Working Days (27 page)

 

 

John Collier.
John Collier, Jr. (b. 1913), was a commercial photographer in San Francisco, who—on the suggestion of his close friend Dorothea Lange—later joined the staff of documentary photographers working for Roy Emerson Stryker, Director of the Historical Unit of the F.S.A. in Washington.

 

 

Pounding.
Years later, a more settled, less frenetic Steinbeck wrote in his
East of Eden
diary: “Today the house is full of pounding. I remember in the Grapes of Wrath book how I complained about the pounding.... I always felt that [it] was definitely designed to disturb me.” See
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters
(pp. 13—14).

The chapter.
Because of the many recent distractions Steinbeck had been working since August 18 on what would become Chapter 20. The chapter covered fourteen handwritten pages; at the end of it, on page 109, he wrote, “long son of a bitch too.”

Marvelous title.
Carol’s discovery of the title, in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), was cause for rejoicing. Within a few days Steinbeck wrote to Louis Paul, Elizabeth Otis, Annie Laurie Williams, and Pascal Covici about the discovery. Otis may or may not have known about Mary Harriott Norris’s
The Grapes of Wrath: A Tale of North and South
(Boston: Maynard, 1901), or Boyd Cable’s novel, Grapes of
Wrath
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917), which, according to Morrow,
John Steinbeck: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Formed by Harry Valentine
(p. 34), reprints lyrics of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the beginning of its text. In any event, in a return letter Otis did nothing to discourage Steinbeck’s choice. On September 10 Steinbeck fired back: “About the title—Pat wired that he liked it. And I too am glad because I like it better all the time. I think it is Carol’s best title so far. I like it because it is a march and this book is a kind of march—because it is in our own revolutionary tradition....” In Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(p. 171).

 

 

House is sold.
On September 16, 1938, the Los Gatos
Mail-News
ran the following notice: “John Steinbeck’s home on Greenwood Road has been sold to Miss Barbara Burke of the Burke Finishing School in San Francisco, it was announced ... by Effie Walton. realtor through whose office the sale was made. Steinbeck has purchased the old Biddle home on the road to Montezuma School. The noted author is seeking greater seclusion” (p. 11). Local lore held that the Steinbecks vacated immediately for the new owners, but that is erroneous, as his next entry reveals.

 

 

111—112.
Steinbeck abandoned the division of the novel into books. Beginning with this entry Steinbeck filled in the number of the manuscript pages he had finished that day. Here, he had just completed the first two pages of “Ch. 10,” eventually to become Chapter 22 in the published version.

New house.
From the outset of their negotiations for the Biddle ranch the Steinbecks knew that building a new house on the property would be more practical and less expensive than restoring the dilapidated original homestead. Lawrence Smith, a local contractor, poured the new foundation and built the house to John and Carol’s specifications. Steve (last name unknown), a local carpenter, did finish and trim work, and took care of the grounds. (See Entry #103 below.) Steinbeck bought a portable generator so the contractors would have electricity. By November—the new house and the new typescript of the novel still unfinished—the Steinbecks camped in a few rooms of the old house. In 1974 Carol told Marjorie Pierce, “I cooked over a wood stove; there were no floors, no inside water and at night the rats ran back and forth in the attic....” Quoted in Ludmilla Alexander, “John Steinbeck, The Los Gatos Years,”
Los Gatos Weekly,
October 17, 1984, p. 16.

 

 

Admission Day.
September 9 is a state holiday, commemorating California’s entry into the United States in 1850 as the thirty-first state.

Letter.
Probably in response to a note Steinbeck had sent: “D—r R. & T.: H-w h-v- y-- b--n. W- -r- f-ne. H-p- y-- a-e f-ne t-o. Haven’t heard from Ed for a long time. Should have his store teeth by now. You must come up as soon as the people are off and see our new ranch. It is beautiful. You will love it.... Write us a note how you are, huh?” (John Steinbeck/Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, postcard, [early September 1938]; courtesy of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley).

Valuable Ma.
Steinbeck’s determination to show Ma Joad in cooperative relationship with society suggests the influence of anthropologist Robert Briffault’s
The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins
(New York: Macmillan, 1931), which Steinbeck had read several years earlier (John Steinbeck/Carlton Sheffield, letter, June 30, 1933; quoted in DeMott,
Steinbeck’s Reading,
p. 18). Carol Steinbeck later claimed Ma Joad was “pure Briffault.” (Quoted in Astro,
John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts,
p. 133). Consult Warren Motley, “From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad’s Role in
The Grapes of Wrath,” American Literature,
54 (October 1982), 397-412, for a discussion of the subject.

 

 

Hitler.
Adolph Hitler was expected to close the German National Socialist Party Congress, convened a week earlier in Nuremberg, with a speech outlining the Nazi plan for resolution—by war, if necessary—of the Sudeten German/Czechoslovakian problem. (After annexing Austria in March 1938, Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia as well, where three million people of German origin lived in the Sudeten area.) His speech was defiant but noncommittal; Hitler pledged aid to the Sudetens, but gave no specific plan. On September 15 Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to convince Hitler to avert war (see Entry #72 below), and, with the aid of France—but without consultation from the Czechs (Steinbeck rightly suspected a “double cross”)—to propose a peaceful solution by directing Prague to hand over to the Third Reich all sections of the country with 50 percent or more German population. The result was the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938), signed by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, which temporarily avoided war by giving in to Hitler’s demands for annexation of Sudetenland (see Entries #80 and #82 below). The agreement proved futile—within a year Hitler took what remained of Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, and precipitated World War II.

 

 

Toilet paper scandal.
Toilet paper was scarce in the government camps. For this comic scene in Chapter 22 (“ ‘Hardly put a roll out ’fore it’s gone. Come right up in meetin’. One lady says we oughta have a little bell that rings ever’ time the roll turns oncet. Then we could count how many ever’body takes’ ”), Steinbeck borrowed directly from Tom Collins’ reports, especially this entry, under “Bits of Migrant Wisdom”: “We were discussing with two women how best to cut down on the use of toilet paper in the women’s sanitary units. One suggested sprinkling red pepper through the roll. The other suggested a wire be attached to the roll so that every time a sheet was torn off the big bell placed on the outside of the building for the purpose would ring and let every one know who was in the sanitary unit and what she was doing. Note: We have followed neither suggestion thus far.” Thomas Collins, Kern Migratory Labor Camp Report for Week Ending May 2, 1936, p. 15. (Facsimile courtesy of Steinbeck Research Center, San Jose State University.)

 

 

Adamic.
Louis Adamic (1899-1951), Yugoslavian-born author, historian, social critic/observer, and liberal journalist, known to Steinbeck for his 1931 narrative of labor violence in America,
Dynamite
(see DeMott,
Steinbeck’s Reading,
p. 3). A few months earlier, Adamic had published
My America, 1928-1938
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), an enormous 680-page compendium of narrative, interview, and exposition—part autobiography, part travel book, part history (a section on the rise of the CIO)—about his anxious quest to get “the feel of things” (p. xiii) in Depression America. Like Steinbeck, he distrusted drawing room theory, and rejected ideology for experience; like Steinbeck, he sought a type of radicalism consonant with the American sensibility and democratic traditions.

Time trouble.
Planning the termination of Rose of Sharon’s pregnancy to coincide with late winter floods.

 

 

Covarrubias.
Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), Mexican artist, and caricaturist (especially for
Vanity Fair).
He was also an ethnologist, whose
Island of Bali
had appeared the year before, and an illustrator of a modern edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1938). He was in San Francisco arranging details for a large mural of the Pacific Islands he had been commissioned to paint for the Golden Gate Exposition, to be held the following year. It is not known whether Steinbeck ever met Covarrubias again, so the following anecdote, recollected by Steinbeck in February 1957, might stem from this visit at the Jacksons’ home. When Covarrubias’ father was dying “... the holy water brought him to and he jumped up and chased the priest out of the house ... [where] ... he died in the middle of the street in his long night gown. Now there’s a proper death for you! And Miguel said that he winged the priest with brass spitoon as he flew out the door.” See Robert DeMott, ed.,
Your Only Weapon Is Your Work: A Letter by John Steinbeck to Dennis Murphy
(San Jose: Steinbeck Research Center, 1985), [p. 14].

Noah down ... river.
Steinbeck had to account for Noah Joad’s desertion at the Colorado River, when the rest of his family crossed into California from Arizona. Prior to starting on manuscript page 127 (the opening of Chapter 24 in the published version), Steinbeck wrote thirty-three lines (roughly 500 words) explaining Noah’s willful action; Steinbeck then inserted the new, but unnumbered, page between manuscript pages 87 and 88 (Chapter 18 of the published version).

 

 

I AM.
The Great I Am movement, an intensely patriotic spiritual cult founded in the early 1930s by Guy W. Ballard (who fancied himself the reincarnation of George Washington). In 1940 two dozen of its leaders were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in Los Angeles for mail fraud. A sensational and thoroughly biased expose is available in Gerald B. Bryan,
Psychic Dictatorship in America
(Los Angeles: Truth Research Publications, 1940).

Francis.
Francis Whitaker, a blacksmith, metal sculptor, and political radical from Carmel, was a member of the John Reed Club. According to Jackson Benson, in
True Adventures of John Steinbeck
(p. 225), Whitaker “worked hard during the early and mid thirties to convert” the Steinbecks to socialism.

Well reviewed.
Annie Laurie Williams’ information that
“The Long Valley
is getting a marvelous press” (Annie Laurie Williams/John Steinbeck, letter, September 23, 1938; courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University) proved to be accurate. William Soskin, in the New York
Herald Tribune Review of Books
(September 18, 1938), p. 7, Elmer Davis, in
Saturday Review of Literature,
18 (September 24, 1938), p. 11, and Stanley Young, New York Times
Book Review
(September 25, 1938), p. 7, all gave
The Long Valley
affirmative reviews. Young predicted Steinbeck “... may become a genuinely great American writer.”

Margolies.
Joseph A. Margolies (1890—1982), former sales manager of Covici-Friede, was an executive at the New York City head-quarters of Brentano’s bookstores.

 

 

Fadiman’s.
Clifton Fadiman’s review of
The Long Valley
appeared in
The New Yorker,
14 (September 24, 1938): “On the whole ... a remarkable collection by a writer who has so far neither repeated himself nor allowed himelf a single careless sentence” (p. 92).

Review in ... Chronicle.
In his column, “A Bookman’s Notebook,” Joseph Henry Jackson singled out the four “Red Pony” stories of
The Long Valley
for special praise. About Jody’s grandfather’s belief, in “The Leader of the People,” that only the process of pioneering mattered, Jackson stated: “Unquestionably it is Steinbeck’s knowledge of the new westering, today’s machine-economy-driven migratory movement, that leads him to say this. Because it is plain as a pikestaff that though the old kind of westering is done with, there must be a new kind, something to take the place of the old—a westering of ideas perhaps” (p. 14).

 

 

Parsons.
Syndicated Hollywood “gossip” columnist Louella Parsons (1881-1972) divulged that Chaplin liked the Los Gatos/Saratoga area so much he was thinking about buying property there. The cause of Steinbeck’s confusion in this entry and in the next one (note the self-confessed “gibbering” below) cannot be precisely identified, beyond its being either somehow connected to his relationship with the impetuous Chaplin, his concern over growing tensions in Europe, or unspecified marital difficulties with Carol; obviously, something deeper than the normal disturbances and interruptions was at work.

 

 

The party.
Steinbeck took Chaplin to Martin Ray’s Masson vineyard, where they helped process the newly harvested Chardonnay grapes. Much to Martin Ray’s pleasure, Chaplin and Steinbeck exhibited a similarly ceremonial attitude toward the work. Afterward Chaplin took charge of roasting a turkey on the rotisserie spit and entertained the guests with singing and music (Mrs. Eleanor Ray/Robert DeMott, interview, June 4, 1985). The hilarity of the event evidently did nothing to ease Steinbeck’s current confusion, though apparently he hid it well from his companions.