satirized Salinas for Holiday. The Garden of Memories cemetery was unlocked and unattended the Sunday I visited, and the John Steinbeck plaque was hard to miss. Visible by virtue of inappropriateness, a tacky sign extends a painted finger to the clutter of weeds, wilted flowers, and cracked pavement leading to the Hamilton family plot where John Steinbeck rests. Nearby, an incongruous military tank rests on its concrete laurels next to the Garden of Memories mausoleum, a paradox on a pedestal making a statement I don’t understand and doubt Steinbeck would approve if I did.

John Steinbeck hated war. Salinas appears to hold a more benign view. The historical society grounds in North Salinas feature a display of oddly obsolete and out-of-place military hardware, public anti-art unique in my California experience. The John Steinbeck museum on Main Street shares space with a pocket park honoring local veterans of the Bataan Death March. Is this another Salinas-persona paradox, or a problem best kept to myself? On the right, the Republican, Rotarian Salinians, destested by John Steinbeck, who stayed and prospered in war and peace. On the left, John Steinbeck: New Deal Democrat, Cold War critic, prophet without honor in Salinas until he died. What middle ground could ever marry such opposites? Perhaps that’s why Steinbeck abandoned his Salinas relationship: irreconcilable differences until death do us part.

The Salinians I asked about my problem avoided politics and talked about personalities. The identity of Salinas citizens Steinbeck is thought to have portrayed in his books is the preferred topic of conversation. Opinions are definite but don’t always agree. An ex-parishioner of St. Paul’s expressed her confidence that Steinbeck patterned his character Andy—the Salinas boy who taunts the Chinaman in Cannery Row—on her grandfather, a church and school contemporary of Steinbeck who stayed in Salinas and lived to a ripe old age. A local expert on Salinas history is equally certain this isn’t so. An informed source in Pacific Grove who interviewed the person in question maintains an open mind on the subject.

John Steinbeck’s Salinas: The Forgotten Violence of 1936

    “The General took a suite in the Geoffrey House, installed direct telephone lines to various stations, even had one group of telephones the were not connected to anything. He set armed guards over his suite and he put Salinas in a state of siege. He organized Vigilantes. Service-station operators, owners of small stores, clerks, bank tellers got out sporting rifles, shotguns, all the hundreds of weapons owned by small-town Americans who in the West at least, I guess, are the most heavily armed people in the world. I remember counting up and found that I had twelve firearms of various calibers and I was not one of the best equipped. In addition to the riflemen, squads drilled in the streets with baseball bats. Everyone was having a good time. Stores were closed and to move about town was to be challenged every block or so by viciously weaponed people one had gone to school with. . . .
    “Down at the lettuce sheds, the pickets began to get apprehensive. . . .
    “Then a particularly vigilant citizen made a frightening discovery and became a hero. He found that on one road leading into Salinas, red flags had been set up at intervals. It was no more than the General had anticipated. This was undoubtedly the route along which the Longshoremen were going to march. The General wired the governor to stand by to issue orders to the National Guard, but being a foxy politician himself, he had all of the red flags publicly burned on Main Street.”
                —John Steinbeck, “Always Something to Do in Salinas”

The epic suffering of the Joads in California enraged the state and alarmed the nation, as John Steinbeck intended when he wrote his masterpiece. But before sitting down to write The Grapes of Wrath in 1938, he composed an unpublished piece about Salinas he called L’Affaire Lettuceburg, a bitter indictment of the violence with which Salinas responded to the 1936 strike by produce packers from the Alisal, an area east of Highway 101 called Little Oklahoma. Warned by his wife Carol that he was writing too close to home and far beneath his capacity as an author, Steinbeck started over again, shifting his vision from Salinas to California’s Central Valley and completing The Grapes of Wrath 60 miles north of Salinas in Los Gatos. But he neither forgot nor forgave what happened in Salinas in 1936, returning to the episode in his piece for Holiday and holding it in his heart, according to his letters, with a indelible mortar of anger and pain. Yet no one living in Salinas today, or with parents living in Salinas at the time, was willing to talk with me about Salinas under martial law 80 years ago.

The burning of The Grapes of Wrath in Salinas in 1939 (and maybe in 1940 as well) is another story. Period photos and first-hand accounts are pretty convincing, and most Salinians I spoke with acknowledge their credibility. A recent book about the extreme reaction to The Grapes of Wrath throughout America both dates and locates the 1939 burning of the book in Salinas. I learned about the later burning from a taped interview with the late Dennis Murphy, the son of John Steinbeck’s church and school mate John Murphy and the author of The Sergeant, an under-appreciated novel that Dennis Murphy completed with John Steinbeck’s encouragement and scripted into a 1968 movie starring Rod Steiger. But this evidence failed to dissuade Salinas enthusiasts who are engaged in an effort disprove that The Grapes of Wrath was ever burned publicly in Salinas.

Highway 101: Today’s Salinas Exit, Yesterday’s Social Wall

    “All might have gone well if at about this time the Highway Commission had not complained that someone was stealing the survey markers for widening a highway, if a San Francisco newspaper had not investigated and found that the Longshoremen were working the docks as usual and if the Salinas housewives had not got on their high horse about not being able to buy groceries. The citizens reluctantly put away their guns, the owners granted a small pay raise and the General left town. I have always wondered what happened to him. He had qualities of genius. It was a long time before Salinians cared to discuss the episode. And now it is comfortably forgotten. Salinas is a very interesting town.”
               —John Steinbeck, “Always Something to Do in Salinas”

According to Robert Johnston’s history, following World War II Salinas city leaders tried to mend fences with the Okies east of Highway 101 in a top-down electoral campaign to incorporate the Alisal into Salinas. But the files of the period I found at St. Paul’s make me doubt the Salinas fathers’ motives as much as their methods. Richard Coombs, the young rector recruited from New York to build a new church for St. Paul’s, reminded his parishioners that they had sinned and fallen short by failing to extend the church’s ministry to the people of the Alisal when help was needed. By the time Coombs arrived in Salinas, the Episcopal bishop in San Francisco had mandated an Episcopal mission east of Highway 101 to fill the gap. Another mission was started in North Salinas, and a third was later established in Corral de Tierra, the setting of Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven. It’s called Good Shepherd; Steinbeck’s heavenly pasture is an upscale enclave of luxury homes, horse ranches, and golf-and-tennis clubs—precisely the future Steinbeck predicted for Corral de Tierra in 1932.

Incidentally, I was invited to speak recently to a Rotary meeting at a Corral de Tierra tennis club where a celebrity tournament was underway, a media circus that required the Rotary meeting to move to the club bar. I felt at home I suppose, but I could have been in Aspen or Boca Raton, other pastures where I’ve also enjoyed bar life among the affluent. This week I was back in Salinas to play for the Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s. Arriving later than expected because of heavy Highway 101 traffic, I looked for a quick place to eat before the choir rehearsed at 8 p.m. Pulling into a tony restaurant near St. Paul’s, a favorite of the Sunday church crowd, I watched the Open sign in the window fade to black as lubricated patrons pushed past my car on their way to the parking lot. A straggler, a Salinas matron with a voice like a chain saw, clipped my bumper with her handbag. “Jesus!” she screamed, pounding my trunk. “You’re moving too fast. Now I think I’ll just a move little slower so you’ll be even later to wherever the hell you think you’re going!”

Mouthing a Merry Christmas, I turned toward the fast food place advertising Open Till 8 across the street. Inside, the young lady who took my sandwich order smiled and apologized for having to close early for Christmas, explaining that this was her first fast-food job and she knew people would still be hungry. I tipped her $10 for my five-dollar meal, and this time I meant it when I wished her Merry Christmas. I felt better about Salinas because of her, and I hope she finds something to do in Salinas and stays in John Steinbeck’s home town. But I have my doubts. And I’ve made my last late-night drive to foggy Salinas. Playing the organ at St. Paul’s has been wonderful and I’ll miss everyone. But I’ve gotten the best gift an outsider like me can expect from Salinas: John Steinbeck. No doubt at all about that. And John Steinbeck travels well.

“Sang’s Cafe” in Salinas, photograph by Jessie Chernetsky courtesy of the artist.

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

John Steinbeck-Robert Frost Biographer Jay Parini Writes New Life of Jesus Christ

December 7, 2013 by William Ray 5 Comments

What does Jesus Christ—or John Steinbeck or Robert Frost—really mean to me? John Steinbeck: A Biography by the writer Jay Parini helped me understand why Steinbeck’s life and work spoke to me so powerfully when I first began reading Steinbeck’s books. Robert Frost is another favorite, and Parini—a professor of creative writing at Middlebury College—brought his fellow New England poet’s interior landscape into focus for me with Robert Frost: A Life, his second work of biography. A celebrated Middlebury College faculty member for more than 30 years, Parini has employed his enviable skills as a poet, novelist, and scholar to re-imagine the life of Jesus Christ—the greatest story of them all—in Jesus: The Human Face of God.

The new book represents a progression, not a departure, for Parini. John Steinbeck was a lifelong Episcopalian who considered Jesus Christ a moral genius, read and raided the Bible for his fiction, and once thought about writing the screenplay for a Jesus Christ biopic based on the gospels that was never made. Like Robert Frost, Steinbeck valued personal privacy and resisted dogmatic assertions of belief, so we’ll never know how his Christ would have fared on film. For that matter, what do we really know about the details of Jesus’ life from historic records? American writers before and since Steinbeck—including the late Duke University novelist and poet Reynolds Price—have rescripted the Man from Galilee with intriguing angles and uneven results. Now an inspired and imaginative writer from Middlebury College—one of America’s oldest and finest schools—has succeeded where others failed.

Jay Parini: The Man from Middlebury College

Like young John Steinbeck growing up in what became Steinbeck Country, Jay Parini is active in his Episcopal church, located not far from Middlebury College in Robert Frost Country, the home turf of Steinbeck’s New England grandparents. Unlike Steinbeck, Parini is fluent in New Testament Greek; like the author, he knows his Bible and his theology and has explored other traditions—Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism—in depth. But I suspect that none of that is unusual around Middlebury College, long a center of language and cultural studies without equal for its size. Resurrecting Jesus Christ from the tomb of time as Parini has done requires a tool more powerful than scholarship, even the industrial-strength form found in the halls of Middlebury College. Re-mythologizing (Parini’s term) requires an eye for the unseen, an ear for the unknowable, and a writer’s way with words. After three decades of practice writing for mainstream readers, Parini possesses these gifts in abundance. His first collection of poems appeared in 1982. His most recent novel was published in 2010. Four years ago his third novel—The Last Station—became an Academy Award-nominated movie.

Resurrecting Jesus Christ from the tomb of time as Parini has done requires a tool more powerful than scholarship . . . .

Parini’s first venture beyond poetry was his life of John Steinbeck, released in 1994 by Steinbeck’s English publisher (cover image below) and published in the USA in 1995. It was followed by two more literary lives, those of Robert Frost (2000) and William Faulkner (2004), making Jesus Christ Parini’s fourth act biography, a challenging art-form that doesn’t always produce miracles. Among the academically inclined, Parini’s The Art of Teaching (2005) and Why Poetry Matters (2008), plus a host of anthologies, have attracted acclaim. Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America (2008) remains a vade mecum for those exploring the topography of American fiction for the first time. Film adaptations of a pair of Parini novels—Benjamin’s Crossing (1997) and The Passages of H.M. (2010)—are underway. Galliano’s Ghost, another novel, is in progress. So is Conversations with Jay Parini, a University of Mississippi Press publication edited by Michael Lackey. In case you’re counting, that puts him just about where John Steinbeck was at a comparable point in his dizzingly diverse career as a writer.

John Steinbeck: A Life

Like Steinbeck, Parini has his critics. I learned this when I answered a Steinbeck scholar’s recent query. What’s your favorite Steinbeck biography? I replied that I still loved the first one I ever read—John Steinbeck: A Biography. If looks could kill, Parini’s book and I both died that day. Had I spoken heresy? If so, I guess I understand. I too have found reason to quibble with minor points in Parini’s life, published years after another biographer’s much longer book, in my recent research into Steinbeck’s religious roots. But—pardon me—Jesus Christ! Do you want good footnotes or great style? Better than any other biographer I know of John Steinbeck or Robert Frost, Parini sees his subject steadily and sees him whole, telling a creative writer’s story as only a creative writer can. If you’re curious about the time the particular author you’re studying went to the bathroom in his publisher’s office on a given day, be my guest—find the longest biography you can. If you want to know how he recalibrated a certain character, re-imagined a significant scene, or overcame writer’s block to meet a deadline, ask another writer. For John Steinbeck and Robert Frost, Jay Parini more than meets this taste test.

Do you want good footnotes or great style?. . . For John Steinbeck and Robert Frost, Jay Parini more than meets this taste test.

Like Steinbeck’s fiction, Parini’s biography of John Steinbeck continues to be popular with readers who are not writing dissertations. I recommend it to anyone interested in learning how Steinbeck developed his craft and overcame his problems. I reread it so often it because it flows so well—unimpeded by anxious over-annotation, syntactical complexity, or current critical cant. Parini’s life of Robert Frost—a natural next subject for a Middlebury College poet-biographer—has the same value for non-natives entering Robert Frost Country for the first time. I’m a Southerner, but I’ll confess that I haven’t read Parini’s biography of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck’s fellow-Nobel Laureate and sometime competitor. My excuse? In graduate school ions ago I studied Faulkner under a meticulous biographer who read from his notes for the prodigious life of Faulkner he was writing. Information without imagination. Not Jay Parini’s problem.

Thinking about Jesus Christ with John Steinbeck in Mind

We can’t know with confidence how Steinbeck’s film Christ would have acted or even looked. But the Jesus brought to fresh life in Parini’s new biography seems just like one of us, only more so. I kept thinking of Steinbeck as I read the book. Though Steinbeck claimed to have no religion (not that odd for an Episcopalian), he disliked reading scripture in any version other than King James, which he knew like, well, the bible. In his new narrative Parini sticks to King James for big stuff like the Beatitudes. But for most of the passages he quotes from or about Christ he provides his own translation—immediate, clear, compelling—in fulfillment of his promise to lift Jesus from the pile of dogma, myth, and demythologizing that have smothered the Christ story. Along the way he quotes other poets, cites other scholars, and acknowledges other teachers at Middlebury College, all without losing momentum or focus for a second. His Jesus Christ is a living teacher speaking in an existential now with something to say to all people. As a believer Parini is passionate about his subject. As a teacher he is careful about his approach. The result? Jesus: The Human Face of God is like a well-taught introductory course in a class of non-majors. No declared religion is required to participate, and doubt is more than welcome. In fact it’s advised.

His Jesus Christ is a living teacher speaking in an existential now with something to say to all people.

The unsmiling Jesus Christ depicted in classic Orthodox iconography (as in the cover image below) seems distant, two-dimensional, hard to embrace, at least for me. Parini’s Jesus, like John Steinbeck’s Ma Joad, is bigger than life but also fully formed, and in the end all-forgiving. The confusing nomenclature of the Bible presents another obstacle to understanding for many. Since I was a kid memorizing the books of the Bible for Sunday school to the time I took the required Old and New Testament courses (both excellent) in college, I’ve felt foggy about biblical names of greater complexity than Paul or Peter and theological ideas more complicated than I Am That I Am. Parini cleared some air in my head.

Parini’s Jesus, like John Steinbeck’s Ma Joad, is also bigger than life but fully formed, and in the end all-forgiving.

For example, I could never keep my Sadducees and my Pharisees straight. No longer! Parini traces the origin of the Sadducees to Saduc, “a legendary high priest from the time of King David,” and describes the group as an easygoing, cultured elite who looked down on their neighbors the Pharisees, seriously doubted the doctrine of bodily resurrection, and deeply enjoyed hobnobbing with foreigners: Episcopalians! The Pharisees? Puritanical, parochial, sure of their salvation—Presbyterians! That confusing half-human, half-divine thing about the true nature of Jesus Christ? Aha! It started with the Romans, maybe earlier. Virgin Birth? Greek and Persian, not Hebrew. Satan? Definitely Hebrew—ha-Satan. Marriage? Jesus Christ was single, but he loved women, knew how to kiss, and produced wine at a wedding over the objections of his mother, a miracle that would have moved a drinker like Steinbeck deeply.

Jesus Christ was single, but he loved women, knew how to kiss, and produced wine at a wedding over the objections of his mother, a miracle that would have moved a drinker like Steinbeck deeply.

In fact, Parini’s Jesus Christ embodies John Steinbeck’s most enviable qualities as a writer and his most admirable aspirations as a man. Listen:

You talked to women without troubling over gender rules. You confronted people about their past lives, their current situation. You didn’t worry about their racial or political origins but sought to bring them into a state of reconciliation with God, a condition of atonement that would fill them with “living water” that reached beyond physical thirst.

Parini’s Jesus Christ loves water, enjoys boats, and is at ultimate ease around fisherman, three constants in John Steinbeck’s sea-sotted life. Jesus is even friendly to tax-collectors (Steinbeck’s father was the county treasurer) and—like Steinbeck—he hated poverty, despised cruelty, and always stuck up for the underdog without starting a war. As Steinbeck, so Jesus: sin is Karma, and it starts inside: “Forgiveness leads to godly behavior”— “anger leads to murderous behavior.” Like Cain and Abel in East of Eden, Parini’s Jesus “takes his listeners back to the origins of murder, anger itself.” Like John Steinbeck in his time, Parini’s Jesus considers affluence a cause of poverty, advising “insane generosity, especially if you love it.” More: “annoy, even outrage, the elite classes. . . .” That’s the mantra Middlebury College had back in my day. I hope it is now. It was certainly Steinbeck’s, starting at Stanford.

Both Jesus and John Made Their Own Myth

Like John Steinbeck, Parini’s Jesus Christ is the maker of his own myth—a slippery term of art in literature that Parini nails down as story. It’s the same meaning Steinbeck had in mind when he resisted the idea of his life story being written while he was still alive, preferring instead to create his own life myth—and not just in novels. So, in his way, with Parini’s Jesus Christ: “One gets the sense that Jesus, knowing the plot of his own story, had arranged everything in advance.” Steinbeck was also skeptical of sudden revolution and instant redemption—much like Parini’s Jesus. Steinbeck on history: Man’s war is with himself. Progress is certain but slow. Peace starts with you. Parini on Christ:

Recognition takes time, becoming in fact a process of uncovering, what I often refer to in this book as the gradually realizing kingdom: an awareness that grows deeper and more complex, more thrilling, as it evolves.

Parini’s life of Jesus Christ, like the fiction of John Steinbeck, engaged me as a participant, not on the sidelines. Occasionally I got so involved I even wanted to add things, as Steinbeck urges us to do when we participate in his stories and continue them in our lives, where they have their true ending. One example must suffice. Late in the his Jesus story Parini pauses to reflect on the unrecognized irony—“lost on our ears now”—implicit in the name of the rebel Bar-abbas, “son of the father,” freed by Pilate in place of Jesus. How I hoped Parini w0uld stop to savor another, deeper irony, spoken by Christ himself to the Sanhedrin shortly before he’s delivered to the Romans: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Hear what Jesus is saying? Your assumptions are all wrong. Nothing is Caesar’s. Everything belongs to God.

This life reminds this reader why Jesus Christ, like John Steinbeck and Robert Frost, has found an ideal biographer in the churchgoing poet-novelist from progressive Middlebury College. Like Jay Parini, John Steinbeck was a socially-conscious Episcopalian storyteller writing for the multitude. Like Robert Frost, Middlebury College sprang from the soil and salt of Steinbeck’s paternal New England, where Parini makes his home. And Jesus Christ loved us all. This book tells me that Jay does too.

Filed Under: Belief, Featured, Politics & Religion Tagged With: Book Reviews