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Steinbeck! Is he hero or SOB?
Who would have guessed in 1902, when California had fewer than one and a
half million people, that one particular baby born in the tiny town of
Salinas would eventually win the Nobel Prize for literature, mostly for
tales of his native state and often his native county? John Steinbeck used
the local clay to mould masterpieces. He wrote about ordinary people.
Whether they were Okie immigrants fleeing starvation, poverty and the dust
bowl, or sardine canners, marine biologists and other denizens of a hard
scrabble world centered in Monterey, Steinbeck made them immortal.
In 1942, while I swung from Eucalyptus trees in Seaside (tearing my corduroy pants)
and my mother worked a few months in the sardine canneries of Monterey,
Steinbeck was absorbing the smells, the ambience, and the knowledge he
needed to write Cannery Row. More than sixty years after Steinbeck wrote
about them, many Californians are once again reading about Oklahomans
fleeing to California in the "Grapes of Wrath."
Sixteen year olds at Terra Nova are learning what life was like in a time almost as remote to them as
the Civil War was to me when I was 16. Okies were part of my childhood. I
had no idea they could be the stuff of literature. Steinbeck was not a PR
man, nor did he write the kind of puff pieces that make Chamber of Commerce
managers feel good. His books are still banned from time to time in some
places for their powerful words. Not everyone wants such words or such
thoughts to become part of the mental processes of others. Salinas, his
hometown, is still ambivalent. Is he a hero or a devil, undercutting the
shiny image of the place where he was born? Is he a son to be proud of, or
an SOB and an embarrassment? My alma mater, San Jose State University, has
seized the opportunity and created a center for Steinbeck studies.
Steinbeck certainly knew where Salada Beach and Pedro Valley were. Could he
have written books about the Italian immigrants who grew the artichokes
that were shipped nationwide? Very likely! Might he have fictionalized the
lives of the Del Rossos, the Magrins, the Pittos, the Bistolfis, the
Malavears, and made them bigger than life? Absolutely, just as he did some
folks from Oklahoma, and some sardine canners of Monterey. A few farmers'
sons and daughters, now into their seventies, remember when the lands that
became Linda Mar were plowed fields. Where Terra Nova High School kids
study today, sheep grazed. The water supply came from a few wells, (not
very good wells), and San Pedro creek.
The isolated coastal valleys that merged and incorporated to become
Pacifica could easily have been grist for the Steinbeck mill. When the
Grapes of Wrath first came out I was eight years old, and Steinbeck would
have been over my head and shocked my sensibilities. As the nation
celebrates the hundredth year of its Nobel laureate in literature, it's
time I, too, read vintage Steinbeck, a book about a state, a county, and
immigrants I knew first hand. You might want to pay a visit to Mary
Florey's bookstore, or the local libraries, and find out if Steinbeck is
still relevant for you in a day of computers, modems, and the Internet. I
think it likely, though California now has more than five people for every
one of us who were here in 1940. The Okies have prospered, the sardines
have disappeared, and what was known in 1940 as the Valley of Heart's
Delight is now more familiar as Silicon Valley.
Paul Azevedo's email address is Paul@thereactor.net.
Check his website at www.thereactor.net.
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