You and Authors of Books-Novel Writer John Steinbeck

Remembering the San Francisco Journalist Who Interviewed John Steinbeck During Travels with Charley

July 25, 2014 by Bill Steigerwald 3 Comments

The death of the San Francisco freelance writer Curt Gentry on July 10 made me especially sad. An old-school journalist, a loyal fan of John Steinbeck, and a fearless writer about subjects close to Steinbeck’s divided heart (J. Edgar Hoover, San Francisco whorehouses), he helped me greatly when I researched Dogging Steinbeck, my true account of Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s so-called non-fiction book. Curt Gentry was a gentleman, and one of the nicest guys I ever met.

Helter Skelter, J. Edgar Hoover, and Travels with Charley

As noted in his San Francisco Chronicle obit, Gentry made his fame and fortune co-writing Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, and a devastating biography of John Steinbeck’s dark nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover. Controversy and power never frightened Curt. Among his 13 books were histories of the downing by the USSR of an American spy plane during the Eisenhower Administration, detested by Steinbeck, and of the legendary madams who made San Francisco famous and, for Steinbeck, appealing.

From the mid-1950s until his death, Gentry lived in San Francisco’s trendy/hip North Beach neighborhood. In late October of 1960, Steinbeck pulled into town with his wife Elaine and their dog Charley on the California leg of the author’s Travels with Charley road trip to rediscover an America he said he no longer understood. Gentry deftly landed an interview with his literary hero and wrote a long piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about what Steinbeck told him.

In late October of 1960, Steinbeck pulled into town with his wife Elaine and their dog Charley on the California leg of the author’s Travels with Charley road trip . . . . Gentry deftly landed an interview with his literary hero and wrote a long piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about what Steinbeck told him.

Fifty years later, Gentry was one of the first people I tracked down when I began my research before I wrote Dogging Steinbeck, a book that reveals how Steinbeck and his editors at Viking padded Travels with Charley with fictions and fibs, then passed it off as a work of nonfiction for half a century. In The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck’s biographer Jackson Benson mentioned Gentry’s San Francisco Chronicle piece without giving the young journalist’s name.

Thanks to the San Francisco Public Library and the Internet, I found Gentry’s address and phone number and called him from Pittsburgh to ask for his help retracing Travels with Charley for my book. How would the man who exposed Helter Skelter and J. Edgar Hoover but admired Steinbeck react when he heard I was trying to piece together his hero’s actual (as opposed to imagined) Travels with Charley? He replied he’d be happy to meet me for lunch whenever I was in San Francisco. I met with him twice, on two separate trips, during long, memorable lunches at nearly empty North Beach restaurants.

“Steinbeck Meets the Press” During Travels with Charley

Here, in this “Steinbeck meets the press” excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck, is what Curt Gentry told me about his encounter with John Steinbeck at Steinbeck’s San Francisco hotel during Travels with Charley in 1960:

“Headquartered at the St. Francis, Steinbeck hung out with old friends at some of the city’s top bars and restaurants. The local print media instantly discovered his arrival. Herb Caen, the famed city columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle and ‘the uncrowned prince’ of the city, reported in his daily column on Oct. 28 that his friend John Steinbeck had ‘chugged’ into town ‘from New York’ on the evening of Oct. 26.

“The next day local writer Curt Gentry got a tip from a Chronicle staffer. Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

“Gentry, then 29, would go on to write more than a dozen books, including his biggest one with Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. But in 1960 he was a struggling writer, ex-newspaper reporter and bookstore manager. He lived in North Beach, the super-hip Italian neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. He mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

“On my research trip in the spring of 2010 Gentry met me at the Washington Square Bar & Grill. In its heyday the dim, aging, wood-lined North Beach landmark was a hangout for writers, politicos, musicians and the city’s in-crowd. But the WashBaG, as Herb Caen had nicknamed it, was almost empty when I was there and in a few months would close forever. Gentry, as well known to the staff as the owner, was easy to spot at the bar, looking dapper in his brown cap. He was the real deal. Helter Skelter made him rich. His 1991 New York Times bestseller J. Edgar Hoover exposed Hoover’s paranoia, his serial abuses of power and how he created the myth of the FBI as invincible and incorruptible.

Gentry, then 29, . . . mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

“At 79 Gentry was still writing tough books like the one he was working on about the Las Vegas mob. He couldn’t have been nicer, more helpful or more supportive of my Charley-retracing project. Not only did he buy me lunch and ignore our wide political divide. But he told me stories about the 1960 North Beach scene, repeated his favorite Steinbeck gossip and, when I expressed doubt about pulling off a book deal, kindly said, ‘I have faith in you.’

“On top of that moral support, Gentry gave me something else that was priceless – 10 pages of notes he had typed up after his meeting with Steinbeck. An observant record of what Steinbeck was doing and thinking in mid-Charley trip, Gentry’s account depicts a politically partisan 58-year-old at the top of his game, not lonely, not depressed, but full of piss and vinegar.

“When Gentry went to the St. Francis for his 11 a.m. interview, he said, Elaine was still in bed, Charley was in a kennel and John was hung over. ‘It looked like they both had quite a night,’ Gentry told me. A longtime admirer of Steinbeck, Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

“He asked Steinbeck to sign the books, which he cheerfully did. Steinbeck had just finished sending Adlai Stevenson a telegram containing some silly anti-Nixon jokes and was sewing together the clasp for his walking stick. Later, after Steinbeck finished a rant about what he called the immorality of Americans, Gentry wrote that ‘he tossed the stick across the room in anger.’

“In his notes, Gentry described Steinbeck as friendly, talkative and animated. They discussed, among many subjects, the presidential election, what was wrong with America, why his friend and neighbor Dag Hammarskjold would make a great president and why Hemingway should write about people not bullfighting. Steinbeck told Gentry he was driving across the country in an attempt to find out what the American people thought about politics. ‘Everywhere he has traveled,’ Gentry wrote in his notes, ‘there is fantastic interest. People are not indifferent, or undecided. They just won’t say.’

“Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had ‘made it fashionable to be stupid.’ Gentry also noted that Steinbeck ‘had much to say on Richard Nixon, a great part of it unprintable.’ According to Gentry, Steinbeck was down on Americans for becoming soft and what he called ‘immoral.’ Previewing what he would express in his recently completed but not yet published novel The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck defined immorality as ‘taking out more than you are willing to put back.’

Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had ‘made it fashionable to be stupid.’

“Steinbeck, wrote Gentry, ‘went on to note emphatically that “a nation or a group or an individual cannot survive immorality. The individual can’t survive being soft, comforted, content. He only survives well when the press is on him. In Rome when they began taking more out than they put in they began to decay.” And then his voice grew louder, his gestures became more emphatic as he added “If a fuse blew out in the Empire State Building today a million people would trample themselves to death . . . No one can do anything anymore. Who could slaughter and cut up a cow if they had to? No it has to be carefully cut for them, cellophane wrapped. They have lost the ability to be versatile. When either people or animals lose their versatility they become extinct.”‘

“When Gentry asked if he’d ever come back to live in California, Steinbeck said what he would later write in Travels with Charley after visiting his old haunts in Monterey. Steinbeck, according to Gentry, ‘said, sadly, “The truest words ever written were Thomas Wolfe’s ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I wish it weren’t so but when I come back to California to stay it will be in a box.”‘

“Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited. The piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, under the headline ‘John Steinbeck: “America’s King Arthur is Coming.”‘ (In an eerie presaging of Jackie Kennedy’s post-assassination comment that her husband’s presidency had been ‘an American Camelot,’ Steinbeck had said, apparently in reference to JFK, that all countries have legendary King Arthur-types who show up during times of trouble.)

Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited.

“In his article Gentry described Steinbeck as ‘big in body, mind, and heart’ and ‘full of humor, vitriol, compassion and strong feeling.’ What Gentry had written was printed in the paper verbatim until it came to his attempts to share some of Steinbeck’s stronger political opinions with the Chronicle’s readers. A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.

“The edits didn’t surprise Gentry. He was very involved in politics in 1960. Like Steinbeck, he was a devout Adlai Stevenson Democrat. During the 1956 presidential year, when he was active in the Young Californians for Stevenson, Gentry was called upon to drive Stevenson around town a couple times. He also was a driver for JFK, who apparently was on his best behavior because Gentry had no sexy story to share.

A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.

“Gentry and Steinbeck kept in touch, exchanging several letters over the next few years. After Steinbeck’s death Gentry wanted to write a book about him and his relationship with his close friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist and real-life model for Doc in Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s agent, Elizabeth Otis, liked the idea, Gentry said. But widow Elaine – who controlled Steinbeck’s estate with a firm hand – nixed it. Elaine was, to put it kindly, not Gentry’s favorite Steinbeck. One thing that bothered him, he said, was the closeness of Elaine to Steinbeck’s biographers, Jackson Benson and Jay Parini.

“’They automatically accepted anything she said about his first two wives, Carol or Gwen,’ he said. ‘Everything I’ve read and heard is that Elaine was a real ball-buster and a terrible person, with her ex-husband, Zachary Scott (the movie actor), manipulating her in the background.’ That was a new bit of inside-Steinbeck World gossip/dirt for me. I had no idea if it was true and didn’t care one way or the other, but it sounded like something a guy who wrote an expose of J.E. Hoover might know.

“Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints. That was pretty much all the ‘entertainment’ there was in 2010. But in 1960, the clubs and bars spinning around the intersection of Columbus and Broadway were booking stars of the present and incubating stars of the future. Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Art Tatum played in clubs. Johnny Mathis got his start in North Beach in the mid ‘50s right after high school.

“The famous North Beach nightclub the Hungry i, by itself, is said to have launched the careers of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters and Barbra Streisand. The Hungry i was owned by mad impresario Enrico Banducci, who also opened up Enrico’s Coffee House on Broadway. Upstairs was Finochio’s, the famous nightclub featuring a vaudevillian floorshow of female impersonators. Gentry knew and liked Banducci. As soon as he made enough money, Gentry said, he basically lived in Enrico’s sidewalk cafe, which by day was a Herb Caen watering hole and by night a jazzy de facto after-hours club for cops, prostitutes and scuffling writers like him.

“Enrico’s Café, now closed, still existed in 2010. But its glory days, like North Beach’s, were ancient history. The afternoon I went to check it out it was closed for lunch. Basically unchanged since 1960, its outside tables were jammed inside behind big glass doors. The sidewalk patio was showing its age, its concrete cracked and its booths worn at the corners. The three-story building needed a paint job. The top floor where Finochio’s raunchy floorshow once shocked or entertained the straight world looked vacant.

Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints.

“Enrico’s Café’s near neighbors in 2010 were strip clubs like the Hungry I Club (‘The Best Girls in Town’) and Big Al’s adult bookstore. But still on the corner of Columbus and Broadway was City Lights Books, which became world famous in 1956 after its owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl.’ The precedent-setting First Amendment test-case that followed ultimately overturned the country’s obscenity laws and allowed banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be published in the Land of the Free.

“For several days in the fall of 1960 Steinbeck loafed only a few hundred feet from City Lights, yet he had nothing to do with the Beats and their revolutionary scene, and vice versa. Ferlinghetti’s assistant told me Ferlinghetti and Steinbeck – the new literary generation and the old – never met then or any other time. By 2010 City Lights and the Beat Museum – a well-done retail shrine to the lives and works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and other dead Beats – were the only two reasons left for going to what was once one of the coolest, most cutting edge, most culturally important intersections in America.”

Curt Gentry’s Book Blurb for Dogging Steinbeck

“I still believe John Steinbeck is one of America’s greatest writers and I still love Travels with Charley, be it fact or fiction or, as Bill Steigerwald doggedly proved, both. While I disagree with a number of Steigerwald’s conclusions, I don’t dispute his facts. He greatly broadened my understanding of Steinbeck the man and the author, particularly during his last years. And, whether Steigerwald intended it or not, in tracking down the original draft of Travels with Charley he made a significant contribution to Steinbeck’s legacy. Dogging Steinbeck is a good honest book.” – Curt Gentry

Photo of Curt Gentry by Jim Wilson courtesy San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck courtesy Bill Steigerwald.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: People

Summering with Steinbeck, Who Traveled with Charley: Pack The Portable John Steinbeck for Your Trip

July 19, 2014 by J.F. McKenna Leave a Comment

John Steinbeck’s dog Charles le Chien remains a creature to be envied, having been squired across mid-20th century America by his restless owner, the author who transformed their journey together into Travels with Charley, a lyrical paean rich in social commentary that became a favorite of Steinbeck readers then and now.

As if a 10,000-mile, tree-filled experience weren’t heavenly enough reward, Elaine and John Steinbeck’s big blue Poodle also gained literary immortality, taking a star-turn in the book that records a road trip taken more than 50 years ago and continues to be read and debated. The appellation lucky dog comes to mind, but Charley was ready for his role as the author’s celebrated sidekick. Steinbeck wanted to see America on his own, but needed a companion who listened well. Charley did.

Wartime Portable Steinbeck Published BC (Before Charley)

No fan of John Steinbeck will ever be quite as lucky as Charley-dog. But may I suggest a second-best experience for two-legged vacationers half a century after Travels with Charley became a national bestseller? Take along your own copy of Viking’s The Portable Steinbeck when you travel this summer. Like John Steinbeck’s polite, attentive Poodle, this popular anthology of the author’s work travels well and fits any space.

A compact book designed for stuffing into suitcases and knapsacks, The Portable John Steinbeck remains an unsurpassed introduction for newcomers to John Steinbeck’s writing and a continuing delight for long-time lovers of The Red Pony, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath. With apologies to a fellow author Steinbeck admired deeply, allow me to call The Portable Steinbeck a moveable feast for readers on the run who favor timeless prose and strong ideas over mindless literary escapism.

The Portable Steinbeck was first published in 1943 at the height of World War II as part of the Viking Portable Series—a literary brainstorm attributed to the writer-broadcaster and soldiers’ champion Alexander Woollcott. As noted at the website AbeBooks.com, “The physical characteristics of the wartime Portables owed more to practicality than anything else. The books were meant to be ‘built like a Jeep: compact, efficient, and marvelously versatile.’”

Idea by Alexander Woollcott, Introduction by Pascal Covici

Woollcott wanted the Portables produced for “the convenience of men who are mostly on the move and must travel light”—soldiers far from home fighting in both theaters of an uncertain war. John Steinbeck shared Woollcott’s belief in the democracy of books and the heroism of young soldiers, some as young as 17. The editors at Viking echoed Woollcott’s words on the jacket of the original Portable Steinbeck, the second book they published in the series.

The Portables, they explained, were produced to present “a considerable quantity of widely popular reading in a volume so small that it can conveniently be carried and read in places where a book of ordinary format would be a hindrance.” Domestic resources were scarce, and the wartime Portables featured “light paper, small margins, and other production economies” while offering a “well and legibly printed and sturdily bound” book designed as much for durability as for literary quality and content.

Like Travels with Charley, Portable Steinbeck Still Popular

Sturdy indeed. The John Steinbeck anthology has gone through numerous editions since 1943, although this Baby Boomer patriot particularly cherishes a pair of copies published in the 1980s, each with an elegant introduction by Pascal Covici Jr., the literary son of Steinbeck’s loyal editor and friend from the prewar 1930s.

The younger Covici’s introduction to John Steinbeck’s long-lived anthology is a model of to-the-point prose:

The gusto of Homer and of Whitman is indeed here, along with the thoughtfulness of Emerson, that philosophical presence which more and more readers have been finding woven into the sturdiest standards of American literature. A humor sometimes sly and often carelessly robust finds its way onto Steinbeck’s pages too.

Contemporary cynics might anticipate a lawyerly disclaimer at this point: Individual reader’s results may vary. But the book’s content lives up to its billing as an introduction to the variety of works written by John Steinbeck, including in its pages the complete version of The Red Pony and a self-contained segment from Cannery Row, along with excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath and (in later editions) the full text of John Steinbeck’s inspired Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Portable Steinbeck—Beach Reading for the Eternal Ocean

I can think of no better way to make the inner light shine brighter for modern readers than this brilliant passage from The Grapes of Wrath:

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “We.”

Or read the sunny lines spoken in passionate hope for the future by John Steinbeck in Stockholm in 1962:

And this I believe: That the free exploring mind of the indivdiual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is I what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

The Portable Steinbeck is a summer book for any season, but it’s far from shallow—a beach read, if you will, that plumbs that ocean of eternal wisdom. Covici in his introduction describes the progression and profundity of the excerpts selected: “a focus of interest more implicit than realized in the very early works, then gradually emerging into sharpened consciousness until it becomes a matter of articulated intention.”

As a child of icy winters spent on the Great Lakes, I embrace summer days. Like John Steinbeck with Charley, I relish them with my favorite fellow-traveler, The Portable Steinbeck, in tow.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: Book Reviews

The Writing of Tortilla Flat and the Mysterious Missing Portrait of John Steinbeck

July 4, 2014 by John Bell Smithback 4 Comments

In the late 1950s I rented a house owned by Barbara Stevenson and Ellwood Graham, artists who knew John Steinbeck when he was writing his 1935 hit Tortilla Flat, at the end of Lobos Street on Huckleberry Hill in Monterey, California. By then Graham and Stevenson—who later adopted the name Judith Deim—had decided to go their separate ways, Ellwood to San Francisco and Seattle, Barbara to live with her four young children in a cave in Spain.

What worldly goods the couple possessed, including a number of Barbara’s paintings that I found leaning against the walls of the three rooms in their small studio-home, were being left behind for the time being. As I unpacked and stored my clothing in the bedroom, I made a surprising discovery behind a pair of sliding closet doors: the now-missing and much-speculated-about portrait of John Steinbeck painted by Ellwood Graham some years earlier.

Barbara was still in the process of vacating the house when I began my move, and I mentioned that I didn’t particularly like Ellwood’s painting (shown above) because I thought Ellwood had made John look like a punch-drunk boxer. Neither agreeing nor disagreeing with my reaction to the work, Barbara told me how it came to be painted.

Barbara recalled that John did much of his early writing in the garage of the Steinbeck family cottage, located down the Hill on 11th Street in Pacific Grove. Like everyone living on the Hill, Barbara and Ellwood were aware that John and his wife Carol had made an unusual arrangement: each morning Carol locked John in the back-garden garage until late afternoon. The garage had a window or two, so there was a way out in case of emergency, but as Barbara explained, John was easily distracted and felt he needed the kind of discipline forced on him by daily isolation when he wrote.

As Ellwood and Barbara sat with John in their kitchen one evening, enjoying a jug of red wine at a massive hand-hewn redwood table with matching picnic table benches, John complained that he was struggling with a story he was trying to write about some of the lively characters who inhabited nearby Cannery Row. Refilling their glasses, Ellwood stated that he thought the material seemed limitless and suggested that John ought to be writing a novel, not a short story. John replied that he couldn’t imagine looking down at a blank page in another new ledger book knowing “I’d still be working on the same damn thing two years from now.”

Ellwood made a proposal: rather than sitting alone in his garage each day, John should move his writing ledgers and his sharpened pencils into their kitchen, where he could write and Ellwood and Barbara could each paint his portrait. Without hesitation, John agreed. Perhaps with the help of their good friend Bruce Ariss, the artist-author who lived next door, Ellwood hurriedly built a portable box-like platform approximately 14 inches high, large enough to accommodate John’s table and chair. It was there that John Steinbeck wrote portions of Tortilla Flat, his first commercially successful book, while Barbara and Ellwood painted their soon-to-be-famous friend from remarkably different points of view.

Today Barbara’s well-known painting, showing Steinbeck seated at his desk writing (above), can be viewed at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. What happened to Ellwood’s portrait of the writer remains a mystery.

(By the way, the similar sound of our names meant that John Steinbeck and I were frequently confused for one another in the minds of some people in Monterey, California. There were occasions when I’d receive checks made out to “John Steinbeck.” I always endorsed them, and I never had trouble cashing one. I mentioned this to John when I saw him in Pacific Grove while he was visiting his sister at some point in the 1960s—the Vietnam War was on, but I don’t remember the exact year—and he said he’d do the same if he ever got a check made out to “John Smithback.” Even-Steven.)

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With: Artists

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

May 30, 2014 by William Ray 6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tips from John Steinbeck on How to Write Well

May 9, 2014 by J.F. McKenna Leave a Comment

How to write well? Some writing tips enter our consciousness formally, through the classroom door. Others arrive surreptitiously, as editors unseen hover over our hands on the keyboard. But writing tips also slip through a half-open window of the struggling writer’s mind, appearing as a bright passage in a book or needed words of encouragement from a colleague that learning how to write well is a craft worth pursuing for yet another day. John Steinbeck’s writing tips took the second and third forms.

For writers like me, Steinbeck’s books and letters are a window on how to write better that never closes.

For writers like me, Steinbeck’s books and letters are a window on how to write better that never closes. Like us, he understood that every lesson on how to write more effectively, however small, is a gift for today and for tomorrow. As Jay Parini notes in John Steinbeck: A Biography, “[John Steinbeck’s] didacticism would become an integral part of his profile as a man and writer . . . .” His lessons on how to write, whatever the context or occasion, remain a source of inspiration, instruction, and delight in my life as a writer.

The Steinbeck Model in Writing Tips from Roy Peter Clark

In the opening pages of Writing Tools, a book of writing tips by Roy Peter Clark that I highly recommend, John Steinbeck appears as a model of how to write well. Clark quotes this passage from Cannery Row as an example of the way master writers like Steinbeck “can craft page after page of sentences” by relying on simple constructions of subject and verb:

He didn’t need a clock. He had been working in a tidal pattern . . . . In the dawn he had awakened . . . . He drank some hot coffee, ate three sandwiches, and had a quart of beer.

Clark notes that “Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence” in the example offered:

Clarity and narrative energy flow through the passage, as one sentence builds on another. He avoids monotony by including the brief introductory phrase . . . and by varying the lengths of sentences, a writing tool we will consider later.

Clark notes that ‘Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence’ . . . .

A respected resource at The Poynter Institute on how to write better journalism, Clark returns to John Steinbeck in his list of writing tips, noting that in Travels With Charley Steinbeck uses passive verbs “to call attention to the receiver of the action” at just the right time.

“The best writers make the best choices between active and passive,” explains Clark:

Steinbeck wrote, “The night was loaded with omens.” Steinbeck could have written, “Omens loaded the night,” but in that case the active would have been unfair to both the night and the omens, the meaning and the music of the sentence.

John Steinbeck’s Advice to Hugh Mulligan on How to Write

A journalist for much of his life, Steinbeck sometimes applied sideways humor to prop open the how-to-write window, a trait noted by the late Hugh Mulligan, a veteran reporter covering the war in Vietnam when Steinbeck was there. In his book The Journalist’s Craft, Mulligan states that he is writing “a nuts-and-bolts book about writing, but before I attempt to get down to the basic hardware, I should note that history is rife with confusion on this subject.” Enter Steinbeck, laughing.

Later in his collection of writing tips Mulligan quotes Somerset Maugham, the English writer who was born 28 years before John Steinbeck but died only 12 months earlier than his celebrated American counterpart:

[T]hat elegant master of the Queen’s English . . . told a BBC interviewer: “There are three basic rules to good writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are” . . . . I mentioned this to John Steinbeck one night in Saigon during the Vietnam War . . . . The Nobel laureate took a stab at filling in the blanks for Maugham: “Never make excuses. Never let them see you bleed. Never get separated from your luggage.” He then added a fourth: “Find out when the bar opens and when the laundry comes back.”

Speaking as a writer who has lost his notes, a bit of his virtue, and a sport coat or two on reporting assignments, I find practical wisdom woven into Steinbeck’s mordant wit. If you write for a living and don’t find yourself grinning at this advice, you might consider taking up another profession. Your absence may be missed, but not by other writers.

Maria Povova’s “6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck”

Fifty years after their conversation, the Internet has expedited and amplified the writing tips shared by John Steinbeck with Hugh Mulligan in Saigon. While roaming the digital byways recently, I came across Maria Povova’s “6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck,” a set of principles on how to write well gleaned from her reading of a 1975 Paris Review article and recent Atlantic magazine blog.

Call my online discovery software-supported serendipity if you like. But Steinbeck’s advice has outlasted the manual typewriter and will no doubt survive smartphones as well.

Steinbeck’s advice has outlasted the manual typewriter and will no doubt survive smartphones as well.

Here are my favorite writing tips from Povova’s piece:

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one.

When he talked about how to write, John Steinbeck always addressed other writers—even if he was the imagined writer he had in mind.

When he talked about how to write, John Steinbeck always addressed other writers—even if he was the imagined writer he had in mind. The process could be painful, and Steinbeck sometimes had to remind himself to follow his own advice. After the announcement in 1962 that he had won the Nobel Prize, he admitted how hard it was to write his acceptance speech in a letter to Dook Sheffield, a college friend and fellow writer:

I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times . . . . Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: Ideas

Was John Steinbeck the First Social Ecologist?

April 11, 2014 by James Kent 15 Comments

In The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck explores social ecology—how individuals interact with each other within their natural, adopted, and built environments—in the crisis created by the Great Depression Dust Bowl. Social ecology recognizes the holistic connection of all elements and influences and how each affects the other in a social complex. Reading The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, and The Grapes of Wrath helped me discover how the principles of social ecology can be applied in practice.

Steinbeck’s depiction of the Dust Bowl and its impact in The Grapes of Wrath clearly demonstrates his familiarity with the ecological disaster resulting from the failure to shift to dry land farming methods before drought conditions overtook large areas of America’s heartland in the 1930s. What is less apparent is the other side of the story, the social ecology disaster that occurred when Dust Bowl migrants tried to find paying work and a new home in California. In The Grapes of Wrath the author adroitly brings together both kinds of environment, social and physical.

The Phalanx in The Moon Is Down and on Cannery Row

My first exposure to John Steinbeck’s understanding of social ecology occurred when I read The Moon Is Down, the play-novelette he wrote for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942. This work—which Steinbeck is believed to have based on the Nazi occupation of Norway—exerted significant influence on the development of my thinking about social ecology. Steinbeck’s story concerns the resistance by the residents of an unnamed coastal village in northern Europe to foreign-army occupiers who invade the town in order to seize its harbor and coal mine.

Their resistance through non-compliance rests on the concept of the informal network, an element of the broader idea behind Steinbeck’s phalanx theory. The phalanx encompasses the entire environment and includes driving forces, unconscious influences, and factors that are physical, social, and cultural; informal networks are the means by which information is disseminated, issues are resolved, and environments are managed in a particular community without using formal systems.

The phalanx encompasses the entire environment and includes driving forces, unconscious influences, and factors that are physical, social, and cultural.

A later example of the function of an informal network within a specific group occurs in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row reprise Sweet Thursday, where Doc’s Western Biological Laboratories, Lee Chong’s Heavenly Flower Grocery, and Ida’s Bear Flag bordello are “bound by gossamer threads of steel to all the others—hurt one, and you aroused vengeance in all. Let sadness come to one, and all wept.” Here Steinbeck’s dramatization of human interconnectedness represents much more than the dynamics between these network nodes or the individuals who comprise them. Rather, it depicts a powerful unconscious influence on the life of the community that functions as its own entity—the phalanx.

(Interestingly, the writer Malcolm Gladwell alludes to the same concept in his 2008 book about super-achievers titled Outliers: The Story of Success. In his introductory chapter Gladwell discusses the people of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a community settled in the late 19th century by immigrants from the town of Roseto Valfortore in Italy. Noting a study 50 years earlier of the low incidence of illness in Roseto—where residents had fewer heart problems than those in towns nearby, no suicides, no alcoholism or drug addiction, little crime, and no one on welfare—Gladwell notes that ”these people were dying of old age, that is it.” When Dr. Stewart Wolfe, the author of this research, studied the health of the people of Roseto, he concluded that the “secret of Roseto was not diet or exercise or genes or location. It was Roseto itself.”)

How Owning The Moon Is Down Became a Capital Crime

In The Moon Is Down John Steinbeck describes his fictional town’s informal network system, the characters in that system and the roles they play, and the bewilderment and frustration of the invaders with the villagers, who don’t behave as expected. The following passage reflects the dramatic difference between a top-down authoritarian type in a position of power, Colonel Lanser, and the informal horizontal system represented by Mayor Orden, a community that is supposedly powerless:

Lanser: “Please co-operate with us for the good of all.” When Mayor Orden made no reply, “For the good of all,” Lanser repeated. “Will you?”
Orden: “This is a little town. I don’t know. The people are confused and so am I.”
Lanser: “But will you try to co-operate?”
Orden shook his head. “I don’t know. When the town makes up its mind what it wants to do, I’ll probably do that.”
Lanser: “But you are the authority.”
Orden smiled. “You won’t believe this, but it is true: authority is in the town. I don’t know how or why, but it is so. This means we cannot act as quickly as you can, but when a direction is set, we all act together. I am confused. I don’t know yet.”
Lanser said wearily, “I hope we can get along together. It will be so much easier for everyone. I hope we can trust you. I don’t like to think of the means the military will take to keep order.”
Orden was silent.
“I hope we can trust you,” Lanser repeated.
Orden put his finger in his ear and wiggled his hand. “I don’t know,” he said.

Steinbeck’s statement about the “authority being in the town” is profound. To Lanser’s amazement, power resides not in a person but in the phalanx. Without analyzing its nature or origin, Orden articulates the insight that something beyond himself exists in the community that would make the silent decision to resist rather than capitulate. Steinbeck’s fictional representation of the power of the phalanx had political consequences. European translations of The Moon Is Down ultimately became operational handbooks for French, Italian, Norwegian, and other resistance movements during World War II. The Germans understood the book’s power. Possessing a copy was punishable by death.

“Threads of Steel” in Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath

The use of such informal networks—“the gossamer threads of steel”—as a means of empowerment and survival occurs in other works by Steinbeck as well. As noted, Mack and the Boys in Cannery Row provide a good example. So do Danny and his paisanos in Tortilla Flat. In The Grapes of Wrath the power of informal networks is described by Tom Joad’s speech about injustice in the work camps and the need to build a movement—a phalanx—that is as invisible to the formal powers that control the field workers as that of the occupied villagers in The Moon Is Down. Tom expresses this promise to his mother:

“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.”

Here Steinbeck defines what we now call a community organizer, a person using informal networks to mobilize people in the worlds of social welfare, social justice, political empowerment, and institutional change. But Tom is also referring to a power beyond himself. Even when he could no longer “be around,” his influence would continue in the power of the phalanx of which he had become a part.

Migrant Camp and Cannery Row “Gathering Places”

As far as I am concerned, John Steinbeck was our first social ecologist. In addition to understanding the power of informal networks, the writer realized that an informal network needs somewhere to call home—and that home is found in “gathering places” like Danny’s house in Tortilla Flat and Doc’s lab in Cannery Row, where Mack and the Boys drop in and out at will, reinforcing the importance of having a place where everyone is equal, humor presides, information changes hands, and issues are discussed and resolved in a safe setting. Steinbeck’s relationship with the real-life marine biologist Ed Ricketts, with whom the writer learned to view the world through the lens of ecology, provided the inspiration for Mack and the vocabulary for the writer to translate the principles of marine ecology into the framework of social ecology—but that is a story for another time.

For now it is important to remember that in writing The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck knew he had to learn through observation and experience about the challenges faced by Dust Bowl migrants, how they dealt with these issues, and how they related to the new environment in which found themselves. In other words, Steinbeck needed a “discovery process”—yet another aspect of social ecology.

In addition to understanding the power of informal networks, the writer realized that an informal network needs somewhere to call home.

The writer’s mentor and guide in this process was Tom Collins, the administrator of Weedpatch, the model migrant camp built by the Farm Security Administration to which Steinbeck gained access. Here and in other outposts where migrants clustered, Steinbeck was seeking more than setting and background for his story; he became intimately involved in understanding the social organization of the people he was writing about. In the process he discovered their survival mechanisms: how they communicated, took care of one other, and managed conflicts internally, even as they appeared powerless to the outside world—like the townspeople in The Moon Is Down.

Steinbeck transforms this knowledge into a fictional migrant labor camp managed by the non-fictional Federal Resettlement Administration. This imaginary camp provides readers of The Grapes of Wrath with an opportunity to observe the migrants’ progression from the social-ecological chaos perpetrated by the Associated Farmers to the creation of social harmony, however fleeting, for families like the Joads. The camp becomes a haven where the Joads and their fellow migrants can predict, participate in, and control their environment in a way that offers stability and protection, however temporary.

Visiting Cannery Row and Applying Social Ecology

In classic “us-versus-them” tradition, Steinbeck uses the camp boundary as a way to illustrate the concept of internal control versus external threat. Inside the camp the migrants are empowered to make decisions about how it is operated. As demonstrated when outside goons try to create a disturbance at a dance, the camp’s residents understand the importance of maintaining and protecting the camp’s boundary. Outside the perimeter they are threatened, exploited, and without power. Inside they exercise control. Preventing or absorbing boundary intrusion is essential to maintaining predictability and control of one’s environment.

As with The Moon Is Down, reading The Grapes of Wrath nudged me down the path of social ecology, leading me to discover the role of “gathering places” and the importance of creating human geographic boundaries. Both concepts reflect the human need to feel secure; the recognition of how boundaries function, where they are placed, and what they mean in everyday life has become a key element of my writing about social ecology and my work as a consultant. The connection has also occasioned several visits to the current Cannery Row. (On one trip, shown here, I was photographed standing between Joan Resnick and Kevin Preister, director of the Center for Ecology and Public Policy.)

As noted, Steinbeck used the concepts of phalanx, “gathering place,” and boundaries—physical, social, and psychological—in books from Tortilla Flat to Sweet Thursday, a space of 20 years. In each he examines and employs the most basic elements of the human condition to make great stories from which I built the framework of a social ecology theory of my own: the human desire to gather together, to communicate, to feel safe, to care for one another, and to be empowered by using one’s environment creatively. This alone is sufficient cause for me to celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: Ideas

From New Paltz to Noel Coward: The Versatile Voice of the Actor Alan Brasington

April 4, 2014 by Administrative Team 1 Comment

Alan Brasington is an American actor and writer from New Paltz who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and lives in New York City. This week he begins his latest role as the voice of Steinbeck Now, reading the first of two short stories by Steve Hauk about John Steinbeck.

The road from college at SUNY New Paltz led through training in London to roles in Hollywood and on Broadway, where Alan performed in productions including the celebrated Noel Coward musical Oh Coward! Along the way he sang and danced, recorded and directed, and built a side business providing period props and costumes for major movies, commercial shows, and name-brand retailers. His current writing project is a novel. Like Steinbeck, he loves England and returns often. Like Steinbeck, his short stories and plays reflect universal human experience from an American point of view.

On stage Alan has played Scrooge and Shakespeare, danced and sung Noel Coward, and developed a distinctive Vincent-Price baritone rich in resonance, range, and New Paltz neutrality—an ability to reproduce multiple characters in recorded dialog without a give-away regional accent. John and Elaine Steinbeck’s New York ascendency coincided with Alan’s years in high school and college and at the Royal Academy, so the famous couple never met the aspiring young actor from New Paltz. But if they had, it’s easy to imagine Elaine spotting Alan (shown here performing in Oh Coward!) as a talent to watch.

Thanks to Alan Brasington’s literary leaning and Royal Academy training, Steve Hauk’s California short stories have found their ideal speaking voice. It happens to belong to a New Yorker from New Paltz with an ear for dialog, an eye for design, and a hand for writing imaginative short stories of his own. Ladies and gentlemen—meet Alan Brasington, the versatile voice of Steinbeck Now. Now sit back and enjoy his performance of “John and the River“—the first of Steve Hauk’s short stories about Steinbeck posted at SteinbeckNow.com.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: People

Collecting John Steinbeck: The Personal Story Behind a Bibliographical Catalogue

March 28, 2014 by Kenneth Holmes Leave a Comment

The recent publication of John Steinbeck: A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalogue of the Holmes Collection attracted attention from Steinbeck scholars and collectors and stimulated inquiries about why and how my spouse Karen and I began collecting books by John Steinbeck. This is the story behind our collection of Steinbeck works and the publication of our catalogue.

Collecting Books by John Steinbeck Becomes a Passion

We have been serious Steinbeck collectors for more than 50 years. Although we started with first editions of books by John Steinbeck and had no interest in other items, such as the little pamphlet publications of stories including The First Watch or St. Katy the Virgin, some smart antiquarian book dealers soon persuaded us to take a more comprehensive approach. Over time, this led us to look for anything we could find with a significant or interesting connection to John Steinbeck.

Approximately 20 years ago, after bringing home a little gem I had found on a dealer’s shelf in Phoenix, Arizona—only to discover I already had a copy (a common experience for collectors, repeated frequently)—I realized that our collection had become too big and complex to manage from memory or by using a card file. We needed a computerized listing of what we had and chose Microsoft Access (Version 1) to design the Forms, Queries, and Reports required to accommodate a description for each separate type of item–book, periodical, foreign edition, stage or screen adaptation, and so forth. This led to creation of a notebook of printouts of 14 separate Access Reports of the material in our possession. From that point to the present, the notebook and our working copy of the 1974 Goldstone and Payne bibliographical catalogue went with us on every book hunt.

But the Goldstone book is hard to find and out of date. Eight years ago we realized that we had accumulated enough new information about John Steinbeck and Steinbeck works to produce our own catalogue as a resource for other Steinbeck collectors and scholars around the world. We decided to pattern our catalogue on Goldstone and Payne, but to make it more useful by employing today’s technology. Thus began the long process of editing and revising our collection catalogue into publishable form. The result of our work has been reviewed in various Steinbeck publications, so I won’t detail the contents of our catalogue. Instead, I’d like to share the story of how we came to create it.

When Public Access, Not Making Money, Is the Purpose

Initially, we hoped to have our work produced and marketed by one of the publishers with a history of printing critical works on Steinbeck and began by contacting the publisher of the Goldstone catalogue, which was limited to 1,200 copies. They declined, explaining that, while in 1974 they could count on a substantial purchase by libraries, today fewer institutions were likely to buy a bibliographical catalogue. So we published our book ourselves at a modest print-run of 250 professionally manufactured copies. The price is under $40 and well within the budget of most buyers—a fact noted by reviewers.

One of the dealers who received a copy noticed this, too, commenting: “Looks great. Lots of work. Could have priced more.” He was right, of course: the book and its accompanying DVD are worth far more than the price we charge. And that leads me to our purpose in publishing John Steinbeck: A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalogue of the Holmes Collection. Money wasn’t our motivation. If we sell every copy we printed we could make a small profit. If not, the project was worth doing for its own sake.

Karen and I are proud of our collection; our catalogue is a permanent record of what we achieved in the course of pursuing our passion for collecting books by John Steinbeck. We gave copies to members of our family and to friends and acquaintances who helped or encouraged our labor of love. We also provided courtesy copies to 10 institutional libraries in the United States that house important collections of Steinbeck books, including the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. We encouraged each to make the electronic files of the catalogue—and of Steinbeck Firsts images by Phil Ralls and other details embedded in the book’s accompanying DVD—available to the public, free of charge, on their website. We want the broadest public distribution of the information we have assembled.

How Technology Helps Collectors Use the Catalogue

Collectors familiar with traditional bibliographical catalogues such as Goldstone’s are aware that they describe the materials they list using words and code. The title page of the first British edition of Tortilla Flat, for example, reads: “TORTILLA FLAT | By | JOHN STEINBECK | [colophon] | LONDON | WILLIAM HEINEMANN LIMITED,” with the code mark “|” designating each end of a line of print. The half-title and copyright pages are similarly described. Comparing the description to a physical book in hand is tedious, but images of relevant pages in the first British edition of Steinbeck books are easy to compare with those in a book in hand and much more interesting to consult for most collectors.

Karen and I dreamed of compiling a catalogue that included images of key pages, not just words. Unfortunately, we learned that this would make our catalogue too expensive and bulky for our intended users. Enter the inimitable Phil Ralls, a man whose enthusiasm for John Steinbeck led him to assemble Steinbeck Firsts, an amazing electronic file of images of Steinbeck material and other detailed information interesting to collectors of Steinbeck works. Phil generously agreed to allow us to include Steinbeck Firsts on a DVD disk tipped into every copy of our catalogue. References throughout the book to “See Ralls’ Images” direct users to this digital file. Following Phil’s untimely death, his daughter Whitney confirmed his family’s willingness for us to complete the collaborative project we had begun with our good friend.

We think the digital feature of our catalogue is a first. We had never seen or heard of a bibliographical catalogue issued with a disk of electronic files, so it seemed a significant step forward for scholars and collectors of Steinbeck books, and reviewers agreed. We even included a PDF file of the entire catalogue on the disk in the interest of access, portability, and quick reference to our index. (Search using the “find” feature in your computer’s Adobe Reader program to locate any name, word, or phrase in the catalogue.)

Another innovation reflecting our motive to help others collect, study, and write about books by John Steinbeck: We included additional information about a particular item described that we thought might be of interest to the scholarly or simply curious—far beyond the confines of conventional bibliograhical catalogues. For example, the section we devoted to stage and screen adaptations of Steinbeck works tells you about any awards they earned, including the Oscar nominations John Steinbeck received for several films.

Learn More About the New Catalogue of Steinbeck Works

To receive a free electronic brochure detailing the book’s contents, send me an email at kholmes22@nc.rr.com. Karen and I are always happy to hear from fellow collectors and scholars of John Steinbeck. Our contacts with many of these individuals, along with our collecting experiences, have rewarded us in ways we never imagined when we bought our first edition of John Steinbeck more than 50 years ago.

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With: People

Steinbeck Spirit in Children’s Art Created in Jacmel, Haiti

November 28, 2013 by Judy Hoffman 1 Comment

Three young artists from Jacmel, Haiti never heard of John Steinbeck before visiting the Bay Area recently to exhibit their art at the Institute of Mosaic Art in downtown Berkeley. Like Steinbeck’s writing, the quality of their painting, papier-mache, and mosaic art—sampled here—speaks for itself. But the story of how three Kreyol-speaking youth found themselves in John Steinbeck’s back yard would have pleased the author, a global thinker and forceful advocate for social justice, individual freedom, and creative art in every imaginable medium.

As with John Steinbeck, Art is Our Youth’s Key to Survival

My business is marketing research. My passions are children, art, and travel, which led me to Haiti. Four weeks after returning from my first trip to Jacmel in 2002, I incorporated ACFFC, a grassroots nonprofit inspired by the renowned Haitian-American artist Turgo Bastien. Nurturing children’s art talents at an early age provides a path for survival, self-expression, and self-sufficiency, particularly in Haiti. When I started Art Creation Foundation for Children (ACFFC) more than 10 years ago to provide a place for Jacmel, Haiti’s poorest children, introducing them to John Steinbeck was probably the last thing on my mind. My mission at the time was first-things-first: clothing, feeding, and schooling a handful of kids with no resources, no future, and frequently no food, wandering the ancient streets of Jacmel.

Jacmel was the architectural model for New Orleans (where John Steinbeck wed his second wife and where my son was married for the first and only, thank God, time). Although located only 1,300 miles from New Orleans in the poorest nation of the Western Hemisphere, Jacmel was once a prosperous port. But like John Steinbeck’s Salinas, its most talented children tend to migrate elsewhere. Children’s art training and community art projects are contributing to the recent revival of the city’s economy, reputation, and quality of life. This is the entrepreneurial part of our educational purpose.

Artists from Jacmel, Haiti Discover Steinbeck Country

Remember the Beatles’ line: “I get by with a little help from my friends”? That’s how Art Creation Foundation for Children grew.

From an initial group of four boys and four girls (we started and stayed with a 50/50 boy-girl rule), ACFFC has become an established organization that clothes, feeds, and schools more than 100 young people ages 3-22, also teaching older children how to make art and build homes using recycled materials such as styrofoam, bottles, and broken glass. Artists and businesses volunteer their time, money, and services, so ACFFC has remained extremely cost-effective. In Jacmel we employ an executive director, an assistant, kitchen and maintenance staff, an English teacher and three tutors, plus one full-time artist. Visiting artists and other professionals travel to Haiti from the U.S. to teach and lead children’s art programs for weeks at a time.

Laurel True, a celebrated mosaic artist and teacher who founded the Institute of Mosaic Art in Oakland and now lives in New Orleans, first brought the mosaic arts to our curriculum in Jacmel following the 2010 earthquake. She conceived and now directs our respected Mosaique Jacmel initiative, the reason 10 of our youth were invited to travel to the U.S. in November for a collaborative project with the Touissant L’Ouverture High School for Arts and Social Justice in Delray Beach, Florida. The American Embassy’s Office of Public Diplomacy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti was a project sponsor. U.S. Representative Lois Frankel, also an artist and advocate for children’s art, helped with arrangements and met with the group.

Mosaic Art Celebration: John Steinbeck’s Kind of Party

Three ACFFC youth also made their way to the Bay Area as part of the tour: mosaic artists and team leaders Michou Joissaint and Jepte Milfort, along with photographer Fedno Lubin. More than 100 Bay Area mosaic artists, collectors, and supporters attended the reception in their honor at the Institute of Mosaic Arts hosted by Ilse Cordoni, IMA’s new owner, and Erin Rogers, the Hewlett-Packard Corporation’s Environment Program Officer and an ACFFC board member who traveled to Jacmel, Haiti, with Laurel True following the earthquake.

Some speculate that John Steinbeck was a citizen spy for the CIA. Whether that’s true or not, I think he would have liked the story of how three young artists from Haiti discovered Steinbeck Country on their cultural mission to California. He had an educated eye for art and loved to draw and make things, so I know that he would find these examples of ACFFC mosaic art, papier-mache, and painting equally appealing. I hope you do as well. If you would like to learn more, make suggestions, or support ACFFC’s work in Jacmel, we would love to hear from you.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With: Artists

My Journey West to the Dark Side of Steinbeck Country

November 2, 2013 by Robert John Andrews Leave a Comment

For this my Miata was made. A man, a towel, a mug, and rag top down. She may have struggled driving over the silt and rocks of the Monument Valley trail. She may have sneezed from the exhaust fumes of flatbeds and semi-trucks. But now my little car was in road rally heaven. This is what she was made for. Her adrenalin was up. Tight on the turns. Anyone can speed up on the straightaway. I love accelerating on curves. It is the story of my life. By the way, in case you haven’t heard, Convertible Top Down is mandatory on the California coast. Citizens approved this rule in one of their incessant ballot-box initiatives. Proposition 42, I do believe—but who else other than Californians is counting?

It had taken hours to drive up Route 1 from the Ventura Highway to Steinbeck Country north of Santa Barbara, wending, weaving, winding along the switch-back curves along the Pacific Coast, some with guard rails, some without. Then Moro Bay. Seal Point with hundreds of seals lolling about on their backs and bellies, tossing sand over themselves with their fat flippers. A few miles beyond, the overweight ostentation of Hearst Castle, built high above the surrounding countryside, trying mightily to look impressive. No, the seals are impressive. The expanse of the Pacific is impressive. Your castle is gaudy.

Americans don’t need guillotines; we have the American Dream.

Hey, buddy, somebody should tell you: This is America. We don’t have castles. We don’t buy into barons, lords, and sultans. Wealthy citizens might try to re-create Europe’s feudal system, but we peasants have a way of rising up and kicking out aristocrats. Americans don’t need guillotines; we have the American Dream.

The jagged coastline of California is always the winner in a beauty contest between nature and humankind. Green grass and lush vegetation crouch up against cliffs and rocks below. Curling waves of cobalt blue crash in bright, white spray. Streaks of aquamarine signal changing currents and temperatures. Big Creek Bridge. The 1932 Bixby Bridge. Then Big Sur with its towering trees and hairpin turns. An elven glen—a place of sprites, hikers, and Zen spiritual seekers. John Steinbeck once wrote this to Adlai Stevenson: “Having too many things they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul.”

‘Having too many things they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul.’

North of Carmel, at Monterey, a right turn to Salinas, my final destination.

From Colorado Shepherd to Salinas Priest

Father James Ezell, the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, drove up to greet me as I loitered in front of the National Steinbeck Center. Steinbeck once suggested a bowling alley if the people of his home town insisted on putting his name on a building. I followed Jim in my car to the current rectory of St. Paul’s, where I would spend the night.

As a boy John Steinbeck served as an acolyte at St. Paul’s when the church was located downtown, on a corner now occupied by an empty parking lot. The St. Paul’s rectory described in East of Eden still exists; today it serves as a law office. They say that Cesar Chavez, champion of the United Farm Workers, held meetings at St. Paul’s with the support of the church’s rector in 1970. Wealthy growers left the church as a result. Some churches want their ministers to be mascots. Or marionettes. But it doesn’t, or shouldn’t, work that way. The moment a pastor worries about losing his or her position is the time that pastor deserves to lose his or her position.

Some churches want their ministers to be mascots. Or marionettes. But it doesn’t, or shouldn’t, work that way.

Oh, I can’t really call the current rector of St. Paul’s “Father Ezell.” He’s Spiff. He’s Jim. He’s been my friend since junior high school. We first met near Detroit on my family’s cross country drive in our old Dodge Motor Home. Our mothers had been cheerleaders together at Westfield High, and my brother remembers seeing a photograph of the prettiest girl he ever saw—Jim’s sister Kathy—at their house. He wanted to meet her, but she was away at tennis camp. He ended up marrying her anyway. Jim, who was a hood with rolled up T-shirt sleeves and a cigarette pack in high school, once worked as a shepherd in Colorado before finishing Alfred College, where he met his wife Lynn.

Later the priesthood beckoned. His first parish was in Asheville, North Carolina, followed by decades working as a chaplain, teacher of Christian education and social studies, and boarding home master to 64 boys in Brisbane, Australia, who come in from the bush for their schooling. The children of parents with ranches requiring two days to cross by motorcycle, their only educational alternative was short-wave radio. A far cry from Steinbeck’s ranchers, a close, clubby group.

Life East of Eden in Steinbeck’s Paradise

Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley is located between the Santa Lucia Mountains and the Gabilan Range, named for the hawks that soar among the hills, predators on the prowl around Fremont Peak. With some justice it’s called the Salad Bowl of the world. Its rich alluvial soil produces most of the lettuce used in the salads we eat. Plus strawberries, potatoes, grapes, and more.

The town of Salinas was already an agricultural center when John Steinbeck was grew up there. Today visitors can take an East of Eden walking tour, following Kate’s path to the bank to the corner of Castroville (now Market) and Main streets where she deposits the earnings from the bordello she owns. Steinbeck wasn’t always welcomed home after he left Salinas, where copies of The Grapes of Wrath—the book that exposed the plight of migrant workers a generation before Cesar Chavez—were burned in the street. Steinbeck’s was the disturbed and disturbing sadness of someone who knew how to see. Learn to look, he urged readers. Just observe. Shove aside presumptions and preconceptions. Steinbeck called it “non-teleological thinking,” and not everyone in Salinas understood.

Steinbeck called it ‘non-teleological thinking,’ and not everyone in Salinas understood.

Twelve miles south of Salinas, down the valley, is Soledad, a name that translates as both solitude and loneliness. It is the setting of Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men. George and Lennie are ranch hands wandering from work to work, hanging on to the shards of their dream about a little piece of land of their own and rabbits for Lennie. Brawn coupled with ignorance spells sorrow. Lennie kills Curly’s wife because her panic frightens him. George does what he must to protect the friend he promised he would look after from being lynched by Curley’s gang. Trapped men. Imprisoned men. Lonely men.

Spiff reminds me that Soledad today is famous as the home of Soledad prison. The prison on one side, agriculture on the other. Families following their jailbird sons, husbands, and boyfriends have led to a recent increase in gang violence throughout the valley. The day after I left Salinas for San Francisco, police and federal agents in an action called Operation Knockout arrested 37 members of the Norteno drug gang in a neighborhood near the rectory of suburban St. Paul’s.

While waiting for Jim to meet me outside the National Steinbeck Center on my first day in Salinas, I watched an elderly man poke his walking stick into a trash bin. He wore a turquoise cap, a blue and white windbreaker, and grey slacks. Rummaging through the garbage, he pulled out a plastic bottle, dumped the remnants of the soda, squashed it with his sneaker, and stuck it into his plastic bag. He moved on, harvesting from other bins located along Main Street. If you don’t have a job and gather enough bottles and plastic, you can make a few bucks from recycling.

If you don’t have a job and gather enough bottles and plastic, you can make a few bucks from recycling.

Following dinner with Jim, Lynn, and their daughter at Clint Eastwood’s Restaurant in Carmel-by-the Sea—and a decent night’s sleep—I awoke to my first rain in 3,000 miles on the road. Before Jim dropped me off at the Center and drove back to his offices to prepare for a funeral, he took me to meet his friend the Methodist pastor. In partnership with local Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, the Methodists and Episcopalians of Salinas operate a drop-in center for hundreds of homeless men, women, and children. That day these folk waited inside, out of the rain, for the free lunch the churches provide daily. They were going to have enchilada casserole.

The homeless of Salinas could also change their wet clothes for dry garments from the clothing ministry. The Methodist church library, which once featured religious books read by few, now serves as a food pantry where canned goods line the bookshelves. Tillich and Barth made way for Heinz and Old El Paso sauce. Counseling services are also provided, along with volunteers who simply listen to these homeless souls tell their stories. A listening ministry. Homelessness, too, means isolation, loneliness, no one to talk with. A van pulled into the cramped church parking area. Clinica de Salud. This was dentist week. Salinas churches also participate in the I-Help ministry, rounding up the homeless in vans and bringing them to area churches for a safe, warm night off the streets.

The Truth of Grapes of Wrath Marches On

This is the California where the story told in The Grapes of Wrath ends. Between 300,000 and 500,000 Dust Bowl migrants, Steinbeck’s “Harvest Gypsies,” left ruined farms in towns like Sallisaw, Oklahoma, drove the Route 66 exodus trail, and huddled together in caravans of the desperate and disillusioned, hoping to reap the abundance of California as laborers for hire. Back home they suffered from bad agricultural practices, sustained drought, and financial indebtedness. They arrived in California to experience hostile police, apocalyptic floods, and even deeper debt.

One diary of a worker on display at the National Steinbeck Center reads: April 21. Work began today. The price was raised to .30 per hamper. Made 14 hampers which made us $4.20. April 22. Something different. Rain. Rained all day. Couldn’t do anything but stay in tent and read.

I double-checked my pocket calendar. Today was April 20. Seventy-five years ago this destitute diarist was filling hampers for .30 cents. Tomorrow I’ll be taking my daughter and her boyfriend out to an expensive dinner in downtown San Francisco. I’ll use my credit card.

April 20. Later I heard the news on the radio about the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana. Eco-disaster. Another Steinbeck theme.

Sallisaw comes from the French word for salt, named for the salt deposits along the streams used by settlers and buffalo hunters to preserve their meat. Salinas also means salt. Salt preserves. Salt brings out flavor. Salt can also heal. Salt is the reason our tears sting.

While I was touring the National Steinbeck Center on my second visit—excited by the touch of a kindred spirit when I recognized Rocinante, the vehicle Steinbeck used to drive America in Travels with Charley—I glanced out the glass entranceway and saw through the drizzle the same fellow in the same clothes harvesting from the same trash bins I’d seen when I arrived in Salinas. Steinbeck would have found it ironic that while I was touring a wing of the museum named for him, local Rotarians arrived for lunch and a program provided by the facility.

Perhaps the Rotarians with their 4-Way Test took time to view the exhibit of photographs in the center’s side hall. I did. It consisted of pictures from around the world—from Vietnam, Haiti, Iraq, Columbia, and beyond—showing victims of war. The display included stories and quotations from the subjects of the photographs. One image depicted an elderly woman, her skin stretched, punctured, and distorted from war wounds. Her body bore the divots of callused causes. Her caption read: My body took the brunt of the bullets but my family was hit hardest. . . . my grandchildren go to bed hungry and crying.

I felt like crying.

The Way Is Open, the Choice Is Ours

Timshel. Steinbeck’s version of a Hebrew word meaning Thou mayest. The way is open. The choice is ours. The word Steinbeck thought was the most important word in the world.

The Grapes of Wrath begins with a drought and ends in a flood. Steinbeck based his fictional flood on a real event that occurred in Visalia, California, 100 miles north of Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley. In the novel what is left of the Joad family huddles together in a rain-soaked barn. They have lost everything except each other. Their grandchild has died and their children go to bed hungry. The Joads’ plight continues today in the sufferings of the grandmother in the photograph, the homeless in the church vans, and the old man in the cap and windbreaker on Main Street, Salinas. Timshel.

The paintings of Albert Bierstadt, shown here, provide visual counterpoint that John Steinbeck would have appreciated. Like Steinbeck, the great Hudson River-Rocky Mountasin School painter was a prolific artist of German heritage who found inspiration in the sublimity of California’s coast and mountains. He died on on February 18, 1902. Steinbeck was born nine days later.