Scholar reflects on creative partnership
Wednesday marks 82 years since the 1939 publication of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” by Viking Press in New York City. Considered his most successful work, it sold more than 400,000 copies in its first year and earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction a year later. The book has since sold more than 14 million copies.
The story of a dispossessed family, who traveled from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, the novel portrays laborer exploitation by the system of agricultural economics during the Great Depression. It was not without early controversy. Some communities, appalled by the book’s use of obscene language and its themes, banned or burned the book. The Associated Farmers of California reportedly declared the book “a pack of lies.”
Yet Eleanor Roosevelt was so moved by the book that she wrote in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, “Now I must tell you that I have just finished a book, which is an unforgettable experience in reading. ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ by John Steinbeck, both repels and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.”
It was not for the faint of conscience or conviction.
Steinbeck’s story inspired the First Lady to explore the living conditions of labor camps in person, after which, she prompted Congressional hearings about labor law reforms and wage regulation.
Although Steinbeck was inspired to write “The Grapes of Wrath” after reporting on migrant labor camps, it was his first wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, who came up with the title. She borrowed it from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” First published in 1862, the song begins, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. . .”
Carol Henning Steinbeck also typed up her husband’s manuscript.
More successful than his journalism was his storytelling. John Steinbeck had the fa
cility to craft a story out of the issues and experiences of his era, leaning wellchosen words against each other to make his tales enduring, memorable and, in many ways, relevant today.
Yet 82 years later, it is Steinbeck Scholar Dr. Susan Shillinglaw of Pacific Grove, whose research, consideration and own writing have created in her the capacity to interpret Steinbeck’s words to provide insight and perspective for contemporary readers.
Complexities of a creative partnership
Susan Shillinglaw isn’t sure Carol Henning ever got over John Steinbeck. The first of his three wives, she married for love — and so did he. Bright, creative, social and smart, she became his editor and typist, his collaborator and his muse. Until she wasn’t.
“Carol and John were great together when they were poor, pulling together,” said Shillinglaw. “He was trying to make himself heard, to write a really important book, and she was helping him make that happen. After ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ was published, when they had done what they set out to do, their life and their marriage changed.”
Suddenly, the Steinbecks had money and different, formidable friends. John was receiving notoriety, being asked to speak about his phenomenal book, while his wife faded into the endpapers. They drank too much, argued too often, slipped into different sensibilities. Then a younger woman entered the scene, which doomed the marriage. Steinbeck had written a sad tale, yet his wife had begun living her own.
Twelve years after their mad love affair had begun, it was over. She left town for a while, and he remained on the Peninsula.
Shillinglaw has developed a sense of his writing and his relationships as if she knew them all well. Already widely published on Steinbeck, including articles and scholarly essays, introductions to his books, and books of her own, she had been considering her next book when she actually took inspiration from Hemingway.
“I read a really good book on Hemingway’s wives,” she said, “which opened a window into who he was. I wanted to do that book, on Steinbeck’s wives, and Carol was a really good place to start. I wasn’t really keen to write much about his second wife, Gwendolyn Conger, and his third wife, Elaine Anderson, was adamant that her biography not be written. Carol was really his collaborator. Without her, I don’t think he would have been the writer he was.”
“Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage,” published in 2013 by the University of Nevada Press, is the compelling story Shillinglaw so wanted to write, yet it didn’t come quickly or easily.
“It was a book,” she said, “that took a long time to write. I felt like I had produced another child. I’d gotten material about Carol in 1990 from Sharon Brown Bacon, her stepdaughter from her subsequent marriage, yet the book didn’t come out until 2013. I wasn’t writing the whole time; I was figuring out how to write it.”
Creating the context of a story
When Shillinglaw read “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” by Stephen Greenblatt (2010), she realized he’d written a compelling book despite knowing only fragments of the Bard’s life, complemented by elements of culture and the forces that shaped the man. That, she felt she could do, on behalf of Carol Henning Steinbeck.
“So, I wrote a story about John and Carol’s world, about what the Peninsula was like in the 1930s, what it was like for them to go on their Sea of Cortez trip. Even though they didn’t really talk about it,” she said, “everyone else did, so I could tell their story from other perspectives. That freed me to write it. Even when you have a story to tell, you still have to figure out how to tell it.”
What emerged in the story is an examination of things that have happened to women, to wives, and the extent to which women have felt erased or their voices silenced. While Henning chose freely to marry John Steinbeck, says Shillinglaw, she kind of silenced herself in giving up her career as a secretary for A. Shilling & Company in San Francisco and becoming his editor, the woman behind the man.
“Even if we make conscious choices,” said Shillinglaw, “we can’t completely know what it will be like, what will come up, until we live it. Carol did creative things — poetry and fanciful drawings Charlie Chaplain loved — but her voice was muted. She didn’t have a full-throated outlet. She wasn’t heard, so she didn’t come into her own. She became unhappy.”
And yet, Henning was deliriously happy at the start of her relationship with the man who was becoming “John Steinbeck.” She and her sister were on vacation in Lake Tahoe, when they noticed a sign which Steinbeck, who was working at a fish hatchery, had hung on his door: “Piscatorial Obstetrician.”
Steinbeck, having left Stanford for New York, which he believed all serious writers needed to experience, had abandoned his plan after a dispirited year, and had left for Lake Tahoe. In addition to odd jobs caretaking an estate and fertilizing fish, he did complete his first novel, “Cup of Gold.” Yet perhaps his most fortuitous moment was in meeting Carol Henning, who shared his sense of humor and, soon, his life.
Learning to love Steinbeck
Susan Shillinglaw read Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” during junior high school and hated it. She actually hates any story where an animal suffers or dies. So, she swore off Steinbeck, vowing never to read him again. Yet Shillinglaw, a professor of English and comparative literature for 34 years at San Jose State University, served 18 years as director of San Jose State’s Center for Steinbeck Studies. She also was a scholar-inresidence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and is considered one of the top Steinbeck scholars in the world.
“I love teaching and talking with students,” she said. “I also like writing, gardening, traveling, and Steinbeck. He decided at age 14 to be a writer; he had such a clear vision of who he was and what he wanted to do. He had such a singleminded career; he wrote every day—fiction, nonfiction, postcards, plays. He was obsessively a writer.”
Shillinglaw did accept Steinbeck in high school when she was assigned to read, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Today she considers it a story worth reading and then re-reading years later, with a little more life experience.
Shillinglaw is currently at work on a book about Steinbeck’s landscapes, which she is endeavoring to write in a personal voice as opposed to the academic tone in which she was trained. “To make it personal and write it as creative nonfiction is a whole different writing challenge,” she said, which is keeping her up at night. In a good way.