John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tribute (review)

Like many readers, I pick up authorial "tributes" with a wary hand, anticipating a routine mix: intonations of immortality, snapshots of babies and pets, movie stars and childhood abodes; some laudatory but not especially laudable poetry; and critical chestnuts liberally coated with a conservative humanist glaze. In John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tribute there is all that, but also much else of considerable value. The editor, Stephen K. George, pledges in the Introduction to "do justice to the complexities of Steinbeck without pandering or dishonest intellectual praise" and by and large he does so, providing, as he says he will, "as many different perspectives as possible." George, in the acknowledgments, expresses surprise as a first-time editor at how much work was involved, but his conscientious efforts are evident in a compilation that brings together thought-provoking reminiscences from a dozen or more of Steinbeck's contemporaries and an equal number of often insightful essays by the best of Steinbeck scholars and critics.

Part I, "Family, Friends, and Authors," brings to light a mosaic of casual, anecdotal fragments reflecting a man who loved singing to his dog, sharpening hundreds of pencils before starting the day's writing, and lifting a glass—many a glass—with friends from an impressive range of social and cultural origins. Not all the outlines that emerge are flattering, however. John Kenneth Galbraith in recalling an accidental meeting with Steinbeck in the Virgin Islands describes the author as "very funny" but also "exceedingly homely"; in mask and snorkel the novelist looks "from shore like some terrible accident of marine miscegenation." Less humorously, Steinbeck's sons and wives from their different angles project a man who maintained no more mastery than the rest of us in the roles of parent and spouse. Interestingly, those closest to him consistently picture him as trying to sidestep the mystifications attendant on celebrity; his son Thom Steinbeck says the craftsman Steinbeck never "believed his voice was the voice of God on any subject whatsoever," and Elaine Steinbeck found the man's humor most appealing, dismissing "pompous" scholars who "think he's the Great Steinbeck and that everything he wrote has to be taken seriously." The witnesses arrayed here give testimony to a man of changes and contradictions: a shy country boy and a famous globetrotter working out of New York; an inveterate mumbler and reluctant public speaker who enjoyed talking profound philosophy and glorious nonsense with his friends; a big, strong man with a "magnificent physique" who generally lost at arm wrestling and suffered debilitating health problems in the end. But by all accounts he was duty-bound to rise early each morning and then work long and hard at his craft. In his own slyly humorous, self-deprecating words, "I want to write something every day, even if—I don't have anything to say." Many days he did have something worth saying in clear, sharp words, and his friend Arthur Miller in his brief remarks targets effectively the monumental accomplishment of The Grapes of Wrath: "Steinbeck's picture of America's humiliation of the poor was his high achievement, which for a time challenged the iron American denial of reality."

The second part of this volume, "Critics, Scholars, and Bibliographers," is a survey of what Steinbeck had to say to esteemed professionals devoted to his work. Several essays take the form of reminiscences, recalling how an unexpected early encounter with the fiction awakened an interest to be sustained through years of academic attention. Robert De Mott's "'Of Ink and Heart's Blood': Episodes in Reading Steinbeck's East of Eden" stands out for its suggestive eloquence and insight among these retrospectives. Roy Simmonds's meandering piece stands out, too, unfortunately, as the rambling recollection of a teenager in London in 1941, whose weary dream leads him to find an abridged version of Of Mice and Men in a bookshop the next day. This is a "true story" ("Cross my heart") but a rather pointless one...