Mad at the World Page 2

  The Steinbeck children and their friends gathered at the Central Avenue house to play in the unfinished attic, which was big enough to roller-skate in, or out in the yard behind a white picket fence. John organized a boys’ club—Mary was included—that met in the basement, which had a dirt floor. John loved dogs. He owned a terrier named Jiggs that could play dead, and later a shaggy mutt named Omar. There would always be a Steinbeck dog. One named Teddy figured in an incident John long regretted. His parents were entertaining friends one evening when they got out some photos of John as a toddler, naked and in his bath. John’s humiliation simmered for days. Finally, when John Ernst and Olive were out, he found the pictures and burned them. When he was discovered, John’s punishment was that he could not play with or even speak to Teddy for two weeks. Remembering this as a young man, Steinbeck told a friend that it had been a terrible time—because it was so hard on Teddy.

  Ignatius Cooper, who belonged to one of Salinas’s few black families, recalled playing marbles with John. He thought John’s parents were friendly, but found John himself serious and standoffish. John’s childhood friends remembered Mr. Steinbeck as tall, reserved, and well-mannered. He was thin and wore a mustache. He always said something pleasant to John’s friends when he met up with them. Olive Steinbeck was nice, too. She seemed in charge of everything, including her husband.

  Outgoing and alert to the family’s place in Salinas society, Olive was thirty-five when John was born. A joiner, she belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star, an auxiliary of the Masons, in which John Ernst was a member. She was also a founder of the Wanderers, a women’s club just thirty-five strong. They maintained a worldly outlook and met to discuss the cultures of other countries. The Wanderers inducted a new member only after someone died or moved away. One of the older Wanderers, Olive was always careful to sit in the back at meetings so she could doze when the speaker bored her. She was convinced that nobody noticed her nodding off, though everyone did. When the town’s first women’s bridge club was organized, Olive was there. The Steinbecks attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, as did many of the town’s better families. John sometimes carried the cross into the service, though his friends had the impression that he didn’t like church and was distracted during the sermons.

  A piano stood in the Steinbecks’ front parlor—a room that was seldom used. The family and their visitors spent more time in the adjoining living room, which had a fireplace. John’s bedroom was upstairs. He rarely showed it to anyone. One friend later recalled that it was austere and had a large dresser against one wall on which John kept a supposedly real human skull—though where he would have gotten one and why Olive would have tolerated such a thing are unknown.

  John’s friends liked visiting because although Olive was strict, she often served them something fun to eat. She could make donuts on short notice. One friend of John’s thought his mother looked like a Gibson Girl, with “a great, big bosom and a cinched-in waist.” A girl who got invited to join the Steinbecks for dinner from time to time recalled how lovely it was—the food was wonderful and the conversation lively. Mr. and Mrs. Steinbeck liked to tell jokes that kept things moving. If you went often, you heard the same jokes more than once.

  The Steinbecks were among a number of Salinas families who owned cottages in Pacific Grove and visited them often throughout the year. A tight grid of narrow streets and wind-sculpted trees, the town clung to the peninsula at the southern end of Monterey Bay. Rising from the water’s edge in sloping terraces to a high, forested ridge, Pacific Grove was wedged between the towns of Monterey and Carmel. In the late 1800s, the area was a quiet wilderness of woods and grazing lands mostly owned by a rancher named David Jacks. Jacks had come to the peninsula in 1849 from Scotland with an unquenchable thirst for land. Eventually he owned more than 100,000 acres. In 1873, a Methodist minister from the East showed up on doctor’s orders to spend time in a moderate climate. Jacks gave the man and his wife a small lot in the pines for a shack, where the minister’s health improved so much that he hurried back East and returned with friends looking to settle there, too. This small group grew into a larger idea: a Methodist retreat inspired by the training camp for Sunday-school teachers at Chautauqua Lake, New York. Jacks sold the congregants land for a campground, which they divided into tiny lots, each barely big enough for a tent. Jacks sold more land to the Southern Pacific Railroad. More people came. Eventually, the devout were outnumbered, and Pacific Grove was steadily transformed into a vacation spot and a gathering place for artists and writers who liked the air and water, as well as the more colorful diversions around Cannery Row next door in Monterey. Every fall, clouds of migrating monarch butterflies descended on Pacific Grove to spend the winter there, and each night in all seasons the beam from the Point Pinos lighthouse bore seaward through the gloom, marking the western edge of the continent.

  Pacific Grove was fifteen miles from Salinas, out at the end of the old road that ran west from Main Street and skirted the Santa Lucias before heading to the ocean. The Steinbeck cottage, small and square, was on a corner of Eleventh Street in the heart of town. John Ernst kept a garden there, and John inherited his father’s passion for growing things. The cottage was just blocks from Lovers Point, a pretty seaside park with a sandy beach for swimming and picnicking, protected from the long Pacific swell that crashed in a tempest of foam and spray against the rocks farther out on the peninsula. Even away from the water, the ocean’s presence was carried up the hill on the cries of gulls and the barking of sea lions.

  John loved his home in the Salinas Valley, loved living surrounded by mountains that felt like family. The Gabilans, he thought, were friendly and inviting and made you want to climb onto their shoulders, while the Santa Lucias were foreboding—and so in their way, foreign, like another country. He wasn’t sure why this was so, but thought maybe it was because the sun rose behind the Gabilans—warming and reanimating the world—and went down beyond the Santa Lucias, leaving him in the dark. And he was afraid of the dark.

  In the light of day, the richness of the broad valley was dazzling—especially after a wet spell, when a profusion of grasses and wildflowers burst from the soil. One time, John’s father helped drill a well—it may have been down at the Hamilton ranch—and they inspected the changing layers of black dirt, white sand, and coarse gravel that came up as the drill went deeper. There were shells and even a whale bone in a layer of sand from an ancient beach. Farther down they found a hunk of redwood left by a forest that had been there before the ocean. Sometimes at night, in his room, John thought he could feel an echo of the past through the bones of the big house, as if there were nothing but invisible time between his body and the ancient geological layers of sea and forest below. But he loved Pacific Grove, too, a haven by the water that was so close to the valley and yet a million miles away. This was his life, a good one, a life between the mountains and by the sea.

  Though he generally preferred his own company, from time to time John assumed the role of leader among a small group of friends. One of the chosen was a neighbor just across Central Avenue from the Steinbecks, a boy named Glenn Graves. The Graves property was big enough for them to keep horses and a chicken coop—a not-uncommon practice in Salinas that was sometimes called a “farm in town.” In the spring of 1906, when John was four years old, the chimney on the Graves home toppled during the catastrophic earthquake that hit San Francisco and damaged more than a dozen buildings in Salinas. John came to see himself as a big brother to Glenn, a shy boy who got picked on. Glenn once told his mother that he hoped to grow up to be vice president. When she asked him why only vice president, he answered that John would be president. John told a classmate that he played with Glenn because “somebody has to take care of him.” As an adult, John would say that the one thing he could not bear was another human being oppressed, abused, or taken advantage of by anyone more powerful, especially if the motive was greed.

  When they were older, John and Glenn owned shotgun
s and would take Omar out to the Salinas River with them to swim and hunt rabbits. John was a strong swimmer and fearless. But it was a dangerous place, Graves said, as there were patches of quicksand along the banks of the river. They saw a few rattlesnakes, but never shot a rabbit.

  Another boy John spent time with was Max Wagner. Wagner had been born in Mexico. His family fled during the Mexican revolution and settled on a farm about seven miles outside Salinas. Because Spanish was his first language, most of the other kids thought Wagner was Mexican. John met him one day when they were playing at the Graves house. John was delighted when he discovered that Max, who would later enjoy a long career onscreen as a bit player in Hollywood, could sing in Spanish. Wagner joined Glenn and John—usually accompanied by Mary—in exploring a nearby section of the slough, pushing their way out to it through the mustard sticks. They built a raft to float around on when there was enough water for it. Other times they would bend the tules flat and build walkways across the marsh. Apparently their parents were unbothered by these activities, except when it rained and the banks of the slough—“dobe,” they called it—turned so slick that falling in and being unable to crawl out was a possibility. When the slough dried out, the cattail tops of the tules cracked and burst open, filling the air with their cottony insides that drifted on the wind.

  Wagner later remembered that he never saw John doing anything with his father, that they respected each other but were distant. John Ernst did not begrudge his son the life he would have liked for himself—a life of possibility in a burgeoning time—but he disliked being reminded of it and kept to himself. According to Max Wagner, John Ernst always seemed to be at the office. Year after year, John Ernst let the demands of his work close over him. Accepting by increments this self-imposed solitary confinement dulled his senses and made his days somber but easier to tolerate. And by staying out of his son’s life, John Ernst shaped that life without meaning to. John was like a shadow cast by his father, a black and moody outline. If John inherited anything from his father it was a milder case of the elder Steinbeck’s susceptibility to bleak moods, a ceaseless struggle between contentment and despair that grew more pronounced as he got older. Sometimes the darkness descended on John without warning. More often it sat inside him, feeding a desire to be left undisturbed that would come to border on obsession.

  But the family demanded proper appearances, and John was civil, well-behaved, and, apart from the usual childhood malfeasances, never rebellious. And he was protective of Mary. Once, when they were playing with a barrel in the yard at the Graveses’ house, Max crawled inside and Mary impulsively jumped in after him. Her skirt caught and was yanked up to her waist. “Hey,” John said, his blue eyes blazing, “don’t get fresh with my sister.” It was the only disagreement he and Max ever had.

  Around 1906, John Ernst surprised John with a pony. It was ginger-colored, had a white blaze, and, according to Max Wagner, grew to be a little larger than an ordinary pony, though not as big as a horse. John named her Jill. Max owned a pair of gold-colored chaps that he sometimes loaned to John in exchange for a ride.

  Much later, Wagner would remember those days as exciting and filled with surprises because John was a “born storyteller.” This more expansive and imaginative side of his personality, which he took pains to hide most of the time, was propelled by visions of faraway lands and ancient times. It was as if there were another person inside John whom his friends glimpsed only when he was in a mood to pull back the curtain. John loved to hear stories and to make them up, and always had a part for Max to play. John was the ringleader, Wagner said, as he conducted his little troupe on one adventure after another. Sometimes they were pirates, other times knights in armor. But always they were part of some tale that John seemed to invent on the spot. “He was a sharpie,” Wagner said. “And he was always the captain.” Wagner and Glenn Graves were privy to something only a few other kids knew about: John and Mary shared a secret language. They sometimes spoke to each other in words that sounded like English but weren’t.

  John often visited his neighbors Belle and Jenny Williams, who had never married and lived in a big house with a tennis court. According to Glenn Graves, the sisters “knew everything there was to know” about the early days of Salinas. John was fascinated by all of it. He was a sponge. If you told him a story, he never forgot it. Another childhood friend said John liked talking to a former ranch foreman named Sylvester Carriaga, who lived around the corner from the Steinbecks and whom everyone knew as Joe. Carriaga told Steinbeck stories about Monterey. These might or might not have included information about Flora Woods, Monterey’s best-known madam, who ran a brothel near the waterfront called the Lone Star Café. Sometimes John got out a small notebook to write down the things Carriaga told him.

  John, age five, and his sister Mary aboard Jill—the pony that would live again in one of Steinbeck’s greatest stories. (Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University)

  John’s affinity for stories and his gift for piecing them together from his own imagination had not been apparent at first. For a time, he struggled to read and hated books. Words on a page went blank inside John’s brain. Learning to read, he later wrote, had been torture. He regarded books as “printed demons—the tongs and thumbscrews of outrageous persecution.” Then, when he was nine, his aunt Molly gave John an unusual book. At first he regarded it grimly. It was The Boy’s King Arthur, a simplified version of William Caxton’s edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (more commonly known as Le Morte d’Arthur).

  But John was beguiled by King Arthur and his mythical court. The Caxton edition, which dates from 1485, is a thicket of perplexing words and mystifying syntax, its archaic vocabulary nearly impenetrable to a contemporary reader. John’s children’s version was easier, though it retained words and ideas that he found strange and magical. Later, he would develop an affinity for dialects, and he never lost his fascination with the sounds of Malory’s ancient language and the mythical place from which it sprang. Other “great books,” as he called works such as the Bible or Paradise Lost, seemed to him to “belong to everyone.” But John believed that Malory was his alone, a story written in a way only he could understand. “I loved the old spelling of the words,” Steinbeck later wrote, “and the words no longer used. Perhaps a passionate love of the English language opened to me from this one book.” The private language John and his sister Mary spoke was no doubt based on Malory.

  John liked to ride Jill out into the fields, Mary at his side, pretending to be on an Arthurian quest. John assumed the role of knight—a stoic, chivalrous protector—while Mary served as squire. She was, he would later say, an excellent one. And every summer, when the Steinbecks made their trip to Pacific Grove, John would beg his father to stop off for their lunch at a pretty valley called Corral de Tierra, with its “castle rock” formation. A high cliff, the fractured and eroded face of castle rock resembles the ramparts of a great fortress. Here, John could imagine Uther Pendragon, the king of England—disguised by Merlin’s magic—sleeping with his enemy’s wife, who was tricked into believing she lay with her husband. The result of this treachery would be a boy child—Arthur, the future king. Such deeds, such words.

  The Steinbecks sometimes took Jill with them to Pacific Grove. One summer John organized a trek into the forest with several vacationing friends from Salinas. John was on foot, with Mary riding Jill. John provided a lively narration of their progress deep into the looming woods. The only sounds were his own voice and Jill’s soft tread on the pine needles. Before long they were lost and seemed to be going in circles. Everyone except John and Mary was frightened. After some time wandering among the trees, they found their way home. John always believed there was a parallel spirit world, and the forest impressed him as a place inhabited by things unseen. He kept the memory of it.

  Like the other kids in Salinas, John began his education at what everyone called the Baby School, which included first and second gr
ades, and where children getting used to being with one another away from home gathered each day to play beneath the drooping arms of a giant weeping willow. After Baby School, John went to the West End Grammar School, where he impressed his classmates as a bright but stubborn child. Out on the gravel schoolyard, he would go off by himself. Sometimes he pretended not to know the answer when a teacher asked him a question, which seemed deliberately odd. Unlike Mary, who would write “100” on her assignments before showing them to their parents, John was uninterested in what they thought. John Ernst routinely asked if he’d gotten “a licking” at school. Somehow, John was allowed to skip a grade.

  His friends learned that if they stopped over after school to see if John wanted to come out and play, they were usually told he was immersed in homework, though they came to suspect that he was just reading and didn’t want to be around anyone. John was a puzzle. Occasionally, he’d ask a few kids over, take them up to the attic, and tell ghost stories. One time Max Wagner showed up at the door. Something was going on. Max went in and the veterinarian was there, explaining to John that Jill had died. Recalling this scene sixty years later, Wagner burst into tears.

  Salinas High School, a turreted, two-story, red-brick colossus built in 1900, was on Alisal Street, only a couple of blocks from the Steinbeck home and right across the street from the county courthouse where John Ernst worked. The school was known as “the Old Brick Pile.” Elvina Iverson, a neighbor who came from one of the oldest families in the valley, remembered walking to school with John every day and never figuring him out. “I don’t think anyone ever knew him,” she said. “He never, ever talked. He was very shy.” John proved an indifferent student in high school—though people noticed how well he did in English. One year the English teacher required a theme every Friday. John looked forward to these assignments, and the teacher often read his aloud to the class.