Working Days

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

Robert DeMott is a member of the
Steinbeck Quarterly
’s advisory board, a former director of San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Research Center, and a recipient of a Burkhardt Prize for his contributions to Steinbeck scholarship. He has published several books, notably
Steinbeck’s Reading,
as well as many shorter pieces in a wide variety of periodicals including
Journal of Modern Literature, Modem Fiction Studies, American Studies, Studies in American Fiction, Ohio Review, and Windsor Review.
He teaches American Literature at Ohio University, where he has received both graduate and undergraduate teaching awards. He lives in Athens, Ohio.

 

 

 

 

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First published in the United States of America by
Viking Penguin Inc. 1989
Published in Penguin Books 1990

 

Copyright © Elaine Steinbeck, 1989

Introduction copyright © Robert DeMott, 1989
All rights reserved

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Hotel California” by Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Don Felder. © 1976, 1977 Cass County Music, Red Cloud Music & Fingers Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Working days: the journals of The grapes of wrath, 1938-1941/
John Steinbeck; edited by Robert DeMott.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67452-5

1. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968. Grapes of wrath. 2. Steinbeck,

John, 1902-1968—Diaries. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—

Diaries. I. DeMott, Robert J., 1943- II. Title.

PS3537.T3234G858 1990

813’.52—dc20 90-37785

 

Set in Bodoni Book

Watercolor portrait of John Steinbeck by Eugene Gregan

 

—Steinbeck, in
Travels with Charley
(1962)

 

 

 

Judging from both the quality and quantity of his writing from 1936 to 1940, John Steinbeck’s residency in the San Jose, California, suburb of Los Gatos ranks as the most professionally satisfying of his entire life. He published a string of best-sellers, including
Of Mice and Men, The Long Valley, Their Blood Is Strong, and The Grapes of Wrath;
he witnessed a long-running New York theater production of
Of Mice and Men
and the brilliant Hollywood film versions of that novel and
The Grapes of Wrath;
he conducted the necessary travel and research for the nonfictional prose work
Sea of Cortez;
and he scripted and helped produce a documentary film,
The Forgotten Village.
Honors, awards, and fame were his for the asking, though lasting personal happiness and a thoroughgoing sense of belonging seemed to elude him during his tenure in Los Gatos.

In spite of his unprecedented artistic success, Steinbeck managed to stay resolutely an outsider in Los Gatos, as unassimilated in his day as he is in ours. Unlike Salinas, his birth place, or the Monterey Peninsula, his spiritual home, Steinbeck never established deep roots in Los Gatos, never imbibed its geographical sense of place. Instead he remained a sojourner, always careful to choose home sites that were increasingly isolated from the town’s center, as though the omniscient tenor of his writing in the late 1930s might be compromised if he approached too closely to the mainstream of suburban society. Although he wrote repeatedly about Salinas and Monterey during his career as a novelist and essayist, he was unusually silent on the subject of Los Gatos. Of course, there are comments about his Los Gatos homes scattered among his private correspondence and recorded frequently in this journal (these houses were the first residential properties that the Steinbecks could afford to buy, and he was uneasy—often embarrassed—about the implications of ownership), but among the books published in his lifetime there are only a couple of entertaining references to Los Gatos in the autobiographical
Travels with Charley.
Though the notorious effects of success eventually got the better of him, the most significant part of his life during the Los Gatos era was directed inward toward personal and psychological vistas. Steinbeck, it seems, could well have written his greatest novels anywhere at all, so concentrated was his gaze toward the private horizons of his fictional landscape, so intent was he on exposing the enormous cultural contradictions inherent in his fabled native state.

Steinbeck’s effacement has been so well maintained that at least one local history of Los Gatos makes no mention of his ever having lived there. Except for occasional items in the Los Gatos and San Jose newspapers (happily, these are more frequent now; until the mid 1980s there had been nothing substantial on Steinbeck in a decade), and reminiscences by long-time residents, Steinbeck’s relationship with Los Gatos remains uneasy, somehow “vague and insubstantial,” as one old-timer told me. Despite the ample information contained in recent biographical works on Steinbeck, local lore is still limited to a few facts—he lived in two different houses in Los Gatos; he wrote
The Grapes of Wrath
in one of them (erroneously thought to be the Brush Road house at the Summit); he dressed so shabbily he looked like a laborer; he was sometimes seen on Main Street in the company of Charlie Chaplin, Wallace Ford, and Spencer Tracy (usually, and again erroneously, all at the same time); he and his wife, Carol, were both considered to be radical bohemians; and they kept a well-stocked wine cellar for their wild parties. Some vestiges of his outward existence, then, appear to be all that remain in the current atmosphere of Los Gatos; such hearsay supplies little indication of the depth, complexity, and intensity of Steinbeck’s inner life during his years of residency there. But perhaps that is not so bad, considering the shameless commercial uses to which Steinbeck’s celebrity has been put by some factions of the Salinas and Monterey communities. “Preferably a writer should die at about 28,” Steinbeck quipped to British journalist Herbert Kretzmer in 1965. “Then he has a chance of being discovered. If he lives much longer he can only be revalued. I prefer discovery.”

Among other reasons, discovering the hidden Steinbeck took me to Los Gatos in early 1984. For nearly two full years, I lived more or less inconspicuously in a transients’ apartment complex edging the foothills of the lush Santa Cruz Mountains. The minute I wheeled my Chevy truck, dusty and battered from its journey west over Route 66, onto the main street of that town, I realized the setting was surely one of the most estimable in America, and I sensed the Steinbecks’ attraction to the surrounding area (Carol had been born and raised in the Naglee Park section of San Jose). The locale is stunning, the landscape sublime and bounteous, the climate benign and temperate, though as with most things about California, full appreciation of its benefits seemed impossible for a newcomer. Like so many of Steinbeck’s characters, falling into Eden, I discovered, was much simpler than getting out, even when I reminded myself that deferred gratifications might prove better than none at all.

Being an outsider does have compensations, however, for it confers a kind of invisibility and promotes observation rather than participation, understanding rather than acquisition. While the residents of that extravagantly expensive and privileged town (it is a cross between Aspen and New Canaan) seemed to go about their usual economic business, I had the advantage of other rewards. My homely dwelling lay roughly equidistant between the two houses John and Carol Steinbeck inhabited during those years, half a century earlier, when they decided to leave the coastal fogs of Monterey for what they hoped would be the clarifying air of western Santa Clara County. From my narrow front balcony I could face eastward toward Monte Sereno to watch the sun break over the vicinity of the Steinbecks’ first Los Gatos house, on Greenwood Lane, only a couple of miles away. From my cloistered rear walkway I could turn southward and listen, as they did from their second Los Gatos home, near the Summit, to the Route 17 traffic whizzing between San Jose and Santa Cruz—perhaps carloads of families returning from a day’s outing at Sunset Beach, or, in my case, commuters coming back from harried Silicon Valley. Everywhere, the comings and goings of scrub jays, Bullock’s orioles, and myriad species of hummingbirds sparked again the lambent air, but never quite loudly or brilliantly enough to efface the incessant whir of automobiles.

Once, headed home from an excursion of my own in Big Basin, above Saratoga, I parked off Highway 9 and hiked into Greenwood Lane. Beneath a dazzling full moon, I stood among oak and manzanita trees and secretly conjured Steinbeck’s presence—the ghost of a man whose fiercely concentrated will and driven imagination enriched the literature of his time, and redeemed the tag end of a terrifying decade. For an instant I glimpsed the profound simplicity of his purpose: his willingness to risk everything to write the best he could with what gifts he had, and in doing so to reveal, unblinking, the enduring human spirit among the ruthless shapes of paradise. Like most luminous connections this one has remained essentially valid, even though its edges began to fade as soon as I moved back into traffic and heard the opening chords of The Eagles’ song, “Hotel California,” blaring from a passing car’s stereo.