Of Mice and Men and a pet rat – and much domestic twaddle

Brian Beacom bemoans a missed opportunity to explain what informed a great American novelist

THERE are two dangers in reading a biography of a famous person such as John Steinbeck when written by a partner. The first is you are offered up revelations that can impact upon your appreciation of the talent. The second is that, while the writer may write in detail about, in this case a writer, they can’t write very well.

My Life With John Steinbeck: The Story of John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Wife, has been written by his second wife, Gywn Conger Steinbeck, and from the outset it certainly informs the reader of the character of the man who produced classic novels such as Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck, we are told, grew up in a “lovely outpost of American life, in Salinas, California,” doted on by his mother and three sisters and expected to be doted on by every woman he’d have a relationship with from that point. Gwyn Conger, a former nightclub singer, met Steinbeck in 1938 while he was married to his first wife, Carol. Conger reveals there was an immediate attraction but she didn’t sleep with him because she “didn’t want to become a marriage wrecker”.

Steinbeck, essentially a functioning alcoholic at this point, came to play upon Conger’s obvious attention but then played her off against his wife by putting them in the same room and telling the pair to work out which one of them needed him most.

“I know you both love me,” said Steinbeck. “And I have been thinking. I want you to talk this out. What do you want to do about me?” Conger backed off at this point but the pair eventually came together and married.

Yet, however besotted Conger was with him, she didn’t fail to spot his “acts of cruelty”. Steinbeck, she recalls, had a pet rat. “John was a sadistic man, of many emotions, but being sadistic was one of his many qualities. And he would let the rat loose to frighten visitors, especially women.”

Steinbeck, according to his second wife, enjoyed the affections of many women. “Life with Steinbeck was quite a combination of heaven and hell – I never knew where one started and the other left off,” she writes.

However, what Conger fails to illustrate is why she was content to live with an unfaithful husband. Could love forgive all? Was she happy to live with a person who was obsessed with his work? It seems so.

But the depth of her concession isn’t detailed. She does add, however: “I was never, ever bored with John; angry, yes. But how could you be bored with a man who always had something exciting to say, even if he made it up with his immense imagination?”

Conger seems to rely on broad strokes rather than precision. The book, for example, references Steinbeck’s pal and drinking partner Burgess Meredith, the actor, several times but we don’t get a sense of the depths, or otherwise, of that relationship.

There is a hint in a tale about Steinbeck’s relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, who was interested in developing his novella Lifeboat as a film. But Conger explains the dynamic all too simply. “He was a determined man, while Alfred Hitchcock was a powerful man, in his way.” No way!

What we do get is lots of insignificant detail, about the houses Steinbeck and Conger lived in, how the writer liked