Mad at the World Read online

  Another girl who knew John, Dorothy Donohue, was convinced John’s reticence hid something going on inside that his friends would have found incomprehensible. “He did things by himself,” Donohue said. “He was a deep thinker. People thought he was antisocial. But he was really just thinking.”

  John never let on what he was thinking about.

  John’s reading life intensified as a teenager. Besides Malory, he read The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by the Roman historian Suetonius, many of the major English poets, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, and rafts of fiction that spoke to youthful exuberance, such as Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. And he read classics: Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary. The Steinbeck house was full of books, and as John’s sister Beth recalled, “The choice was ours.” Some years later Steinbeck reckoned that the books he immersed himself in as a boy were “realer than experience.” He didn’t remember them as books, but as “something that happened to me.”

  John; his parents, Olive and John Ernst; and younger sister, Mary, reading at home. (Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University)

  Almost everybody in the school attended a weekly dance in a warehouse by the railroad tracks in Chinatown. John never went. He didn’t like going to ballgames either. If he had a girlfriend, she would have been the only one who knew it, though it was rumored that he and Max Wagner—who was handsome and popular—sometimes sneaked off to visit two girls who lived over on Market Street.

  In his senior year, a change came over John and he got involved in school activities he had previously avoided. He became interested in drama and landed a part in the school production of Mrs. Bumstead-Leigh. He was associate editor of the yearbook, El Gabilan, and contributed a funny essay describing the school, including the English classroom—English, he wrote, being “a kind of high brow idea of the American language.” John was no athlete, but he was big and strong and gamely ran track and made the basketball team, though he never got into a game. To everyone’s astonishment, John was elected president of the senior class.

  In 1895, the California National Guard had formed a cavalry unit called Troop C, headquartered in Salinas. For the next two decades they did nothing but train. Then, in 1916, Troop C was called up to join the Punitive Expedition under the command of General John J. Pershing. President Woodrow Wilson had ordered Pershing into Mexico to pursue and capture the revolutionary Pancho Villa after Villa raided a U.S. Army post in New Mexico, leaving sixteen people dead and the garrison in flames. Troop C was mustered and marched down Main Street in Salinas before a waving crowd. Pershing led 10,000 men south, easily defeating Mexican forces. But they couldn’t find Villa and withdrew after a few months. One soldier in Pershing’s army was a Harvard-educated, thirty-two-year-old National Guardsman from New York named William Maxwell Evarts Perkins, who spent much of the campaign reading The Iliad. Perkins longed to return to his job as an editor at the publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, where in the coming decade he would find himself at the epicenter of a revolution in American literature.

  Troop C came home to Salinas. No one thought they would stay long. Two years earlier, on June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old student named Gavrilo Princip had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, shooting them dead with a pistol as they passed by in an open car in Sarajevo. The news reached Salinas a day later, and in the coming months the Salinas Daily Index reported on preparations for war in Europe. And what a terrible war it was—World War I, the Great War. Bitterly, hopefully, and in the end wrongly, it was called the war to end all wars.

  The United States remained on the sidelines of the war until the spring of 1917. Though half a world away, the fighting in Europe threatened to end a civilization thousands of years in the making. The war’s horrors broke history in two, obliterating all notions of the glories of armed conflict. Soldiers cowering in filthy, water-filled trenches succumbed to disease and incessant mortar fire. Tanks and poison gas rolled across devastated fields, and airplanes fought in the smoke-smudged skies. Everything died in the war, not just men but ideals such as valor and duty and honor. The human toll was staggering. In one battle that raged for months along the Somme River in France, more than three million had fought, with a million killed or wounded. Ultimately, some two million American soldiers would deploy to Europe, under the command of General Pershing. In Salinas, Troop C was mustered again, and marched once more down Main Street on its way to war. Although many people in Salinas were, like the Steinbecks, of German descent, the troops received a rousing send-off. Salinas was all for the war.

  Salinas High School maintained a military training unit called the Cadets. Many of the boys belonged to it, and they expected to join Troop C after graduation and join the fighting in Europe. John was a Cadet and wore the high-collared uniform as they conducted marching drills around town. Glenn Graves remembered a day when he and John were in uniform and encountered a regular army officer. They were thrilled when they saluted and he saluted back. Sometimes the boys went to the gun range to practice marksmanship. The surplus army-issued rifles had a brutal recoil, and one time Glenn’s shoulder hurt so much after a session at the range that he could not get out of bed the next day.

  In the summers, the Cadets were often put to work on local farms, which were shorthanded because of the war. They called these work parties “bean vacations.” One summer, John also did a stint of work at the Spreckels plant, where he was injured when he got a chemical solvent in his eyes. Nearly blinded, John had his eyes heavily bandaged for days, and looked disturbingly like a casualty of war. But he recovered, and it came as a relief and a disappointment when the war ended in the fall of 1918, when John was still a senior at Salinas High. The war was the story of stories, but it would be for others to tell.

  Salinas High School 1919 track team. John is in the back row, far right. (National Steinbeck Center)

  If his classmates felt they got to know John slightly better as their school days came to a close, what he thought remained a mystery. John was good with his hands and would stay after school to work in the woodshop on his own. Nobody had any idea what he’d do with himself. The prediction for him in the El Gabilan yearbook was that he’d be a preacher—an inside joke. Max Wagner, who knew John as well as anyone could, said he read a lot and could quote from books, but never talked about himself unless it was to be seen as different. “John just loved to do the opposite of what a normal person would do,” Wagner said. Glenn Graves would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, notice a light on in John’s bedroom across the way, and figure he was reading again. John told him that he always kept paper by his bedside in case he wanted to write something down.

  What was John’s story anyway? The “opposite of what a normal person would do” doesn’t explain much. What’s clear is that his mind was aflame from an early age, and that certain impulses fell into place and took hold of young John Steinbeck, a boy who would not conform, who could not tolerate a bully, and who believed that somewhere within the solitude he craved there was a world that could be rendered sensible and fair. These tendencies were hard to reconcile and hinted at a difficult but consequential life ahead.

  One day after school, John invited a boy named Bill Black up to his bedroom. The house was empty, and the steep, narrow stairway creaked as they climbed to the second floor. Black said the room was plain and dim. Dust floated in shafts of light from two small windows. John walked over to the dresser and motioned for Black to come closer. John knelt and slowly pulled open the bottom drawer. It was full of manuscripts.

  2

  LIVE, NOT HOPE TO LIVE

  IN OCTOBER OF 1919, John Steinbeck boarded the train in Salinas—his family did not own a car until 1931—for the seventy-five-mile trip north to Palo Alto and Stanford University. At seventeen, Steinbeck was nearly his adult height of six feet. The only other person from Sal
inas headed to Stanford that fall was Bill Black, a standout athlete who would join the track team as a pole-vaulter. Because he’d gotten a D in Latin, Black had to retake the course to get into Stanford. Black planned to study engineering. He had no idea what Steinbeck was going to college for, but he thought Steinbeck wanted to be a writer. Black never forgot that day in the upstairs bedroom on Central Avenue, when he’d listened as Steinbeck read one story after another. There must have been at least fifty of them, each one handwritten on white paper. Black thought the stories were “grand,” packed with action and “easy to follow,” and that Steinbeck read them in a way that made them even more compelling. They were all about the Salinas Valley. One story that stayed with Black had been about a pony.

  From his earliest efforts, Steinbeck was ambivalent about his writing. He was quick to insist that it was no good, and even after he became one of the world’s most successful authors, he continued to doubt that anyone would want to read whatever he was working on. Steinbeck was indifferent about the stories he wrote in high school. He’d sent some of them around to magazines, but nothing came of it. This was due in part to Steinbeck’s refusal to include his return address with the manuscripts, which he always sent out under a pen name. Unnerved at the prospect of any direct contact with a magazine, he instead watched to see if any of his stories appeared. None did. Steinbeck said later he was “scared to death,” afraid that if an editor contacted him it would be with a rejection—or, worse, Steinbeck said, an acceptance. This was the way it was to be for Steinbeck, craving success and horrified that it might befall him.

  Young, shy, uninterested in school, and reluctant to admit to anyone what he hoped to become, Steinbeck was unlikely Stanford material. Opened in 1891—its first student was future U.S. president Herbert Hoover—the university had begun as a monument to Leland Stanford Jr. The only child of Leland and Jane Stanford, Leland Jr. had died of typhus at the age of fifteen. His father, a railroad tycoon and one-term governor of California, believed Leland Jr. had spoken to him in a dream, telling him to “live for humanity.” Stanford University was the result.

  Public sentiment had been against the university at the outset. It was seen as an unwelcome competitor for the nearby University of California at Berkeley, and a waste of millions of dollars its detractors said would have been better spent augmenting the endowments of existing schools. But by the time of Steinbeck’s arrival, Stanford had a student body of nearly 3,000, with graduate programs and a medical school.

  Unlike the elite eastern colleges on which it was modeled, Stanford was not a selective training ground for the privileged. Most Stanford students came from working-class families. Admission was essentially open to anyone. Tuition for California residents was free—though that changed after Steinbeck’s arrival. In 1920, attending Stanford would cost $40 a quarter.

  Stanford occupied nearly 9,000 acres south of San Francisco, near Menlo Park, where Leland Stanford had farmed, kept a vineyard, and raised horses. Stanford students to this day refer to the university as The Farm. In Steinbeck’s time the campus was arranged around a Spanish-influenced central quadrangle, red-roofed and flanked by colonnaded arcades; the low-slung buildings and broad lawns lent it a gauzy otherworldliness. Stanford was the warm, egalitarian antithesis of its stony counterparts in the East. Flowers bloomed in February, and on clear days beneath the rapturous Palo Alto sky it always felt like spring.

  Steinbeck’s first home at Stanford was the men’s dormitory, Encina Hall. Inspired by a Swiss resort Leland Stanford had visited, it stood four stories tall, was built of massive limestone blocks, featured long, echoing hallways, and was home to 400 postadolescent males who’d come from mostly small towns or rural areas. In the early years it was bedlam. A favorite prank was “turning up a room”—that is, turning everything in a room upside down while its residents were elsewhere. Freshmen were regularly “tubbed,” held underwater until their struggles indicated imminent drowning. Explosions of fireworks and the crash of large objects tossed into the stairwells were common occurrences. Less frequent but more alarming was the discharge of a pistol.

  On registration day in October of 1919, a student named George Mors went down to the swimming pool near Encina and saw a “big guy” doing laps. It was Steinbeck. They started talking. Mors was the same age as Steinbeck. He’d grown up in Los Gatos, only twenty miles away, and entered Stanford at the age of sixteen. But he had caught the flu during the 1918 pandemic and missed most of his first year. Mors was lucky. The worldwide flu outbreak infected half a billion people, killing about one in ten—nearly five percent of the world’s population. Now Mors was back. He told Steinbeck he planned to live in Encina Hall. Steinbeck suggested they room together.

  To Mors, Steinbeck seemed a friendly lug, a “country hick.” He had a scar on the side of his chest that he said was from surgery to relieve the pleural pneumonia he’d had as a kid. Steinbeck got a little money from his father each month. His mother sent brandied cherries. One night in the dorm, Steinbeck and Mors gave each other tattoos: small hearts carved with India ink and a razor blade, just above their left elbows. Steinbeck was nervous about the blood and was so timid with the razor that Mors’s tattoo soon faded away. But Steinbeck’s got infected and healed into a welt that was still there forty-five years later. He said it had a sharp outline under a full moon.

  Mors said that from the moment he met Steinbeck, it was clear that the only thing he cared about was writing. He balked at taking courses that he didn’t think would make him a better writer. Steinbeck was warned about this, but “[h]e only took what he wanted to take,” said Mors. In a sign of trouble to come, Steinbeck told his friend Glenn Graves that he preferred spending most of his time in the library.

  Mors and Steinbeck roomed together off and on for two years. Steinbeck’s comings and goings confused several people who knew him at Stanford, and their later accounts of his college days did not always agree as to what happened and when. Since it was clear to Mors that Steinbeck was struggling and cared nothing about school, he asked Bill Black if perhaps he could help. Black had already tried to persuade Steinbeck to come out for track, thinking it would help him fit in. Now he admitted to Mors that he was at a loss. “We both liked John,” he said later, but in the end there didn’t seem to be anything they could do for him.

  In the summer of 1920, Mors and Steinbeck went down to Salinas. Steinbeck’s father had a connection in the highway department and had arranged jobs for them on a survey crew laying out the new Highway 1 south of Carmel, along the coast of Big Sur. At the time there was no road on the coast, just an old Indian trail. “You could only travel there on foot or horseback,” Mors said. It was wild, forbidding country—steep, crawling with poison oak, and teeming with rattlesnakes. Despite the stunning views of the Pacific Ocean, often from high above, it was said that Big Sur could drive people insane if they stayed there too long. Then there were the “watchers,” solitary, wraithlike figures that according to backcountry legend would appear outlined against the sky on a ridgetop and would vanish if approached. Steinbeck admitted he wasn’t sure if any of this was true, but allowed that there could still be some Indians roaming the hills. He and Mors carried sidearms—supposedly for rattlers, though they took occasional potshots at seagulls. They worked only a short time before Steinbeck decided they’d be happier and safer at the Spreckels sugar plant. They stayed at Steinbeck’s home. Mors was smitten with Steinbeck’s sister Mary. She was pretty and had a figure that made him lightheaded. Steinbeck, he thought, treated her like a daughter.

  John Ernst asked Mors to “look after” Steinbeck at Stanford. Mors wrote the Steinbecks often—more often than Steinbeck did. It fell to Mors to talk with Steinbeck’s parents when he disappeared one weekend. Nobody knew where he was, and the Steinbecks were concerned. John Ernst came up to Stanford and spoke with the dean of men. Eventually they learned that Steinbeck, convinced he was on the verge of flunking out, had gone to San Francisco and gotten a job as a
clerk in a department store. He eventually turned up at Mors’s house in Los Gatos, asking if he could stay there. Mrs. Mors spent several days “straightening me out,” Steinbeck later recalled. She persuaded him to call his mother. Steinbeck returned home and, later, went back to Stanford.

  Steinbeck had managed to make another friend at school—Carlton Sheffield, whom everyone called “Dook.” They were in two classes together during freshman year, one of which was French. Later, they shared a room in Encina Hall. Sheffield remembered Steinbeck as a “large, rather quiet, impressive individual.” He received $50 a month from his parents, which Sheffield said put him in “the plutocrat class.” Steinbeck kept his hair short on the sides, which Sheffield said emphasized his high forehead and prominent ears. When he laughed, everyone noticed the fathomless blue of his eyes.

  Steinbeck told Sheffield story after story, mostly about his life before Stanford. Some of them might even have been true. There was one about putting his sister Mary onto Jill and then tying her feet together under the pony’s belly so she wouldn’t fall off. She fell off anyway and was dragged over the ground while Steinbeck struggled to pull her free. That sounded real enough. One of Steinbeck’s more dubious claims was that he’d lost his virginity to a one-legged babysitter. Sheffield thought Steinbeck had a knack for vivid narration. Talking about the day-long buggy rides from Salinas to Pacific Grove, Steinbeck remembered those trips in such detail that Sheffield said he could almost feel the plume of grit rising behind the horse on the dusty way to the sea.

  According to Sheffield, Steinbeck joined ROTC, but quit almost immediately. It was the same when he went out for the freshman football squad, where they tried, unsuccessfully, to find a place for him on the line. Steinbeck had size and strength but demonstrated no ability. He rowed crew a little longer, but he somehow damaged the veins in his legs as he strained at the oar—an injury that affected him throughout his life. Steinbeck didn’t like strangers or crowds, was frightened of public speaking, and tended to keep to himself. Sheffield said Steinbeck worked for a time as a waiter at a Chinese café in Palo Alto where a lot of Stanford students ate because a meal there cost 25 cents. After a few weeks, Steinbeck got into an argument with one of the cooks and had to flee the place. He told Sheffield he had “barely beaten a meat cleaver out the door.”