Mad at the World
John Steinbeck in 1954. (Yousuf Karsh)
MAD AT
THE WORLD
A LIFE OF
JOHN
STEINBECK
William Souder
For my wife, Susan Sperl
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
—ROBINSON JEFFERS
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
PART ONE Between the Mountains and by the Sea
1.The Boy No One Knew
2.Live, Not Hope to Live
3.The Long Winter
4.Carol
5.Crash
6.Such Good Friends as These
PART TWO Phalanx
7.A Unit of the Greater Beast
8.Get Me Out of This Sort of Thing
9.Take Off Your Hat, Lennie
10.The Hundred-Day Siege
11.I’ll Be There
12.At Sea
PART THREE Travels
13.Conceived in Adventure and Dedicated to Progress
14.A Rock Falls into the Water
15.Each Book Dies a Real Death
16.The Best I Could Do
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
John, age five, and his sister Mary aboard Jill
John; his parents, Olive and John Ernst; and younger sister, Mary
Salinas High School 1919 track team
Katherine Beswick
Stanford’s Edith Mirrielees
Carlton “Dook” Sheffield
Ritchie Lovejoy, Steinbeck, and Carol
Carol and John Steinbeck on their wedding day
A dust storm overwhelms Rolla, Kansas, April 14, 1935
Ed Ricketts
Joseph Campbell
Tom Collins, director of the federal migrant camp at Arvin, California
Steinbeck, circa 1939
Pascal Covici
Elizabeth Otis
Gwen Conger
Steinbeck with his third wife, Elaine, at Sag Harbor
Steinbeck during the Whalers Festival at Sag Harbor in the summer of 1966
Steinbeck at work in his Manhattan apartment, 1958
Steinbeck with Charley
PART ONE
BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS AND BY THE SEA
1
THE BOY NO ONE KNEW
IN THE CALIFORNIA winter, after the sun is down and the land has gone dark, the cool air slips down the mountainsides that flank the great Central Valley, settling over the fields and tules below. When conditions are right, the night air forms a fog so dense that you cannot see your own feet on the ground. These fogs can last for days, and sometimes fill all 450 miles of the valley.
To the west of the Gabilan Mountains, in Monterey County near the ocean, lies another, smaller valley. Once it was an arm of the sea. Ninety miles long and shaped like a sword, it follows the course of the Salinas River, which runs north to Monterey Bay. The valley is flat between the Gabilans and the Santa Lucia mountains that separate it from the Pacific. Here, a different fog comes in summer, when inland heating draws in a marine layer of cooler, moist air from the ocean. This sea-born fog does not lie still on the land, but seeps over the folded hillsides, rising and falling along the river bottom. When the fog comes and the mountains are hidden, the world is an abstraction and you are alone with your thoughts. But the gray veil lifts. The light returns, the scene changes, and the fog retreats. Day by day the mountains turn from blue-black at dawn to pale gold under the sun and the towering sky, and the earth of the valley floor is lined with rows of lettuce, some a mile long.
In the winter of 1902, in the midst of a drought, the skies over the Salinas Valley opened. On February 27, the Salinas Daily Index reported that the Salinas River—which in the dry season ran underground in places—was out of its channel. Trees along the banks had water six feet up their trunks. A tangle of deadfall and debris had swept through the valley overnight in the flood, and those who had been praying for rain began praying for it to stop. That same day, in a large, Queen Anne–style house in a well-to-do neighborhood of the town of Salinas, Olive Steinbeck gave birth to her third child and only boy. They named him John—like his father, like his father’s father.
One world was ending; another, beginning. The promise of the new century was that nothing would remain the same for long, including America’s place in the world. With the Victorian Age barely over, the Steinbecks’ baby boy hurtled into a future he would help to write. Before his second birthday, Wilbur and Orville Wright would fly. And within months of his death, Neil Armstrong would walk on the moon. In between, John Steinbeck tried to tell the story every writer hopes to get right, which is only how it was during one small chapter of history. It is not much to ask, but the hardest thing on earth to do.
Thousands of years before John Steinbeck opened his eyes, bands of nomadic Indians—most recently the Ohlone—ranged through the Salinas Valley. They lived on game, fish, and shellfish, plus plants and seeds gathered in the woods and on grasslands sustained by controlled burnings that kept down the brush. The Ohlone also raised tobacco and managed a fraught coexistence with rattlers, mountain lions, and the now-extinct California grizzly bear.
In 1602, a Spanish explorer, Sebastián Vizcaíno, sailed up the California coast as far as the estuary of the Salinas River. Captivated by the harbor near the river’s mouth, and by the panorama of mountains and rocky headlands that curled into the Pacific around the northern and southern ends of a great bay, he named the place Monterey. In 1769, a Spanish expedition coming overland from Baja reached the southern tip of the Salinas Valley and found it an unpromising place. “The hills,” their report read, “gradually became lower, and, spreading out at the same time, made the canyon wider; at this place, in sight of two low points formed by the hills, it extends for more than three leagues.” The soil, the report continued, was poor and offered “treacherous footing,” as it was “full of fissures that crossed it in all directions, whitish in color, and scant of pasture.”
It would take more than two centuries for Spain to enforce its claim to Monterey Bay and throughout the rest of Alta California, as this region north of Baja was known. The Spanish established religious missions, built presidios, or forts, and connected the settlements with a 600-mile north-south road, El Camino Real. They brought livestock to the Salinas Valley—lean, compact cattle good for hides and tallow—and tried irrigation schemes at several of the missions, damming rivers, excavating canals and reservoirs, and building aqueducts. As poor as the land appeared, water transformed it into a garden of astonishing abundance. Almost anything would grow on it. The Spanish carved out ranchos for grazing, and introduced a novel form of bullfighting in which bulls were made to fight bears.
After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, Alta California was loosely administered as a Mexican territory. In 1846, the United States declared war against Mexico. It was the same year that a group of American settlers led by James Reed and George Donner became snowbound in the mountain passes near Truckee, in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California. Nearly half of the Donner Party, as it came to be known, perished. The others survived by eating their dead family members and friends. The tragedy demonstrated the arduousness of the journey at the heart of America’s so-called Manifest Destiny, a call to occupy the country from sea to sea that was encouraged by President James K. Polk’s administration. Immigrants from Europe, having crossed an ocean, now undertook the longer voyage across a continent, wresting the land from native peoples on whom they visited new diseases, the destruction of the bison herds, and a ceaseless wa
r of conquest. The extent of the United States reached violently and inexorably westward. In February of 1848, the war with Mexico ended, and in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the United States purchased a vast area between Texas and the Pacific Ocean, including Alta California, for a little more than $18 million. One month earlier, gold had been discovered at Sutter’s Mill just east of Sacramento. As prospectors poured into California, it raced toward statehood, which was ratified on September 9, 1850, at Colton Hall in Monterey.
As the population swelled, ranching and farming in the Salinas Valley boomed. Heavier-bodied beef cattle arrived from the east. Two rich aquifers were discovered beneath the valley floor—one at a depth of 180 feet, the other down at 400 feet. Below that is more water, though no one knows how much. By the late 1800s, farmers were experimenting with deep wells and then with pumps powered by gasoline engines. At the turn of the century, 7,000 acres were irrigated. Grains, hay, alfalfa, beans, potatoes, and mustard seed—staples of so-called dry farming—made room for an explosion of new crops including strawberries and lettuce and sugar beets as irrigation spread across the valley. Beef, milk, and produce moved out of the valley to San Francisco on the Southern Pacific Railroad, which reached Salinas in 1872.
Salinas sat in the midst of five large ranchos, residue of the early Spanish licenses and later the many more Mexican land grants that by Steinbeck’s time had been mostly broken up. A provision in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to keep the ranchos intact and their owners in place. But three years later, the California Land Act of 1851 effectively erased many of those longstanding claims. Then, in the 1860s, periods of flooding alternating with drought devastated cattle herds, and over time the rancho owners fell into a downward spiral of debt and rising costs that made their huge holdings—some of the ranchos were nearly 9,000 acres—unsustainable. The ranchos failed, but their boundaries, which wandered along recognizable natural features such as rivers and mountain ranges, kept their identities alive informally. If you said you were from Llano de Buena Vista, anyone would understand that your people lived in the country south of Salinas. Crumbling adobes still stood in places, organic extensions of the earth from which the Spanish and Mexicans had raised them. Most people in Salinas could remember when and how their families had come to the valley. And although Salinas was dominated by its founding families, no one apart from descendants of the native Ohlone could claim to have been there first.
The ranchos were framed by the mountains, and Salinas was framed by the ranchos, so that the town felt like an island. Salinas had sprung up to the southwest of an imposing, pyramid-shaped mountain called Fremont Peak. The town occupied an eighty-acre tract nearly encircled by a sharp bend in a tule-choked waterway called the Alisal Slough, which passed through fields of mustard plants as tall as a man. In the early days, the slough serpentined through the town, though it was interrupted by so many footbridges and streets that it had become a scattering of sloughs without names. Salinas began as a stopping-off place for a stagecoach line, with a hotel and a saloon where patrons could wager on what time the next coach would arrive. The line’s most celebrated and heavily bet-on driver was Charley Parkhurst. After Charley died in 1879, it came as a shock to everyone when they learned that he was a woman named Charlotte Parkhurst.
As a boy, John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was not lonely, but he was mostly alone. Though he grew up with a handful of schoolmates who liked spending time with him, none felt they knew him well. As one childhood acquaintance put it, John “didn’t have a lot of friends—but he could be friendly if he liked you.” Remote and seemingly preoccupied by ideas he never shared, John was big-boned and rangy, with a blunt face and a thick mop of hair parted on the side. People said he looked like “an unmade bed,” though his sapphire-blue eyes were striking and he had a piercing gaze that set him apart even more. Until high school, John wore knee pants. Nobody else did. In one important way, though, he was not alone. His older sisters, Esther and Beth, adored John and spoiled him when they were around. But it was his sister Mary from whom he was nearly inseparable. A bold little girl three years younger, she was pretty and had blonde, ring-leted hair. Mary went where John went. And yet John remained a boy apart in a place unto itself, a small town disconnected from the larger world. From an early age, he bridled at the bland striving in this narrow universe and, later on, at the town’s conventional propriety, which he came to see as a veneer concealing the darker human impulses that exist everywhere.
John’s father, John Ernst, had been born in Florida during the Civil War, one of six sons of Johann Adolph Großsteinbeck, a German-born immigrant who shortened his name to Steinbeck on arriving in the United States. Johann Adolph brought his family to California, where they farmed a small acreage near the town of Hollister, north of Salinas. John Ernst studied accounting. Like so many polite and proper men, he was by nature unhappy and spent much of his life wishing he had done something else, without any firm idea of what that would have been—though he was a passionate gardener and at one low point said he wished he’d become a farmer. Instead he went to work for the Southern Pacific Milling Company in King City, at the southern end of the Salinas Valley, and later at Paso Robles, fifty miles to the south in San Luis Obispo County. In King City, he met and married Olive Hamilton, one of Samuel Hamilton’s nine children.
Sam Hamilton had lived in Salinas, and signed the city charter in 1872 before homesteading a ranch near King City, in a ravine warped into the “dry, hard-looking hills,” as one friend put it. Hamilton was as charming and wise as his land was poor. His formidable daughter, Olive, taught school but had higher ambitions, and these seemed to be realized when John Ernst became manager of the Sperry Flour Mill in Salinas, by then a growing town of 2,500. Salinas was the county seat of Monterey County, a vast region that touched Monterey Bay, followed the coast down around Carmel and along Big Sur, and included the Salinas Valley and the surrounding mountain ranges—a county larger by half than the state of Delaware.
The Steinbecks settled into Salinas’s middle class. They bought a big house on Central Avenue, and they built a vacation cottage on a hillside overlooking Monterey Bay in nearby Pacific Grove. But the Sperry mill closed in 1911, following a period of decline during which John Ernst’s salary had been cut in half. Now, with the plant shuttered, he was out of a job. He told Olive he didn’t know what to do next. He complained of feeling “dippy” and became forgetful. He was, he confided to their daughter Esther, “a lost sheep.” Olive, who kept up a brave front—she said John Ernst had been fortunate to escape a business that probably should have closed a year earlier—admitted in a letter to Esther that John Ernst was tormented and often woke in the middle of the night and remained up until dawn, a spectral figure pacing the silent house. One worry among many was how to keep Esther, who had enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in college. Olive reassured Esther that her father’s unemployment would not interrupt her schooling, at least for the current term. Esther, meanwhile, contemplated transferring to Stanford. As the family teetered, John and his little sister, Mary, could not grasp what the trouble was. They had been under the impression that their father owned the mill.
John Ernst opened a feed store on Main Street, but after a few years, as horses gave way to automobiles, it, too, failed. Then he landed work as a bookkeeper at the Spreckels Sugar plant near Salinas, and the family regained its footing. Claus Spreckels was a German-born sugar and railroad magnate who, beginning in the 1870s, had acquired large tracts of former ranchos in northern California. Spreckels paid tenant farmers to grow sugar beets, eventually concentrating his efforts in the Salinas Valley. At first he shipped the beets by train to processing plants to the north, but in 1898 he put up a new facility—at the time the largest sugar-processing plant in the world—just four miles south of Salinas. Spreckels built a community of small houses for workers near the plant, and this became the factory town of Spreckels. Much of the Salinas Valley, including the town of Salinas, orbited Sp
reckels. And now, so did the Steinbeck family.
In the early years of the new century, Salinas prospered. Main Street was wide, flanked by shops and restaurants and stables—and soon garages and auto dealerships. Telephone wires ran down both sides of the street, and electric lights dangled above the pavement. There was an opera house in town, and in 1911 Salinas became the home of the annual California Rodeo. There was a roller-skating rink that was popular. Every evening at 8:00 p.m., the fire station rang its bell signaling curfew for the underaged.
Before Prohibition arrived in 1920, bars and saloons stood on nearly every corner. They stayed open until 2:00 a.m. One, called the Stream, featured a spittoon that was a trough of running water beneath the footrail. Bars were generally for men only, though a few had side rooms where women could be served. There was a Chinatown, its air thick with seductive aromas and its streets lined with gambling houses where the clack of dominoes could be heard from out on the sidewalk. Many of the town’s leading men patronized the red-light district on California Street. John heard stories about the “sporting houses” from a classmate who delivered newspapers and would sometimes be invited in to sit and talk with Jenny, a well-liked madam who smoked cigars and kept her girls out of sight when young visitors stopped by.
Despite the family’s reversals—John Ernst saw his job at Spreckels as a leveling-off of his stuttering career—the Steinbecks led a comfortable life. In early 1923, with help from friends, John Ernst was appointed Monterey County treasurer after his predecessor committed suicide. The county offices were an easy walk from the Steinbeck home, and the work suited John Ernst. The job paid $250 a month and John Ernst worked to keep it. He won election to a full term and was routinely reelected after that, remaining in the job for the rest of his life. It was the secure dead end he had always feared and always longed for.