Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage
By Susan Shillinglaw
University of Nevada Press, cloth, $34.95
Seventy-five years on, John Steinbeck’s masterwork, The Grapes of Wrath, remains potent reading. The opening prose poem about the drought that drives the Joad family to the promised land of California—“The sun faced down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more”—takes on a new resonance as the Golden State suffers its own arid era.
The book’s politics continue to resonate. It reads like an Occupy manifesto in its indictment of raw capitalism: a bank or a company, “they breathe profits; they eat the interest on money.” The farmers bulldozed off their land link to homeowners displaced by the mortgage crises of the Great Recession.
The Grapes of Wrath grabs the reader with a singular energy that makes it easy to miss the dedication: “To CAROL who willed this book.” The Carol in caps is Carol Steinbeck, who not only picked the title, but also rode herd on the manuscript, the research and the hard years of creation in a rare kind of artistic synergy. For more than a decade, Carol and John Steinbeck were soul mates and collaborators, also birthing The Red Pony, In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men.
And then the publication of The Grapes of Wrath brought fame, money, frenzied attacks and censorship. Their marriage, their artistic union, dissolved in animosity and bile.
In Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage, Susan Shillinglaw fleshes out the book’s dedication and gives Carol Henning Steinbeck her full due. This strong-willed, opinionated, forceful, sharp-witted woman was more than just a supportive wife, more than a repressed Zelda Fitzgerald: “Her story is, in effect, his. His greatest triumph, hers,” Shillinglaw argues.
For many years, the director of San Jose State University’s Center for Steinbeck Studies, Shillinglaw has drawn on her deep access to archives, letters and family interviews for her fascinating study of two people ideally suited to each other for a passionate decade and then doomed to an unhealable rift.
Carol Henning was born in San Jose, four years after John Steinbeck and just a month before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Precocious and witty, Carol was a spirited outsider at San Jose High School; she couldn’t wait to move to San Francisco, where she attended secretarial school, which sounds old-fashioned but was daring for her times, a “modern option that led to a socially useful career in business,” not to mention economic and sexual liberation. Like an intellectual flapper, Carol was “a poster child for the decade: she smoked freely, swore energetically and set her own rules.” She even bought her own Buick roadster.
In the summer of 1928, Carol and a friend vacationed at Lake Tahoe, where would-be author John Steinbeck, a few years out of Stanford, was biding his time working at a fish hatchery. The attraction was pretty much instantaneous. Shillinglaw quotes Carol’s sister, Idell, on the suddenness: “John fell upon Carol like a bear coming out of hibernation would fall on a fresh beef steak!”
As for sex, that came quickly, too, and John was ready, having made “condoms out of fish skins” (“apparently,” Shillinglaw adds for the squeamish). The intellectual connection was even stronger; within weeks Carol was helping John with a play he was writing.
After marrying in early 1930 in L.A., John and Carol moved to a cottage in Pacific Grove, a small town both isolated and yet surprisingly fertile intellectually, not least as the stomping grounds of philosopher/marine biologist Doc Ed Ricketts.
The Bohemian life suited Carol and John. The Pacific Grove years were free of money worries, not because they had a lot, but because no one had much. A party could convene around a cheap jug of wine (“20 cents a gallon”). The relationship even survived Carol’s affair with Joseph Campbell, a young classics scholar (he went on to write The Hero With a Thousand Faces) who had wandered into Ricketts’ orbit and went on tide pool expeditions when he wasn’t mooning after Carol, whose breezy outspokenness had an addictive effect on men.
In the mid-’30s, a deepening interest in politics and the strife and suffering of the Depression pointed the Steinbecks toward a novel about the migrant experience in California. John traveled widely in the Central Valley soaking up the hardscrabble stories of field workers. A good part of the growing sense of outrage on this “pilgrim’s journey to partisan wrath” came from Carol, who was Shillinglaw writes, “the more politically engaged.”
The reach for authenticity in the voices of migrant experience eventually found another valuable contributor, Tom Collins, the manager of a migrant camp at Arvin near Bakersfield. John drew on Collins’ detailed reports for an up-to-the-minute oral history of Oakie life. There’s a good reason that the book’s dedication, below Carol, also mentions Tom.
Carol and John were so immeshed during this period that much of Carol’s character found its way into the female characters, especially Ma Joad. Summing up the impact of The Grapes of Wrath, Shillinglaw points out that John managed to tie together all the strands of the “genres documenting poverty in the 1930s”—from photojournalism to folk songs to documentaries—into a blended narrative that combines a wide view of history and nature with precise, person-by-person close-ups of migrant pain. And Carol was indispensable to this achievement.
The rest of John and Carol’s saga unravels unhappily, the intensity of their creative yoking dissolving as simply as a “spinning top running out of momentum can easily be tipped off axis,” in Shillinglaw’s astute image. A fruitful but very contentious research cruise with Ricketts led to The Log of the Sea of Cortez and some embarrassing scenes between the fracturing couple. Finally, John took up with a younger woman, Gwen Conger, and Carol’s anger took over, especially when she was drunk.
Carol and John Steinbeck does a valuable service in exploring a model of creativity beyond the usual solitary-genius trope. In Shillinglaw’s analysis, their marriage achieved something “larger than both individually, with art the ‘keying mechanism’ of their marital bond.” His name is on the cover of every edition of The Grapes of Wrath, but Carol lives in all of its pages.
Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World—From the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief
By Tom Zoellner
Viking, cloth, $27.95
Following in the tracks of Paul Theroux, journalist and English prof Tom Zoellner succumbs to the lure of railroad travel, even if it can be slow, late, cramped and dangerous. He calls our ongoing love-hate relationship with trains “Train Sublime,” and waxes rhetorical about “the tidal sway of the carriages, the chanting of the wheels striking the fishplates, the glancing presence of strangers on their own journeys and wrapped in private ruminations.”
In Train, Zoellner embarks on long-distance journeys across England, India, America, Russia, China, Peru and Spain. Less cranky than Theroux, the author eagerly welcomes the phenomenon that railroad brought to the world in the early 1800s, when “people were suddenly forced to talk with strangers.”
He strikes up impromptu friendships with fellow travelers, relishing the conversational possibilities; the train, he writes, is “always a hot herbarium of stories.” More than once, his romantic tendencies lead him to read a little extra into the sight of a beautiful stranger. In the introduction, Zoellner confesses that he has never forgotten, after 20 years, the vision of a young woman across the aisle of a Pennsylvania train: “We were standing perfectly still, yet moving over parallel lines of steel, and she seemed like a ghost in the dim light.”
The flipside of romanticism is a solid grasp of the historical, political and social upheavals that trains made as they ushered in the industrial era. Zoellner deftly interleaves fascinating asides about Chicago’s meatpacking era; the resource-sucking design of the Trans-Siberian (“The train was basically a straw through which to suck money into St. Petersburg”); the demographic effect of China’s high-speed rail system on Tibet; and the economic significance of the sprawling Indian rail system, a “giant Keynesian jobs juggernaut.”
The chapter on the arduous route through the Andres comes complete with a harrowing visit to the engine cab, where a moment’s distraction could spell a runaway disaster—as well as the story of a roguish San Francisco promoter named Henry Meiggs. Chased from the United States, Meiggs landed in Peru in 1868 and convinced President José Balta to built an impossibly difficult Trans-Andean line. The project turned out to be a boondoggle, but somehow the rails got laid and the resources of the Andes got laid bare for exploitation.
The final chapter looks at Spain’s successful high-speed trains, and then asks if the United States has the same will to build, particularly in California. The proposed S.F.-L.A. link is fraught with cost overruns. In addition to budget complaints, some conservatives (Zoellner cites George Will) recoil at the whole idea of trains, which they consider collectivist and anti-individualist. Zoellner remains optimistic, but the book was finished before Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom threw some cold water on Jerry Brown’s (and Arnie’s and Gray Davis’) pet project.
Transit politics aside, Zoellner is really at his best evoking the mystery and gravitational pull of the long train ride. His imagery is often striking: “Our progress across the midsection of Siberia had been steady but almost invisible, like a man growing older but not understanding when, exactly, the gain had taken place.” His depiction of the industrial outbacks that trains traverse and freeways often miss is priceless: “Deserted streets arrowed away, and apartments shuffled past like a series of Edward Hopper paintings on an educational filmstrip.”
Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store
By Daniel Herbert
UC Press, paper, $29.95
The recent debacle on HBO’s Go site that squirreled the streaming of the last episode of True Detective might make some people nostalgic for the good old days of DVDs or, even better, videotapes. Daniel Herbert’s fascinating new study, Videoland, recalls a time that seems impossibly remote, even though it barely ended a decade ago.
Starting in the late 1970s, the video-rental store quickly transformed the distribution and consumption model for movies. What had once been a social spectacle dictated by Hollywood became a home experience controlled by the consumer. The video store, Herbert argues, turned movies into commodities.
By the late ’80s, there were some 30,000 rental outlets in the United States, exceeding the number of theaters. In 1987, rental revenue surpassed the box-office returns.
With the rise of even more convenient alternatives—DVDs by mail from Netflix, ubiquitous Redbox kiosks and Internet streaming, a drop in the purchase price of DVDs—the video store retreated, with behemoths like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video failing. A number of the independent stores that Herbert wanted to study for Videoland were going out of business even as he tried to arrange interviews for the book.
Herbert raises some intriguing ideas about how video stores, especially the independents, spread movie culture. The best stores were always quirky. Part of the experience was the social interaction between customer and clerks, who were forthright in their likes and dislikes. Stores often functioned as “de facto film schools.” The phenomenon persists; the other day, I visited Video USA in Aptos, where Sharpie-scribed notes by the clerks still flutter in the aisles like origami cranes.
The video store, like the independent bookstore, is threatened but still vital. Even as vinyl and early videogames beckon a new generation with the lure of the retro, “people continue to value the tangibility of video and the materiality of the video store.” Some companies are now issuing films on VHS again; in New York, fans of vintage technology united to save Video Free Brooklyn. In an increasingly immaterial world, Herbert speculates, people crave the “tangible media in a public space.”
Conceived as a research project, Videoland suffers from a surfeit of academic prose (overuse of “valorization,” for starters) and the university press habit of stating the thesis of every chapter before getting down to the nitty-gritty. Still, Herbert, who clerked at a video store before attending graduate school, got out to a lot of video stores for substantial first-hand reporting, and he evokes some fond memories.
I was especially transported to the ’80s by the photograph of that ubiquitous shaming tableau posted by the register at many video stores: the twisted lump of melted plastic that was once a functioned tape accompanied by the dire warning “Tape left in the car in the hot sun! Don’t let that happen to you.”
What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night
Edited by John Brockman
Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99
The title of the new compilation volume What Should We Be Worried About? cries out for a reader’s response: “What shouldn’t we be worried about?” The book is a project of the website Edge (née the Reality Club), which annually surveys scientists, philosophers and assorted deep thinkers about speculative topics. As any born worrier might suspect, there is no end of things to worry about, which makes this a good bedside title for insomniacs.
The more than 150 bite-size entries in What Should We Be Worried About? run the gamut from the obvious (climate change, duh) to field-specific fretting (scientists apparently worry a whole lot about finding new big-budget experiments to pursue), from familiar hand-wringing about social media (we’re too connected; no, we’re not connected enough) to both fear of and excitement about artificial intelligence. Surprisingly, given the current political discourse, there are only a few passing references to income inequality, but maybe that’s something that scientists don’t lose sleep over.
Steven Pinker’s mini-essay about the “Real Risk Factors for War” seems especially prescient in its analysis of narcissistic leaders embarking on “imperial adventures,” even if he doesn’t cite Vladimir Putin by name. Equally troubling in light of the failure of government to regulate and Wall Street to atone is psychologist Randolph Nesse’s warning about the “hidden fragility of complex systems,” especially in the machinery of global finances.
Columnist and author of To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov skewers Silicon Valley hubris by noting that so-called “smart solutions don’t translate into smart problem solvers.”
Although we are perfectly capable of destroying our own world, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak reminds us that “an attack by malevolent extraterrestrial beings” is a legitimate concern and not just “shabby science fiction.” As seems both appropriate for a printed book and a trifle hypocritical for a printed book generated by a website, David Gelernter argues that “the Internet forces a general devaluation of the written word,” which in turn “creates pressure … to downplay or eliminate editing and self-editing” (which gives the dwindling breed of editors ulcers).
Contrary to the red flags hoisted by modern Malthusians, Kevin Kelly of Wired says that our real problem is what happens after we reach peak population, and society starts to become both smaller and older, with significant effects on economic growth. Completely missing the point of Battlestar Galactica, tech author Rodney A. Brooks figures that we’re going to need a lot more robots than we’re currently working on in order to take care of that aging population.
Given the somewhat elitist nature of the project, many of the scientists in the anthology worry about anti-scientific thinking, mass stupidity and inadequate science education—or what psychologist Douglas T. Kenrick terms the “looming idiocracy.” He doesn’t mention the Tea Party by name, but the inference is worrisome.
As a countermeasure, several contributors take the “meta” route and discuss the possibilities and limitations of worry and anxiety as human traits. Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson thinks that people waste valuable time worrying about the wrong things. Psychiatrist Joel Gold calls worry a “corrosive” force that renders us passive and helpless.
To leaven all the worst-case scenarios, Monty Python original and director Terry Gilliam confesses, “I’ve given up worrying. I merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me … and marvel stupidly.” Or, as Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman once quipped, “What, me worry?”
