William Souder - Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck in 1954. (Yousuf Karsh)

MAD AT
THE WORLD

A LIFE OF

JOHN
STEINBECK

William Souder

For my wife, Susan Sperl

Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire,

The atom to be split.

ROBINSON JEFFERS

CONTENTS

I N THE C ALIFORNIA winter, after the sun is down and the land has gone dark, the cool air slips down the mountainsides that flank the great Central Valley, settling over the fields and tules below. When conditions are right, the night air forms a fog so dense that you cannot see your own feet on the ground. These fogs can last for days, and sometimes fill all 450 miles of the valley.

To the west of the Gabilan Mountains, in Monterey County near the ocean, lies another, smaller valley. Once it was an arm of the sea. Ninety miles long and shaped like a sword, it follows the course of the Salinas River, which runs north to Monterey Bay. The valley is flat between the Gabilans and the Santa Lucia mountains that separate it from the Pacific. Here, a different fog comes in summer, when inland heating draws in a marine layer of cooler, moist air from the ocean. This sea-born fog does not lie still on the land, but seeps over the folded hillsides, rising and falling along the river bottom. When the fog comes and the mountains are hidden, the world is an abstraction and you are alone with your thoughts. But the gray veil lifts. The light returns, the scene changes, and the fog retreats. Day by day the mountains turn from blue-black at dawn to pale gold under the sun and the towering sky, and the earth of the valley floor is lined with rows of lettuce, some a mile long.

In the winter of 1902, in the midst of a drought, the skies over the Salinas Valley opened. On February 27, the Salinas Daily Index reported that the Salinas Riverwhich in the dry season ran underground in placeswas out of its channel. Trees along the banks had water six feet up their trunks. A tangle of deadfall and debris had swept through the valley overnight in the flood, and those who had been praying for rain began praying for it to stop. That same day, in a large, Queen Annestyle house in a well-to-do neighborhood of the town of Salinas, Olive Steinbeck gave birth to her third child and only boy. They named him Johnlike his father, like his fathers father.

One world was ending; another, beginning. The promise of the new century was that nothing would remain the same for long, including Americas place in the world. With the Victorian Age barely over, the Steinbecks baby boy hurtled into a future he would help to write. Before his second birthday, Wilbur and Orville Wright would fly. And within months of his death, Neil Armstrong would walk on the moon. In between, John Steinbeck tried to tell the story every writer hopes to get right, which is only how it was during one small chapter of history. It is not much to ask, but the hardest thing on earth to do.

Thousands of years before John Steinbeck opened his eyes, bands of nomadic Indiansmost recently the Ohloneranged through the Salinas Valley. They lived on game, fish, and shellfish, plus plants and seeds gathered in the woods and on grasslands sustained by controlled burnings that kept down the brush. The Ohlone also raised tobacco and managed a fraught coexistence with rattlers, mountain lions, and the now-extinct California grizzly bear.

In 1602, a Spanish explorer, Sebastin Vizcano, sailed up the California coast as far as the estuary of the Salinas River. Captivated by the harbor near the rivers mouth, and by the panorama of mountains and rocky headlands that curled into the Pacific around the northern and southern ends of a great bay, he named the place Monterey. In 1769, a Spanish expedition coming overland from Baja reached the southern tip of the Salinas Valley and found it an unpromising place. The hills, their report read, gradually became lower, and, spreading out at the same time, made the canyon wider; at this place, in sight of two low points formed by the hills, it extends for more than three leagues. The soil, the report continued, was poor and offered treacherous footing, as it was full of fissures that crossed it in all directions, whitish in color, and scant of pasture.

It would take more than two centuries for Spain to enforce its claim to Monterey Bay and throughout the rest of Alta California, as this region north of Baja was known. The Spanish established religious missions, built presidios, or forts, and connected the settlements with a 600-mile north-south road, El Camino Real. They brought livestock to the Salinas Valleylean, compact cattle good for hides and tallowand tried irrigation schemes at several of the missions, damming rivers, excavating canals and reservoirs, and building aqueducts. As poor as the land appeared, water transformed it into a garden of astonishing abundance. Almost anything would grow on it. The Spanish carved out ranchos for grazing, and introduced a novel form of bullfighting in which bulls were made to fight bears.

After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, Alta California was loosely administered as a Mexican territory. In 1846, the United States declared war against Mexico. It was the same year that a group of American settlers led by James Reed and George Donner became snowbound in the mountain passes near Truckee, in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California. Nearly half of the Donner Party, as it came to be known, perished. The others survived by eating their dead family members and friends. The tragedy demonstrated the arduousness of the journey at the heart of Americas so-called Manifest Destiny, a call to occupy the country from sea to sea that was encouraged by President James K. Polks administration. Immigrants from Europe, having crossed an ocean, now undertook the longer voyage across a continent, wresting the land from native peoples on whom they visited new diseases, the destruction of the bison herds, and a ceaseless war of conquest. The extent of the United States reached violently and inexorably westward. In February of 1848, the war with Mexico ended, and in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the United States purchased a vast area between Texas and the Pacific Ocean, including Alta California, for a little more than $18 million. One month earlier, gold had been discovered at Sutters Mill just east of Sacramento. As prospectors poured into California, it raced toward statehood, which was ratified on September 9, 1850, at Colton Hall in Monterey.