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    Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage
    Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage
    Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage
    Ebook520 pages9 hours

    Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

    By Susan Shillinglaw

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    Carol Henning Steinbeck, writer John Steinbeck’s first wife, was his creative anchor, the inspiration for his great work of the 1930s, culminating in The Grapes of Wrath. Meeting at Lake Tahoe in 1928, their attachment was immediate, their personalities meshing in creative synergy. Carol was unconventional, artistic, and compelling. In the formative years of Steinbeck’s career, living in San Francisco, Pacific Grove, Los Gatos, and Monterey, their Modernist circle included Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, and Lincoln Steffens. In many ways Carol’s story is all too familiar: a creative and intelligent woman subsumes her own life and work into that of her husband. Together, they brought forth one of the enduring novels of the 20th century. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Nevada Press
    Release dateOct 20, 2013
    ISBN9780874179316
    Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage
    Author

    Susan Shillinglaw

    Susan Shillinglaw is a professor of English at San Jose State University and the 2012-13 President's Scholar. She has published widely on Steinbeck, including introductions to Penguin Classics editions of Steinbeck's works as well as A Journey into Steinbeck's California (2006) and Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (2013). From 1987 to 2005 she was the Director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State.

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      Book preview

      Carol and John Steinbeck - Susan Shillinglaw

      Carol and John Steinbeck

      Western Literature Series

      Carol & John Steinbeck

      PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

      Susan Shillinglaw

      UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

      RENO & LAS VEGAS

      WESTERN LITERATURE SERIES

      University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

      Copyright © 2013 by University of Nevada Press

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Design by Kathleen Szawiola

      Selections from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, editors: Copyright 1952 by John Steinbeck, © 1969 by The Estate of John Steinbeck, © 1975 by Elaine A. Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

      All previously unpublished selections by John Steinbeck: Copyright © Waverly Kaffaga, Executrix of the Estate of Elaine A. Steinbeck, 2013. Printed with permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc.

      The material attributed to Joseph Campbell's journals comes from an unpublished manuscript for a work of fiction developed by Joseph Campbell and is quoted under license by the Joseph Campbell Foundation, © 1942, Joseph Campbell Foundation. All rights reserved.

      Unless otherwise identified, all photographs are from the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Shillinglaw, Susan.

      Carol and John Steinbeck : portrait of a marriage / Susan Shillinglaw.

      pages cm. — (Western Literature Series)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-87417-930-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

      ISBN 978-0-87417-931-6 (ebook)

      1. Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968—Marriage. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

      PS3537.T3234Z8664 2013

      813′.52—dc23

      [B]     2013008777

      Frontispiece: Carol and John, mid-1930s. Photo from Carol's scrapbooks.

      TO BILL GILLY and JACK BENSON who, in different ways, willed this book.

      And to IAN and NORA, who, with great forbearance, lived it.

      Contents

      List of Illustrations

      Preface

      Introduction

      ONE Renegades

      TWO Make It New: Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and Eagle Rock

      THREE Home in Pacific Grove

      FOUR At Ed Ricketts's Lab

      FIVE Wave Shock, 1932–35

      SIX Viva Mexico!

      SEVEN California Is a Bomb Right Now … Highly Explosive: Writing The Grapes of Wrath

      EIGHT Enter Gwen Conger

      NINE On the Sea of Cortez

      TEN Life in Fragments

      Coda

      Notes

      Selected Bibliography

      Index

      Illustrations

      Carol in front of her childhood home in San Jose

      John and his red pony, Jill, circa 1907

      John and Carol gathering cephalopods: drawing from Carol's scrapbooks

      Carol, John, and Ritchie Lovejoy, mid-1930s

      John and Carol with duck in photo booth, mid-1930s

      Woodcut of John by Ritchie Lovejoy, mid-1930s

      Carol in Mexico City, 1935, with maids Candy and Apple

      Carol, mid-1930s

      Carol on deck of SS Drottningholm in 1937, bound for Denmark

      Carol at the Dickey Wells Club, New York City, 1938

      John, in late 1930s

      Brush Road ranch, Los Gatos

      Carol and Elsie Ray with rattlesnakes, Brush Road ranch, circa 1939

      Edward F. Ricketts, 1930s

      Page from one of Carol's scrapbooks

      Carol's drawing from the sportswomen series The Diver

      Gwen Conger, publicity photo, circa 1938

      Carol volunteering for the Red Cross during World War II

      Carol's marriage to Loren Howard, Camp Roberts, 1943

      Carol's passport photo, 1948

      Preface

      ON A RECENT TOUR I led to the Red Pony ranch near Salinas, California, a woman asked me if I was related to John Steinbeck. You are, aren't you? No, definitely not, although when I stand on dusty Hebert Road, near the barn with the little swallows’ nests still under the eaves, with the water tank behind me and the paddock before me, the white buildings of distant Salinas on the horizon, I know that I see pretty much what Steinbeck saw and I think I feel pretty much what he felt when a California vista knocks you flat. Steinbeck's soul, I sometimes think, has become a little piece of my own. I live in Pacific Grove, California, as did he and Carol, and in Los Gatos, as did they. I drive to Salinas reluctantly, as did they. And I have a husband who, like Ed Ricketts, is a marine biologist, and we met on a trip to the Sea of Cortez, digging for chocolate clams. We married on Ricketts's birthday, May 14. We teach holistic biology together at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, where Steinbeck took classes in 1923. I like all these intersections. I like that I have known Steinbeck's nieces and his third wife, Elaine, and his sons, Thom and John. And I like knowing Carol's stepdaughter, Sharon Brown Bacon, who lives by the Carmel River where Mack and the boys hunted frogs. It was she who set me on this biographical road by donating Carol's scrapbooks, photographs, and poetry to San Jose State University's Steinbeck Research Center, shortly after I became director in 1987. I am profoundly grateful for her generosity and patience throughout this project. And I was guided throughout by her own love for Carol.

      This wall of background (Steinbeck's term) helped shape this book, the story of a marriage that I have spent some twenty-five years researching and writing. Initially, I was stumped, since Carol Henning Steinbeck left no account of her life, wrote few letters, and did not confide in friends the full extent of her woe. I have worked hard to understand her role in John's life and work—work that would not have been the same without her defining presence in his life.

      I am fairly certain that Carol, married to John from 1930 to 1943, never stopped loving this man who gave light and purpose to her youth. And that is part of the story I tell, how we come to be defined by the web of associations that shape formative years. During my eighteen years as director of San Jose State's Steinbeck Center, while editing the Steinbeck Newsletter, organizing conferences, teaching and lecturing on Steinbeck, and somehow raising two children, John and Carol's story, waiting to be told, was ever on my mind. Some of Carol's story is mine, and I hope I have plumbed her great spirit and captured a bit of it.

      The list of scholars and friends who shaped my career and scholarship is a long one. Glittering at the top are Jackson J. Benson and Robert DeMott, who have counseled and inspired me for a quarter of a century. In 1987, when I became director of the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State, with scant qualifications for the job, I had in hand a recent PhD, a dissertation on James Fenimore Cooper, and memories of reading The Red Pony in junior high, a book I disliked because the pony dies. I had put Steinbeck on a back shelf with Old Yeller, The Yearling, and the story of Lad, a dog circling his bed for the final time. Both Jack and Bob, models of generosity, helped me catch up, sharing their rich store of Steinbeckiana. This book would not exist without them.

      I also thank a woman for selecting me as director in the first place, Lou Lewandowski, chair of the English Department, who believed that a fledgling lecturer would make the grade. Two other colleagues were models of scholarly deportment and hard-won female wisdom, Ma Joads: Arlene Okerlund, provost, and Fanny Rinn, editor of San Jose Studies.

      My heartfelt thanks to Carol's relatives: Sharon Brown Bacon; Idell Budd, Carol's sister; and Carla Budd and Nikki Tugwell, Carol's nieces. And to John's: Toni and David Heyler lifted a cover on the Steinbeck family, as did Virginia St. Jean and Steinbeck's nieces.

      Without John Seelye's cheerful support, I might not have written my first two introductions for Penguin Classics—on Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men; his zest for literary studies quickened my own. He and Michael Millman, editor at Viking Penguin for many years; Eugene Winick, former president of McIntosh and Otis; Jackson Bryer, editing mentor; and Ted Hayashi, pioneering Steinbeck scholar, supported my first publications on Steinbeck. I am ever grateful.

      The imprint of other Steinbeck scholars is everywhere in this book. Their friendship sustained my career. Louis Owens's work helped me to love this state of failed dreams. John Ditsky's steady output in Steinbeck was inspirational—as was his unfailing kindness. In 1996 Kiyoshi Nakayama and the Steinbeck Society of Japan invited me to lecture on Carol and John, an unforgettable journey; thanks also to Hiromasa Takamura, Osamu Hamaguchi, and Scott and Susan Pugh, who hosted me and my daughter in this country of gentle courtesies. Warren French was the dean of Steinbeck studies, a man with a lopsided tie and grin and the willingness to revise opinions on this author. Mimi Gladstein has examined Steinbeck's women steadily and well. Bob and Katherine Morsberger, Roy Simmonds, and Leland Person modeled meticulous research and unfailing grace. Katie Rodger, my former student, has often lifted my spirits—and taught me much about Edward F. Ricketts. In 1992, Susan Beegel, Wes Tiffney, and I organized a conference in Nantucket on Steinbeck and the environment that launched my study of Steinbeck as ecologist. At the Jared Coffin House, I first met ever-vibrant Elaine Steinbeck. She loved the idea of this book, but did not want my scholarship to extend to her life; I respect that boundary. Finally, Harold Augenbraum, formerly director of the Mercantile Library in New York City, was codirector of the 2002 Steinbeck Centennial, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts; he taught me the delights of steady collaboration.

      The work of many other scholars, of course, shaped my ideas about Steinbeck, particularly John Timmerman, Chip Hughes, Chris Fink, Charlotte Hadella, Kevin Hearle, Don Coers, Cliff Lewis, Brian Railsback, Graham Wilson, and Jay Parini. I owe all these and many others a huge Steinbeckian debt of gratitude.

      To those who helped me connect biographically and historically, my thanks. Anne Loftis, Barbara Marinacci, James Houston, Gerald Haslam, Kevin Starr, David Wyatt, Timothy Egan, and Morris Dickstein deepened my understanding of California history. William Wulf generously gave me access to the Henning family papers in his archive of Los Gatos history.

      Of course, I also wish to thank Steinbeck's friends, the people I interviewed from 1988 on, so often quoted in this book. Many are no longer living, and as I wrote and revised this text, their kindness to me returned in waves. Ed Ricketts Jr. talked to me about his father and John and Carol more times than I can count. In Alaska and in California, his sister Nancy Ricketts has done the same as we hiked around Sitka and exchanged letters.

      Bob Harmon, Jim Johnson, Art Ring, Dick Hayman, Ken and Karen Holmes, and the late Phil Ralls and Dick Hayman, each a collector and Steinbeck enthusiast, gave me free access to their minds and collections. Jim Dourgarian, collector, took me to meet Carlton Sheffield in 1990, a memorable afternoon. Writer John Thompson introduced me to Harold Ingels, and we poured over Beth Ingels's literary past while my daughter Nora, then four, displayed three hours of such patient charm, writing her own spontaneous scripts with her toys. Rereading John's letter of thanks twenty-two years later, I am stunned at how much I put everyone through during this long quest—especially my children Ian and Nora when my gaze was diverted from their antics to Steinbeck's.

      Stanford archivist Maggie Kimball and Morgan librarian Robert Parks made research so much easier, at all stages of this project.

      Nearer at hand, I warmly thank my Salinas and Monterey friends who have supported my work on Steinbeck: John Gross, director of the Steinbeck Library; Mary Gamble, archivist; and Pauline Pearson, whose spirit remains in the many interviews she conducted in the 1970s and ’80s for the Steinbeck Library. More recently, Herb Behrens, archivist at the National Steinbeck Center, sent me information at regular intervals. Carol Robles's work on the Steinbeck family in Salinas is precise in ways I envy. Since 1997, directors of the center have been unstinting in their support, most recently Colleen Baily; I delight in my position there as a scholar in residence. In Monterey, hats off to Dennis Copeland and Neal Hotelling.

      The work of any professor is enriched by eager students, too many to name. The high school teachers who participated in the National Endowment for Humanities Summer Institutes I have codirected, John Steinbeck: The Voice of a Region, a Voice for America, also imprinted this narrative. I also thank my first codirector, Mary Alder, for again showing me the delights of collaboration.

      Finally—and perhaps most important—a scholar is propped up by friends and family. Thanks to Betsy and Whizzer, Heather and Ian, Geri and Jim, Carol and Greg, Ginger and Doug, Susan and Vladimir—and Katie, Persis, Marianina, and Clare. Anne and Ellen Shillinglaw, my cousins, sheltered me during research trips. My very generous aunt Frances eased many burdens, financial and emotional. And in ways they scarcely know, so did my brothers, Tom and John; my sister-in-law Betsy; and my children, Ian, Nora, Clayton, and Amanda. With my husband, Gilly, they are my phalanx of believers. Add Frank and Dorothy Gilly to that mix.

      This book was completed because I was granted sabbaticals at San Jose State; because my research requests were supported by directors and assistants at sjsu's Center for Steinbeck Studies—particularly Sstoz Tes and Peter Van Coutren; because I had a loving husband who served as sensitive editor; and because the University of Nevada Press and director Joanne O'Hare saw value in a California writer and his first wife, both of whose main connection with Nevada was a messy divorce from a second spouse. My heartfelt thanks to institutions and individuals alike.

      This long-emerging text seems a miracle to me. Like Steinbeck, I am awed by participation, the extensive and supportive phalanx that made this book possible.

      Introduction

      VIKING PRESS spent more money on the publicity campaign for The Grapes of Wrath than on any other book in its history. Editor, president, and sales force knew prerelease that they had a blockbuster. Sales were brisk before the novel hit bookstores on April 14, 1939, growing to a torrent after reviews came in lauding and denouncing the book that, on the one hand, so movingly depicted the Southwest migrants’ poverty and, on the other, scraped nerves raw. Across the nation, fictional characters became shorthand for class fissures. The Grapes of Wrath was denounced and rebutted—sometimes burned and banned. The East Saint Louis, Illinois, library board ordered three copies burned in front of the courthouse. In Buffalo, New York, the city's librarian refused to purchase it for circulation. Powerful Californians were wrathy about the novel, and in conservative newspapers headlines screamed protests: Native Farmers Deserve Most Pity! Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas burned a symbolic copy, while the head librarian at the San Jose Public Library—only a dozen miles from where the author was living at the time—sniped that a line must be drawn somewhere and that Grapes was unfit for patrons. By August of that year, the Associated Farmers of California, fuming all summer long over Steinbeck's depiction of greedy and vitriolic landowners, sent a congratulatory letter to the Kansas City school board after that body banned the book from the city's public schools. A day after posting that letter, on August 21, 1939, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned Grapes throughout the county—Kern County, where John Steinbeck's Joads first stand on California soil and in glazed wonder look down on the Central Valley.

      Indeed, this novel about humble migrants wanting a fresh start on California's fecund acres set off cultural wildfires in a way that is nearly inconceivable today. Articles and tracts set out to disprove everything from John Steinbeck's mathematical acumen (surely the Joads had enough money for several months in California) to the color of the soil in Sallisaw, Oklahoma (not red in that county), from the number of tractors in Sequoyah County (a mere forty) to his depiction of California as dominated by large corporate farms. While a great many book reviewers noted the novel's fluidity of language and emotional wallop, others decried its gritty prose. Congressman Lyle Boren from Oklahoma lambasted it on the floor of Congress as a dirty, lying, filthy manuscript … a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind. Steinbeck was called a communist. He was harangued by publicity requests. Mail sent to his Los Gatos home horrified him, from death threats and warnings that his wife would be raped to pleas for money and grim accounts of suffering. He wrote woefully to Tom Collins, the man who had provided factual background: I am getting pushed around something terrible and don't know what I am going to do. Steinbeck's dream of composing a perfectly crafted novel of social protest—so palpable when he wrote the final scene—turned into a nightmare only a few months later. In response, he took himself home to Moody Gulch in the Los Gatos hills and padlocked himself against the world, admitting to Eleanor Roosevelt, who defended The Grapes of Wrath in a June 29th My Day column that I have been called a liar so constantly that sometimes I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard in the period of my research. Life seemed unendurable.

      Someone else faced this postpublication onslaught with John—Carol Henning Steinbeck, his wife of a nearly a decade. Plucky, loyal, intensely proud of her husband, she tried to protect him from critics. When a Los Angeles Times reporter ventured up to their Los Gatos mountain citadel to write a feature on John, she chided her husband for shouting at the reporter and then brought out a stuffed gingham dog to show the visitor, Migrant John. A gift from a destitute family, the pooch was proof, Carol thought, of the migrants’ appreciation of John's book. Someone should have stitched a Migrant Carol mate: The Grapes of Wrath was, in fact, their shared creation. To CAROL who willed this book the dedication, in part, reads. Again and again John declared that it was truly Carol's book, for she had been a part of its composition since gestation began nearly three years earlier; it was she who had nudged him to compose a novel about Southwest migrants. Together John and Carol had produced the manuscript—he writing, she typing and editing and coming up with the title—and together they had awaited publication of The Grapes of Wrath like anxious parents. When the masterpiece was buffeted unmercifully during the summer and fall of 1939, the two winced and suffered. He wrote fewer letters, fended off requests for public appearances. She wrestled with the publicity, answered the letters, defended his prose, and also felt very much left out of the spotlight on John's book, only John's. And when he fled from the firestorm for a sojourn in Los Angeles, Carol became the lonely and besieged wife left at home.

      What happens when a dream sours? This had been Steinbeck's theme for years, showing how the visions and hopes of small farmers and paisanos, bindle stiffs and migrants, shrivel in the glare of California's economic and social realities. Now, ironically, he and Carol had stepped into one of his own plots. Although not migrants, like the Joads, nor wanderers, like George and Lennie, John and Carol were similarly marooned and perplexed when the bubble of shared creativity burst. The couple paid a high price for the magisterial Grapes. Criticism of content and language and accuracy stung both deeply; requests for speaking engagements and for Steinbeck to solve financial woes of countless migrants distressed both; tensions and pressures of sudden money and unwanted publicity overwhelmed the couple. At this triumphal yet anguished moment, their marriage began to crumble. Step by slow step they became exiles from an Eden of their own creation. John left Carol, first emotionally, then sexually, and then through his writing. They sold their beloved ranch in the Los Gatos, California, foothills, an hour south of San Francisco. And they were divorced in 1943, when he was forty-one, she thirty-seven. The book that was dedicated to Carol, who willed it into being, would be both the monument to their marriage and shared creativity and also the cause of their undoing. The great dividing line between marital contentment and despair was its 1939 publication.

      With its steady movement away from hierarchical and patriarchal models of home and family and toward a communal and matriarchal model, The Grapes of Wrath suggests much that was central to their companionate marriage. From early in their partnership, Carol and John shared a sense of themselves as outsiders and a desire to reenvision themselves apart from received assumptions. Their marriage was not bourgeois, not complacent, not rigidly defined along gender lines, not mainstream. Throughout the 1930s, John composed stories about outsiders like himself and Carol, some with the courage or pluck to envision another reality, others without that flexibility. His 1930s fiction taps into cultural stories of dispossession, loneliness, and entrapment as well as the counternarrative of possibility, articulated for generations by dreamers like Tom Joad or Of Mice and Men's Lennie Small: Tell me about the rabbits, George. Dreamers yearn for things real yet illusory: rabbits, a ranch, a little house, an orange. A particularly American freedom, argues Arnold Weinstein, is the imperious desire to make reality rather than to undergo it. Casting themselves out of their middle-class backgrounds, Carol and John were makers and dreamers. They were a scrappy and fiercely creative duo.

      When John and Carol met in 1928, he was working at a fish hatchery in remote Lake Tahoe, adding flourishes to the novel he had rewritten countless times, Cup of Gold, finally published in 1929. I learnt [my craft] with 8,000,000 words of rejection slips, Steinbeck would recall years later. During their first week together, Carol bucked his flagging confidence in the manuscript, reading it in draft and declaring it good, very good. Then he set her to work typing another manuscript, To an Unknown God, and her own destiny was clear. In addition to creative synergy, their characters meshed. Both appreciated the offbeat. Both shunned phoniness. Both were unconventional. Even more than John, Carol was fearless, her sister Idell remarked. She was also witty, down to earth, and practical—and a handsome beauty, a tall, healthy brunette with luminous skin and a clear, bold expression. Young John Steinbeck was erotic, violent, passionate, stimulating. Their interests tallied; their energy sizzled. They brought out the best in each other.

      That initial response decanted the spirit of the age, and a jolly good time it was—at least for those who could afford to thumb their noses at bourgeois complacency. In 1928 the stock market had not yet crashed, and the world seemed expansive. Both John and Carol pushed the boundaries of their parents’ pieties. Together in San Francisco—Carol lured John from his Sierra Nevada retreat—they danced as joyously on the bones of straitlaced sensibilities as did Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in New York or Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in Paris. Indeed, they were hardly distinguishable from their better-known counterparts in their determination to respond to a new cultural beat. I think rebellion man's highest state, Steinbeck wrote a college friend in 1924. All that we regard most highly in art, literature, government, philosophy, or even those changes which are the result of anatomic evolution had their beginnings in rebellion in an individual. Steinbeck aspired to that state.

      He and Carol shook their fists at the complacencies of the world they were born to. In 1921, for example, while visiting a friend in Oakland, a nineteen-year-old John Steinbeck exploded with indignation during a church service he was attending as a guest. The long, earnest, and windy sermon intoned that the soul must be fed. St. John, as his friend Robert Bennett called him, yelled out to the stunned congregation: Yes, you all look satisfied here, while outside the world begs for a crust of bread or a chance to earn it. Feed the body and the soul will take care of itself! Robert Bennett's mother was shocked and chagrined that her son's friend trampled on what most Americans still assumed were universal Protestant values. Carol's devout mother was similarly disappointed in Carol's spiritual lapses and in her daughter's disdain for convention of any kind: I hate expediency is Carol's earliest extant poem:

      I hate women who are afraid to love as much as they want to

      Lest their beloveds hurt them or love them less or leave them.

      I hate women who are afraid to hate—for fear of wrinkling their smooth

           beautiful faces—

      I hate children who are polite to people they intuitively dislike and distrust

      Because they have been taught that those are important ones who

           can help them.

      I hate men who are afraid to put themselves on paper for a woman friend

      Fearing that she'll turn traitor and sue them for breach-of-promise

           —or something

      And men who are afraid to love gently and tenderly lest someone

           accuse them of being effeminate—

      Oh yes—beyond all things in this uncalcuable [?] and lovely world

      I certainly do hate expediency!

      Below the handwritten manuscript of this poem that is carefully pasted into an early 1930s scrapbook, Carol wrote, in pencil, First draft 1914. That would make her eight, an enfant terrible, then and later.

      Carol's life story cannot be writ small. All her dimensions, physical and mental, were oversize. Her wit made those with similar askew perspectives howl with glee. She had a warm heart and was quick to connect with children and dogs and friends who could chuckle. She made friends easily and just as easily might offend them. One acquaintance said how hard it was to capture Carol because so much of her presence was physical: her energy and wit filled a room. She was the master of the one-liner, not easy to reproduce.

      That outspoken candor gave John starch when most needed. And sometimes he needed ego bolstering, an essential boost for this powerful but sensitive, often shy man who yearned to find words for the pictures floating through his mind. John Steinbeck had a tremendous physique and had all the macho characteristics … yet at the same time he had this great sensitivity, recalled one college friend. While he always was supremely confident of his eventual success as a writer, he was also plagued by self-consciousness and insecurities. In a very real sense, he grew to depend on Carol's vivid presence in the world to propel him into narratives. A year or so into their marriage, John admitted that Carol had become more real to him than he was to himself. She brought him stories, friends, and her own fine-tuned sensibilities, the fodder he needed to write.

      Until recently, some of John and Carol's books remained on the shelves of the little cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where the couple lived in the 1930s, where his older sister Beth lived until the mid-1990s. One was Louis Paul's 1937 novel, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! which was stamped on the inside cover, like so many others in their library, This Book belongs to Carol and John Steinbeck, and was inscribed by Paul: For John Steinbeck and Carol—my models for Resin Scaeterbun and Nina Gumbottle. After returning from World War I, Resin writes and edits a sexually explicit magazine called Gusto; at his trial for distributing salacious materials, Nina, an Aubrey Beardsley-like illustrator, is his indefatigable ally—much as Carol was John's:

      I love him with all my heart. Your honor, are we not all people of the world, people who have plumbed to the depths and found nature wanting, wanting, wanting what it must not ask for? Resin Scaeterbun is an artist, a genius, a great poet, whose only crime was to attempt to educate the masses in the just too simply and utterly complete joys of free, beautiful love. He worked and starved and slaved that we all might know the beauties of dynamic intercourse. I helped him in my own just simply too humble way, but I would gladly go to prison for him. I was as much responsible for Gusto as he—if not intellectually, then morally. If he is to be punished, punish me. I care not what the world thinks …

      That's a Carol speech. And Resin is an outsized John—pornographer, bootlegger, Lothario, and bum, a Latin- and poetry-quoting caricature. Virgin Nina is drawn with similar insouciance, with her "outrageous dreams (which were Carol's) and bohemian notions: Don't you think that we have been just too completely enslaved by our parents’ ridiculous taboos and inhibitions, Mr. Scatterbing? asks Nina at their first meeting. But the rebel spunk is John and Carol's, as is the love of wordplay—the silly and repeated mispronunciations of Scaeterbun's name—as is the intellectual curiosity and the sexual joie de vivre. Hallelujah, we're bums!" might well have been the clarion call of John and Carol's early years together.

      Not unlike their great collaboration, The Grapes of Wrath, Carol Henning Steinbeck's story has epic dimensions. Just as certainly, hers is a painfully ordinary plot, an oft-told tale of a woman who hooks herself to a man's comet. So thoroughly did Carol embrace their partnership and shared dream of artistic integrity and purpose, that it subsumed her identity. From the first weeks she and John were together, she was intellectually and emotionally bound to him. Like countless women before and since, she threw her own intelligence and considerable energies into her mate's endeavors. As Virginia Woolf observed, women may become looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size and thus have no room of their own, no creative space that is theirs alone. Undoubtedly Carol's considerable creative drive was banked during her years with John. But she insisted that hers was not the part played by Zelda Fitzgerald, a woman embittered by the imbalance between Scott's success and her own muted triumphs: I am not now, nor was I ever, a Zelda, Carol told Steinbeck biographer Jackson Benson. I was not a frustrated artist, repressed by her husband. Don't see me that way. While Zelda competed with her famous husband for artistic credibility, Carol zealously supported John's writing, so much so that at least one friend from the 1930s said that Carol certainly loved John deeply but she loved his art with at least equal fervor. Friend after friend as well as her sister all said the same thing: She really poured herself into that. If it weren't for Carol, John would not be what he was. … They were a team working together for a common cause, his art. Her story is, in effect, his. His greatest triumph, hers.

      Carol's room was John's prose—a solution to women's subordinate roles that Virginia Woolf, no doubt, would hardly embrace. But Carol did, and did not consider her role secondary. The marriage unit was, in effect, a phalanx, larger than both individually, with art the keying mechanism of their marital bond. Steinbeck's theory of group man provides a clear interpretive lens to view their relationship, their artistic sensibilities grounded in a mythic fusion of artist and muse. In June 1933 he wrote: Now in the unconscious of the man unit there is a keying mechanism. Jung calls it the third person. It is the plug which when inserted into the cap of the phalanx, makes man lose his unit identity in the phalanx. The artist is one in whom the phalanx comes closest to the conscious. Art then is the property of the phalanx, not of the individual. Art is the phalanx knowledge of the nature of matter and of life. Steinbeck intended that his art tap that deep knowledge, an intention apparent in To a God Unknown, composed during the first four years he knew Carol. That same urge informs the stories he wrote intermittently from 1931 to 1935, work realistic in surface texture but also plunging into the stream underneath and the meanings I am interested in. To express the deepest human urges subsumed his identity, his ego. To write about the nature of matter—physics, biology, botany, and history—as well as a holistic sense of life itself was an ideal that took hold of Carol as well. Her role as muse draws on an older sense of that word—the muse as conduit to inspiration, the guide to logos, knowledge, and the one who helps understand and unlock the creative spirit. A muse helps link the artist to the deepest sources of meaning, the unconscious currents that Steinbeck yearned to express. From the phalanx, writes Steinbeck, unit man takes a fluid necessary to his life.

      Edward F. Ricketts, marine biologist and Steinbeck's closest male friend in the 1930s and 1940s, was also part of Steinbeck's visionary drive and a muse in this expanded sense. So were loyal friends. As Steinbeck admitted, he was a shameless magpie who picked up and stitched into his fictive vision fragments of local history, scraps of dialogue, amusing tales, eccentric behaviors. I spread out over landscape and people like an enormous jelly fish, having neither personality nor boundaries, he wrote in 1934. That is as I wish it, complete destruction of any thing which can be called a me. The work is necessary since from it springs all the other things. That was Steinbeck's concept of himself in relation to his work—the creation was greater than the creator. That exalted notion of creativity, the power of art to alter and clarify human understanding, swept up those who floated by. The writer was simply the one in whom the ideas came closest to consciousness.

      This story is about a delicately constructed team, the essential units John and Carol and the company they kept. To see one is to see both. To see both in shifting circles of friends is to recognize the vital importance of others to John's creativity—as muse, as audience, as participants. The Great Depression was the necessary crucible for this gritty pair, the decade when banding together meant survival. A man's history, insisted Steinbeck when pressed for biographical details, should be the history of his people. In 1936, he wrote this to a would-be biographer, essentially a cultural and ecological expression of his phalanx theory: It seems to me that if you could write the biography of Captain [John Paul] Jones not only as an individual but also as a part of this movement, you would be doing a unique and useful thing. It is constantly strange to me that the ecology of humans is so completely ignored. That is good advice for any biographer—to consider the notion of human ecology, the connective layers of family and friends, histories and places, politics and philosophies, spirituality and religion and psychological depths that make up a life. This book considers the ecology of Carol Henning and John Steinbeck: their shared roots, cultural moment, friends, travels—and art.

      The story of a fragile unit coalescing into something magical, something with a shared purpose and destiny, also reveals the thread of its inevitable unraveling, as Steinbeck suggests in Tortilla Flat, a novel structured around the Arthurian myth of the Round Table. And yet Carol and John's phalanx, held together by the keystone of art, brought forth one of the most compassionate, urgent, and enduring novels of the twentieth century. The Grapes of Wrath, Carol's book, is the apogee of their tale of bright visions and ragged disappointments and the fulcrum on which their lives tipped.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Renegades

      THEIR CHILDHOODS WERE HAPPY ENOUGH, yet neither Carol Janella Henning nor John Ernst Steinbeck was a particularly settled child. Both felt like outsiders. John told his younger sister Mary that he was never at home in Salinas, where he was born in 1902. I was a stranger there from birth. And Carol, born sixty miles north in San Jose, was the black sheep in the Henning family's Christian fold. Nellie Henning lavished attention on Carol, her firstborn, planning excursions to Carmel-by-the-Sea, reading to her, carefully pasting tiny paper bunnies around toddler photos in a lovingly assembled scrapbook. But Nellie was also a rigid, exacting, and self-righteous mother. Carol grew up tilting swords with this woman who expected lockstep devotion to family and God, expectations met by her younger daughter, Idell, but not the older. Carol grew up with a lopsided vision of love and fairness and maternal devotion. Well before age ten, she was known as the naughty child, whereas tractable Idell was sociable and gracious, maturing into a God fearing woman who was easily intimidated, faint of heart, and demure. Those female roles of angel and vixen stamped the two Henning sisters for life: Idell's path was smooth, Carol's rutted and twisted. Whereas Idell was like her father, quiet and more receptive, the kind of child that parents wanted to coddle, Carol was combative, saucy, and unconventional, more like her mother, in fact, but also bucking Mrs. Henning's religious beliefs, Victorian rigor, and conventional expectations. And yet Carol yearned for the unconditional love that was given readily to Idell. In Carol, Idell quipped, the lamb and the wolf wrestled for ascendancy. Negotiating that gap between a vigorous resistance to the Hennings's middle-class values and a deep need for love, connection, and domestic harmony is the central dynamic of Carol's life story.

      John Steinbeck's psychological inheritance and artistic terrain evolved from a similar landscape, although he sparred with community, not family. His adolescent fury at the bourgeois pretensions of Salinas growers and shippers matured into a lifelong disdain for the selfishness, greed, and complacency of the powerful, coupled with a great sensitivity to human despair, often his own. In a 1962 interview after the Nobel Prize ceremony, he clarified that conviction:

      The thing that arouses me to fury more than anything else is the imposition of force by a stronger on a weaker for reasons of self-interest or greed. … It's the one unforgivable thing I can think of. … And I suppose that's the fury that comes on me when someone is mistreated. There's a waste there somehow, a waste among people because it seems to me people want more than anything else to associate. I think we're such a lonely species and always crying out for companionship of some kind and when we destroy it willfully it gives me great fury.

      Marriage to Carol helped him transform that cultural disequilibrium as well as his own inner demons into art that explored uncertainties of edges and borders, the pathos of the marginalized and disinherited, the psychic depths of despair and loneliness, and the passionate dream of meaningful participation with another human.

      These two unsettled souls, John and Carol, were raised in equally idyllic slices of the American West, and their families and environments were, in many ways, similar. Second-generation Californians, the Steinbecks and Hennings aspired to turn-of-the-century Progressive ideals; they were high-minded people, mindful of civic obligations. Both families gravitated to enterprising communities located on some of the most productive agricultural land in the state. Salinas was the richest community per capita, we were told, in the entire world, recalled Steinbeck, writing in the mid-1950s about his hometown. Certainly we Salinians never questioned it, even when we were broke. First wheat, then sugar beets, and, early in the twentieth century, lettuce made fortunes for Salinas Valley farmers. Visiting Salinas in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson characterized it as thoroughly Protestant—in contrast to Spanish/Mexican (and Catholic) Monterey—and

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