May 28th 2021
Time was, I would write a blog every week. This is the first blog since December 2020. But I just got back from Monterey, California, a sort of Mecca for me, because it is the home and muse of John Steinbeck, and I have this to share: as far as writers go, they don't come any better than Steinbeck.
I feel a bit guilty about this, because in my own country there are fine writers. Lewis Grassic Gibbon is at the top of the list. I have been to the countryside in the North East of Scotland he wrote about; I have been in the little museum that shows the film about his life. I have been to see his gravestone in the nearby church. Sunset Song is one of the finest novels in any language.
But there is something about Steinbeck that calls to me, and when I am in the places he lived and moved, I drift into a different space altogether. The hotel I picked was in Pacific Grove, a town that Monterey merges into and where his family had a summer cottage by the sea. Here he gathered his anecdotes and stories for what would become Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday. The Grapes of Wrath came out of his experience helping desperate migrant workers exploited by California's fruit growers. He said, "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this." I love Steinbeck for his social conscience and because he cared about the people he wrote about. Perhaps he wrote about them because he cared.
During the school year, Steinbeck's family lived half an hour inland in a farming community called Salinas, and where these days his childhood home has become a museum. Stepping into the hallway of that house, walking through the rooms with some of the original furniture, I come under a spell. Here were the stairs that led up to the room, where he wrote small offerings for magazines when still a child. (None was published. ) Here is the spot in the dining room where as a grown man he set up his writing station and tinkered with what would become his celebrated story "The Red Pony," while his mother died slowly in the bedroom opposite.
In Monterey itself, there is barely anything to suggest it was an author named John Steinbeck that made Cannery Row famous. The Cannery Row of today is a bustling tourist trap, with T-shirt shops and tacky restaurants. He is not remembered much here, because the people of Monterey resented Steinbeck for bringing attention to "the poem, the stink, the particular quality of light" that was this town in its fishing days. In Salinas, they burned his books for their supposed obscenity and because he stood up to the landowners. When he was driven home, he would have to lie on the floor of the car so that no one took a shot at him.
In America, there is much hullabaloo about Steinbeck's contemporary, Ernest Hemmingway. Everything this author ever touched has been enshrined and immortalised. America's Public Broadcasting Station just came out with a six hour documentary on the man. But then, this is what Ernest Hemmingway was after. Before Hemmingway ever wrote a book, he was looking for an entourage, for fame. Steinbeck, on the other hand, had no time for publicity. He understood the threat that acclaim can pose to an author's authenticity.
Steinbeck wrote about the people and places he knew. I don't think he ever ended his stories particularly well, but between the covers is a rich feast of words and images, crafted sonorously as only he knew how. And, too, there's always a strand of humour in Steinbeck's writing, always the oddly funny character, even when he is plummeting the depths. His facility with the sentence, especially with those spoken, is unmatched.
When Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature, the American press crucified him. They said he was not worthy, and he agreed. But he never recovered. Although he was not yet an old man, he never wrote another word of fiction. Still, the speech he gave at the Nobel ceremony is tight and singing, wonderful and profound: Literature was not promulgated by a pale emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
He wasn't a perfect man. He probably died a couple of decades early from the toll he exacted on his body. But he was a man of heart, a man who saw deep, but was never caught up in his own image or in his own importance.
For all these reasons I am an unashamed fan. I will keep going back to Monterey and Salinas because it feeds something in my own creative process. You can take your Hemmingway and the cult that surrounds him, and leave me on the steps of the Pacific Biological Laboratory that belonged to Steinbeck's much beloved friend Ed Ricketts. He ran up that staircase many, many times in pursuit of ideas and what was true about the world. It is magic here on this step. The wooden railing is peeling now, and the place looks odd, towered over by the bustle and the modernity. But it is the only spot on Cannery Row that still has a hum, a peculiar quality of light. It is here, I encounter John Steinbeck, the very best of writers.
