Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

Chapter Seven. California Is a “Bomb Right Now . . . Highly Explosive”

164 mexico was a seminal journey. In the spring of 1936, a refreshed Steinbeck sat down to write with a transformed sensibility. Both imaginatively and physically, he would leave his valley of the world and turn to the world at large, his focus changing from roots to routes (a distinction made by Paul Gilroy in his study of the African-American diaspora). Roots demand an attachment to a place based on history and deep connections, which is one way to describe all of Steinbeck’s fiction through Tortilla Flat. But routes trace movement and involve fluid boundaries of identity, home, and place. Steinbeck ’s prose composed during the next five years—Of Mice and Men, “The Harvest Gypsies,” “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” The Grapes of Wrath, and Sea of Cortez—all follow routes: of tramps in 1920s California, of Okies in the 1930s, of Steinbeck and Carol and Ricketts at sea in 1940. That spring, while John hammered together a temporary writing room in Pacific Grove, Carol orchestrated their departure from the Monterey Peninsula and relocation to Los Gatos, about an hour north. With Ed Ricketts sixty miles away, Carol would become John’s regular sparring partner and sounding board. There is no period in their lives where her identity slips so fully into his work, no period when so little of her distinctive voice is in evidence. But neither is his own voice, for that matter. He seems to have written fewer letters to Elizabeth Otis, his agent, to Pat Covici, his editor, and to old friends—at least fewer letters survive—and instead corresponded increasingly with partisan artists and activists. During this time, Steinbeck would run on overdrive, motoring through California’s immense Central Valley, committing himself to the migrant cause, and working furiously to capture the story of the migrant journey to California. And he was married to a woman who “willed” his searing social commentaries into being, who willingly served as researcher, typist, editor, and title-maker for two novels that would become the signature works of the Great Depression, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. California Is a “Bomb Right Now . . . Highly Explosive” Writing The Grapes of Wrath c h a p t e r s e v e n c a l if or nia is a “b omb right now” 165 Carol shadowed every step of this pilgrim’s journey to partisan wrath and kept their reaction to social injustice turned on high. Her conscience was his, his wrath hers. Their indignation meshed, as they worked together on his “big book,” The Grapes of Wrath. This novel is his most nuanced treatment of the constructive and destructive potentials of the phalanx, of its psychological as well as social implications: Tom Joad and Casy slowly keying into partisanship; the Joads joining other migrants moving west on Route 66; the California Farmers’ Association (in reality the Associated Farmers) donning “hoods of hate . . . pulled down over the heads of men” in vigilante violence. Writing about California workers in both Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck depicts those with the deepest roots as rigid and uncompromising—the Boss or Curley or Carlson, landowners or the Farmers’ Association run by the “Bank of the West” (Bank of America). These fiercely rooted Californians resist change and furiously assert their right to maintain control. Confronting this bastion of the established are the “routed,” like George and Lennie and the Joads, and all those whose fictional lives are fluid, liminal, pitched to survival, creative. The lives and emergent identities of wanderers were those that Carol and John set out to understand and record. The town of Los Gatos was an “energetic place,” John admitted soon after he and Carol arrived in May 1936. The choice of Los Gatos, at the southern end of the Santa Clara Valley, was largely Carol’s idea, no doubt. She hated the foggy Pacific Grove summers, which inflamed her sinuses. Her spirit expanded in the sun, and, according to John, she needed sun more than food. And he agreed that summers in Pacific Grove were “lousy.” Balmy Los Gatos, on the other hand, had endless days of summer sun, and a climate once celebrated as one of the two most ideal in the world (the other was Aswan, Egypt) in a 1905 article in the British medical journal The Lancet. In 1936, it was a charming town of thirty-five hundred nestled against the western slope of the...