The Man Who Belonged Nowhere

By Melvin Maddocks

THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF JOHN STEINBECK, WRITER by Jackson J. Benson; Viking; 1,116 pages; $35

Faulty timing marked his career. Though only three years younger than Ernest Hemingway, he was ineligible for the vocation of Great War novelist. While the young Hemingway was driving an ambulance on the Italian front, Steinbeck was a second-rate basketball player at Salinas (Calif.) High School. In 1925, the year that F. Scott Fitzgerald became famous for The Great Gatsby, Steinbeck, 23, was still studying "creative writing" at Stanford--too late, as well as too naive, to become a chronicler of the jazz age. William Faulkner sank his roots in Oxford, Miss., and lived off the accumulated capital of the Old South. The nouveau Californian nourished a vague passion for the Pacific Ocean, which helped him more as an amateur marine biologist than as a professional storyteller.

Steinbeck ended up a Lost Generation unto himself. As a novelist, he found his theme only when he ran into those other lost and rootless Americans, the Dust Bowl migrants, making their way to California's orchards and lettuce farms in 1935-36. The Grapes of Wrath stands as his one full-scale masterpiece.

Jackson J. Benson, who teaches American literature at San Diego State University, cannot abide people saying this. He has written his enormous biography to prove the unprovable--that Steinbeck wrote many splendid novels before and after The Grapes of Wrath, justifying the Nobel Prize he received in 1962. Benson's admirations exclude only East of Eden; the biographer finds it stilted and overwrought. If Steinbeck did not produce as many great novels as he should have, Benson blames his editor or his agent and, above all, the critics, who kept asking for more Grapes.

The success and failure of American novelists is far too fascinating and complex a story to blame on their readers. Fortunately, Benson has been so diligent in gathering papers and anecdota that he escapes from his own simplifications. For there is indeed a special chaos to Steinbeck's life, even by the disorderly standards of the lives of American writers.

Nobody ever wanted to be a writer more than John Steinbeck; as a student he would take to the woods with pen, ink bottle, and the ledger books borrowed from his father--treasurer of Monterey County--to scribble his first short stories. With a stubbornness that bordered on menace, the "red-faced, blue-eyed giant," as a contemporary described him, toughed out the lean years. He worked as a hand on sugar-beet ranches and wheeled 100-lb. barrows of concrete as a construction worker at Madison Square Garden during a stay in New York City. The publisher of his first novel, Cup of Gold, a lush fantasy about the pirate Henry Morgan, promptly went belly-up. So did his next two publishers. It was not until 1935, with Tortilla Flat, a somewhat arch dramatization of the lives of Mexican Americans, that Steinbeck had his first success. He was 33.

Instead of stabilizing Steinbeck's life, success confused him more than failure did. He could not decide where to live, or with whom. In 1938 he and his first wife, Carol, built a house in Los Gatos, eight miles from San Jose, complete with swimming pool, and hobnobbed with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Spencer Tracy.

With his second wife, Gwyn, whom he married in 1943, Steinbeck went in for Manhattan town houses, and New York literati like John O'Hara and Nathaniel Benchley were favorite guests. As he approached 50, Steinbeck and his third wife, Elaine, moved to Sag Harbor, a resort and fishing village on the eastern end of Long Island. All along, his life was like a badly made play; none of the people or places quite seemed to fit the man, any more than did the costume he sometimes affected: black cape, cane and broad-brimmed hat.

It was as a writer that he became finally and truly lost. In almost all of his 17 novels he exhibited a fatal temptation to play the philosopher, to make a large statement. He described his 1950 drama Burning Bright, which closed on Broadway after only 13 performances, as "a morality play, completely timeless and placeless." He translated and retold Arthurian legend and once proposed collaborating with Director Elia Kazan in staging modern versions of Greek tragedy.

He hungered for the epic yet ended up producing journalism. It was work he took up partly out of perversity. "I can, if I wish," he wrote a friend, "throw a punch or two at the critical semaphores who direct the traffic of literature and who sit in their warm blinds and blast me regularly like a sitting duck, which I am. Now this is going to be one duck with brass knuckles." After serving as a World War II correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, he wrote columns for Figaro Litteraire, Punch, the Daily Mail of London and any number of American newspapers to finance the restless trips that took over his life. He covered everything from political conventions to the Viet Nam War, which he supported nearly to the bitter end. By then his oddly incompatible circle of friends came to include both Jazz Guitarist Eddie Condon and Lyndon Johnson. When, nearly 60 and plagued by circulatory ailments, he climbed into a camper and spent three months chugging across the U.S. with his dog, the hit-or-miss quest could have symbolized his life. "I don't belong anywhere," he confessed to a friend.

In fact, the result--Travels with Charley--was a charming little book. Benson might well have made his strongest case for Steinbeck as a rambling raconteur, or as a superb short-story writer. 77?^ Red Pony and The Leader of the People live on as classics for the loving precision with which they portray a young boy's painful need to grow up and an old man's passion to recall his youth. If only Steinbeck, an innately modest man, had been more modest as a writer, he might not have been destined to whipsaw himself between the pretentious and the trivial. It was his bad luck that he happened to be one of the last writers to dream, in all innocence, of writing the Great American Novel.

--By Melvin Maddocks