Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley and Monterey Bay Today

At San Jose State University, April’s John Steinbeck Month

April 4, 2014 by Paul Douglass 2 Comments

This is the year of The Grapes of Wrath—its 75th anniversary—and the cause for self-reflection for readers of John Steinbeck, including me. My version is both personal and professional. I teach at San Jose State University, one of the world’s top centers of John Steinbeck research, and for the second time I am serving as interim director of the University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies while Nicholas Taylor, the permanent director, is on leave.

John Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University

When I accepted the same post on a permanent basis in 2005, I was—to be frank—wet behind the ears, despite my apprenticeship 10 years earlier filling in for Susan Shillinglaw, the Steinbeck Studies Center director, during her sabbatical. I had a solid enough background teaching and writing about American Modernism, the era that includes John Steinbeck, although too often Steinbeck is ignored in academic discussion of his less popularly-read contemporaries such as Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot. But I made some embarrassing errors anyway—like revealing my lack of familiarity with the 1950 stage production of Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s third, last, and least-successful experiment with the play-novella form following Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down.

Of course, I had huge shoes to fill when I became the permanent director in 2005. Susan Shillinglaw’s stature as a John Steinbeck scholar was enormous when she stepped down as director of the Center at San Jose State University, where she continues to teach, and it has continued to grow. Part of my learning curve in her footsteps was to deepen my knowledge of John Steinbeck’s life and work, particularly the agony and transcendence embodied in The Grapes of Wrath—a book that continues to create more heat than light for certain readers in Oklahoma and California, and the excuse for latter-day book-banning in places where controversial classics such as Huckleberry Finn are deemed morally unwise or politically incorrect.

Celebrating The Grapes of Wrath in Pictures and in Words

When Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath on April 14, 1939, John Steinbeck became a national celebrity. The following year his book won the Pulitzer Prize, John Ford made the movie starring Henry Fonda, and Steinbeck’s notoriety spread throughout a world already at war. To mark the 75th anniversary of the novel’s debut on the international stage this month, San Jose State University will sponsor a series of celebrations in honor of Steinbeck’s masterpiece—a work that is integral to California history, relevant to American society, and as well known as Huckleberry Finn to readers as far away as Russia and Japan.

As noted in an earlier post, an exhibition of colorful covers selected from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath is currently on display at the Center for Steinbeck Studies. The exhibit, assembled by Archivist Peter Van Coutren, is accompanied by information about the novel and its background. I recommend it to anyone visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on the San Jose State University campus.

Thanks to the efforts of San Jose State University faculty members such as Scot Guenter, the SJSU Campus Reading Program will sponsor a Grapes of Wrath “readathon”—a public performance of the entire novel, starting at 6:00 p.m. on April 16 and ending 24 hours later, more or less. Individuals who participate as readers will receive a gift, along with listing on the Spartans Care Read-a-thon Honor Roll. (In case you’re wondering, “Spartans” is the designation for San Jose State University’s sports teams.) Signing up is easy.

Reprising the Stage Version of Steinbeck’s Masterpiece

Thanks to the hard work of David Kahn, the chair of San Jose State University’s Department of TV, Radio, Film and Theater Arts, and his colleague Barnaby Dallas, the Coordinator of Productions, a main attraction will be the stage production of The Grapes of Wrath at the Hal Todd Theatre on the San Jose State University campus. The play—Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel—is directed by Laura Long and runs April 11-12 and April 15-19. The April 16 performance features a pre-performance reception and a post-play “talkback” with Susan Shillinglaw about her new book On Reading The Grapes of Wrath. Tickets can be purchased online.

Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 1988 and ran for three years. It also traveled to London and New York, where it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of 1991. Galati received two 1990 Tony Awards—Best Play and Best Direction—for his work, which also garnered a half-dozen acting award nominations for cast members Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, and Lois Smith. Galati, a former professor at Northwestern University, was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2004. San Jose State University produced his Grapes of Wrath in the 1990s, so this month’s run is a celebratory reprise.

In May there will be more—but I’ll save that for another time. Who said April was the cruelest month? At San Jose State University, it’s the coolest—thanks to John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath.

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

Roger Williams University Honors The Grapes of Wrath in Liberty’s Rhode Island

March 14, 2014 by Christine S. Fagan 5 Comments

America’s 2014 celebration of The Grapes of Wrath, written in California and published in 1939, became bicoastal on February 1, when Roger Williams University kicked off a two-month exhibition devoted to the novel’s historical context and contemporary relevance with a lecture by Robert DeMott, an international authority on John Steinbeck’s life and work. The location was propitious: Rhode Island, the home of Roger Williams University, began in 1636 as Providence Plantation, a refuge for minorities fleeing religious persecution in neighboring colonies. Rhode Island retains the progressive spirit of Roger Williams, its colonial founder—a spirit that permeates The Grapes of Wrath and the literature of social protest.

As a collections and exhibitions manager for the Roger Williams University Library, I had the pleasure of collaborating in curating the exhibition with west coast colleagues at San Jose State University and with partners closer to Rhode Island: the Library of Congress; the University of Virginia; Redwood Library in Newport, near the Roger Williams campus; and individuals including Robert DeMott, a distinguished professor emeritus at Ohio University. Rhode Island’s celebration of The Grapes of Wrath is part of Roger Williams University’s Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Memorial Program, an annual series of events honoring great works of literature now in its 14th year.

The Grapes of Wrath in Image, Text, and Facsimile

The exhibition—open to the public through March 31—is designed around themes such as the Dust Bowl and migrant workers and employs historical and contemporary photographs to document the background of the writing, publication, and aftermath of The Grapes of Wrath. The Dust Bowl section is composed primarily of Farm Security Administration photographs from the period. The section on California migrant workers today includes photographs from The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers by Rick Nahmias. The book focus of the exhibition features facsimile selections from the digitized manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath, written in Steinbeck’s cramped, hard-to-read hand at his home in the Santa Cruz mountains, far from Rhode Island but close to his novel’s California context.

Why Rhode Island Loves Carol Henning Steinbeck

Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s first wife, was an artist and activist who served as the author’s amanuensis and adviser. The title of The Grapes of Wrath was her idea, and she was an intuitive editor. At Roger Williams University, we chose to honor her talent and independence with samples of her drawings and sculpture. Along with Susan Shillinglaw’s recent biography of the Steinbeck-Henning marriage, the book section includes Working Days, Robert DeMott’s meticulous edition of the journal entries made by Steinbeck during and following the writing of The Grapes of Wrath. Like our colleagues at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies in San Jose, California, we chose cover art from foreign-language editions of The Grapes of Wrath that illustrate specific passages from Working Days.

Roger Williams Welcomes You in Person or Online

Rhode Island is small, friendly, and accessible. Visit us as we celebrate The Grapes of Wrath in the state with the motto Hope founded by Roger Williams—like Steinbeck, an advocate of liberty and apostle of hope who changed the course of history. If you can’t come to the Roger Williams University campus, share the experience online. Our exhibition page features a section not included in the physical exhibition: the adoption of the Library Bill of Rights by the American Library Association. A direct result of the censorship issues associated with The Grapes of Wrath, this pioneering document is powerful proof that The Grapes of Wrath matters, the point and purpose of liberty-loving Rhode Island’s bicoastal collaboration.

Filed Under: Featured, Steinbeck Events Tagged With: Events

San Jose State University Has The Grapes of Wrath Covered for 75th Anniversary

February 14, 2014 by Administrative Team 4 Comments

Since 1938, The Grapes of Wrath has been translated into more than 25 languages. In February, San Jose State University kicked off the novel’s 75th anniversary with an exhibit of 15 colorful covers selected from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath housed at San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Each cover is featured on a different poster designed specifically for the exhibit; each poster includes a quotation from The Grapes of Wrath or from Working Days, Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott’s edition of journal entries made by Steinbeck during the writing and controversial aftermath of the novel and movie starring Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda (shown here). Unfortunately for collectors, the posters are one-of-a-kind items destined for the Center’s extensive archive of Grapes of Wrath manuscripts and memorabilia. Fortunately, the 75th anniversary Grapes of Wrath exhibit is free and open to the public on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, a joint venture of San Jose State University and the City of San Jose, California.

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

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

January 24, 2014 by William Ray 3 Comments

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

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

The William Blake-John Steinbeck-Roy Bentley Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starlight Taxi: High-Flying Poetry Printed with Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 17, 2014 by William Ray 5 Comments

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

Mission Santa Clara: Perfect for Artful Organ Music

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

Steinbeck and Pipe Organs: Music for Life and for Death

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

Familiar Organ Music Inspired by Nights in Monterey

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

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

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

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

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

His Greatest Generation: The Lessons of John Steinbeck’s World War II Reporting

January 17, 2014 by J.F. McKenna 5 Comments

In staid Victorian England, Matthew Arnold, the author of Dover Beach, described journalism as “literature in a hurry.” Six decades and two world wars later, John Steinbeck confirmed Arnold’s lofty assessment of the correspondent’s craft, creating an enduring account of what he saw in Europe and Africa during the darkest days of World War II.

The Greatest Generation Goes to War

A member of the Greatest Generation who wrote and read poetry throughout his life, Steinbeck understood Arnold’s image of “a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.” In his Steinbeck biography, the poet-novelist Jay Parini points out the acknowledgment by Newsweek magazine that the famous novelist was also a capable journalist, that his “cold grey eyes didn’t miss a trick, that with scarcely any note-taking he soaked up information like a sponge, wrote very fast on a portable typewriter, and became haywire if interrupted.”

Steinbeck understood Arnold’s image of ‘a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

More than a decade after World War II, Viking Press released Once There Was a War, a collection of Steinbeck’s war reporting from June to December 1943—reporting that inserted the 41-year-old author of The Grapes of Wrath into the global madness that began when France and England declared war on Nazi Germany in 1938 and ended seven years later with the surrender of Japan, Germany’s chief ally.

Filing human interest stories in the gritty, humorous style of the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle, Steinbeck was stationed in London before shipping off to North Africa, where he experienced first hand the immediate aftermath of the Allied liberation of southern Italy. By that time Italy, the third element in the Axis triangle, had formally surrendered, although the battle for Nazi-occupied northern Italy would continue into 1944, costing literally countless British, American, and European lives.

Writing Steinbeck Biography in the World War II Years

Although considered by some a minor component of the Steinbeck canon, Once There Was a War nonetheless illustrates how John Steinbeck, working under the most difficult and dangerous professional conditions, was always conscious of leveraging his strengths as a writer engaged with the world. Steinbeck biography written since World War II acknowledges this facet of the author’s diverse career in varied ways.

In The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer—the Bible of Steinbeck biography—Jackson Benson notes of Steinbeck’s World War II reporting that the author “would not try to compete for the hard news but would work to see things that had been overlooked or to see differently things that had already been reported.” Benson convincingly connects Steinbeck’s qualities as a fiction writer to his journalism: “He would become a correspondent of perspective, just as he had been a novelist of perspective—not telling us new, but seeing it new. In his concern for the commonplace and in his preference for the ordinary soldier, he became in many ways a correspondent much like the war journalist he admired the most, Ernie Pyle.”

‘He became in many ways a correspondent much like the war journalist he admired the most, Ernie Pyle.’

Focusing on a perturbed period of Steinbeck biography in John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939-1944, Roy Simmonds speculates about the aging author’s ulterior motive in signing on as a front line correspondent at the height of World War II: “There is little doubt that within defined parameters he seized the opportunity to use the dispatches—through the mouths of the servicemen he met, or sometimes writing on their general behalf—to draw attention to many matters he felt needed publicity and urgent rectification.”

‘There is little doubt that within defined parameters he seized the opportunity to use the dispatches—through the mouths of the servicemen he met, or sometimes writing on their general behalf—to draw attention to many matters he felt needed publicity and urgent rectification.’

Whatever his motivation, however, John Steinbeck knew how to enfold moments of simple human existence in a lyricism that rises above the horror of modern slaughter, as almost any sample of his World War II dispatches demonstrates:

“LONDON, July 10, 1943—People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them.

“’It’s the glass,’ says one man, ‘the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle. . . . My dog broke a window the other day and my wife swept up the glass and a cold shiver went over me. It was a moment before I could trace the reason for it.’

“The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.”

. . . .

“On the imaginary line the children stand and watch the cargo come out. . . . How they cluster about an American soldier who has come off the ship! They want gum. Much as the British may deplore the gum-chewing habit, their children find it delightful. There are semi-professional gum beggars among the children.

“’Penny, mister?’ has given way to ‘Goom, mister?’

“When you have gum you have something permanent, something you can use day after day and even trade when you are tired of it. Candy is ephemeral. One moment you have candy, and the next moment you haven’t. But gum is real property.

“The grubby little hands are held up to the soldier and the chorus swells.’Goom, mister?’”

. . . .

“MEDITERRANEAN THEATER, October 6, 1943—You can’t see much of a battle. Those paintings reproduced in history books which show long lines of advancing troops are either idealized or else times and battles have changed. The account in the morning papers of the battle of yesterday was not seen by the correspondent, but was put together from reports.

“What the correspondent really saw was dust and the nasty burst of shells, low bushes and slit trenches. He lay on his stomach, if he had any sense, and watched ants crawling among the little sticks on the sand dune, and his nose was so close to the ants that their progress was interfered by it.”

John Steinbeck and Dad: Why World War III is Unthinkable

As John Steinbeck noted in his introduction, his World War II dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune record events as they occurred. “But on reading this reportage,” Steinbeck adds, “my memory becomes alive to the other things, which also did happen and were not reported. That they were not reported was partly a matter of orders, partly traditional, and largely because there was a huge and gassy thing called the War Effort.”

Roy Simmonds, the author of the only Steinbeck biography by an Englishman and a survivor of the Blitz, notes that Steinbeck understood but resented the “huge and gassy thing” produced by the fog of war: “Talking to [enlisted] men, Steinbeck discovers that what also troubles many of them are the lies, both of commission and omission, being fed to the folks back home.”

Steinbeck understood but resented the ‘huge and gassy thing’ produced by the fog of war.

From the body of the writer’s World War II reporting, one thing can be said for certain: John Steinbeck chronicled and explored humanity’s most destructive behavior with the same honesty and intensity that he invested in mankind’s most noble pursuits. Despite his reluctance to revisit his war reporting for publication in 1958—a reticence confirmed by every Steinbeck biography of note—the dispatches he produced for immediate domestic consumption stand as an enduring testament, not only for the Greatest Generation but for every generation that followed.

The dispatches he produced for immediate domestic consumption stand as an enduring testament, not only for the Greatest Generation but for every generation that followed.

My father-in-law, a proud World War II naval veteran named Jerry Hollingsworth, believes that another global war is simply unthinkable. In a recent message he echoed John Steinbeck, who explained this belief in 1958, in the introduction to Viking’s collection of his World War II dispatches:

“The next war, if we are so stupid as to let it happen, will be the last of any kind. There will be no one left to remember anything. And if that is how stupid we are, we do not, in a biologic sense, deserve to survive.”

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

A Mild Concussion: A Play in Two Acts by Steve Hauk

January 3, 2014 by Steve Hauk 7 Comments

Major creators, whether in the arts or sciences, are often victims of their own creativity. Literary work is plagiarized, inventions are stolen. The creative force behind television, Philo Farnsworth, is one example of the latter. The computer age is no exception. Stories are legion of ideas stolen or plagiarized. In most cases the usurpers are not particularly creative but adept at business and gaining an edge, while the creators are often inept when it comes to the world of business, or simply not interested. There have been exceptions to this, Thomas Edison among them. This play is about a creative genius lacking the ruthlessness to rank profit over an idealistic outlook. In some ways he sets himself up for failure, which is no reason that he should be exploited. The play is very loosely based on something that really happened, but does not pretend in any way to be a history. As I write early in the directions, “all is in doubt.” Yet not quite all is. There is no doubt Ryan was brilliant and idealistic and that he was exploited and eventually destroyed. If it was in part through his own character flaws, it was as much through those who preyed on him for their own profit and glorification.

A Mild Concussion

The Rapid Rise and Long Fall
of an Idealistic Computer Genius

A play in two acts
by Steve Hauk

Characters:
RYAN, a computer scientist
DONNA, his wife
ROBIN, once worked for Ryan
JOHN PERSONS, a microcomputer entrepreneur
JIM, associate of Ryan’s
FIRST MAN, representing a giant company
SECOND MAN, the same
A YOUNG NURSE

Act One
The First Day

Music. Hard rock. Dancing. Sensual and menacing figures. All
figures except Ryan suggested by shadows. Ryan staggers, falls,
striking his head. He wears jeans, cowboy boots, a vest. This is a
memory play. A slight haze over everything, a surreal quality.
Nothing is absolutely real. Just glimmers of reality and the
perception of what might or might not have been. All is in doubt.

A siren. Figures _ shadows or silhouettes _ gather around Ryan’s
body. He struggles to his knees. Siren dies out. Figures back
away. Then the figure of a woman approaches; Ryan holds out
his hand, she takes it. He stands.

Blackout. Music stops. Lighting up to indicate the spare
representation of a living room, a few pieces of furniture, a small
bar. Ryan in a chair, his eyes closed. No longer wearing the vest.
The same woman sits by him, holds a damp cloth to his forehead.

Ryan is in his early fifties. He is slim, roughly handsome. Until a
year or two ago he was in fine physical condition, but since then
he has gone through particularly bad times and shows it _ some
darkness under his eyes _ which can still sparkle at times with a
high degree of intelligence and humor _ gauntness in his face,
and a slowness of movement brought on by the fall he has just
taken, and alcoholism.

She _ Robin _ is a woman in her early forties, attractive. She is
dressed for an evening out of respectable club and/or bar-hoping
_ but the night has dragged on excessively and punishingly and
she and her clothing show it.

On the periphery, in their own light and surrounded by shadow,
two men in suits, standing together; Jim and Donna, standing
together; John Persons, alone; the Nurse, alone.

A suspended window indicates darkness. The outside lighting will
move toward dawn at the end of the first act.

ROBIN (To audience): Ryan makes me think of a bird called
killdeer. He’s wounded _ in many ways _ and the Killdeer is a bird
which continually plays the wounded creature . . . This time,
though, Ryan is truly wounded, and that also eventually happens
to the killdeer . . . (Smiles.) Of course.

DONNA: I’m not surprised Ryan found a woman to take care of
him _ he was always good at that. God knows, I did it long
enough and helped him to achieve what he achieved. Isn’t that
what the first spouse always does? And then is thrown aside?
(Pause.) But he’s a gifted man . . . and sometimes I miss him,
especially his humor.

ROBIN: I hadn’t seen him for years, more than two decades.
Then, last night, I saw him on the floor of a local club, after a
terrible fall _ that’s what they think it might have been, a fall. It
could have been something else. There will probably be an
investigation. He opened his eyes, all these people around _
and recognized me! I couldn’t believe it. After all those years.

DONNA: Ryan died two days after the fall.

NURSE: He had been misdiagnosed . . . If they had brought me in
a little earlier . . . well, I take it back _ if the doctors missed it,
who’s to say I wouldn’t have, too . . . On the other hand, who’s to
say I would . . .

JIM: I had the feeling he was dead before he died . . . He gave
away so much in his life . . . it became a habit . . . and then he
gave away his life.

FIRST MAN IN SUIT: That’s meant for us _ his “giving away”
things.

SECOND MAN: Don’t believe it.

FIRST MAN: Slander, grounds for a lawsuit.

A moment, then they all look at Persons.

PERSONS: No comment _ for the moment. (Pause.)

Ryan opens his eyes. Robin removes cloth from
his forehead, looks at him.

ROBIN: Go slowly, please . . . you’re injured.

RYAN: No, I’m . . .

ROBIN (Just noticing): There’s blood, on the back of your head _
where you struck your head. Lift your head, please . . .

She raises his head, dabs at the blood with the
cloth.

RYAN (Pause): I drink . . . An everyday thing . . . What’s a
killdeer?

ROBIN: Oh . . . I thought you were . . .

RYAN: Out?

ROBIN: Yes . . .

RYAN: Well, I was . . . that doesn’t mean . . . (Studies her a
moment): I didn’t _ don’t know _ about this bird . . . Why is it
called a Killdeer?

ROBIN: That’s the sound it makes! `Killdeer! Killdeer!’ Especially
when it flies off after faking an injury.

RYAN (Pause): Why would it do that . . . what you just said _
fake an injury?

ROBIN: Well, it’s a silly bird _ a beautiful bird but a silly bird. It
makes it’s nest on the ground . . . in dunes . . . on a beach. So
very vulnerable, the nest and the eggs, and when they are born,
the chicks . . . If you approach the nest, the parents will limp off,
faking a broken wing or leg or whatever . . . lead you away from
the nest. Amazingly, it works. It would have to or the killdeer . . .
as a species . . . would be extinct.

RYAN: So not so silly.

ROBIN (A beat): No, I guess not completely silly _ when you think
about it. The ruse is clever, the silly part is making its nest on the
ground.

RYAN: Sounds like some people, doesn’t it? . . . Building on flood
plains, earthquake fault lines . . . you name it. . . . Anyway, I may
be silly but I’m not extinct _ yet.

ROBIN: You’re famous.

RYAN: You think so.

ROBN: Oh, sure, cover of Fortune, Time.

RYAN: People say that. I didn’t make Time . . . People imagine
that.

ROBIN: Well, Fortune, Newsweek?

RYAN (Pause): Maybe . . . It all blurs. Long time ago in any case.
(After a moment, looks toward window.) What time is it?

ROBIN: I don’t know . . . Wednesday, approaching dawn . . . very
early . . .

RYAN: This will sound stupid _ really dumb _ but the year? . . .
wait, I know _ 1995?

ROBIN (Smiles): You get an `A.’

RYAN (Thinks a moment, then with a sheepish smile) : I’m afraid I
don’t know the month.

ROBIN: July, late July.

RYAN (Pause.) I apologize for this because I know I should, but
. . . but I’m afraid I don’t know you.

ROBIN (Pause): I worked for you, a long time ago. (Pause.) My
name’s Robin.

RYAN: You worked for me _ the early days?

ROBIN: There were a lot of us; I was one of dozens. No reason
for you to remember me . . . I wasn’t one of the `geniuses’. . . But
you were encouraging. I was young, I didn’t know how rare that
would be _ encouragement. I’ve always appreciated the way you
treated me . . . the others.

RYAN: Thank you . . . I’m in my home? (Smiles.) I mean, it feels
familiar _ is it?

ROBIN (Nods): I drove you here, in your car. You gave me
directions . . . when you could.

RYAN: It was a long haul . . . difficult, I’m sure . . . sorry. Drunk
passenger, no street lights to speak of . . . People get lost trying
to find this place in the daytime . . . sober. (Pause.) So . . . what
happened?

ROBIN: You don’t remember anything?

Ryan starts to stand.

ROBIN: I wouldn’t . . .

RYAN: I need to . . . (He takes a few steps, shaky; she hovers
nearby, at first a hand on his arm.) So, I drank too much . . .

ROBIN: I’m sorry _ did you hear me when I said you struck your head?

RYAN (Somewhat forced blase’): I was drinking _ right? _ and
stumbled . . .

ROBIN: You were drinking, yes _ but add to that, you took a
nasty, heavy fall . . . I really can’t overemphasize . . . I heard the
thud across the room _ over loud music, loud talking . . . We all
did . . . Fifty, sixty people, some drunk . . . I saw you on the floor.
That’s when I recognized you. (Pause.) I really do think we should
get you to a hospital. (Pause.) Since we arrived here you’ve been
talking to people . . . people who are not here.

RYAN: Have I? . . . been doing that lately . . . Anyone in
particular?

ROBIN: Your wife, I mean your first wife . . . Donna . . . she
treated me well, too . . . your children . . . other voices . . .
(Pause.) You don’t remember anything before? . . . An ambulance
was called, you refused attention . . . said you’d be OK.

RYAN: I was with? . . .

ROBIN: You were alone as far as I could tell. (Pause.) Well, no
one claimed you. I just happened to be there. You recognized me
. . . (A beat; a little embarrassed.) . . . then. . . for a moment at
least . . . Held your hand out to me . . . I was surprised you’d
remember me . . .

RYAN: Did I say your name?

ROBIN: No. You didn’t know it . . . I brought you here, to your
home, at your request, since there didn’t seem to be anyone else.
I was happy to do it because . . . Well, you seemed very alone for
. . . (Pause.)

RYAN: For . . . ?

ROBIN: For who . . . whom you are . . . (Pause.) But now . . .

RYAN: Yes?

ROBIN: I don’t think you should have refused medical attention
. . . You should have let them . . . the paramedics . . . take you to
the hospital.

RYAN: Well, I don’t remember and I’m OK . . .

ROBIN: That’s what I thought at first . . . hoped . . . sober you up
_ everything’s fine . . . I’ve done it before _ not with you, other
guys . . . it’s well known you drink . . . but _ you see _ you’ve
been in and out of consciousness . . . several times . . . the last
few hours . . . So I think . . .

RYAN (Simply): It’s happened before.

ROBIN: Has it? . . . . Really?. . . Pass out, come back like that?
Really? . . . I need to tell you, this is the first time you’ve been . . .
conversant.

RYAN (Small smile): With you, you mean?

ROBIN (Also smiles): Right, you’ve been conversant with others,
but not me. (Pause.) And the police _ they’ve called. Several
times. They want to talk to you _ when you’re able.

RYAN (Pause, serious): What do the police want?

ROBIN: To know what happened, naturally . . . Stand still. (She
pushes the hair off his forehead.) I don’t know how you can see
and we don’t want you tripping . . . and because it was . . . violent
. . . your accident . . . and because of who you, who you are . . .

RYAN: Was, you mean, before it all went to hell . . . I’m not
anyone anymore . . . to speak of . . .

He looks at her a moment, attracted, but moves
away.

ROBIN : Where are you going?

RYAN: The bar _ something to hold onto . . . not to drink . . .

ROBIN: You’re talking about . . . it went to hell six, seven years
ago?

RYAN: Around. Little longer. I don’t remember a lot at the best of
times . . . lately . . . a kind of ongoing fog . . . And now . . .
(Pause.) Hey, are you a reporter? . . . (Smiles.) I was on my way
then . . . injured but not faking it, no kill . . . what do you call that
bird?

ROBIN: Killdeer. It’s called a killdeer. A precocial species _ as in
precocious _ chicks born with their eyes open, able to run in
minutes . . . from predators.

RYAN (A beat): No killdeer, not me . . . I get caught . . . Why do I
have a headache?

ROBIN: Well, that fall.

RYAN: Oh, right . . . slipped my mind, not a good sign.

ROBIN (Pause): It was _ what? _ fifteen, twenty years ago you
got the idea?

RYAN (Suspicious): How do you know this?

ROBIN (Smiles to reassure him): I followed your career _ in the
papers, the computer magazines. I’m sure thousands of people
know that.

RYAN: Sorry, you’re right, of course . . . Stupid of me. (Pause.)
I’ve been . . well, no reason, really, to care anymore, what gets
out . . .

ROBIN (Pause): Years later _ about the time you did it and
became famous _ I read a quote by you, “It will change the world
as we know it.” And it did and I thought . . .“I knew him once . . .”

RYAN (Looks at her a moment, smiles): “The computer world as
we know it.”

ROBIN: An operating system to tie all personal computers in the
world into . . . (Genuinely curious.) I’ve always wondered _ do you
mind if I ask? _ if I’d put a few thousand in at that time _ not that I
had it _ what would I be worth today? A million? Ten? Something
like that?

RYAN: But your life would have spiraled downward, Robin. You’d
be a major depression case with the rest of us. The industry is
littered with bodies _ and souls.

ROBIN: You changed the world.

RYAN (Politely correcting): The personal computer world.

ROBIN: Well, almost the same thing.

RYAN (Considers pouring a drink, pushing a glass around bar
surface): But not quite . . . No one remembers anyway.

ROBIN: I do _ was it exciting?

RYAN (A beat _ his natural, broad humor beginning to return,
turning away from the glass): Oh, sure _ most exciting moment in
my life, except the time I visited Niagara Falls. Anyway, your ten
million, that’s stretching it. That’s about what what’s his name
offered me for the whole company a year ago.

ROBIN: Who’s what’s his name?

RYAN: You know . . .

ROBIN: Who?

RYAN: What’s his name . . . (Indicates his head and trouble
thinking.) . . . Oh, boy . . . guess I did hit it pretty hard . . . guy with
the glasses and slicked down hair . . . Most depressing day in my
life, except the time I visited Philadelphia. I said _ this was very
late in the game, understand _ just last year if I recall _ heyday
over, bottom falling out, I fly to see him _ I say _

Lighting change. Robin gone. John Persons, older,
steps forward, in a rumpled gray suitcoat over a red V-neck
sweater. We will see him at various times at age twenty-two
or so, to his present age of forty-three or forty-four.
He wears rumpled slacks and a red V-neck sweater over a
white button-down; when he plays older he wears the gray
suitcoat he has on now; when younger, he does not wear the
suit coat. Persons is average looking, his hair slicked down
but not enough to hold down his natural cowlick; he wears
glasses and could probably lose a few pounds. He is a very
intense, difficult-to-ignore presence. He is pushy, combative,
quick on his feet.

RYAN: How can you offer so little after what you did _

PERSONS: What?

RYAN: You know . . .

PERSONS: No, I don’t. Is this why you wanted to see me, Ryan,
recriminations? . . . because I’m busy and _

Starts to leave.

RYAN: No, don’t go, John, please . . . We’re in trouble and _

PERSONS (Turning back to him; subtly aggressive): You arrive
unannounced . . . Do you think I can just drop every _ who’s in
trouble?

RYAN: The company and, and _

PERSONS: Sure it is. I know that. The industry knows that. Why
you’re here. Are you blaming us?

RYAN: Because _

PERSONS: Look!

RYAN: No, I don’t _

PERSONS: You want _ need _ to sell?

RYAN (Some pain): I can’t remember this _

PERSONS: What? Remember what?

Light dims on Persons as he takes a few
steps back. Robin back in light, moving
close to Ryan.

RYAN: _ remember this now. I don’t want to . . . not now . . . head
throbbing . . .

ROBIN: Remember what? . . . Are you OK?

RYAN (Smiles sheepishly, a beat): Sorry . . .

ROBIN: I’m calling the hospital . . .

RYAN: No, please _ get the hospital involved and the police will
follow for sure; this business, everyone hears everything . . . I
need to sort this out . . . come to some . . . resolution . . . He
called. Persons. Years ago. When I first met him. The first time.
No one’d heard of him.

ROBIN: Persons? Do you mean John Persons? Everyone in the
world has heard of John Persons.

RYAN: Not then. I was on all those covers before Persons . . .
The idea was still forming . . . coming together as a concept. I was
close . . . and excited. Floating, every day _ floating in this unreal
world of ecstatic anticipation. Everything was better . . . food . . .
sex . . . driving fast . . . flying! . . . I couldn’t wait to get back to the
tool shed and the computer and begin composing. I hadn’t been
so excited since the day . . . (Searching.)

ROBIN: You saw Niagara Falls?

RYAN (Gives her a funny look): Yes _ Niagara Falls! How can
anyone forget Niagara Falls? . . . I don’t know what’s going on
with my head. So one day I received a call from . . . (Searching.)

ROBIN: Persons.

RYAN: Yes _ Persons! He had been thinking of forming a
company _ inspired by mine! . . . That’s what he said . . . he was
in town. Could he drop by? Donna welcomes everyone. We
invited him to dinner, to spend the night. Persons was so young. I
was, back then? . . .

ROBIN: Twenty-nine, thirty?

RYAN: Thank you, about that _ almost decrepit. He was twenty-one,
-two, something like that . . . looked fifteen . . .

Lighting change. Robin backs away. Persons, appearing
much younger, minus suit coat, and Donna step forward.
She is dark, attractive, wears dark slacks and a white
blouse.

PERSONS: . . . kind of you to invite me . . .

RYAN: . . . sounded twelve.

PERSONS: I know it was sudden . . . but driving up the coast
. . . passing though . . . lovely house . . .

RYAN: Not much room . . . two small kids . . . I work in a tool
shed _

PERSONS: Well, we’re all struggling, aren’t we? . . . Looking for
our niche _

RYAN: _ and the payments . . .

PERSONS: _ pioneer days. I heard someone say that recently,
good description. We’re like (Indicating he and Ryan.) Lewis and
Clark . . . (Smiles.) Navigating upriver . . . against the current . . .
Anyway, money shouldn’t be a problem long for you . . . from
what I hear.

DONNA: What do you hear?

They both look at her.

RYAN: Drink, John?

PERSONS: Thank you, but I don’t drink . . . You do?

RYAN: Now and then. Sure.

PERSONS: I don’t disapprove, not at all. But surprising, someone
with your gifts . . . Something could happen to that talent, couldn’t
it? Isn’t that a concern . . . with genius, you don’t want to . . . rock
the boat, do you?. . .

RYAN (Uncomfortable): No. Well, I . . . maybe I do . . .

PERSONS: They say you’re working on an interesting operating
system . . . intriguing concept . . . bold application . . . almost
visionary . . .

RYAN: I wish. Right now I’m just at the point of, of _

DONNA: Shouldn’t we eat? . . . John? . . . Ryan?. . . (Pause.)
Hungry?

They look at her. Persons considers. Lighting change
as Donna and Persons step back, just Ryan and Robin.

RYAN: So he stays over. We talked and talked. He stayed up
late. Maybe the whole night. I got up to go to the john about _
well, like this hour, whatever that is _ and saw the light under his
door . . . I heard him on his computer, tip-tapping away. He left
early, before we woke . . . (Pause.) He left a thank you note . . .

Ryan unsteadily walks front, distracted.

ROBIN: He was typing?. . .

RYAN: Something . . . (Puzzles, smiles.) . . . The thank you note?
. . . At the time . . . at the time as I recall . . . I didn’t think anything
of it. Well, maybe that he was composing, being creative . . . Now
I know _ how wrong that was . . . His mind doesn’t work that way
. . . Instead, he . . . (Pause.) Sorry . . . But I envied him at that
moment, if that was what I was thinking about. Everything’s fuzzy
now, so can’t be sure of anything . . . that fall _ that’s what you
said, right, I took a fall? (Pause.) What I meant is, I can’t work at
night. Too bad. For me the night’s for other things. Why I get in
trouble _ for instance, last night _ (Smiles at her.) _ if we’re to
believe the rumors. (Pause.) I need to work on that . . . once I
clear my head. Once this . . . headache . . . goes away . . .
(Pause.) Donna wasn’t sure about him . . . reserved judgement.
Suspicious, as I recall . . . she has better instincts . . . than I . . .
He showed up several times over the next year or so . . . usually
unannounced . . . as I got closer to . . . to . . . (Can’t find the
word.)

ROBIN: `Composing’ ? _ Composing it?

RYAN: Yes! _ as it became more clear . . . clearer . . . as I began
to finally visualize it . . . (With difficulty.) . . . to conceptualize . . .
the program . . . he must have known, an instinct . . . But then I
think . . . (Depressed.) I’m sorry, what did I just say?

Light dimming. Persons approaching, wearing the
rumpled suit coat, older demeanor.

PERSONS: Are you blaming us?

RYAN: What?

PERSONS: Are you saying we stole from you? Because if that is
what you are saying _

RYAN: No, of course not. Did you?

ROBIN: What?

Lighting change as Persons steps back.

RYAN: Oh, thinking of something else. Not very well. Something
that happened more recently _ not clear what, but it nags at me
. . . Wondering _ just at this moment _ if I was pushed.

ROBIN: Your fall? . . . . Last night? . . . You said you didn’t
remember.

RYAN: Something’s come back . . . a glimmer . . . and feeling . . .
a soreness in my back, as if someone had shoved me. Perhaps
that precipitated the fall. Of course, I was so bombed, it wouldn’t
have taken much, much of a shove . . . I’ve dissipated badly . . .
muscle tone goes, balance follows . . . I think that’s the sequence
. . .

ROBIN: They said . . . (Pause.)

RYAN: Said . . . ?

ROBIN: . . . you knocked over a stool, falling. Perhaps that
accounts for _

RYAN: Who said?

ROBIN: Television news.

RYAN: Television? Television has it? (Looking off, looking back.)
And . . . what did television say again?

ROBIN: That you knocked over a stool _ when you fell.

RYAN: And so the soreness in my back . . . Sure. I guess . . . But
why did I fall?

Spot on Persons, in suit coat, as he comes forward
a few steps, chin out.

PERSONS: Are you blaming us, Ryan?

RYAN: What?

PERSONS: Are you saying we killed you? _ that is, rather,
caused your fall? . . . Because, Ryan, if that’s what you are
saying _

RYAN: No! Yes! Did you? (Pause, looks at Robin.) Did I just say
something? I did, didn’t I? It’s . . . I’m dizzy . . .

Persons steps back, spot off.

RYAN (Looking at audience, but to himself): John Steinbeck got a
call one day from his hometown _ Salinas . . . California . . . It’s,
it’s 1938, or around then and he’s in a little cottage twenty miles
away on the coast putting the finishing touches on “The Grapes
of Wrath.” A woman _ friend for years, high school classmate _
calls and says, “John, what’s this talk you think people are after
you because of what you’re writing? It’s not so! We all love you!
We’re having a picnic today in Salinas. Please come. We want to
see you, like the old days.” . . . So he went and it was great for
him _ a picnic in the sun . . . life rich, heady _ the promise of a
great novel . . . friends, warmth, wine . . . and then two cowboys
approach and one sticks a gun under his chin and says, “If you
write another fucking word about farm workers being exploited,
we’ll blow your fucking head off.” (Pause.) Well, they didn’t,
because all those people were there . . . otherwise . . . and
Steinbeck overcomes . . . the trauma . . . and writes for another
thirty years . . . but the gun stuck under his chin was real . . . it
could have gone off and we wouldn’t have. . . what? . . . “East of
Eden.” (Pause.) He thinks about such things. He knows himself
and he knows what he might do if he lives. He moves to the East
Coast _ to New York. He applies for and receives a license to . . .
naturally . . . own a gun. (Pause.)

Lighting change.

ROBIN (Coming forward, to audience): All kinds of stories came
out about what happened to Ryan that night . . . That a biker
brawl led to his death . . . He died from a heart attack . . . blow to
the head . . . suicide . . .

Lighting change.

RYAN: Slow suicide then . . . (Sexy smile.) Did we ever . . . Robin,
did we . . . ?

ROBIN (Smiles): You were faithful in those days . . . you looked
me up and down a time or two . . .

RYAN (Pause): Did I really ask what I think I just asked you or
am I . . .

ROBIN: You asked it.

RYAN (Smiles): But I didn’t try anything _ good and good. We
were close then . . . Donna and I . . . (Ryan temporarily loses his
balance, grabs a chair before Robin can get to him.) Fuck . . .
Ryan is temporarily in his own light.

RYAN: So he showed up a few months later . . . We’re all still
young . . . early 1974, maybe `73, somewhere in there. Right
decade, I’m sure. (Smiles, mocking himself.) Twentieth Century.
He . . . You know . . . (Frustrated.) . . . him! (Coming toward
Robin, searching _ before Robin can speak.) No! I’ll get it for
God’s sake! _ Persons! . . . John Persons. (Visibly relaxes.)
That’s it, you know . . . something eludes you, think of something
else . . . I used to advise my students to try it. That’s the way I
compose. Easy . . . not thinking directly of the problem . . .
Drifting, in a way . . .

A phone rings.

ROBIN: I’ll just be a moment, do not, Ryan . . . do not do anything
. . .

Lighting change. Persons, young, and Donna
approach as Robin moves off.

RYAN (Suddenly exuberant): . . . drifting, in a way . . . freeing the
mind! . . .

PERSONS (Eager): And then _ ?

RYAN: . . . I try, John, to let my subconscious kick in. Well, the
opposite of “try,” really . . . open the way for it is better . . . and
when it does _

PERSONS: When it does?

Donna turns away. Ryan and Persons, momentarily
sharing this world, do not notice.

RYAN: It’s like _ you know, John _ it’s so wonderful! It’s like _ it’s
what I imagine it’s like _ to compose music. It pours out, the
binaries becoming notes. And look _ when you look at it, isn’t the
computer keyboard like a piano? A chess board? Hell _ a lit up jet
control panel as you cross the country in the middle of the night
with the whole country sleeping below you . . . There’s a beauty
there, isn’t there? . . . Don’t you think . . . a kind of elegance?

PERSONS: Yes, yes, I think so, Ryan _ I know what you are
saying. I’ve felt this myself! . . . Those moments! . . .

RYAN: Or am I overstating it?

PERSONS: No, no, I don’t think so.

RYAN: I knew you’d understand, John.

PERSONS: Well, sure . . . it’s something . . . we both . . .

RYAN: We can talk.

PERSONS: Of course.

DONNA: How . . . how do you compose, John?

Lighting change, Persons and Donna
step back. Robin returns.

ROBIN: Well, that’s interesting _ now there’s a story that has you
falling off a ladder.

RYAN (A beat): What story?

ROBIN: A call just now about your fall last night.

RYAN: Oh, yes, the fall . . . I forget, but maybe that’s a blessing. I
thought the biker brawl story seemed . . . I mean, I ride, but . . .

ROBIN: But you were wearing a biker’s vest, Ryan . . . with
Harley-Davidson patches. I took it off you because there was
blood . . .

RYAN (Pause): Oh, well, sure, I wear that vest sometimes, but
would that cause a brawl? . . . (Shakes his head as if to clear it.)
Someone hit me, that’s what’s implied? Some biker? . . . And that
last one again _ ?

ROBIN: Falling off a ladder.

Ryan’s own light, dim, softly pulsing.

RYAN (Amused): Falling off a ladder in a `nightclub’? What would
I be doing on a ladder in a nightclub? Adjusting the lights?
(Grudgingly, smiles.) Well, I stick my nose in . . . Wait, you’ll see,
someday they’ll program lighting _ lighting “concerts,” on a disc,
gorgeous compositions of _ (Catches himself.) . . . All I
remember is _ all I remember is my head on the floor, looking up
at dancing bodies, thinking _ or maybe they were brawling bikers
looking like dancers _ I remember thinking, “Please do not step
on my head . . . Please, oh God, please do not let them kick me in
the head . . . I still have use for it . . . It has more to do . . . more to
. . . finish . . . ”

A silence. Lighting back to normal.

ROBIN: Do you?

RYAN: Have more to do . . . finish? Of course. (Trying to focus.)
People think you do something . . . you should be content with
that . . . even if that thing has been taken from you . . . Do you
think I want to spend the rest of my life . . . not doing what I was
meant to do? Not . . . testing myself?

ROBIN (Softly): Why did you go alone, Ryan?

RYAN: Go where?

ROBIN: The club . . the fall.

RYAN: Oh, the fall. Did I go alone? Did I? I don’t remember.

ROBIN: No one has come forward . . .

RYAN: To say they were with me? Then I guess I was alone.
What are you saying? I’m not popular? . . . That’s not news.
Word’s out I’m bad luck. The man who could have . . . could have
had it all . . . but let it slip through his fingers. (Pause, rubs his
forehead.) I did, didn’t I? . . . That’s what happened, isn’t it? . . . I
blew it. Made all the wrong moves.

ROBIN: I don’t know. I told you, I only know what I read . . .

RYAN: A lot of that _ this I do remember _ is bullshit. The stuff
with the suits, for instance _

ROBIN: Suits?

RYAN: Suits. The kind of people . . . I’m . . . I’ve always been . . .
uncomfortable with . . .

Lighting change. Donna and Jim step forward.

Jim is thirty-five, a straight-forward, uncomplicated
appearing person, casually dressed.

JIM: The “suits” are here, Ryan.

DONNA: They’ve taken a room in town.

JIM: They want to meet with you.

RYAN: The suits . . . Oh really, I can’t . . . You do it . . .

JIM: They want to talk to you. You’re the one they’ve come to see.

RYAN: I was about to leave for the track.

JIM: Look, Ryan . . . these are very powerful men. And this is an
important thing we are talking about, something we have been
working a long time to achieve . . .

DONNA: Jim’s right. It’s an opportunity that may not come around
again, Ryan. You should think about that.

JIM: The fruit of your genius, Ryan.

DONNA: They’ve come to us. That’s a point . . . Still, if you . . .

JIM (Glances at her, mildly disapproving): Not us to them. We
have the leverage at this point.

DONNA (Glances at him): That’s so, but it is Ryan’s creation.

JIM: But it’s for the taking now.

RYAN (Pause): We don’t need them. Money’s not a problem.
We’re doing fine. We’re growing.

JIM: Ryan, we’re talking more than fine _ we’re talking huge.
We’re talking the world _ the PC world. They can place our
operating system in every personal computer _

RYAN: _ In the world? Well, this is very exciting. As exciting as
the first time I saw _

DONNA (Cutting him off): Ryan, this is serious. Whatever
decision you make, I am with you. But I want you to think about it,
I don’t want regrets.

Donna waits. Ryan gives no sign of acknowledging
the gravity of the situation.

DONNA: Ryan?

RYAN: I’m sorry, Donna. I’m going to the track _ I’m going to take
the Lamborghini around the oval a few times.

DONNA: That is what you are going to do now _ race your
Lamborghini around the track?

Ryan nods.

DONNA (To Jim, who’s about to protest): No, let him be. (To
Ryan.) Do as you wish. I just hope this is what you really want.

She steps back. Jim looks after her, looks toward

Ryan, waits.

RYAN: I can think when I am behind the wheel. It . . . frees me up.
I thought she understood that.

Jim nods, shrugs, steps back.

Lighting change. Ryan and Robin.

ROBIN: Did you go racing that day?

RYAN: I think so.

ROBIN: Think so?

RYAN: The most traumatic episode in your life _ not dramatic,
traumatic _ do you remember everything? In the proper
sequence, scale . . . ? I’ve never been clear about that day . . . or
days. I wasn’t sure what had happened the day after it happened.
Time shifts . . . Events . . . incidents recede or become
exaggerated . . . What you imagine becomes real, and reality
becomes dreamlike . . . surreal . . .

Lighting change.

RYAN: . . . and you begin to doubt it.

DONNA (Not moving forward): Or, Ryan . . .

RYAN: Yes?

DONNA: Perhaps you simply don’t want to remember.

RYAN (Smiles): There’s that, too.

Lighting change.

ROBIN: What?

RYAN: Maybe I simply don’t want to remember.

ROBIN: And the fall _ ?

RYAN: Has nothing to do with my memory of that . . . those days
. . . (Frustrated.) I don’t think it does. (Pause.) I went racing _ no,
driving fast, racing myself. But the suits were there when I
returned. That part has been left out of the story. . . It’s a story
they love repeating. “The day he could have owned the world, he
drove around and around in circles” . . . It’s catchy _ even amuses
me _ and makes me look like an idiot . . . So of course they keep
it out there, keep it alive . . . Makes it seem I deserve what
happened to me . . . Justifies what they did . . . But I met with the
suits, that day or the next. Whenever the hell it was. I think I finally
realized it was a business _ as I drove around the track I realized
it was a business. It was as if the words were stenciled on the
windshield of the Lamborghini: It Is Business, Ryan. This is
Business.

ROBIN: What else could it have been?

RYAN: I’m not sure _ I had been a teacher, for a government
institution, what did I know about business? _ you teach, you
grade papers _ you hope you inspire and instill passion _ you get
your paycheck. Maybe I thought it was discovery . . . innovation
. . . education . . . fun! . . . those things . . . Things I would never
associate with what people call business. Anyway, it was new . . .
a new science; in a way an art, part mathematics part
composition, like music _ business hadn’t fully sunk its claws into
it . . . yet. It _ software, the concept of it _ was still . . . virgin . . .
territory. No one knew how to copyright it, protect it . . . No one
knew if you could copyright it. All I knew was suddenly I was
doing it _ and doing it well! And it was consuming me! (Pause.) As
I remember. (Pause.) If I remember. So we met . . .
Lighting change. Misty, shadowy. The two men in
suits approach. Their faces kept in shadow.

RYAN: There had been three suits. One had left _ to report back
to suit headquarters, I suppose. So we met _ and I knew it was
business. (To them.) You propose? I think you have a proposal
for me.

FIRST MAN: You’ve kept us waiting, you know.

RYAN (Uncomfortable, awkward, but trying to assert himself):
Sorry. I was involved in something . . . Tell me what’s on your
minds.

SECOND MAN: You know who we are and you kept us waiting
anyway.

FIRST MAN: We flew across the continent to meet with you.

SECOND MAN: In the company jet _ one of the company jets.

FIRST MAN: Don Hatcher had to return to the home office

RYAN: Don Hatcher? . . .

FIRST MAN: There were three of us. Now there are two.

SECOND MAN: Don’s reporting on what’s gone on here.

FIRST MAN: Which has been very little. The story is you brushed
us off to drive a car around a track.

RYAN (Smiles, more at ease _ “Who wouldn’t skip a meeting to
drive a Lamborghini?”): A Lamborghini, a red Lamborghini.

SECOND MAN: We heard that you like speed.

FIRST MAN: Is that a death wish kind of thing _ the love of
speed?

RYAN (Smiling, offhand): Naw . . . if it was?

FIRST MAN: Well, then we’d have to think about it. (To Second
Man.) Wouldn’t we?

SECOND MAN: Would we? Why?

FIRST MAN: It would make a difference.

SECOND MAN: I don’t see that. Once an agreement is signed . . .

FIRST MAN: Oh, right.

RYAN (A beat): I’m sorry, you had a proposal . . .

The two men look at each other.

FIRST MAN: Right.

SECOND MAN: Righto.

FIRST MAN: We have developed a hell of a new personal
computer, if we do say so _ the _

SECOND MAN (Warning): Richard.

FIRST MAN: Well . . . model name’s not important.

Donna approaches. They look at her a moment.

SECOND MAN: Can do anything.

FIRST MAN: Or could _

SECOND MAN: _ if it had an operating software system. We
mean, a system worthy of its excellence.

FIRST MAN (Pause): What we have is, frankly . . . limited.
A general silence.

DONNA: So then it can’t do much?

Ryan smiles.

FIRST MAN (Irritated she’d have a question): What’s that?

DONNA: Your new computer, as is.

FIRST MAN (Clears throat, somewhat hostile): Well, sure _ that’s
the point. But it could.

SECOND MAN: If it had a superior operating system.

A general silence.

DONNA: A brain, you mean.

Ryan smiles.

FIRST MAN (A beat): Well . . .

SECOND MAN: You might call it that. Maybe nerve system’s
better.

DONNA: Otherwise it functions . . . well?. . .

FIRST MAN: The new computer?

SECOND MAN: Of course it does!

FIRST MAN: No problem there.

DONNA: Adds numbers, subtracts and multiplies, too, but can’t
communicate, you mean. Other than that . . .

SECOND MAN (Rattled, irritated): Look, the thing is: it’s all there,
except for _

FIRST MAN: _ you know.

SECOND MAN: And John Persons says you have one.

RYAN: John said that?

FIRST MAN: Yes.

SECOND MAN: He recommended you.

RYAN: John Persons?

FIRST MAN: Yes.

RYAN (A beat): John’s a friend.

Donna looks away.

FIRST MAN: Well . . .

SECOND MAN: If you say so.

RYAN (After a pause): So you talked to him _ John Persons _
first?

FIRST MAN (After looking at other man): Yes.

DONNA (Turning back quickly): Why didn’t you go with him?

FIRST MAN: With . . . ?

RYAN: Donna means with John’s operating system _ for your
new computer.

DONNA: If he has one. Does he?

SECOND MAN (A beat): Look, I don’t think we can talk about
that.

FIRST MAN: John wouldn’t like that.

SECOND MAN: We keep our dealings _ (Looks at other man.) _
what?

FIRST MAN: Compartmentalized.

SECOND MAN (Nodding): Compartmentalized.

FIRST MAN: It’s the ethical thing to do.

DONNA: He knows we have one.

FIRST MAN: That’s between you and him.

SECOND MAN: Not us.

DONNA: He knows about us, we don’t know about him.

FIRST MAN: Look _ (They’d rather not talk to her; pointedly to
Ryan): _ we’d really like to work something out. We’d like to do
business . . . (Again excluding Donna.) . . . with you.

SECOND MAN (Only to Ryan): There’s something here for both
sides.

RYAN: Which is _ (A flicker of anxiety _ and perhaps pain _
registers on his face.) . . . specifically?

SECOND MAN (Registers on this, a beat): Well . . . excuse me,
you’re OK?

RYAN: Yes.

SECOND MAN: You’re sure?

RYAN: Yes.

The two men exchange looks, making a mental
note of this. Donna has missed it, but realizing
she has missed something she moves protectively
to Ryan’s side.

DONNA: Ryan?

FIRST MAN (To Donna): Excuse me. (To Ryan after a glance at
his friend _ this has been rehearsed.) Before we proceed _

SECOND MAN: _ we need you to sign _

FIRST MAN: _ a nondisclosure agreement.

He pulls a folded paper from his suit coat
pocket.

SECOND MAN: It simply says this meeting _

FIRST MAN: _ never took place _

SECOND MAN: _ generally and, of course, as pertains to the
particulars.

A general silence. First Man taps the paper in the
palm of his other hand. Ryan, unsteady, and Donna
look at each other.

RYAN: We’re not here then.

FIRST MAN: That’s a good way of looking at it.

RYAN: If we’re not here, how can we sign it?

SECOND MAN (Shrugs _ “What can I say?”): That’s another way
of looking at it.

DONNA: What are the particulars we wouldn’t be disclosing?

FIRST MAN (To Ryan): Our business arrangement, naturally.

RYAN: So . . . our operating system . . . our software . . . (Falters,
takes a deep breath.) Sorry . . . in your computers?

FIRST MAN: Yes.

The two men exchange glances.

SECOND MAN: That’s it.

FIRST MAN: We don’t discuss it at this time . . . With people, the
press . . . Eventually it becomes known. When we’re protected.
Both sides.

RYAN: What kind of royalty are we . . . not talking about?

SECOND MAN (After a glance at Donna): How does _ would you
feel better about the disclosure _ about this agreement _ if I
whisper it? (Approaches Ryan, whispers in his ear, then backs
away.) How does that strike you?

RYAN (Pause): As . . . as not enough.

FIRST MAN: You realize we are talking several million computers
_ just to begin with! Take that number and multiply by _

DONNA (Impatiently, suddenly): He’s a mathematics genius, for
God’s sake. He figured the numbers _ tabulated them,
extrapolated them and square-rooted them _ the instant they
were out of your mouth. He doesn’t think about it _ it just
happens. Do you understand him at all? Do you?
A general silence; they shift uncomfortably.

RYAN (Pause): Donna . . . (A beat): We’re being dictated to, but
. . .

DONNA: Ryan, remember, it’s just money.

SECOND MAN: But?

RYAN (To Donna): Meaning?

DONNA: Don’t make money the determining factor _ whatever
you decide to do.

FIRST MAN: So, but?

RYAN: I’ll consider the offer, we’ll consider the offer _ if . . .

FIRST MAN: If?

RYAN: _ if you sign a nondisclosure agreement with us. (Pause.)
I think that’s fair.

SECOND MAN (A beat): It’s out of the question. We don’t sign
disclosure agreements of any kind, Ryan . . . It is Ryan, isn’t it?
. . . (A beat.) Because, Ryan, you don’t seem to understand us at
all.

FIRST MAN: If you’ll take a moment and look at this document,
you will see it states we are allowed unfettered _ (To Second
Man.) Is that the word? Yes, unfettered use of any information we
may wish to use, privately or publicly, on you and/or your
company.

SECOND MAN: And as you might understand, signing a
nondisclosure agreement with you would contradict the unfettered
provision.

First Man taps document on his hand as
others stand silent. Ryan and Donna look
at each other.

DONNA (Finally; British accent, to Ryan only, smiling): Lovely.

RYAN (Smiles and nods at her and them; British accent): Quite, I
say. . . (He staggers, stumbles forward, grabbing his chest _
stricken) I say! . . .

DONNA: Ryan!

Lighting change as Donna repeats Ryan’s name. Ryan
and Robin. Robin goes to Ryan’s assistance. Ryan takes
a moment to regain his balance and composure.

RYAN (Smiling sheepishly): Clumsy lately, but I think that’s what
happened . . .

ROBIN (Holding his arm): And just happened again _ which was?

RYAN: Irregular heartbeat.

ROBIN: Still?

RYAN: No _ just imagination . . . memory . . . (Moves away from
her.) No reason to stumble like that . . . then . . . I recovered in
moments . . . then, like now . . . I guess I was _ am _ being like
that shore bird of yours _ the, the _ ?

ROBIN: Killdeer. It’s _ they’re called _ killdeer.

RYAN: Right _ killdeer. Drawing the predators away, away from
the nest, pretending an injury, a broken wing or something _ isn’t
that what you said? (Smiles.) Scared me, that’s all. I didn’t know
what it was . . . then.

ROBIN: Your heart?

RYAN (Nods): That was the first time. Well, a few hours earlier,
on the track just a quick few beats, taking a curve in the red
Lamborghini . . . I dismissed it. Thought it had something to do
with the coming meeting with the suits. (Pause, laughs.) Thought
it was me composing _ da-da-da, da da. Binary rhythms, you
know. (Smiles, looking at her.) Or perhaps you don’t. Then, at the
suits meeting, I pretty well knew it was something else.

ROBIN: And that had something to do with your decision _ your
health?

RYAN: What decision?

ROBIN: Not to go with them.

RYAN: I didn’t go with them because a lump sum, for the rights to
my work into perpetuity, seemed like a raw deal. Maybe health
figures into perpetuity, I don’t know.

ROBIN: I thought they offered a royalties deal. Isn’t that what you
said?

RYAN: Did they? Did I? I don’t know. I don’t remember that . . .

ROBIN: You said a royalty on each computer, with the computers
numbering into the millions.

RYAN: No. I think . . . I think . . . Sorry, head’s throbbing a bit . . .
I think I asked for a limited royalty contract and they said “lump
sum, perpetuity. Plus, sign the disclosure.” If I indicated otherwise
. . . did I?

Robin nods.

RYAN: I don’t know, maybe that happened. (Pause.) Anyway,
whatever they offered _ we weren’t going to get by the disclosure
requirement.

ROBIN: So you said _

RYAN: “Sign my disclosure.” Another way of saying kiss my ass.
(A beat, small smile.) I’m afraid I’m not very good at this, am I?

Lighting change. Donna and Jim move forward
a bit.

DONNA: You’re not. We’re not. So take it, Ryan, take the deal.
Let’s be done with it before it destroys us.

RYAN (Looking front, not at them): That’s no deal.

DONNA: Don’t take it then. I don’t know. I don’t know what you
want. I just don’t know.

JIM: Donna, if he doesn’t . . .

RYAN: If I don’t?

JIM: You could _ we could _ be left out.

DONNA (Weary): Is that so bad?

JIM: But it all comes from _ it all stems from _ Ryan. Without him,
it isn’t. It is his creation. How can he be left out of that? That
doesn’t seem right to me.

DONNA: But it happens, doesn’t it? Isn’t that a pattern in the . . .
world?

Sudden lighting change. Ryan and Persons,
stepping forward, older.

PERSONS: So, I ask you again, why are you here? What do you
want? . . . Ryan, you must understand I’m busy.

RYAN: We have, John . . . John, we have a number of
stockholders . . . not wealthy . . . good, honest people . . . In
deep . . .

PERSONS: Yes?

RYAN: Who could be hurt . . . Deeply invested, close to life
savings tied up in the company . . . Some of them . . .

PERSONS: And? . . . That’s too bad but what does that have to
do with me _ and my company _ Ryan?

RYAN: I’m fine, myself and the rest of the board, we’re secure,
covered . . .

PERSONS: Same question applies. (Looks at wristwatch.) I’m
waiting, Ryan. (Pause, sighs loudly.) I assume, you fly a thousand
miles, you must have something on your mind. Something
important to say. (A beat.) Something difficult for you to say.
Ryan turns away, bites his lip.

PERSONS: You have trouble with this kind of thing, don’t you?
Some sort of hang-up, isn’t it? . . . (A beat; suddenly intensely
curious, moving toward Ryan): You flew yourself, as usual?
Ryan turns back.

RYAN: What does that have _ ?

PERSONS: Plenty! I thought something was missing. You usually
march in with your pilot’s helmet in the crook of your arm, scarf
thrown back, like some sort of World War II hero. Swashbuckling
. . . swaggering . . . big smile . . . But not today. (Pause, waits.)

RYAN: Right, John, I didn’t fly myself . . . but we were talking
about _

PERSONS: No, you didn’t. I’d heard that maybe . . . you weren’t
anymore . . . flying, I mean . . . for some reason . . . (A thoughtful
pause, then with extra animation, pacing, in a way stalking him.)
But, Ryan, you’re a famous flyboy! The flamboyant genius!

RYAN: John . . .

PERSONS: Wait: the devil-may-care pilot who jets himself across
the continent at the drop of a hat! . . . under a star-lit sky, reciting
poetry! . . . while the rest of us . . . the rest of us unbathed nerds
. . . the popular perception . . . we’re having trouble tying our shoe
laces . . . Isn’t this what I’ve read? . . . Is written? . . . You’re the
un-nerd of the computer world. You never fly commercial _ you
never let anyone fly for you _ unless . . . (Looks at him
differently, moves closer again, circles him.) . . . unless they took
away your pilot’s license. Did they? . . . Is that what happened,
Ryan? . . . What’s wrong? Were you stripped of your license?
Grounded, isn’t that what they call it? (A beat.) Something
happened. Are, are we looking at a drinking problem? . . . I hope
we are not looking at a serious drinking problem, Ryan . . .

RYAN (A beat): Do you, John?

PERSONS: Because we all know . . . have known for a long time
. . . that you have a propensity . . . A weakness toward . . .
(Pause.) . . . for . . . (Wants Ryan to say it.) Ryan? . . . (Pause.)
Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you, years ago, can you? Do you
remember, Ryan _ that first night at your house? Talking about
your gift? The danger of abusing it? (A beat _ pointedly.) Donna
was there. Ask her, she’ll remember.

RYAN (A beat): Fuck off, John.

PERSONS (Pause, shrugs): Well.

Persons steps back, shaking his head.

Lighting change, Ryan and Robin.

RYAN (Smiles): I don’t think I said that. I wanted to. But I needed
him. Anyway, it was probably better that he thought I wasn’t flying
because of a drinking problem than a . . . a health problem. You
can kick the booze, or so they say. But if he knew I might be
about to kick off . . . well . . . and the odds of that seem to have
gone up considerably in the last few hours . . .

ROBIN: He was . . . for a long time you thought he was your
friend.

RYAN: By then _ and for some time _ I knew he wasn’t. But I had
for years _ admired and respected him. His fight . . . intensity . . .
tenacity . . . his . . . tunnel vision . . . (A beat.) That’s what kind of
genius I am. So the . . . where was I?

ROBIN: Persons, your friend.

RYAN: Before that.

ROBIN: The suits?

RYAN; So the suits, giving up on me, fly up to see John _ and
miracle of miracles, he suddenly has an operating system. One
that would work for them. I thought, “Wow, to come up with
something like that in twenty-four hours after years of trying, that’s
something.” (Pause.) That’s what I really thought . . . was blown
away. (A beat, somewhat unsure.) I mean, it’s not that farfetched.
Someone with John’s talent . . . It can happen, you know?
(Pause.) You know? . . .

Lighting change, Jim and Donna step forward. Ryan
pours a drink.

JIM (With urgency): They’ve made some kind of deal _ Persons
and the suits. That’s the word.

RYAN: The word? What word?

JIM: That is what they are saying, what is being said. Word gets
around quickly.

RYAN (Shrugs): Screw `the word.’ It’s really none of our
business. We have enough on our own plate.

He offers Jim a drink, who declines with an
impatient gesture.

JIM: Ryan, two days ago he sends the suits to us because he
doesn’t have an operating system. How can he have one now? It
doesn’t make sense.

RYAN (Looking off): As you say, he sent them to us. John was
doing us a favor. Otherwise, why would he do it?
He drinks.

JIM: Because he didn’t have anything. Because he needed us . . .
He would have wanted something eventually, a cut, a partnership,
a percentage of the licensing fee _ something. (A beat.) Ryan, he
knew he could talk you into something like that, no problem _ (A
beat, considers.) _ and in the long run get the better part of the
deal _ something for nothing is probably what he had in mind.

RYAN (Pause, flushes, deeply embarrassed): That’s what John
thought?

JIM: Yes. Of course he did. Is that a surprise? (Pause.) Face it,
Ryan: you’re an easy touch . . . not a . . . you’re not a
businessman . . .

RYAN: And? . . .

JIM: And?

RYAN: And I’m . . . naive?

JIM (Considers): . . . Let’s just say you’re not exactly
Machiavellian. (Pause.) Sure, you’re naive _ so was Othello. It’s
nothing to be ashamed of . . .

Ryan smiles, still embarrassed, makes a quick
little toast with his glass to Jim. Both look away.
There’s a general silence.

DONNA (Thoughtfully, softly, and to break the silence): Well, it
does happen.

JIM: What happens?

DONNA: They come up with their own program in a day . . . a
sudden inspiration. Some of Ryan’s best ideas have come
suddenly.

JIM: Yes, I understand that. But it doesn’t usually come packaged
and ready to go as an operating system. And if it did happen _ if
they were on the verge, close _ even if they saw it as a remote
possibility down the line – would they have sent the suits to us?
No, no way in hell.

Ryan moves off.

DONNA: So. Does it really matter?

RYAN: Donna’s right. We’re getting all the business we can
handle. (Drinks.) Jim, we’re in a million computers and still
growing. What’s the problem?

JIM: We can lose business, Ryan. As fast as companies pop up in
this business, they go away . . . disappear. No one has signed on
with us for forever. We don’t do perpetuity contracts, remember?
That’s someone else. Maybe we should.

DONNA: Whatever program they have, it won’t be better than
Ryan’s.

JIM: What if it’s just as good as Ryan’s, Donna? (Pause.) What if
it is Ryan’s?

RYAN: John wouldn’t do that. That’s not something John would
do.

JIM: Really? (A beat.) I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t do
. . . to come out on top. (Pause.) Look, I’m not saying . . . I mean,
I don’t know where they got it . . . it’s just, from what I hear . . . it’s
an awful lot like . . . and if you believe in unbelievable coincidence
. . . nearly incalculable odds . . . well, you’re the genius, I’m not
. . . (Pause.) I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, I’ve got family . . . (Starts to
go, stops.) Remember that, Ryan _ factor that in _ most of us
have family.

Jim steps back. Donna looks at Ryan, he
doesn’t look at her. Ryan sets his drink down,
moves back.

DONNA: Ryan, where are you going?

RYAN (Shrugs): I don’t know.

DONNA: It’s night _ you can’t go racing.

RYAN: No.

DONNA: Don’t fly . . . not tonight, Ryan, please. I’d worry . . . I
can’t . . .

RYAN: No. I don’t fly if I’m not . . . right. You know I wouldn’t do
that.

DONNA: Then why don’t you stay?

Ryan hesitates, shrugs apologetically.

RYAN: I don’t know, I’m sorry.

Lighting change, Donna steps back. Ryan and
Robin.

RYAN: It was after that . . . a few days later, we realized Jim had
been right about Persons.

ROBIN: It’s like your program?

RYAN: It’s almost exactly mine, with a tweak here or there for
appearance’s sake . . . As Jim said, the odds are, well . . . say
. . . say someone takes “Hamlet” and changes the title to . . .
“Lars” . . . (He smiles.) . . . and moves the play from
Copenhagen to, say, Tuscaloosa . . . and Polonius becomes
Felonius . . . (A beat, but can’t resist: with a sly smile.) Portia a
. . . Lamborghini . . . That sort of thing . . . So blatant it’s kind of
funny. (Serious again.) The thing is, those tweaks . . . they’re not
harmless. They cause crashes . . . which cost money . . .
sometimes . . . could cost . . . lives . . . (Pause, he hesitates,
having difficulty with his balance; takes a deep breath.) . . . so
they sold my work _ now called something else, of course _ to the
suits, interesting that . . . I’ve never heard of selling anything that
belonged to someone else. I didn’t know you could do that. A neat
trick. (A beat, with a whimsical, sad smile.) In that area, it must be
admitted, they’re . . . innovative.

Lighting change and Jim takes a step forward.

JIM: There’s only one thing to do, Ryan: we have to take them to
court.

RYAN: I didn’t get into this to sue people, Jim. My God, it’s the
last thing I want to do with my life _ waste my time that way . . .
Besides, we don’t even know if we can.

JIM: Well, we have to do something or we go down. We
eventually get ground into the dirt. They’re taking over the
business overnight. Using what you created, they’re four times
our size . . . And they’re just not growing, they’re taking our
customers with them. (A beat.) It continues, we’re history _ a
footnote, one of dozens of little footnotes in this business that
come up with a good idea and are buried because of it. The
reward of innovation is destruction . . . But none of them had or
have your vision, Ryan _ and I hate to see you go their way.

RYAN (Really to himself, a slight note of panic): It’s about
education, Jim . . . Don’t you see that? It’s innovation . . .
communication . . . discovery. It’s supposed to be fun, like . . .
like music!

JIM: Music’s a business, Ryan! Get your head out of the . . . out
of wherever the fuck it is.

RYAN (Off somewhere): John and I spoke of that once. You
weren’t with the company then. He agreed with me, about the
beauty of it, the excitement of breaking new ground. I had this
idea _ a long time ago _ that we might work together someday,
create something magnificent.

JIM: Are you kidding _ you and John? Oh, for Christ’s sake,
Ryan _ he’s going to bury you! (Pause.) I think he already has.

(Pause.)

He steps back, Donna moves forward tentatively.

(Pause.)

DONNA: I think, Ryan, whatever’s going on with you and John
and the suits _ the whole business, actually _ it’s becoming
beside the point now, isn’t it? . . . I mean, you’re so far removed
. . . from me, now the kids . . . maybe there’s nothing left. (Pause.)
Or is . . . or is your creativity all we ever had in the first place?

(Pause.)

She remains. Ryan takes an unsteady few steps,
having trouble with his balance. He looks around
for Donna but can’t find her. He grabs a chair
for support, takes a few deep breaths. Looks at
Robin.

RYAN (Smiles, shaken): I’m remembering a little too much . . . It’s
(Indicating his head.) . . . the old noggin . . . it’s suddenly working
. . . but . . . all of a sudden I wish it wasn’t . . . don’t appreciate the
. . . clarity . . . not at . . . (Pause.) . . . Robin, could you give me a
ride to . . .

ROBIN: Sure. Wherever.

RYAN: To . . . Or maybe better, call an ambulance, please. I’ve
always wanted to ride in an ambulance _ (Smiles.) _ all that legal
speed, you know.

ROBIN (Briskly): OK.

She starts to move off quickly.

RYAN: Because this headache . . . is acting up a bit . . . And I
think you might be right _ (Pause.) _ I think I might be in some,
some trouble . . . (Smiles, waits.)

Light fades.

End of Act One

Act Two
The Final Day

In dim light, Ryan and a Nurse. He is in the chair, leaning back;
she has pulled up a chair to be nearby, pages through a
magazine. He is in different clothes, casual and comfortable, but
similar; he now wears the motorcycle vest with Harley-Davidson
patches. A strip of gauze on the back of his head. His eyes are
open. The Nurse is attractive and young.
On the periphery: Persons; Jim and Donna, together.
It is evening twilight; the act will advance into darkness.

RYAN (After a few moments): It’s like, it’s what I imagine it’s like
to compose music . . .

The Nurse smiles wanly, watches him from the
corner of her eye.

RYAN: . . . the binaries becoming notes . . . The notes appearing
out of nowhere. (Pause.) There’s a beauty there, isn’t there? A
kind of elegance?

Persons moves up a few strides.

PERSONS: Speaking to me, Ryan? . . . To anyone? . . . `A kind
of elegance’? Well, it’s neither here nor there anymore, if you ask
me . . . You’re dying and you know it. So why go on about the
beauty of composing programs? Once it was . . . acceptable . . .
tolerable . . . But now? . . . You might as well talk about building a
house or founding a business _ you’re not going to do either.
They make as much sense as composing a program. It’s futile.
(Pause.) You’re no longer in the game. Not a player. (Pause.)
You’re history _ if that . . . if you’re lucky . . . (Pause.) If I allow you
to be. (Pause.) History. (Pause.) Because, Ryan, the winner
writes the history. Everyone knows that. (Pause.)

RYAN (Not looking at him): Do they? . . .

PERSONS: Yes. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do _ I’ll think about it,
about you getting some credit, I mean . . . because I really don’t
think you should be forgotten . . . I feel a certain responsibility that
you’re . . . remembered . . . But . . . well . . . I will have to think
about it.

RYAN (Pause): Good of you, John.

PERSONS: I pick up on your tone, but you think about it, Ryan _
you haven’t been cooperative . . . I want to do what’s right, but
you don’t make it easy . . .

RYAN: No, I meant it _ good of you, considering . . . considering
all that . . . (Breaks off, adrift.)

PERSONS (A bit awkward): It’s . . . that’s OK . . . glad to consider
it.

He steps back. Lighting change.

RYAN (To Nurse, after a moment, refocusing, a friendly smile):
Hello.

NURSE: Hello.

RYAN: You’re? . . .

NURSE: Certainly not John. Or Donna or Jim. You’ve been calling
me John or Donna or Jim. And some other names, including your
children. You miss your children. (Pause.) I’m a nurse _ Helen.

RYAN: My nurse?

NURSE: Your nurse. We’ve already met by the way.

RYAN: Sorry . . .

The Nurse shrugs.

RYAN: There was someone earlier . . .

NURSE: A woman _ Robin.

RYAN: She won’t be coming back?

NURSE (A beat): I don’t know . . . she was very upset . . . felt she
let you down . . . nice lady.

RYAN: It’s that bad?

NURSE: Not so bad. But the doctors feel it’s a good idea for you
to be observed. Someone to keep an eye . . .

RYAN: Because I have . . . ?

NURSE: A mild concussion . . .

RYAN: That’s the diagnosis?

The Nurse nods.

RYAN: Which is better than . . . ?

NURSE: . . . than moderate or severe, of course . . . or any other
number of things that can happen when a person takes a hard
fall.

RYAN (Considers): Well . . . so . . . (Pause.) What are they
saying . . . ?

NURSE: Saying?

RYAN: In the papers . . . ?

NURSE: I’m not sure I understand . . .

RYAN: The papers, television, about . . . from what Robin had
said . . .

NURSE: About you? It might not be a good idea to . . . (He looks
at her, she considers.) Well, quite a lot. You create things, things
which I cannot begin to understand. You’re a very creative man,
perhaps a genius.

RYAN: About the other night, I mean . . . the fall.

NURSE (Considers again; a pause): There’s speculation, that’s
all.

RYAN: Speculation? . . .

NURSE (A beat): Well, perhaps suspicion.

Silence; she regrets having said this.

RYAN: Suspicion? . . .

NURSE: Well, most likely you fell . . . that’s the feeling . . . but
maybe pushed . . . (Pause.) That would be suspicious, of course
_ being pushed . . . But someone bumping into you . . .
accidentally . . . that seems more likely . . . that seems to be a
theory . . . and you drinking too much . . . You did, didn’t you? . . .
That is more than implied . . . (A beat.) And maybe something
else . . .

RYAN: Something else?

NURSE: In addition to the . . . to the drinking . . .

There is a silence.

RYAN: Stuff? . . . Using stuff? . . . That’s what they’re saying? . . .

NURSE: Look, I shouldn’t have said that, this isn’t something I
should be . . .

RYAN (Shrugs): It’s possible . . .

NURSE: Because your health is what matters.

RYAN: What else?

NURSE (A beat, sighs): What it comes down to . . . no one
knows, really . . . (Pause.) What I mean is . . . it’s been almost two
days now since the accident and no one’s come . . . coming
forward . . . about it . . . (A beat.) From what I’ve read and heard
. . .

RYAN: Well, that’s not surprising with me . . . lately. People have
careers to protect . . . Dangerous knowing me if you want to keep
your job, much less . . . advance . . . much less . . . (Pause.) . . .
much less . . . (Pause.) Have _ do you happen to know _ have the
police spoken to me? They wanted to speak to me _ that’s what
she . . . (Searches.) . . . Robin . . . said.

NURSE: Not to my knowledge. You don’t know?

RYAN: No. I think perhaps . . . I don’t think so . . . I’ve been to the
hospital? . . .

NURSE: Of course _ you know that. I just said _

RYAN: Do I know that? . . . I don’t know much . . . (Pause.) How
much time do I have?

NURSE: That’s an absurd question, especially for a `genius’ . . . If
there was any doubt about that, you’d still be in the hospital, for
sure.

RYAN: It’s just that . . . something’s happening . . . going on
. . . (Looks at her, smiles): You just sounded like my first wife _
Donna.

NURSE (Also smiles): How many have you had?

RYAN: You really want to know?

NURSE: Well, I was going to ask you to do the usual thing in
cases like this _ recite the alphabet, count to ten. You know,
every few hours or so. But if you want to count wives instead, that
would let you off lightly _ let me off lightly _ if you’ve had less than
ten.

RYAN (Thinks, smiles): I’ve . . . this is funny _ maybe a godsend
_ but I think I’ve lost count. You know, the . . . (Gestures to his
head.) . . . fall.

NURSE: Don’t worry. Typical concussion case . . . Are you
married now? The papers don’t say.

RYAN: I’m not sure . . .

NURSE (Laughs): Classic concussion case, for sure.

RYAN: I mean, I don’t know if it’s gone through _ this last . . .

(Searches for the word.)

NURSE: Divorce? . . .

RYAN (Bitterly): Yes . . . last I recall, was in the throes of . . .
a . . . (Searches for word.) . . . a . . . divorce.

NURSE (Smiles, strokes his forehead once, then takes her hand
away.) Please. Try to relax. Do it sitting up. Reasons of
observation. We don’t want you sleeping just yet. A precaution.
I’m the one observing. That’s part of my job.

RYAN: And waiting?

NURSE: I do a lot of that, too . . . (Ruefully.) That’s for sure . . .

RYAN (Pause): I feel . . . (Pause, moves a hand across his
eyes.)

Lighting change. The Nurse steps back.

NURSE (From a distance): Don’t drift off, please don’t close your
eyes.

RYAN: I suppose I should thank you, John.

NURSE: And please keep John out of it.
Persons steps forward, studies Ryan for a
few moments.

PERSONS: What’s that, Ryan ? _ I caught you drifting there a bit.
Thought we might have lost you _ I mean, you lost me. Your
imagination’s not what it used to be.

RYAN (Not looking at him): Do you mean . . . memory?

PERSONS: Almost the same thing, don’t you think?

RYAN (Smiles): Maybe . . .

PERSONS: The great ones _ they have . . . had . . . both. You
were one of those, but you’ve lost one . . . or another . . . I hope
not both . . . that could be the end.

RYAN: You said . . .

NURSE (Sounding far away, almost an echo): Eyes open, please!
. . . Thank you and keep them that way. I’ll get you . . . something
to drink . . .

She stands off.

PERSONS: She cares about you, Ryan. Another one falling for
you . . . amazing . . .

RYAN: I think you said . . . you said you’d see that I was
remembered.

PERSONS: Considering it . . . No commitment yet . . . No
promises . . . “Maybe’s” the best I can do for you now. (Pause.)
Or for anyone else, for that matter.

RYAN (Smiles, amused despite himself): John. You’re a kind of
mad dream, aren’t you? A sort of devastation?

PERSONS (Considers it, somewhat amused himself): I don’t
know, am I? Perhaps. (Moves around a bit, pauses, considers.)
Ryan, remember we both gave speeches once, a convention
somewhere . . . Miami or Boston or somewhere _ one of the stops
in the early days anyway, when it was all still so new . . . And you
looked out at all those faces, all those hopeful upturned faces with
their pasty complexions and big ideas, and you said, “There’s
room for all of us. There are opportunities for all of us in this
business. There’s so much we can do. We’re only at the
threshold. It’s just the beginning” . . . You were inspiring, I give
you that. My God, you made it sound like we were capable of
saving the world.

A silence. Ryan says nothing.

PERSONS: They loved you for that . . . those people . . . for
saying that they were going to be part of it . . . for giving them
hope. I’ve never had that, that ability to inspire, so I’ve had to be
. . . had to cultivate other talents. (Pause.) But I understood my
weaknesses . . . limitations . . . and did something about them,
whereas you . . . you didn’t. Simply didn’t bother. I guess you
thought the world would accommodate you, but it doesn’t work
that way.

A silence. Ryan says nothing.

PERSONS: Anyway, I followed you to the podium and, and what
did I say, Ryan? Do you recall? (Pause.) Ryan?

RYAN (Some head pain, looking down, pause): What I said,
John?

PERSONS (Irritated): Not what you said, Ryan _ we just went
over that. You’re not concentrating very well, are you? What I
said.

RYAN: Well . . . (Pause, looks up, off.) I think it was . . . it’s been
so long . . . was it something like, “Sorry, Ryan . . . there’s only
room for one in this business”?

PERSONS: Good. You can remember when you want to, can’t
you? And how did that crowd respond, Ryan? . . .

RYAN: I’m sorry, I _

PERSONS (A sudden anger and passion): It _ they _ laughed,
Ryan! I told them, I warned them _ and you. I put it out there. I
didn’t give them false hope like . . . Well, not that you did . . .
intentionally . . . I think you believed what you said . . . But . . . it’s
. . . what you told them . . . it was nowhere, Ryan. A dead end.
Time has proved me right. (Pause.) There was even press there,
for God’s sake. They laughed. All of them, including the press _
including you. Do you remember that? Because I sure do. (A
beat.) I told you _ all of you _ there was only room for one . . . for
me . . . I was proud of that _ proud of myself for being forthright
. . . honest about my intentions . . . and none of you took me
seriously.

RYAN: Now I remember _ you laughed when you said that, John
. . . You smiled.

PERSONS: And?

RYAN: That’s why they laughed.

PERSONS (Interested): What’s the point? They didn’t take me
seriously?

RYAN: Of course they took you seriously. They laughed because
you laughed. They feared you _ it was nervous laughter . . .
forced . . .

PERSONS: Did you laugh?

RYAN: Sure, but because I didn’t believe you. They were smarter
than me. I’ve always been stupid that way _ lie to me and I
believe you, tell the truth and . . . (Gestures.)

PERSONS (Irritated): You didn’t believe me? Christ, Ryan.

RYAN: How could I? I couldn’t _ still don’t _ see how anyone _ in
all seriousness _ could believe something that . . . that narrow
and confining _ I mean, room for only one in a field so vast, with
so much potential for good, with so much talent eager to
contribute. What kind of ego claims that? It would be a crime to
put that into one person’s, one company’s hands . . .

PERSONS: Nothing gets done your way, Ryan. . . . that’s
anarchy.

RYAN: Have you ever heard of “creative chaos”?

PERSONS (Impatiently): Whatever the process, usually just one
emerges. A dominant figure. Look at history . . . Besides, how
many of those so-called creative types that were in that audience
that day, Ryan _ how many do you think are still with us? . . . Not
many . . . You’re among the last.

RYAN: What do you mean by `still with us’?

PERSONS: Still in the field, of course.

RYAN: Still in the field? Screw the field _ some of them are dead,
John.

PERSONS: Yes, that may be.

RYAN: Died while young, John _ a few by their own hand . . .
hands.

PERSONS: Right.

RYAN: Disillusioned . . . depressed . . . betrayed . . . fucked over
. . .

PERSONS (Weary): It happens, Ryan, it happens.

Simultaneously, Nurse approaches with a glass
as Persons backs away and lighting changes.

PERSONS (His voice becoming distant): Are you blaming me for
them?

NURSE: Open your eyes, please.

PERSONS: Are you blaming me for you?

NURSE: Now!

PERSONS: Because if you are _ remember, Ryan, I’m the one
who decides . . .

NURSE: Drink this, please.

PERSONS: . . . and I don’t forget . . . I thought you understood
this . . . I thought you realized . . .

Persons is gone. Ryan drinks from glass, looks
at her. She waits a few moments.

NURSE: How do you feel?

RYAN: I feel a . . . a slight buzz. (He smiles at her.) That was
quick.

NURSE: Is it a good or a bad buzz? (Noticing his smile.) Oh _
right, it must be good.

RYAN: As good as I’ve felt in some time . . . Is it legal?

NURSE: You must be feeling very good. It will relax you. You can
sleep now, if you wish, but I will have to wake you now and then.
(She pushes the hair back off his forehead.) Just to check.
Nothing to worry about.

She leaves. Lighting change. A few moments of
silence.

JIM’S VOICE: Ryan, we can’t afford to delay any longer _ we
need to sell now.

RYAN: Sell? What do you mean?

Donna and Jim both move forward, Donna
somewhat reluctantly.

JIM: The bottom’s falling out. The company’s at fifty-million and
slipping. We have to do something about it _ soon.

RYAN: It’s amazing to be in trouble and be worth fifty million _ or
maybe it’d be more amazing the other way around.

JIM: Our reputation’s a bit shaky. Word’s out you’re not . . . you.
Next month at this time it could be forty. And the month after that
_

RYAN: Right . . .

JIM: Sinking ship . . . You forget, but there was a time we were
pushing a couple hundred million.

RYAN: I don’t forget. Those were the days . . . cover of . . . cover
of . . . (Pause.) . . . what? . . . something . . .

DONNA (Pause): But we’re fine, Ryan.

RYAN: Us. Financially . . . that’s what you mean.

They assent through silence.

RYAN: Well . . .

JIM: But there are others, Ryan, who aren’t, who are heavily
invested.

DONNA: Non-partners, people not on the board. But good people
who trusted us . . . believed in us . . .

JIM: Mortgages, college education funds, you know, tied up _
with _ in _ us . . . We can’t let those people lose everything.

DONNA: We can survive it, they can’t.

JIM: We should have sued when we could . . .

Donna gives him a look.

RYAN: Oh, right _ sue. I forgot about that. (Brightly hopeful.) Too
late?

JIM (Smiles ruefully, glances at Donna): Oh, yes, missed the
seven-year window some time ago. By six or seven years. Went
by like that. Papers sat on the lawyer’s desk. Sat and sat. He
didn’t know what to do _ out of his depth. And we, we weren’t
much better _ we sat and sat, did nothing.

DONNA: Jim . . .

RYAN: I said, screw them. I’ll come up with something new,
something even greater. There’s more where that came from, for
God’s sake.

DONNA: But there has been, Ryan . . . you’ve developed . . .
innovated . . . educational programs for kids, an encyclopedia of
the internet _

JIM (To Donna, interjecting): But nothing to top himself. Not the
next brilliant concept. That’s what he’s talking about and that
hasn’t happened. We had to have that. Well, we had it, but he _
we _ gave it away.

DONNA (Irritably): Nothing was given away. It was taken . . .
everyone knows that . . . the law wasn’t clear . . . You just said
as much . . . and Ryan’s not done, and it can’t be just on his
shoulders.

JIM (Shrugs): You usually get just one great concept, even the
`geniuses.’ Whitney the cotton gin, Franklin electricity, Morse the
code, Farnsworth the TV _

RYAN (Very dry, distant, ticking them off): Edison the telegraph
transmitter _ phonograph player _ incandescent lamp _ alkaline
battery _ talking movie pictures _ microphone . . . the, the
whatever he set his mind to . . .

A silence.

DONNA (Pause): You’ve been ill, Ryan . . . You’ve been sick.

JIM (To Donna): Which is why we need to get this done as soon
as possible . . . We can’t . . . sustain . . .

RYAN (Pause): And _ again _ you want me to . . . ?

JIM: Not want _ what we want is no longer . . . anything. It’s what
we need to do.

RYAN: Sell it? Sell the company now?

DONNA (A beat): There’s no choice, Ryan.

JIM: That or stand by and watch it die . . . better someone else
have it than that.

A silence. They both look at him.

RYAN: If that happens we get out OK, but the others _ the others,
they lose?

JIM: Right. If we could get, say, twenty-seven, hell, twenty-five
million, that would protect them, get them their money back. And
the buyer will be getting a wonderful deal . . . a steal, actually . . .
having the stability we lack.

RYAN: Selling a life’s work _ it would include everything we’ve
done, everything we have in development . . .

JIM: Everything? . . . I don’t know . . . we could hold back on
some of the latter, perhaps . . . Some of those . . . concepts . . .
that we’ve been working on that are . . . well . . . not quite there
yet . . . I mean, who’d know?

Ryan looks at him.

JIM (A beat): OK _ but you can’t give them those things that are
still in your head, that are not on paper. They don’t get that for
their lousy twenty-five million. Please don’t screw yourself again,
Ryan. You keep saying “screw them”, but you’re the one who
gets it. You screw yourself. Don’t give them what’s still up here _
that’s still yours.

RYAN (Pause): No . . . not that . . . they can’t have that . . . .
(Smiles, taps his head.) If it’s still there . . . big question.

A silence. They watch him, waiting.

RYAN (Catches himself): Oh, right _ business.

Lighting begins to change.

RYAN (A long pause): There’s . . . well, there’s only one person
I know who could write a check for . . . that amount . . . just
. . . like . . . that. Just . . . write . . . it. (Pause, he smiles slightly,
ruefully.)

A silence. They watch him as he looks down,
considers.

RYAN (Pause, shrugs): OK, that’s settled _ meeting’s concluded.

JIM: You never did like long meetings.

RYAN: Meetings period. (Pause.) OK, I’ll fly up and see him.

(Pause.)

DONNA (Pause): Don’t fly yourself, Ryan.

RYAN (Smiles): Don’t worry. Haven’t you heard? _ my pilot’s
license’s been revoked . . . health reasons . . .

The Nurse approaches, then waits in a separate
light. Donna exchanges a look with Jim, who hesitates,
then steps back.

DONNA: Ryan . . .

RYAN: Yes?

DONNA: The papers are going through . . . when you return, our
divorce should be final.

RYAN: Oh, right. (Pause.)

DONNA: I don’t think we’ll see each other again . . . (A beat.) Do
you? . . .

RYAN: No. Well, by chance . . .

DONNA: Take care of yourself . . .

RYAN (Pause): Thank you . . . you too . . .
Lighting change as Donna steps back.

NURSE (After a moment): Did you doze?

RYAN: No . . . (Begins to struggle to his feet.) I’m going to the
airport. I have to fly to _

NURSE: To the where? . . . The airport? (Smiles.) Oh, you’ve
been dozing, for sure.

RYAN: Oh, yes, I suppose . . . I thought I was . . . .

NURSE: Yes. I know _ going to the airport . . . not tonight you’re
not.

He stands cautiously.

NURSE: Steady . . .

RYAN: What are they saying?

NURSE: About what?

RYAN: There’s not been something more? . . .

NURSE (Pause, considers): They _ the radio _ say there’s going
to be a formal investigation.

RYAN: Of my death?

NURSE: Of the accident.

RYAN: It will come to the same thing . . . no? . . . accidental
death?

NURSE: No! . . . (Pause.) Let’s hope not, shall we?

Ryan falls to his knees.

NURSE (Going to him): But I think we do have a problem here.
She drops to one knee, tries to support him.

NURSE: Look at me.

RYAN (Trying to rise): I have to get to the airport. I’m a pilot, you
know.

NURSE: You’re a grounded pilot _ Isn’t that obvious to you?

RYAN: I have to see John . . . to sell the . . . people depending on
it . . .

NURSE (She tries to look into his eyes): You’ve seen John _ that
was years ago . . . John is a very powerful man now _ he would
not see you. I do not even think he is presently in the country. He
is done with you. Don’t waste your . . . strength on him. (She
snaps her fingers in front of his face.) Wake up! _ now! _ quit
dreaming!

RYAN (Small smile): `He wouldn’t see me?’ . . . I see you’ve been
doing your homework, Nurse Helen.

NURSE: But not my job. You distracted me . . . You’re good at
that . . .

RYAN: Like that bird . . . the . . .

NURSE: No talking about birds. (Takes his head in her hands.)
Your eyes are glassy. (Pause.) Tell me about that bird . . .

RYAN: I thought . . .

NURSE: I changed my mind . . . And look at me while you do it!
. . . What is it called?

RYAN: It’s called . . . called . . .

NURSE: Yes? It’s called?

RYAN: A . . . (Mild triumph.) . . . a . . . killdeer!

NURSE: And the killdeer is good at _ what? (Waits.) Distracting
people, isn’t it? . . . That’s what it does!

RYAN (Boyish smile): Yes _ predators. Throwing people off its
trail . . . faking injury . . .

NURSE: Just like you, right? . . . (Pause, still looking into his eyes
_ with deep concern.) Well, no more . . . No more killdeer. This is
very real . . . I’m going to make a phone call, Ryan. You will sit _
and wait _ understand?

RYAN: So I’m dying . . .

NURSE: No, you are not dying. But it’s not good. We need to get
you to . . . Look at me _ I want to see your eyes again! (Looks into
his eyes, a beat.) Maybe a mild hemorrhage . . . be quiet and sit
still.

RYAN (Smiles): First a mild concussion . . . and now . . . is there
such a thing as a mild hemorrhage? . . .

NURSE: It’s possible . . . for one to lead into the other . . . (She
brushes the hair back from his forehead, looks at him, pauses.)
Don’t stand. Let’s hope, shall we? That’s important. You’re better
off where you are . . . Don’t exert yourself _ we want to keep your
heart rate down. That’s important too. I’ll be back in a few
minutes.

RYAN: Another ambulance?

NURSE: Yes.

RYAN (Smiles): If you don’t mind, I’d rather not _ I didn’t like the
last ride.

NURSE: You’re not supposed to like it.

She goes, completely leaving the stage.
A radical lighting change, moody with a blue or green
tint. Persons steps forward into Ryan’s space, will
look “at” Ryan in this scene as if Ryan is standing,
at eye level. Ryan remains on the floor, looks straight
ahead.

RYAN: . . . Could be hurt, John . . . People deeply invested, life
savings tied up . . .

PERSONS: Sad, Ryan, sad sad, but what does that have to do
with? . . .

RYAN: I’m fine . . . rest of the board . . . all taken care of . . .

PERSONS: Question remains the same . . . (Looks at
wristwatch.) I assume, you fly this distance . . . you have
something . . . .

Ryan makes an effort to rise, can’t.

PERSONS (Said flatly, metalically): . . . . something difficult for
you to say . . . hang-up you have . . . Where’s the devil-may-care
. . . ? (Shaking his head, now ironically.) Grounded . . . abusing
your gifts . . . Someone like you, given that kind of genius, one in
a million _ hundred million _ and pfitt! (Shakes his head, starts
off.) Ask Donna . . . I warned you . . . Long time ago. You should
have listened. Look, I have people waiting . . .

RYAN: John! . . .

Persons hesitates.

RYAN: The company, John! Twenty-five million for the company _
to you. Worth almost double that . . . easy!

PERSONS (Stops, interested): Really? For everything? . . .

RYAN: Yes . . .

PERSONS: Everything . . . all patents . . . all projects in
development? . . .

RYAN makes an effort to rise, can’t.

RYAN (Frustrated, as he falls back onto his knees): Yes!

PERSONS (A beat, cocks his head): Projects you inaugurated?
. . . we can’t do it if it doesn’t include projects you _

RYAN: Yes! . . .

PERSONS: Holding nothing back?

Ryan doesn’t respond, stares straight ahead,
his eyes dull, glassy.

PERSONS: Of course _ not you. Not Ryan . . . Stupid of me . . . I
apologize for the remark. (Pause.) What about? _ what about, you
know, what’s still in your head? . . . (Pause.) Ryan?

Ryan doesn’t respond, stares straight ahead.

PERSONS (Smiles): No, I guess not. That would be asking a lot
. . . though there has to be a question of . . .

RYAN (Smiles, slowly): What’s left there, yes . . .

Persons nods. Ryan makes a weaker effort to stand.
Persons studies him dispassionately.

PERSONS: One thing I have to know, Ryan _ why would you
come to me with this opportunity?

RYAN: Because I think I finally understand business, John . . .
and . . . and you’re the person who can write the check . . .

PERSONS: Yes? And?

RYAN: And . . . (Pause.) . . . and I still . . . I don’t know . . . I still
had some kind of hope . . .

PERSONS: Well . . . (Studies him a moment.) I’ll tell you what,
Ryan, I’ll tell you _ I’d like to do it, I really would . . . but you’ve
weakened that company of yours considerably, and I can’t _ I am
responsible to other people, too, you know, just as you are _ and I
can’t justify . . . justify that kind of money on a company that’s
faltering . . . (Pause.) So I’ll tell you what I’ll do, out of respect for
our past friendship, our shared . . . tribulations _ I’ll write a check
right now (Pulls a pen and checkbook from his suit coat pocket),
this minute, for . . . say, twelve million dollars _ and the deal is
done.

A silence broken by the audible click of
Persons’ pen. He clicks it several times.
Ryan waits a moment then smiles.

PERSONS: Why are you smiling, Ryan?

RYAN (Pause): Because . . . because, John, you know what the
company’s worth _ and that I’m going to tell you . . . to go fuck
yourself.

PERSONS (Pause): I think you probably will . . . (Small smile.) . . .
did . . . and that’s . . . that’s unfortunate.

RYAN: You are making a bad business decision, John.

PERSONS: Perhaps.

RYAN (Taking a great effort): It will go to someone else _ a
competitor _ and that competitor will come after you like I wouldn’t
. . . should have, but didn’t.

PERSONS: Perhaps.

RYAN: And cost you money.

PERSONS: Maybe.

RYAN: Money, John.

PERSONS (Immovable): Right. I hear you, Ryan.

Ryan tries to rise.

RYAN (Pause, he tries to concentrate, then smiles): You know . . .
it’s kind of funny, John _ I think I just said I finally understood
business . . .

PERSONS: And?

RYAN: Well, if I do . . . well then I have to ask myself . . . why
would John Persons . . . a business genius . . . intentionally make
a bad business decision? . . . What does John Persons have to
gain by that? . . .

PERSONS (Pause): I guess, Ryan . . . (A beat.) I guess you’ll
never know.

A silence, then Persons clicks pen _ the sound
again heightened _ and replaces it and checkbook
in his suit coat pocket. Sound of a siren in
the distance. Ryan tilts his head in the direction
of the sound; Persons does not hear it.

PERSONS: But If you want to be remembered . . . (Light dimming
on him.) If you don’t want people to . . .

The stage begins to darken.

PERSONS: . . . don’t want people to forget . . . because, Ryan,
they do . . .

Persons steps back and watches with others.

Ryan tries to rise, but can’t.

RYAN (After a few moments): That’s something I . . . I don’t . . . I
simply . . . don’t . . . can’t . . . understand . . . what you would
have to gain by that . . .

The Nurse approaches tentatively. Ryan tries to rise
but can’t. The siren draws nearer then winds down as
the pulsating lights from the ambulance flash through
the room, at first with the rhythm of a heartbeat, then
steadily decreasing.

Ryan’s head drops slowly as his body folds into
itself, then remains still.

End of Play

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

Portraits of Salinas, CA

December 28, 2013 by Jessie Chernetsky 1 Comment

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

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

December 28, 2013 by William Ray 2 Comments

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

Salinas from Highway 101 Before Reading John Steinbeck

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highway 101: Escape Route from Salinas to High Culture

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

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

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

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

Steinbeck-Denial and the Name-Game in Salinas Today

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

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

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

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

John Steinbeck’s Salinas: The Forgotten Violence of 1936

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Steinbeck Inspires Monterey County Visual Arts Masters, Past and Present

December 20, 2013 by David Laws 2 Comments

The rugged coast and majestic mountains of Monterey County, California, inspired awe-struck visual arts professionals and amateurs long before John Steinbeck appeared on the scene. So it seems natural that Steinbeck, born and raised in Monterey County, was attracted to the visual arts and met well-known artists of the period, such as E. Charlton Fortune and Armin Hansen, California Impressionist painters who lived and created much of their most popular work in Monterey County.

Writing in and about Monterey County in the 1930s and 40s, Steinbeck befriended a host of younger artists who were, like the author, perfecting their craft in the company of colleagues, friends, and lovers. But the ripening John Steinbeck-Monterey County-visual arts connection didn’t end with the author’s death. Forty-five years later it continues in the work of contemporary Monterey County painters including Warren Chang (above left) and David Ligare (above right), successful artists who differ in technique but share a source of inspiration in the literary landscapes of John Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck and the Visual Arts in Monterey County

Steve Hauk—the Monterey County writer and art dealer who co-curated This Side of Eden – Images of Steinbeck’s California, the inaugural exhibition of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas—is an expert on John Steinbeck and the visual arts, past and present, in Monterey County. He was interviewed for films on E. Charlton Fortune and on John Steinbeck and his Monterey County artist circle for the 100-Story Project, an archival narrative of Monterey County history and culture. Among the best known members of Steinbeck’s circle were several artists—notably James Fitzgerald, Ellwood Graham, Judith Deim, and Bruce Ariss—who created notable portraits of the author, a shy person who enjoyed being painted but didn’t like to be photographed.

Image of John Steinbeck portrait by James Fitzgerald

Portrait of John Steinbeck by James Fitzgerald
Charcoal on paper (1935)

John Steinbeck also befriended artists beyond Monterey County. Among his closest confidantes was Bo Beskow, the Swedish painter who completed portraits of the author at Steinbeck’s request in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The American painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose perspective on his native Midwest mirrored Steinbeck’s passion for Monterey County, never met the writer but shared his populist politics and anti-elitist aesthetics. Benton’s illustrations for a special edition of The Grapes of Wrath captured the book’s spirit so well that the writer and the artist became synonyms for sentimentality among critics of their work.

Today the Canadian painter Ron Clavier continues the John Steinbeck-visual arts tradition beyond Monterey County in paintings that portray passages from The Grapes of Wrath. A neuropsychologist by training, Clavier unites science and the visual arts in painting that would have appealed strongly to Steinbeck’s sense of unity, universality, and nature. “As a visual artist,” says Clavier, “I dream that I might replicate the magnificent imagery of the world, and by doing so, remind others of their own core decency,” adding that “each day, I try to experience what American author and Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck described as awe, humility, and joy.”

The Visual Arts in Action: Warren Chang and David Ligare

David Ligare and Warren Chang are leading examples of contemporary Monterey County artists whose work reflects Steinbeck’s empathy for the dispossessed and the author’s love of the Monterey County landscape. River/Mountain/Sea—Ligare’s current exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art—is a compelling example of the John Steinbeck-Monterey County-visual arts phenomenon that has made Monterey County a mecca for aficionados of the visual arts and Steinbeck fans alike. Similarly, Warren Chang’s 2012 ten-year retrospective at the Pacific Grove Art Center shows the inspiration provided by Steinbeck’s rich human material—in Chang’s case, Steinbeck’s stories of marginalized Monterey County farm workers, a major subject of the author’s early writing.

Like John Steinbeck’s fiction, the paintings of David Ligare and Warren Chang are technically superb, thematically coherent, and emotionally riveting. While acknowledging Steinbeck’s impact on the development of their very different versions of visual-arts realism, each also notes the influence of European classicism in their work. Chang’s style owes much to the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Ligare notes the rules of visual arts structure exemplified by Nicolas Poussin as an influence, along with classical art and literature—a lifelong interest of John Steinbeck, who acknowledged the role of Greek and Roman authors in his literary development, as Ligare does in the visual arts.

Like Steinbeck, Chang portrays the pain of the human condition and the triumph of the human spirit: his paintings of farm workers toiling in Monterey County fields depict disenfranchised members of modern society, as Steinbeck did in his most memorable fiction of the 1930s. By contrast, Ligare’s Monterey County landscapes are devoid of human artifact or activity, relying on dramatic lighting and carefully crafted composition to suggest the tension and complexity beneath the pastoral surface. Steinbeck achieved a similar effect with words, notably the extended description of the Salinas Valley that opens East of Eden, as well as the stories, letters, and essays in which he described the Salinas of his boyhood as a placid town with an undertone of evil.

Warren Chang’s Stories on Canvas

Chang was born and raised in Monterey County and attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he received his BFA in illustration in 1981. After working as an award-winning illustrator in California and New York, he eventually returned to Monterey and transitioned to an equally successful career as a fine artist. Today he is one of only 50 artists recognized as a Master Signature member of Oil Painters of America.

Chang’s portfolio features interior and landscape subjects including portraits, still-life paintings, and scenes from his home, studio, and the San Francisco Academy of Art University classroom where he teaches. As Steinbeck observed, the visual arts, like literature, can tell dramatic stories that draw viewers into the picture—a truth demonstrated in Chang’s Monterey County landscapes, where a single moment captured on canvas suggests the ongoing narrative of which it is a part. Chang’s paintings of Monterey County field workers have been compared to the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Examples from Warren Chang Narrative Paintings (Flesk Publications, 2012) are shown here with the permission of the artist, whose paintings can also be seen at Hauk Fine Arts in Pacific Grove and at the Winfield Gallery in nearby Carmel. (For more information, visit Chang’s website.)

Image of "Approaching Storm," painting by Warren Chang

Approaching Storm is a dramatic study of Monterey County workers hurrying to complete the broccoli harvest before an unseasonable storm that could destroy the crop and their livelihood. Agriculture is a major Monterey County industry: the fields dotting Monterey County’s coastline and valleys produce lettuce, broccoli, and artichokes in abundance.

Image of "Day's End," painting by Warren Chang

Day’s End portrays laborers leaving the artichoke fields near the Monterey County town of Castroville at the end of the work day. John Steinbeck, who worked alongside migrant laborers as a young man, conveyed the mood and feeling of Monterey County’s farm fields in carefully chosen words. Chang accomplishes the same purpose through deep shadows and late afternoon lighting rendered in subdued colors.

Image of "Fall Tilling," painting by Warren Chang

Fall Tilling recently won Best of Show in the 2013 RayMar Fine Art Competition. Except for the cell phone and Coke clutched by the female figure in the foreground of the painting, this characteristic Monterey County scene could have been painted using the same essential elements—mountains, fields, workers—at any time in the past 200 years. Chang’s reply to a question about the meaning of his works could have come from John Steinbeck, a writer who demurred when asked about the meaning of his books. “No one interpretation is necessarily more accurate than another,” says Chang. “You have the freedom to take from each painting what you will.” Ut pictura poesis: the visual arts, like literature, create images that invite us to draw our own conclusions.

David Ligare’s Paintings from the Pastures of Heaven

Unlike John Steinbeck and Warren Chang, David Ligare is not a Monterey County native. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he traveled to Los Angeles to study at the Art Center College of Design. From there—inspired, he recalls, by the writings of John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers—he moved to Monterey County, where he lived and worked in a small house on the Big Sur coastline, experimenting “as young artists do, with new styles and concepts.”

Ligare’s experimentation led to a distinctive style that he describes as “Post-Modern, Neo-Classical American,” weaving contemporary retelling of Greek myths into landscapes that are instantly familiar to Monterey County residents. His paintings have appeared in numerous solo exhibitions and can be found in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi in Florence, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art in Madrid.

The following examples of the artist’s work span the period from 1988 to the present and are shown with the artist’s permission. Several recent paintings appear in River/Mountain/Sea, the exhibition showing at the Monterey Museum of Art through April 27, 2014. Others can be viewed at the Hirschl & Adler Modern Gallery in New York and at the Winfield Gallery in Carmel. (For more information, visit Ligare’s website.)

In “John Steinbeck and the Pastoral Landscape: An Artist’s Viewpoint,” a lecture delivered in 2002 at the National Steinbeck Center, Ligare explained his purpose: “I have basically made a career of pulling the past into the present.” Landscape with a Man Drinking from a Spring is set in the Gabilan Mountains, not far from the site of Steinbeck’s novella The Red Pony. Ligare’s depiction of “a celebration of a wholesomeness that embraces both life and death”—a pervasive theme of Greek and Roman writing—shares two key symbols with Steinbeck’s description of the boy Jody, drinking from a mossy tub on the Tiflin Ranch, in the first part of The Red Pony. In both painting and story, the clear spring represents life while the cypress tree beneath which Carl Tiflin slaughters his pigs signifies death, unavoidable and often dirty.

Image of "Landscape with a Man Drinking from a Spring," painting by David Ligare

Landscape with a Man Drinking from a Spring
Oil on canvas by David Ligare, 60 x 90 (1988)
Courtesy of the artist. ©David Ligare

After Ligare moved to Monterey County’s Corral de Tierra, the setting of John Steinbeck’s novel The Pastures of Heaven, the Monterey County landscape emerged from the background to dominate his paintings. David Ligare, a catalog published by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery in 1999, contains nine plates; six are panoramic views of Steinbeck’s heavenly valley by the artist that could easily serve as illustrations for the novel. The subject of the catalog’s cover illustration—Landscape with a Red Pony—refers to Steinbeck’s story of adolescent initiation in rural Monterey County, written when the struggling author and his wife Carol were intimately involved with Monterey County’s Depression-era visual arts scene.

Image of "Landscape with a Red Pony," painting by David Ligare

Ligare explains why he likes to paint in the “golden hour” of the late Monterey County afternoon: “No matter whether I’m painting a simple rock or a figure in a landscape or a still life, it’s important to me to use the late afternoon sunlight and to create a sense of wholeness by recognizing all of the direct and indirect light sources. Everything in nature is a reflection in one way or another of everything around it.”

Image of "River," painting by David Ligare

River is one of three monumental paintings in the River/Mountain/Sea exhibition created by the artist in homage to his adopted Monterey County. Like Mountain and Sea, it represents an iconic Monterey County location featured in Steinbeck’s fiction. Ligare’s river scene shows the Salinas River as it emerges from the valley’s mouth into its broad agricultural plain. Mountain depicts majestic Mount Toro and Castle Rock—the rock formation that fired John Steinbeck’s boyhood imagination—as shadows fill the folds on Mount Toro’s western flank. In Sea, the third painting, granite tidal rocks are lit by the last rays of the evening sun near Lover’s Point in Pacific Grove.

Visiting Monterey County? Don’t Miss Masters in Miniature

Miniatures, the Monterey Museum of Art’s annual holiday exhibition and fundraiser, features 300 paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and mixed media works contributed by Monterey County artists for purchase through the sale of raffle tickets. Paintings by David Ligare and Warren Chang are among the most highly sought-after works featured at the event each year. Chang and Ligare’s 2013 offerings capture the essence of their art in the 7 x 9 inch-limit format mandated by the museum for paintings contributed to the show: Ligare’s Pinax, a meticulously rendered image of a Monterey County pine cone on a polished pine wood mount, refers to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine who sported a pine cone on top of his staff. Chang’s Master Study of Velazquez’s “The Fable of Arachne” displays the artist’s trademark use of highlights and shadows in an intimate portrait of a woman winding a ball of wool. Miniatures is open through December 31. If you’re visiting Monterey County during the holidays, don’t miss it.

Photo of Warren Chang by Sonya Chang, courtesy of Warren Chang. Photo of David Ligare courtesy of David Ligare.

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

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