Recommended Books on Steinbeck & Other Famous People

Hollister, California, the San Benito County Town Where The Other Steinbecks Lived

February 18, 2015 by Administrative Team 3 Comments

In East of Eden John Steinbeck wrote imaginatively about the Salinas Valley Hamiltons—grandparents, aunts, and uncles on his mother’s Scots-Irish side. But his father Ernst Steinbeck’s people, solid Central California farmer-entrepreneurs living east of Salinas, were also important in the writer’s early life. Folks in Hollister, California, the San Benito County village where the family migrated from New England in the 1870s, like to remind visitors that Steinbeck Country starts in their city, a peaceful farming community set among the rolling hills near historic Mission San Juan Bautista. When John Steinbeck was growing up in Salinas, Hollister was a day’s ride over the steep San Juan Grade, so the Hollister Steinbecks weren’t around as much as the familiar Hamilton clan. But the dramatic story of how they came to Central California is, if anything, even more memorable than that of the Hamiltons, and Steinbeck wrote about it in the 1960s.

Present-day Hollister—the San Benito County, California seat—is a 10-minute drive east off Highway 101 north of Salinas, a must-make side trip whether your primary destination is San Juan Bautista, Monterey, or Salinas, 20 miles to the south on 101. In a curious episode of Steinbeck Country history, the creation of San Benito County was the result of Salinas ambition, and a certain Hollister-Salinas-Monterey rivalry can still be felt when the subject comes up in conversation. The Central California coastal mission settlement of Monterey—California’s first capital—was the original seat of Monterey County, which extended east to include San Benito County when California became a state in 1850. But Salinas Valley farming grew fast following the Civil War and civic boosters in Salinas got ambitious, winning a referendum in 1874 that moved the Monterey County seat to their town. Votes from Hollister and San Juan Bautista—so goes the story—were influenced by the promise to carve out a new San Benito County with a Hollister, California seat.

John Adolph and Almira Ann Steinbeck, young John’s Hollister grandparents, grew apricots and operated a dairy, eventually moving into town once their five sons (John Steinbeck’s father Ernst among them) had families of their own. But their roots were in Puritan New England, where Almira’s pious father was known as Deacon Dickson, and Protestant Prussia, where John Adolph and his brother were wood-craftsmen before packing up for Palestine in 1850 with a sister and her husband, a Lutheran missionary. There they met the daughters of Deacon Dickson, a Massachusetts farmer on a mission to the Holy Land, marrying two of the girls in Jerusalem in 1856. Murder, rape, and escape ensued, and the third Dickson sister eventually settled in Hollister, California, too, along with Adolph, Almira, and their five sons. The future novelist was familiar with the family’s story of violence and flight from Palestine to America, and he admired his father’s hardworking people, from whom he inherited hands that liked to garden, fabricate, and repair things. His writing in the 1960s expresses the abiding connection he felt with the prolific San Benito County branch of the Steinbeck family tree.

Call the San Benito County Historical Society Museum before your next trip to Central California and see for yourself. The not-for-profit facility is open by appointment only, but the hospitable volunteers who make it run are proud of their heritage and know a lot that isn’t in books about John Steinbeck. Hollister, California is right: “Steinbeck Country starts here!”

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

Time for Change! Russell Brand and Naomi Klein Channel John Steinbeck

January 21, 2015 by William Ray 15 Comments

Though he’d probably be puzzled by the media contemporary counter-cultural critics like Russell Brand and Naomi Klein employ to communicate the human cost of mounting income inequality, predatory capitalism, and pending climate crisis—YouTube, podcasts, personal websites—John Steinbeck would likely agree with their call for a revolution in how we think and organize ourselves as a survival-species. I encourage you to read Russell’s Brand’s Revolution and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, both published in 2014, if like me, The Grapes of Wrath captivated your imagination and outraged your sense of justice.

Though he’d probably be puzzled by the media employed, John Steinbeck would likely agree with the call for a revolution in how we think and organize ourselves as a survival-species.

Not long after meeting Joseph Campbell—quoted by Brand and Klein in their writing about human belief and behavior—Steinbeck encountered first hand the evidence of destructive income inequality and environmental degradation in the Midwestern Dust Bowl and California labor camps of the Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath was the result of John Steinbeck’s personal epiphany. Both the struggle and the enlightenment he dramatized continue in our time. Russell Brand and Naomi Klein project Steinbeck’s local vision on a global screen, exposing the noxious roots of global income inequality, climate change, and predatory capitalism—problems that are worse today than when John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

‘The Grapes of Wrath’ was the result of John Steinbeck’s personal epiphany. Both the struggle and the enlightenment he dramatized continue in our time.

As I read Russell Brand and Naomi Klein, it occurred to me that they were really channeling John Steinbeck, even when quoting Joseph Campbell or James Lovelock, the British biologist whose 1960s Gaia theory (Earth as a single organism comprised of interconnected systems) reflects advanced thinking about ecology expressed by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts in Sea of Cortez. For that matter, Tortilla Flat presages the small-group collectivism espoused by Russell Brand in Revolution, and Travels with Charley suggests the same connections between consumerism, conflict, and unhappiness drawn by Brand and Naomi Klein in their books. Events have caught up with John Steinbeck’s prophecy; as I write, his beloved city of Paris remains on security alert following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and Agence France-Presse reports that the richest one percent of the world’s population will own half of the world’s wealth by next year. Like John Steinbeck, Russell Brand and Naomi Klein wish to advise us of disaster ahead.

Like John Steinbeck, Russell Brand and Naomi Klein wish to advise us of disaster ahead.

Russell Brand’s Revolution—Change You Can’t Believe In?

Mention Russell Brand to anyone under 40—the age the hyperkinetic actor, radio host, and comedian will reach in June—and you’ll likely learn about Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, youth-market movies in which Brand played offbeat characters. I’ll show my own age and admit I didn’t know who Russell Brand was until he was called out by Bill Maher (on Real Time with Bill Maher, soon after the 2014 election) for asserting in Revolution that voting is pointless because all political parties have the same agenda: getting and keeping power and protecting moneyed interests. But watching Maher, I recognized Brand’s face from St. Trinian’s, an offbeat British comedy about an anarchic private girl’s school that I enjoyed. In the movie, Brand plays a hyperbolic drug dealer, Colin Firth is a clueless Tory Minister of Education, and Rupert Everett portrays a playboy dad and—in dreadful drag—the school’s pot-smoking headmistress, who is Firth’s love interest as well. Naturally, I bought Brand’s book.

Mention Russell Brand to anyone under 40 and you’ll likely learn about ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ and ‘Get Him to the Greek,’ youth-market movies in which Brand plays offbeat characters.

When I learned more about Russell Brand, his role in St. Trinian’s made sense. Turns out he’s an up-from-poverty populist with an ability to talk fast, a history of alcohol and drug abuse, and a slight criminal record—sort of an updated character from Tortilla Flat, but with an East London accent. As a thinker Brand firmly believes in benevolent anarchy, the form of social reorganization he recommends in Revolution. As a speaker and writer he manages, like John Steinbeck, to mix high-level messaging with low-level language, similar to the chatty social outcasts who populate Cannery Row. Also like Steinbeck, Brand attributes greed and consumerism to spiritual causes embedded in the human condition. This is where John Steinbeck’s friend Joseph Campbell, the anthropologist of myth-making, comes in handy for Brand, a recovering alcoholic whose 12-step program for curing income inequality (Chapter One: “Heroes’ Journey”) rests on spiritual insights found in the world’s great religions and literature. William Blake, whose visionary poetry particularly appealed to John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, is mentioned frequently in the same vein.

As a thinker Brand firmly believes in benevolent anarchy, the form of social reorganization he recommends in ‘Revolution.’

I marked my copy of Revolution as I read along because so much that Russell Brand says is, like his movie roles, so entertaining. And while he’s perfectly aware of the paradox that he’s trashing capitalism in a product published by an affiliate of the media conglomerate Bertelsmann, it wouldn’t be fair to discourage other buyers by over-quoting from the book. (Also, as Brand might observe, there’s them corporate lawyers, so look out.) Brand’s serio-comic perceptions are memorable because they mix things up, Tortilla Flat-like. Here are a few examples, chosen because they connected with John Steinbeck, Joseph Campbell, Blake, or my funny bone:

“We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected.”

“Campbell said, ‘All religions are true in that the metaphor is true.’ I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable.”

“At some point in the past, the mind has taken on the duty of trying to solve every single problem you are having, have had, or might have in the future, which makes it a frenetic and restless device.”

“The alarm bells of fear and desire are everywhere; these powerful primal tools, designed to aid survival in a world unrecognizable to modern civilized humans, are relentlessly jangled.”

“At some Anglican sermon in Surrey, the ‘file-down-the-aisle, handshake-and-smile’ ending is the energetic climax of proceedings. After a polite rendition of ‘Jerusalem’ (in which Blake was apparently being sarcastic) or ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ (which Stewart Lee breaks down beautifully), there isn’t a moment of postcoital awkwardness where everyone thinks, ‘F*** me, we really let ourselves go here.’”

And that’s only from the first five chapters. There are 33 in all, and there are no asterisks in any of them, suggesting a P-13 rating if the book were a motion picture. In a hostile review, The Guardian newspaper dismissed Revolution as “The barmy credo of a Beverly Hills Buddhist.” Then again, the London paper’s online logo boasts that it’s a past “Winner of the Pulitzer prize,” information that Russell Brand would probably identify as a sign of deep-seated corporate insecurity, and that John Steinbeck, who won a Pulitzer for The Grapes of Wrath and disliked self-promotion, would also find deeply unimpressive. Newspapers were economic enterprises with political agendas in Steinbeck’s view, one based on bitter personal experience, and certain media moguls particularly bothered him. The Grapes of Wrath could be characterized as “the barmy complaining of a Los Gatos liberal” and was called worse in print; Steinbeck went out of his way to disparage (without identifying) the ruthlessly acquisitive California publisher William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of Steinbeck’s day. Brand, like Naomi Klein, calls out Murdoch by name for creating the global media machine that protects the interests of predatory capitalism and right-wing politics everywhere: a Citizen Kane on steroids.

The Guardian newspaper dismissed ‘Revolution’ as ‘The barmy credo of a Beverly Hills Buddhist.’ Then again, the London paper’s online logo boasts that it’s a past ‘Winner of the Pulitzer prize,’ information that Russell Brand would identify as a sign of deep-seated corporate insecurity, and that John Steinbeck, who won a Pulitzer for ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and disliked self-promotion, would also find deeply unimpressive.

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Third Hit in a Row

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate got better reviews. The medium is the message, and the book’s careful composition reflects the contrast between Naomi Klein’s polish and Russell’s brand of craziness. He’s hot, hyperactive, and can seem hostile, even with a bath towel draped around his naked neck on his daily YouTube news show, The Trews. Naomi Klein is cool, calm, collected—the daughter of American professionals who left for Canada during the Vietnam War. Brand grew up on the mean streets of East London with a struggling but doting mum and a step-dad. Naomi Klein’s mother is a documentary filmmaker and her father is a physician; both are social activists committed to global causes. In May, Klein will be 45, one month before Russell Brand turns 40. His previous books were wacky children’s stories; hers—No Logo (2000) and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)—are already considered classics of contemporary cultural criticism. She writes well and she writes often, for The Nation, Harper’s, and—yes—The Guardian; Russell Brand’s mode is oratory, on stage, on radio, and on YouTube. He’s poetry, she’s prose. Other than not bothering to finish college, neither one remotely resembles John Steinbeck in background or personality. But both share Steinbeck’s anger about income inequality, environmental degradation, and social injustice, writing from rage without being inhibited by academic or institutional affiliations.

‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’ got better reviews. The medium is the message, and the book’s careful composition reflects the contrast between Naomi Klein’s polish and Russell’s brand of craziness.

After viewing Russell Brand’s daily Trews segment this morning—a denunciation of military-industrial profiteering and health-service cost-cutting in Great Britain—I dialed back to his October 15, 2014 podcast with Naomi Klein about her then-new book. Her clear, controlled answers to his exuberant questions were just like her writing: comprehensive, linear, and built on solid research, including copious sources, vigorous narrative, and clusters of checkable statistics. The New York Times praised This Changes Everything as “a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable.” The same can be said of Klein’s earlier books. No Logo (“No Space, No Choice, No Jobs”) explores corporate branding from various vantage points—economic, psychological, sociological, political—and turns up a goldmine. The Shock Doctrine connects the dots between Cold War American interventionism, both covert and undeclared (as in Chile under Pinochet), George Bush’s Halliburton-helping invasion of Iraq, and post-Katrina profiteering by firms like Blackwater. Henry Kissinger, the architect of U.S. shock-doctrine foreign policy, and Milton Friedman, the father of free-market economic ideology, receive the close attention the human damage they caused deserves.

The New York Times praised ‘This Changes Everything’ as ‘a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable.’ The same can be said of Klein’s earlier books.

John Steinbeck’s public support for American intervention in Vietnam—pre-Friedman and pre-Kissinger—continues to trouble the author’s admirers. Based on private correspondence, however, there’s little doubt that Steinbeck had his doubts about the war’s wisdom or justification, or that he might eventually have come around to Naomi Klein’s parents’ point of view. He was no friend of torture, assassination, or reactionaries, either; we can be confident that Klein’s compelling critique of Margaret Thatcher’s England, George W. Bush’s America, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia would resonate with him if he were alive. As Russell Brand would say, laissez-faire only sounds like a laid-back street party; it’s actually quite dangerous. As political and economic doctrine, it encourages corporate cronyism, induced-disaster opportunism, and national-security statism on an Orwellian scale. Brand and Klein remind us that the unfortunate evidence can be found on the ledgers of both political parties in the U.S., on both sides of the aisle at Westminster, and in both major post-Communist nations, Russia and China.

Perhaps Russell Brand is right, then: why bother to vote if the outcome will always be the same? As Klein notes, even conservatives make concessions to personal freedom (gay marriage, for example) to keep the public’s nose out of Wall Street’s business, which is avoiding regulation, breaking rules, and increasing income inequality. I know, this part’s a bit confusing, because laissez-faire economics is called neo-liberalism in Europe, rendering the term useless in discussing the economic implications of American politics. (Milton Friedman, the right wing’s Karl Marx, was a neo-liberal. Go figure.) John Steinbeck supported liberal politicians all his adult life—Roosevelt, Stevenson, Kennedy—and he actively disliked neo-liberal conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, who would be considered too moderate by Tea Party members today. I’m pretty sure Steinbeck would argue with Russell Brand about not voting, but I’m equally certain he would agree with Naomi Klein’s analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine, where he wrote some of his most interesting travel commentary before the Six-Day War that changed the political landscape of the Middle East, it would appear permanently.

John Steinbeck supported liberal politicians all his adult life, and he actively disliked neo-liberal conservatives who would be considered too moderate by Tea Party members today.

In a sense, This Changes Everything is a continuation of the cultural narrative begun in The Shock Doctrine. Indeed, Naomi Klein’s books can be read (and I recommend this) as a single meta-story, not unlike the alternating narrative and intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. The social and environmental consequences of laissez-faire economics—perpetual armed conflict, growing income inequality, cataclysmic climate change—all flow from a singe source in both interpretations of current events: the enshrinement of personal greed as a political philosophy, employing all of the tools that government, media, and private wealth possess to reshape collective consciousness and reify the status quo. James Lovelock, the author of the earth-as-organism theory that I first heard about in college biology, was and is a sunny optimist, now approaching the age of 96. But as John Steinbeck knew, hope can be a commodity too.

James Lovelock, the author of the earth-as-organism theory, was and is a sunny optimist, now approaching the age of 96. But as John Steinbeck knew, hope can be a commodity too.

When John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Sea of Cortez, and later Cannery Row, war and drought and despair seemed liked passing phases, misfortunes to be confronted and endured and survived. Now, three-quarters of a century later, are we still that sanguine about the future? As Naomi Klein demonstrates in This Changes Everything, the global climate clock is ticking, and the accumulated power of the international petroleum industry prevents the reformation of human belief and behavior required to slow it down. I’m glad she picked Bill Gates and Virgin’s Richard Branson for special scorn in her book. As she shows, each is a wolf in liberal’s clothing when it comes to meaningful action in the current crisis: the billionaires won’t save us when the oceans rise, she proves that for sure. If not reform—as John Steinbeck warned us in The Grapes of Wrath, then what? Revolution?

Filed Under: Books, Current Affairs, Featured Tagged With: Ideas

Short Story by Roy Bentley: “The War of Northern Aggression”

January 16, 2015 by Roy Bentley 2 Comments

It had rained. The hillside was a black enormity both sides of the road as if the world had lost its color or dissolving objects had become apparitions and blurred into one another.

We had never been close, my brother and me, standing apart even in family photographs, but he rescued me from prison at the last possible moment by having me committed. What had I done? The misdemeanor offense of aiming and firing at a man. All right, I ran a man who shall remain nameless up a telephone pole with a .45 that I carried in my pocketbook—there were black bears in that part of the state and randy bootleggers loose in the night. I might have felt kindly toward TW, but I was thinking of Daddy and his locking me in a closet for three days.

It was one of those damp days in fall, everything a shade of gray. I was on leave from Eastern State Hospital, known as Kentucky Asylum for the Insane before 1913. My brother TW thought I should be at the funeral of our father, Quentin Wolff, who had burned to death in a field fire. TW had signed me out on furlough and was driving me to Neon from Lexington in a 1930 Model A Ford I recognized as one Daddy gave me to use for my eggs and butter route.

Shock treatments my brother signed off on at Eastern left me seething. And “seething” is putting it mildly. If I had tried to kill someone who got me in the family way and then wouldn’t leave his wife and children—if I had emptied an entire clip of store-bought ammunition at Nameless as he scurried up a phone pole, what might TW and the rest of eastern Kentucky imagine I would want to do next? TW seemed wary. He kept looking over in my direction. He acted like he had something he wanted to say. He looked changed from the last time I’d seen him: a fletching of gray at the temples, lace-like lines around the eyes. He always wore a kind of uniform: white shirt, suspenders, wingtip shoes, a suit jacket. His feelings for Daddy were what I’d call a grieving love. 1940 could have been a tough year for him already for all I knew.

My brother said, You look nice in that dress. Gray suits you.
I don’t want to talk, I said. I’m not mad. I just don’t want to talk.
TW looked over at me then back down the road. His expression hadn’t changed.
That’s all right, he said. Save me having to talk about the weather.

When I was growing up, my folks would talk about the hostilities that tore Kentucky apart in the Civil War. My granny taught me the phrase The War of Northern Aggression. I’ve heard the North wasn’t the aggressor and that the South was defending its right to own and trade slaves. This was like that, a white lie. TW saying I looked nice. What you hear in place of something it was understood you had spared the hearer. I’d been cooped up for three years in an institution whose saving grace was that it wasn’t Kentucky State Women’s Prison.

I wanted to believe the shock treatments were necessary. If I closed my eyes I could see attendants standing over me before the air turned gold then blue-black and I went unconscious and woke to see the matron in charge—Hazel Lynch—with her black hair pulled back tight. I’d see her giving orders with the carriage of one used to taking charge of others. I’d see an orderly wiping up something. Riding in a car that had been mine, I had to tamp down my rage. Nothing about what had happened was fair, but where in the black and white world was there a house where what happened was fair? I was helpless in the face of the consequences of my one very-visible act of aggression against the world of men. I was never demure, never girly, but I was learning what it takes not to call attention to oneself. I held my hands folded in my lap.

If you were to look at old photographs of my brother Thomas William Wolff at medical school in Lexington: Errol Flynn. All movie stars look crazy, but especially Flynn. Others whispered TW had the world by the tail, but I saw the fear. His pencil-thin moustache was part of a mask. I knew he was terrified he might crack up or become a man who buries money in a Maxwell House coffee can in the backyard then forgets where he buried it—like Daddy.

Before my commitment I prided myself on dressing in store-bought clothing and a few fine accessories that won me notice if not compliments. I had been the captain of my own ship—a canary-in-the-coal-mine Model A—and I had seen what dressing well could lead to. I had money and a smile on my face. I was someone others said hello to. I wasn’t someone about to crack up and need to be put away. That is, until ol’ Nameless Married Someone noticed me.

I delivered eggs and milk and butter then. His neighbor Joe Samuelson was on my route. The first time our eyes met—on the stoop at the Samuelson place—Nameless looked at me like he couldn’t face a day without me in it. I was important to someone. Which was what I’d heard I was on the earth for. I’d been married. I knew. That didn’t mean he didn’t take advantage of me. He did. Three times he caught me alone and tried to force me, three times I said no. The fourth time he cornered me. It was night. We were outside. Stars wheeled overhead, the spaces between stars a sullen web. What was happening—it was like the color was being drained from the world.

A few months after, Daddy locked me in a closet. He had gone into Neon and someone had asked him if I had taken up with a married man and “gotten in trouble.” It was the first Daddy had heard of me and Nameless. Maybe the first time he had thought of me as having sex and being someone men might want to have sex with. I’d been married, had two children, but this was something else. I was under his roof. He was responsible for me.

The closet might have been all right, bearable, but after I went to the toilet in the slop jar he had allowed me, I started vomiting. That made it, that confined space, take on a woozy stench.

I didn’t eat for three lost days. When he finally threw open the door, Daddy didn’t say anything. Didn’t apologize. I went and drew water. Boiled it. I bathed. Dressed in other clothes. I had found flour to make biscuits and was in the middle of rolling the biscuits when Daddy came in. I had looked down at dough I was rolling and so didn’t see him raise his hand.

He hit me with his fist. I know I lost consciousness because, when I woke, I was lying on a bed of feed sacks on the porch where I’d been dragged and left.

I made up my mind that someone was going to pay. If not Daddy, someone.

When I fired the pistol at Nameless, I was smelling that foul closet and seeing the last pieces of the light become an inverted delta and disappear in that space as the door closed.

TW didn’t smoke or chew, didn’t swear unless it was something he did out of everyone’s hearing, so he would have been designated a moderate man. A man who other men knew could be trusted with their secrets or their money. But I knew TW had a couple of women up in the hollows. You wouldn’t have known it to look at him, but he was something of a ladies man.

As he drove, and the black-tree-miles passed by on either side of the Model A, I thought of one mountain woman named Beth Stallard. Beth was a quilter renowned in the mountains for her skill. The rose pattern in the quilt on floor of the front seat was likely hers. The fact that it rested where it did wasn’t an indication of anything, but I thought it signaled some fondness. The quilt—like Beth—referenced the mysteries of a man who stood apart from others in and around this part of Letcher County. There was a flame juggler prancing on the roof of a house. A Stars & Bars and a crucified Jesus. I reached to the floor for the quilt.

You cold? TW asked.

He looked back at the road as I unfolded the keepsake quilt. It presented as a rising sun on a field of patchwork clouds. It had a star-strewn, black square in the foreground that reminded me of Hazel Lynch’s hair and of the trees at the side of the road. Black was, I thought, an odd color to plant front and center like that. Morbid, to some eyes. Tacked to the sky in another square was a rainbow above a Christ-on-the-cross. Ravens crossed the respective squares, streaming into the assumed air like black water. I smoothed the quilt across my lap then sat and rubbed the place between my thumb and forefinger on my left hand and rocked.

Sometimes I think too much, I said.
I don’t think enough, he said. I know.
I’m glad you’re here.

He started to say something else. Thought better of it. Sighed.We drove on. I counted the embroidered ravens on the quilt as I rubbed my hand.

It was the third year of my hospitalization. I had been married and divorced. My three children had been taken from me. I was a stranger to them now. If I wasn’t a conversational companion, I thought I’d earned some understanding. I knew my anger was a cloud between us.

And the way TW strained to see landmarks ahead, it had nothing to do with landmarks.

He opened the ashtray. Took out a pack of Camels. Tapped one into his mouth and lit it. In a moment he cranked his window down.

I can stop at a diner I know up ahead, he said. If you want.

I knew he wouldn’t offer me a cigarette since he likely recalled I didn’t smoke. Smoking was not among my vices, not yet, but I liked the smell. I liked that it reminded me that the air around some men is poisonous. There were few other cars traveling the road my brother and I had been on now for a little while. It might be nice to have a slice of pie. Apple. Maybe a dollop of vanilla ice cream. I told him to stop. Which seemed to please him. He flipped the lit cigarette out the window, blew the smoke out the opening, then cranked the window back up. I had the quilt across my lap, but I said what I said not caring whether I might be thought odd or crazy.

TW had my future in his hands. A furlough was what he called this leave from treatment.

He would decide how long I had on the outside of Eastern’s red colonial walls.

Leave the window down, I said. I might like some air.

After the diner, we drove. The air brightened. The trees changed colors. Black became forest green. Shadows flew. Maybe I did need a slice of Bluegrass State apple pie a la mode.

I didn’t remember the trip to Lexington taking this long, but I’d been in handcuffs and in a different car, a sedan, and a state of mind that doesn’t allow for close observation of distances and time. Ravens like those on the quilt had been in the impossibly blue sky as I stared out the window of a sheriff’s car. I remembered wings. Blue-black wings. Snow either side of the road. The smell of men in the front seat smoking cigarettes. That day, I remembered looking down at myself at some point during the ride and noticing that my skirt had ridden up and no one had smoothed it down. This was a different day. The birds in the air weren’t circling or sending messages to one another in some language known only to birds. This was the day that the crazy woman in the yellow Model A had lost her father. Today I could watch and listen to the birds without worry that they were betraying secrets. I could smooth down my own skirt. I could ask for, and be handed, a wedge of warm pie with a mini-mountain of vanilla ice cream on top.

* * *
I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep. TW was smoking a cigarette. Driving. He looked in my direction then back out the windshield and down the road.

You been asleep about an hour, he said.
How much farther?
Not far.

I fell back asleep and dreamed of Eastern State. Its orchards and ornamental trees. The trees became attendants grabbing hold of me to drag me to a room for another session with the electric-shock machine. This time, in the dream, someone was saying According to E.A. Bennett 90% of cases of severe depression which are resistant to all treatments will disappear after three or four weeks of ECT. The words of the sentence remained now after the therapy had wiped away my memories, though they came rushing back first as dreams then as nightmares.

When I awoke again, the car was stopped and TW absent from the driver’s seat.

Judging by a winged-horse swinging sign on a post outside, we were at a gas station. I heard a laugh then TW was by the driver’s-side door and then the door opened.

I had to stop, he said. I was running on fumes.

The quilt had slid onto the floor. I picked it up and spread across me once more.

TW said, You like that, don’t you.

There were other cars on the road. One driver honked. Waved at a car driven by someone with flame-red hair. A woman, judging by the lipstick-red smile. The woman waved back.

TW pulled out onto the road again.

We should be there in an hour or so, if I don’t get behind another coal truck.
On Sunday?
TW looked at me. This is Thursday, he said.

I felt myself looking at my brother. I saw him now as something other than the boy-man who came back from medical school with a lightness to his step and a smile and a good word for everyone. His face seemed sadder. The lines had deepened. At the temples his wire-rimmed spectacles had worn a thin line of green in the gray, close-cropped hair. A patina. He had taken off his glasses in the diner and I had noticed it then, but now I could plainly see green against the gray. Like one of the doctors at Eastern named Gragg who coughed between endless cigarettes.

TW began speaking. He said, We can drive straight to the funeral home. Or we can just go the house—the new brick house. You haven’t seen my house, have you? Let’s do that.

I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be made to see Daddy. Especially since he’d died by fire. I imagined his body—seeing it—might cause me to get upset. It didn’t occur to me to consider that the casket might be closed.

I said, I would like to see my boy.
Is that what you want? I’m happy to do that. Molly is waiting to feed us—she may have it ready and on the table. You like ham, right?

The child in question was my bastard by Nameless. I had named him Charlie: Charles Leroy Wolff. TW had been “seeing after him”—his phrase those times he’d visited me in the years I’d been away. I wanted to try and add up the number of visits, but I couldn’t. Often when he had come, I’d been in restraints for an outburst or rule infraction and was so mad I forgot who was and wasn’t in the room. If I had to guess, I’d say he came to Eastern State Hospital twice a year: Christmas and Easter. Always with something for me to sign. And always after the holiday.

On one such visit TW asked me to sign over—deed—to him my portion and share of the bottomland-homestead forefathers had claimed when they came into the Big Sandy River Valley area with Daniel Boone before 1800. My arms had to be released from a strait jacket then massaged for me to be able to write. My brother waved to the attendants to make that happen.

He said he would bank my share. I would have what I needed out of the interest.

He’d manage the principal. Invest it.

I wasn’t sure TW had heard me. I was used to what I said being ignored or dismissed as the ravings of a mad woman. I said it again.

You can do that. And you will. But you have to behave.

We were turning onto the two-lane that I recognized as leading into Neon. There was the Ford dealership, a drugstore-soda fountain, the Bank of Neon, and The Neon, the town’s one theater. The marquee at The Neon advertised The Wizard of Oz. I had heard attendants talking about it. Someone said it was in color—of all things! They said it was a children’s movie.

I said, I’d like to take Charlie to The Neon. See that new movie.

His eyes turned from the road. We’ll see, he said.

The car was warm. I kicked off the quilt then thought better of that and scooped it up and folded it. I tucked the quilt into the place where I’d found it. The flame juggler stared out from the fold. The act of caring for the quilt seemed to meet with some approval on my brother’s part. He pulled the car up a brick drive to a level spot. Parked. I’ll get your suitcase, he said.

Should I bring the quilt inside, I asked, knowing who had made it.
No was all he said.

The house smelled of bread and something else. Maybe—pecan pie.

TW’s wife Molly greeted me with a hug and kind words. After my time in Eastern, I recognized kindness. If it had a color, I thought of kindness as blue. It was a Kentucky sky. Not the pewter skies above the snaking two-lanes. Not the salt-colored smoke TW blew out the window of a yellow Ford. Not the sentinel gray-then-black-then-gray confederacy of trees on the grounds of Eastern lining both sides of a winding path referred to as the Main Building.

I was glad for her presence. TW kissed her and glided past and up a set of stairs.

Molly ushered me into the parlor. A picture of my parents stared down from a wall like the eyes of Janus. My mother’s dour face and pulled-back-into-a-bun black hair answered the mystery of why I had seen Hazel Lynch as a familiar evil. Mother’s pearls rested against a dress the front of which was a blaze of roses retouched in by some photographer-artist. Daddy’s look was one of brokenheartedness that no amount of retouching could lessen or translate or soften.

Not a hint of blue anywhere in the photograph. Background golds raged the way flames will, the way deciduous trees do in fall. The coloration of the faces served up a belligerence I felt hovered over me, awake or sleeping. A wild in the blood that sooner or later consumes us.

I slept in an upstairs bedroom and so had to be called down to breakfast by a loud rapping at the door of the room. It was TW. He was dressed and telling me what sort of Friday I could expect before my feet touched the floor. His day involved arrangements at the funeral home for the burial on Sunday. He said that today I’d be free to visit with Molly.

Calling hours are tonight and tomorrow night, he said and I nodded from the bed.
Molly has your breakfast downstairs, TW concluded and closed the door.

There was a pitcher and bowl on a washstand by the bed, but I knew it wouldn’t be necessary. TW’s house had indoor plumbing. The bathroom was just down the hall. I had discovered this the night before. It was furnished with a claw-foot tub and running water and a flush toilet. I ran a bath with hot water and slipped into it. In a little while, I pulled the plug and watched water spiral down the drain. Then I got out and dried off and wrapped a robe around me.

I went back to the bedroom and dressed in something from my gray suitcase.

My clothes were wrinkled but felt comforting. Familiar.

I made the bed and went downstairs.

Molly was busy in the kitchen. When she saw me, she stopped what she was doing and motioned for me to sit. The kitchenette was a four-person affair with brushed chrome and padded yellow chairs. It looked modern in a way that seemed appropriate for a house belonging to TW Wolff. In a short while we were together at the table, eating eggs and ham and biscuits.

Light from one of four long windows in the room fell on Molly’s hands. Those bright hands made me connect her movements to the idea that she might help me to see the boy.

I began by asking a question about what had happened to Daddy.

Molly said there had been nothing anyone could do. She began the story of the day they had heard the news: a telephone call from the Junction alerted them to the accident. They were calling the fire that, an accident, and it sounded right since the wind isn’t to be dictated to.

Some people have faces that stay with you, hall portrait or no hall portrait, and Molly’s face was one of those. Soft-featured, mature but not old, intelligent green eyes—like the doctor at Eastern who had leaned over me to describe the shock treatments and what I could expect.

The light wasn’t on Molly’s hands or face now. Not in the same way.

I asked my question: Do you think I could go to Merkie’s and see my boy?

I know what it’s like not to be listened to. This wasn’t that. She was listening.

When she spoke, I knew it wasn’t something she had thought would be asked of her.

Molly rose from the table. She began taking plates and glasses, forks and knives and spoons, to the sink by the long windows. I had no choice but to wait. Waiting was something I had learned to do at Eastern. I rubbed my hand and sat.

Why don’t you dry, Abby—I’ll wash. And we’ll talk about it.

I stopped rubbing my hand and got up from the table and began doing as she asked.

I had to guess where each item belonged in the cupboards, but Molly smiled and nodded, or pointed with a soapsuds-white hand, and we got through the task. Afterwards she made a phone call and talked to someone who seemed to make her repeat every other sentence.

I was standing in the hallway by the portrait of Mommy and Daddy and rubbing my hand, though I was standing. I felt my heart sink as she hung up the phone.

It was clear that she had been talking with TW.

I’m to drive you to see your boy Charlie. Your brother will call Merkie and arrange it. He said you’re not to upset him, Abby—your boy Charlie. He said you’d know what that means.

I thanked her. Not upsetting my son meant I’d continue to be Aunt Abigail.

Charlie had gotten so much bigger I almost didn’t recognize him. Merkie—America, my sister—brought him out onto the porch after she had laid down a warning I didn’t need to hear.

He favored our side of the family, the Wolffs, and was tall for four years old.

Merkie had dressed him in his Sunday clothes. He smelled freshly bathed. His brown hair was damp and I smelled soap as he settled himself into the glider between Molly and me.

Auntie, Mommy says I can’t feed the chickens. Can I feed the chicks, Aunt Abby?

Maybe the world is two things at once: a House of Pain and a House of Pleasure, but I figured it would be the odd woman who could hear a son call another woman Mommy and not feel like she’d been ushered into the House of Pain. I let that injured feeling slip from me.

I asked Charlie a question, ignoring the commandment against his feeding the chickens.

You’re dressed up—would you like to go see The Wizard of Oz with your Aunt Abby?

He perked up. Clearly, even at 4, he knew more about the movie than I did.

I had guessed right: Molly’s presence caused older-sister to check herself before she spoke. America looked to Molly. What do you say about that? she asked.

Molly looked at me. Then at Charlie on the glider. She smiled.

I’ll chaperone, she said.

I shouldn’t have been happy, but I was. Daddy was dead and soon to be buried in the Wolff cemetery overlooking the Pure Oil station and the A & P. I was headed back to that hellhole of a sanitarium in a matter of a few too-short days. But to stand in line with Charlie at the Neon and buy tickets—actually, Molly paid: I hadn’t been trusted with money—and then to go inside and buy popcorn and Dixie cups of Co-cola and sit with my son was answered prayer. A blessing. If I had believed in God, which I didn’t, how could I after Eastern, that God would have been a she and would have looked like Molly and spoken in a voice like my sister-in-law’s.

The movie started. Charlie’s eyes were frozen on the screen. I thought my son was awfully well behaved: not once did he ask for other treats or to go to the bathroom. He seemed terrified by the green-faced witch. He looked down and away then back up for reassurance.

Charlie moved his eyes, following the singing silver can that banged on its chest and intimated that all we need to survive is a heart and friends. A smidgen of kindness. Maybe the luck of the innocent. Certainly a lot more luck than Daddy had the day his ran out.

By the time Dorothy Gale got to see the Wizard the second time, with the charred broomstick of the Witch of the West as proof she had accomplished her mission, Charlie Wolff was hooked. A few more shock treatments and I might forget my whole life, but my hope was that he’d keep this somewhere. It might have been a lot to ask, but I didn’t think so just then.

Hear “The War of Northern Aggression.”

Filed Under: Anthology, Featured Tagged With: New Writers

Short Story Narrated: “The War Of Northern Aggression”

January 16, 2015 by Roy Bentley 1 Comment

Gloria Regalbuto Bentley narrates “The War of Northern Aggression,” a searing short story set in the Steinbeck-era South, where a female patient on funeral furlough from an Eastern Kentucky mental hospital encounters a brother with secrets, a town without pity, and an illegitimate son torn from her by a world of men-who-hurt-women. John Steinbeck found his female voice in the heroic women of The Grapes of Wrath, characters whose collective strength survives famine, flood, and separation. Roy Bentley’s unforgettable protagonist barely hangs on, exiled and powerless, in a house of pain without company, hope, or exit. Like Steinbeck’s novel, Bentley’s story starts with an act of self-defensive violence provoked by savage male aggressiveness. Unlike Tom Joad, who served his time and was welcomed home by family, this transgressor’s sentence becomes a permanent condition through a brother’s complicity—a tragic example of punishing the victim for which Steinbeck would have felt anguished empathy. So will Steinbeck readers like you. Click below to hear Gloria Regalbuto Bentley narrate a stunning new short story, “The War of Northern Aggression.”—Ed.

Read “The War of Northern Aggression.”

Filed Under: Anthology, Featured Tagged With: New Writers

J. Edgar Hoover and Me: Undercover for the Federal Bureau of Investigation During the Vietnam War

January 1, 2015 by Jody Gorran 2 Comments

As an ambitious George Washington University student during the Vietnam War, Jody Gorran came to share John Steinbeck’s dim view of J. Edgar Hoover. Becoming an undercover operative for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and posing as a member of Students for a Democratic Society led to a personal crisis of conscience, changing his mind about politics and altering his plans for a government career. An avid Steinbeck reader, he relates his education in the turbulent politics of the Vietnam War era, explaining how he became involved with the FBI and why he risked reprisal by extricating himself from the agency following an accidental George Washington University building takeover that caused injury and led to punishment. His account, published here in his own words with photos he supplied, provides fresh insights into a divisive period in the life of America, John Steinbeck, and a college freshman on the front line of domestic dissent. The parallels with Steinbeck’s life and times are striking, and the lessons Jody learned still apply.—Ed.

Readers familiar with John Steinbeck’s life already know that the federal government snooped on American citizens at home long before 9/11. The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Steinbeck as early as 1942, annoying the controversial author and motivating his letter to a highly placed contact in the Roosevelt administration complaining about J. Edgar Hoover. As dramatized in Steinbeck’s published fiction and noted in his private correspondence, city police departments around the country were also poking into people’s lives, even in his hometown of Salinas. Military intelligence agencies had long noses, too—one reason Steinbeck didn’t get the commission he hoped for when the U.S. entered World War II. America’s security-state apparatus expanded exponentially in the cold war that followed , a period of aggressive domestic surveillance justified in the name of anti-Communism. When John Steinbeck died, I was a college freshman. Four months after his death, I got caught in the same net that snagged him three decades earlier. This is the story of my education.

George Washington University: The Place To Be in 1968

As an 18-year-old student at George Washington University, I wound up playing an unplanned part in the national security excesses of the Vietnam War protest era. American campuses became covert battlefields where J. Edgar Hoover’s agency waged undercover war on dissidents, often in complicity with local police. Like Steinbeck, my parents had been young adults during the Great Depression and trusted government, encouraging me to focus on academics so I could get well-paying federal job with a pension. As I considered various colleges, I thought majoring in political science made sense for someone, like me, contemplating a foreign service career with the State Department. At the time, Washington, D.C., seemed like the best place to be for my particular goal. What happened after I enrolled at George Washington University changed my politics and my career plans.

What happened after I enrolled at George Washington University changed my politics and my career plans.

Before registering for the fall 1968 term, I spent the summer working as a Fuller Brush Man in my hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey. Unlike Steinbeck, I enjoyed door-to-door sales, which earned me money and got my entrepreneurial juices flowing. While reading a direct marketing sales magazine one day, I noticed an ad offering distributorships for a new product called the Paralyzer, a pocket-sized tear gas canister designed for personal protection. D.C.—a high-crime city where riots occurred—seemed like a natural market. In my ambitious 18-year-old mind, who better than me to supply the demand for security anyone could carry in a pocket or purse? I scrapped together the money I needed to secure start-up inventory and started my side business, unaware that I’d set off a chain reaction that would alter the course of my life at and after George Washington Unversity.

Coming-of-Age Politics in the Anti-Vietnam War Era

Despite my ambition, I arrived at George Washington University in the fall of 1968 apathetic about partisan politics, pretty typical for kids with my background. Though a certain percentage chose to attend colleges in the District of Columbia because they were engaged by current events, this was long before the internet, social media, and cable TV brought daily news into every den and dorm room. Even with the Vietnam War raging and John Steinbeck’s unpopular friend Lyndon Johnson on his way out as president, having a student deferment served to insulate most college students from what their government was doing in Southeast Asia—let alone on campus.

Even with the Vietnam War raging and John Steinbeck’s unpopular friend Lyndon Johnson on his way out as president, having a student deferment served to insulate most college students.

But I became curious about what was taking place in the nation’s capital on Election Day that November. The George Washington University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, also known as SDS, had tried to stage a march from the Lincoln Memorial to Lafayette Park across from the White House to protest the election, a close contest between Hubert Humphrey and a man Steinbeck hated—Richard Nixon. Anti-Vietnam War protests had disrupted Humphrey’s nominating convention in Chicago, where Mayor Daley’s police overreacted in force and may have cost his party the election. Tension was high when Election Day protestors at George Washington University were denied a permit to demonstrate by D.C. authorities. They marched anyway until they were forced back onto campus by the Metropolitan Police Department.

Tension was high when Election Day protestors at George Washington University were denied a permit to demonstrate by D.C. authorities.

I was standing on George Washington University’s urban campus, made up of intersecting city streets, when I noticed a crowd of demonstrators headed my way and crossed the street to get a better look—just as the police moved in. Suddenly, a cop ran by swinging a club, hitting me on the back and forcing me to the ground. One of many bystanders who were attacked without warning, I was less than happy about the behavior of the police. When I heard about an SDS meeting being called to discuss what occurred, I was curious to find out what had happened to others and decided to go. I knew next to nothing about Students for a Democratic Society, but I learned soon enough.

I knew next to nothing about Students for a Democratic Society, but I learned soon enough.

Students for a Democratic Society started at the University of Michigan in 1960 with a political manifesto known as the Port Huron Statement, formally adopted at the organization’s first convention in 1962. Drafted by Tom Hayden, a University of California anti-Vietnam War activist, it faulted the political system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and critiqued Cold War foreign policy, particularly America’s super-sized military arsenal and the very real threat of nuclear war. Vietnam War opposition aside, SDS was pretty close to John Steinbeck’s thinking on domestic issues, including racial discrimination, economic inequality, and the big corporations, big unions, and political parties that benefited most from the accelerating arms race.

Students for a Democratic Society started at the University of Michigan in 1960 with a political manifesto draft by Tom Hayden, a University of California anti-Vietnam War activist.

It has been suggested that Steinbeck sent his sons to fight in the Vietnam War out of loyalty to LBJ, whose First Lady was a childhood friend of Steinbeck’s wife. I don’t know enough to comment. But when Johnson escalated the conflict in February 1965 by bombing North Vietnam and sending American troops to fight the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, SDS chapters on American campuses staged small, localized demonstrations against the Vietnam War, coordinated through the group’s central office in New York, which led in organizing the national anti-Vietnam War march on Washington in April that year. By then there were 52 SDS chapters in the United States, and America’s mainstream media began to pay attention. The youthful New Left—misunderstood and distrusted by most adults of John Steinbeck’s generation—had arrived. The Vietnam War-era draft provided a particularly potent calling card for student recruitment, and college protests spread. Back in Washington the government’s most experienced Communist-hunter, J. Edgar Hoover, was watching. The Federal Bureau of Investigation may have lost interest in John Steinbeck by 1965, but a hot wind was rising on campuses from California to New York, and J. Edgar Hoover knew how to stop a storm.

The youthful New Left—misunderstood and distrusted by most adults of John Steinbeck’s generation—had arrived.

Protests became more and more militant throughout the winter and spring of 1967. Actions aimed at Army recruiters on college campuses accelerated, and demonstrations against Dow Chemical Company—the manufacturer of Napalm—added a combustible element to the anti-Vietnam War mix. New Left Notes, the newspaper of the movement, was creating a sense of coherence and solidarity among local SDS chapters; when Madison riot police injured and arrested students protesting the presence of Dow employee-recruiters at the University of Wisconsin in October, the growing national network was electrified. Four days later, 100,000 people marched on the Pentagon, with hundreds of protestors injured and arrested. Nighttime raids on local draft offices became more common, and a million students boycotted classes on April 26, 1968. The shutdown at Columbia University in New York—known, simply, as the Revolt—received major media attention, and SDS became a household word. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the stage was set for my personal political awakening.

My First Date with the Federal Bureau of Investigation

The day after the November 1968 election, someone I happened to remember seeing at the George Washington University SDS meeting must have recognized me as a guy who had pocket-sized tear gas canisters for sale, because a few weeks later he approached me with an offer. Would I be willing to sell him a large quantity of Paralyzers from my supply? As a budding businessman, I liked the idea because sales so far had been less than robust. Because I was now paying attention to political news, I also understood clearly from our conversation that the proposed purchase was directly related to the presidential inauguration—an event I suspect contributed to the death of John Steinbeck, a passionate anti-Nixonite, six weeks after Richard Nixon’s election. In what lawyers like to call an abundance of caution, I declined the deal, a rational decision that failed to save me from J. Edgar Hoover’s unwanted attention. Someone was already watching me.

I also understood clearly from our conversation that the proposed purchase was directly related to the presidential inauguration—an event I suspect contributed to the death of John Steinbeck, a passionate anti-Nixonite.

On the evening of January 8, 1969, there was a knock at my George Washington University dorm room door. The two men standing in the hallway identified themselves as Secret Service agents and said they’d gotten word that I was going to sell my tear gas canisters to demonstrators for non-peaceful use during Nixon’s swearing-in. When I explained that I turned down the guy from the SDS meeting who had approached me, they suggested that they hold on to my inventory for safe keeping until after the inauguration. Sensing that they didn’t trust me, I agreed—and I was worried. I came to George Washington University because I wanted a government career, and as they talked all I could think about was how I could prove my loyalty and keep the incident from ruining my future. John Steinbeck had goaded J. Edgar Hoover in a well-written letter. I was afraid of the man, so I just improvised. Was there any way I could prove my loyalty, I asked? Maybe, they said. The Secret Service didn’t need campus operatives . . . but the Federal Bureau of Investigation did.

How J. Edgar Hoover Kept Up with the Joneses at the CIA

So why would the Federal Bureau of Investigation consider someone like me useful? Readers of Brian Kannard’s book Steinbeck: Citizen Spy are aware of the government’s secret surveillance program called COINTELPRO, a clunky acronym for an elusive enterprise created in 1956 to ferret out suspected Communists, including Steinbeck’s friends and (from J. Edgar Hoover’s point of view, no doubt) Steinbeck himself. Though the acronym stands for “Counterintelligence Program,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targets were not enemy spies but American citizens considered radical and worth eliminating through exposure, harassment, and prosecution for real or imagined political crimes—an FBI version of the kind of covert action for which the CIA, its rival agency, was criticized by writers like Gore Vidal.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targets were not enemy spies but American citizens considered radical and worth eliminating through exposure, harassment, and prosecution.

Under the new program, Hoover’s headquarters instructed its field offices to propose schemes to “misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” individuals and groups considered dangerous to the status quo. Close coordination with local police and prosecutors was encouraged, but ultimate authority rested with top FBI officials in Washington, who demanded assurance that “there is no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau.” More than 2,000 individual actions were officially approved. The methods used, uncovered long after the fact, confirm John Steinbeck’s suspicions about J. Edgar Hoover’s dark side:

Agents and undercover informers were to discredit and disrupt, not simply spy on subjects of interest.
Agents and police collaborators were to wage psychological war on approved targets through bogus publications, forged correspondence, and anonymous letters and calls.
Harassment, intimidation and violence, eviction, job-loss, black bag operations and break-ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame-ups, and physical violence were to be threatened, instigated, or executed to intimidate activists, mislead the public, and disrupt protest plans. When challenged, officials were to deny, conceal, or fabricate legal pretexts for their actions.

J. Edgar Hoover Needs You: You’re in the Agency Now!

Of course I knew none of this at the time. As I pondered my approach to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the day after my visit from the Secret Service, I saw a notice about that evening’s SDS meeting at George Washington University. I attended out of curiosity, my first regular SDS meeting. The guest speaker was a Mr. Al McSurly, who made statements advocating the overthrow of the government of the United States, though not violently. His comments didn’t sit well with me, and I thought that telling the FBI about the meeting and the speaker could serve as my ticket to J. Edgar Hoover’s forgiveness. The following day I walked down to the FBI’s Washington Field Office, known as the WFO—then located in the Old Post Office Building. There I was escorted to a small office where I spoke with an agent and signed on. From that point forward events moved quickly.

I thought that telling the FBI about the meeting and the speaker could serve as my ticket to J. Edgar Hoover’s forgiveness.

I was asked to join the George Washington University SDS chapter, as well as the national group, and to provide written reports on the activities of the organization and its members. I would be paid $15 for each report, plus expenses. While I could generally choose the subjects of my reports based on discussions with my FBI handler, from time to time I would receive instructions about specific subjects or events that J. Edgar Hoover’s people wanted me to research or attend and report. I was provided with a direct telephone number where I could leave messages for my handler, along with a code number for reporting. I was told that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would perform a field background check on me—just as they had on John Steinbeck, without warning, three decades earlier.

I was told that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would perform a field background check on me—just as they had on John Steinbeck, without warning, three decades earlier.

My first assignment was to attend a regional SDS conference being held across town at American University. There I learned that the national organization had decided in December to stay out of inauguration demonstration events in January. Instead, a group called Mobilization Against the War in Viet Nam would handle these activities. I also met the Washington Regional SDS coordinator, a 24-year old named Cathy Wilkerson who I later learned was a major focus of agency attention. To me Cathy seemed an unlikely agitator, the child of parents in Connecticut and a graduate of Swarthmore College. I was even younger than she was, but I was learning fast—though not, I soon discovered, fast enough to avoid the crisis of conscience that would derail my relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

To me Cathy seemed an unlikely agitator, the child of parents in Connecticut and a graduate of Swarthmore College.

The first 60 days of my undercover activities were cataloged by the FBI in documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Request I filed years later. Here is what my handler wrote about my work:

Gorran has voluntarily expended an estimated 69 hours in attending SDS meetings and the National Mobilization Committee counter inaugural activity. He has furnished 29 pertinent photographs, and his written reports have totaled approximately 44 pages.

Gorran has been volunteering information on members and activities of the GW SDS as well as the activities of members of the Washington Regional SDS. He has attended one SDS Regional Meeting in Wash DC and a two-day Eastern Regional meeting held at Princeton, NJ. Gorran has also furnished timely information and photos concerning the recent student agitation at American University.

On 2/15/69, Gorran, at risk to his personal safety, voluntarily furnished a vast amount of invaluable information, not otherwise obtainable, in connection with the Center for Emergency Support sponsored St Valentine’s Day Teach-In on the Police. This information included over 200 names of individuals of interest to the Bureau, with current addresses and organizational affiliations. Many of these names and organizational affiliations were not previously known to the WFO. Also included in this information was data concerning 28 financial disbursements made by the organization, the current financial status of the organization and miscellaneous notes, memos and material relating to this organization.

What my handler failed to mention was that this information was obtained through an illegal black bag operation—in this case, a literal black bag. Though compliance was voluntary on my part, I had been tasked to snatch a briefcase containing the information from its location at the rear of the crowded room in which the meeting was being held. It was simple. I got up, walked purposefully to the back of the room, carefully picked up the briefcase, exited the building, and headed for my George Washington University dorm two blocks away. My heart was in my throat the whole way, but apparently no one saw me; the next day I took a cab downtown to the Greyhound Bus Station as instructed, placed the purloined briefcase in a locker, then delivered the key to my handler. I was given a $100 bonus for my boldness.

As my file shows, J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were pleased with me—for the moment:

Also according to the FBI, the information reported by Gorran has been current, detailed and accurate. His reports are considered very good to excellent. Of unusual value was Gorran’s detailed 12 page report and copies of proposals and materials concerning the SDS Eastern Regional Meeting at Princeton, NJ. The information furnished to date by Gorran has been corroborated by other sources and is considered to be 95 to 100 percent accurate.

In my interaction with my handler, I noticed that the more information I could provide regarding Cathy Wilkerson, the happier he seemed to be. But the bulk of my reporting concerned proposals that filtered down from the SDS national office through the Washington regional group. The implications of the protest plan called “Smash the Military in the Schools” would have appalled an egalitarian like Steinbeck. It exposed the problems encountered by campus military recruiters and the tracking systems supposedly used to ensure that African-American and Puerto-Rican students were shoved into the armed forces or toward menial civilian jobs when they finished high school.

Visit Cuba, Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

As part of my undercover job for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I helped develop and distribute flyers in an effort to stop recruiting by Sikorsky and other military-equipment suppliers for the Vietnam War, and I warned fellow students, as instructed, about CIA recruitment activity at George Washington University. But there was also a chance to travel. At one point my handler asked if I would like to visit Cuba during summer vacation, something SDS members seemed to find particularly appealing. Though the agency would pay my way, it couldn’t offer protection if I got arrested. Despite prodding, I declined.

At one point my handler asked if I would like to visit Cuba during summer vacation, something SDS members seemed to find particularly appealing.

Later I was assigned by my handler to tape-record a George Washington University speech by Hans Dietrich Wolff, a member of West Germany’s version of SDS. Wolff’s main point—one that probably flattered as much as it frightened the Feds—was that a revolution in any country had to be coupled with a revolt in the United States. For some reason, Wolff’s plan to solicit funds in the U.S. to support German SDS activities appeared to interest the agency more than his vision of world revolution. Though he didn’t pass the hat at George Washington University, he did sell posters showing Karl Marx with a caption that read (in German) “Everyone talks about the weather. We don’t.”

For some reason, Wolff’s plan to solicit funds in the U.S. to support German SDS activities appeared to interest the agency more than this vision of world revolution.

I still couldn’t shake my concern about the FBI’s interest in sending me to Cuba. Frankly, I thought the CIA was a safer bet if push came to shove on foreign soil. After making an extra copy of my recording of Wolff’s speech, I took a cab to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, where I was admitted and handed over my tape. During my debriefing interview, the possibility of my going to Cuba with CIA oversight was discussed. Due to my doubts about the FBI, there I sat, offering myself up as a CIA asset, though the agency never followed through. Incredibly, I was able to walk into CIA headquarters unimpeded, though I needed a pass to leave. Whether or not John Steinbeck was ever involved with the agency, as Brian Kannard believes, I think he would have appreciated the irony.

Policemen, Polygons, and Vietnam War Protest Pressure

In mid-March of 1969 my handler informed me that due to agency cutbacks I was being asked to transfer my efforts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department Intelligence Division—another irony worthy of a writer like Steinbeck. Where the FBI gave me $15 per report on an a la carte basis, the MPD would pay me a flat fee of $60 a week.

As noted, the FBI had a close relationship with the MPD, and my former handler would still have access to the fruits of my labors. This time, however, instead of a number I was given the code name Polygon, a term meaning “many-sided figure”—Irony #3, since the head of the D.C. police intelligence division was a chip off J. Edgar Hoover’s shoulder who insisted that anyone opposed to the Vietnam War was subversive. This overreach resulted in surveillance of peaceful anti-Vietnam War organizations with a commitment to nonviolence, a bitter reminder that the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. was targeted for character assassination by J. Edgar Hoover long before being killed by James Earl Ray in Memphis. Other big-city police departments were also active in surveillance against the New Left at the time, including New York, Los Angeles, and—of course—Richard Daley’s Chicago.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was targeted for character assassination by J. Edgar Hoover long before being killed by James Earl Ray Memphis.

Although the FBI always seemed to want to know everything, the Washington PD was only interested in clear and present danger. As a result my work became a matter of diminishing returns, despite the higher pay. While undercover I was never privy to the identities of other government operatives planted in local and regional SDS groups, though I sensed they were there. But legitimate SDS members tended to speculate amongst themselves about various individuals, especially non-students who hung around, showed up for meetings, and participated in campus demonstrations without having a known connection to George Washington University. I suspected that several of these characters were fellow agents: two in particular—a man named Smiley, who dressed poorly and claimed to be an army veteran, and a bearded guy I called Dave whom no one seemed to know much about. Smiley and Dave appeared to be friends.

CONUS Once Shame on You; CONUS Twice Shame on Us

Because of Smiley’s supposed army service, I wondered if he might be working for military intelligence, which I later learned had expanded domestic surveillance activities significantly in the years following the failure of John Steinbeck’s friend Adlai Stevenson, a liberal, to win the presidency. These activities accelerated in the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as a result of perceived threats posed by the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War feelings, and urban riots. By 1965 a new intelligence command had been established at Fort Holabird, Maryland, to coordinate the work of counterintelligence agents at army commands throughout the United States., preparing daily civil disturbance situation reports on right-wing extremists, civil rights activists, and Vietnam War dissidents.

By 1965 a new intelligence command had been established at Fort Holabird, Maryland, to coordinate the work of counterintelligence agents at army commands throughout the United States.

By 1966 the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Command at Fort Holabird had broadened its civilian surveillance, including operations that clearly violated regulations and probably occurred without the approval of senior commanders. In 1968 it was renamed Continental United States Intelligence (CONUS Intel), producing daily computerized field reports on civilians assembled by more than 1,000 plainclothes agents who monitored civil rights and antiwar organizations, infiltrated radical groups such as SDS, and engaged in provocative and illegal acts to discredit protest efforts—just like the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The extent of CONUS Intel domestic military surveillance activities became the center of controversy when a former intelligence officer exposed its operations in the January 1970 issue of Washington Monthly magazine. Thirty years earlier John Steinbeck’s chance for a wartime commission had been sandbagged by the same military mentality, another case of “John was there first” in the troubling history of domestic spying on U.S. citizens.

Barbarians at the George Washington University Gate

Things were heating up for both SDS and me at George Washington University on the evening of April 23, 1969, when the Black Panther film Pig Power was shown along with the Columbia University takeover documentary, Revolt. The well-publicized event drew a crowd of about 200 SDS members and non-members. Cathy Wilkerson, the subject of Federal Bureau of Investigation interest from Connecticut, was in the crowd, and so was I. At approximately 10 p.m. the leader of the local SDS chapter stood up and announced, “Our brothers have taken a building. Let’s join them!” And we were off to nearby Maury Hall, the George Washington University building that housed the Sino-Soviet Institute, a think tank with presumed military ties.

At approximately 10 p.m. the leader of the local SDS chapter stood up and announced, ‘Our brothers have taken a building. Let’s join them!’

A group of 20-30 attendees proceeded down G Street past a row of George Washington University fraternity houses, where a claque of jeering frat boys decided to follow us to Maury Hall. When I reached the building the front door was open and a few people were standing around in the lobby near a cleaning lady with keys to the locked interior offices loosely tied around her waist. I remember that someone said we couldn’t ask her to give us the keys because it might get her into trouble while somebody else gently unsnapped her key ring and led us on. Fights broke out between the frat-boy hangers-on and student protesters who had just walked in. As the violence escalated, the SDS chapter leader’s wife was hit repeatedly, sustaining a serious blow to the head.

As the violence escalated, the SDS chapter leader’s wife was hit repeatedly, sustaining a serious blow to the head.

Soon the dean of students arrived and announced that the front doors would be locked for 15 minutes with us inside, then reopened so we could leave safely—clearly a command, not a request. The SDS leader with the injured wife suggested that we had made our point by peacefully entering the building and should comply with the dean’s order: the bullies outside were thirsty for blood, and we’d be smart to exit the building while we still had the chance. Others present, egged on by the mysterious Smiley, were adamant about remaining. A vote was taken about whether or not to leave Maury Hall. The chapter leader lost and we stayed.

A vote was taken about whether or not to leave Maury Hall. The chapter leader lost and we stayed.

In the end, the SDS barricade of Maury Hall at George Washington University was as unplanned as my involvement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation—something, as Steinbeck would say, that happened. The Greek-letter warriors outside were already climbing the fire escape to get in, literal barbarians at the gate. So we built barricades, using desks, chairs, and bookcases that we moved from fortified floors to those with exposed windows. I knew how the Romans must have felt with Goths and Vandals at the gate: when I looked out from the second floor window the crowd below was chanting jump, jump, jump!—Steinbeck’s Mob Man incarnate. I was disgusted with the goons, but I was also disgusted with myself. Furniture had been damaged, people had been hurt, and the occupiers had done nothing to deserve this. I wanted out—out of Maury Hall, out of J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia, and (ultimately, I discovered) out of George Washington University.

The Greek-letter warriors outside were already climbing the fire escape to get in, literal barbarians at the gate.

At 3:00 a.m. the school’s vice president said we had to leave immediately or be subject to violating a federal court injunction that could expose us to penalties for contempt, including jail without trial. Within 30 minutes we had abandoned Maury Hall. Later that day several hundred George Washington University students and faculty members assembled in Lisner Auditorium to discuss the takeover. Some expressed support, others disapproval. I had already made up my mind when walked to the lectern to speak. “I know I’m going to get criticism from both sides,” I said. “But I have a confession to make. For the last four months I’ve been working as an undercover agent for the FBI and the Metropolitan Police Department Intelligence Division. I’m sick and tired of the repression of SDS. And I don’t care what the cops do to me now!”

At 3:00 a.m. the school’s vice president said we had to leave immediately or be subject to violating a federal court injunction that could expose us to penalties for contempt, including jail without trial.

My confession made quite an impression, and it wasn’t friendly. As I was escorted from the building by a group of SDSers, I saw Dave with the beard making a fast exit through a side door. I realized then that he was what I had suspected—another undercover operative. Like a character in a Steinbeck strike story, I seriously wondered if I was going to be killed. Instead, I was debriefed by Cathy Wilkerson, who obviously knew that she was the subject of ongoing surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover & Company. I made it clear to her and those listening that I was done with both sides of this conflict and wanted out. But not everyone was done with me.

Leaving the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Get a Lawyer

A week later, 14 other George Washington University students and I were charged with unlawfully seizing Maury Hall. The Federal Bureau of Investigation couldn’t and wouldn’t help me. Fortunately I had a good lawyer—myself. Though I was always paid in cash and had no check stubs to prove that I was working as an agency operative, the tape-recordings I had made of numerous phone conversations with my FBI and MPD handlers spoke volumes. I played the tapes at my hearing and George Washington University dropped the charges.

A week later, 14 other George Washington University students and I were charged with unlawfully seizing Maury Hall. The Federal Bureau of Investigation couldn’t and wouldn’t help me. Fortunately I had a good lawyer—myself.

In July the U.S. House of Representatives Internal Security Committee investigating SDS activities on college campuses subpoenaed me. (This was the successor to the House Un-American Activities Committee, the body that failed to call Steinbeck as a witness in its investigations of suspected writers and artists a decade earlier.) In my testimony I made it clear that anything I testified to had already been disclosed as part of my undercover work for the federal government. The Congressmen present appeared to know the answers to the questions they were asking, and it all struck me as little more than a public show. The only thing they seemed seriously concerned about was that I not go into too much detail about the FBI, something I couldn’t do and answer their questions honestly. (Did John Steinbeck also have information about government surveillance that Congress didn’t want to hear?)

Did John Steinbeck also have information about government surveillance that Congress didn’t want to hear?

Although I eventually transferred to Rutgers, I returned in the fall for another year at George Washington University. During an October afternoon walk off campus, I happened to find myself near the Washington Monument watching an anti-Vietnam War demonstration by a Mobilization Against the War group. Off to the right I noticed a uniformed army officer conferring with two men in J. Edgar Hoover attire—white shirts, dark suits, conservative ties, and trench coats. One was easy to recognize. It was Smiley, the SDS member who was so adamant about staying in Maury Hall despite the danger. I had never seen him dressed so well. Now I knew why: Smiley was an agent provocateur who encouraged people to do destructive things that they hadn’t planned on doing.

The second man was a harder to identify, but I managed. It was Dave with the beard, clean-shaven and spiffy. I went up to him and said, “Hi Dave!—or whatever your name is. I always thought you and Smiley might be army intelligence and now I know for sure.” (I’m no Steinbeck and I don’t plan to write a story of betrayal featuring these characters, but someone probably should.)

After the Fall: Cathy Wilkerson’s Unhappy Ending

On the morning of March 6, 1970, Cathy Wilkerson stumbled onto 11th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village in tatters, bleeding, her clothes shredded. Her father’s townhouse at 18 West 11th Street had just been blown to pieces, killing three members of the Weathermen group who were building bombs in the basement. After the explosion Cathy went underground for a decade, surrendering in 1980 and serving less than a year in prison. The only other survivor, Kathy Boudin, was captured in 1981 during the robbery of a Brink’s truck in which three people were murdered.

After the explosion Cathy went underground for a decade, surrendering in 1980 and serving less than a year in prison.

Following the takeover of Maury Hall in 1969, Cathy had been arrested and prohibited from setting foot on the campus of George Washington University, or any other college in the District of Columbia. Precluded from continuing the campus organizing she so enjoyed, she joined the Weathermen, the explosive group that evolved out of SDS two months after Maury Hall and adopted much more violent tactics.

J. Edgar Hoover, John Steinbeck, and America’s Aftermath

During the 1960s and 70s, COINTELPRO, CONUS, and other government surveillance programs distorted the public’s view of radical groups in a way that helped, as intended, to isolate them and to de-legitimize lawful political expression in America. The efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular reinforced and exacerbated the weaknesses of these groups, making it difficult for sincere but inexperienced activists to learn from their mistakes and build solid, durable organizations opposed to the Vietnam War and domestic government overreach. Covert manipulation by undercover operatives, media manipulation, and agents provocateurs like Smiley eventually helped to push committed and seasoned activists such as Cathy Wilkerson to abandon grassroots organizing and join groups like the Weathermen, further isolating them and depriving peaceful protest movements of experienced leadership.

During the 1960s and 70s, COINTELPRO, CONUS, and other government surveillance programs distorted the public’s view of radical groups in a way that helped, as intended, to isolate them and to de-legitimize lawful political expression in America.

COINTELPRO succeeded in convincing some of its victims to blame themselves for problems the government created, leaving a legacy of cynicism and despair that has worsened with time. By operating covertly and illegally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and police and army intelligence professionals were able to severely weaken domestic political opposition—a phenomenon unimaginable to John Steinbeck when he wrote his letter complaining about J. Edgar Hoover in 1942. It really happened, and for a brief period in the late 1960s I was a part.

COINTELPRO succeeded in convincing some of its victims to blame themselves for problems the government created, leaving a legacy of cynicism and despair that has worsened with time.

As for John Steinbeck’s alleged involvement with the CIA, I asked someone in a position to know more than most people about this controversial question. Commenting for background only, a former Deputy Director for Intelligence of the CIA explained the possibilities to me:

“There were two ways a U.S. civilian might be used for intelligence gathering by the agency. He might be actively tasked by the operations directorate to obtain specific information or take a more passive role by simply being debriefed regarding any information he might have inadvertently obtained during his travels.”

The former DDI added that, though he had absolutely no information about John Steinbeck, “the latter situation would have probably been the more likely scenario for Steinbeck if he had been providing any intelligence for the agency, but the former more active role could not be excluded.”

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: Constitutional Rights

Think Global, Act Now! 2016 John Steinbeck Conference at San Jose State University

December 23, 2014 by Administrative Team 1 Comment

Mark your calendar for May 2016, but put on your thinking cap today. The newly renamed International Society of Steinbeck Scholars will host John Steinbeck as an International Writer, a conference on the author’s continued relevance for the 21st century, in San Jose, California, May 4-6, 2016. Scholars, students, and lovers of Steinbeck everywhere are invited to participate by attending and submitting a paper for presentation at this landmark event, hosted by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. According to the recent issue of Steinbeck Review—printed by Penn State Press, a powerhouse of scholarly journals on popular subjects such as John Steinbeck—the 2016 conference will probe Steinbeck’s connections with classical and modern literature, philosophy, politics, ethics, gender studies, and world affairs. Have global ideas about Steinbeck’s internationalism worth exploring in a paper of your own? Subscribe today and submit your proposal between August 2015 and March 2016.

Filed Under: Featured, Steinbeck Events Tagged With: Latest News

Calling Dr. Freud? Letter Explains John Steinbeck’s Short Story “The Snake”

December 1, 2014 by Michael Kenneth Hemp 2 Comments

Fresh questions raised by scholars about the source of John Steinbeck’s brief short story “With Your Wings,” recently published for the first time, reminded me that Steinbeck’s college friend, the writer A. Grove Day, once sent me a personal letter with an eye-witness explanation of the incident behind “The Snake,” an earlier short story set in Doc’s Lab on Cannery Row. “The Snake” was written before Tortilla Flat appeared in 1935, and Steinbeck’s friend Bruce Ariss, the Cannery Row painter-writer-publisher, printed it as “A Snake of One’s Own” (the original title) in a local publication called The Beacon. In 1938 the short story was published in Esquire magazine and in Steinbeck’s classic short story collection The Long Valley, where it continues to attract readers fascinated by its gritty, gruesome subject and intriguing origin.

“The Snake” takes place in a familiar version of Ed Ricketts’ Doc’s Lab on Cannery Row, a frequent venue in Steinbeck’s writing and a big part of my recently revised book Cannery Row: The History of John Steinbeck’s Old Ocean Avenue . Steinbeck tells the story from the viewpoint of a Dr. Phillips, the story’s Ed Ricketts character, and it contains stark sexual symbolism frequently interpreted by critics in Freudian terms. But did the disturbing incident at the story’s core come from Steinbeck’s imagination, or did it really happen as described? Even Steinbeck’s friends from the time didn’t agree about where he got the idea for “The Snake.”

While reading comments by Robert DeMott concerning the context of John Steinbeck’s forgotten World War II story “With Your Wings,” I recalled an acknowledgement letter I received years ago from A. Grove Day, the late historian and biographer who became Steinbeck’s friend at Stanford in the 1920s, where both were members of the famous Stanford English Club. Born in Philadelphia in 1904, Grove died in Hawaii—the subject of his special expertise as a scholar—in 1994. I found his fascinating 1987 letter about “The Snake” in my files, postmarked from Honolulu.

Grove’s letter, which shows his skill as a writer and his knowledge of Doc’s Lab, augments other interpretations of “The Snake,” including those by two other friends from Steinbeck’s Stanford student days, Toby Street and Dook Sheffield. (In this photo of the English Club, Day is seated far left on the middle row; Street sits third from the left on the same row.) Grove’s letter claims that Ricketts’s father—who helped out at his son’s Cannery Row marine specimen business—caught the snake on a golf course and put it in a cage at the Lab, where “a young lady with us” fed it a white mouse as the snake’s first meal in captivity. Sheffield, who became a newspaper reporter, was more direct when he spoke about the story. He claimed that a local showgirl needed the snake for her act, although a rattlesnake would be a dangerous choice for the purpose.

Street commented about “The Snake” in a 1975 interview with Martha Heasley Cox, founder of the Steinbeck Studies Center at San Jose State University. His version possesses the weight of what lawyers call credible evidence and is quoted in full below. At this point in his exchange with Professor Cox, Street mentions “a girl that was on the circuit here [who] took a fancy to Ed.” When asked by Cox to explain what he means by “the circuit” (roadhouse and bar entertainment replacing vaudeville with some burlesque), Street employed a combination of diplomacy and directness developed in his post-Stanford career as a Monterey attorney for clients including John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. Like Grove, Street was as careful with facts as with feelings. When he spoke to his interviewer for the record about “The Snake,” he may have omitted living names, dates, and details.

“They used to have, you know, the piano player and a couple of girls and they’d entertain and they’d go around. And this girl happened to be [at the Blue Bell Café] and took a fancy to Ed, and Ed invited her to the lab. And she was a kind of sexy-looking dame and so while she was there, he said that he had to feed the snake. He had a big cage, quite a big cage full of white rats—and he went in there and selected one and put it in with the rattlesnake. The mouse ran all around, and this girl was just fascinated by the damned thing. And then, pretty soon, the little mouse stopped and the rattlesnake struck. Its fang caught in the mouse. And when he pulled, he brought the mouse back with it, and of course the mouse didn’t pay any attention, just ran around until the toxic effects began to take hold. His back got all rigid, and he stood up on his back feet and when he fell down, he put his paws right on his nose, like that. This girl, by this time, was right up there looking down at that. And the rattlesnake went over, and you know the way they do—they go up and down the body, noticing how long it is and whether it is still alive. Their auditory nerve is on their tongue. It then finally discovered that the mouse was in fit shape to eat. He went over and went through all his business and got his jaws on the edge and took this little mouse in his mouth. And she watched, oh, I think perhaps half an hour, until there wasn’t anything left but the tail of this mouse hanging out of the snake. John made a story out of it and gave it a lot of implications that probably were there.”

In his way, Toby Street agrees with Grove Day about the story’s Freudianism, as does Bruce Ariss, a Cannery Row legend in his own right. Bruce’s book, Inside Cannery Row: Sketches from the Steinbeck Era, identifies a tweedy, spinsterish dean from an eastern girl’s college as the woman in Doc’s Lab who became excited and told Ricketts she wanted to pay him to keep and feed the snake for her.

Frank Wright, another friend of Ed Ricketts from the 1940s, introduced me to “The Snake” more than 30 years after Steinbeck wrote his short story. Following Ed’s death, Frank became a member of the circle of men who saved Doc’s Lab, all friends of Monterey schoolteacher Harlan Watkins, who rented Doc’s Lab in the early 1950s before buying it from the Yee family (the real-life family of Lee Chong in Cannery Row). Watkins eventually sold the Lab to Frank and friends, and it was there that Frank first played for me the LP recording of John Steinbeck reciting “The Snake”—a dramatic way for any new reader to participate in Steinbeck’s provocative short story. Brought to life by Steinbeck’s distinctive baritone and experienced where the incident occurred, “The Snake” takes on a powerful feeling all its own. Friends lucky enough to have Frank as their Cannery Row guide continue to enjoy listening to John Steinbeck recite his story while visiting Doc’s Lab.

Now listen for yourself. Pay particular attention to what Steinbeck says before he recites the story. Though missing from printed editions, the compelling comments Steinbeck makes here about “The Snake” confirm how he liked to cover his tracks in his writing. Using the same phrase (“something that happened”) he employed elsewhere about other challenging subjects in his fiction, Steinbeck makes a funny reference to the sex-symbolism that distressed certain readers of “The Snake” from the beginning: “One of my favorite pieces of fan mail came from a small town librarian. She said it was the worst story she’d read anywhere; she was quite upset at its badness. Actually it isn’t a story at all. It’s just something that happened . . . . ”

Postscript: Steinbeck’s reading of “The Snake” and “Johnny Bear”—another short story from The Long Valley—was released in 1953 as a now-rare Columbia Literary Series record album. As noted, the details about the story’s origin provided by A. Grove Day in his letter differ in emphasis from those offered by Toby Street and Dook Sheffield, whose versions differ substantially from that of Bruce Ariss. As I thought about time and memory, another conversation with a friend of John Steinbeck came rolling out of the past. In 1983 I interviewed the great Joseph Campbell in Doc’s Lab, where he recalled the time “Ed called us all down to the Lab to watch him feed a rattlesnake.” Here is what Campbell had to say about “The Snake” that day on Cannery Row three decades ago.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With: Latest News

John Steinbeck’s African-Americans—Author Susan Shillinglaw Clarifies the Context of the World War II Hero in “With Your Wings”

November 26, 2014 by William Ray 2 Comments

The publication of John Steinbeck’s “With Your Wings” continues to stimulate conversation about the writer’s understanding of African-Americans and the roots and relevance of his forgotten World War II short story about a black Air Force aviator. Last week Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott challenged assumptions about the story’s origins. This week Susan Shillinglaw, author of On Reading The Grapes of Wrath and Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage, interprets the story’s African-American hero in the context of Steinbeck’s World War II experience and writings about African-American characters and issues. Like Robert DeMott, she responded generously to my request for expert comment about “With Your Wings.”

Susan Shillinglaw interprets the story’s African-American character in the context of Steinbeck’s World War II experience and writings about African-American characters and issues.

A professor of English at San Jose State University, she teaches the only regularly scheduled college-level John Steinbeck course offered anywhere. As Robert DeMott’s successor as director of SJSU’s Center for Steinbeck Studies, she introduced previously unpublished Steinbeck works of various kinds in Steinbeck Newsletter and Steinbeck Studies. These included the short story “The Kitten and the Curtain,” “The God in the Pipes”—an early fragment of what became Cannery Row—and an omitted chapter from the novel, “The Day the Wolves Ate the Vice Principal.” She wrote introductions for popular Penguin Classics editions of Steinbeck’s fiction, co-edited John Steinbeck’s America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, and is co-editing a major Steinbeck reference work. Her 25-year record of teaching, editing, and writing was recognized by her designation as SJSU’s President’s Scholar in 2012-13. She is also Scholar in Residence at the National Steinbeck Center and co-director of a summer program on John Steinbeck for high school teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

On Reading “With Your Wings”: African-Americans in John Steinbeck’s Life and Writing in and out of World War II

Susan Shillinglaw’s enlightening comments on the cultural and historical context of John Steinbeck’s World War II character William Thatcher, the African-American hero of the newly published short story “With Your Wings,” are quoted in full:

“This aviator, a second lieutenant with gold bars on his sleeves, would have earned his flight wings in Tuskegee, Alabama, where all African-American pilots were trained during World War II. ‘To have gone through the schools they must be very good, very intelligent and alert,’ Steinbeck writes in Bombs Away, a book-length propaganda piece published in 1942 on assignment for the U.S. war department in which Steinbeck lucidly explains the training of bomber pilots.

‘This aviator, a second lieutenant with gold bars on his sleeves, would have earned his flight wings in Tuskegee, Alabama.’

“Presumably Steinbeck produced ‘With Your Wings’ after writing Bombs Away and following his stint as a war correspondent covering England, North Africa, and a daring diversionary maneuver by Allied forces off the coast of Sicily and southern Italy. It’s tempting to think he wrote his short story after he returned from the front, where he might have encountered the Tuskegee Airmen, the 99th Squadron of the Army Air Forces first posted to North Africa in April 1943—four months before Steinbeck arrived at a ‘North African post,’ as in notes in Once There was a War, a collection of his World War II dispatches. Both Steinbeck and the 99th squadron then went on to Sicily, so it’s quite possible he knew and admired men like William Thatcher in this first African-American squadron posted overseas in World War II.

‘It’s tempting to think Steinbeck wrote his short story after he returned from the front, where he might have encountered the Tuskegee Airmen.’

“This aviator wants to detach from his 16-man group, to go home to ‘get something,’ to think about himself only. ‘He had thought to come home in triumph,’ a hero, a man set apart. But instead, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, he discovers he is a group man, buttressed by family and community and ‘every black man in the world.’ That’s ‘something’ to hang on to.

‘Like Tom Joad, William Thatcher discovers he is a group man, buttressed by family and community and “every black man in the world.”‘

“Steinbeck’s lean little sketch, which reminds me a little of his short story ‘Breakfast,’ relies on sharp details: the aviator’s gold bars, straightness (the men ‘rigid as cypress logs,’ the aviator behind the wheel of his car, the young cotton, the standing community), the sun. It’s such an ordinary scene—except that the man is black, an exemplar because he’s earned those wings.

‘Steinbeck’s lean little sketch relies on sharp details: the aviator’s gold bars, straightness, the sun.’

“Steinbeck created a dignified African-American—Crooks—in his earlier novel Of Mice and Men, made into a movie in 1939. A dignified black man also occupies the lifeboat in another Steinbeck novella—Lifeboat—made into a movie in 1944. In the 1960s Steinbeck wrote about race in a long essay, in a letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Travels With Charley in Search of America, and in his 1966 volume of essays, America and Americans.

‘Steinbeck created a dignified African-American—Crooks—in his earlier novel Of Mice and Men. A dignified black man also occupies the lifeboat in another Steinbeck novella made into a movie.’

“Throughout his career John Steinbeck was deeply concerned with the common good, a phrase I recently heard NEH Director William Adams discussing on the Diane Rehm radio show. Steinbeck’s sense of the common good, I think, had something to do with empathy, humility, and understanding—for all.”

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With: Latest News

The Facts about “With Your Wings”—Robert DeMott on An Old John Steinbeck Short Story Recently in the News

November 21, 2014 by William Ray 10 Comments

For decades a leading scholar of American literature taught John Steinbeck using a race-themed Steinbeck short story described as lost in news reports on its recent publication by a colorful short story magazine. Printed in The Strand Magazine for the first time since being read on the radio by Orson Welles during World War II, “With Your Wings”—Steinbeck’s inspiring portrayal of a black pilot returning home to the South as a hero—is written in the idealized style of the author’s World War II book, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. But Robert DeMott, Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Ohio University, says that Steinbeck’s short story wasn’t lost—and that Steinbeck’s friend Burgess Meredith, not Orson Welles, probably got first dibs on the story when it was written for broadcast in the 1940s.

John Steinbeck and Orson Welles

According to Andrew Gulli, managing editor of The Strand Magazine, Gulli discovered “With Your Wings” among Steinbeck’s papers at the University of Texas. In his editorial for the current issue of the magazine, Gulli adds that Steinbeck’s very short story about an African-American’s heroic homecoming was recited by Orson Welles on air in 1943 or 1944, then forgotten until it was recovered from the archives at Austin. Gulli’s version of the story’s provenance provides further evidence of Steinbeck’s role as a World War II propagandist. It also suggests that a relationship existed between Steinbeck and Welles, whose classic feature film Citizen Kane is based on William Randolph Hearst, the right-wing publisher of The San Francisco Examiner and The New York Morning Journal who was disliked by Steinbeck and disparaged (though not by name) in The Grapes of Wrath.

Gulli’s version of the story’s provenance provides further evidence of Steinbeck’s role as a World War II propagandist.

As Robert DeMott notes, more documentation is required before inferring a John Steinbeck-Orson Welles relationship from Gulli’s comments. But the possibility is intriguing, particularly in the context of continuing conjecture about Steinbeck’s connection to American intelligence agencies during and following World War II. Citizen Kane was every bit as controversial as The Grapes of Wrath, and for similar reasons. Steinbeck and Welles were celebrated artists with close ties to the Roosevelt administration. More important, they were political progressives who applauded the aims of the New Deal, decried the excesses of capitalism, and distrusted newspaper reviews of their works—though Steinbeck reported briefly on World War II for The New York Herald Tribune, a competitor of Hearst’s that Steinbeck described in private as reactionary.

Steinbeck and Welles were celebrated artists with close ties to the Roosevelt administration.

Co-written, produced, and directed by Welles—who also played the lead—Citizen Kane portrays Hearst, a Californian, as an eccentric empire-builder in the cut-throat world of New York newspaper publishing. Hearst’s papers boycotted the film, and Welles was accused of being a communist or worse even before the picture was released. Steinbeck’s labor novels In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men—made into a 1938 motion picture featuring Burgess Meredith—had provoked a similar reaction when they were written. The publication of The Grapes of Wrath fueled the fire, which had become a conflagration by the time Welles’s movie appeared two years after Steinbeck’s novel.

Writer and Actor Activists in World War II

Like John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith, and other left-leaning writers and actors of the period, Orson Welles devoted his time and talent to the American war effort in Europe and the Pacific. Broadcasting proved particularly effective at boosting morale and providing writers and performers a way to entertain the troops at home and abroad. Welles’s World War II radio broadcasts included guest-hosting four episodes of the popular Jack Benny Program in 1943 and producing and hosting several radio series of his own, including Ceiling Unlimited, the program for which Andrew Gulli says John Steinbeck wrote “With Your Wings.” If true, the assertion raises a possibility of special interest to people who think Steinbeck worked for America’s emerging national security establishment in ways not apparent at the time.

If true, the assertion raises a possibility of special interest to people who think Steinbeck worked for America’s emerging national security establishment in ways not apparent at the time.

According to Wikipedia, Ceiling Unlimited was sponsored by the World War II aeronautical giant Lockheed-Vega Corporation “to glorify the aviation industry and dramatize its role in World War II,” much as Steinbeck’s Bombs Away and “With Your Wings” did for the Air Force pilots who flew the company’s planes. If Steinbeck wrote his short story for Orson Welles, was it at the behest of Lockheed, the California aerospace pioneer founded by two brothers in San Francisco? So far evidence is lacking. Wikipedia doesn’t list Steinbeck among the writers—including Arthur Miller—who contributed to Welles’s radio show. Nor does any reference to Orson Welles, Ceiling Unlimited, or Lockheed occur in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975), Jackson H. Benson’s biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984), or Brian Kannard’s Steinbeck: Citizen Spy.

John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith, and “With Your Wings”

But references to Burgess Meredith abound in the record of John Steinbeck’s life. Like Orson Welles, Meredith achieved success as a New York stage actor before becoming a Hollywood screen star. Steinbeck met Meredith around the time the actor was cast as George in the 1939 movie Of Mice and Men, and the two men hit it off. When MGM refused to let Spencer Tracey narrate the 1941 film version of Steinbeck’s documentary The Forgotten Village, Steinbeck turned to Meredith, whose serene voice was well-suited to Steinbeck’s understated narrative. Like Orson Welles, Meredith and Steinbeck shared a penchant for politics, partying, and multiple partners. For a period they were neighbors, and they remained close until 1958, when a personal quarrel ended their 20-year friendship.

Like Orson Welles, Meredith and Steinbeck shared a penchant for politics, partying, and multiple partners.

Though the John Steinbeck-Orson Welles connection remains conjectural, Steinbeck’s relationship with Burgess Meredith supports Robert DeMott’s version of the “With Your Wings” back-story. The author of Steinbeck’s Reading (1984; 2007) and Steinbeck’s Typewriter (1996; 2012) and the editor the Library of America’s collection of John Steinbeck’s works, he taught generations of students at Ohio University how to read, write, and think with the depth of reason and empathy required to appreciate Steinbeck, his scholarly specialty. In response to my inquiry about “With Your Wings,” he pointed out that Burgess Meredith knew both Steinbeck and Orson Welles and devoted a chapter to each man in his 1994 memoir, So Far, So Good. Most important, he corrected the claim that “With Your Wings” was lost and raised the possibility that it was written by Steinbeck for Meredith, or for Welles through Meredith. His insights into John Steinbeck’s World War II short story about race in America, the Steinbeck-Welles-Meredith connection, and Steinbeck’s “radical humanism” are quoted in full:

“I’ve known about the story for several decades and in fact have a Xeroxed copy of it in my files. On occasion I’ve used it in my classes and seminars when talking about Steinbeck and race and it never failed to elicit strong, positive responses from students. The more ‘politically correct’ among them were surprised that a dead white male author could cross racial boundaries like that! The story is on the feel-good side and surely shows Steinbeck’s idealism and patriotism but even at that Steinbeck was nearly alone among his writing peers in responsibly portraying African-American characters at a time when the Armed Services were segregated. Not just the pilot in this story but the character of Joe in Steinbeck’s original narrative treatment of Lifeboat. For me, these characters link up with Steinbeck’s other cast of down-trodden or marginalized characters who people his work of the 1930s and 1940s. So propaganda or not, it seems of a piece with his radical humanism.

“But I did not know about the Orson Welles connection, and while I am happy to learn of that new thread in the carpet I am not entirely convinced that Steinbeck wrote the piece expressly for Welles and/or the Lockheed-Vega Corporation. Recently, James Cummins, a rare-book dealer in New York, offered for sale a typewritten draft of the Steinbeck story as part of a batch of Steinbeck documents in the Burgess Meredith archive. Cummins quotes a letter (ca. 1943) from Steinbeck to Meredith that accompanied the story and in which the author says, ‘A different version of the following was done for overseas broadcast to the troops by O.W.I.’ [Office of War Information], though I am not certain whether that and the Welles broadcast are the same. Steinbeck went on to offer the piece to Meredith for use in his shows, and stressed that it be read like a ‘pure mood’ piece, to be ‘delivered like soft music.’ For what it is worth, I am inclined to believe that the connection between Steinbeck and Meredith on this subject is perhaps more telling and deeper than that between Steinbeck and Welles, and certainly deserving of more investigation.”

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With: Latest News

John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Celebrated in Farsi Language by Najia Karim

October 15, 2014 by Administrative Team 3 Comments

John Steinbeck’s poetic protest novel The Grapes of Wrath came to renewed life in a Farsi language poem written and recited by Najia Karim for San Jose State University’s September 10 event honoring the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, author of the bestselling novel The Kite Runner and recipient of the 2014 Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award for artistic achievement and service to humanity. Hosseini’s moving acceptance speech was heard by hundreds at the San Jose State University Student Union. Proceeds from the event benefited the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, which confers the award.

In the photo, Hosseini (at left) stands with San Jose State University President Mohammad Qayoumi, Najia Karim, and Jan Sanchez, the San Jose high school teacher who introduced Hosseini to Steinbeck as a student. Hosseini’s mother taught Najia at a school for girls in Kabul, the Afghan city where Hosseini was born. The Farsi language—the tongue of the ancient Persian empire—has a rich literature, including much poetry, and is spoken by a majority of Afghans today. Hosseini and Najia are shown holding the Farsi language original of her poem (translated as “The Wrath of Grapes”), while Jan Sanchez holds the English language version.

Like Hosseini, Najia immigrated to the United States at a young age, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Cincinnati before moving to California. The author of fiction as well as poetry in Persian, she has been published in various Farsi language periodicals and books. Like Hosseini, she is a resident of the Bay Area, where she founded the Cultural Society of Afghan Women and hosts Gulzar Andisha (“Splendor of Thoughts”), an Iranian-community television program. She recited “The Wrath of Grapes” for the first time at a private reception honoring Hosseini held at the Center for Steinbeck Studies.

View Najia Karim as she recites the Farsi language original of her poem in this six-minute video, which includes an English translation read by Nick Taylor—novelist, teacher, and director of the Center—accompanied by photographs of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression taken by Dorothea Lange, John Steinbeck’s contemporary and fellow advocate for the victims of both disasters.

Feature photo courtesy Robert Bain/San Jose State University.

Filed Under: Anthology, Featured Tagged With: Poets

Hollister, California, the San Benito County Town Where The Other Steinbecks Lived

Time for Change! Russell Brand and Naomi Klein Channel John Steinbeck

Russell Brand’s Revolution—Change You Can’t Believe In?

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Third Hit in a Row

Short Story by Roy Bentley: “The War of Northern Aggression”

Short Story Narrated: “The War Of Northern Aggression”

J. Edgar Hoover and Me: Undercover for the Federal Bureau of Investigation During the Vietnam War

George Washington University: The Place To Be in 1968

Coming-of-Age Politics in the Anti-Vietnam War Era

My First Date with the Federal Bureau of Investigation

How J. Edgar Hoover Kept Up with the Joneses at the CIA

J. Edgar Hoover Needs You: You’re in the Agency Now!

Visit Cuba, Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Policemen, Polygons, and Vietnam War Protest Pressure

CONUS Once Shame on You; CONUS Twice Shame on Us

Barbarians at the George Washington University Gate

Leaving the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Get a Lawyer

After the Fall: Cathy Wilkerson’s Unhappy Ending

J. Edgar Hoover, John Steinbeck, and America’s Aftermath

Think Global, Act Now! 2016 John Steinbeck Conference at San Jose State University

Calling Dr. Freud? Letter Explains John Steinbeck’s Short Story “The Snake”

John Steinbeck’s African-Americans—Author Susan Shillinglaw Clarifies the Context of the World War II Hero in “With Your Wings”

On Reading “With Your Wings”: African-Americans in John Steinbeck’s Life and Writing in and out of World War II

The Facts about “With Your Wings”—Robert DeMott on An Old John Steinbeck Short Story Recently in the News

John Steinbeck and Orson Welles

Writer and Actor Activists in World War II

John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith, and “With Your Wings”

John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Celebrated in Farsi Language by Najia Karim

About John Steinbeck

Stay In Touch

Recent Posts

Latest Tweets

Join the Conversation

Need Content for Your Website?

Recent Posts

Steinbeck Now Books

Russell Brand’s Revolution—Change You Can’t Believe In?

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Third Hit in a Row

George Washington University: The Place To Be in 1968

Coming-of-Age Politics in the Anti-Vietnam War Era

My First Date with the Federal Bureau of Investigation

How J. Edgar Hoover Kept Up with the Joneses at the CIA

J. Edgar Hoover Needs You: You’re in the Agency Now!

Visit Cuba, Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Policemen, Polygons, and Vietnam War Protest Pressure

CONUS Once Shame on You; CONUS Twice Shame on Us

Barbarians at the George Washington University Gate

Leaving the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Get a Lawyer

After the Fall: Cathy Wilkerson’s Unhappy Ending

J. Edgar Hoover, John Steinbeck, and America’s Aftermath

On Reading “With Your Wings”: African-Americans in John Steinbeck’s Life and Writing in and out of World War II

John Steinbeck and Orson Welles

Writer and Actor Activists in World War II

John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith, and “With Your Wings”

About John Steinbeck

Stay In Touch

Recent Posts

Latest Tweets

Tags

Join the Conversation

Need Content for Your Website?

Recent Posts

Steinbeck Now Books