A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

John Steinbeck was born 108 years ago today in Salinas, California, the “Salad Bowl of the World.” His family lived in a Victorian house that still stands on one of Salinas’s main streets. It is a restaurant now. And down the street just a couple of blocks sits the National Steinbeck Center, at the head of Main Street, which anchors the Oldtown district of the city. Freight trains crawl along in the near distance, running along the tracks above the underpass that the city’s many visitors use to get to Route 101. Route 101 that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles, running past green fields devoted to crops; some of them traditional, like lettuce, garlic, artichokes and others marking evolutions in America’s gustatory superabundance: maché, nuts, grape vines for wine.

The city of Salinas is not a nonpareil of a resort like nearby Carmel. It is not ocean-kissed like its near neighbors of Monterey and Pacific Grove. There are other towns like Salinas that seem down at the mouth, even embittered. But if Salinas does not have the wallet-and purse-opening allure of a place that draws people solely for its beauty, it does exude an air of optimism, of something beyond mere grappling with survival. Its Oldtown looks much more alive than it did when my brother and I passed through it a decade ago on a trip north. “Could Salinas evolve into an internationally-recognized literary-historic destination, appearing regularly in national press and travel literature, sought after by tourists and the employees of new businesses as a unique place to visit?” the city website asks. Salinas has become the epicenter for Steinbeck fans. And Steinbeck fans, especially in this part of the world, are legion.

Nearly every native or long-term Californian who picks up A Journey Through Literary America, takes a test drive by reading the piece on Steinbeck. In a piece called “Why Ready John Steinbeck, Dr. Susan Shillinglaw wrote: “Steinbeck wanted his prose to recapture a child’s vision ‘of colors more clear than they are to adults, of tastes more sharp…I want to put down the way afternoon felt and of the feeling about a bird that sang in a tree in the evening.’” In hundreds upon hundreds of pages of prose, amateur naturalist John Steinbeck captured California through his close observance and vivid description of the flora and fauna. Amateur sociologist and philosopher Steinbeck captured its people. California is a massive state—as large as and more economically mighty than many nations (though it is currently gasping for air). The odds stand firmly against one artist being able to wrap his brain around it. But by dint of perseverance, inexhaustible curiosity, willingness to travel, and a unique combination of gifts, Steinbeck succeeded in doing just that.

For a fairly recent Newsweek article about conditions in the agricultural area around the Weedpatch camp (the model for the migrant camp that the Joads reached in The Grapes of Wrath) click here.

And below, selections from Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, presented to him with these words: “Thanks to your instinct for what is genuinely American you stand out as a true representative of American life.”

Trivia Note: Alfred Nobel made his fortune through the patenting and sale of better and better explosives. Perhaps Steinbeck is the only Nobel Prize-winning author who was experienced in the use of dynamite.

From the speech:

“Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.



Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.



The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.



Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.



Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.



This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.



Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.



I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”



TRH

If you’re a reader, and you’re tuned into the sense of place that is critical to the work of many great writers, this handsome book is for you. The photographs capture the essence of the places that inspired 26 American writers, from Thoreau to Steinbeck to Faulkner to Proulx to Dove. The text is readable, to-the-point, thoughtful and economical, with the photographs providing the perfect amplification.

A clue to the fashioning of Yoknapatawpha County: The New York Times ran a story Wednesday about a diary belonging to some Mississippi slaveholders that appears to have heavily influenced Faulkner. He was fascinated by his contents and apparently took lots of notes. Much of the details in the diaries wound up, in one form or another, in his books. The descendant of the man who kept the diaries suppressed them for years. It was his wife who finally convinced him to make them public (and he doesn’t sound entirely convinced). He is not a Faulkner fan. He let on that he tried to read Go Down Moses once and got so angry that he thew it across the room. What stoked his anger is left a mystery.

Speaking of things coming to light: also in the New York Times books section is an article about some Salinger letters, written to his dear friends, that are now being made public. They contain, among other things, the titillating detail that he kept writing long after his vow of silence. But they don’t tell where the manuscripts are buried.

TRH

February 9th is the date that Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with Boni and Liverwright–one of the most influential publishers of the early part of the 20th century, publishing work by Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck and others. Horace Liverwright also formed the Modern Library in 1917. The company had a sad demise, precipitated by Liverwright’s alcoholism. It has been suggested that Mr. Boni and Mr. Liverwright flipped a coin to decide who would lead the company. Liverwright won control, and the company went down with him.

Hemingway was, all things considered, perhaps lucky to extricate himself, though the way he did it was rather unpleasant. For more details, click on this link from Steve King’s fine Today in Literature website.

TRH

It is now two decades ago that I got my first job after college: as assistant to the manager of Access Services of Gelman Library, George Washington University. I had come to Washington, D.C. with hopes–no, expectations–of landing a well-paying job in editing or some other aspect of publishing. After several months of rejections (it was not as bad a time to come out of college as it is now, but the class of 1990 graduated only a three years after Black Monday, the day on which the Dow plunged over 22% and bankers jumped out of windows) I fell back on the only relevant work experience I had and applied for jobs at the library.

I wore a suit (I had two) to my job every day. I had a variety of ties. I was half convinced the job would be a steppingstone to some other management position and half in utter denial of the fact that I had put my shoulders in the harness of a 9-5, 40 hour per week job. I wanted to be a writer.

It was there, in the Gelman stacks, that I discovered the collected Paris Review interviews–an impressive row of hardbound volumes, featuring the famed quarterly’s interviews with some of the greatest writers in the English language, probably bound in some dim library bindings.

I was enthralled.

The interviews, and the works of Henry Miller (particularly Tropic of Capricorn) became the arrows I used to ward off the idea of spending the rest of my life in a 9-5 job. Had I known what I now know (happy marriage and son aside), I might have put my suit and ties in a bag with a rock in it, tossed them into the Potomac and striven for a minimum of five years to become a writer. But such is hindsight.

The memory of the pleasure those interviews gave me has never been dulled. I would just  disappear into the stacks on the upper floors (while I was supposed to be checking on the Access Services staff to make sure they were maintaining smooth access to the building, busting people for chewing gum, drinking soda, looking up skirts with mirrors, etc..) to read what William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, or Robert Frost had said about their craft.

When internet sites, like Alibris, for buying rare books came into being, I remember thinking that what I would one day buy the collection for my library.

Well, it turns out I didn’t have to wait  until I had a library to put it in. Last year I read that Picador was releasing the complete interviews in paperback. And, thanks to my parents, and Hopkin’s Bookshop, I am now the owner of it; it being the only thing I wanted for Christmas.

It stands there in front of me right now, in its black slipcase with an open quotation mark on one side and a closing quotation mark on the other, and its list of 64 authors down the spine or the back, depending on which way you like to display your slipcases. Volume one is bright yellow, volume two is azure, volume three is a muted red and volume four a royal purple. The outer edge of the pages is deckled. The pages themselves are quite thin. I do not like slipcased paperback collections. From the moment you open the shrinkwrap, the cardboard slipcase is already dented and the white of the paper underneath is visible. Chances are that at least one of the books is a bit crunched or dinged as well, and the covers often look shopworn and scuffed from whatever was done in the bindery before they went into their own box.

That said, as soon as I opened volume two and started reading the interview with Graham Greene, I was thrown, I would almost say violently, back to those days in Gelman Library, when each word of those interviews was like water on parched ground. I had forgotten that one of the keys to the greatness of the Paris Review interviews was the brief scene the interviewers set before the interview itself. For instance:

The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Jack Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, Berrigan simply showed up at the Kerouacs’ house….Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once….It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs’ looking for the author of On the Road and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations.”

The other thing that must be said for the interviews is the obvious dedication of the interviewers and the openness of the interviewees (what the Seattle Times called the “unguarded moment…the holy grail for any interviewer.” After reading some of these interviews, who wouldn’t want to join that fraternity of amusing and acutely intelligent scribblers?

Needless to say, in the past twenty years, the interviews have progressed beyond those classic great writers I was reading back then. (Incidentally, I used a fondly-remembered fragment of the Frost interview–about how he got jiu-jitsu flipped by Ezra Pound–in A Journey Through Literary America.) Maya Angelou’s in there now, and Orhan Pamuk, Stephen King, Alice Munro, and Paul Auster. I have only read the Graham Greene interview and the beginning of Kerouac’s. I am skipping around randomly, at this point. Savoring the collection.

Every time, when I explain why I would write a book about the places that inspired great Americans, I begin by saying that I have always been fascinated by authors, and what makes them tick. And every time I say those words, my mind flashes back to the Paris Review interviews.

So, here’s to Picador, for putting them out in paperback. For the masses.

TRH