Following the Steps of the Hero:An Approach to Jim Nolan's Initiation Journey in John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle Oana Melnic (bio) John Steinbeck's use of Mythical Patterns has been much discussed, along with his interest in Jungian psychology. At the beginning of 1932 he met Joseph Campbell, "who was becoming one of the foremost authorities in mythology" (Benson 223), and even earlier talked with Evelyn Ott, a former student of Jung's who became a psychiatrist in Monterey (Rodger xxviii). Ed Ricketts had befriended Ott a few years before while pursuing his own interest in Jungian thought. Both proved to have a powerful influence on Steinbeck's writing, as his second novel To a God Unknown (1932), clearly attests. Robert DeMott notes that "[f]or a while, Campbell and Steinbeck enthusiastically shared their parallel investigations into anthropology, ethnography, psychology, primitivism, mythology, comparative religions and Arthurian romance" (DeMott, Introduction to To A God Unknown xxviii). "[A]ccording to Carol [Steinbeck]," Benson observes, "her husband picked up a good bit of useful material from [Campbell]. Yet although Campbell was the mythologist, he feels he may have learned more from Steinbeck about the relevance of myth than vice versa" (Benson 223). The influence was probably mutual, and so was their fascination with symbols and myths, for as Campbell points out in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, myths "carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self" (Campbell 8). The effervescent dialogues in Ed Ricketts's lab that frequently explored the depths of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical theories, yielded long term results, shaping both Steinbeck's [End Page 91] and Campbell's ways of perceiving the world and of expressing its truths. Writing to Campbell in 1946, Ed Ricketts described his friend's transformation over the years: "Seems like you're blossoming out as a writer at a great rate," Ricketts wrote. "I have to readjust my mind to think of you that way. As a thinker and a teacher, but not until now as a writer" (Rodger 247). Like Steinbeck, Campbell was aware of the importance of "that sense of integration with a whole picture" (ibid.), of the impossibility of real knowledge and understanding of "one" outside the context of "many," of the individual psyche detached from the Jungian "collective unconscious," of the tide pool apart from the stars. Hence he became an "integrator of myths and literature" (ibid.), one of the most eloquent expressions of his power of "integration" being the acclaimed The Hero With a Thousand Faces, published in 1949. As for Steinbeck, the process of writing To A God Unknown, and the discussions with the Lab Group led, in spite of the "humility and terror" and "[f]ear that the workings of [his] pen cannot capture the grinding of [his] brain" (A Life In Letters 64), to another novel steeped in Jungian ideas, In Dubious Battle. Even though published thirteen years earlier than The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Steinbeck's 1936 novel bears a striking resemblance to Campbell's book, its focus being a hero's initiation journey and the elaborate processes inherent in "self-discovery and self-development" (Campbell 23). Robert DeMott notes in his introduction to Steinbeck's To A God Unknown that "[t]he hero's spiritual quest toward self-realization was to become one of Campbell's supreme subjects, . . . [and] undoubtedly enlarged Steinbeck's view of Joseph Wayne's mythic dimension and the several stages of his progress, from his call to action through his transformation" (xxviii). But Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle is generally not read from the same perspective, probably because the use of mythical/archetypal images is not as obvious as in To a God Unknown. Abby Werlock addresses the "mythic image" of the Madonna Steinbeck uses in In Dubious Battle, and which Campbell felt "may have come out of their discussions" (Benson 223), and agrees with Warren French that Jim is "very much a Percival figure . . . on a quest . . ." (Werlock 53). James David McTee talks about mysticism and initiation in In Dubious Battle, applying to Steinbeck's novel the precepts expressed by Evelyn Underhill in Mysticism...
Cumulative Index, The Steinbeck Newsletter And Steinbeck Studies Volumes 1 to 15 (1987 - 2004) Compiled by Robert Harmon Click for larger view Figure 1 The First Steinbeck Newsletter, Produced in Fall 1987 [End Page 212] In the fall of 1987 the Steinbeck Research Center (now the Center for Steinbeck Studies) at San José State University published the first issue of The Steinbeck Newsletter. Two issues per year or one combined issue were published annually. Included in the Newsletter have been articles by Steinbeck scholars and others, reviews of related books, articles, dramatic productions, conferences, and some bibliographic work. In the summer issue of 1990 Steinbeck specialist Lee Richard Hayman began his column "Again Please?" which corrects errors about Steinbeck appearing in various publications. The column "Steinbeck Today" started its run in the Summer 1993 issue which includes interesting news items, headlines and references to Steinbeck sent to the editor designed to keep readers informed of what is going on currently with respect to Steinbeck studies. News about the Center for Steinbeck Studies' collections and activities are contained in a "Notes from the Director" column in most issues. The Steinbeck Newsletter is replete with interesting illustrations and photographs, which enhance its appeal. Beginning with the 2001 Winter issue, Vol. 13, no. 1, the title changed to Steinbeck Studies. This new title should not be confused with a journal published by The John Steinbeck Society of Japan which bears the same title. With volume 15 (2004), Steinbeck Studies was greatly expanded and changed to a traditional 6" by 9" journal format. * * * This index has been compiled to assist readers in finding needed information quickly. It is divided into three sections covering Author/Names, Titles, and Subjects. For most items the information is presented at a shallow level [End Page 213] excluding items within articles, and imprint information. Additionally, there is a Reviews Index, including Article Reviews, Book Previews, Book Reviews, Musical Performance Reviews, Opera Reviews, and Play Reviews. Author/Name Index The names of those submitting major articles for this journal are included in this section. You will also notice many cross-references to individuals who have reviewed books, plays, operas, and musical performances. Those who are collaborative authors, written introductions to books, or have been cited as significant contributors to operas, plays or musical performances are also covered. There are some instances where an author has a nick-name listed or has not given a middle initial. For those who are well known in the field, the full given name and middle initial are provided. AAGARD, Al [pen name for Albert Walton DeRome] "Last days of the Pilchard," 13:2 (Fall 2001), 19-22. (Introduction by Debbie Gilbert.) ARIKI, Kyoko. See Reviews Index, Book Reviews. ARISS, Bruce. See Reviews Index, Book Reviews. BAIN, Robert. "Two versions of the West: The Grapes of Wrath and The Big Rock Candy Mountain," 10:1 (Spring 1997), 14-17. BARBOUR, James. See Reviews Index, Article Reviews. [End Page 214] BARRIGA, Joan B. "Lark on a barbed-wire fence: Ruth Comfort Mitchell's 'Of Human Kindness,'" 2: 2 (Summer 1989), 3-4. BASKIND, Samantha. "The'true' story Life magazine, Horace Bristol, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath," 15: 2 (Winter 2004), 41-74. BENSON, Jackson J. "Remembering Professor Peter Lisca." 13:2 (Fall 2001), 33. See also Reviews Index, Book Reviews. BENSON, Philip A. "Fifty-thousand-dollars' worth of jelly beans," 12: 2 (Winter 2000), 1-4. BERGON, Frank. "Louis Owens in the East," 14:1 (Fall 2002), 10-11. BETTINGER, Jin. "Abalone,." 15: 1 (Spring 2004), 141-142. BEYER, Preston C. "John Steinbeck and the Armed Services Editions," 4: 2 (Summer 1991), 5. BIXLER, Paul. "Book, banned By Greene County libraries, is offered to public by Antioch College," 6:1 (Winter 1993), 10-11. BLUM, Richard H. A. See Reviews Index, Book Reviews. BOSSE, Kay. "Staging Steinbeck: building 'To a God Unknown,'" 12: 2 (Winter 2000), 18-20. [End Page 215] BOSTON, Jenny. "Every picture...
A Foolish Consistency:Sparky in Cannery Row John Ditsky (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ritzi "Tiny" Colletto (left) and Horace "Sparky" Enea on the Western Flyer in the Sea of Cortez [End Page 124] The late Sparky Enea, especially to those who might have met him at the Salinas Steinbeck Festival, was a colorful fellow whose historical importance derived from his having been part of the crew of the Western Flyer on its 1940 Sea of Cortez odyssey. But Enea also makes his appearance in scant but fictionalized form in a work of fiction, for John Steinbeck gives him a walk-on role in his 1945 best-seller Cannery Row. But Enea's permanency in print is tarnished a bit. Somehow his name became transformed, when it appeared in Chapter 25 of the original Viking edition, to "Evea"; and no one then or since seems to have noticed or at least troubled to make a correction (166). Should anyone care to argue that Steinbeck was deliberately disguising the identity of his onetime shipmate, we must note that he also appears with his name correctly spelled in Chapter 11 (70) . In fact, the name continues to appear in both versions in subsequent typesettings of the novel—in the 1986 reissue (69, 157), for instance, as well as the 1994 Susan Shillinglaw-introduced Penguin edition (66,148). Moreover, and most recently, the definitive Library of America edition (2001), for all the care Bob DeMott put into its scholarly apparatus, subverts that care by persisting in the error (143, 202). Thus Enea appears damned to an eternity of doubleness! John Ditsky John Ditsky has retired from the University of Windsor, where he taught for thirty years. He has written extensively on Steinbeck and music. Copyright © 2005 Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies
Bibliography:A Tribute to Lee Richard Hayman and a Brief Description of His Collection Jennifer Uchiyama (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The dustjacket of Autobus auf Seitenwegen, a German translation of The Wayward Bus (Zürich, 1958), one of the treasures of the Lee Richard Hayman collection [End Page 190] Steinbeck aficionado, teacher, and collector Lee Richard ("Dick") Hayman lovingly and diligently amassed a huge and variegated collection of John Steinbeck-related materials over a 36-year period, beginning soon after Steinbeck's death in 1968. Mr. Hayman generously donated his extensive collection to the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies in 2004, where it will be available for researchers soon. Born in Indianapolis in 1922, Mr. Hayman moved to what he called the "salubrious part of the world," the Pacific Coast, in late 1958. He taught English at Salinas High School and was an active board member of the Steinbeck Foundation in Salinas. His avocation for anything and everything Steinbeckian eventually led him to collaborate on several books and, beginning in 1971, to teach "the World of John Steinbeck," a survey of Steinbeck's life and works, at Pepperdine University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, as well as at Salinas High School. Hayman was probably best known to Steinbeck Newsletter and Steinbeck Studies readers for his regular column "Again Please?" in which he used his biting wit to set straight errors and myths about Steinbeck's life and work that appeared in the popular media. A believer that anything by and about Steinbeck belonged in his collection, Hayman built up a striking array of written material and memorabilia. Hayman's collection contains many items that any self-respecting Steinbeck collector would want, such as the over 2000 primary and secondary books, including signed firsts and other rare editions. But Mr. Hayman also had a keen eye for [End Page 191] ephemera, and filled numerous boxes and filing cabinet drawers with magazines, newspaper clippings, catalogues, pamphlets, photographs, and audio-visual materials. Dick Hayman's legacy of collecting Steinbeck, which ranged from a Shqipe (Albanian) translation of The Grapes of Wrath to five boxes of newspaper articles to needlepoint creations, will serve in perpetuity as a rich resource for Steinbeck researchers and casual browsers at the Center. The passion of a collector such as Mr. Hayman may be eccentric and consuming in the moment, but it also becomes an invaluable resource to later generations. It is our good fortune that Mr. Hayman was so passionately preoccupied for so many years. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Lee Richard Hayman Brief Preliminary Description of The Collection The Hayman Collection can be divided into four categories: books and other writings by John Steinbeck, books or other written material about or related to John Steinbeck, ephemera material associated with the life and works of John Steinbeck, and other works in various formats connected to the life and career of John Steinbeck. Books and other writings by John Steinbeck: Included are books and pamphlets by Steinbeck, books with contributions by Steinbeck (anthologies, introductions, cookbooks, etc.), and periodical articles/short stories/opinions by Steinbeck. Hayman [End Page 192] collected many first editions, including a signed first edition of East of Eden, as well as foreign editions in over 20 languages (from western European languages to Hebrew to Thai). Books or other written material about or related to John Steinbeck: Included are all major biographies devoted to Steinbeck and literary criticisms on John Steinbeck's works. Also in this category are the biographies of Steinbeck's family and associates and genre material, i.e. the Depression, the Dust Bowl, Migrant workers, and California. Ephemera material associated with the life and works of John Steinbeck: Included are a wide array of ephemera ranging from book publisher's posters to film and theatre performances (playbills and articles) to bookseller catalogues. Other works in various formats connected to the life and career of John Steinbeck: Included in this category are audio-visual material and miscellanea. Unique to this collection are the taped interviews by Lee Richard Hayman with those who knew Steinbeck in his younger years and with...
The Story of John Steinbeck in Communist Czechoslovakia Petr Kopecký (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Steinbeck, Adolf Hoffmeister, and Edward Albee together in Prague, 1963 [End Page 80] It would not have occurred to me to write an article on this subject had it not been for the time I spent researching at San José State University as a visiting Fulbright scholar. It was only there, surfing the bookshelves in the Center for Steinbeck Studies, browsing through the translations into a host of languages, that my curiosity about Steinbeck's literary conquest of my native country, Czechoslovakia, was aroused.1 I wondered why Steinbeck's popularity in Czechoslovakia arguably surpassed that in his own "country" of California.2 More importantly, I was interested in the way Steinbeck was (mis)interpreted by literary scholars, journalists, and editors in the communist era (1948-1989), which is the focus of this study. Afterwords, dictionaries, and reviews thus form the body of critical resources upon which I draw here. American Literature in Totalitarian Czechoslovakia Before scrutinizing Steinbeck himself, it appears necessary to outline the environment in which the publication of Steinbeck's work took place. Geographically landlocked, Czechoslovakia was politically locked into the eastern bloc—the key was in the Soviet hands. The only permissible ideology was communism as postulated by Marx and Lenin. The capitalist world west of the Czechoslovak frontier was portrayed as corrupt and evil. The country that symbolized all the vices of the West was America. As Joseph McCarthy's America persecuted everything "un-American," communist Czechoslovakia went after the American [End Page 81] as well. A small American flag on a T-shirt could bring the wearer a lot of trouble. The state-controlled media systematically drew a very bleak picture of America. The anti-American propaganda was not necessarily mendacious but it showed just one side of America, especially its crime, unemployment and obscenity. In an age when the world-wide web was not yet woven, it was hard even for the inquisitive citizen to get access to reliable information about American reality. The lack of facts about American society, the American economy and related fields was compensated for by literary accounts. Consequently, American literature was not studied only for literary purposes but also provided useful insights into the life of real America. That would not have been possible without the effort of the translators who made the best works of American literature accessible to readers in Czechoslovakia. The years following the communist takeover in 1948 were characterized by the all-permeating ideology of Marxism and Leninism, which naturally affected the critical reception of literature. In practice, it was Stalin's ideological guidelines as formulated in his essays that caused considerable damage in publishing. In 1952, a remarkable ideological guide to Western literature was published in Czechoslovakia. It bore the suggestive title Trubaduři nenávisti: Studie o současné západní úpadkové literatuře (Troubadours of Hatred: A Study of the Contemporary Decadent Literature of the West). Its author, Jaroslav Bouček, aimed to reveal "the close relationship between literature, whose goal is nothing but to sully and degrade man, and the prolonged degeneration of the capitalist order which is currently coming into a monstrous fascist bloom" (Bouček 7). In his attack, Bouček did not even spare Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck. Despite "critics" like Bouček, American literature remained largely popular with Czech readers. As the preeminent Czech Americanist, Josef Jařab, states in his afterword to the Czech translation of Ruland's and Bradbury's From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, "the editors of English and American sections [in publishing houses] enjoyed a certain 'protection' from the directorate; that, however, was gone once an 'ideological mistake' happened" (Jařab 402). The publishing house which deserves the greatest credit for introducing quality American literature was undoubtedly Odeon. Yet the good taste of its editors was often "corrected" or wholly [End Page 82] marred by the censors from the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, to which all the yearly editorial plans had to be submitted. In fact, the publication of every...
Affirming Whiteness:Visualizing California Agriculture Marilyn Wyman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Guardian of the Waters, San Diego, California [End Page 32] The Guardian of the Waters (Figure 1) looks down over the citizens of San Diego.1 As a fountain, she signifies the importance of water in the development of culture and community in the otherwise hot, dry climate of California's southernmost metropolitan center. Sculptor Donal Hord, raised in this dry southern California climate, understood the vagaries of what geobotanists call the "Sonora Zone." In an essay written for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, Hord acknowledged the dynamics of water —its availability, its conservation— as the essential issue of the region.2 For Hord, the vagaries of nature rather than personalities determined the development of his Southern California community. But Donal Hord's Guardian, completed for the Works Projects Administration Federal Art Project in 1939, is more than a symbol of the forces of nature in the Southland. She also signifies the growing nativism of the Depression years and the need to reaffirm traditional American values within a population displaced by unemployment and failed farms. Although Guardian of the Waters appears to us today as a rather cumbersome, if not benign, figure, unenthusiastically viewed by those who espouse the power of modernism over regionalism, her appearance in 1939 sparked a controversy that cut to the core of the American-ness of the Federal Projects themselves. Guardian of the Waters is a twelve-foot tall silver-grey granite figure standing on an eight-foot drum embellished by a stylized landscape and anthropomorphized clouds. She looks out over the [End Page 33] federal plaza with downcast eyes while lifting to her left shoulder a Yuma (Indian)—style water jug from which life-giving water symbolically flows over the arid southern California land. Her skirt, emphasizing her compact nature, is composed of stylized pleats and folds inspired by the thick, fluted, columnar stem of the native Saguaro cactus. A shawl wraps around her upper torso and covers her head. Who is this guardian lifting the jug of water in silent prayer? To some, she was the archetypal American pioneer woman—strong, valiant, self-reliant, and capable of dominating an inhospitable environment. For others, her broad facial features, shawl and jug all pointed to one ethnicity — Mexican. And, in the race-conscious environment of the 1930s, they were outraged. Hord and his supporters from the San Diego Fine Arts Society successfully defended the commission, and Guardian of the Waters was completed as proposed. The heated controversy surrounding her features, the disdain for an image that looked Mexican and was therefore "deviant," (un-American) would be played out in the 1930s on many stages throughout California. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Mural in U.S. Post Office, Modesto, California By contrast, in the California Central Valley city of Modesto (Figure 2), white farmers look down from the walls over citizens as they enter the main post office. Grain in the field waves in an unseen breeze; tractors plow across the fertile fields; conveyor belts hum as they move the crop to waiting market trucks; women stand with baskets laden with the succulent fruits of the harvest. No Dust Bowl here; no trace of migrant laborers; no sense of the poverty and displaced field workers who made these crops possible— who made this farm successful. [End Page 34] This benign farmer and his wife give little evidence of the underlying alienation of the Depression years in California — the potent nativism; the fear of legal and illegal aliens in the fields; the need to reaffirm American-ness in a state with a large Mexican and Mexican-American population and a burgeoning population of migrants displaced by the Dustbowl of the American Midwest. Nor does this mural speak to the decimated farms in the heartland of the United States. The stock market collapse in October 1929 was not the first signal that the American economy was in trouble, but few people paid much attention to the American heartland. Landowners in the Midwestern or Plains states had financially over-extended themselves during World...
June 1, 2003 Dear Katie, I’ve just returned from a trip to the Sea of Cortez and since it involved the Baby Flyer and the Hansen Sea Cow, I thought you might like to hear about it. The idea was to visit as many of the Steinbeck/Ricketts collecting sites as I could get the Baby Flyer to. I left three weeks ago in my “Travels With Maggie” rig with the Baby Flyer in tow. Since I knew that my 1936 Sea Cow would no-doubt find pleasure in playing mind games with me — and since there were to be some long stretches to cover — I took along a more modern and reliable outboard motor: a thirty-year-old 15 hp Evinrude that had been salvaged from the bottom of the Willamette River in Oregon. Indications were that the motor had spent at least a year on the bottom of the river. As for the Sea Cow, it was extremely important for the motor to be running for at least part of the expedition. A friend of mine, David Vaughn, is perhaps the remaining guru of the really old Johnsons. After explaining where I was taking the motor and why it was critical to have it run, David took pity on me and agreed to take the project on. A few weeks later he called me to say that he had gone through the entire motor “and now it runs like a fine Swiss watch. You won’t have any problem,” he said. It was then that I knew I was in trouble. The Sea Cow had snookered my friend, ‘made a chump out of someone who really cared. I thought of this motor’s brother when Steinbeck referred to the latter: “It loved no one, trusted no one. It had no friends.”
To John Steinbeck Lucia Trent (bio) Your weapons are not shot or splintering shell. With simple words you telescope the hell In which our migrant countrymen are bogged. No wonder those who've diligently hogged The acres' bounty cry against the light Your pages channel down the stolid night. More than a thousand scientists' research Your single fiery work of art will smirch The lords of profit and all their greedy ilk: The poor of heart whose bodies swell in silk, The poor of soul whose smugness breeds decay While fellow humans toil their lives away. John Steinbeck, men salute your daring name You photograph so well a nation's shame! Lucia Trent Lucia Trent (1897–1977) and her husband Ralph Cheyney were activist poets of the early twentieth century. Together, they edited the magazine Contemporary Vision. She published many works intended to raise the consciousness of the middle and working classes, including Children of Fire and Shadow (1929) and Thank You, America! (1937). “To John Steinbeck” appeared in a periodical in 1938 or 1939, and then was published in Davis' Anthology of Newspaper Verse for 1939: 21st Annual Edition (New York: Henry Harrison, 1940). Copyright © 2005 Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies
The Translation and Reception of John Steinbeck in Slovenia: A Bibliographic Exploration Vesna Krajnc Click for larger view Figure 1 John and Elaine Steinbeck (wearing hood) touring in Budapest, Magyarorszag (Hungary). Steinbeck's works were widely disseminated in Eastern Europe before he took this tour in 1947 [End Page 178] John Steinbeck is known among Slovenians as the writer of social protest novels exposing the difficulties of living in the United States. He is remembered as an empathetic reporter of fearful conditions on American farms during the 1930s, as a correspondent during World War II and the Vietnam War, and as a Nobel Prize winner for literature. Critics in Slovenia championed his work and helped him achieve popularity based upon his theme of social injustice, but this oversimplification also stunted his Slovenian readership's ability to appreciate the breadth of his literary and aesthetic accomplishments. Steinbeck's name can be first traced in the Slovenian periodical press in 1938. An unknown author of the article "An English novel of the previous year" thought that "Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was the only novel of American prose worth mentioning, beside Hemingway's To Have and Have Not."1 Steinbeck's name appeared only twice more in Slovenian newspapers before any of his works were translated into the Slovenian language; in 1939 Anton Debeljak mentions him in the article "American Literature Today" in Jutro magazine2 (Steinbeck was also briefly mentioned in an anonymous article called "Notes" in Jutro in 1940). An article from 1943 about a Slovenian storyteller Gelči Jontes states that "the publishing house Plug is planning to translate several works of world-famous authors, among them: Herman Melville, Luigi Pirandello and John Steinbeck."3 The times that coincide with the beginnings of Steinbeck's literary career were not promising, neither in America nor in Slovenia. No wonder the works of foreign writers on Slovenian [End Page 179] bookshelves were rare. Neither is it surprising that Steinbeck's most famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) elicited the biggest interest when it was translated in 1943. The translation was the work of Rudolf Kresal and it was published by Plug.4 An inappropriately translated title and many foreign expressions, especially in Croatian (the translator probably used a Croatian version of the book from 1940) bothered an unknown critic who wrote the article "John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath."5 The Slovenian language has changed a lot since 1943, and recent readers are also puzzled by the archaic expressions. Not many critical discussions can be found in Slovenian periodicals. Božidar Borko's article "Two Translations" (1944) mainly summarized the novel's content.6 After the first of Steinbeck's novels had been translated, it was followed by a several years pause which ended with a study, published in the magazine Novi svet in 1947. In "About the social novel in the United States of America," Russian author A. Starcev condensed his analytical review of socially realistic fiction in the United States.7 The first chronological survey of Steinbeck's work appeared in the article "The latest Steinbeck novel," published in the weekly Ljudski tednik in 1947.8 That same year a series of translations from the novel Tortilla Flat appeared in Ljudski tednik.9 A fragment from the novel can also be found in the newspaper Tovariš, translated by Anton Debeljak, named "Searching for Treasure."10 An important turning point in translating Steinbeck's works into Slovenian occurred in the 1952 and 1953. These years inaugurated the beginning of serial successive translations of his books. The first among them was the short novel Of Mice and Men.11 It was translated by Meta Gosak and published by Slovenski knjižni zavod in 1952. In the foreword, Božidar Borko claimed that "Of Mice and Men was the book that made [Steinbeck] one of the most popular American authors." Nonetheless, the translation of Of Mice and Men garnered even less critical attention than...
The Wayward Bus:Steinbeck and Queer America Kim Welter (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Dan Dailey and Jayne Mansfield in The Wayward Bus (1957), Directed by Victor Vicas [End Page 66] Divorce a Text from its political, historical and biographical realm and you separate what a text means from how it means. This is what has happened to John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus. The critical reception of The Wayward Bus indicates that readers have failed to see the relationship between the text and other contemporary texts and context sources. By bringing the context of the post World War II years in which The Wayward Bus was written into a close reading of the text, I will demonstrate the intertextuality that provides a way to talk about this text and how it comes to have meaning. I will reconnect The Wayward Bus with other contemporary texts, all of which were originally connected for Steinbeck, who was unable to divorce his texts from politics. Using Queer Theory and the context of Steinbeck's world, I will unghost the lesbian characters in The Wayward Bus. Personal identification was the inspiration for analyzing the identities of Steinbeck's women pilgrims, lesbians in their desires if not through genital sex. Further, the analysis of context also demonstrates how this little known novel comes to have meaning. In The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck has provided the reader with a fascinating series of character sketches, complete with innermost desires described for the reader. By analyzing the desires articulated by Mildred, Camille, and Norma, Steinbeck postulates a variety of ways that women deal with same-sex desire. Without regard for the political, historical, and biographical aspects of Steinbeck's life, critics and scholars have ignored The Wayward Bus and the desires it articulates. [End Page 67] Doing a Queer Theory reading of John Steinbeck's work, particularly a reading of lesbian characters seems a dubious undertaking, considering the preponderance of heterosexual male characters in most of his work. However, Steinbeck's biographer, Jackson Benson, tells us that many of Steinbeck's friends were artists who have either come out of the closet in recent years, or been outed by other writers. Steinbeck's 1947 novel The Wayward Bus is filled with characters that perform their sexual identities and lay bare their intimate sexual desires in a variety of ways. Applying ideas from Judith Halberstam's book Female Masculinity offers insight into how society views a masculine woman like Mildred Pritchard and her college physical education instructor. Halberstam also offers three physical archetypes for lesbians that Steinbeck seems to have considered as well. The first archetype, like Mildred, is masculine in appearance; the second, like Camille, is very feminine; and the third, like Norma, is unattractive in general. Additionally, when considering Camille Oaks, Katherine Liepe-Levinson's essay "Striptease: Desire, Mimetic Jeopardy, and Performing Spectators" is about, among other things, how striptease can be a way for white, middle-class women to make their personal and political spheres "strange" (queer?). That no one seems to be noticing these aspects of The Wayward Bus can be attributed to its relative obscurity in part, but may also be attributed to the difficulty heterosexuals have in reading queer identities and to what Terry Castle calls the ghosting of lesbian characters in general. As much as some critics object to Lillian Faderman's inclination to believe many woman-loving-woman relationships do not include genital sex, her ideas do apply to many of the characters in The Wayward Bus. Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's description of homosocial behavior among men, Faderman's ideas represent homosocial behavior among women, like Camille, Lorraine, and Norma. As a middle-class white woman who ignored my own lesbianism for more than half my adult life, I immediately connected with both Mildred Pierce and Norma. That I recognized in them my own experience makes me a reader who may not be typical for The Wayward Bus. My own personal experience as a lesbian who spent many years attempting to prove otherwise lends the events in this novel credibility that other readers may not grant it. [End Page 68] I happen to agree with...
A Question of Memory: Bing Crosby and The Grapes of Wrath John Ditsky Click for larger view Illustration 1 Thomas Hart Benton's illustration for The Grapes of Wrath of musicians performing at a Goverment Camp [End Page 132] In the "hamburger stand" fifteenth chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, there are three mentions of crooner Bing Crosby that almost seem to give structure to this single intercalary exercise. In the first paragraph, for instance, a typical such traveler's stop is described, with a trio of slot machines sitting next to a juke box—Steinbeck calls it a "nickel phonograph"—with its "records piled up like pies, ready to swing out to the turntable and play dance music, 'Ti-pi-ti-pi-tin,' 'Thanks for the Memory,' Bing Crosby, Benny "Goodman" (208). At this point the five terms seem an arbitrary listing of one genre, two specific numbers, and two artists— though what relationship in logic they might have to the hamburger stand's clientele (truck drivers, haughty tourists, migrants) can only be guessed at. Five pages later, when tourists have come and gone and a pair of truck drivers have entered, we have also been introduced to the proprietors, Al and Mae, who have a respect for the working men of the road. Then it is that one of the latter "puts a nickel in the phonograph, watches the disk slip free and the turntable rise up under it. Bing Crosby's voice—golden. Thanks for the memory, of sunburn at the shore— You might have been a headache, but you never were a bore—'And the truck driver sings for Mae's ears, you might have been a haddock but you never was a whore—"(213). As the truck drivers finish their coffee, the recording comes to an ending: . . . Bing Crosby's voice stops. The turntable drops down and the record swings into its place in the pile. The purple light goes off. The nickel, which [End Page 133] has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play—this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. This nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction. (214) Thereafter, the chapter occupies itself with an account of a horrific accident involving migrants on the road, and the visit of the stand of actual needy migrants to whom Al and Mae respond with unostentatious generosity. The chapter, in which physical aspects of mechanisms and sweetness are raised to a level of observations Steinbeck would not match until The Wayward Bus, ends with another pair of trucks about to indulge in a rich pie while "cars whizzed viciously by on 66" (221). The philosophical implications of round wheel, pie, and recording will have been covered amply—or nearly so—by now. What concerns me here is a smaller business intimately tied into what the singularly useful nickel causes—the creation of music, if not also the benign behavior of its listeners. It is, specifically, a recording of "Thanks for the Memory" as sung by Bing Crosby. Wheel, pie, and music; the sweetness of selectively remembered time. It all goes together. But wait a minute! Surely "Thanks for the Memory" belongs not to Bing Crosby, but to Bob Hope, who (tributes on his recent death most ceaselessly reminded us) broke into motion pictures by singing the song in a segment of The Big Broadcast of 1938—and was associated with it ever after—not Bing Crosby (the likelihood of whose appeal to truck drivers being best left for another venue). Crosby and Hope as a radio team were still off in the future in 1938, and their Road pictures far over the horizon. I can't find an entry for a Crosby cover of "Thanks for the Memory" at all, and most certainly not by 1938. Ralph Rainger wrote the lyrics to...
“What's Your Opinion of…Steinbeck's Prose? John Ditsky (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. John Steinbeck at the "Scoppia del Carro" festival in Firenze, Italy, on Easter morning, April 21, 1957 [End Page 156] That's a Line From a Major Number, "Conga!," from the 1953 Broadway musical Wonderful Town, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and the late Adolph Green. The show was only recorded as late as 1958, when it captured (after a telecast) the notable starring performance of Rosalind Russell. To many of us who remember the original telecast, the question to be asked over nearly half a century has been, "Why not again, or since?" But that's an aficionado's query; to others, it's a matter of what "Steinbeck's prose" is doing in a '50s musical, and to what it refers. In fact, Wonderful Town is itself a musicalization of the 1940 stage adaptation (by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov) called My Sister Eileen of the autobiographical contributions to The New Yorker of the late Ruth McKenney, who constantly deferred to her sister Eileen as the pretty one of the duo. These stories can also be called Steinbeckian in tone, as indeed they are—stylistically reminiscent of the journalistic pieces Steinbeck wrote for money during the last decade of his life. The McKenney sisters came to New York in 1933, though the stage versions suggest 1935 as the likelier date—which still doesn't give much explanation for the question of "Steinbeck's prose." The McKenney girls came from Ohio (whether Cleveland or Columbus is up to which version you are reading); suffice it to note that William Dean Howells had taken literary Ohio out of the Wild West three-quarters of a century before the McKenneys were in business. Ruth wanted to be a writer, and such she became; her sister's pheromones were directed towards the male [End Page 157] gender, and when the stories and play (and eventual film version) take leave of her, Eileen has become the wife of the Hollywood screenwriter (and fictionist) Nathanael West. The latter two died together in a car crash in 1940, just days before the play version opened. Bernstein, and Comden and Green, were just into the writing of what might be properly called a Saga of New York City when they took on a failed draft stage version of My Sister Eileen (with music by Leroy Anderson) and converted it into a successful Broadway production in the space of not quite a month. But let's finally get to "Steinbeck's prose." It isn't likely that anyone would have remarked upon that commodity as an object for discussion in 1933, or even 1935. What then? In fact, little of what was gathered together as the story collection My Sister Eileen ever made it into the stage or film versions, though interestingly, Ruth's pursuit of a journalistic career leads her to work on a book following the history of the United Rubber Workers of America (205) Obviously, Steinbeck was at roughly the same time ready to start working up his studies of migratory farm workers into what would become The Grapes of Wrath. The two may thus have been kindred stylistic spirits by reason of their shared sympathies. "Conga!" is the only story—then entitled "Beware the Brazilian Navy"—to make it more or less recognizably intact into the later staged versions of My Sister Eileen. In it, Ruth pursues the notion of interviewing visiting Brazilian Navy personnel, reputedly the heirs of coffee fortunes, on a shore visit to Manhattan. As eventually staged, the story becomes a manic episode in which the mariners pursue Ruth, who is in turn trying to ask the usual inept questions about their impressions of "good neighbor" America; in return, she (improbably) teaches them to dance the conga, which of course only excites them further. McKenney's Eileen stories are, as noted, primarily autobiographical, in spite of the title of a later anthology of all the stories, All About Eileen. Whenever one piece entitled "Love, Marriage, and Broadway" was actually written, it speaks of a second...
Awe and Humility and Joy: A tribute to John Steinbeck Preview of an exhibition Ron Clavier Artist Ron Clavier describes his next major exhibition of oil paintings as a tribute to the author's exquisite visual power as well as his political philosophy. According to Clavier, "Steinbeck's provocative metaphoric use of the redwood forest expresses his passion for the towering ideals that define what is great about American society. He extends the metaphor to convey his contempt for those who, for their own selfish profit, would tear down those same ideals." Quite a few years ago, when I was living in my little town on the coast of California a stranger came in and bought a small valley where the Sempervirens redwoods grew, some of them three hundred feet high. We used to walk among these trees, and the light colored as though the great glass of the Cathedral at Chartres had strained and sanctified the sunlight. The emotion we felt in this grove was one of awe and humility and joy; and then one day it was gone, slaughtered, and the sad wreckage of boughs and broken saplings left like nonsensical spoilage of the battle-ruined countryside. And I remember that after our rage there was sadness, and when we passed the man who had done this we looked away, because we were ashamed for him.1 Clavier's twenty-six images are inspired by passages in which Steinbeck champions individuals, often disenfranchised, who strive to establish their place in the larger society. In search of his images, Clavier explored the Salinas Valley and environs in [End Page 121] five separate trips, beginning in 2001. Some were easy to find; it was as if Steinbeck had provided a verbal map guiding him to the treasure: Click for larger view Figure 1 "We're There" (The Grapes of Wrath) "A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green."2 Other images needed more detective work, and Clavier spent many hours in the archives of the National Steinbeck Center (Salinas), and the Center For Steinbeck Studies of San José State University. He expresses his appreciation for the generous help and encouragement he received from Dr. Susan Shillinglaw, Herb Behrens, Neal Hotelling, and others. Clavier says he believes that Steinbeck's greatness resides in his sense of social responsibility and integrity, and in the desire to help the reader. "Honesty, humanism, and humour have been guiding principles in my own life. I thank Steinbeck for his magnificent articulations of the ever present need for these qualities." Ron Clavier studied and taught Neuroscience at Northwestern University Medical School before turning to painting. He currently practices Clinical Psychology in Toronto. Notes 1. John Steinbeck, America and Americans (New York: Bantam, 1966) 148. 2. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) 7. [End Page 122] Click for larger view Figure 2 "Stoop Crops" (The Grapes of Wrath) Click for larger view Figure 3 Hour of the Pearl (The Pearl)
Hidden Treasure:The Steinbeck-Rudloe Letters Thomas Manning (bio), Suzanne Matos (bio), and Brian Adler (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A Jumble of Specimens from Ed "Doc" Ricketts' Lab. [End Page 108] A half century ago, in the midst of a productive literary career, John Steinbeck published The Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday, a work of nonfiction and two novels centered on the life of a marine collector. Later in life, Steinbeck was good friends with a young man who lived in the Florida panhandle named Jack Rudloe, the founder and managing director of Gulf Marine Specimen Laboratory in Florida. His education and research facility is nestled off the thready highway that cuts through the sleepy fishing town of Panacea, located on the Sunshine State's Gulf Coast. Rudloe is an outspoken conservationist, marine naturalist, and gifted collector. Gulf Specimen has provided specimens to over thirteen hundred institutions across the nation for teaching and research purposes. Rudloe is also an avid writer. The author of nonfiction books, a novel, and numerous articles, he is a critically respected and well-received teacher and storyteller. Perhaps one of the vehicles that paved the way for Rudloe's personal success was the unlikely correspondence that he shared with Steinbeck. They exchanged over thirty letters (recently given to the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University) and this relationship had a significant influence on modern day marine science, from natural products to ecology. That a young New York transplant, struggling to make a place for himself within a small oceanside community, was able to catch the attention of the 1962 Nobel laureate may seem odd. Rudloe was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lived there until his early teens, when his family moved to Lanark Village, a small [End Page 109] town on the Florida Panhandle whose population scratched out a living from oysters, crabs, fish and timber. In the late 1950's and early 1960's Rudloe, as a teenager, was looking for opportunities along the rural panhandle and realized that the Gulf of Mexico was a boundless resource: "[T]here was basically a market for marine life, I was interested in it, there was diversity there, and I was able to spark a small business, which was supplying animals to labs in schools and . . . the marine environment is a much richer area than anything terrestrial. So once you get out here there's a much greater diversity. And not only that, there was a much greater interest in marine life as opposed to spiders or frogs" (Personal Interview. Note: All direct quotations by Rudloe in this article are taken from this same interview). The social novelist was a former Stanford marine biology major, and Rudloe's stationery caught his attention. "I had a little letterhead with a picture of a hammer head shark and an eel on it or something like that," said Rudloe, "and it said Gulf Specimen Company at the time." Jack also focused on one of Steinbeck's personal treasures: The Log of the Sea of Cortez (1941). Along with Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), these works all focused on the life of a marine collector. In catching Steinbeck's attention with a letterhead that appealed to the author's fondness for marine science, and in focusing on a book the prize-winning writer himself held dear, Rudloe was able to breech the fortifications set up against "flatterers," those "people who want something," as Steinbeck put it in a letter to Rudloe. As Rudloe explained, the intertwining of writing, language, science, and study was set as the two began a correspondence that would span more than four years and would include three visits. According to Rudloe, "And that's where we began our correspondence. And at the time, I'm saying to myself, 'Well, can I really do this?' because there was no guidelines, and it was, it was just an idea. I picked up a few little orders here and there. I didn't know what the heck I was doing." In referring to both his marine collection activities and some early writing...
Reviewed by: John Steinbeck's “Of Mice and Men”: A Reference Guide Mimi Gladstein (bio) John Steinbeck's “Of Mice and Men”: A Reference Guide Barbara Heavilin Praeger, 2005. 134 pp. Barbara Heavilin's study of and guide to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men has much to recommend it. She provides interesting and informative chapters on the Contents, Texts, Contexts, Ideas, Narrative Art and Reception of the novel/play. There is also a brief bibliographical essay. Having gone over some of this same ground in my years of teaching what I consider a well constructed, almost perfect work of narrative art, it is always pleasing to me to find a writer who brings something new to the criticism, makes me look at the novel in a fresh way and gives me more ideas to introduce in the classroom discussion. Heavilin's particular strengths are demonstrated during her explications of the narrative art of Steinbeck's novel. Particularly refreshing is her comparison of Steinbeck and Wordsworth, which is part of her more comprehensive argument about the poetic quality of the novel. She writes: "Steinbeck's intentions in writing his novel parallel the British Romantic William Wordsworth's stated purpose in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: to write about 'humble, rustic people, using their own language or dialect' " (61). Heavilin then adroitly continues the comparisons, highlighting characterizations and poetic language. Her emphasis on the shared qualities of poetry and drama are right on point. In a subsection of the chapter on "Ideas," Heavilin introduces the idea that Steinbeck wrote "lovingly and carefully" about some characters that society might consider "grotesques in their midst" (47). These she identifies as "the old and feeble, the mentally ill and mentally handicapped" and also those who might be considered grotesque because of gender or race. It is an interesting [End Page 145] image, one that Heavilin connects to Wordsworth's conception of the poet. I was surprised, however, that there was no discussion of Sherwood Anderson, whose influence on the writers of Steinbeck's generation was significant. Steinbeck considered him one of the inventors of the modern novel and was familiar with Winesburg, Ohio, in which Anderson coins the usage of the term "grotesque" to describe the people in his fictional small town who have been variously stunted or negatively affected, mostly psychologically, because of the familial and societal limitations of their environment. "The Book of the Grotesque" serves as an introduction to the novel. Heavilin's use of the term stimulated me to see many parallels in Steinbeck and Anderson, not only in Of Mice and Men, but also in the portrayal of characters in Pastures of Heaven and The Long Valley. Heavilin's volume is brief, although there is a certain irony in the fact that it is longer than the work it is studying. While the brevity is not a problem in chapters such as the one on Content, other chapters might have benefited considerably by expansion. The bibliographical essay is particularly troublesome since this work is sub-titled "A Reference Guide" and as such should be a resource for students, writing papers and/or larger research projects. In the bibliographical chapter Heavilin produces a "Works Cited" list of only twenty-seven sources, which in itself might not be problematic if her "Works Cited" had been followed by a more comprehensive bibliography. There are brief lists of "Works Cited"' after each chapter, but there is none for the work as a whole. With nearly seven decades of criticism to draw from, a bibliographical essay that has such a meager bibliography is disappointing. The discussion of the criticism she does cite is adequate although Heavilin privileges the readings of Charlotte Hadella and Louis Owens, devoting half, some seven pages in a fourteen page section of the chapter called "Critical Trends," to their readings. Owens and Hadella have added much to the scholarly dialogue on Of Mice and Men , and I am a great admirer of their work, but by weighting the chapter so heavily toward two critics, many important essays are ignored. Just off the top of my head I note the absence of Mark Spilka, William Goldhurst, Anne Loftis, Marilyn McEntyre...
Bibliography:Durable Steinbeck Greta Manville (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tom (Jody), played by Peter Miles, listens to Billy, played by Robert Mitchum, in this scene from The Red Pony (1949), Directed by Louis Mileston [End Page 194] Two scholarly journals devoted solely to the study of Steinbeck's life and art brought forth a wealth of new material in 2004. Steinbeck Studies, beginning with volume 15, changed over from a large magazine format to a standard journal format, but Editor Susan Shillinglaw retained the use of archival photographs helpful to understanding the man and his milieu. (A cumulative index of the journal's essays, articles, and reviews follows this essay.) Steinbeck Review (SR), edited by Stephen K. George and Barbara A. Heavilin, is a brand-new offering, also in standard journal format, and started off with the broad perspectives noted individually herein by subject. Heavilin and George also produced Steinbeck Yearbook: Steinbeck's Sense of Place (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2003), Vol. 3 in the series (SY3). The editors' individual introductions point to the new spirit and the power of place in Steinbeck studies. The volume divides thematically into five essays on sense of place and three on comparative studies, several of which are reprints; the new essays are documented herein. Memorial tributes recognize Elaine Steinbeck and recently deceased Steinbeck scholars. Seven peer reviews conclude the volume. Significant new selections from other sources, published over the previous two-to-three years, but not reported here, provide evidence of Steinbeck's continuing—and ameliorating—appeal in the twenty-first century. By far the greatest attention has been directed to The Grapes of Wrath, but an abundance of cultural, philosophical, psychological, and ecological studies display an outpouring of interest in Steinbeck's work, overall. [End Page 195] On The Grapes of Wrath From a cultural standpoint, which comprised the preponderance of focus on Grapes, evaluations of the novel's social value, combined with personal reflections attest to its durability. Patricia Leigh Brown's "Oklahomans Try to Save Their California Culture" (New York Times 5 Feb. 2002, sec. A: 22) tells of former occupants of the Weedpatch camp who describe life as it was—while members of the Dust Bowl Historical Foundation attempt to restore the remaining buildings. Michael Kinsman's column (Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 Nov. 2002: Item 02307015) points to social injustices toward migrant workers in present-day California that parallel those found in the struggles of the Joad family. In "The Lingering Shadow: The Grapes of Wrath and Oklahoma leaders in the Post-Depression Era" (Chronicles of Oklahoma 81.1 [2003]: 80-103), Jennifer J. Collins examines how the stereotyped image of an Okie, forever characterized by Steinbeck as a Dust Bowl migrant, shaped Oklahoma's economic, educational, and political policies after the 1930s. Personal essays by Tracy Daugherty in Five Shades of Shadow (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003), which are primarily reflections on the grief brought about by the bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah building, mention Steinbeck throughout the book. Daugherty gives credit to reading Grapes for his first understanding of the power of language to evoke the world, thus illuminating the struggles of women and men. "The Meredith March" by Paul Good (Reporting Civil Rights. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America, 2003. 510), briefly compares the 1966 gas mask attack by highway patrolmen on civil rights marchers at Canton, Mississippi, to the masked tractor drivers in Grapes. Robert W. Snyder, in his chapter "John Steinbeck" in American Rebels (ed. Jack Newfield. New York: Nation Books, 2003. 173-80), states that in Grapes Steinbeck's detailed knowledge of the migrants' struggles united fact and fiction with a vitality that should not be obscured by a reputation battered by critics since the Depression. By scalding America's injustices and affirming the strength of its working people, Steinbeck's best work echoes through his successors in American culture. In a brief mention by activist Anita Roddick in "My Five Most Influential Books" (Ecologist Oct. 2003: 61), she says she has campaigned for the past twenty-five years against "free-trade-at-all-costs" and identifies Grapes as...
in my Dozen yeArs of reCorD reviewing for Fanfare, I never encountered as much deliberate marking-over of a package as those borne by my review copy of this second Steinbeck-based opera to be released by the Albany label—including, absurdly, the covering-up of its catalog number. I mention this only because in every other respect this production deserves to be called nearly flawless—though some might wish the recording had been done without an audience present. But a few coughs and stage noises, and the final applause, are not enough to cause serious cavils among listeners used to Saturday afternoon radio opera broadcasts.
