Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

Preface

xi 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. Preface xii prefac e 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...