Sunday, February 24, 2002

John Steinbeck:
He won a Nobel Prize, his books are beloved by readers, so why does he get no respect?

Wherever lovers of John Steinbeck's work meet up, two words never fail to conjure a smile: Lonesome Harry. Furtive, persecuted, like dissidents swapping a midnight password, these aficionados can only be referring to the last couple of pages in Part 2 of "Travels With Charley."

That book is Steinbeck's account of a road trip he took across America in 1960 with his French poodle. Steinbeck was 60 when it came out two years later, which makes the book 40 in this, his centennial year. Those who've been put off it by the received wisdom are missing one of 20th century American literature's sneakiest pleasures. Go ahead, pull it down and crack it open. Two million copies were once in print, there must be one handy somewhere.

Halfway through "Travels With Charley," Steinbeck fetches up in Chicago, near the headwaters of Route 66. That's the highway he dubbed "the mother road" in ''The Grapes of Wrath" -- a nickname that's lasted longer than the road did. So Steinbeck pulls off into Chicago and tries to claim his reserved room at the Ambassador East Hotel.

He's tired. Check-in time isn't for hours. Finally, by threatening to conk out right in the lobby, Steinbeck cajoles the desk clerk into offering him a recently vacated room to snooze in before noon. And there, in a room that would deserve a plaque if only Steinbeck had disclosed its number, he makes the acquaintance of Lonesome Harry.

Lonesome Harry is the nickname Steinbeck gives to the room's previous occupant, a business raveler whose detritus the chambermaid hasn't yet gotten around to cleaning up. Steinbeck's curiosity just won't let him alone. He finds a scrap of hotel stationery on which Harry has practiced his signature, suggesting a certain lack of confidence. He finds a bobby pin, but no tissues with blotted lipstick, suggesting a visitor who didn't stay the night. He finds a vase of roses smelling of Jack Daniels, suggesting an unmistakable professionalism on the part of Harry's date. And gradually, surely, using only these and a few other clues, Steinbeck comes to know Harry better than Harry's own wife back home does -- fortunately for Harry. The whole interlude clocks in at less than four pages, and it ends with this crushing paragraph: "Three things haunted me about Lonesome Harry. First, I don't think he had any fun; second, I think he was really lonesome, maybe in a chronic state; and third, he didn't do a single thing that couldn't be predicted -- didn't break a glass or a mirror, committed no outrages, left no physical evidence of joy. I had been hobbling around with one boot off finding out about Harry. I even looked in the bed and in the closet. He hadn't even forgotten a tie. I felt sad about Harry."

Steinbeck's putting on a clinic here. Taken together, they're an amazing few pages, a virtual master class in how a great writer uses all his senses to understand and convey a scene. It recalls those unforgettable moments in Poe's crime stories, where fiction's first detective notices a thread on his friend's coat or a spot on his shoe and proceeds to deduce the man's entire day up until that moment. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later stole shamelessly from these scenes, but it took Steinbeck to invest them with a freshness of emotion that no amount of rereading can dilute.

Emotion. The knock on Steinbeck has always been that he's too emotional, too sentimental, his symbolism is so apparent that -- heaven forfend! -- even a high school student can appreciate it. As one of his biographers, the novelist Jay Parini, says of him, "Where he's weak is when he's a little too obvious. In a work like 'The Pearl,' he used symbolism a little too obviously. His symbols sometimes clang."

But unlike every other American novelist capable of bad writing -- in other words, unlike everybody except Fitzgerald, who couldn't write badly on a bet --

Steinbeck gets judged on his worst work instead of his best. The man writes "The Grapes of Wrath," he writes the hysterically funny and romantic "Cannery Row" and "Sweet Thursday," he writes "Of Mice and Men," for crying out loud, and all we hear out of academia is, "Steinbeck? Good for what it is, I suppose.

Have you tried the monkfish?"

The worst offender here has to be the New York Times. If the Western United States ever declare open hostilities against the East, what the New York Times did to Steinbeck in December 1962 will have to rank at or near the top among our articles of war. That's when the Times suborned a hit piece on him from a Princeton professor

named Arthur Mizener and ran it on the day Steinbeck was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

What were Steinbeck's crimes, that the most influential paper in the country picked the moment of his greatest triumph to take him down a peg? For one, he was political. Though not a Communist, and though his fiction could be surprisingly nuanced on the subject of unionism, Steinbeck made no secret of his sympathies for workers over their bosses.

For another, people made a habit of reading Steinbeck without the Times telling them to. They still do. Steinbeck has something most writers of renown can only dream about, what Parini, a syllabus-compiler of several semesters' experience, refers to as "actual voluntary readers."

Finally, Steinbeck was a Californian -- from New York's perspective, a not- one-of-me. Some contend that if it weren't for the championing of Joseph Henry Jackson, The Chronicle's book critic from 1935 to 1955 and a book commentator on the Mutual Radio Network, Steinbeck might never have gained a national reputation.

But don't believe a Californian with a chip on his shoulder. Believe Chicago-born Saul Bellow, who Parini says lobbied for Steinbeck's Nobel years before he got his own. Or believe Chicagoan Peter Orner, author of last year's acclaimed "Esther Stories" and a professor in the writing program at University of California at Santa Cruz. At a recent event for him and others who were included in this year's "Best American Short Stories," and in a follow-up e-mail, Orner paid tribute to abiding influence of "The Grapes of Wrath":

"At one point Tom says about killing a man, 'Knocked his head to plumb squash.' Steinbeck taught me how important it is to listen to the cadences of the way people actually talk.

"Reading 'Of Mice and Men' this year, I was struck by similar things in the conversations between Lenny and George. It's a manual for how to write a relationship through dialogue. You need only listen to George forbidding Lennie to carry around his pet dead mouse to know all there is to know about this friendship.''

It's worth quoting Orner at length because only another fiction writer can really assess a precursor in terms of technique -- i.e., in terms of what he can steal. Orner later quotes Steinbeck doing the same thing. The effect is that of listening to great writers talking shop across the decades:

"Steinbeck says somewhere that reading certain great books ('Madame Bovary' and 'Crime and Punishment') was less like reading than living through them because they became a part of his actual memory. All that happened in those books happened to him personally. I feel the same way about 'The Grapes of Wrath,' that I lived through all that dust and hunger and, most important, anger.

"It's a furious book in the way that Zola's 'Germinal' and Dickens' 'Bleak House' are. You can feel the writer's anger as you read, even in the beautiful descriptions of the roads and the dust and the labor camps. Like Dickens and Zola, Steinbeck had definite cause. "I know this is the knock on him, that many of his books have such a clear standing on who's right and who's wrong. But I see this as a strength because the cause, coupled with his so obvious genuine love for his characters, makes us care about the characters, makes us live through them.

"This seems so easy and obvious, but my experience is that it is so rare in other books. It's why I think the book has endured in spite of the attacks of critics. I think the many millions who've read 'The Grapes of Wrath' don't give a damn what critics say about him being sentimental. Who's not sentimental? Is it such a crime to love your characters?"

The Swedish Academy of Arts and Letters didn't think so. Neither does the California Council for the Humanities (www.calhum.org) which is challenging all Californians to read "The Grapes of Wrath" and discuss it in a series of public forums this year. Neither does the Mechanics Institute Library of San Francisco (www.milibrary.org), which kicks off a whole month of Steinbeckiana with a starry, promising panel this Thursday at 5:45.

A hundred years after his birth in Salinas on Feb. 27, 1902, a modern reader can easily get to feeling like Steinbeck himself, wandering around that early-morning hotel room at the Ambassador East. An enigmatic figure has checked out too soon, leaving no shortage of artifacts behind him: a shelf of books still in print, a mantel full of prizes, a hometown museum dedicated to his legacy, generations of admiring disciples. Of his phantom hotel roommate in "Travels With Charley," Steinbeck concludes, "I felt sad about Harry." Should we feel sad about Lonesome John, still stuck in the critical doghouse after all these years?

No, only about those who put him there. They can't possibly know what they're missing.