Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

Chapter Three. Home in Pacific Grove

60 for the next five years in pacific grove, John and Carol lived a pared-down life. Mr. Steinbeck had the tiny board-and-batten retreat constructed in 1903, and young John had spent many foggy summers there, poking in tide pools along the rocky coast two blocks from the cottage and riding in the community donkey cart. That little house was his home base—true in 1930 and equally true a quarter century later: “I long for it with almost a pain sometimes,” he wrote to his sister Mary in 1955: “it has a pull almost irresistible . I have never slept in my life as I can sleep there.” But Carol may not have slept quite so well. To shift from communal antics in Eagle Rock to solitude in staid Pacific Grove must have been unsettling for her. Even John admitted that sometimes both felt marooned on the Monterey Peninsula’s foggy tip, where “nothing happens” and they found “no companionship of any kind” for the first year or so. In the 1930s Pacific Grove was insular, far more conservative than the other Peninsula towns—“lackadaisical” Monterey, capital of Spanish/Mexican California, and “bohemian” Carmel, mecca for artists. The local paper bragged about Pacific Grove’s singularity, a “City of Homes” in the “Old American Strain . . . a New England village, a Rochester, Indiana, a Clinton, Iowa, rolled together . . . with all the architecture and traditions that are purely and exclusively American,” a town buffered from Depression woes—hardly the spot for a New Woman. Founded in August 1875 as a Methodist seaside retreat, incorporated as the city of Pacific Grove fourteen years later, the community had long been earnest, pragmatic, and stiff lipped. Until the 1890s a fence surrounded the town with gates locked ceremoniously at 9:00 p.m. each night. Denizens were proud of their conservatism. No “objectionable attractions” like poolrooms or saloons were permitted. Nor was alcohol. “The driest little town on earth” repeatedly “vanquished ” any attempts by wets to bring bars to “saloonless streets” well into the 1960s. “People in Pacific Grove kind of stayed away from New Monterey. All foreigners,” mused gas station owner Red Williams, a man featured in c h a p t e r t h r e e Home in Pacific Grove home in pacific grove 61 Cannery Row. “There was a division between here and there.” “There” Italians covertly bottled homemade wine during Prohibition. “Here” in Pacific Grove, announced promotional brochures of the 1920s, a “high moral tone” was cultivated among the Methodists, along with spiritual uplift and “innocent amusement,” perhaps sea bathing or a stroll along the beach or a spot of roque at local courts. Both physical and mental refinement were encouraged . Summer meetings of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, beginning in the 1880s, featured lectures on everything from opera to marine invertebrates. The natural history museum housed a vast collection of stuffed local birds and mammals as well as a world-class library on the South Seas. Summer festivities and the promise of cool weather brought visitors from California’s hot Central Valley to the foggy Monterey coast. Beginning in 1905, July’s Feast of Lanterns was patterned after lantern parades held in Lake Chautauqua, New York. All over town Japanese lanterns hung from the Victorian cottages and festive boats sailed on the bay at night, decorated with more lanterns. In 1914, as a twelve-year-old, John might have relished two hours of “military stunts” at the celebration, including the engineering corps dynamiting a pontoon bridge and a mounted cavalry equipment race (the cavalry from the nearby Presidio of Monterey). In 1935, the Feast of Lanterns queen was crowned by full-suited deep-sea diver Eddie Bushnell (one of the men responsible for maintaining the underwater pipes that carried sardines from fish hoppers—floating boxes located five hundred to a thousand feet out in the bay where boats unloaded sardines from the late 1920s on—to canneries along the shore). Crown in hand, Eddie emerged from the bay in a hundred pounds of armor, nearly collapsing on the queen. A Butterfly Pageant was begun in 1939 to honor the thousands of Monarch butterflies that landed on Pacific Grove pines each November: “Any Person caught molesting the butterflies will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” proclaimed a sign at the entrance to the grove. The fine was a stiff five hundred dollars. (Fictional butterflies in Steinbeck’s 1954 novel Sweet Thursday get “cockeyed...