#1582 On the Trail of John Steinbeck
2024-01-15 00:59:07
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Hello everyone, it's Clay Jenkinson welcoming you to this podcast. Introduction to this week's program, a second conversation with my friend Russ Eagle of Salisbury, North Carolina. Russ is a Steinbeckian.
He loves Steinbeck, It's almost the case that he lives and breathes Steinbeck. He's writing a book on Cannery Row. He hopes to finish it in the calendar year 2024..
That's his favorite Steinbeck book. We slightly disagree about that. He's an amazing person. Russ is. We've been on many, many, many, many, many adventures together and more coming.
And this program consists of really two elements first, his report on being in Monterey when the boat, the Western Flyer, returned to Monterey after decades. The boat was the one that Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took to Baja, California, to the Sea of Cortez in 1940, just after the great success of The Grapes of Wrath. And he wrote a book about it.
In fact, he wound up writing two books about it, although they're mostly the same book, The Sea of Cortez, and then later, The Log of the Sea of Cortez. And Ed Ricketts was an incredibly important figure in the intellectual and philosophical life of John Steinbeck, and he helped Ricketts. Ricketts was a bad money manager and never really recognized how to run a business. Supplying marine specimens to high schools and laboratories and colleges, and so on. So, Russ has been following this story since the boat was found up in puget sound and, at great expense, refurbished.
Now it's come back to Monterey, where it's one of the principal Steinbeck attractions and relics. And it's going to be used as a scientific laboratory, which is the best possible use for this boat. And so we got to talking about other Steinbeck things. Rossonante, the camper truck that is in the it's the main feature of the International Steinbeck Center at Salinas, California. Or about Sag Harbor, on the edge of Long Island, where he lived during the last years of his life and is the starting point for the 1960 journey.
Travels with Charlie or the ranch in the panhandle of Texas, where he had Thanksgiving with his wife, Elaine Scott on the Travels with Charlie Tour. Or a couple of things that Russ has not been able to see yet. Somerset, England, with Discove Cottage, where Steinbeck and his third wife, Elaine, lived for nine months in 1959, etc. etc. So this is sort of two literary nerds, even two literary geeks, talking about their deep love of Steinbeck.
I'd say my love of Steinbeck rates at about six out of ten, and Russ's Love of Steinbeck rates at about ten out of ten, or 9.82 out of ten. And so I think, to tell you the truth, I think he looks down a little bit on me as somebody who's not really sufficiently enamored of Steinbeck's achievement. Which is not quite true.
I give more time to Steinbeck than to most people, but Steinbeck compared to what to Shakespeare, to John Donne, to Mark Twain, etc. so I love Steinbeck. But this side of idolatry, and I don't think that there is this side of idolatry for my dear, dear, amazing friend Russ Eagle.
We've also been up the top of Mount Whitney together, we have gone on the Lewis and Clark Trail time after time together. It's one of the richest and most satisfying friendships of my life, and I'm just amazed to have such a friend. And I'm hoping that he will join me at different waypoints on my own travels with Charlie Tour next year.
So that's what this one is about. This is the second of two with Russ Eagle on the question of John Steinbeck. I'm trying to think of any writer who has more relics. More places you have to go to, you know, there are joyce places in Paris and in Ireland.
There are Hemingway places, his villa in Havana, Cuba, Key West, Ketchum, Idaho, even Cook City, Montana, where I have cabins. He spent parts of summers there, and it was an important part of his own formation as a writer. John Donne, my poet. St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Lincoln's Inn, one of the law schools, law courts in England and other places there. You know, we can think of people whose literary careers invite sort of pilgrimages, I would say.
I would love to follow the pilgrimage of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims from London to Canterbury. That is probably not very likely, given the intense population density and industrial infrastructure of that zone of England. But I think it would be good to do. Something I also want to do is to walk the entire Thames from its source. I've been to the source with my daughter Catherine to its mouth. That's actually quite doable and has been done and is done.
It's one of those trips you can sort of plan. You don't stay in tents in this one, you stay in Airbnbs and bed and breakfasts and hotels and inns. But I'd love to do that. Walking an entire river. I've walked the entire Little Missouri River, from Devil's Tower to its mouth in North Dakota. That's the only river I've ever walked in its entirety. But I would love to walk.
The Thames River sources are of great interest to me. I'm hoping to write a book about the search for the sources of the great rivers of the world. But particularly those in the United States, the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Colorado, the Arkansas, of course. So, anyway, this kind of collecting locations is really an unusual sport, let's call it. And Russ has spent a lot of time and a good deal of money chasing Steinbeck, and I'll be chasing him in another expensive way here shortly. But my trip with my airstream, which is hardly a camper truck, much more luxurious than that. But my journey next year, and the year after, and the year after that, will be Steinbeckian.
Yes, that will be a central theme of all that I do, but I also will be using it as a framework on which to attach a larger quest. 250th birthday is coming. The country, Who are we now, where are we headed, what do we still value?
Do we have a common narrative? Why are we so seemingly divided? What is America at 250? I think I knew what America was at 200 back in 1976, much better than I know what it is now as it approaches its 250th birthday. So it's all great fun for me and to have someone. I can hardly express what it means to have someone in my life who is as deep into all this as I am. And more.
So, in other words, when I have a question and I send Russ text questions, you know, two or three or four or five times a month, you know? When did such and such a book appear? when did Steinbeck first have a literary agent? Just query after query. Some of these you can look up, but some of them you just can't look up in any easy way.
And if I text or write to Russ and say, Here's my question, the answer comes almost immediately. He has a greater and a sure sense of the biography of Steinbeck than anybody. I think he has a great mind for detail and he works hard at it. And to have somebody that's fully on board with a quest like this, it's an amazing experience for me and my gratitude is 100%.
So anyway, one more thing before we go to the show, which I think is really fun, you should get out an atlas, maybe for some of this. But tomorrow, my daughter Catherine, Missouri, you've heard her on this program. She will be pushing Send for her doctoral dissertation On the Tower of London in the era of Queen Elizabeth I and James I. She will be pushing Send on a 300-page doctoral dissertation of 100,000 words.
That has been her focus for the past three or four years. I have read it, it's a really extraordinary piece of work. I am immensely proud to be her father, she's lapped me.
I knew she would and she's getting started here and so what a lovely achievement and I'm just so pleased for her. She's exhausted, as you might well expect.
She's been putting in 18, 19, 20-hour days for the past three weeks, going over every single. Citation, footnote, the bibliography, transcriptions from Elizabethan texts, which are in a handwriting that's hard to read and their spelling was crazy. So she's been proofing it, not the arguments. the arguments have been settled for a month or two, but proofing it for detail.
And, of course, the genius is always in the detail. So, three cheers for Catherine Missouri Walker Jenkinson. I'm amazed to know the people that I know and you are among them, and I so appreciate all of you.
You buoy up my life as a, I guess, itinerant humanities scholar all over the intellectual map, and it's great fun. And without you, my life would be in so many ways, impoverished. So let's go to the show.
Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America, back by popular demand. My friend Russ Eagle, who is an expert on John Steinbeck and has had the experience of watching the boat, the Western Flyer, go from wreckage to its spectacular relaunch in November. Welcome Russ.
Thank you.
When you were last here, you told us how excited you were. It was just four or five days before this event. You went out to Monterey. Tell us what happened when you went there.
It was a great experience. It was, you know, one of those rare trips that, you know, exceeds your expectations. Everything went well. You know the locals, people we know locally, you know people in restaurants and hotels and all. Everybody kept saying, you don't know how lucky you are. We don't get this weather this time of year.
I mean, sunny days, short-sleeve weather. So everything just seemed to go right. And so, you know, on that, it was a Saturday, November 4th, I think it was, it was a Saturday morning, you know, because it was such a beautiful day. We actually went and parked down at the far end of Cannery Row, and, you know, walked a mile, a mile and a half up to the wharf. You know, just sort of a Steinbeck experience.
If you've never been to Cannery Row, and I know you have, but it's a neat place. It's somewhat of a literary theme park, and, you know, it has all the tackiness of a theme park.
Which upset him when he came back in 1960 and realized that there were no smells, the canneries had closed. All of his old friends were either gone or decrepit. And that it had turned into a kind of a John Steinbeck tourist trap.
Yeah, there's the Steinbeck Jewelers.
I remember when you and I were there recently and we went into that grocery store, what's it called?
I think it's Abilinetti's, it's a small chain owned by Safeway, I think.
Just a couple of blocks from the heart of where Cannery Row is set, and there are Steinbeck sayings all over the walls and murals. I remember asking, Remember the clerk, how do you feel about all that, Steinbeck? And he's like, I don't know what the big deal with this guy is, it's kind of a distraction.
Well, before we go on, just to give Cannery Row what you do. It does have the Monterey Bay Aquarium, you know, and Hopkins Marine Station from Stanford University, you know. It's got that stunning coastline. It's a national marine sanctuary, you know, otters, dolphins, whales. It really is a spectacular place to be and to walk along. And, you know, as we got closer and closer to the wharf, though, because it was still pretty early on a Saturday morning, you know, it was obvious something was going on.
There were food trucks setting up.
You're wondering what's really going on here? This can't all be for John Steinbeck.
Exactly, you know, there are all these little parks and grassy areas along the harbor, and people were setting up chairs and blankets. And we got there about two hours early and walked up to the observation deck that's down at the end of Fisherman's Wharf. And when I got there, I realized, I'm going to have to stay here if I want to have a spot where I can see. So I did.
I ended up standing there for two hours.
Well, you were with your wife, Liz, and some friends from Seattle, and so you held the line while they went and had breakfast or something.
They had lagged behind. You know, I was sort of there with a mission.
So all this anticipation, I mean, who would have known? I mean, you told me you were going to go out for this and it sounded great. I wished I could be there, but I would have thought Russ there'd be between 65 and 200 people there.
Right, I think. Later that afternoon, they had more than a thousand people waited in line, well, more than an hour, just to walk through the boat. You know, it was a big deal. They had a parade of boats that I thought were going to leave the Western flyer in.
But actually, the flyer came first behind the fireboat, you know, and the water cannon was shooting water, you know, seemed like into the heavens. And one of the neat things was that I think everybody who went to the Sea of Cortez on that boat in 1940 had family members there in attendance.
That's amazing. So there were descendants of the key figures from that adventure.
I even heard from Carol Steinbeck's stepdaughter. She contacted me on social media just to tell me how much she had enjoyed our coverage on Listening to America. So that was a cool thing.
You know, you are, I would say, a fairly low key human being, hard to excite.
That's part of your, I think, your stoicism. But on a level of one to 10, how much are you just giddy as that thing comes around the corner?
Oh, yes, I mean, I got that way.
It's funny, I've only seen this boat, you know? I was thinking maybe half a dozen times, and most of those times it was, you know, decrepit. But you know, when you saw it, you know people were passing around binoculars, and you know when you saw it, you know. Bouncing on the waves, you know, out on the bay, you know, on its way in. It made the hair stand up on your neck. It was a big deal for me and for a lot of people. You know, and the, you know, the Monterey fishing industry, you know the families of that industry over the past century or more, you know, they were a big presence there and it was a big deal to them as well.
So it comes in and it docks. Were there speeches and dedications and ribbon cuttings, and so on.
Yeah, it came in and it did. Sort of a, you know, 360, sort of like a model on the red carpet, you know? There at the end of the wharf and people took pictures and they were blowing horns and all. And then, yeah, they did have. They had a Mariachi band set up on the stage. And then all the politicians, congressmen, mayors. I think I even mentioned in the thing I wrote on the website. I was impressed that Selena sent somebody over to bring their best wishes to.
The town of Monterey, you wrote. If people wish to, they can go to ltamerica..org and find your report of that day, and we appreciate you, our correspondent, for this. So did the people who had actually rescued the boat and refurbished it. Did they speak? They did.
You know, John Gregg?
Was there, you know, he's the man that made all this happen, and I talked to him briefly, you know, he had everybody wanted to talk to them. But he did remember speaking to our group four years ago, he did remember that, he said. I remember asking your group if they'd like to return to the Sea of Cortez on this boat, he said. And they all raised their hands.
I haven't forgotten that, I hope he remembers that later down the line when we can actually.
Do that. Maybe he was the last one to speak, but everyone that spoke beforehand, of course, mentioned his name. And you know, he's a big guy. But you could just see every time his name was mentioned, he just shrunk down, he just did not want any attention. He's very much a remain in the background type guy. He was not even on the boat when it came in.
He rode on.
One of the boats that followed it in. At some point, all the pageantry is over and then people queue up to actually have a chance to get on the boat, right? And, of course, we were waiting for.
That, and, you know, thought we would be near the front of the line, and I guess in a sense, we were. But still, it took us an hour of waiting to get on the boat. I mean, people were lined up down the wharf. I think there's some drone footage of the whole thing on the Western Flyer Foundation website.
You can see so it went on all afternoon. So how long were you actually on deck? Well, they would let you meal around as long as you wanted.
We tried to take advantage of the photo ops. And, you know, I did have the advantage of having been on the boat several times when it was in Port Townsend. So I tried not to linger too much. But well, this actually grew out of the Grapes of Wrath, in a sense, all of the hullabaloo over the Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck You know, being a very private person, you know? He had difficulty dealing with the success of some of his lesser works, you know, like Tortilla flat, you know? When the Grapes of Wrath just exploded, his life really fell apart and he was just looking to get away.
He also at the time, you know, just thought, Okay, that's all I can do with the novel.
He thought he had taken the novel to its terminus, and whatever else he did would not be a novel.
Right, so, he was looking to become a scientific writer, and his great friend, Ed Ricketts was a scientist. But he didn't have an advanced degree, he didn't even have an undergrad degree, and so he was struggling to be taken seriously. And, you know, as it still is, Monterey was sort of a center for marine biology.
You know, Stanford had their facility there at that time that is still there, so you know, so they sort of each had an ulterior motive. For this trip to Ricketts to advance his reputation as a scientist, Steinbeck to establish some credentials. And so they chartered this boat. This was first going to be a Rosanati type trip.
They acquired a vehicle and started outfitting it, and then I think they realized how ludicrous it was. You know, the Baja Peninsula in 1940, you weren't going to go down there and drive down to the shore, you know, all these stopping points around the Sea of Cortez. So they realized they had to have a boat, they had a hard time getting a boat.
The Sardine season was over. You know, there are all sorts of speculations, but the one that seems to carry the most weight. You know, Steinbeck was, you know, his reputation was as pro-labor at that time as anybody in the United States. And you know, the fishing industry was a big deal. You know, there were unions there and so forth. So the boat owners weren't really looking to lease their boat or charter. let Steinbeck charter their boat.
But Tony Berry and the Western Flyer, they were new to the area, even though the boat was relatively new, only a year or two old. He had been to the Sea of Cortez, and so they took the trip six-week charter. This was in, I think, March and April of 1940..
So just after the gigantic success of The Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer Prize has come in already.
Yes, I would think so.
The marriage with Carol was also starting to come apart, and so he was looking for escape. She winds up forcing herself onto the trip. But, as you said, the last time we talked, he did not mention her in the book.
No, and you know, we can only guess at why that is true. But you know at the time that he was actually set down to write the book? Their marriage was, you know, she was in Hawaii at the time, in fact. And Steinbeck was holed up in a little house down near where Asilomar is now, with Gwen, who would become his second wife.
Hold it right there. We need to take a break, so it's a cliffhanger. So he's with his girlfriend near Asilomar, he sends Carol to Hawaii.
And I remember, he says, Just stay as long as you need. You probably need some more time. Just go ahead, and you know, this is good for you. Just take all the time you want.
Talking with Russ Eagle about the Western Flyer and, of course, John Steinbeck. We're going to take a short break, stay with us, we'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America Russ. You got us through the trip, so the six-week trip to Baham. But their interest was in collection, they were going to collect specimens, because that's what Ed Ricketts did. His income, such as it was, was selling frogs and salamanders and octopi and other marine specimens to high schools and colleges and institutions around the country.
And what I learned from preparing for this program is that. Steinbeck did most of the grunt work, the serious collecting work on the trip, and Ricketts was frequently in the bathtub reading. Ricketts really saw it more as a vacation from his work, and Steinbeck was more earnest to get something accomplished, yes.
Jackson Benson.
Steinbeck's biographer, who recently passed away. He actually talked with Tony Berry, the captain, and this is a quote here, he said. Ricketts didn't pull his weight and was soused most of the time.
Carol is almost a stowaway. Reports vary, but she may have been having sexual relations with men, not her husband. She frequently sunburned naked on the ship. That sounds like a zoo to me.
Oh, yeah, Sparky Aneo, one of the crew members, did publish a memoir back in, I think in the early 90s, yeah, there was a great deal of dysfunction, alcohol, brothels, nudity, adultery, fistfights. That's just not the story that Steinbeck chose to tell, and Tony Berry actually challenged Steinbeck privately about that, asking why he didn't include those things.
Steinbeck gave him a two-word answer. He said for Ed, he was trying to help his friend with his scientific reputation, and they were successful. They discovered more than 50 new species. The first edition of the book has that phyletic catalog at the end that catalogs more than 550 species that they came across.
So there are two books that came out of this.
Right, there's The Sea of Cortez, which was the original book, and then later it's reissued.
And now it's the log of the Sea of Cortez, right? Steinbeck's publisher, The Viking Press, and his editor, Pat Cavicci, they had no interest in this book. They did not want Steinbeck to do this. I mean, you imagine that one of your authors puts out the grapes of wrath and then this is what he wants to follow up with.
Then they did not want Ricketts's name on it. There's no great mystery about it. It was a true collaboration, and Steinbeck told him in those uncertain terms, that his name's going to be on it. If you don't want to publish it, somebody else will.
He was going to get what he wanted. And the original book, it only sold a few thousand copies, and the big reason for that was it was published the day before Pearl Harbor.
In the second book, which is published after the death of Ricketts, there's a beautiful biographical tribute to Ricketts himself that is not in the first book.
Right, and that was sort of, I think they sort of bargained with Steinbeck, all right, let's take Ed Ricketts's name off. As a co-author. You can include this tribute, and Steinbeck made some sort of arrangement with the Ricketts family.
It does include that really long essay it's called about Ed Ricketts. A lot of people think that essay belongs with Cannery Row rather than C..F. Cortez. But you see those two projects as sort of.
A continuum that they almost need to be read in tandem, right? Ed's the center of both of them, the real Ed in one, and sort of a slightly mythologized Ed in the other, but they're.
Part and parcel of each other, right? Yeah, Benson called the log from the C...F. Cortez, the foundation for Cannery Row. I mean, it has a lot of the same concepts, the variability of perspective and how people see what they want to see. And peering into the tide pools at the animals is sort of the that's what's going on in C..F.
Cortez And that's sort of the.
Controlling Metaphor with Cannery Row. And we all look forward to your book on this subject, which is still in process. When you look at Steinbeck's career, if I went in my next travels and said to everyone I met, what do you know about John Steinbeck? They're going to say, Well, he wrote of mice and men, didn't he? He wrote The Grapes of Wrath.
They might say, East of Eden Cannery Row, I don't think, is going to be in the top three of people's cultural memory of Steinbeck. You've been fascinated by this for a very long time, you have followed this project through. From a total wreck that should have been written off as just the boat's gone, there's no point in trying to restore it in any way.
They spent millions to do it. It's now there. It's not just a thing. It's going to be a scientific laboratory that's going to be dedicated to do serious marine work, right, right?
I did see on the website, I think it's going to be.
Available for charter as well, it might be something for you to think about.
Yeah, let's do it. We're going to need some benefactors, I think for that one. What an amazing experience for you to be able to go there with your wife and your friends and to be there at that time. And to know that you have been more than just an observer, that you had a role in this story, let's talk about the other experiences that someone who loves Steinbeck wants to have. I'll start and then you go next.
Thanks to the work that we do together, we were able to see the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath in its original Ledger book at the University of Virginia Special Collections. Amazing experience to be able to not only be there, but to be able to ask for certain pages to be opened to inspect it. For me, that was one of the great Steinbeck experiences, that if you can do it, you should. What are some of the others?
I think it's the ransom center at the University of Texas. I know that they have the box that Steinbeck carved in the evenings when he was writing East of Eden. Then he delivered the manuscript, along with what became the manuscript of the East of Eden Letters that came out years later. Really, two books. He presented the manuscript in that box to his editor and friend, Pat Cavicci.
I have an edition of the book that has a photo of the box on the cover at the center. In San Jose, I mean, in Salinas, they have a sort of a replica, I don't know how.
True it is. We'll be going there, I'll be going there next year on my travels with Charlie Tour of the Country when I get there. I hope it'll be at a time when you can join me. And we will have that experience together. To see the original box and the manuscript and whatever else they have. At the University of Texas, as you've said before, Elaine, the third wife, studied at UT Austin.
And she studied at the same time that Lady Bird Johnson was there. They became friends, and this led to the friendship, the amazing friendship that Steinbeck and L.B.J. developed between 1964 and 1968. So that's on the list, what else is on your list? We've both been to Doc's lab together.
I don't think that's quite as hard as I originally thought. I think it's pretty easy to get into Doc's lab in Monterey. But we've now done it three or four times, and I'm sure you've done it more.
We actually walked down to Doc's lab after the Western Fire event, they had it open all day, but for years it was difficult to get in there. But they did some, they essentially took the facade off piece by piece, they put in fire protection system, earthquake, they made it earthquake proof and made a lot of improvements. And I think now and again, Covid shut this down for a while. But now the city of Monterey, which owns it, I think maybe every month or so they find a way to make it available.
And you know, they let they have docents there, but they.
They let us just wander around in there. This is Ed Ricketts laboratory, right on the main drag on Cannery Row, as it's now called, and it has a kind of an antique look, it's brown.
You climb up a somewhat rickety set of stairs to get in, and inside, it's kind of a lounging living room where there are posters and a record player and sort of the things that were there. And then you can go back into other parts of the lab and down into the bowels of it, where the actual collection work was done. And some of his jars and samples are still there. And a huge desk slash chamber trunk that was specially built for the Western Flyer is there, which I lust after. You've had plenty of experience with that place, right?
All right, so what about Sag Harbor? So he owns many houses over the time in New York, I'm I'm less interested in that. But towards the 1950s, he bought a place out at the end of the end of Long Island, an old whaling village, Sag Harbor. And he had a house there, right on the water, built a little outside.
He had a swimming pool, but he also built a little writing shack that he called Joyous Guard, after something from the Arthurian tales. You've not been there, I have not been there, but we'll be going there.
On this journey, yes, the Steinbeck's heirs, his wife, his third wife, Elaine, her heirs, recently sold that house. You know, Sag Harbor is not a sleepy, sleepy little fishing village any longer. It's sold for, I think, tens of millions.
It also had a pretty large parcel of land. I think you can get access, you know, to tour it. It's been, you know, it's been renovated, they added a loft and things like that. But there's still a lot of Steinbeck still there. Of course, his little writing shack is still there.
The whole property is full of oak trees.
A lot of which he planted, so it's there. It was a modest place, I think in his time, it was not a grand home. Although I'm sure it's in much better condition now that money has been poured into it. I don't know if it'll be ready when I go through, but I certainly want you to join me if you can.
I'm hoping to stay there, it may be too soon, they may not have gotten all that in place. And I may not be the kind of writer that they're really talking about in this. But that's certainly in the list of things you must do if you love Steinbeck. At least seeing it from the outside and seeing the writing shack. Joyous Guard is one of them, and I so look forward to that. How about Rosanante, which is the camper van that he commissioned in the Midwest and took on the famous Travels with Charlie Tour? And then, when he got back, sort of unceremoniously, auctioned off, sold it. But it's been recovered and was brought on a lowboy of some sort out to California, where it now is the great centerpiece of the Steinbeck Center at Salinas.
We've both been there a number of times. That's certainly one of the holy grails of Steinbeck, right? it is.
And I think he sold it to a farmer and he really had no literary interest. But he did understand the importance of that truck, so he sort of kept it in somewhat pristine shape, just used it for light farm work. And when he got to the end of his life, when they retired, he called the Steinbeck Center and said, I don't need this truck anymore. Do you want it? It's really a neat thing to say. See, I wish they would sort of change the display at the Steinbeck Center. They sort of have it tucked away, where you can't really enjoy it, I think. But it's still a highlight. And it's interesting now that Rosanante is there in Salinas, and then the Western Flyer is going to be docked over in Monterey.
Two of the great Steinbeck relics.
Rosanante is in great shape. When you and I were there, not so long ago, we were down in the archives with Lisa, who is their archivist. And she showed us the user's manual from it and some of the paperwork. And helped us solve a question I had about power steering, it turns out he actually writes about that in Travels with. Charlie says. It was power-assisted steering. Do you remember that era when power steering first came in and the big deal was having power-assisted steering?
So we've been there and that's a.
What would you say is the number one relic of Steinbeck? If you could only see one of the great Steinbeck things, which one does it have to be?
Well, I know that Stanford has his Nobel prize as a lifelong Cannery Row fan. You know, Doc's Lab originally? For me, I've been in there probably a dozen times now, so maybe it's lost its luster somewhat. And Cannery Row itself, like I said, it's sort of tacky, sort of like a literary theme park, but it is still there, mostly intact the setting of the book.
The only thing that I find that's tacky, aside from the inevitable cotton candy and taffy store, is that ridiculous museum that you go into and you go downstairs and there are dioramas, and there is a mannequin of Steinbeck, and that's.
I mean, that shouldn't we need to keep that now, because it's just so tacky that it's interesting, but it's the worst of tourism.
And it's been there in the.
I know it's been there for 30 years because I've been going there that long, I only went down there once, that once was enough.
Do you think seeing the Western Flyer or Doc's Lab is as important?
I know I'm asking you impossible questions, but is that more important than being in the presence of the Grapes of Wrath manuscript?
No, no, that's a good point, that may be it. There are other manuscripts spread about, some that I've seen, some that I hope to see. But, as you know, the Grapes of Wrath manuscript sort of stands out from the others. I mean, he wrote it just in 100 days, just non-stop, in this giant ledger, tiny handwriting.
He was just on, he had been trying to write that book for a long time and finally, everything was just clicking and it was going so well. His wife, Carol, was going behind him and typing, This is his first draft.
There was no second draft. And you can see where she had the red pencil, where she would make occasional corrections. He wasn't even stopping for paragraphs, she would go through and mark where new paragraph. He was just, I guess, on a roll.
His penmanship is legible. It's very tiny. It's amazing to behold that. And when we were there, I recall you reminded the curator about the problem of Noah. Tell that story.
There were 13 people that left Oklahoma on the Joad's truck. Jim Casey and his 12 disciples, people like to say so. Steinbeck was juggling a lot of characters as he wrote that book, and, as we just said, he was writing in a hurry.
He wrote the entire book, and so it's a big book, and he wrote it in a hundred days. And at one point, he realized, Oh, I forgot about Noah. It's just one of the Joad's, I guess he was the Joad's oldest son.
Several characters die and they're buried along the way, and so there's A and Connie, the boyfriend of the fiance, runs off. He can't handle the pressure, so it's like, And I got the Christie thing. Then there were 12 and then there were 11, and then there were 10..
But he gets to California, and he realizes, Oh, Noah's disappeared from the book.
Yes, and so. He took a sheet of paper and he wrote three paragraphs, and then he went back in his manuscript and put asterisks Insert paragraph one here. And essentially, Noah wanders off. He was sort of a loner anyway.
And at one of the camps they stopped at, he just tells Tom, I'm leaving, I'm going off on my own. And I didn't think about it the first time I read it. But once you know this story, you notice in the book, yeah, that's very sudden, and it's dealt.
With in three paragraphs. Well, he doesn't want to kill Noah. Noah is slightly mentally deficient. I think a little strange as a human being. And so he just finally says, It's time for me to my destiny is not with you.
I need to go off by myself. I'll never forget Russ. The moment in the special collections when you had your multi-page handwritten type notes and you said to the curator, can we look at such and such a passage? Because I believe that's where the character Noah dropped out of the book and Steinbeck had to insert. And the docent dutifully goes there and his eyes get wider and wider, and he said, Whoa, I wasn't aware.
You're the first person that's pointed this out, and it was just such a delicious moment, a monument to your own scholarship, but also to his generosity. Because somebody else in that position could have gotten a little miffed, like, who is this guy who is telling me stuff? But he was totally delighted by the things you asked him to point out in the book. Yeah, he was very much a.
Man who enjoyed his work until he was in the right spot. I'll never, I'll never, ever forget.
That moment. So for me, that's the great thing. I've been to Rosanate, I have not seen the Western Flyer, I have not been to Saig Harbor.
I have been to a couple of places I think that you haven't yet been to in the Great Steinbeck Quest, but let me give you one more here. And that is the Thanksgiving orgy, as Steinbeck calls it. That's in the heart of travels with Charlie. He had traveled with Elaine from Seattle to Monterey, then she had gone on by plane. And he then raced more or less to the panhandle of Texas to catch up with her.
She was from that part of the world and they had, she had friends there, and they had a really amazing Thanksgiving at a very, very wealthy but understated Panhandle ranch. And we have a mutual friend who's been there, neither one of us has been there yet. But I think we have an opening to do that next year.
Yes, that was the Bitter Creek ranch. I believe it's near Amarillo, I believe it's southeast of Amarillo. I'm not a hundred percent sure of that, but it was owned at the time by Lawrence Hagey. it was very well-known, very wealthy Texan.
And he and Elaine were related through Elaine's first marriage. So that is how Steinbeck happened to be having a Thanksgiving dinner there in 1960. And our friend Joe did go there and he took a lot of pictures. And that's the one thing you see from the picture. Steinbeck was very as he always was, he was very spot on with his descriptions.
And the ranch has changed hands a number of times since then, but it's still that part of it where Steinbeck stayed is intact. So, yeah, that would be a neat place to go.
Our mutual friend Joe is going to try to get us access to that on this trip that I'm taking. So I'm spending a lot of your money here, flying you from one place to the next. But I'm guessing you will want to do most of it because these are things that are on the list. We need to take a short break when we come back. I want to keep asking you about sort of chasing Steinbeck. You're listening to a special edition of Listening to America.
Welcome back everyone to this special edition of Listening to America with my friend Russ Eagle. Russ lives in North Carolina. We've been friends for a long time now. We have climbed the Wendover Death March on the Lewis Clark Trail, we've canoed on the White Cliffs section of the Missouri River.
We have climbed Mount Whitney twice together successfully, and we have gone on a range of wild adventures, some of them involving John Steinbeck, most of them not. And when I do the Steinbeck retreat in the Monterey area, which we'll be doing again. Russ is a sort of a co-presenter in all of that, so Russ. I've got a couple of little advantages over you, and one of them is that. My daughter and I were able to spend a few days at Discove Cottage in Somerset in England last year.
I wanted to go to Discove, I was able to go to Discove with my daughter who's just finishing up at Oxford. And we were told in advance. As I know, you know, Russ, that yeah, you can come to the site, but you're probably not going to get in. You know, they're very private, etc.
But they did invite us in and we had about an hour inside Discove Cottage. And then we went to the Little Museum in town in Bruton and saw the desk that he ordered. He ordered a special kind of an architect's desk or a draftsman's desk so that he could write more comfortably upstairs. One of my goals is to get you there, too.
It's a spectacular part of England. And he was enchanted by Camelot and Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot and this whole song. And he made friends with an eminent Arthurian, a man named Eugene Van Aver. I think that's on the list, although that's a foreign trip, that's a big one.
And the other thing that I'm really eager to get you to, which will happen, I think, in the next year, is to the J.
P. Morgan Library in New York City, where, among other things, the manuscript and the typescript of the original draft of Travels with Charlie is held. And I know from work that a man named Steigerwald did that. There are some very large differences between the draft and the final published version of Travels with Charlie. So I'm sure that's going to be one of our great moments. People listening to this Russ must be thinking, What's wrong with these guys?
You know, this is what you live for. To wander around to Steinbeck places. I mean, it's expensive, it's time-consuming, life is short. We could be at NASCAR or NFL football games, we could be in Cabo. There are many other things that you do in your life that are of great interest to you.
Why do you think we do this kind of thing? I mean, it's a simple answer, you know?
It's just fun to do, but something that Steinbeck himself always said, you know, if you go out looking for something, you're going to have so many other great experiences and meet people. You know, it doesn't really matter whether you get there or not. And you know, I think one that we haven't even mentioned yet. But a couple of years ago, we were able to go. Where not many Steinbeck enthusiasts have gotten to go, and that's to the Lake Tahoe area and see the estate that Steinbeck spent two winters back in the 1920s. And I mean, you just think back to that trip and the people we met while doing that and the adventures we had. Trying to set it up, trying to find it.
So, you know, it goes way beyond, just, you know, standing there, nodding your head, Okay, there it is. They always end up being very rich experiences for a number of reasons.
Do you feel that in sort of following to these sites? And there are more Steinbeck sites than of almost any writer I can imagine. Do you feel that it gives you insight into his life and.
Achievement. Oh, certainly, and you know, some more than others, you know, spend time, you know, in the Salinas Valley, you know, or the, you know, the Gatlin Mountains or the Santa. Yes, you know, go out and walk, you know, again, getting back to the Cannery Road. But get out, you know, at five in the morning, you know, before the garbage trucks and everything. And go walk along the coast in Pacific Grove. I mean, Steinbeck is just so tied to that area.
And when you have these experiences, you see why it gives you a great appreciation for his, you know, I mean, I think what first brought me to Steinbeck was his descriptions of the natural world. And you know which travels with Charlie, which we've been talking about? He's just crammed full of those. I think people don't tend to look past those sometimes, but just go through and look at those passages and they're really amazing.
I mean, we've talked about Lewis and Clark. I read the Lewis and Clark Journals before I ever went on the Lewis and Clark trail. And then every part of the trail you go on, you know, it totally changes your perspective and your understanding. You know, the example I always use. You know when Meriwether Lewis had the encounter with blackfeet Indians, and you know, they had to escape on horseback and they rode for. I don't know how many hours it was. And you read this and you think, Well, you know, that's just overkill.
You know, it could not have been that big a deal. And then you go up and you look at that spot and you say, yes, there's no way. How it feels, because you can see forever up there. You know, it's things like that, they increase your understanding, and you know, it's not necessarily something you can. I have the eloquence to describe, but yeah, it enriches the experience tremendously.
Just a couple of more minor ones, well, not minor, but ones that we haven't mentioned. The cottage in Pacific Grove is still there and you've taken me there.
I've been in there.
You've been inside.
I've been inside, yes.
And so not many people get inside. You're fortunate, I think now that is also being made available to writers.
No, that is a separate cottage that he bought when he and Carol were in the process of splitting up. It's on Eardley Street. The famous 11th Street cottage is still in the family. And I'm only aware, you know, there may have been others. I'm only aware of one time that it was open during a Steinbeck festival and they only took like 10 people.
And I was fortunate to be one of them.
Fremont Peak, which is not so far from Salinas, where he sort of the climax scene. And travels with Charlie when he goes back to Monterey with his rig and the dog. And he has a very.
Disillusioning experience. And he's channeling Thomas Wolfe. You can't go home again. And he has a really disappointment in going back to Monterey, where he's too famous now to be knowable by the people. And they look at him differently, they don't.
They see him as somebody who's important and maybe too important, and he's not really what they remember. And he doesn't want to drink heavily with them and carouse with them in the old way. And besides, many of them are dead. But but before he leaves Monterey, he and Charlie, they take this difficult drive.
We've been on it. It's a it's no fun. As a drive, you get to the top of the parking lot and then it's still a 15 or 20 minute walk up to the top.
That's an important place, do you think, Charlie?
Was really on the top of that thing.
Who knows it is? I can't imagine walking an older dog up.
To that point, but we have a hard time walking up some older people up to that point, as you recall.
Right? But that's one of those experiences you wouldn't have to care one bit about. Steinbeck to be moved by going up to the top of Fremont Peak, just an amazing view up there, yeah.
Because it's, it's, it's the basically the larger Central valley of California, so flat and suddenly you're on this extraordinary peak where you can really see forever. And he had a great passage in travels with Charlie about not only what he sees from there, but also memories of his parents. Back when. California was a much less crowded place than when he went there in 1960..
Right, it gives a lot of personal history there, I mean, Travels with Charlie is certainly the closest Steinbeck ever came to writing biography.
And I was going to ask you about that. I've been rereading travels with Charlie to get ready for this epic journey. I'm going to be taking. Which you're going to be on as much as you have time for and interest in. But when I've been talking about it lately, I've been calling it The Confessions of John Steinbeck. It's a very personal and often confessional book. He talked about growing old.
He talks about losing his creative mojo. There's a lot of sense of loss. But he gives us glimpses into his own character and his private life in a way that he didn't. I don't think in any other book. I mean, do you agree that most of his books have very little of it at all? Including East of Eden, right? I mean, East of Eden had some.
Family stories and family characters. But Steinbeck himself, and he is in the book, but not in any major way. He's in there as a kid, essentially. But no, I think that's a big reason for why travels with Charlie has been so popular. Steinbeck was a very popular writer all over the world. I just think people enjoyed reading about him.
I think the book is.
Much more about Steinbeck than it is about America. I do, too. There's a sense in which it's sort of a testament. It's revealing. There's that famous early passage where he says, and maybe you can quote it, but I have lived violently.
I have drunk hugely, I've had hangovers, but I've regarded them as the price you pay for, et cetera. It's an amazing paragraph about his own life. And if you didn't know anything about Steinbeck and you read that, you would think this is a really extraordinary man. Not just like a Truman Capote writer who's living in comfort and luxury, that he's had a life of physical adventure, too, yes.
And then I think.
The famous Maple River scene in North Dakota The Maple River scene. Well, let me just set.
Everything up, he spends October 12th, 1960, in North Dakota. He travels from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, all the way to beach, North Dakota, fudges, a little bit on the lodgings and so on. But he crossed the whole state. He stops at the Maple River, which is near Fargo, and he encounters an itinerant actor, a Thespian, a Lyceum actor who loves Shakespeare.
And they have this encounter, which has been disputed by some of the snarkier Steinbeck historians and biographers. But it's a really. I think that's one of the best moments in the book. I don't know how you feel about it, but I think that a that happened in some sense of the term. I don't think he made that up, but the people who have, who want to find fault with Steinbeck, sometimes say. He made up a lot of stuff. He covered up a lot of stuff.
He underplayed the amount of time he spent with Elaine and overplayed the amount of time he spent sleeping in the rig. Maybe some of that is true, but how do you read that moment at the Maple River?
I think he's definitely, well. Let me preface that with something that Steinbeck wrote to Peter Benchley of all people who wrote jaws. People may not know, but he grew up with Steinbeck as his landlord and a neighbor. And when he was in college, he had asked Steinbeck to contribute something to the college newspaper. And a little snippet from that, Steinbeck said. Of course, a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, devises beginnings, middles and ends, and this is arbitrary because there are no beginnings nor any ends.
And so it wouldn't surprise me at all if that encounter was tailored to fit what Steinbeck needed. In the book. I think he presents him as an alter ego. They have so much in common.
Is Peter Benchley the son of Robert Benchley, the humorist?
Grandson.
Grandson So Robert Benchley was a New Yorker writer and a humorist, and Peter, who lived next door, was the grandson.
Right? Nathaniel Benchley was the generation in between. He and Steinbeck were good friends. In the 40s. Steinbeck had matching Brownstones side by side that he owned and he rented to the Benchleys.
They often went drinking together at a pub nearby.
Right?
How many places in New York City, you know? In New York City, for example, Theodore Roosevelt's boyhood home is commemorated. Are there places in the city itself that have plaques or that have visitation?
I don't think so. You know, Steinbeck, when he lived in New York, you know, after he was successful, he was always up on the Upper East side. He had these brownstones, and eventually, he and Elaine moved to a high-rise apartment.
13th floor, wasn't it? or 17th, one of the two?
Something like that, yes, it was very high, it sold, it's been a long time now, but it sold for an enormous sum as well. But, you know, back to the actor, you know, he had a beard like Steinbeck.
He had a dog, he was traveling, you know, with a trailer. He was in the twilight of his career, you know, and I think also the timing, you know, maybe that happened. If that didn't happen, maybe it happened somewhere else.
But I think Steinbeck sort of fit perfectly right there because the very next thing he crosses the Missouri River into the West. I'm not claiming to know what that means, but I think he was just sort of accepting, you know, as the actor talks about the way he accepts his limitations. You know, I think Steinbeck, just, you know, Steinbeck always said, You know, I long ago realized I'm not a great writer. What I accomplish, I do by hard work, he said. By the whip.
So how close to you at this moment in your home in North Carolina is a copy of Travels with Charlie right here? Wow, so right there. Why is it so close at hand?
Well, travels with Charlie C.
F. Cortez and then Cannery Row. I don't know, they're just always right here, you know, if you refer to something so often.
Can you look for the live, violently passage? It's in the first four or five pages.
Yes, sir, I can get to technology here.
Okay, either way, so this is real time listening to America. Russ, in his man cave in North Carolina, put his hands on a copy, a physical copy of Travels with Charlie within seconds. And now he's using that internet to find the passage in. You know, I think you have an e-version of the entire works of John Steinbeck.
I do, I do, so this is early on. Let me set it up. He's basically saying, I'm growing old.
I don't want to be one of those guys in his slippers who's, you know, everyone protects, and he's afraid to sneeze or do anything. I want to be a man, I've always been a man, and I'm going to prove with this journey that I still am physically vigorous. If nothing else, go ahead.
Yes, I've got it here if my voice holds up, he says. A second kind of childhood falls on so many men, they trade their violence for the promise of a small increase in lifespan. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror, for I have always lived. Violently drunk, hugely eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long and glorying, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness.
I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender. Fierceness for a small gain in yardage. That's magnificent Russ, I mean.
He can say he's not a great writer, but he is a great writer. That's an incredible passage, and there's, you know, there's so much candor and even loss here that, you know. His health is not great. He's had a stroke, he's banged up his body in a number of ways.
He's become very, very dependent on his third marriage, on his life with Elaine. He's also rich now and used to living in luxury. When he goes out in this camper van, he's in his mind. He's slumming it in a big way, because his daily life, by this time, is filled with luxury in every sense of the term. And then he has this astonishing passage, and, you know, the word I love most is slobbed.
That's a strange use of that word, but it works, doesn't it? It does.
And I should have probably read the next line. I knew that 10 or 12,000 miles driving a truck alone and unattended over every kind of road would be hard work. But to me, it represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man. I've known those professional sick men.
I know, you know, some, too, people that give up on vitality and just let their lives take them to its terminus. My father, unfortunately, was such a person. I admire Steinbeck for this and I admire this, and you've given me a new insight.
We're out of time. But a new insight into the famous encounter at Maple River. I believe it occurred, I believe it occurred there. But even if it's in some ways imaginatively constructed, it's a sort of mirror, isn't it? And he's reflecting on his own life, where he is pretending to be incognito.
Maybe he is, but the man says to him, You've done some theater, and he says, Yeah, mostly. Flops Well of Mice and Men can hardly be called a flop. One of the major works of theater of the 20th century, it's a book about John Steinbeck. The trip is just the framework.
And so my challenge is to figure out how to recreate the trip so that it's not just a feat. It's not just like, Oh, on such and such a day, I was here, on such and such a day. I was there to somehow dig deeper into the life and character and achievement and soul of Steinbeck. But also to do what he wanted to do, and I don't think did very successfully, which was to search for the soul of America in 1960. So what's your next Steinbeck event? when do you go back to Monterey?
I don't know. I was hoping to go in the spring and do some research, having shoulder surgery next week, so that may cause some adjustments in my schedule. But that's the plan at this point.
Yeah, so I hope very much that in the next year we will see each other at six or seven Steinbeck places around the country. Certainly two or three. Among them, the ranch near Amarillo and the J..P. Morgan Library and Saig Harbor. But who knows, it's all in the womb of time.
Russ, We're also grateful for you. Sorry, Russ. We're also grateful to you for going out there and reporting what you saw and giving us a glimpse into this extraordinary, extraordinary man and writer. We'll see you all next week for another edition of Listening to America.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os