California State University, Northridge the Long Valley

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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

THE LONG VALLEY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PEru1UTATION \ \

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in

Geography

Martin S. Kenzer ....-

Augu-st, 1980 The Thesis of Martin S. Kenzer is approved:

Robert M. Newcomb

Elliot ~cintir~

David Hornbeck, Committee Chairman

Cqlifornia State University, Northridge

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements represent the release of pent-up pressures and

they are also a sort of confession; those tortuous hours and days of

anguish are finally over, and it is now tii'le to credit those who took

the time and made it (somehow) all work out in the end.

On the lighter side, I must say thank you to the wonderful

procrastinations I was able to create: Dodger gam~s, the Pub, that

uncontrollable Frisbee, those long thought-provoking lunches, and watching that inimitable fellow we deemed the "Coke Man," are all most certainly a part of this paragraph. To these, and to all the many other diversions that allowed me to .look busy while I did very

little, I am most grateful.

To the RTD for making my life utterly miserable as I tried to commute to school each day, and to all the automobiles and filth producing industries that make the air in Los Angeles so outright disgusting, I am additionally grateful because these are the sorts of things that drive a person to finish a thesis so he can then leave.

On a more serious note, to Leroy the custodian, for being himself and for placing things into perspective, I extend a warm

thank you and a smile. Likewise, to all the Geography department

secretaries, but especially to Peggy Michaels and Trudy Sterner, I am appreciative for their honest friendship and for the comfort of a

couple of shoulders to lean on and a few pairs of ears that would always listen.

iii It is perhaps quaint to say so, but 'i.'lithout my parent's support

I would never have been able to go to school in the first place, much less complete this M.A. degree. Although the ultimate reward has yet to be realized, I also owe more than a small amount of gratitude to

Ralph Vicero. To Joyce Gerritsen, who typed, re-typed, cursed me in private, and then re-typed this thesis again, I acknowledge much more than a simple thank you; I would still be here typing the manuscript.

Next, tl1ere is Elliot Mcintire who offered co®nents, encourage ments, and his two "eagle-eyes" t.o proofread this thesis at its numerous stages of progress. To Robert Ne,.7comb, who is both a comrade and a genuinely nice person, I offer a sincere and much deserved string of thank yous.

To a select but unnamed group of students and friends, I am grateful for their continual motivation, their constant (although playful) prodding, and for all those subjective experiential realities that this thesis is all abcut. Of these, Robert A.

Rundstrom must be singled-out from the rest; without the many pleasing and philosophical c;.;.>nversations. we had, I would have gone crazy long long ago--a special Thank You! To the one individual who has probably meant more and done more for me than any other single person, I cannot find the words but please accept my thanks and remember I will always be there.

And finally, to David Hornbeck, who planted the seed of an idea, left it alone to germinate, and then watched that seed sprout, slowly take root, struggle to live, wander for a time, and ultimately bear fruit, I offer the five essays which follow.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

ABSTRACT vi

Chapter

1 1

2 12

3 42

4 70

5 97

APPENDIX .- 104

BIBLIOGRAPHY 108

v ABSTRACT

THE LONG VALLEY; A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERMUTATION

Martin S. Kenzer

Master of Arts in Geography

August, 1980

A central focus of geography is the study of place. No two places on the earth's surface are exactly the same and geographers are concerned with finding out why. To this end, however, their approach to understanding has relied primarily on paradigms and research strategies t:hat some·times exceed a millennium in agei a logical, objective, rationalistic orientation to nature--later termed logical-positivism--has become the mode of explaining reality.

This thesis suggests that a subjective, humanistic perspective is needed to augment objective fact-finding. To accomplish this, this thesis further suggests that regional novels, when viewed within this humanistic framework, become prerequisite data sources for the historical geographer interested in gaining an insight into the

"inside" workings of place.

As an example, John Steinbeck's "Salinas Novels" are used in this thesis to show that Steinbeck, a non-teleological writer, was

vi writing from a humanistic/phenomenological point of view, and

therefore serves as a perfect model for analyzing subjective research.

His philosophy of life, as exemplified in Sea Of Cortez: A Leisurely

Journal Of Travel And Research, shows tha·t Steinbeck was only

concerned in writing about what is, not what could or should be.

The thesis concludes that geographers cannot ignore subjective

sources of data (in this case regional nove~sl, and that the histori

cal geographer in particular, should view novels as social documents which provide the intimate, "lived-world" reality of a particular place at some specific point in time. One additional reconunendation found in this thesis is that for the student, regional novels are an excellent introduction to the understanding of place, and of how places truly do differ over the surface of the earth.

vii ' .

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm·--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

Joseph Conrad

Chapter l

There are basically four traditions within the field of geo-

graphy--an earth science emphasis, an area studies perspective, a

spatial orientation, and an approach stressing man-land relation 1 ships. Attempts at defining the basis for geographic research have

also yielded four primary paradigms--enviroP~.ental, regional studies, . . 2 t h e stu d y o f place, and geography as a synoptlc sc1ence. Central to

both schc~es, appears to be the geographer's emphasis on places. No matter what methodology geographers use, and no matter which paradigm

they place that methodology within, they must somehow be concerned 3 with specific locales. Nearly every professional geographer whc has

ever penned a textbook has, at some point in the text, laid claim

to the distinctive character of places, and has 0mphasized the idea

that the study of geography is based on differentiating one place 4 from another. But in order to capture the true essence of a part-

icular place, the geographer must be open to data which transcends the physical world of abstract space. Attuned to a humanistic per 5 spective, geographers have begun to explore alternative sources of dat..a, usually to be explained from a subjective, phenomenological 6 framework. One such source of data has been the use of regional 7 literature, more specifically the regional historical novel.

l 2

The regional novelist is essentially interested in the same

thirig that concerns the regional geographer. That is, "to integrate

the multitude of seemingly disconnected facts about nature and man in 8 the region he is describing." Both are interested in characterizing

the uniqueness of the particular area they are concerned with. Yet

each approaches their description from different ends, via different media. The geographer collects "objective" data and remains

remo;.·ed from the description by presenting an "unbiased" explanation.

The novelist, however, draws his data from real-life experiences and presents a subjective accounting. Because of this isolated subjectivity, geographers are often war1 of using regional novels,

claiming that they vlere purposefully contrived to express a particu1ar point of view. g_ Yet geographers who feel this way are seemingly missing the true value of novels and are thereby neglecting a valuable resource for geographic research.

N0'.Tels derive their strength as =< resource in the fact that th~y draw on human experiences. Novels are not based on a ficticious world that only exists in the minds of the authors. Rather, novels mirror reality. They portray the deep human emotions and experiences that the so-called objective, scientific researcher cannot abstract 10 from his or her brand of data. It is "the skillful novelist" writes

Meinig, who "often seems to come closest of all in capturing the full 11 flavor of the environment." The novelist is not studying the environment, he is an intricate part of the environment. He is writ.ing .from the inside, rather than trying to understand the area from above. Therefore, he provides a unique perspective of human 3

experience unavailable to the "outsider." It is this very "inside" perspective that qualifies novels as sources of data. As Salter points out, "The strength of landscape in literature lies in its subtle human qualities, its potential for revealing the hidden

. . f h . ~ ...... ~\12 d 1.mens1.ons o uman mean1.ng, ana not 1.n 1.ts ObJectJ.vJ.ty.

But novels provide more than emotions and a quality of life totally lacking from the best geographic description. Perhaps of most importance to the historical geographer, is the novelist's conscious or unconsc1.ous. representat1.on. o f a .Lan~ d scape t h at no 1_anger ex1.sts.. 13

For who can generate a scene better L'1an the good regional novelist?

The best objective descriptions of landscape can hardly compare with the evocative and colorful portrayal of a scene depicted in a regional novel. And if the geographer is truly interested in relating the distinctive nature of a locale, how could he or she better hope to capture and communicate that essence than through the eyes of a novelist?

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how regional historical novels, when viewed within a humanistic/phenomenological framework, become prerequisite sources for the delineation of essence of place and for understanding the man-land relationship within that place. For means of illustration, the example presented in the following pages will be the novels of John Steinbeck, provided as an aid to the understanding of the Salinas Valley.

While sitting here contemplating the justifications for this thesis, I am reminded of Marie Curie's exclaimation that "In sci"'nce 14 we must be interested in things, not in persons," and it once 4

again occurs to me that the basis for writing this paper arose more out of an attitude, than oct of any definable problem. Curie's attitude to.,.mrd science and things scientific, although steeped in nineteenth-century philosophy, is still the prevalent feeling of 15 toclay's scientific community; people are simply reduced to objects for the purposes of generalization, model-building, and ultimately, prediction. But what happens when generalizations and models fai.l to recognize the human, decision-rnaking element and eventually prove to 16 be worthless? In other words, what happens when we, as social scientists, generalize to the point of losing sight of the very thing we are supposedly engaged in studying--people?

Another reason for undertaking this thesis lS to point out the supplemental nature of literary works. Geographers, whether they be concerned with past or contemporary landscapes, can utilize regional historical novels to better familiarize themselves with the area they are atte:;:;:pting to understand. The no-v-elist concerned with "place" will often highlight a particular feature that the geographer, educated to see reality from only one vantage point, will perhaps be

"trained" to overlook. Yet, quite often, it is this overlooked feature that the geographer needs, to tie t-ogether the rest of his research. And many times it is the lack of the human element that makes.a piece of research seem so dry or sterile. As Gilbert writes:

The regional novelists have been able to produce a synthesis, "a living picture of the unity of places and people," which so often eludes geographical writing. The geographer often speaks of the 'personality' of a region and this is exactly what the ~ovelist has brought out so strongly. He has been ·able to reveal the individuality of a particular . . ·.,landscape. 5

My purpose is not to persuade geographers to abandon their cur-

rent research or data sources, and to wholeheartedly adopt a human-

istic perspective in toto. My contention is that literary sources, particularly regional historical novels, should be freely used in con-

junction with other, more "objective" sources of data. "Landscape

in literature" opines Salter, "should not be thought of as a substi-

tute for the more cor.ventional modes of geographical study, but

rather as a supplemental and special source of landscape insight ....•~ 8

The reasons I have chosen to use John Steinbeck as a model for

this thesis are really raL~er simple. In additicn to having been an excellent writer who was merely interested in presenting an accurate 19 d escrlptlon. . o f wh at are very real p 1 aces, ]_. t h as b een suggested by one of Steinbeck's sharpest critics, that "His great possession as a writer ... was an usuai simplicity, a natural tenderness and ease in 20 his relation to his California world." Steinbeck spent his forma- tive yec:.rs in California and was intimately tied to both the land a.nd the people. He was an extremely observant individual and his writing reflects the mind c£ a person keenly aware of his surroundings. A contemporary of his once remarked that because Steinbeck was such a sensi t.ive and "outward-oriented person" that he "readily absorbed the 21 spirit of the time" in his writing.

But the area Steinbeck was most sensitive to, and the place he 22 knew the best, was the Salinas Valley--a place that has been refer- red to, by more than one writer, as "a microcosm of the agricultural 23 conflicts taking place all over the state'' in the 1930s, and hence, an excellent example of what might be termed "the average rural 6

California community" for that period of time.

The methodology and organization employed during the course of

this investigation will vary in accordance with the chapters and

their contents. Chapter two, essentially a biography of John Stein-

beck, will concern itself with the man, his background, his talents

as a writer, and the influence his environment had on that writing;

all of Steinbeck's major accomplishments as an artist will be in-

spected. Chapter three will first examine the philosophy of pheno- menol

literature can contribute to the geographer's understanding of place.

This will immediately be followed by an in-depth examination of Stein-

I • 1 • ' 24 • d • h b eck s non-~eleologlca thlnklng, alme at demonstratlng t at he was a phenomenologist and that his "fiction" should be interpreted in

those terms. Both of these chapters were researched within a

logical-positivistic framework and will necessarily be examined from

. f . 25 th at same polnt o vlew,

Chapter four will investigate man-land relationships and extract

the essence of plar.8 for the Salinas Valley usinq a select number of 26 Steinbeck's novels. This chapter will be approached and interpreted

from a humanistic/phenomenological viewpoint, as defined in chapter

three. The final chapter, the fifth, will be a summation of the argument presented in this thesis, with an eye on possible future research for the huma.nistic geographer. 7

Notes: Chapter 1

L William D. Pattison, "The Four Traditions of Geography," Journal of Geography, Vol. 63, No. 5 (May, 1964) pp. 211-216.

2. J.A. May, Kant's Concept Of Geography And Its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1970, pp. 218-219 and 250-252.

3. The idea of "place" being central to the study of geography is anything but new. Most of the regional geographers and many of the cultural geographers of the past thirty years have, at least implicitly, proposed such a statement 0n geography's focus. See, for example, Andrew H. Clark, "The Whole Is Gr-eater Than The Sum Of Its Parts: A Humanistic Element In Human Geography" in Donald R. Deskins, ~Tr. et al., Geographic Humanism, Analysis and Social Action: Proceedings Of Symposia Celebrating A Half Century of Geography At Michigan, Michigan Geographical Publication No. 17, University Of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1977, pp. 3-26; Preston James, "Differences From Place To Place," Journal of Geography, Vol. 45, No. 7 (October, 1946) pp. 279-285; Preston James, "Geography In An Age of Revolution," Journal of Geography, Vol. 62, No. 3 (March, 1963) pp. 97-103; Carl 0. Sauer, "The Personality Of Mexico," Geographical Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (July, 1941) pp. 353- 364; and Derwent Whittlesey, "The Regional Concept And The Regional Method" in Preston E. James and Clarence F. ,Jones (Eds.) American Geography: Inventory & Prospect, Syracuse University Press: Syracuse, 1954, pp. 19-68.

4. For a mere smattering of geography texts, both old and new alike which posit this idea, see: Jan C.M. Broek and John W. vJebb, A Geography Of Mankind, McGraw-Hill Book Company: New York, 1978; Harm J. deBlij, Human Geography: Culture, Society, and Space, John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1977; Preston E. James, One World Divided: A Geographer Looks At The Mo~ern World, Blaisdell Publishing Company: Waltham, Massachusetts, 1964; Preston E. James, A Geography Of Man, third edition, Blaisdell Publishing Company: ~valtham, Massachusetts, 1966; Terry G. Jordan and Lester Rowntree, The Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction To Cultural Geography, Canfield Press: San Francisco, 1976 and J.E. Spencer and William L. Thomas, Cultural Geography: An Evolutionary Introduction To Our Humanized Earth, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: New York, 1969.

5. Humanistic geography is rapidly becoming a well-defined sub-fleld of geography. For a description of humanistic geography and some of its possibilities, see: Clark, op. cit., footnote 3; David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels, "Contexts of Modern Humanism In Geography," in David Ley and Marwyn Samuels (Ecis.) Humanistic Geography: Prospects And Problems, _ Maaroufa Press, Inc.: Chicago, 1978, pp. 1-1'/; Sister Annette Buttimer, Values in Q ' Geography, Resource Paper on College Geography No. 24, Association of American Geographers: Washington, D.C., 1974; Anne Buttimer, "Grasping '!'he Dynamism Of Lifeworld," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 66, No. 2 (June, 1976) pp. 277-292; Marwyn s. Samuels, "Existentialism And Human Geography," in David Ley and Manvyn S. Samuels (Eds.) Humanistic Geography: Prospects And Problems, Maaroufa Press, Inc.: Chicago, 1978, pp. 22-40; and Yi-Fu Tuan~ "Space And Place: Humanistic Perspective," in Christopher Board, et al., (Eds.) Progress In Geography, Vol. 6, 1974, reprinted in Stephen Gale and Gunnar Olsson(Eds.) Philosophy In Geography, D. Reidel Publishing Company: Holland, 1979, pp. 387-427.

6. Phenomenological interpretations of geographical questions, previously ignored as a source. of explanation, are now becoming common place. See: Buttimer, Values ... op. cit., footnote 5; Edward Relph, "An Inquiry Into The Relations Between Phenomenology And Geography," Canadian Geographer, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall, 1970) pp. 193-201; Edward Relph, Place And Placelessness, Pion Limited: London, 1976; Yi-Fu Tuan, "Geography, Phenomenology, And The Study Of Human Nature," Canadian Geographer, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Fall, 1971) pp. 181-192; Yi-Fu Tuan, "Humanistic Geography," Annals, Associa tion of American Geographers, Vol. 66, No. 2 (June, 1976) pp. 266- 276; and Thomas D. Wilson, Jr., Thirteen Perspectives On The Grammatical Landscape Of Social Science, unpublished M.S. Thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1976.

7. The novel is quite different from other forms of literature for it contains specific attributes that other genres do not. For an insight into the novels' uniqueness as a form of literature, the reader is di:cected to the following: Frank Kermode, "Novel, History And Type," Novel, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1968) pp. 231- 238; Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, translated from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Beacon Press: Boston, 196~ F.rl'l. Morgan, "Three Aspects Of Regional Consciousness," The Sociological Review, Vol. 31, No. l (January, 1939} pp. 68-88, see especially pp. 84-85; Maurice Natanson, Literature, Philosophy, And The Social Sciences, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1962, see especially p. 91; Bernard J. Paris, "Form, Theme And Imitation In Realistic Fiction," Novel·, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1968) pp. 14(}- 149_; Richard West Sellars, "The Interrelationship Of Literature, History, A!ld Geography In ~'lestern Writing," Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April, 1973) pp. 171-185; Philip Stevick (Ed.l The Theory Of The Novel, The Free Press: New York, 1967; and Ian ~·Jatt, The Rise Of The Novel: Studies In Defoe, Richard son And Fielding, University of California Press: Berkeley, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1957. 9

8. E.W. Gilbert, "'rhe Idea Of The Region," Geography, Vol. 45, Part 3 (July, 1960) p. 167.

9. Myongsup Shin, "Geographical Knowledge In Three Southwestern Novels" in Gary T. Noore and Reginald G. Colledge (Eds.) Environmefrtal Knowing: Theories, Research, And Methods, Dowden, Hu~chinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 273-278; and Yi-Fu Tuan, "Literature, Experience, And Environmental Knowi:1g" in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Colledge (Eds.) Environmental Knowing: Theories, Research, And Methods, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 260-272 .

. 10. Lewis A. Coser (Ed.) Soci.ology Through Literature: An Introduc tory Reader, Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, p. 2; Gilbert, op. _cit., footnote 8, p. 168; Aldous Huxley, Literature And Sci<:-nce, Harper & Rmv: Ne\v York, 1963, pp. 8 and 79; David A. Lanegran, "'!'he Pioneer's View Of The Frontier As Presented In The Regional Novel 'Giants In The Earth'," International Geography, 22nd. International Geographical Congress, Montreal, 1972, Vol. l, pp. 350-352; Natanson, op. cit., footnote 7, pp. 96-97; Christopher L. Salter and ~villiam J. Lloyd, Landscape In Literature, Resource Papers for College Geography No. 76-3, Association of l~erican Geographers: Washington, D.C., 1977, p. 3; Tuan, op. cit., footnote ·g; and Victor F. Weisskopf, "Art And Science," The American Scholar, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Auturrn, 1979) p. 476.

11. D.W. Meinig, "Environmental Appreciation: Localities As A Human Art," Western Humanities Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter, 1971) i.l. ~~~~)~- ~·,6~ 10, p •.a. ll. Historical geography, for purposes of this thesis, is broadly defined as the reconstruction of past landscapes. For further reading and a more detailed explanation see: R.G. Cant, "The Dilemma Of Historical Geography" in vl.B. Johnston (Ed.) Human Geog:r:aphy: Concepts And Case Studies, Department of Geography, University of Canterbury: Christchurch, N.Z., 1969, pp. 40-60; Andrew H. Clark, "Historical Geography"· in Preston E. James & Clarence F. Jones, American Geography:· Inventory & Prospect, Syracuse University Press: Syracuse, 1954, pp. 70-105; Andrew Hill Clark, "·Historical Geography In North 1\.merica" in Alan R.H. Baker (Ed.) Progress In Historical Geography, Wiley-Interscience: London, 1972, pp. 129-143; W. Kirk, "Historical Geography And The Concept Of The _Behavioural Environment," Indian Geographical Society, Silver Jubilee Volume, 1952, pp. 152-160; Robert M. Newcomb, "Twelve Working Approaches To Historical Geography," Yearbook, Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Vol. 31, 1969, pp. 27-50; H.C. Prince, "Progress In Historical Geography" in Ronald U. Cooke and James H. Johnston (Eds.) Trends In · · > · Geography: An Introductory Survey, Pergamon Press: Oxford, 1969, :pp. 110-122; Hugh C. Prince, "Real, Imagined And Abstract \'lorlds 10

Of The Past," Progress In Geography, Vol. 3 (1971) Edward Arnold: London, pp. l-86; and C.T. Smith, "Historical Geography: Current Trends And Prospects" in Richard J. Chorley and Peter Haggett (Eds.) Frontiers In Geographjcal Teaching, Methuen & Co. Ltd.: London, 1965, pp. 118-143.

14. "Quotations," in Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedic College Dictionary, New York, 1968, p. 179S.

1~. For an investigation into this disposition, especially as it relates to geography, the following sources are called to the reader's attention: Buttimer, Values ... , op. cit., footnoteS; Derek Gregory, Ideology, Science And Human Geography, St. Martin's Press: New York, 1979; Preston Jame-s, "On The Origin And Persistence Of Error In Geography," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 57, No. l ( March, 1967) pp. l-24, Relph, "An Inquiry Into ... ," op. cit., footnote 6; Tuan, "Geography, Phenomenology, And ... ," op. cit., footnote 6; and Wilbur Zelinsky, "The Demigod's Dilemma," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June, 1975) pp. 123-143.

16. Lakshman S. Yapa, "Ecopolitical Economy Of The Green Revolution," Professional Geographer, Vol. 31, No. 4 (November, 1979) pp. 371- 376; and Zelinsky, op. cit., footnote 15, pp. 129-130 and 136.

17. Gilbert, op. cit., footnote 8, p. 168.

18. Salter and Lloyd, op. cit., footnote 10, p. l. Also see: David Seamon, "Phenomenological Investigation Of Imaginative Literature: A Commentary," in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Golledge (Eds.) Environmental Knowing: Theories, Research, And Methods, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 286-290; O.H.K. Spate, "New Perspectives In Geography," Australian Journal of Science, Vol. 22, No. 11 (May, 1960) pp. 436-439; and Tuan, op. cit., footnote 9, pp. 204-205.

19. This is one of the major points to be addressed in chapter three of the present work.

20. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature, abridged with a new postscript, Doubleday Anchor Books: New York, 1956, p. 306.

21. Carey McWilliams, "A Man, A Place, And A Time," The American ~vest Vol. 7, No~ 3 (May, 1970) p. 4.

22. John Steinbeck was born and raised in the Salinas Valley which is extremely important to note because, as Briggf: points out, "A basic distinction must be drawn ••. between impressions of the identity of places as set out in traveler's tales and the sense of _identity felt by those who live in an environment and 11

experience it directly and continuously." Asa Briggs, "The Sense Of Place," in The Fitness Of Man's Environment, Smith sonian Annual II, Smithsonian Institute Press: Washington, 1968, p. 88. Also see chapter two of this thesis.

23. Mike Messner, Steinbeck Country In Dubious Homage, New American Movement: Santa Cruz, California, 1979, p. 12. Also see: Freeman Champney, "John Steinbeck, Californian," Antioch Review, Vol. 8, No. 3 {September, 1947) p. 348; McWilliams, op. c1t., footnote 21, p. 4; and Walter J. Stein, California And The Dust Bowl Migration, Contributions in American History No. 21, Greenwood Press, Inc.: Connecticut, 1973.

24. Steinbeck's non-teleological philosophy is openly expressed and espoused in Sea Of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal Of Travel And Research, written \-lith his friend Edward F. Ricketts, and originally published in 1941.

25. For an explanation behind the history, philosophy, and metho dology of logical-positivism, the reader may choose to examine the following: Burnham P. Beckwith, Religion, Philosophy, And Science: An Introduction To Logical Positivism, Philosophical Library: New York, 1957; Frederick Copleston, S.J., Contem porary Philosophy: Studies Of Logical Positivism And· Existentialism, Newman Press: Paramus, N.J., 1966; C.E.M. Joad, A Critique Of Logical Positivism, Victor Gollancz Ltd.: London, 1950; Rev. Cornelius L. Maloney, M.A., Logical Positivism And American Education, The Catholic University of American Press: Washington, D.C., 1951; and Cornelius A. van Peursen, Phenomenology And Analytical Philosophy, translated by Rex Ambler, checked and amendt:d by Henry J. Koren, Duquesne University Press: Pittsburgh, Pa., 1972, especially pp. 57-72.

26. The novels used in both of these chapters will only be the five novels which have the Salinas Valley as their setting: To A God Unknown, East Of Eden, The Long Valley, Of Mice And Men, and The Pastures Of Heaven. "What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and h~s words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself •..• Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man- the biography of the man himself cannot be written."

Mark Twain

Chapter 2

Edmund Richards has suggested that "one may never hope to put 1 his finger on the whole secret of a great writer." But one aspect of that secret must certainly be found in the inflv~nces that prompt good writers to spend the hours required to communicate their ideas.

A writer is usually bent on communicating an idea, a belief, or perhaps outrage over a particular issue. Whatever the purpose, though, the reason or reasons behind it normally stem from real-life ex_periences, 1;.vhether they be experiences from the author • s o~·:n background or not. In John Steinbeck's case, however, the experiences he wrote about were from his past. The things that influenced his writing more than anything else were the things that he had direct experience with. It has been insinuated by his critics and fans alike, that "Perhaps the most important biographical link between John

Steinbeck and his writing is that he was born and came to maturity in 2 the Salinas Valley."

John Steinbeck could quite justifiably be called a literary 3 reg~ona.. l' ~s t . The vast majority of his writing deals with the conditions, people, and conflicts that existed (and still exist) in

California. 'l'he people in California feel different or "unique" from the rest of the nation--a people set apart. 'l'he reasons for their

12 13

ir~tigration into the state were usually based on distinctive attractive qualities or age-old lore about the region. The result has been the existence of a varied group of people, exhibiting a 4 peculiar relationship with and attitude toward their surroundings.

The primary focus of Steinbeck's novels was to demonstrate this relationship by delineating the quality of life in the Salinas Valley as the unique place he envisioned it to be.

Born and raised in an environment replete with dichotomies-- drought followed by excessive periods of rain, agribusiness monopolies looming over denigrated migrant workers, the long-settled Paisano representing the status quo and the newly-arrived Anglo with his modern ideas--his verve was drawn to write about those very s extremes. Out of that environment developed a speculative mind dedicated to the rights and welfare of the underdog. Paisanos, displaced "Okies," bindle stiffs, transplanted migrants, and the socially downcast--these were the people who formed the subject matter of Steinbeck's books--the common man. These were the sorts of people that Steinbeck knew from his direct experiences in central

California. He could relate to their conditions and his writing was for them. "All his work" exclaims Gray, "steams with indignation at injustice, with contempt for false piety, with scorn for the cunning and self-righteousness of an economic system that encouraged exploita 6 tion, greed, and brutality." He saw a world full of inequity and dichotomies, and he set out to articulate that injustice through· the medium of the novel. 14

vllien Steinbeck left his central California home, the tenor of his writing, for the most part, changed. The familiarity, the com- pa::;sion, the descriptive nature of the landscape, and the "sense of place," all qualities associated with his "California books," began to slov;ly wane. Although East Of Eden is an excellent book in its own right, it still lacks most of the dynamic qualities found in The 7 Pastures Of Heaven, To A God Unknown, or Tortilla Flat. Watt has noted that "As .a general rule the farther Steinbeck strays from the people and p~acee of his earliest experiences, to which his humane 8 imagination always warms, the less vital and certain is his touch."

His writings mi:t:rored his environment, and when he left the Salinas

Valley for New York his characters began to assimilate the more urban . 9 sett1.ng.

Although John Steinbeck produced some two dozen major works of fiction and non-fiction, authored numerous plays, screenplays, and documentaries, and could very well be considered one of America's 10 foremost writers of the twentieth century, there still exists no 11 authoritative biography of the man. There is, however, a very good reason for this biographical lacuna: Steinbeck never wanted or believed in biographies. It may, in fact, be argued that he had aD outright disdain toward them. An early response to a request for 12 biographical information will tell the story:

You know as much about me as I do, and your information is more interesting than mine, say anything you like. Make up things. Biography by its very nature must be half fiction. Autobiography is all fiction. For myself, I don't see why any is necessary .... The fact that I have house-maid's knee or a fear of yellow gloves has little ··'to do with The Grapes at· f.-Ira th or any. book. 15

l3 And to an even earlier request he quite emotionally states:

Things of the greatest emphasis to me would be more or less meaningless to anyone else. Such a biography would consist of such things as--the way the sparrows hopped about on the mud street early in the morning when I was little--how the noon bell sounds when we were writing dirty words on the sidewalk with red fuchsia berries--how Teddy got run over by a fire engine, and the desolation of loss--the most tremendous morning in the world when my pony had a cold.

Nonetheless, there has been a considerable amount of information written about John Steinbeck, and the remainder of this chapter will use that material to present a thumbnail sketch of the man and his 14 work.

Amongst other noteworthy events, 1902 witnessed the deaths of

Bret Harte and Frank Norris, two of America's greatest authors, the

United States surrender of authority in Cuba, and the birth, on

February 27, of John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. B8rn in Salinas, California 15 to John Ernst Steinbeck, a descendant of German parentage, and

Olive Hamil~on, of Irish extraction, John.Jr. would spend his boy- hood and the early part of his adult life experiencing the sights, sounds, smells, and the capricious climate of the long slender valley he would come to affectionately write about.

John Steinbeck Sr. was a flour mill owner and the Monterey

County Treasurer from 1924 to 1935. His wife, Olive, was a school- teacher, and the first person to contribute to her son's germina- ting preoccupation with books and words. Steinbeck's mother began teaching her son to read at the ripe age of three, and by age nine he owned his first book, Sir Thomas Malory's Marte d' Arthur, a book which would have considerable influence throughout the writer's 16

career.

John attended public school in Salinas where he graduated from

Salinas High School in 1919 and soon afterwards matriculated at

Stanford University. He attended the renowned university selecting

a wide variety of classes until 1925, when he finally left for good, never completing a major and consequently without a degree. Host of

the classes Steinbeck opted to take were literature or English courses, but an interest in the life sciences led to his enrollment 16 in a ·zoology class, as well as one in marine biology. It was during Sceinbeck' s college years that he began to familiarize hi.'TI- self with the central California environment. that was to play such an 17 1mportant. part 1n. h'1s f uture wr1t1ngs.. . As a student, he had a few iterr,s printed in the Stanford Spectator and the :Lit, but, for t.l-J.e most part, this period of time was spent by the budding novelist 18 "collecting rejection slips from various magazines."

Frustrated with his time spent at Stanford, and convinced that the life of a writer was more apt to take shape in New York, Steinbeck left San Francisco on a freighter bound for the East Coast in

November of 1925. Arriving in New York City with only three dollars in his pocket and no job prospects, he quickly sought help from his brother-in-law who landed him a job as hod-carrier in the construction of Madison Square Garden. When work on the Garden was completed, he found work as a reporter for the (now defunct) New York American at 19 twenty-five dollars a week. Apparently unsuited for newspaper reporting, Steinbeck made his way back to California discouraged and completely broke. .J.I

Back in California, Steinbeck accepted e~ployment as a care- taker at Lake Tahoe, was subsequently fired, and later worked at the

Tahoe City Fish Hatchery, earning one hundred and fifteen dollars a 20 month. It was during this period that he wrote what was to become his first published novel, Cup Of Gold (Robert M. McBride and Company)

--accepted for publication and first printed in August of 1929.

Although a financial failure, Cup Of Gold did encourage the hopeful author to proceed with his writing. Due to a new sense of achievement, Steinbeck took the little money accrued from the sales of his 21 book and, in 1930, married Carol Henning in Los Angeles. Stein- beck's father gave the couple the small, three-room house he owned in Pacific Grove and put John on a twenty-five dollar a month allowance. While residing in. Pacific Grove, Steinbeck met Ed

Ricketts in the waiting room of a dentist's office. Ricketts, who owned Pacific Biological Laboratories in Pacific Grove, and Steinbeck, would socn form a partnership and a d;:ep friendship that would 22 continue until Rickett's untimely death in 1948.

Steinbeck and his bride lived in Pacific Grc'Je for a couple of years while the hopeful writer continued to produce manuscripts for publication. Unfortunately, however, all of Steinbeck's efforts during this early period were for naught. Again dismayed at the apparent prospects of his career as storyteller, the Steinbecks moved to Eagle Rock, near Los Angele~ in 1932, the year his second novel, The Pastures Of Heaven (Brewer, Warren and Putnam) was first published. The following year played host to the issuance of To A

God Unknown (Robert 0. Ballou), a book that Steinbeck had written 18

23 numerous times, never completely satisfied with its progress. Like his first novel, The Pastures Of Heaven and To A God Unknown were both dismal failures in terms of financial rewards.

Returning to central California in 1933 due to the severe illness of his mother, John and Carol again resumed their residence in the Pacific Grove cottage where Carol secured "a job for a while 24 with the local Chamber of Commerce. " The yea:r:· that followed was both painful and rewarding for Steinbeck. In 1934, after a prolonged and deteriorating illness, Steinbeck's mother, Olive, died on

February 19, only two months before he was awarded the 0. Henry 25 Prize for 1934.

For the Steinbecks, 1935 proved to be a carbon copy of the pre ceeding year. John Ernst Sr.'s failing health, and his gradual resignation of life after the death of his wife, lead to his death on

May 23--five days prior to the publication of Tortilla Flat (Covici-

Friede); the novel that would initiate his son's fame into the 26 literary world.

Tortilla Flat provided John Steinbeck with ~he ticket to success 27 he had actively pursued for nearly a decade. The novel gained immediate acceptance by the public and helped launch a career that needs little comment beyond an acknowledgment of his future accom plislunents.

For the remainder of the 1930s, Steinbeck's career continued to reach higher and higher summits, his name becoming a household word amongst the reading public. Concommitant with an increased awareness of his writing, was a blossoming association with his portrayal of the co~mon working man as the novels of this period attest to.

In Dubious Battle (Covici-Friede), first published in 1936, has been acclaimed as "the best proletarian novel written in our time by an 28 American." After In Dubious Battle, the emotion-filled drama of

Of Mice And Men (Covici-Friede) appeared in February of 1937 and was then released as a highly-successful play in November of the same 29 year. But the novel that gained the most publicity during the career of the soon-to-be infamous Mr. Steinbeck, the novel that has received comments along the lines of "the major American novel to 30 emerge from the depression's ferment," and "a phenomenon on the 31 scale of a national event," is also the novel that has received perhaps more attention than any other piece of literature written during the twentieth century; the book, of course, is The Grapes Of 32 Wrath (The Viking Press), first published in April of 1939. So much time, effort, and emotion was utilized in the composing of The

Grapes Cf Wrath, tha.t Steinbeck finally succur:ilied and was bE:d-ridder! directly following the completion of the lengthy manuscript.

Prior to the printing of The Grapes Of Wrath, Viking Press published The Long Valley, a collection of short stories about the 33 Salinas Valley, including a four-part version of The Red Pony.

Although most of these stories had previously appeared separately,

The Long Valley was an instant seller and continues in popularity today.

In 1940, John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the

American Bookseller's Award lpredecessor of the National Book Award) for The Grapes Of Wrath which continued to boast of exceptional 20

34 sales. But Steinbeck was a quiet person who hated the notoriety

that the novel had brought into his life. Disturbed by the attention

that had now become part of his daily life, he "escaped" the

publicity by embarking, with Ed Ricketts, on the Western Flyer to do

some specimen-collecting in the Gulf of California. Setting sail

from Monterey, California on March 11, 1940, and returning April 20

of the same year, Steinbeck and his friend traversed the better part

of the Gulf, as well as the West Coast of Mexico and the adjacent

islands. The result of the expedition was the Sea Of Cortez: A

Leisurely Journal Of Travel And Research (The Viking Press), 35 published in December of 1941. Immediately upon returning from the

Gulf, Steinbeck once again left for Mexico where he wrote the

script for The Forgotten Villf'J.ge (The Viking Press), a documentary

film depicting the perilous existence of a Mexican community. wnen

he returned a second time from Mexico, he found a lonely, unhappy wife who could no longer tolerate her husband's newly realized

importance--an importance that seemed to constantly keep John away 36 from her.

John and Carol Steinbeck were separated in 1942 and during this

period Steinbeck's writing begins to change. The Moon Is Down (The

Viking Press) \vas published in 1942, as was Bombs Away: The Story Of

A Bomber Team (The Viking Press). The former book, the story of a

resistance movement in a Nazi-occupied nation, was written because of

a suggestion by the Office of Strategic Services. The latter, a

second-rate piece of propaganda, was written primarily as a recruit-

ment manual for the United States Air Force. Both books reflect the " .

changes that Steinbeck was experiencing in his personal life, both

books lacking in feeling and tenderness--elements characteristic of

his earlier works. The Steinbecks were finally divorced in the early

part of 1943.

On the heels of his divorce (it was a matter of days) came his

marriage to Gwendolen Conger in March of 1943. This marriage was to

have a considerable affect on Steinbeck because, among other things, 37 the new life would take him to a new location--New York City. Once

in New York, Steinbeck was hired as a war correspondent for the New

York Herald Tribune and was sent to Europe and North Africa for five

months of detailed :r·eporting. From his stretch overseas, he wrote

the material for Once There Was A War (The Viking Press) which went

unpublished until 1958.

Back from the \var, Steinbeck wrote two filmplays, Lifeboat

(Twentieth Century-Fox) and, the following year, 1945, A Medal For

Benny (P~ra~ount). While in Europe, some enlisted men had asked

Steinbeck if he could "Write something funny that isn't about the

war," so the first novel he wrote upon his return was Cannery Row (The 38 Viking Press, 1945) "a book which on the surface is the most gay, 39 irresponsible and rollicking of all Steinbeck's novels." The book,

which took Steinbeck a staggering six weeks to complete, was an

overnight success. This was the first major piece of writing about

California that Steinbeck produced since The Grapes Of Wrath, some

five years before.

Steinbeck's ensuing accomplishments included publication of The

. k. ) 40 . 1 ( h . k. ) 41 Pearl ( The V1 1ng Press , A Russ~an Journa T e V1 1ng Press , 22

and 'l'he Wayward Bus (The Viking Press). Although written at different

points in time, all three books were made public in 194'/, presumably

because all three are so dissimilar and would, at least in theory,

appeal to different reading audiences.

Nineteen forty-eight proved to be an eventful year for John

Steinbeck. In the early part of the year, the American Academy of 42 Arts and Letters honored Steinbeck by announcing that he had now

achieved "membership" status and that he, as well as some of his more

famous contemporaries--such as William Faulkner and Mark Van Doren--

could now take their places amongst the other celebrated members . . . . . 43 o f t h J.s prestJ.gJ.ous organJ.zatJ.on. But the good news ended early,

and was followed by two events that would drastically alter the

writer's future. On May 11, Ed Ricketts' car was suddenly struck by

a passing train and "within hours" John had boarded a plane back to 44 California to see his hospitalized friend. Rickett's death four

days l~ter was only the beginning of what was to beset Steinbeck that

year. Two months later his second wife, Gwendolen, was to walk out

on him and subsequently ask for a divorce. This second divorce had

a profound effect on Steinbeck and produced extended periods of

excessJ.ve. d epress1on. . 45

Between 1948 and 1950, Steinbeck produced very little in the

way of remarkable accomplishments. The better part of this period

was spent mulling over the death of his close friend and the divorce

from "Gwyn." But things began to quickly change for the better

after he met and fell in love with Elaine Scott (Elaine Anderson,

., · · former wife of Zachary Scott). Steinbeck was soon "back on his feet" 23

46 and suddenly writing once again. The first thing he finished after

his "revival" was an outstanding screenplay entitled Viva Zapata!

(Twentieth Century-Fox) . This wa.s immediately succeeded by Burning

Bright (The Viking Press), a three-act play-novelette. In December

of 1950 he married Elaine Scott and thereafter begins the final

phase of John Steinbeck's writing.

East Of Eden (The Viking Press) was a project that the author 47 had anticipated since at least 1933, but one which he did not

seriously begin to research until 1948. However, because of the personal tralli~as of that year, little, in the way of writing, was accomplished until 1951. It took Steinbeck the better part of the year to write, revise, and rewrite the massive piece, but the book was soon finished and published in 1952. A few months prior to the release of this, his magnum opus, Viking Press decided to print

The Log From The Sea Of Cortez which, in addition to the narrative section of Sea Of Cortez, included Steinbeck's heartfelt tribute to 48 his close friend and business partner Edward Ricketts.

While writing East Of Eden, Steinbeck kept a daily diary of 49 sorts that was addressed to his editor, Pascal Covici. After the deaths of both men, this "diary" was publis-hed as Journal Of A Novel:

The "East of Eden" Letters (The Viking Press) in 1969. This book, when read in conjunction with the other two collections of published letters written by Steinbeck--Steinbeck And Covici (Paul S. Eriksson) and Steinbeck: A Life In Letters (The Viking Press)--together provide what is probably the most accurate and unbiased biography of the man available. 24

East Of Eden was completed early in 1952 and Steinbeck, who was totally exhausted and now in need of glasses for the first time in his life, at once dashed off to Europe to get the much-needed rest he so eagerly sought. Upon arrival in Italy, however, he encountered nume:cuus political problems and, following a "very depressing" sojourn in Ireland, he returned to New York in September of the same year. He promptly commenced writing Sweet Thursday (The Viking

Press), but publication of the novel, a sequel to Cannery Row and a 50 subtle bit of homage to Ed Ricketts, was forestalled until June of

1954.

In 1955 the screenwriter-storyteller purchased an ocean-front home at Sag Harbor, on Long Island, and this was to become the house that Steinbeck would spend the balance of his life in. The following year he spent a good deal of time writing campaign speeches for 51 Adlai Stevenson, a close friend of many years. When he was not writing political speeches he was working on yet another manuscript, this time a fable that eventually came to be titled The Short Reign

Of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (The Viking Press). The only book-lr:mgth piece of satire Steinbeck ever permitted his publisher to print, the novel "hit the streets" as another Book-of-the-Month Club selection during the first half of 1957 and was another best-seller across

America.

In 1957, t}J.e restless Mr. Steinbeck left once again for Europe.

But this was to be no ordinary trip. Indeed, it was possibly a trip he had envisioned soon after receiving his very first book, Marte d'

Arthur, in 1911. The purpose of this trip, which eventually lasted 25

(on and off) three years, was to totally familiarize and immerse himself into the Zeitgeist synonymous with Sir Thomas Malory.

Steinbeck's fascination with Malory was so deep-seated and Steinbeck was such a stickler for detail, that only by working in the hallowed ' archives of Italy, France, and England would his curiosity ever be satisfied. It is worth quoting here, and at some length, the extent to which the writer was utterly spellbound by his desire to understand and to somehow actually "feel" the place and the time that was

Malory's. In a letter to his sister, dated January 7, 1957, Steinbeck 52 spe 11 e d out t .ne preparat1on. h e rna d e f or h'1s tr1p. a b roa d :

Since Christmas I have been reading, reading reading and it has been delightful, like remembered music. I've gone back over my Anglo Saxon, unused since I was in college and into the old and middle languages, carefully and reading them aloud for sound. I've been back into Gildas and into the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, into Bede, and back into histories of Roman Brittain [sic] and Saxon Brittain [sic] and into the whole field of the myth and back and back to the Greek myth in which this thing has a strong plant and to the Buddhist myth which is full of it, and into the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth century in England--all not for background necessarily but to surround myself with the odor, the gas, the feeling, whatever you want to call it. And now I am ready to go on. I have even gone into Jung's interpretation of the myth in a modern psychological sense. I rather think this has been necessary

Steinbeck's research on Malory was unfortunately never completed, but a posthumous collection of his notes was sufficient enough to produce, in 1976, The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights (Farrar,

Straus and Giroux) . The book has never gained popular acclaim, but to anyone interested in fully understanding John Steinbeck, it lends a great deal of fresh insight into his private world. 26

After having spent the better part of three years in Europe,

Steinbeck returned to New York late in 1959. What he observed happening in the States disgusted him, and his attitude toward the nation became highfY cynical and even bitter. In a letter written to Dag Hammaskjold, another of the writer's growing circle of political friends, Steinbeck expresses concern over the general . 53 breakdown of values in America. He wr1tes:

I arrived at home for the,culmination of the TV scandal [*] . Except as a sad and dusty epi '3ode, I am not deeply moved by the little earnest, cheating people involved, except insofar as they are symptoms of a general immorality which pervades every level of our national life and perhaps the life of the whole world. It is very hard to raise boys to love and respect virtue and learning when the tools of success are chicanery, treachery, self-interest, laziness and cynicism or when charity is deductible, the courts vena.l, the highest public official placid, vain, slothful and illiterate. How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence?

The prevailing attitude of the nation upset Steinbeck and he came to believe that he had somehow lost touch with his homeland. So, in

September of 1960, in an effort "to try to rediscover. this monster 4 land' ,S he em b ar k e d on a JOurney· across th e count ry. The trip took him through nearly forty states and resulted in the publication of

Travels With Charley: In Search Of America (The Viking Press), first issued in 1962. But before he made his nation-wide trek, Steinbeck completed a novel that \'lould echo his growing disdain for America's

*The scandal refers to the unprofessional antics of a TV quiz show which were brought to the public's attention during this period. 27

state of affairs. The new novel, The Winter Of our Discontent (The

Viking Press), was the last book-length manuscript he would ever finish. It was well-received when it first went to press in 1961, and was, in all probability, the accomplishment that capped the decision to honor the novelist with the Nobel Prize the following 55 year.

The next few years were rather restful for the aging Steinbeck.

Early in 1963 the author was busy making plans to visit Russia and

Eastern Europe as part of a "Cultural Exchange Trip." But in June of that year he awoke blind in one eye (due to a detached retina) and was unable to leave for the Soviet Union until late September. Now unable to comfortably write, the once-prolific man of words ceased to pen much more than letters. to close friends.

In June of 1964, Steinbeck learned that he would receive the

Presidential Medal of Freedom, the 'highest civil honor conferred by the President .•• for service in peacetime; and replied that he was 56 "deeply moved pleased and proud" at such recognition. Within a year, he had feverishly returned to the Malory p"-.oject that lay uncompleted, but in December of 1966 the tireless, sixty-four year old

Steinbeck abandoned his writing and left for Viet Nam as a corres- 57 pendent for Newsday. Before he left, however, another book,

America And Americans (The Viking Press), a pictorial essay concerned 58 with the fifty states of the Union, had been printed and published.

Steinbeck remained in Southeast Asia until the following spring when a bad back precipitated an unexpected return to New York. His condition worsened until he was finally forced to undergo surgE~ry 28

r ,

(for a spinal fusion) that autumn. As such, confined for the most part to the therapeutic comfort of his home, and experiencing, in

May of 1968 what was later diagnosed as a small stroke, the now 59 bedridden Steinbe~k did little writing whatsoever.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an eventful, momentous, and noteworthy year in America's short, but colorful history. The year began with the seizure of the Na•ry ship U.S.S. Pueblo by the North Koreans who declared that the boat was in proscribed waters. In April, three months later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl

Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. On June 5, presidential hopeful Senator

Robert F. Kennedy was killed by Sirhan B. Sirhan in California, and in November, Richard M. Nixon went on to win the presidential election by defeating Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. On the twenty-first of December, the Apollo VIII team was launched from Cape Kennedy on what was to become an historic six-day-journey. And on December

23, the crew of the Pueblo, taken captive eleven months earlier, was finally released by the North Koreans. But what will probably go unrecorded in the vast majority of all history books, is the fact that on December 20, 1968 the author of Tortilla Flat, The Grapes Of Wrath, and East Of Eden peacefully died in the bed of his New York apart- 60 ment. 61 Mos t o f t h e cr1t1c1sm. . . t h at h as b een 1 eve 1 e d aga1ns . t Ste1 . nb ec k I s works (and there has been a huge amount of it) has neglected the fact 62 t1ath- Jon h Ste1n . b ec k was a western wr1ter,. wr1. t'1ng 1n. a soc1e . t y dominated by eastern ideas and critics; indeed, until recently, the entire publishing industry has been centered in New York City. 29

Writing about a. place and people foreign to most New York critics,

there was little chance of gaining their sympathies or, better yet,

their approval. To be sure, there were those who, even from the outset, admired Steinbeck's descriptive talents, but even some of his 63 earliest allies soon changed camps as Steinbeck changed styles. In 64 general, however, the critics have been unfair and unkind to Mr.

Steinbeck, while the reading public has found great satisfaction and

65 enJoyment. 1n . h'1s b oo k s, as ev1'd ence d b y t h e1r . cont1nual . sa 1 es.

Examining specific criticisms of Steinbeck's works, at this juncture, seems to be somewhat beyond the scope of this thesis, but there is one point, vis-a-vis his criticism, that should be illumina- ted. A writer of fiction can respond to his criticism in a number of ways: He or she can simply choose to ignore it (and a few hungry writers do); he can take heed and adapt his writing to please those critics whom he considers worthy of such alterations; ah author can attempt to please every critic (and thereby cease to write out of constant fear); or, as was the case with John Steinbeck, he can use criticism not as a guideline to follow, but as a means of pointing out the fallacies and weaknesses inherent in the critic's task.

Steinbeck was perpetually engaged in a private verbal battle with his critics. He respected their job and understood the function of a critic. What he could never fathom, however, was why the critics could never understand the role of the writer. By mid-century the critics were writing Steinbeck off as finished and "washed-up." From that point on, his modus operandi would be to constantly annoy the critics who constantly annoyed him. He would begin to write short 30

pieces designed to be affective in the most belittling of manners--

by derision.

In 1950 the book Burning Bright and the play of the same name

were released. The critical reviews of both were far from laudatory

and Steinbeck, no longer able to tolerate the overly blatant attacks

on his works, lashed out in what was to begin a public outpouring of

verbal response. It is worth quoting at some length the sort of mockery that Steinbeck trained on his literary connoisseurs (most

frequently in reply to their badgering and, in Steinbeck's opinion,

excessive faultfinding). In an issue of The Saturday Review the

novelist published a short piece entitled "Critics, Critics,

Burning Bright." In the article the writer trys to explain what the

story was about, why it was written, and the public acceptance of

the play. Then, to the drama critics, in regard to their views of 66 the play, he says:

We had favorable notices from two critics, a mixed review from one, and the rest gave the play a series of negatives--from a decisive no through a contemptuous no to an hysterical and emotional no, no, no. Indeed, most of the criticism seemed emotional beyond the importance and the danger of the play. The critical impulse seemed to be to kill it quickly and get it buried before it contaminated any more audiences. And this in spite of every indication that the audiences liked the play. It is a matter of wonder to me. . 67 He cont1nues on:

I wonder what bothered them so much. With one exception they did not denounce the production nor the sets. They went out of their way to admire these if only to show how reprehensible the play was. And in denouncing the play they did not touch on what the play said but on its method. This seemed to enrage them. One critic was aroused to 31

such an enthusiasm of rage that he wrote a notice which is j_ncomprehensible to everyone to whom I have shown it. 68 And later:

My experience in writing has followed an almost invariable pattern. Since by the process of writing a book I have outgrown that book, and since I like to write, I have not written two books alike. Where 'ITOuld be the interest in that? The result has been (and I can prove it with old reviews) that every book has been attacked by a large section of the critical family. I can also prove by old notices that the preceding book is compared f::1vorably over the current one and the one before over the preceding one. To a sensitive reader this would indicate that starting nowhere I have consistently gone down.

A few years later his tone began to change and his response was of a more cynical nature. His philosophy a.bout criticism in 1955 can 69 be gleaned from the following passage:

Much of the new criticism with its special terms and parochial approach is interesting to me, although I confess I don't understanQ. it very well, but I cannot see that it has very much to do with writing of novels ·good or bad. And since the new critics fight each other even more fiercely than they do the strapped down and laid open subjects of their study, it would seem to me that they do not have a table of constants. In less criticismal terms, I think it is a bunch of crap. As such I am not against it so long as it is understood that the process is a kind of ill tempered parlour game in which nobody gets kissed. What such an approach would do to a student beyond confusing him and perhaps making him shy away from reading, I have no idea. I do not read much criticism of my work any more. In the first place it is valueless as advice or castigation since t~e criticised piece is finished and I am not likely to repeat it. And in the second place, the intrafrontal disagreements only succeed in puzzling me. Recently a critic proved by parallel passages that I had taken my whole philosophy from a 17th century Frenchman of whom I had never heard. 32

And, in another statemen·t published later that year: 70

Here is a thing we are most likely to forget. man's writing is himself. A kind man writes kindly. A mean man writes meanly. A sick man write's sickly. And a wise man writes wisely. There is no reason to suppose that this rule does not apply to critics as well as to other writers. 71 And as a concluding point to the entire issue of critics he writes:

Itwould be very interesting for a good and intelligent critic to exercise his craft on a body of work of his fellow critics. If this should happen I think it would be found that the product of a revie\~er is not objective at all, but subject to all of the virtues and vices of other writers in other fields. I don't think critics should change; only our a·tti tude toward them. Poor things, nobody reviews them.

The point to be made here, is that John Steinbeck was more than

a writer of fiction. He was an individual who had very definite

views of the world and he refused to compromise those views in the

face of literary (especially eastern) critics. He was influenced

tremendously by the California environment that he came to write

about, and cared little whether the critics or anyone else could 72 understand that influence. Wallis has keenly noted that:

At its best, th"'! literary critic's search for unity in fiction can illuminate the body of an author's work and provide insight into his individual works. At its worst, the search for unity can become a fetish, so that the critic forces and distorts his material to impose a specious unity upon it.

That the world port.rayed in Steinbeck's novels was fake or contrived

in the eyes of the critic was of no concern to the California author.

... He knew that the people and the places he wrote about were real, and

. · thatc.was all that mattered. Besides, the public enjoyed his 33

stories and that, believed Steinbeck, was all a writer should concern himself with. What he failed to perceive, however, was that his writing was deteriorating as a direct result of his lose of contact with the very loca~es he continued to describe. Physically removed from the settings of his novels, the warmth, the familiarity, and the vivid, life-like descriptions he so artfully captured in his earlier novels, were lost in the later ones; the authenticity, and the accuracy of setting still existed,· but the "feel" for the people and the place, the true essence of their interrelationships, the intangibles that Steinbeck was previously able to communicate due to a daily association with the subjects of his novels, were soon being replaced by new, aLmost sterile characters and landscapes drawn from less familiar environments. The critics, removed from the v1riting, could see this very clearly. But Steinbeck, immersed in a battle to survive the fickle book-buying public, was blindly fighting for his literary life! 34

FOOTNOTES: Chapter 2

1. Edmund C. Richards, "The Challenge Of John Steinbeck," The North American Review, Vol. 243, No. 2 (Summer, 1937) p. 408.

2. Peter Liska, "John Steinbeck: A Literary Biography," in E.W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker (Eds.) Steinbeck And His Critics: A Record Of Twenty-Five Years, The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, p. 3.

3. For an explanation of regional, or "local color" writing, see Donald A. Dike, "Notes On Local Color And Its Relations To Realism," College English, Vol. 14, No. 2 (November, 1952) pp. 81-88, but especially p. 82; and F.W. Watt-, Steinbeck, Oliver and Boyd: Edinburgh, 1967, p. 3.

4. The basis for and the result of this attitude is discussed in Anne Loftis, California--Where The Twain Did Meet, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: New York, 1973; Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, Peregrine Smith, Inc.: Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City, 1976; James J. Parsons, "The Uniqueness Of California," l!merican Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. l (Spring, 1955) pp. 45-55; and for an interesting look at Califor nia writers, Edmund Wilson, The Boys In The Back Room: Notes On California Novelists, The.Colt Press: San Francisco, 1941.

5. James Gray, John Steinbeck, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 94, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1971, p. 7.

6. Gray, op. cit., footnote 5, p. 9.

7. Although Steinbeck returned to the Salinas Valley to recapture the "flavor" and to re-experience the area before he began writing East Of Eden, it was written later ir" his life, at a point when his feelings and emotions were no longer attuned ~-o the California consciousness that so dramatically influenced his early novels.

8. Watt, op. cit., footnote 3, p. 23. Also see: Warren French, "John Steinbeck: February 27, 1902-December 20, 1968," Steinbeck Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1969) p. 4; Claude-Edmonds Magny, "Steinbeck, Or The Limits Of The Impersonal Novel," in E.W. Tedlock, Jr. and C.V. Wicker (Eds.) Steinbeck And His Critics: A Record Of Twenty-Five Years, The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, pp. 216-217; and Carey t-1cWilliams, "A Man, A Place, And A Time," American West, Vol. 7, No. 3 (May, 1970) p. 5.

9. Prentice Bas.com Wallis, Jr., John Steinbeck: The Symbolic Family, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 1966, p. 25. 10. A listing of Steinbeck's major accomplishments is located in the appendix of this thesis.

11. Two exceptions should be nct_ed: Thomas Kiernan, The Intricate Music: A Biography Of John Steinbeck, Little Brown And Company: Boston, 1979; and Nelson Valjean, John Steinbeck The Errant Knight: An Intimate Biography Of His California Years, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1975. Kiernan's "expose," although the only book-length attempt at capturing the man's background and influences, is, in this writer's opinion (as well as the opinions of many of the book's reviewers), one of the worst, inference-ladden biographies ever to be published. (In all honesty, however, it should be noted that the introduction of Kiernan's book does have some first-rate insight.) Valjean's book, although an adequate endeavor, is unfortunately limited to Steinbeck the Californian, and therefore examines only a portion of his full and exhausting career. It is this critic's view that the best biography (of sorts) that exists about John Steinbeck is Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (Eds.) Steinbeck: A Life In Letters, The Viking Press: New York, 1975. 'l'his posthumous publication, a collection of letters written by Steinbeck, spans nearly one-half decade of the author's life, and perhaps better than any second-hand biography could; portrays the real man behind the pen.

12. Quoted in Lewis Gannett, John Steinbeck: Personal and Biograph ical Notes, The Viking Press: New York, 1939, pp. 5-6.

13. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op~ cit., footnote 11, pp. 62-63.

14. Most books "about" Steinbeck are really ::10 more than an analysis and a review of his writings, supplying the reader with a brief and cursory section devoted to his accomplishments outside of the literary field. Of these, a number stand out as being particularily helpful and will therefore form the framework for the main part of this chapter. They are: Jos~ph Fontenrose, John Steinbeck: An Introduction And Interpretation, American Authors And Critic Series, Barnes & Noble, Inc.: New York, 1963, pp. 1-6; Warren French, John Steinbeck, College and University Press: New Haven, Connecticut, 1961, pp. 19-30; Warren French, John Steinbeck, second edition, revised, Twayne Publisherp: Boston, 1975, pp. 20-36; Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels Of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study, second edition, Kennikat Press, Inc.: Port Washington, N.J., 1968, pp. 73-96; and perhaps the best of these short biographical sketches can be found in Peter Liska, John Steinbeck: Nature And Myth, Thomas Y. Crowell Company: New York, 1978, pp. 1-25.

15. The original family name was Grosssteinbeck, but Steinbeck's grandfather dropped the prefix. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit. footnote 11, p. 204. 36

16. Fontenros8, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 3: Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 5-6; and Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 47-64.

17. Between 1918 and 1925, Steinbeck worked as a chemist in a sugar beet factory near Salinas, at odd jobs such as on road gangs and as a ranch hand, and one summer was spent working at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. French, op. cit., 1975, footnote 14, p. 21; Gray, op. cit., footnote 5, p. 9; Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 5-6; Moore, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 76-77; and Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 77-88.

18. Robert Beronett, The Wrath Of John Steinbeck, The Albertson Press: Los Angeles, 1939, p. 3.

19. l<'ontenrose, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 4; French, op. cit., 1961, footnote 14, p. 21; Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 6; and John Steinbeck, "Making Of A New ·Yorker," New York Times Magazine, Part II, February 1, 1953, pp. 26-27 and

20. Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 7; and Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 111.

21. Steinbeck met Miss Henning at Lake Tahoe nearly two years earlier. See: Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 113-114 ..

22. Edward Ricketts, Jr. was killed by a train in May of 1948. The two men were extrente1y close and the event affected Steinbeck's work for a considerable period afterwards. For an excellent account of the relationship between the two men, as well as an ir...:;ight into the infleunce tb.at Ricketts had on Steinbeck, See: Richard Astro, John Steinbeck And Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping Of A Novelist, The University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1973. The reader is also directed to "About Ed Ricketts," the introduction to The Log From The Sea Of Cortez, (see appendix), Steinbeck's tribute to Ricketts.

23. Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 9-10; and Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 67.

24. Moore, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 82.

25. Fontenrose, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 4; French, op. cit., 1961, footnote 14, p. 22; and Va1jean, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 149- 152.

26. Olive Steinbeck and her husband, John, both died of the same affliction--cerebral leakage. See: Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 110; and Va1jean, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 151-152. 37

27. The success of Tortilla Flat is an often-told bit of irony due to the fact that at least nine and possibly eleven publishers rejected the novel prior to its printing by Covici-Friede in May of 1935. For an account of Steinbeck's experiences with this book see: Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 10-11; Liska, op. cit., footnote 2, p. 9; Moore, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 82-83; and Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 154-156.

28. Richards, op. cit., footnote 1, p. 41.0.

29. The play version of OfMiceAnd Men won high praise for Steinbeck and was awarded the coveted Drama Critic's Circle Award for the 1937 season. The book version was the first of Steinbeck's novels to be selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. See: French, op. cit., 1975, footnote 14, pp. 24-25; Liska, op. cit., footnote 2, pp. 11-12; Moore, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 85-89; and Watt, op. cit., footnote 3, p. 8.

30. Walter J. Stein, California And The Dust Bowl Migration, Contributions in American History, No. 21, Greenwood Press, Inc.: Connecticut, 1973, p. 19.

31. Liska, op. cit., footnote 2, p. 13.

32. Space does not justify a·proper devotion to the subject, but there have been literally thousands of articles and a number of fine books written about The Grapes Of Wrath; the influence and ramifications of the book would result in a dissertation in itself. For those interested in pursuing these topics, however, a starting point should at least include the following: Agnes McNeil Donohue (Ed.) A Casebook On The Grapes Of Wrath, Thomas T. Crowell Company: New York, 1970; Warren French (Ed.) A Companion To The Grapes of Wrath, Augustus M. Kelley: Clifton N.J., 1972; Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, pp. 17-18; and Stein, op. cit., footnote 30, pp. 208-210.

33. The Red Pony was originally released in individual sections and was later printed as a three-part short story.

34. McWillia~s says that over 420,565 copies were sold within the first year of its publication. Carey l-lcWilliams, Ill Fares The Land, Barnes & Noble, Inc.: New York, 1967, p. 42. Also see: French, op. cit., 1975, footnote 14, p. 25.

35. The Sea Of Cortez is essential to understanding Steinbeck's philosophy and writings, and therefore is examined, in depth, in chapter 3 of this thesis. Also see: Liska, op. cit., footnote 2, pp. 14-15.

36. One reason he was always "away" was.due to the illicit love affair that he had been having with Gywndolen Conger since 1940. 38

See: Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 20; and Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 214-220 and 224.

37. When New York became the professional's new horne, he left the familiar California environment. And with that move began a new phase in the author's life that would come to produce profound changes in his writing.

38. John Steinbeck, "My Short Novels," in E.W. Tedlock, Jr. and C.V. Wicker (Eds.) Steinbeck And His Critics: A Record Of Twenty-Five Years, The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, p. 39.

39. Watt, op. cit., footnote 3, p. 79.

40. Originally publif3hed as "The Pearl Of The World" in Woman's Home Companion (December, 1945) this was the first occasion of its being released as a short novel.

41. For a h~~orous and interesting account of Steinbeck the man, the reader is advised to see pp. 146-149 of A Russian Journal, "A Legitimate Complaint," written by Robert Capa, the photographer who accompanied Steinbeck on his trip to Russia.

42. For Steinbeck's reply, see: Thomas Fensch, Steinbeck And Covici; The Story Of A Fr.iendship, Paul S. Eriksson: Middleburry, Vermont, 1979, pp. 92 and 214; and Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 344.

43. Fontenrose, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 6; French, op. cit., 1975, footnote 14, p. 30; ana Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 22.

44. See footnote 22 of this chapter. Also see: Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 180.

4~. The affects of his second divorce are vividly recorded in the many letters written during this period. See: Fensch, op. cit., footnote 42, pp. 75, 86-88, and 96-98; and Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 319-344.

46. The rapid change (reflected both in attitude and in his writing) that overtook Steinbeck when he met Mrs. Scott makes for excellent and interesting reading, and can be found in Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 357-358 and 361-393.

47. The earliest account I could find of his reference to doing a history of sorts about the Salinas Valley is a letter found in Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 73, and is dated 1933. 48. In order to help finance Rickett's laboratory in Monterey, California, the author gave Ricketts the money he needed to keep the place solvent and, in this manner, became half owner of the establishment. See: Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 93.

49. Steinbeck was extremely close to his editor, as witnessed by the number of letters exchanged hetween the two men (and found in the three collections of letters mentioned in the text) . He shared a similar relationship with his publishers, Elizabeth Otis and Mavis Mcintosh as revealed by the bulk of letters written to them. In particular, the reader is directed to the index of Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 901 and 902.

50. The character of "Doc" in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday is modified after Edward Ricketts. See: .Astra, op. cit., footnote 22, p. 4; Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 474; Valjean op. cit., footnote 11, p. 135; and "About Ed Ricketts," op. cit., footnote 22.

51. French, op. cit., 1975, footnote 14, p. 33. He also wrote speeches for Stevenson in his 1952 nomination, as well as for Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign. See: Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p~ 461; and Fensch, op. cit., footnote 42, p. 226.

52. Fensch, op. cit., footnote 42, p. 198.

53. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 653.

54. John Steinbeck, Trav~ls With Charley: In Search Of America, Bantam Books: New York and elsewhere, 1977, p. 5.

55. Fontenrose, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 132; l"'rench, op. cit., 1975, footnote 14, p. 34; and·Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 25.

56. Steinbeck and ~vallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 801.

57. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 838.

58. The book, conceived as a "busy-work project" following the death of his friend and editor, was originally designed as a book of captions to accompany a collection of photos. The captions w~re expanded into essays, however, and the result was a book of ideas and introspection. See: Fensch, op. cit., footnote 42, p. 202n; and Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 807.

59. The volume of letters Steinbeck was writing sharply declined from ,, '

a rate of what must have been at .least two or three a day, to the sporadic output during this segment of his life that often resulted in only one letter, average, per week. See: Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, pp. 812-861.

60. Fensch, op. cit., footnote 42, p. 231; Liska, op. cit., footnote 14, p. 25; and Valjean, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 183.

61. The main type of criticism a novelist receives is in the form of book reviews published in magazines, newspapers, and certain journals devoted to literary topics. As one could well imagine, the volume of such reviews for a man of Steinbeck's stature is staggering, and simply precludes reference here. HoweveY, being the controversial (and, in myopi.nion misunderstood) writer he was, there have been numerous collections of interpretations which also contain very adequate sections on criticism of Steinbeck's accomplishments. Of these, the most useful and comprehensive are Peter Liska, The Art Of John Steinbeck: An Analysis And Interpretation, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of v\Tisconsin, 1955; and E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker (Eds.) Steinbeck And His Critics: A Record Of Twenty Five Years, The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerqe1e, 1957. For The Grapes Of Wrath, see: Donohue, op. cit., footnote 32.

62. Western writing as used in this thesis, refers to writing which characterized the frontier experiences of Arne:r.ica, particularly from the Great Plains westward. It is literature which "becomes more and more identified with geographical place and setting and less confined to stories involving frontier history." Richard West Sellars, "The Interrelationship Of Literature, History, and Geograpqy In Western Writing," Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April, 1973) p. 173. Also see: J. Golden Taylor (Ed.) The Literature Of The American West, Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston and elsewhere, 1971, pp. v-· viii. For California literature, a good beginning is Frederick Bracher, "California's Literary Regionalism," American Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Fall, 1955) pp. 275-284.

63. Each of Steinbeck's novels were written with a different idea or theme behind it. He made a conscious effort to forget a book, once finished, and to begin each novel as a separate and distinct entity. His design, if it can be so termed, was to constantly and purposefully change his style with the completion of each book. This lead to the accusation that he was no longer taking his· writing seriously, but as he once commented in a letter, "I take every thing I write seriously." Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 30. Also see: Steinbeck, op. cit., footnote 38.

64. In particular, the reader is directed to Tedlock, Jr. and 41

Wicker, op. cit., footnote 61, pp. xl-xli.

65. At the present time, only two of Steinbeck's novels are out of print--The Pastures Of Heaven and Sweet Thursday.

66. John Steinbeck, "Critics, Critics, Burning Bright," The Saturday Revi.ew, November 11, 1950 reprinted in Tedlock, Jr. and T/Vicker, op. cit., footnote 61, p. 46.

67. Steinbeck, op. cit., footnote 66, p. 46.

68. Steinbeck, op. cit., footnote 66, p. 46.

69. John Steinbeck, "A Letter On Criticism," in Tedlock, Jr. and Wicker, op. cit., footnote 61., pp~ 52-53.

70. John Steinbeck, "Critics--From A Writer's Viewpoint," The Saturday Review, August 27, 1955 reprinted in Tedlock, Jr. and Wicker, op. cit., footnote 61, p. 49.

71. Steinbeck, op. cit., footnote 70, p. 51.

72. Wallis, op. cit., footnote 9, p. 1. ..

"It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking ·the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet." Werner Heisenberg

Chapter 3

Science, as an identifiable entity in Western society, originated

in 6th century Greek philosophy. Since that time, the ways and means

of science have stressed a logical approach to the interpretation of

universal phenomena. By the end of the seventeenth century, and

especially following the writings of Rene Descarte (1596-1650), the

primary mode of investigating problems, interpreting data, and indeed,

even one's approach to understanding reality, was based on what 1 eventually came to be labeled logical-positivism. Rooted in a

tradition of empiricism, the word "science" soon became synonymous with

logic and objectivity. Experience and subjective phenomena were dis-

carded as "useless," and a strong emphasis was placed on rational

understanding.

But science, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, was

concerned with all aspects of the universe. The physical and social

sciences were united as a single field of study, and it was not until

the beginning of that century that universai scholarship--cosmogr_aphy--

be·gan to fragment into the more familiar academic deV:isions that: exist 2 today. But when science began to partition into narrower, more

manageable disciplines, the new sub-fields simply adopted the

paradigms and methodologies of the old order; it was a gradual and

seemingly natural process, and little (if any) self-analysis was

.,, needed.

42 43

Time, however, has shown that a period of self-analysis was very much needed. Social scientists have now begun to question seriously whet.her the research strategies of the physical sciences are all that appropriate for the social sciences. Objectivity and a logical orientation may be appropriate to the physical sciences which deal with unconscious, inanimate phenomena, but a growing number of social scientists are becoming increasingly wary of its application to the 3 explanation of human behavior. The "most obvious difference between the social sciences and the other sciences," writes George Homans, is

"that they (the social sciences) deal with the behavior of men. In no other science do the scientists study the behavior of things like 4 themselves."

In :r;-esponse to this "questioning," a more human or humanistic approach has slowly developed in the social sciences. The reasoning behind this movement lies in the· subjective nature of human beings.

To isol~te or aLstract hurr.an behavior from the rest of the cosmos seems inappropriate, owing to man's sole ability to question, think, and act in a ratior.dl, calculating manner. We can seemingly predict cause and effect relationships in the physical world because the physical world is objective, in as much as it is totally subservient to the whim:of nature (outside influences). But when we extend this notion to human beings who are nearly able to remove themselves from nature by oftentimes controlling it, we have come to realize that it becomes far more involved and complicated. There are certain things which influence human behavior that transcend objective identifica tion. This is what Hilson refers to when he claims that "Much of our 44.

reality is an interface between individual and cultural predilection 5 and the unspeakable that lies beyond that." In other words, examining group behavior may not necessarily explain the individual behavior that arises out of personal experiences; the call, therefore, is for a more subjective, personalized paradigm to account for such behavior. And, if "The .•• humanistic approach lies in describing 6 the quality of the emotion experienced in specific settings," then there is a need for a philosophy that recognizes and acknowledges subjectivity and the individual intention behind human action.

Phenomenology is such a philosophy. Based, for the most part, 7 on the writings of Edmund Husserl, phenomenology "emphasizes not the abstract conceptualizations and objective pretentions of positivism, 8 but a more concrete concern with actual lived experience." Phenomena- logy seeks understanding rather than explanation. The core of pheno- mer.ology seems to rest on its search for the intention behind subjective behavior. According to phenomenologists, individual experience-- manifesting itself in intentional actions--accounts for human behavior to a far greater degree than the learned norms of social interaction do. A crucial idea behind phenomenology is that man gains knowledge and insight only through his continuous encounters with the real world, and that prior to these encounters, man's mind resembles a clean slate, devoid of information and consequently incapable of decision making. All actions and decisions are stimuli responses . 9 to actua 1 experlences.

One major benefit accruing from a phenomenological perspective 10 derives from its search for essence. Contrary to the aloof, abstract approach of logical-positivism, phenomenology's vital concern

for subjective experience freely lends itself to an understanding of man and his relationship to non-human and inanimate phenomena. In

its search to define essence, it seeks to make sense out of that which

logic can not explain. Merleau-Ponty suggests that it "offers an account of space, time, and the world as we 'live' them," as it attempts "to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the casual explanations which the scientist, the historian, or the sociologist 11 may be able to provide." In short, phenomenology is not a substitute for the objective but rather a pattern of ideas reflecting solely upon the intangibles of existence. It seeks to understand where science fails to explain, and the greatest asset phenomenology has to offer academia is not in the form of some panacea replacing the rigors of scientific investigation, but as a complement to scholar~:idp, augmenting objective resec::.rch by providing the missing element in a more holistic approach to the interpretation of human behavior.

For the geographer interested in the search to understand place, phenomenology has a number of specific contributions to make. Since. it has. been shown that phenomenology is concerned with essence and subjective human behavior, one can now begin to see where the geographer can use ph~nomenology to achieve insight into the distinc tive nature of places.,

Whatever the scale, no two places on the earth's surface are exactly alike. Some of the reasons for this are purely the result 46

of physical processes: wind patterns, solar declination, topographical differences, geologic structure, soil conditions, precipitation factors, and a host of other naturally occuring circumstances. Other factors that contribute to making one place different from any other place are cultural or man-induced: settlement patterns, technological advancements, transportation systems, harvesting techniques, religious beliefs, and any other aspect of the landscape which results from human intervention. But beyond the physical and cultural factors, yet intbnately entwined within both, are psychological, subconscious, experiential factors that can not be measured and most frequently can not even be properly articulated. Attitude and subjective experience can influence two groups of people with the same general backgrounds

12 to respond to similar locales in totally dissimilar manners~ And when we look for substantial, logical explanations to thi.:; sort of situation, we are unable to produce them.

1 Hugh Prince has noted that "once the question \\7hy' is asked the full answer can no longer be sought in the external world, because 13 mot~ves,. a t t~tu . d es, pref erences and pre]u . d. ~ces must b e exam~ne . d .... n

For this reason, a phenomenological perspective seems more appropriate to the task at hand. There are certain aspects of places--their human creation Cin the sense of settlement); the influence they exude on those who inhabit them; and the unique image that outsiders perceive of them--that simply are not amenable to objective research methods.

Phenomenology, on the other hand, will seek to understand the peculiar subjective nature of the place and all subsequent aspects associated

\17ith it. Then, combined with an in-depth, objective study, a place 47

can come to be more fully realized in a (now) somewhat larger view

of reality. "There are different ways of perceiving a situation,"

opines Weisskopf, "ways which may seem unconnected or even contra-

dietary, but they ~re necessary for understanding the situation in its 14 totality."

Geographers have been accused of being "color blind" and criti-

cized for the fact that they "tend to write about synthetic annual

scenes rather than real scenes, and attempt to describe landscapes not

from the ground but rather from an imaginary position above the 15 ground."- By the same token, another critic of the discipline has remarked that "Despite the fact that 'landscape' and 'man and environment' are old themes in geography, the older work tended toward rather wooden stereotyped descriptions of landscape elements with rather simplistic interpretations, while the newer work, enamored of quanti- fication and systems analysis, becomes increasingly theoretical and 16 anth ~. thet~ca . 1 t o any k.~n d o f 1 oca 1 app 1 ~cat~on.. . " Implicit in both condemnations is the fact that there has been something missing from geographic research. Because geographers (and other social scientists as well) have tended to take the "outside" or observer's viewpoint, . . 17 instead of the "inside" or participant's perspect~ve, most geographic research has resulted in the aloof, sterile ~rriting so common in the so-called "hard sciences." What geographers seem to need, is a subjective source of data that can complement their research by providing an "insider's" perspective, in addition to the common, more objective, rational viewpoint alone. If the geographer is truly concerned with the full and complete understanding of place, he or she 48

must begin augmenting his or her respective research interests with additional viewpoints--subjective viewpoints which reflect a more humanistic interpretation.

One excellent source of subjective humanistic information available to the geographer in his or her quest to understand the intricate nuances of place, is regional literature. Although highly praised and criticized alike as a data source for 9eographic 18 research, there are aspects of literature which, when viewed phenomenologically, deserve attention in terms of this present undertaking.

Regional literature can evoke a sense of place that objective research, no matter how intensive and complete it may be, will rarely approximate. Regional literature can supply us with the "inside" view of a particular place (or society, or region, or nation, or at whatever scale available) that we so notably lack in our attempt to understand the real world. It gives us a medium to examine the day-to-day subjective experiences of human beings, and to articulate their constant responses to both human and objective phenomena. It is unique in that it shares with film, the distinction of being the two subjective sources of data which interpret man's conjunctive responses to the tangible and the intangible world as a single entity.

Another feature of literature, and one particularly re.levant to the novel, is di.alogue. Dialogue is usually regarded as the essence of subjective writing, but this use need not imply a negative opinion.

Dialogue may (or may not) be considered subjective, but where else can the social scientist look for examples of day-to-day, humanistic, 49

experiential behavior? Dialogue represents interpersonal experience

of place; no dialogue of one region could be substituted, verbatim

for that of another region. Nuances of language, syntax, grammar,

and pronunciation ~rohibit the novelist from attempting to portray

dialogue outside of its proper regional setting. When a author does,

however, include a conversation (or a character}_ which is outside of

its prescribed background, we immediately recognize it as being

"awkward" or "out of place" and this contributes to our overall per-

ception of the novel's realism. An author, and especially a regional

writer, must show a high degree of verisimilitude in order to be

faithfully accepted by his or her readership. Dialogues, like

characters, cannot merely be created without a strong correlation with

our perception of what could possibly exist relative to our current understanding of time and space for any.given area. A similar idea

f ~s. expressed b y Raymond Tsc h umL . . ~n. t h e o 11ow1ng . passage: l9.

It is not sufficient for the author to create a character out of his own substance and to endow him with an appearance: he has to judge him, to see him as a whole, as a relation, as a reality. The character will live, not according to his will only, but according to his fate, so that it is a necessity for the author, not only to know his character, but also to know what is opposed to or modifies him. That is the whole story, the equation of fate and will, appearance and spirit, without which we are not convinced of the character's reality.

A third feature of literature (touched upon on the preceding paragraph but one whi(;h needs to be developed in terms of its phenomenological implications), is the relationship of literature to historical "fact" and, for our purposes, its relevance to historical geography. 50

Historical research poses two distinct problems and both are

very different from research which utilizes current data. In the

first place, the past no longer exists: research of past peoples

and places must rely on recorded data, not on interviews, surveys,

or opinion polls. Therefore, what we use to reconstruct the past

depends on what survives to the present. And, since not everything

will survive the fate of time, we are disposed to exploit only those

fragments of the past which are available. A second problem with

historical research lies in the interpretation of historical data.

Hmaans have a tendency to interpret the past through the eyes of the

present. But relics from past landscapes and lost realities must be

evaluated in light of their original function. Cole Harris argues

that "data from the past are neither static nor separate from their

interpretation. They acquire meaning in a scholar's mind as they are 20 placed in context." Moreover, we must become so familiar with an

area that we are readily able to place ourselves within that area's

"lived-world" experiences for any given period of time and, by doing

so, we can then begin to interpret the historical data from that

period; this means developing an "historical mind," as Harris refers

to it.

But can we ever know enough about a particular place in a past

time period to say we sincerely "know" that place? Will we ever be

able to truly comment about an historical landscape to the degree

that we are able to authoritatively account for the attitudes,

feelings, emotions, biases, and experiences that produced that

,.; . landscape? I feel that the answer to both of these questions is "yQs," 51

but a "yes" qualified with the opinion that the ability to "know" a

place or region that well, will only occur a£ter a thorough investiga-

tion of objective and subjective data sources. Likewise, I believe that until we abandon. the notion of history Cor historically-based research)_ being a science, will we ever effectively open our senses up

to the "inner" world of subjective experience and intentional behavior.

History always has been, and forever will be an art, not a science;

to think otherwise, is to misinterpret the end product. Russel Nye 21 has demonstrated this most eloquently:

The historian may be~ his task as an objective impartial observer, following all the rules of evidence, weighting the facts and presenting them without distortion or preconception; but before he is through, he is bound to find himself doing what the literary artist does, and for much the same reasons--that is, giving a view of life, an estimate of the "human cor.dition, a perspective on the world we have lived in, a judgement on the success or failure of man's aspirations. He cannot help it, for he is dealing with human beings, with their ideas and beliefs, with things derived from the hearts and minds of men long gone but whose minds and hearts once were quick and sensitive. Like the literary artist, he 'is looking for what was real in life and th.e records of life.

If we fail to account for subjective experiential motives, how can we hope to adequately account for "unpredictable" behavior in the past? Until we adopt a phenomenological perspective, some of the pieces of our historical puzzle will always be missing.

When we ignore regional literature, or when we claim it is invalid because of its subjectivity, we are not only exercising a very biased value judgement, we an~ negating a subjective interpretat.ion of place (the author's) in favor of our time-honored preference for so-called objective data (a subjective decision in itself). Are we 52

justified in making such a decision, or do we even question the 22 paradi~ns that we make our decisions within? Again, quoting Nye:

The historian is not a camera; he cannot include all the facts for he cannot know them all. {sic ] and even those that he know are not all of equal value. The facts that the historian uses do not choose themselves; he selects them, orders them •.vith.in ·some larger context. Facts, as they saying goes, do not speak for themselves; they say something only when chosen, arranged, and interpreted.

And what of the author himself? Can we deny that. a novel re-

fleets the author's kn0wledge of or feelin9 for place, as well as his

or her perception of a particular environment? In the same manner,

does not a piece of literature help acquaint us ,with the social values

and the implicit spatial experiences of a particular landscape? And

what of the intellectual concerns of a given place and time·, i.e. do

nineteenth-century immigrants on the Great Plains consider, or even

know about what is concurrently happening in Western Europe? Regional

literature can provide clues to these and many kindred questions, but

we first have to change our impressions of literature.

A popular notion is that the word "literature" is synonymous

with "fiction." Compounding the issue, are terms like "imaginary''

and "literary landscapes," suggesting that the landscapes portrayed

in a novel are most assuredly fake or contrived; it exists withiri the minds of the author and the reader, but that is where its reflection of reality ends. But even if we were to accept this attitude that

literature is fiction, does that negate what regional literature still has to offer the social scientist? "If we are to do justice to realist.ic fiction," writes Paris, "we must learn to speak of its 53

central achievement--the imitation of social and psychological . .,23 rea l 1.ty ••.. We (including an author) cannot make-up or create reality; we must draw from our experiences and from our perceptions.

F..ven the writing of science-fiction depends upon a culture's level of

sophistication and therefore mirrors a people's level of consciousness.

Chapple believes that "Literature is very often history being recorded more or less as it happens; it reflects contemporary people and 24 events." Expressed differently, but addressing the same point, . 25 Lowenth a 1 states t h e f o 11ow1.ng:

All insight about social, cultural, and geographical environment--especially those exemplified in literature and painting--are embedded in the experience of particular people in specific times and places. How people view and articulate their experience is a product both of their own place in history and of that of their success~ve interpreters. The very words used to describe environmental conditions and responses alter in force, context, and meaning over time.

Even that which we invent comes from and represents, that which we have learned or experience~.

And what of this notion that all literature is pure fiction?

Are regional novels to be regarded solely as the works of "creatLre" or "fertile imaginations," or is there a possibility that some novels are actually based on "hard," real-world facts, which can later be verified on the physical landscape or through "objective" historical 26 data? And what of the author himself? Can we not gain a better glimpse into the· so-called literary landscape if we explore the intent behind the author's writing? If we are to freely incorporate a holistic approach to our understanding of human behavior--here, 54

through the supplemental use of a phenomenological perspective--we must explore the motivation(s) which led a particular novelist to pen a particular story. Additionally we should investigate the writer's background, his relation to the places he describes and, most im- portantly (if possible)_ his world-viewi hence, we need to "know" the author so we can understand his subjective experiences, before we can come to "know" the characters of his novels. If Relph is correct in his conviction that "man is describable in terms of his consciousness rather than his behaviour and lives in a set of subjective and ,.27 meaningful worlds that change as his intentions change, then it becomes not only an option, but the social scientist's duty to investigate the intent and experiential background of an author.

Returning to our discussion of John Steinbeck (~he example used for this thesis)_, \ve find that his intent in writing novels stems from a desire to sketch the world as he saw it. His concern was to describe what he perceived to be "reality." In Sea Of Cortez: A

Leisurely Journal Of Travel And Research (The Viking Press, 1941)

Steinbeck spells out his personal philosophy, and from this special piece of writing we can begin to outline the motivating forces behind

. 1" hr 28 h ~s many accomp 1s ments.

According to Steinbeck, a method of thinking which would produce

"a kind of purity of approach" could be achieved through non- 29 te 1 eo 1 og1ca. 1 th'11n k"' 1ng. Non-teleological thinking, or "is" thinking, is an acceptance of the world the way it is, without searching for hidden meanings. This manner of thinking, writes Steinbeck, "concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or might be, but rather Q '

with what actually 'is'--attempting at most to answer the already 30 sufficiently difficult questions what or how, ins·tead of why."

With this sort of philosophy, any search for cause and effect is al:.andoned; things are merely accepted as being just "so." Adopting this view of the world, Steinbeck is also claiming that there is no purpose or pattern to the universe. "Non-teleological ideas .... consider events as outgrowths and •expressions rather than as results; conscious acceptance as a desideratum, and certainly as an all- . . . ,.31 J~portant prerequ1s1te.

Existential in its nature, "is" thinking seeks factual knowledge through total acceptance: Things are because they are, and to go beyond that is to read meaning into their being. "'It is so because 32 it's so, "' claims the author, "It is not. enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The 33 process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing." In other words, human beings are wasting their time trying to interpret reality. What makes far greater sense, at least to John Steinbeck, is to agree with what resembles "truth," and to assent to the fact that that is the way it is. Steinbeck's picture of the cosmos involves

. f . h h f . . . . 34 t h e qua 1 ~ty o ex1stence, not t e searc or 1ts or1g1n:

The whole is necessarily everything, the whole world in fact and fancy, body and psych, physical .fact and spiritual truth, individual and collective, life and death, macrocosm and microcosm (the greatest quanta here, the greatest synapse between t.hese two), conscious and unconscious, subject and object. The whole picture is portrayed by is, the deepest word or deep ultimate reality, not shallow or partial as reasons are, but deeper and participating, possibly encompassing the Oriental concep.t of being. 56

In the introduction of Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck makes a nt~ber

of statements about the book and the expedition that led to the book's

formation. Embodied in these statements are his non-teleological

attitudes of life, which serve to emphasize the subjective frame of

reference that he brougnt to his writing. "The design of a book" he begins, "is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer. This is completely understood about poetry or 35 fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact." The point to be made here is that Steinbeck was more than casually aware of the influehce experience exerts on man's subjective approach to

(all facets of his)_ life. To elucidate this point, some rather ' . . 36 extenslve ~~otlng lS necessary;

Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea botton dredged? Why do men, sitting at the microscope, examine the calcareous plates of a sea-cucumber, and, finding a new arrangement and number, feel an exaltation and give the new species a name, and write about it possessively? It would be gocd to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the 'services to science' platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing. . 37 He cont:tnues:

One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip --and when we used this reason, we ·called the trip an expedition--was to observe }emphasis added] the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their ~inds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. That plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth. But we did tell the truth to ourselves. 38 And he then adds:

We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what. we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled 57

imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all patterns are warped, first by tl1e collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes--we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality.

The underlying notion is that Steinbeck not only recognized the

subjective nature of behavior, but he was quick to demonstrate that he was eternally conscious of it. He accepted life but more signifi-

cantly he used his subjective experiences of life to write from. Ten years ago Carey McWillia1"IlS noted that "As a writer he [Steinbeck] knew what he needed to know--having spent five years at Stanford--but he got his themes from the life he knew and not from books he had , 39- read." But even his earliest writing radiated a "feel" for life's essential experiental qualities. Richards, in a 1g37 article for

The North American Review recognized this when he wrote that

"Creative writers go directly to life and not the editor's desk for their materials. Steinbeck is in the tradition of the great creative writers because his books do not stem from other books but come 40 immediately from a fresh assessment of life's traditional values."

One of the major criticisms of Steinbe·ck is that the characters in his novels are seemingly fake and "cardboard-like." Critics have argued that Steinbeck's description of the environment is often bolder and far more realistic than his description of characters.

"Steinbeck can speak of animals and plants, or orchards and mice 41 better than he does of men" is a very typical comment. The reason for the confusion, I·believe, i? that the critics were expecting more. 58

We tend to automatically elevate human beings to an artificial level, where they somehow dominate the universe and occupy a symbolic position of superiority. When humans (or, in Jiterature's case, their representative characters) do not live up to our expectation, we regard them as being spurious or fabricated.

But Steinbeck was unable to distinguish between humans and the rest of the universe. As a non-teleological thinker--unconcerned with the scientific exploration into causes and effects, and therefore without any predilection to discover why--he saw the world in terms of being, and essences, and as one uniform, interrelated whole: all things were equal, or as equal as the enviror@ent and man's subjective consciousness permitted. Again, refering to the Sea of 42 Cortez, we read the following .ideas expressed by the author:

Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is rela tional to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning bu·t the feeling about species grows misty. One emerges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into· the whole and are inseparable from it. 43 And, summarizing this feeling he states:

And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is' one of the prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understand ing and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, .known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made 59

a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Prancis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing :i.s all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of tL~e. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

James Gray has remarked that John Steinbeck was "storyteller, fabulist, critic of social institutions, innovative stylist, and 44 appraiser of experience in philosophical t.erms," and I think he has hit the nail squarely on the head. Just as Steinbeck could not separate human beings from the rest of the world, he was equally unable (or unwilling) to draw any distinction between literatw:·e and reality. His novels were not ·stories, in the fictive sense of the word, but rather honest (albeit, admittedly subjective) accountings of his environment and his subjective experiences within that environment. His characters, mirroring this ideology, expressed reality from their own viewpoint: each was very different from the others; each had a distinct, unique set of beliefs based on his or her own subjective experience of reality; and each character interacted in a 45 correspondingly unique manner. As such, his works oftentimes exhibit a religiousness which isunexplainable in terms of ordinary literary comment. Yet, critics have approximated a degree of insight in this regard. "His biggest contribution as a writer," remarked Champney,

"may turn out to have been the exploration and colonization of the no-man' s-land bet•.veen intellectual and nonintellectual, rational and 46 subrational. " 60

The critics could never categorize him because they strove to

find (or implement, if necessary) a unity and a pattern to his writing

and his world. But there obviously was no unity; he wrote from life

and life only presents itself with some sort of arrangement or 47 structure if we look for it. There is pattern and unity in a world view steeped in logical-positivism, but there can hardly be any with

a non-teleological orientation to life. But since most critics bring

an experience of logical, methodological thinking into their sub

jective encounter with reality, they would even find a hard time relating to my last sentence--unless theysuspend their iron-clad

"objective" thought processes and learn to also see the world from an

existential/phenomenological perspective.

The public, on the other hand, bought his books by the millions because they could relate to the intimate, experiential nature of the stories quite readily. They were not interested in deep inner meaninqs, nor were they very coacerned \vith the philosophical nature of the characters. They enjoyed (and still enjoy) his novels because they were well-written and because they were able to quickly relate to their personal tenor. In fact, Steinbeck was always rather curious about this and wondered why his books sold so well--since he 48 was only writing about "reality."

The fact that Steinbeck was, indeed, intending to give an honest appraisal of \vha t was real (to him) becomes evident if we look at some of the available written evidence. Tortilla Flat was first published in 1935 but numerous editions were (and continue to be) released. In

1937 The Modern Library edition of the novel was printed, and i.n it, 61

49 the author included a foreword explaining why he wrote the book. In this foreword he explains that the stories are factual and that he is sorry if he has hurt anyone by telling the truth. "When this book was written" he explains, "it did not occur to me that paisanos [a word used in the American Southwest to denote persons of mixed Spanish and

Indian heritage] were curious or quaint, dispossessed or underdoggish.

'I'hey are people who::n I know and like, people who merge successfully wit.~ their habitat. ,.SO "I wrote these stories" he ccncludes, "because 51 they were true stories and because I liked them."

But one novel can hardly be used to demonstrate an author's intent. The Red Pony, perhaps Steinbeck's most universally enjoyed piece of writing, was also written to express subjective experience.

It "was written ... when there >yas desolation in my fa'Uily." Steinbeck remembers, "The first death had occurred," and "The Red Pony was an 52 attempt. .. to set down this loss and acceptance and growth." Similar~ ly, The Grapes Of Wrath, published in 1S39, contained some rather risque language and, for that time, a somewhat shocking final scene.

Asked to change parts of the book because the puhlic might be outraged and appalled by them, Steinbeck replied, in a letter to his editor,

"I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written," and then "throughout [the novel] I've tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it 53 Wl.'1 1 be sea :ted ent1rely. on 1us . own depth or ho llowness."

But it is East Of Eden, Steinbeck's major literary accomplishment, which provides us with the greatest amount of documentary evidence regarding the author's original intent behind the writing of the book. 62

East Of Eden, originally titled "The Salinas Valley," was to be the

biography of the Steinbeck family and the biography of his Valley.

When Steinbeck's editor, Pascal Covici, received East Of Eden in the

mail, the first page of the manuscript was addressed to the author's 54 two sons and began: "Dear Tow and John." It was written to them 55 because:

They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are gx-own and the pains and joys have tousled them a little. And if. the book is addressed to them, it is for a good reason. I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people. One can go off into fanciness if one writes to a hug~ nebulous group but I think it will be necessary to speak very straight and clearly and simply if I address my book to two little boys who will be men before they read my book.

Steinbeck was compelled to write not only a story about the

Salinas Valley, but an accurate one. When he anticipated writing the

novel he was then living in New York. Before returning to Salinas,

California he wrote a letter to Paul Caswell, editor of the Salinas-

Californian asking whether he would be able to consult the files of

the Californian and the Index as preparation for the novel. Caswell

replied that Steinbeck was "welcome" to the files, and from this 56 meager beginning Steinbeck began his research. In February of

1948 he wrote his editor telling him that "Arrangements have finally

been made for the photographing of the. Salinas papers which will

give me as fine a reference library on the daily history of a 57 ··: .~. community as it is possible. to have. " He then spent long arduous 63

hours in the archives of the Salinas newspapers and afterwards

wrote "I have now checked the stories of all the old timers against

the reports of the papers of the time, and I find that old timers are . . .. 58 a 1 most 1nvar1ably wrong ... So although his non-teleological ap-

proach left him with little concern for explanation, Steirilleck was

very concerned with accuracy.

So Steinbeck's non-teleological approach to t~e world is apparent-

ly very similar to the phenomenological method that certain members

of the social science community seem to be looking for. Neither

philosophy is engaged in a search for ultimate answers. But pheno-

menology and non-teleological thinking are methods for understanding,

not a means to final explanation. Both ideologies are terribly akin

in their acknowledgement that ·man's behavior is best explained by

the intentional experiential world of the subjective. And both

perspectives allow the "open" observer to translate reality from a

non-logical point of view--a view which we have seen is often of

little value in the "scientific" quest to explain, model, and predict.

But, as we shall see in the following chapter,non-teleological or

"is" thinking is detectable in Steinbeck's novels to a far greater

extent in his description of the landscape-~place--than it is through

an examination of his subjective and "real-world" approach. Seeing

and communicating the syncr4tic relationship between man and the land,

as well as the ability to articulate that subsequent essence of place which comes to be, or that which is the Salinas Valley, could perhaps on.Iy be verbalized and imparted through this subjective treatment of regional literature. 64

FOOTNOTES: Chapter 3

1. See chapter 1, footnote 25. Also Gustav Bergman, The Metaphysics Of Logical Positivism, The University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, Milwaukee, and London, 1967.

2. Preston E. James, All Possible Worlds: A History Of Geographical Ideas, The Odyssey Press: Indianapolis, 1977, p. 12.

3. Wilbur Zelinsky, "The Demigod's Dilemma," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June, 1975) pp. 123-143. With the accumulation of new ideas and new developments in the fields of physical engineering, there are even_members of the so-called "hard" sciences who are now employing the same types of non-rational questions to their research problems. See Fritjof Capra, The Tao Of Physics: An Exploration Of The Parallels Between Modern Physics And Eastern Mysticism, Bantam Books: London, New York, and Toronto, 1977.

4. George c. Homans, The Nature Of Social Science, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.: New York, 1967, pp. 71-73.

5. Thomas D. Wilson, Jr., Thirteen Perspectives On The Gram~atical Landscape Of Social Science, Unpublished H.S. Thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1976, p. 26.

6. Yi-Fu Tuan, "Humanistic Geography," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 66, No. 2 (June, 1976) pp. 269-270.

7. Calvin s. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Theories Of Personality, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: New York and elsewhere, 1970, p. 553; Edward Relph, "An Inquiry Into The Relations Betv1een Phenomenology And Geography, " Canadian Geographer, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall, 1970) p. 193; and D.J. Walmsley, "Positivism And Phenomenology," Canadian Geographer, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, l974) p. 102.

8. Neil Smith, "Geography, Science And Post-Positivist Nodes-of Explanation," Progress In Human-Geography, Vol. 3, No. 3 (September, 1979) p. 365.

9. Neil Bolton, "Reflecting On The Pre-Reflective: Phenomenology" in Andrew Burton and John Radford (Eds.) Thinking In Perspective: Critical Essays In The Study Of Thought, Processes, Nethuen & Co., Ltd.: Londo.n, 1978, p. 205; Anne Buttimer, "Grasping The Dynamism Of Lifeworld," Annals, Association of American Geographers Vol. 66, No. 2 (June, 1976) p. 277; and Relph, op. cit., footnote 7, p. 195. 65

10. Buttimer, op. cit., footnote 9, p. 279 and Maurice Merleau-Poney, "What Is Phenomenology?" translated by Colin Smith, in Vernon W. Gras (Ed.} European Literary Theory And Practice: From Existential Phenomenology To Structuralism, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.: New York, 1973, p. 69.

11. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., footnote 10, p. 69.

12. A good example might be the way the Iberian peoples settled South America. The Spanish and the Portuguese, although very alike in culture, produced two very different cultural landscapes in South America. For a comparison of their respective back grounds and the ways they differed in their attitudes toward settlement, the reader is offered the following entries: E. Bradford Burns, A History Of Brazil, Columbia University Press: New York and London, 1970, pp. 16-32; Charles Julian Bishko, "The Iberian Background Of Latin_American History: Recent Progress And Continuing Problems," Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 36 (February, 1956) pp. 50;..;55 reprinted in Lewis Hanke (Ed.} History of Latin American Civilization: Sources And Interpretations, volume one, Lit.tle, Brown and Company: Boston, 1967, pp. 5-9; A. Curtis Wilgus, The Development Of Hispanic America, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.: New York, 1941, pp. 49-84; and what is probably the best book in this field, because it is quite provocative, is Manoel De Oliveira Lima, The Evolution Of Brazil Compared with that of Spanish And Anglo-Saxon America, edited with introduction and notes by Percy Alvin Martin, Russell & Russell: New York, 1966.

13. Hugh C. Prince, "Real, Imagined and Abstract Worlds Of The Past," Progress In Geography, Vol. 3 (1971) Edward ALnold: London, p. 24.

14. Victor F. Weisskopf, "Art And Science," American Scholar, Vol. 48 No. 4 (Autumn, 1979} p. 474.

15. Marvin w. Mikesell, "Tradition And Innovation In CUltural Geography," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 68, No. 1 (March, 1979) p. 15.

16. D.W. Meinig, "Environmental Appreciation: Localitie As A Humane Art," Western Humanities Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter, 1971) p. 3.

17. Sister Annette' Buttimer, Values In Geography, Resource Paper on College Geography No. 24, Association of American Geographers: Washington, D.C., 1974, p. 24.

18. The following is a rather complete list of published material by .geographers who have spoken out, either for or against, t.hc use of literature in geographic research: Charles s. Aiken, 66

"Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha Count.y: Geographical Fact Into Fiction," Geographical Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (January, 1977) pp. 1-21; H.C. Darby, "The Regional Geography Of Thomas Hardy's Wessex," Geographical Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (July, 1948) pp. 426-443; Gary s. Elbow and Tom L. Martinson~ "Science Fiction For Geographers: Select.ed Works," Journal Of Geography, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January, 1980) pp. 23-27; Colin D. Gunn, "The Non-Western Novel As A Geography Text," Journal Of Geography, Vol. 73, No. 3, (March, 1974) pp. 27-34; Don R. Hoy and Gary S. Elbow, "The Use Of Literary Works In Teaching Latin American Geography," Journal Of Geography, Vol. 75, No. 9, (December, 1976) 556-569; Jean Hodgin, "The Geographical Plight Of The Regional Novel Site," International Geography, 22nd International Geographical Congress, Montreal, 1972, Vol. 1, pp. 342-344i A.J. Lamme, III, "The Use Of Novels In Geography Classrooms," Journal Of Geography VoJ.. 76, No. 2 (February, 1977) pp. 66-68; D.N. Jeans, "Some Literary Examples Of Humanistic Descriptions of Place," Australian Geographer, Vol. 14, No. 4 (November, 1979) pp. 207- 214; David A. Lanegran, "The Pioneer's View Of 'Ihe Frontier As Presented In The Regional Novel, Giants In The Earth," International Geography, 22nd International Geographical Con gress, Montreal, 1972, Vol. 1, pp. 350-352; David A. Lanegran and Susan Allen Toth, "Geography Through Literature," Places, Vol. 3, No. l (March, 1976) pp. 5-12; W.J. Lloyd, "Landscape Imagry In The Urban Novel: A Source Of Geographic Evidence," in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Golledge (Eds•) Environmental Knowing: Theories, Research, And Methods, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 279-285; ~villiam J. Lloyd, Images Of Late Nineteenth Century Urban Landscapes, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977; Tom L. Martinson, "From Agatha Cristie 1'o Frank Herbert: Tracing Geographical Themes In Popular Literature," Geographical Perspectives, No. 43 (Spring, 1979) pp. 10-14; Douglas R. Mcr1anis, "Places For Mysteries," Geographical Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (July, 1978) pp. 319-334; D.W. Meinig, op. cit., footnote 16; Hugh c. Prince, op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 1-86; Christopher L. Salter, "Signatures And Settings: One Aproach [sic] To Landscape In Literature," in Karl W. Butzer (Ed.) Dimensions Of Human Geography: Essays On Some Familiar And Neglected Themes, Research Paper 186, The University of Chicago: Chicago, 1978, pp. 69~83; Christopher L. Salter and William J. Lloyd, Landscape In Literature, Resource Papers for College Geography No. 76-3, Association Of American Geographers: Washington, D.C. 1977; David Seamon, "Phenomenological Investigation Of Imaginative Literature: A Commen·tary," in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Golledge (Eds.) Environmental Knowing: Theories, Research, 11nd Methods, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 286-290; Myongsup Shin, "Geographical KnoHledge In Three Southwestern Novels," in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Golledge (Eds.) Environmental Knowing: Theo.ries, Research, And Methods, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 273-278; 67

Sherman E. Silverman, "The Use Of Novels In Teaching Cultural Geography Of The United States," Journal Of Geography, Vol. 76, No. 4 (April/May, 1977) pp. 140-146; Yi-Fu Tuan, "Literature, Experience, And Environmental Knowing," in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Golledge (Eds.) Environmental Knowing: Theories, Research, And Methods, Dowder., Hutchinson, & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, pp. 260-272; Yi Fu Tuan, "Literature And Geography: Implications For Geographical Research," in David Ley and Marwyn s. Samuels (Eds.) Humanistic Geography: Prospects And Problems, Maaroufa Press, !nc.: Chicago, 1978, 194-206; and William Wyckoff, "The Prairie Novel And The European Immigrant: New Perspectives For The Geography Classroom," ~rournal Of Geography, Vol. 78, No. 6 (November, 1979) pp. 226- 230. l-9" Raymond Tschumi, A Philosophy Of Li terat:ure, Dufour Editions: Philadelphia, 1962, p. 54.

20. Cole Harris "The Historical Hind And The Practice Of Geography," in David Ley and Marwyn s. Samuels (Eds.)_ Humanistic Geography: Prospects And Problems, Maaroufa Press, Inc.: Chicago, 1978, pp. 125-126.

2;1... Russel B. Nye, "History And Literature: Branches Of The Same Tree," in Robert H. Bremner (Eds.}_ Essays On History And Literature, Ohio State University Press: Ohio, 1966, p. 158.

22. Nye, op. cit., footnote 21, p. 154.

23. Bernard J. Paris, "Fonn, Theme, And Imitation In Realistic Fiction," Novel, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1968) p. 149.

24. J.A.V. Chapple, Documentary And Imaginative Literature, 1880- 1920, Barnes and Noble, Inc.: United States, 1970, p. 15.

25. David Lowenthal, "Heroes And rlistory: A Commentary," in Gary T. Moore and Reginald G. Golledge (Eds.) Environmental Knowing: Theories, Research, And Methods, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.: Pennsylvania, 1976, p. 292.

26. Kenzer has demonstrated that this, in fact, is possible, using both empi~ical and historical data. Martin s. Kenzer, Steinbeck's "East Of Eden: The Reconstruction Of A Past Land scape And The Essence Of Place," A paper presented at the 76th Annual Meeting, Association of American Geographers, Louisville, Kentucky, April 13-16, 1980.

27. Relph, op. cit., footnote 7, 198. 68

28. Sea Of Cortez was co-authored with his friend Edward F. Ricketts, and alt.hough they use the pronoun "we" throughout the text, it is generally assumed that Ricketts wrote the technical appendix which describes ·the species they recovered from the Sea of California, while Steinbeck w-.cote the day-to-day journal. See Peter Lisca, The Wide: World Of John Steinbeck, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1958, p. 181 and Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (Eds.) Steinbeck: A Life In Letters, The Viking Press: New York, 1975, pp. 228 and 230-232.

29. Although the majority of Sea Of Cortez reflects this method of thinking, the section which most fully elucidates this idea is contained within pp. 131-151. The aforementioned pages and all future quotes frcm the Sea OF Cortez are from t..'le following edition: John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea Of Corte,;: A :Geisurely Journal Of Travel And Research, Paul P. Appel: Mamaroneck, New York, 1971.

30. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 135.

31. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 135.

32. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 144.

33. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 165.

34. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, pp. 150-151.

35. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 1.

36. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 1.

37. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 2.

38. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 2.

39_. Carey McWilliams; "A Man, A Place, And A Time," American West,. Vol. 7, No. 3 (May, 1970) p. 4.

40. Edmund C. Richards, "The Challenge Of John Steinbeck, " The North American Review, Vol. 243, No. 2 (Summer, 1937) p. 6.

41. Claude-Edmonde Magny, "Steinbeck, Or The Limits Of The Impersonal Novel" in E. W. ·redlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker (Eds.) Steinbeck And His Critics: A Record Of T~venty-Five Years, The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, p. 223.

42. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 216.

43. Steinbeck and Ricketts, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 216-217. 69

44. James Gray, John Steinbeck, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 94, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1971, p. 12.

45. See Lester Jay Marks, Thematic Design In The Novels Of John Steinbeck, Studies in American Literature, Vol. II, Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers: The Hague, 1969, p. 12. ' 46. Freeman Champney, "John Steinbeck, Californian," Antioch Review, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September, 1947) p. 362. Also see E.W. Tedlock, Jr., "A Pathos And A Power," Steinbeck Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Sununer, 1969) p. 28.

47. capra, op. cit., footnote 3, p. 15.

48. See Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels Of John 8+:einbeck: A First Critical Study, second edition, Kennikat Press, Inc.: Port Washington, New York, 1968, p. 96 and F.W. Watt, Steinbeck, Oliver And Boyd: Edinburgh, 1967, pp. 1·-2 and 52.

49. The reason he wrote the foreword was because the Monterey Chru~ber of Commerce, "fearing for its tourist business," released a statement describing Tortilla Flat as a fraud, assuring any prospective tourists that no such people existed in Monterey. See John Steinbeck, "My Short Novels," in E.W. Tedlock, Jr. and c.v. Wicker, Ste.inbeck .Zmd His Critics: A Record Of Twenty Five Years, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, pp. 38-40.

50. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, Random House: New York, 1937, in the foreword, unnumbered.

51. Steinbeck, op. cit., footnote 50, in the foreword, unnumbered.

52. Steinbeck, op. cit., footnote 49, p. 38.

53. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 28, p. 178.

54. John Steinbeck, Journal Of A Novel: The East Of Eden Letters, The Viking Press: New York, 1969,. p. 7.

55. Steinbeck., op. cit., footnote 54, p. 4.

56. Steinbeck and Walls ten, op. cit., footnote 28, p. 303.

57. Steinbeck and Walls ten, op. cit., footnote 28, p. 304.

58. Steinbeck and Walls ten, op. cit., footnote 28, p. 304. "What is it like Captain Steinbeck Do you worry about the things you miss? 'Well I do and I hurry like a fool from 9 to 5 Trying to keep my words alive'·

I would shout out my story With a heavenly glory If I could only find the words If I could only find the words." Jim Krueger

Chapter 4

There is an unexplainable sy-mbiosis between man and the physical

environment. They effect one another in a manner that we are often

unable to pinpoint. It becomes very diff±cult to articulate the

metaphysical relationship between human beings and a river or a butte

or a valley; furthermore, to rank tha~ and to then determine their

relative relationship, is perhaps better suited to the fields of psychology and physics. Yet,· as geographers concerned with places and

their respective differences over the surface of L~e earth, we too

have valid reasons for understanding this fusion, this syncretic

relationships between the anll1ate and the inanimate, the thinking

and the thought of, the subjective and the objective, man and the physical landscape. To help accomplish this, the humanist geographer

can find some augmentative information in regional literature, and

this chapter will suggest how novels of place, in this case those of

John Steinbeck and the Salinas Valley, could possibly be interpreted with this end in mind.

Whether we call John Steinbeck a non-telelogical thinker and conform to his termir.ology, or we adopt my preference and regard him as a phenomenologist, the distinction is the same: he was writing a

70 71

subj ec·tive accounting of the world. Steinbeck's novels were not stories: They were actual happenings based on his subjective experience of the "lived-world" he encountered from day to day, month after month--in essence, his personal reality. He never wrote about a place he had not been to. Moreover, the vast majority of his novels encapsulate areas he was intimately familiar with. He was an individual with a keen awareness of his immediate ~nvironment, and his writing de.rnonstrates a "feel" for the world that mere description can not project. 1 In 1959 Steinbeck remarked that:

..• a writer sets down what has impressed him deeply, usually at an early age. If heroism impressed him that's what he writes about and if frustration and degradation, that is it. Maybe somewhere in this is my interest and joy in what I am doing.

For John Steinbeck, "frustration and degradation" was the result and recognition of man's relation to the land.

At an early age Steinbeck realized that man is an integral part of nature and that the two can never be separated. Growing up as a part of the rural, far-western American experience, he developed an 2 outlook that was often contradictory, often confusing. His experiences with the agricultural folks of central California who relied on unpredictable weather patterns and, at the same time, his involvement with a breed of frontiersmen heavily influenced by generations of persistence, caused the young author to speculate on man's connection to the physical world. From years of speculating, the artist learned that man's relationship to the natural runs deep . 3 and that we have a lesson to learn from this: 72

It is strange. In spring and summer we work over the earth as though it belonged to us--plant lawns and cut them, flowers, trees, put in water pipes. We are proprietors. And then the fall comes and t~e frost and the ice and it is too much for us. We lose our ownership. We scurry to put things away out of danger, drain water, let the leaves be as they fall. The strong forces creep back and we burrow down like moles to wait it out until we can take control again. It's a fine lesson every year--a lesson in humility. I can sit in my little house on the point and watch the winter come and I guess I a~ a traitor to my species because I get a sharp sense of joy to see the older gods·move back in. I am for them.

And so goes John Steinbeck's writing. His novels, steeped in

this man-land relationship, reflect the "trials and tribulations" of

a phenomenologist trying to portray, with as little explanation as

possible, the confusing and the seemingly awesome reality that was

his own world view. Joseph Warren Beach has likened Steinbeck to

Thomas Hardy, exclaiming that he "begins with physical nature and

• I 4 comes b y slow d egrees to human1ty. ' "By slow degrees" because it is very difficult for a phenome!lclogist to separate mau and nature; for

it is, in fact, an artifical distinction. And because he was unable to make that distinction, h~s regional novels exr.~bit a union between man and his environment that can only be defined as syncretic.

Steinbeck's understanding of place emanates from his close 5 association with the Salinas Valley. Because he was born, educated, and raised in the "long valley," and because he wrote primarily about his experiences of that Valley, Steinbeck's novels situated in this central California setting are powerful in their verisL~ilitude.

There is a "feel" for the landscape that can only result from years of experience with the people and the re'gion he describes. All the 73

nuances and subtle paradoxes of the Salinas Valley which "outsiders"

would be hard pressed to notice (or at least to understand in their

prope:r· context), are exemplified by this mastercraftsrnan of the

. d 6 'YTr 1 tten wor .

Steinbeck's writing often approachs the realm of magic. His

capacity to capture the realism of place was, in no s::nall part, a

product of his ability to make words sing with life. By utilizing

an economy of language, he was able to create dialogues and

descriptions that could lite:cally captivate. This is an important

point to understand because language is the weapon of the phenomena-

logist. Subjective experience defies description so long as we must

describe it through objective means. Conversations, like folklore

and myth, result partly from their regional setting, and they must

therefore be analyzed in such a light. To do so, requires the

"inside," everyday language of place, not the universal, "outside," 7 language--the technical language of society. Tuan alludes to this

when he suggests that speech is a good medium for elucidating a 8 sense of place:

The felt quality of a place can never be fully revealed by describing the physical structures and noting the ways people move in them. Nor is it merely a stable attribute that can be elicited through the use of restrictive questionnaires. Such approaches have evident value, but they must be supplemented by studying a people's speech as it appears naturally in the cour~e of day-to-day living and on more dramatic occasions.

But place should never be thought of as a static entity. No

matter.:the scale, a place, because it both influences and, in t.urn,

., is influenced by man, is constantly changing. Any human interaction 74

with the enviromnent will create a new, somewhat different environment. Therefore, when we attempt to articulate and circumscribe the dimensions of place, we must be continually aware of the temporal

9 nature of place. ,In short, places change: as such, no experiential accounting of place (due to the relatively short time-frame involved with human experience), in opposition to objective descriptions, can ever be duplicated because of man's subjective nature and, more impor-tantly, because of the change·man induces by his mere observation of place.

But what do novels actually tell us of place? What type of information can we gleen about a particular locale by reading the literature of that area? Is it all a story, or does the "reality" of place transcend the fictive aspect of regional literature? For 10 our present concerns, are John Steinbeck's "Salinas novels" nice, quaint, pleasant, well-written tales? Or, are these stories a function of location, perhaps representing a subjective history of the Salinas Valley? The remainder of this chapter will focus on these and similar questions. ll Steinbeck penned one dozen "California novels," and a careful inspection of them reveals four themes which, in varying degrees, are present in all twelve books. Although interrelated and all tied to 12 the author's n~stalgia for the 1and, each theme is singularly defineable and each a bit different. These tl1emes are most evident, however, in his "Salinas novels" because this in the country he kne\v and understood best; subsequently, this was the landscape he could best interpret from an experiental background. The four themes might 75

best be termed "westering," an "American land ethic," a "love of land," and "changes on the land."

"Westering," or man's migration across the American frontier and subsequent settlement in the West (usually California), is something Steinbeck mentions in'all his novels with the Salinas Valley setting. Somet.imes the reference is deliberate, as is the case of

To A God Unknown, East Of Eden, and The Long Valley; in other situa- tions the reference is more subtle, as we find in Of Mice And Men, and 13 The Pastures Of Heaven.

In To A God Unknown, westering is Joseph ~vayne' s need to leeve

Vermont and move west to California where life is easy and land is 14 still cheap:

But they're homesteading the western land, sir. You have only to live a year on the land and build a house and plough a bit and the land is yours. No one can ever take it away.

In East Of Eden Steinbeck relates, through the characters of

Charles and Adam Trask, why they ought to leave Connecticut and move

"f . 15 to Ca l ~ orn~a:

On a winter evening Adam looked up from his account Book. "It's nice in California," he said. "It's nice in the winter. And you can raise anything there." "Sure you can raise it. But when you got it, what are you going to do with it?" "How about wheat? They raise a lot of wheat in California." "The rust will get to it," said Charles. "What makes you so sure? Look, Charles, things grow so fast in California they say you have to plant and step back quick or you'll get knocked down." 76

This need to move west, indeed, the need of Americansto just

move and remain mobile was recognized by Steinbeck a half a century

ago. In The Pastures Of Heaven he characterizes this restless feeling

by describing the rapid changes that occurred in the human landscape

. '- . . . d h 16 o f · t h e West. Speak 1ng to tnlS anx1ous e1tt1 tu e e says:

In the West, where, if two generations of one family have lived in a house, it is an old house and a pioneer family, a kind of veneration mixed with contempt is felt for old houses. There are very few old houses in the West. Those restless Americans who have settled up the land have never been able to stay in one place for very long. They build flimsy houses and soon move on to some new promise.

But the epitome ofwestering(Steinbeck's own term) is related via

"The Leader Of The People," the fourth and final segment of "The

Red Ponyn found in The Long Valley. Jody's grandfather, "the leader

of the people," represents the western movement to California. For

him, and those he speaks for, ·the move west was far more the1n a move

across tne land to a new destination. It was the excitement of

leaving the kncwn--the East--for the unknown--the West. It was full

of purpose and what they found once they arrived was of little

consequence. As Jod y I s mot h er exp l a1ns: . 17

lThe move west] was the big thing in my father's life. He led a wagon train across the plains to the coast, and when it was finished, his life was done. It was a big thing to do, but it didn't last long enough. Look! she continued, it's as though he was born to do that, and after he finished it, there wasn't anything more for him to do but think about it and talk about it. If there'd been any farther west to go, he'd have gone. He's told me so himself. He lives right by the ocean where he had to stop.

This is the exact same attitude we find from the old man in To .-.'1 God ,, '

Unknown who lives on a cliff above the beach. The sole purpose for

residing on this cliff is so he can be the last person in the ~est

to see the sun set. He has made this move west farther than any of 18 his contemporaries; he is the western movement;

I am the las·t man in the western world to see the sun. After it is gone to everyone else, I see it for a little while. I've seen it every night for twenty years. Except when the fog was in or the rain was falling. I've seen the sun set. He looked from one to the other, smiling proudly. Sometimes, he went on, I go to town for salt and pepper and thyme and tobacco. I go fast. I start after the sun has set, and I'm back before it sets again. You shall see tonight how it is.

So obsessed with the importance attached to being as far west as one

can possibly go, the old man spends every evening sacrificing animals

tq the setting sun. The sacrificing is necessary because, as Jody's 19 grandf ath er re l ates ,, ·westerlng. :LS . over. T h e sp1r:1.t . . h as d.:I.e d :

IWesteringJ was a whole bunch o£ people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but t!:8 big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, if I hadn't been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head. Under the little bushE::s the shadows were black at white noonday. When we saw the mountains at last, we cried--all of us. But it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and-westering. We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The we;:;tering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up until the continent was crossed. Then we came down to the sea, and it was done. 20 And he then concludes:

There's no place to go [now] . There's the ocean to stop you. There's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them. 78

So the first theme we can note in Steinbeck's Salinas novels

is westering, the desire or compulsion to move west at any and all expense. And once the westward trek has been fulfilled, Steinbeck tells us that the new California citizen is both effected and changed . 21 b y t h J.s process. All of Steinbeck's California novels are filled with people on the move: either they are moving west, or they are moving internally, wj_thin Ca1iforniai there are very few stable, sedentary characters in his California novels. Those moving west are moving to the new Eden, the much-publicized land of promise that is

California. Those who have already made the journey west are still restless, continually dismayed when the adventure has come to an end.

But the glory that was California has not endedi the West becomes 22 Eden whether it exists or not.. And why question if this was Eden?

The one thing they found in abundance when they stormed into

California was land--plenty of good open land, and some of the very best land to be haO. was the rich dark fertile soil of the Salinas

Valley.

Land is a prime commodity in California--it always has been.

The American expansion westward was an experience in land exploitation. There was a seemingly endless surplus of land and pioneers~

Yearning to own that piece of land they were denied in the Old World,~ were more than eager to occupy and claim it. Steinbeck makes this 23 quite clear in East Of Eden:

When people first carne to the West, particularly from the owned and fought-over £armlets of Europe, and saw so much land to be had for the signing of a paper and the building of a fqundation, an itching lanLyJreed seemed to come over them. They 79

wanted more and more land--good land if possible, but land anyway. Perhaps they had filaments of memory of feudal Europe where great families became and remained great because they owned things. The early settlers took up land they didn't need and couldn't use; they took up worthless land just to own it. And all proportions changed. A man who might have :&een well-to-do on ·ten acres in Europe was rat-poor on two thousand in California.

The West represents the terminus of this American experience, and

California, because of its salubrious climates and spectacular 24 scenery, became the focus of this preoccupation with the land; to own land was the dream, California was Eden and the place to own it.

So the "American land ethic," the obsession to possess and own land, emerges as the second theme in Steinbeck's California novels.

But land is not equally distributed, not in topography nor in its ability to produce food for man. So, the most sought after land in California became those areas where the soil was such that man's labor was minimal--this was the central California valley known as

Salinas.

The Salinas novels are replete with references to the land.

Man must own land because this is where he derives his strength; without it, man is meaningless, forever in search of it, never a complete person. Richard Astra noted this ·in Steinbeck's writing when he wrote that "nearly all of Steinbeck's protagonists love the land, not only for its beauty but also for its ability to provide 25 man Wl.. t h. mean1.nc;~ . 1.n . 1'1. f e .... "

In The Red Pony, Steinbeck dramatically relates this relationship with the land through Gitana, the old paisano who returns to his old rancho to die. He's a vagabond, but when death approaches he ,80

feels he must return to his land. If he dies without his land, he 26 may as we 11 h ave never 1 ~ve. d . As Ste1n. b ec k te 11 s 1t:.

Gitana took off his old black hat and held it with both hands in front of hi.TU. He repeated, "I am Gitana, and I have come back." "Come back? Back where?" Gitana's whole straight body leaned forward a little His right hand described the circle of the hills, the sloping fields and the mountains, and ended at his hat again. "Back to the rancho. I was born here, and my father, too." "Here?" she demanded. "This isn't an old place." "No, there," he said, pointing to the western ridge. "On the other side there, in a house that is gone." . . 27 And as t h e conversat~on cont~nues:

"And what do you want here now, Gitano? 'II will stay here," he said quietly, "un#l I die." "But we don't need an extra man here." "I can not work hard any more, senora. I can milk a cow, feed chickens, cut a little wood; no more. I will stay here." He indicated the sack on the ground beside him. "Here a.re my things."

And with further questioning, Jody's father inquires:~~

"Haven't you got any relatives in this parL of the country? he asked. Gitano answered with some pride, "My brother-in law is in Monterey. I have cousins there, too." "Well, you can go and live there, then." "I was born here," Gitana said in gentle rebuke.

It was not that there was nowhere for the old man to go; he was welcome in other parts by friends and relatives both. But it was not his place. There was no meaning dying on someone else's land; his being, his very essence, that which made him Gitana tl1e individual,

29 eminated from the land--his land. This is what Joseph Wayne means . ,.30 when he tells his father "I've a hunger fer land of my own, s1r.

He moves because of the land and he must own it--it must be his! 81

But Of Mice P~d Men is the Salinas novel where we find this

theme most fully articulated. Lennie and George are two itinerant

farm laborers who "travel together" looking for work from place to

place. ;rhey are constantly on the move, but their dream is to own

land. Without a piece of property, the two men are forever destined 31 to roam. It lS. l an d , an d 1 an d a 1 cne, t h at wl'11 c h ange t h..elr 1'lves:

"Guys like us, that \vork on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to. " 32 And later:

Someday--we're gonna get the jack together and we're gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an' a CC'.v and some pigs and--" "An' live off the fatta the lan' ," Ler.nie shouted.

But George and Lennie are not the only ones infested with this desire to own property. Later on, when Candy the swamper overhears

them talking about a fanta.stic piece of land that they are apparently planning to purchase and live off of, he becomes instantly interested . . . 33 and his need for land is reawakened too. He JOlns the conversat~on:

George sat entranced with his own picture [of the land] • When Candy spoke they both jumped as though they had been caught doing something reprehensible. Candy said, "You know where's a place like that?" George was on guard immediately. "S'pose I do," he said. "What's that to you?" "You don't need to tell me where it's at. Might be any place." "Sure," said George. "That's right. Y'ou couldn't find it i.n a hundred years." Candy went on excitedly, "How much they want for a place like that?" .82

George watched him suspiciously. "Well--I could get it for six hundred bucks. The ol' people that owns it is flat bust an' the ol' lady needs an operation. Say--what's it to you? You got nothing to do with us." Candy said, "I ain't much good with on'y one hand. I lost my hand right here on this ranch. That's why they give me a job swampin'. An' they give me two hundred an' fifty dollars 'cause I los' my hand. An' I got fifty more saved up right in the bank, right now. Tha's three hundred, and I got fifty more comin' the end a the month. Tell you what--" He leaned forward eagerly. "S'pose I went in with you guys. Tha's three hundred an' fifty bucks I'd put in. I ain't much good, but I could cook and tend the chickens and hoe the garden some . Hov1' d that be?" George half-closed his eyes. "I gotta think about that. We was always gonna do it by ourselves."

But Candy's flame had been re-lit and the old desire was rekindled . 34 to.an obsession. He cont~nues:

"I'd make a will an' leave my share to you guys in case I kick off, "cause I ain't got no relatives nor nothing. You guys got any money? Maybe we could de her right now?"

And now, at long last, the heretoforth dream has the potential of becoming a reality and the three men are caught-up in their nostalgia 35 for land:

George spat on the floor disgustedly. "We got ten bucks betweei' us." Then he said thoughtfully, "Look, if me an' Lennie work a month an' don't spen' nothing, we'll have a hundred bucks. That'd be four fifty. I bet we could swing her for that. ~hen you an' Lennie could go get her started an' I'd get a job an' make up the res', an' you could sell eggs an' stuff like that." They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true. George said reverently, "Jesus Christ! I bet we could swing her." His eyes were full of wonder. "I bet we could swing her," he repeated softly. Candy sat on the edge of his bunk. He scratched the stump of his wrist nervously.. "I got hurt four year ago," he said. "They'll can me purty soon. " . 83

Jus' as soon as I can't swamp out no bunk houses they'll put me on the county. Maybe if I give you guys money, you'll let me hoe in the garden even after I ain't no good at it. An' I'll wash dishes an' little chicken stuff like that. But I'll be on our own place, an' I'll be let to work on our own place. [emphasis added]"

This passion for the land is something that permeates the Salinas

Valley area. Steinbeck wrote these novels because he was Yrriting

from his experience with the many Georges and Lennies who inhabit

the Valley. Land was and still is a symbol of prestige in America,

and in the Salinas Valley it could be callea no less than a precious

commodity. In a letter written during the middle of his life, 36 Steinbeck says of the area:

We were poor people with a hell of a lot of land which made us think we were rich people, even when we couldn't buy food and were patched. Caballeros--lords of the land, you know, and really low church mice but proud.

So the owning of land, like westering, are two themes that

Steinbec~ has chosen to illustrate the Salinas Valley as a place with

a particular personality. A third theme, one closely related to the

second because it is born from it, is what I call a "love of land."

This is the American land ethic manifest in its most feverish way.

Steinbeck insinuates via the dialogue -found in his Salinas novels

that man's desire for land in this valley goes way beyond a need; it

is an intimate love affair with the land, where man is satisfied only by relating to' the landscape in a personal manner. Man 37 literally makes love to the land:

The hunger [for the land] in his eyes became rapaciousness as he looked down the long green valley. His possessiveness became a 84

passion. "It's mine," he chanted. "Down deep it's mine, right to the center of the world." He stamped his feet into the soft earth. Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river. He flung himself face downward on the grass and pressed his cheek against the wet stems. His fingers grlpped the wet grass and tore it out, and gripped again. His thighs beat heavily on the earth.

But Joseph's infatuation with nature (above) is expressed in many ways other than by his act of making love to it. When he receives a letter informing him that his father has died in Vermont,

Joseph imagines that his father has actually crossed the continent to be with him, and that his father is now in the oak tree which towers over his newly-built home. The land is no longer an inanimate, unconscious object; it is now full of life and embodies all the 38 characteristics of people--the l~nd is human:

•.• the great tree stirred to life under the wind. Joseph raised his head and looked at its old, wrinkled limbs. His eyes lighted with recognition and welcome, for his father's strong and simple being, which had dwelt in his youth like a cloud of peace, had entered the tree. Joseph raised his hand in greeting. He said very softly, "I'm glad you've come, sir. I didn't know until now how lonely I've been for you." The tree stirred slightly. "It is good land, you see," Joseph went on softly. "You'll like to be staying, sir."

And again, at the end of the book, where the land appears to be drying up and dying from the drought, Joseph retreats to his "sacred" glade and there comes to belive that he and the land are now one and the same. In a sacrifical gesture designed to help nature produce the. water and the nourishment the land must have to survive, Joseph slices his wrist to let his life flow into the land, and, at long last,. 85

39 he and the land are now and forever one:

••• he took out his knife again and carefully, gently opened the vessels of his wrist. The pain was sharp at first, but in a moment its sharpness dulled. He watched the bright blood cascading over the moss, and he heard the shouting of the wind around the grove. The sky was growing grey. And time passed and Joseph grew grey too. He lay on his side with his ~~ist outstretched and looked down the long black mountain range of his body. Then his body grew huge and light. It arose into the sky, and out of it came the streaking rain. "I should hav·e known," he wfuispered. "I am the rain." And yet he looked dully do,,m the mountains of n1s body where the hills fell to an abyss. He felt the driving rain, and heard it whipping down, pattering on the ground. He saw his hills grow dark with moisture. Then a lancing pain shot through the heart of the world. "I a1n the land," he said, "and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while."

A Sb~ilar aspect of this third theme is the use, by Steinbeck, of "landscape metaphors" (as noted in the quotation directly above).

In his descriptions of the landscape he regularly does so by giving it h~~an qualities. Likewise, when he is talking about a person he frequently attributes characteristics we usually identify with the earth or nature. This is why we find passages like "the mountains to the west of the Salinas Valley have a thicker skin of earth on them 40 than have the eastern foothills," or, when describing Mollie, the author's aunt, he says that "Her ankles were as slender as grass and 41 she moved like grass." The relationship between his characters and the landscape is so great,. that it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other. "Of the kinds of awareness that Steinbeck's stronger characters bring to their confrontation of life," says

Covici. "this sense of an intimate and o~erpmr1ering connection between 86

man and land becomes the most persuas1ve,. the most elementa 1 • .. 42

But if you live in the Salinas Valley, and if you find the

Valley changing from the id€al, Eclen-like place you remember as a

youth, you may be inclined to sit down and write about it and tell

the world what has happened. This is exactly what John Steinbeck

did in all of his Salinas novels. These Salinas novels are stories

of changes--changes to the Valley, changes to the inhabitants of the

Valley, and changes in the relationship between the two. All of his

novels which portray life in this, the long valley of central

California, we find that change is one of the most, if ~'1ot the most

overriding concern. And so the fourth theme we have come to identify

with these regional novels is "changeson the land."

If we begin with the earliest of the Salinas books--The Pastures

Of Heaven--we fj.nd, in the very beginning, reference to the fact that

th.e area has undergone some drastic changes in its short history.

First tnere were the Indians, unobtrusive, doc.;i.le, bewildered by th2

arrival of the Spaniard and Christianity. Later, we learn that the

Spanish are no longer masters of this land because squatters from 43 the East have arrived and usurped their land. In short, the entire

story of The Pastures Of Heaven is about change, the change evoked 44 by one family after they move into the valley.

Woven throughout 0£ Mice And Men is this same idea of changes.

George and Lennie are outsiders who come to this central California

ranch and create problems; they upset the status quo; they produce

.. . . marked changes.

:'.This idea of an out.side element that supposedly "invades" the 87

peace and serenity of the Salinas Valley is very important to under-

stand. During the period Steinbeck was growing up and beginning to

write, this area of the nation was going through a great trans-

formation; it was po longer a pastoral region with an economy that

was predominately agricultural. Large business concerns were moving 45 into California in greater and greater nt~bers. A short time later

was the Dust Bowl and the subsequent arrival of the so-called "Okies" 46 and "Arkies." Tremendous changes were taking place in California,

and many of these changes were directed at t~e Salinas Valley because

of its importance as a rich agricultural region. The land was

beginning to change hands from the individual, land-owning farmer, 47 to th e 1 arge corporat1on. and Ste1nbec . k tr1es . to d ocument t h'1s

change in his writings.

East Of Eden is undoubtedly the novel par excellance for depicting this outside influence and the consequential landscape

changes that were occurring in the Salinas Valley. The novel begins with a very romantic view of the valley, an untouched, unspoiled, 48 virgin landscape:

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two rang~s of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until ;it falls at last into Monterey Bay. 49 And again, two·pages later:

Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good smell, and under the mossy banks of the water courses whole clumps of five-fingered ferns and goldy-backs hung down. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and t~ese were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out .. and special all day long. 88

The first humans to inhabit the valley did little in the way 50 of ,o.ffecting changes and the author tells us so:

First there was Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that I lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish. They ate what they could pick up and planted nothing. They pounded bitter acorns for flour. Even their warfare was a \'leary pantomime.

Th ey were f o 11owe d b y t h e "har d , d ry Span~ar . d s. .. sl They were some- 52 what harder on t.he landscape because they were:

••• greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain title to building lots. 53 And the effect they had on the landscape r,.1as minimal, if any:

These first owners lived in poor feudal settlements, and their cattle ranged freely and mult.:_plicd. Periodically the owners killed the cattle for their hides and tallow and left the meat to the vultures and the coyotes.

But then came the Americans and the real changes began to occur 54 because:

••. there were more of them. They took the lands, remade the laws to make their titles good. And farmholds spread over the land, first in the valleys and then up the foothill slopes, small wooden houses roofed with redwood shakes, corrals of split poles. Wherever a trickle of water came out of the ground a house sprang up and a family began to grow and multiply.

In To A God [Tn,kno1vn we have seen that when Joseph migrated to the

Salinas Valley from Vermont there were no problems because he quickly adapted to the land ethic prevalent in the valley; he had a true reverance for the land. But when his family follows his footsteps 89

and move to the valley to join him, problems begin to occur because

they lack the "feel" for the land that Joseph has. 'I·he drought

begins and the land dies afte.r the outsiders (void of any passion for

the land) reach th~ West. But the real problems begin only after

Burton, Joseph's brother, kills the oak tree which Joseph has come

to "worship." While the tree is alive, the land suffices and there are no problems. But as soon as the tree is girdled, the land shows

signs of suffering and the expected Autumn rains so important to life in this part of the country become an object of longing, causing the characters to indicate that perhaps the rains will be returning late in that year. Beginning on the same page that we read that the 55 t ree ~s. d eaa,• we a 1 so rea d tnat:'

-The cold of late autumn came into the valley, and the high br:indled clouds hung in the air for days at a time. Elizabeth [Joseph's wife] felt the golden sadness of the approaching winter, but there was missing the excitement of the storms. She went often to the porch to look at the oak tree. The leaves were all pale tan by now, waiting only the buffeting of rain to fall to the ground. Joseph did not look at the tree any more. When its life was gone, no remnant of his feeling for it remained. He walked often in the brittle grass of the sidehills. He went bareheaded, wearing jeans and a shirt and a black vest. Often he looked up at the grey clouds and sniffed at the air and found nothing in the air to reassure him.

The land has begun to die and, as -was the case with the rest of

Steinbeck's Sa-linas novels, the land c:eases to function, the problems always arise, and the landscape undergoes its drastic changes, only after an outside, "foreign" influence has made contact with the valley. Left alone, the Salinas Valley represent.s Eden. But after man--and here we speak of man as being an agent or force unsympathetic 90

to the symbiotic relationship he shares with the earth--comes changes 56 in the landscape--changes that ultimately effect man as we11. So

"changes on the land," as the fourth theme in John Steinbeck's

Salinas novels, becomes the result of newcomers tampering with the

"pristine" Salinas Valley. And the changes these "outsiders" create are changes on the land, but the land is dynamic and it, in turn, pro duces profound changes in man. The result: a new Salinas Valley; a new setting; a new place! John Steinbeck was a novelist with a phenomenal appreciation of issues relevant to cultural geography. Whether he realized it or not, many of the questions he asked--questions reflected in these four themes--were geographic questions that trained geographers wrestle with day-in and day-out. But because he was aligned with the world of literature, Steinbeck answered those questions from a subjective per spective. Novelists and geographers seem to have the same basic end in mind--to understand the world of man and the relationship he has with the physical environment--it is only their means that differ.

The novelist will offer a beautifully-written, subjective explanation for an unequal distribution of prime land in some particular locale; the geographer's explanation is more objective, stressing ethnicity, inheritance,~~pportunities vis-a-vis market demands. When John_Steinbeck sought to understand why the inhabitants of the Salinas Valley were so mobile and so obsessed with the land, he looked to the "gut-level," experiential realm; the historical geographer, wanting the very same answers, might. examine contemporary economic factors and try to understand from diaries or manuscript 91

records, the relative percentage of migration and pattern of growt.h

for a similar period. By itself, neither approach is wrong;

conversely, neither is independently right. Both the novelist and

the geographer are concerned with the same result: what happened and

why? The difference is that the geographer looks for, relies on,

and offers an explanation steeped in a logical objective, positivistic

paradigm. The novelist, on the other hand, wants to know about people

and what it is inside of their heads that makes them turn left when

the scientist says they ought to turn.right. So the novelist looks

for, relies on, and offers an explanation derived from the world of

the subjective, the experiential, the phenomenological. The advan

tages the literary writer has, is that he or she uses, digests,

incorporates, and adapts academic research into his or her writing and benefits from a more well-rounded holistic understanding of people and places. The geographer, unfortunately, refuses to see that there art: (at least) two parallel worlds in operation here. He has an extremely firm understanding of one. But his failure emanates from his refusal to recognize and learn from and to incorporate from the other.

With this in mind, it becomes the geographer's requirement--in deed, it becomes his preliminary obligation--to familiarize himself with the regional novels set within whatever the locale that he or she is concerned with. If I were to begin research on the American plains region, the first books I would consult would be the novels and the related literature of the time period I was involved with.

How else could I understand how an average family in Ohio, in say 92

1825 1 responded to the waves of immigrants that passed through

that state? Or where else would I turn to find subjective opinion

regarding new techniques for prairie farming in 1870 Nebraska?

What other sources do I have to answer those sorts of questions?

I can consult tabulated census records. I could wade through archival

tax files and perhaps get some generalized answer to these issues.

But if I want to feel what it '.-Jas like to have lived in Ohio in 1825

and to have witnessed wave upon wave of iminigrants pass through that expansive valley; if I want to know what people might have said to one another as they watched battalions of optimistic, ne>-;ly-arriving

Kansas-bound families roll westward, when just that very morning they had also seen three worn and ragged families returning East, penniless and hungry because .their land had failed and their hopes and dreams died alongside their crops, then I, as a researcher, as

a human geographer, and as a human being striving to understand these things sc tha.t the objective "facts" make g:r-eater sen~e to me,must read the regional literature of the plains as a prerequisite to my research. 93

FOOTNOTES: Chapter 4

l. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Nalls ten (Eds.) Steinbeck: A Life In Letters, Th~ Viking Press: New York, 1975, p. 630.

2. JohnS. Kennedy, "John Steinbeck: Life Affirmed And Dissolved," in E.W. Tedlock, Jr. and C.V. ~'licker (Eds.) Steinbeck .lind His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years, The University of New gexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, pp. 121.

3. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 1, pp. 596-597. Also see James Gray, John Steinbeck, University of tvlinnesota Pamphlets on' American Writ.ers, No. 94, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1971, p. 44; and Carey McWilliams, "A Man, A Place, And A Time," The American West, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Nay, 1970) p. 4.

4. Joseph Warren Beach, "John Steinbeck: Art And Propaganda," in E.W. Tedlock, Jr. and C.V. li'Jicker (Eds.) Steinbeck And His Critics: A Record Of Twenty-Five Years, The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1957, p. 255.

5. Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels Of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study, second edition, Kennikat Press, Inc.: Port Washington, N.J., 1968, p. 14.

6. This notion is analagous to Lowenthal's comment that he knows "a great deal about that tiny fraction of the globe I live in--not merely facts that might be inferred from general knowledge and verified by visitors, but aspects of things that no one, lacking my total experience, could ever gra~_r as I do." D3vid LowenthAl, "Geography, Experienc~, And Imagination: Towards A Geographical Epistemology," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 51, No. 3 {September, 1961) p. 248.

7. Calvin s. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Theories Of Personality, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: New York and elsewhere, 19.70, pp. 568-569.

8. Yi-Fu Tuan, "Sign And Metaphor," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 68, No.3 {September, 1978) p. 372.

9. See Edward Relph, Place And Placelessness, Pion Limited: London, 19.76, p. 12.

10. The "Salinas novels" are To .A God Unknown, East Of Eden, The Long Valley, Of Mice And Men, and The Pastures Of Heaven. (See appendix) 94

11. The "California novels" are The Pastures Of Heaven, To A God Unknown, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice And Men, The Red Pony (later released as part of The Long Valley), The Long Valley, The Grapes Of Wrath, Cannery Row, The Wayward Bus, East Of Eden, and Sweet Thursday. (See appendix)

12. "Land-nostalgia" is a cormnon theme in American literature. John Ditsky has tried to determine the difference between the land nostalgia of Faulkner, Cather, and Steinbeck. He found it fairly easy to categorize Faulkner into five specific types of land nostalgia, Cather into three, but he was unable t.o catagorize Steinbeck. He felt that Steirilleck's works represent a "religion of nature" and therefore could fall \vithin an infinite number of categories. 'I'his seems to coincide with the premise behind a non-teleological/phenomenological approach to reality; Steinbeck was not w.citing what he believed should be, he was writing what is. Therefore, each character was unique and different, each resembling the subjective beliefs of that individual person. John M. Ditsky, Land-NostaJg.ia In The Novels Of Faulkner, Cather, And Steinbeck, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1967; John Ditsky, "From Oxford To Salinas: Comparing Faulkner And Steinbeck," Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Fall, 1969) pp. 51-55; and John Ditsky, "Faulkner Land And Steinbeck Country," in Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi (Eds.) Steinbeck: The Man And His Work, Oregon State University Press: Corvallis, 1971, pp. 11-23.

13. The following editions are the ones I will refer to in the remainder of this chapter, and all subsequent footnotes will derive from the same sources: John Steinbeck, To A God Unknown, Penguin Books: New York and else~vhere, 1976; ,John Steinbeck, East Of Eqen, Bantam Books: New York and elsewhere, 1977i John Steinbeck, The Long Valley, Bantam Books: New York and elsewhere, 1977; and John Steinbeck, The Pastures Of Heaven, The Viking Press: New York, 1963.

14. Steinbeck, To A God ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 2.

15. Steinbeck, East Of ..• I op. cit. 1 footnote 13, p. 118.

16. Sbeinbeck, The Pastures ... , op. cit., footnote 13, P· 227.

17. Steinbeck, The Long ... , op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 201-202.

18. Steinbeck, To A God .•• 1 op. cit., footnote 13, p. 143.

19. Steinbeck, The Long ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 213.

20. Steinbeck, The Long ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 213.

21. For an example of how the theme "westering" is manifest in 95

East Of Eden see Gray, op. cit., footnote 3, pp. 18-19.

22. R.~v.B. Lewis, "John Steinbeck: The Fitful Daemon," in Robert Murray Davis (Ed.) Steinbeck: A Collection Of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc.: New Jersey, 1972, p. 168.

23. Steinbeck, East Of .•. , op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 13-14.

24. See chapter 2, footnote 55. Also see Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eisen (Eds.) The California Dream, Collier Books, New York, 1968.

25. Richard Astra, "Steinbeck And Mainwaring: Two Californians For The Earth," Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. l {Winter, 1970) p. 7.

26. Steinbeck, The Long . .. , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 170.

27. Steinbeck, The Long •.. , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 170

28. Steinbeck, The Long ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 175.

29. Prentice Bascom Wallis, Jr., John Steinbeck: The Symbolic Family, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1966, p. 141.

30. Steinbeck, To A God ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 2.

31. Steinbeck, OfMice ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 15.

32. Steinbeck, Of Mice ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 15.

33. Steinbesk, Of Mice ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 64-65.

34. Steinbeck, Of Mice ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 65.

35. Gteinbeck, Of Mice .•. , op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 65-66.

36. Steinbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 1, p. 5.

37. Steinbeck, To A God ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 8. Also see Wallis, op. cit., footnote 29, p. 44.

38. Steir>.beck, To A God ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 17. Also see F.W. Watt, Steinbeck, Oliver and Boyd: Edinburgh, 1967, p. 4.

39.. Steinbeck, To A God ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 179. Also see Watt, op. cit., footnote 38, pp. 31-32.

40. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 179. 96

41. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 318.

42. Pascal Covici, Jr. (Ed.) The Portable Steinbeck, The Viking Press: New York, 1974, p. XIV.

43. Steinbeck, The Pastures ... , op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 1-3.

44. This is a true story according to the author. For further information, the reader is directed to Steinbeck and ~vallsten, op. cit., footnote 1, pp. 42-43.

45. Watt, op. cit., footnote 38, p. 5. Also see Mike Messner, Steinbeck Country In Dubious Homage, New American Movement: Santa Cruz, 1979.

46. This period of history was, of course, chronicled by Steinbeck in what is perhaps his most famous novel, The Grupes Of Wrath. (see appendix) Also see Watt, op. cit., footnote 38, p. 63.

47. Messner, op. cit., footnote 45, p. 5.

48. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 3.

49. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 5.

50. Steinbeck, East Of ••. , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 6.

51. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 6.

52. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 6.

53. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 6-7.

54. Steinbeck, East Of ... , op. cit., footnote 13, p. 7.

55. Steinbeck, To A God ... , op. cit., footnote 13, pp. 119-120.

56. See Watt, op. cit., footnote 38, p. 4. For Steinbeck's response to the changes that had occured in the Salinas Valley, see Stienbeck and Wallsten, op. cit., footnote 1, pp. 280-281. "It is no easy thing to tell a story plair,ly and distinctly by mouth: but to tell one on paper is difficult indeed, so many snares lie in the way. People are afraid to put down what is common on paper; th2y seek to embellish their narratives as they think, by philosophical speculations and reflections; they are anxious to shine, and people who are anxious to shine can never tell a plain story." George Borrow

Chapter 5

From the previous chapter, we have seen that Steinbeck used

four thernes--"westering," the "American land ethic,·· a "love of

land," and "changes on the land"--to convey his conceptual under-

standing of life in the Salinas Valley. We have also noted that

Steirilleck's world consists of man and the land, his effort to under-

stand -their relationship, and his apparent conviction that that relationship is S}~iotic. Man a£fects the physical environment and

that enviror&,ent, in turn, o!fects man. Their relationship could be valued .:ls one to one, and this, Steinbeck believes, will cause

"place" to respond accordingly and change.

If geographers are indeed interested in places, and how they

change, and why they change, and what happens when tt:ey do change,

then it would seem that regional novels, s~ch as Steinbeck's Salinas novels, which present a subjective expe·rience of the "lived-world," might prove to· be a source for future exploitation. Of course, distinction needs to be made between novels written by natives (or

those intimately familiar with a locale) and the accounts by those who have never even set foot inside the place they proceed to write about. There is a vast difference, because the native recognizes

97 98

the "inside" view and can (or at least has ·the potential to) place

human behavior in its proper local context. As Lowenthal has worded . 1 ~t:

As natives of places we acquire and assimilate information differently than we do as travelers; and personal observation, whether sustained or casual, yields impressions different in quality and impact from those we build out of lectures, books, pictures, or wholly imaginary visions.

But in order to interpret literature or any subjective account-

ing of reality, the researcher must first fully understand the

phenomenological approach to "knowing." It is an approach which can

aid the researcher but he or she must always be aware that it is a

non-rational, non-logical method and, therefore, it can seldom be

duplicated in the laboratory or in the field. It is an approach that

requires the researcher to be "open" to any and all facets of

experiences and thoughts.

Steinbeck, as a non-teleological, "is" thinker, could convey a powerful sense of place bepause he was "open" to experiences that

transcended objective reality. James Gray recognized this when he 2 remarked that:

His books were all products of a speculative intelligence. The writing of fiction was for him ·a means of trying, for his own benefit and that of his readers, to identify the place of man in his world. His conception of that world included not merely the interests of economics and sociology but those of science and the realm of the spirit as well. Into the bloodstream of his work he released a steady flow of ideas to enrich its vigor.

But Grey is a critic, and his viewpoint mirrors a rational, objective, rather cut and dry approach to the analysis of Steinbeck.

Steinbeck, on the other hand, although speculative by nature, 99

he refused to J?ermi t conscious speculation to influence his wTi ting

beyond his desire to portray reality. His subjective, non-teleo-

logical viewpoint allowed him to merely see and accept.. It would

be hard to deny this interpretation after reading any of John Stein-

beck's novels. It is harder yet to deny when we read an excerpt . 3 from one of the author's letters written ln 1959:

Lift up your mind to the hills, Gady [Elia Kazan] . Criticise nothing, evaluate nothing. Just let the thing come thundering in--accept and enjoy. It will be chaos for a while but gradually order will appear and an order you did not know.

The discipline of geography is essentially concerned with the

interpretation of places on the globe, and why places are different

and how those that are similar got to be that way. It seeks to

understand the cultural landscape by exploring the geography of

human behavior. To complete a task as large and as cmnbersome as

this, the geographer must be disposed to scrutinize every avenue of potential. reseaL·ch; con::;equently he can not afford to ignore certai.!1

techniques or ideas· because they are not fashionable or "in style."

The cultural side uf geography is interested in people. Yet people are far too variable to explain from one point of view. If any

true understanding of.mankind's geography is ever· to be approached, we must employ numerous methods of inquiry and only begin to reject data after careful analysis. What is needed is an holistic frame of mind, open to all conceptual potentials, assuming no verities, questioning from every angle; this, after all,is what cultural 4 geography is all about.

Novels are subjective accountings of reality. They are an ·100

author's perspective on what has happened and what is going on and what is being said in a particular place, at a particular point in time. Their strength lies in the lli

only be1 within that same framework.

Literature is art, but art must never be viewed with an eye of scepticism just because it is not sound, firmly-based, or, worst of all, because it is not "scientific." Art allows man to understand and, hopefully, to accept a world wh~8h is a little uifferent, a little "lighter," a little more human than the one science forces . 1' . 5 hun to ~ve ~n. Art, as subjective behavior, is the alternative to logic and objective explanation, and literature, as subjective experience, is another mode of understanding how people react to their environment and sometimes why people react the way they do.

Literature can be criticized, debated, and even maligned, but it can never be ignored.

This thesis has explored man's subjective behavior over time in the Salinas Valley of central California using the novels of

John Steinbeck and has, optimistically, yielded a little bit of 101

insight into the relationship between man and the land in the same

valley. By doing so, it has given rise to an awareness of the

Salinas Valley as an unique place, inherently different from all

other places, yet like all places, continually changing, constantly

emiting a new essence of being, a new ambiance.

But Steinbeck was only an example--a model if you will--and any

number of other regional novelists and any other number of other

places could have just as easily been selected and substituted for

him and for the Salinas Valley. And, if any conclusion at all can

be reached about regional novels and about using literature as a

data-base for geographic research, then it is: use them! Novels

provide the sort of information and contextual understanding that objective data cannot. For historical research, they should be

viewed as documents, providing a subjective interpretation of what happened in the past, no better and no worse than any.of the other fragment3 of pieced-together data that survive t~ the present.

Novels relate social history in a readable form and they employ dialogue, a temporal and regional example of day-t.o-day subjective

expression. Literature should be the geographer's augm2ntative 6 source of data \vhich can, at the same time, be the student's

introduction to new worlds and, and new dimensions of old ones.

Literature is evocative and that makes one t.hink.

Geography is not a static discipline. It is constantly changing and it is constantly being reworked into new paradigms and new avenues of understanding. It is a field-oriented "science" and to me t.his·means going out into the world and exploring. It means 102

being inquisitive about the world we live in and it means asking a barrage of questions and later re-asking the same questions in the light of new evidence. It means that every bit of dat.a must be uncovered and examined and that the job of learning about man and his environment never ends--we only limit our possibilities by ignoring perspectives and approaches which lie outside our world view.

Geography is the study of the surface of the earth and how man acts upon it, what he does with it, how: he acts because of it. But if VTe limit ourselves to the familiar and never give in to t:.hat inner quest of exploration, we will never know "why;" we will only be able to assume. Geography is not a textbook, it. is life, and like life it must be experienced from all sides. As John Steinbeck said, 7 "Geography doesn't mean much until you've moved over it .... " ·103

FOOTNOTES: Chapter 5

1. David Lowenthal, "Geography, Experience, And Imagination: Towards A Geographical Epistemology," Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 5, No. 3 (September, 1961) p. 260n.

2. James Gray, John Steinbeck, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American ~vriters, No. 94, University of Minnesota Press: t1inm~apolis, 1971, p. 41.

3. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (Eds.) Steinbeck: A Life In Letters, The Viking Press: New York, 1975, p. 627.

4. See Marvin vl. Mikesell, "Tradition and Innovation in Cultural Geography" ATmals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Harch, 1978) pp. l-16 but especially p. 12. Also see ,James M. Blaut, "Comrnentaries on 'Values In Geography'," in Sister Annette Buttimer, Values In Geography, Resource P3.per on Colleg-e Geography No. 24, Association of American Geographe:rs: Washington, D.C., 1974, pp. 44-45; and Andrew H. Clark, "The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts: A Humanistic Element In Human Geography" in Donald R. Deskins, Jr. et al, Geographic Humanism, Analysis And Social Action: Proceedings Of Symposia Celebrating A Half Century Of Geography At Michigan, ~1ichi<;an Geographical Publication No. 17, University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1977, pp. 3-26 but especially p. 9.

5. Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics And History, Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Garden City, N.Y., 1954, p. 251.

6. Joseph May says that "geography as a science will increasingly merge with other disciplines closely related to it," and that "this conclusion need not alarm geographers unduly." He feels that geography's independence is guaranteed "provided that geographers are prepared to expand the effort to familiarize themselves with worl< being done in fields that border on their particular interests." J.A. May, Kant's Concept Of Geography And Its Relation To Recent Geographical Thought, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1970, p. 253. ·

7. Steinbeck and Walls ten, op. cit., footnote 3, p. 709. i\PPENDIX

Chronology and Selected Bibliography:

1902: John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. born on Feb. 27~~ in Salinas, California

1919: Graduates from Salinas High School

1920: Enrolls at Stanford

1924: Has two stories printed in the Stanford Spectator

1925: Leaves Stanford wi thdu·t a degree; visits and works in New York City

1926: Returns to California

1929: Cup Of Gold is published by Robert M. McBride & Co: New York

1930: Marries Carol Henning; moves to Pacific Grove; meets Ed Ricketts

1932: The Pastures Of Heaven is pGb1ished by Brewer, Warren & Putnam; moves to Los A.'lgeles

1933: Returns tc central California; To A God Unknown is published; first two parts of "The Red Pony" are published in North American Review

1934: "The Murder" is selected as an 0. Henry Prize story; Steinbeck's mother dies

1935: Tortilla Flat is published by Covici-Friede; Steinbeck's father dies

1936: In Dubious Battle is published by Covici-Friede; moves to Los Gatos; "Saint Katy The Virgin" is published as a limited edition by Covici-Friede (later is included as part of The Long Valley

1937: Of Mice And Men is published by Covici-Friede and the play is released, later that year, winning the Drama Critics' Circle Award; a three-part version of The Red Pony is published by Covici-Friede as a signed, limited edition

104 105

1938: Their Blood Is Strong, a reprir,t of "The Harvest Gypsies" which appeared in 1936 in The San Francisco News is published by the Simon J. I,ubin Society of California; The Long Valley, containing the fourth part of The Red Pony is published by The Viking Press

1939: The Grapes Of Wrath is published by The Viking Press; film version of.Of Mice And Men is released

1940: Wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes Of Wrath; visits the Gulf of California with Edward Ricketts; writes the script for The Forgotten Village in Mexico; The Forgotten Village is filmed and released; film version of The Grapes Of Wrath is released

1941: The Forgotton Vi.Ilaqe is published by The Viking Press; Sea Of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal Of Travel And Research is published by The Viking Press

1942: Separated from Carol; Bombs Away: The Story Of A Bomber Team is published by •rhe Viking Press; The Moon Is Down is published by The Viking Press; writes and releases the play version of The Moon Is Do~m: A Play In Two Parts

1943: Divorces Carol; marries Gwendolen Conger (Gwen Verdon) in March; is war corresponden"!: for the New' Yock He1:ald Tribune; The Portable Steinbeck is published by The Viking Press

1944: Son Thomas is born; Lifeboat (Twentieth Century-Fox); Cannery Row, dated 1945, is published by The Viking Press in December

1945: A Medal For Benny (Paramount) is released; The Red Pony containing all four parts, is published by The Viking Press as a special illustrated edition: "The Pearl Of The World" is published by Woman's Home Companion; SteiP~eck buys a home in New York and begins permanent residence there

1946: Son John is born; is awarded the King Haakon Liberty Cross (Norway) for The Moon Is Down

1947: The Wayward Bus, The Pearl, and A Russian JoUJ:nal are all published by The Viking Press; writes the script for the film version of The Pearl in Cuernavaca, Mexico

1948: Divorces Gwendolen; Ed\vard Ricketts is killed in May; is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, returns to California

1949: The film version of The Red Pony is released; returns to the East Coast 106

1950: Burning Bright is published by 'I'he Viking Press; marries Elaine Scott; the play version of Burning Bright is published by Dramatists Play Service Inc

1951: The Log From The Sea Of Cortez is published by The Viking Press inclading the si1ort piece, "About Ed Ricketts"

1952: Wrote the screenplay Viva Zapata! (Twentieth Century-Fox); East Of Eden is published by The Viking Press; spends the su~er writing at Siasconet, Nantucket

1953: The Short Novels Of John Steinbeck is published by The Viking Press

1954: Sweet Thursday is published hy The Viking Press; correspondent for Le Figaro, Paris

1955: Pipe Dream (Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II), musical comedy based on Sweet Thursday is produced; wrote editorial for The Saturday Review; bought his summer cottage in Sag Harbor, Long Island

1956: Wrote campaign speeches for Adlai Stevenson; covered both national conventions for the Louisville Courier-Journal

1957: The Short Reign Of Pippin TV is published by The Viking Press; correspondent in Europe; began research on Malory and Marte d'Arthur

1958: Once There Was A War is published by The Viking Press

1959: Spends most of the. year in Bruton, Somerset, England working on Marte d'Arthur

1960: Travels throughout the United States with his dog, Charl~y

1961: The fvinter Of Our Discontent is published by The Viking Press; historian for Project Mohole off Mexican coast

Travels With Charley: In Search Of America is published by The Viking Press; receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

1963: Steinbeck tours Europe for the u.s. CUltural Exchange program

1964: Is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Johnson·

19.66: America And Americans is published by The Viking Press; The John Steinbeck Society is founded; war correspondent for Newsday in Viet Nam 107

1968: Dies in New York City on December 20th

1969: Journal Of A Novel: The East Of Eden Letters is published by The Viking Press

1975: Steinbeck: A Li.fe In·Letters is published by The Viking Press

1976: The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1979: Steinbeck And Covici: The Story Of A Friendship is published by Paul S. Eriksson BIBLIOGRAPHY

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--... ---.--.------. To A God Unknown. Robert 0. Ballou: New York, 19.33.

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------"The Pearl Of The World." Woman's Home Companion, Vol. 72 (December, 1945) pp. 17ff.

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------"Critics--From A Writer's Viewpoint." The Saturday Review, Vol. 38 (August, 1955) p. 20.

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