WHATEVER ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE JOHN had acquired during his final years of high school did not accompany him to Stanford in October 1919. The great university was less than four decades old but was often referred to as the Harvard or Yale of the West Coast. Stanford was deliberately created, cultivated, and funded to be a major center of education, but its many opportunities were not for John Steinbeck.
The summer had left him tanned and muscular. At seventeen he stood six feet tall. He smoked cigarettes heavily and spoke of his fondness for liquor and the company of women. John shared a room with George Mors on the first floor of Encina Hall, a five-story dormitory. Mors was also a freshman, planning to become an engineer and carrying a full load of difficult technical courses. John’s roommate was well organized and studious, the sort of young man who might be held up as an example of a model student. John was not interested in models of good behavior. Weeks of hard labor with tough crews had made him into his own man. John would make his own rules.
He made certain everyone knew how independent he was. John would not be bound by the expectations or rules the university imposed upon its students. If he did not feel like going to class, he did not go. If he wanted to attend a lecture for which he was not enrolled, he sat in anyway. Class assignments received only the barest attention. While Mors and others studied, John roamed the stacks of the magnificent Stanford library. He read whatever caught his attention. John ignored basic texts upon which an education could be built. He concentrated instead on great and obscure novels, poetry, and works of history. Even that ambition soon faded: by midsemester John was spending most of his time reading pulp fiction. Exciting detective stories printed on cheap paper were more important to him than the university’s required reading.
Perhaps aware that their son’s attention might wander, John Ernst and Olive insisted that John spend his weekends at home in Salinas. They could keep up with him there and make sure he was properly devoting his energy to his studies. John followed their wishes for the first few weeks of school but soon began fashioning explanations for why he could not come home. His parents thought that he was spending his weekends at the Stanford library. John was actually investigating the delights and temptations of San Francisco, just a few miles from the Palo Alto campus. Sometimes he did stay on campus over a weekend. On such occasions he could always find a card game or a companion to share a bottle of wine. There were far better things to do than study.
John’s first quarter results were dreadful. He completed barely half the work required of him, and that with poor grades. Worse, John had become a disciplinary problem in some classes. He acquired among his professors the reputation of being a loudmouth, someone who joked and whispered his way through lectures, disrupting the concentration of those around him. The university made clear that it would not tolerate such behavior for long. John was unrepentant. He was a writer, he proclaimed, although since summer’s end he’d done little writing. As far as the professors’ complaints, John saw little reason to respond. Everyone should be able to tell that John already knew more than any of his teachers.
His attitude seemed certain to result in early dismissal from Stanford, but John’s college career was rescued by illness. In the middle of his second quarter, John caught the flu. The influenza developed into pneumonia. John’s parents, recalling his bout with pleurisy, brought John back to Salinas to recover. John stayed in bed throughout the winter. As had happened during the episode with pleurisy, John’s illness seemed to instill in him a new determination to succeed at school. He returned to Stanford in the spring of 1920, filled with resolve. John moved back in with George Mors and set about becoming a model student himself. In May his body betrayed his good intentions. John’s appendix had to be removed. He went through the operation and recovery in Salinas, missing the rest of the school year. John had completed—with poor grades—only three courses out of two semesters.
George Mors spent the summer of 1920 with the Steinbecks. John and Mors secured jobs with survey crews mapping the route of what would be the Pacific Coast Highway. They worked in the Santa Lucia Mountains, chopping brush and lugging heavy equipment over rugged terrain. John was too exhausted to appreciate the company of rough men this time. The young men looked to John’s father for a way out of the surveying job. John Ernst found them positions in the maintenance department at Spreckels sugar refinery. This work was more to their liking, and they stuck with their jobs through the summer.
John was aware that his parents found more to admire in George Mors than they did in their own son. Mors did little to alter that perception. He spoke frankly with the Steinbecks about John’s laziness at Stanford. In a private conversation with Olive Steinbeck, Mors agreed to encourage John to apply himself more fully at Stanford. Mors was equally candid in conversations about John’s writing. He pointed out that he never saw John write anything. Where were the stories and poems of which John boasted? All John did was talk about writing. John shrugged off the criticism, but he was a little stung by Mors’s accuracy. Back at Stanford in the fall of 1920, John spent more time at his textbooks and also at his own compositions.
His academic discipline gave out first. Mors tried to prod John to greater diligence, but it was no use. They joined the newly set up campus Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program together, but John attended only a few drills. Not many weeks of the fall quarter had passed before John began cutting classes again. The university had been built on a ranch owned by Senator Leland Stanford, and there were hundreds of acres of beautiful land in which to escape from classroom drudgery. John was far more interested in wonderful books he could come across on his own than in what he thought were dull volumes assigned by dull teachers.
John stuck to his writing longer than he stuck to his studies. He remained convinced that good writing had to be based upon the writer’s own experiences, but his own reservoir of experience was small. John wrote sketches about laborers he’d known. He wrote several pieces about college life, but he could tell before finishing them that such stories were trivial and unconvincing. As the semester proceeded and his grades worsened, John began muttering about leaving school altogether. He would go out into the world in search of experiences from which to create his stories. It was the same approach to writing that Jack London and others among John’s heroes had pursued. Experience in the world must precede worthwhile writing.
By November it appeared that John would get to experience the world beyond the university whether he wanted to or not. He could not make his writing do what he wanted it to do. Every sentence seemed worse than the one previous. John withdrew into himself and retreated once more to the comfort of cheap magazines. He had little to say to Mors or anyone else. John stopped making any effort in his classes. Mors was sufficiently concerned to write to Olive, telling her that John was about to be expelled as a result of scholastic failure.
Olive traveled to Palo Alto where she and John had a long meeting with one of the university’s deans. The dean did not mince words. He openly stated that John had very few prospects as far as Stanford was concerned. He was willing only to offer John two weeks on academic probation. During that period John could not miss a single class. He was also to be held responsible for all the work he’d missed or failed to complete. After stating the conditions of the probation, the dean ended the meeting. Outside, Olive attempted to lecture John about the embarrassment his laziness could cause the family. She wanted him to understand just how much trouble his irresponsibility had caused. John was not interested in her lecture. He was not interested, he made clear, in Stanford either. He was going to have a career as a writer, and there was nothing at Stanford that could help him realize that goal. He could save the university the trouble of expelling him. He could quit school immediately. Olive wept, and John swallowed as much of his pride as he could. Before his mother departed for Salinas, John promised to obey the rules of academic probation.
He didn’t last a week. By December he was fed up with Stanford and its requirements. He made up his mind to leave school. John left George Mors a brief note announcing his intention to ship out of San Francisco. He was bound for exotic China and the world of real experience. He left behind him the stately campus buildings and spent the next few days living in flophouses near the waterfront. John joined the queues of seamen seeking working berths on long voyages. He had no luck. Shipmasters were not interested in hiring a young man who’d never put to sea. Christmas neared and John’s financial reserves dwindled. He would not go home. He ate cheap food in dirty restaurants. He did without clean laundry. During the Christmas shopping rush he found temporary jobs in department stores and haberdasheries. When the holidays ended, though, so did the stores’ need for extra help. New Year’s Day 1921 was particularly grim. Away from family and friends, John felt adrift. His depression deepened. At last he gave up and set out for Salinas.
John Ernst and Olive gave John no lectures about his failure at college. Correspondence from the university made formal John’s dismissal. The university would allow John to return to its ranks only if he proved himself more mature. That maturity might come from a season or two of hard, physical labor. John Ernst arranged for John to go to work in the Spreckels sugar beet fields. When he had previously worked for Spreckels, during summer vacations, John had lived at home. Now he would be given a bunk in the fieldhouse where other workers slept. Early in 1921 John left home for the beet fields. He carried with him a new notebook and pencils that he had persuaded Olive to purchase. John was going to show his family that he was really a writer.
He spent most of his time working in the fields. They seemed to go on forever. The sugar refinery started by Claus Spreckels at the turn of the century had become one of the Salinas Valley’s largest employers. During peak seasons its labor payroll rose as high as five thousand dollars a day, although the workers were not well paid. The fields were irrigated from the reservoirs beneath the mountains. The farmland was planted with an improved variety of sugar beet, drought resistant and tough enough to withstand the constant winds that blew through the fields. The huge refinery, rebuilt after the earthquake, was a marvel of modern agricultural technology, processing nearly four thousand tons of beets a day, producing as much as sixty thousand tons of sugar per harvest. John found himself rising at first light and joining the Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino laborers working with hoes to keep the rows of beets cultivated. It was exhausting labor, work that made a man’s back ache. Despite his intentions, John did little writing during his free time. He was too tired.
John got along well in the rough company of the laborers. He was finding story materials and anecdotes, but he was also displaying a talent for managing laborers. By the summer of 1921, John was made a crew foreman. It was his job to set the pace for the workers stacking heavy sacks of mature beets on railroad cars bound for the refinery. Being a boss was more exhausting than being a crew member. John’s initial excitement over the possibility of finding stories in the fields faded quickly as the summer passed. He’d found out all he wanted to find out. It was time for him to do some writing. He quit his job with Spreckels and returned to Salinas.
In town there was some tension between John and his parents. John wrote sketches about the workers, but he could rarely make a piece hold together for more than a few hundred words. All of his stories collapsed long before he finished them. His parents were by now convinced that John truly wanted to be a writer. They were less convinced that he had anything important to say. When they spoke of their concerns, John grew annoyed. Near the end of the summer he left Salinas, and to be by himself he moved into the Steinbeck cottage at Pacific Grove, near Monterey.
John hoped the solitude of the cottage and the splendor of the coast would inspire him to write. Once more, though, he was inspired only to talk about writing. He did much of his talking in Monterey and a good deal of it from bar stools. Writers were supposed to drink, and John did. In San Francisco he’d worn dirty clothes out of necessity. In Pacific Grove and Monterey he wore them because they suited his mood. If he could not write, he could act like a writer, or what he supposed a writer to be—a hard-drinking, unshaven, ragged bohemian, an artiste whose difficulties with his work were more important than the work itself.
He carried this defiant posture back to Salinas with him in the fall. At home he simply lounged, unwilling to press on with his work or help with the household chores. Often he left home for days at a time, camping along the Salinas River or carousing with companions of whom John Ernst and Olive would certainly disapprove. Their disapproval voiced itself as concern for John’s mental and physical health. By the end of January 1922, John Ernst had had more than enough of his son’s bad attitude. John could either seek to cure himself of his problems, or he could get out of the house. A physical examination showed John to be in good health. Whatever was wrong with him was self-imposed. More than than, John Ernst argued, it was self-indulgent. John returned to the cottage in Pacific Grove. As the winter passed, he buried himself in great novels, reading carefully to see how writers achieved the effects that made their works so powerful.
The novels and stories he read seemed more real than any of his own experiences. That was even more true for John at twenty than it had been a decade earlier. Reading a great novel was almost the same as living the novel’s story yourself. There were so many elements that had to work together in a novel. In his sketches of workers and college students, John had concentrated on characters alone. Now he was learning not only that the characters must be well developed and believable, but also that they must move through a strong story set in a world that is real for the reader. A great novel, John saw, came as close to duplicating the experiences of life as it was possible for art to come. As spring approached, he began to write again, paying attention now to using physical detail and description as well as to making his characters come alive.
The more he wrote, the more eager he became to have new experiences to write about. John forced himself to stick to subjects he had witnessed himself. He began making long journeys up and down the Pacific coast. He visited small towns such as Carmel. He climbed mountains and hiked far into the wild country at Big Sur. Everything was alive and open to him. All of his senses were alert, all of his energies devoted to observation and to the re-creation of those observations. He kept a journal of his walking trips, recording his feelings as well as describing the sights and sounds he came across along the way. At first most of his effort was focused upon descriptions of the countryside and its features. John hoped to use his writing as a means of coming to terms with his ideas and feelings about the natural world. That world’s magic still captivated John.
Walking through the region, John grew angry at the increasing amounts of commercial exploitation that scarred the land. Crews of workers with heavy equipment were carving out areas where developers would erect sanitized quarters for the growing numbers of tourists who wanted to experience the California coast’s “natural beauty.” Back in Pacific Grove, John struggled for several days to put his feelings into publishable form. He wanted readers to appreciate the natural treasures that were being destroyed. He wanted them to share his anger.
When the long article was completed to John’s satisfaction, he attempted to place it with the Monterey newspaper. The piece was rejected, although the editor took the trouble to write John an explanatory note. John’s article, the editor observed, was too likely to offend tourists. The irony of the rejection was not lost on John. Newspapers and magazines depended upon advertising for revenue. They were unlikely to publish work that presented unflattering portraits of important advertisers. The rejection was not completely disheartening. John’s ambition was to write fiction. He knew from his long hours over novels that writers could cover their truths with a layer of fiction and say things that newspapers lacked the courage to put into type. John took up his pencils again. For a while he wrote brief sketches, but they satisfied him less and less. It was the spring of 1922, and the countryside around Pacific Grove grew gorgeous with wildflowers. John stayed indoors. For the first time he began sustaining his efforts through more than a few descriptive paragraphs.
The nice thing about sketches was their brevity. A quick portrait of a migrant worker or a college professor could be completed in a couple of hours. Short stories, John discovered, took longer. They demanded days or even weeks of labor. That discipline had to be self-imposed, which was hard for John. He did not give up. John carefully created a set of characters, basing them upon families of sardine fishermen he’d observed in Monterey. The community itself he was able to evoke well. He captured the feeling of the night fog upon his characters’ skin. He put onto the page the sounds and smells of Monterey’s Cannery Row, where the sardine catches were brought for processing. For a plot, though, John had to rely upon his imagination. He structured his story around the effects of adultery, of which he knew little. Still, the harder he worked, the more he liked his story. He forced himself to be ruthless as he approached his words. He taught himself to edit every sentence, seeking to use only the most effective and essential language. When this first story was done, he put it aside and started another. This time he worked closer to his own experience, basing the new story on an incident from his childhood. His pencil bore down on page after page. When one story was finished he started another.
His new abilities at writing fiction gave John courage to try another newspaper article. This time he concentrated on nature, leaving opinion out of the piece. With the article completed, John once more approached the editor in Monterey. His work was again rejected, but this time the editor offered more advice. John was trying too hard to bring the natural world to literary life. John relied too heavily upon effect, too little upon insight and reflection. During the course of the rejection it was suggested that John return to college to study journalism and English. Once he had received a degree he could spend time working on a newspaper to discover whether he was really a writer.
John gave the advice careful consideration. Perhaps he had left Stanford too quickly. He was unaware that the editor had a long acquaintance with John Ernst and was participating in a conspiracy to get John back to school. The editor rejected John’s article, but he wrote a letter of recommendation that urged Stanford to reconsider John for admission. John closed the Pacific Grove cottage and returned to Salinas to discuss his prospects. His parents were full of conditional encouragement. They would support a renewed academic effort, but John would have to take a job until he was re-admitted to the university. John Ernst was able this time to find his son an indoors position at Spreckels. In the summer of 1922 John worked as a bench chemist at the sugar refinery, testing samples of beets to see if they were mature enough for harvest. Some of his old fascination with the sciences returned as he worked with laboratory tools and learned lab procedure. As always, John gathered material from experience. Scientists and lab technicians began to appear as characters in his work.
Stanford did not make up its mind about John until summer was nearly over. He would be accepted once more as a freshman, but could not return to classes until January 1923. That would put John behind his younger sister, Mary, who entered Stanford that fall. John did not complain. He arranged to share a room with a friend from his earlier days at the university, Carlton Sheffield. Sheffield, whose nickname was “Dook,” was also hopeful of a career as a writer. Unlike John, he found the university to be a wonderful environment in which to learn to write. There were other would-be writers on campus, organized into formal and informal groups. The groups engaged in constant dialogues about literature and writing. Sheffield could put on literary airs as eccentric as John’s, but Sheffield’s audience was composed of college students rather than citizens of the Monterey wharf John began to sense how much he had missed, how far behind he was. Dook Sheffield was a senior on the verge of graduation. John, nearly twenty-one, was still a freshman.
John could change that. While he remained high-spirited and defiant—John and Sheffield constructed a mock sacrificial altar in their dormitory room—John brought a new level of concentration to his classes. He did some writing that semester, and quite a bit of drinking, partying, and philosophizing. But he also completed his assignments accurately and on time. By summer he’d dealt with his incompletes and was awarded an A in three of his courses. None of his grades was lower than a C. As summer began John wistfully attended his roommate’s graduation exercises. The two had become close friends, and John had opened himself to Sheffield as he had to few others. Suddenly, with Dook leaving, the years of college that lay ahead of John lost their interest.
He did not give up immediately. With the good grades providing some momentum, John decided to take some summer courses. He joined Mary at Pacific Grove where they lived while enrolled in the summer program Stanford offered through Hopkins Marine Station. John took two English courses, continuing to prepare for the journalism degree he’d promised his parents. He was more interested in the marine zoology course he and Mary were taking. During summers as a boy at Pacific Grove, John had been thrilled to ride in the university’s glass-bottomed observation boats. As a college student on board those boats, he began to see the unity of all natural life. His instructors showed him how to observe natural life in the wild, far from the controlled conditions of the laboratory. From his study and observation, John began to perceive the interrelationship of living things both plant and animal, whether living in the sea or on land. Everything was intertwined and interdependent. There were ultimately no individual elements of nature—there was only all of nature, with humans filling a place in its majestic organization. Zoology and its portrait of the order of life excited John far more than literature during the summer.
He could not sustain the interest nor extend it to other areas of study. Before the summer ended he resolved not to go back to Stanford for the fall semester. He made certain his parents understood that he was making a mature decision this time. John was determined to proceed through college at his own pace, and he insisted on paying the rest of his tuition himself. He was far older than most of the college students he knew. He felt that he was too old to continue depending upon his father and mother for support. John would spend the fall of 1923 working for Spreckels. He knew his way around the intricacies of the lab bench and got along well with the other workers. The chemist’s job was far less exhausting than field work, and John had enough energy and time to make a serious push on some writing projects. He lived carefully at home, saving his money and focusing upon his goals. By the time he returned to Stanford in January 1924, he was able to pay nearly all of his own expenses and tuition.
Taking a semester off had not advanced John’s position at Stanford, but he had become a better writer during the fall season away from school. Some of the stories he had completed in Salinas caught the eye of the editor of Stanford’s campus newspaper, the Spectator. John returned to campus in January and the following month saw the Spectator provide him with his first publication. The February issue carried a sarcastic short story called “Fingers of Cloud.” The story displayed John’s fascination with the coarseness of life among immigrants and ranchers. John appreciated the praise the story earned and was already at work on new stories. In fact, he was enrolled in a writing class that concentrated upon the short story. The teacher, Professor Edith Mirrielees, prodded John to greater effort. He needed to give his imagination freer rein, she said. No matter how hard John worked on a story, Professor Mirrielees demanded more. She held up to John and the class examples of great short stories. She spoke of the dedication to craft that guided great writers. John began to see just how large a challenge he had set himself when he decided to write. Throughout the semester he spent hours over his stories. His efforts were rewarded with an A in Professor Mirrielees’s course.
John spent the summer of 1924 working once more for Spreckels. He joined the crew of a sugar mill the company operated south of San Francisco. Carlton Sheffield joined John for the summer. They enjoyed each other’s company, but the work at the small mill was far harder than at the large, modern Salinas facility. In the evenings John was too exhausted to work at his writing. With Sheffield present, he at least had someone with whom to talk of literature. One particular story was on John’s mind. It was a story about Henry Morgan, an eighteenth-century pirate. John called the story “A Lady in Infra-Red.” There were days when he suspected that story might be turned into a novel. The prospect of working for months, perhaps years, on a single piece was forbidding. It was easier to talk literature than to get on with its practice. John decided to skip the coming semester at Stanford, once more under the pretext of earning money for his expenses.
Actually, he and Sheffield had decided to see some of California and Mexico together. They allowed the quality of their work at the refinery to decline. John became surly and argumentative. Finally his behavior grew bad enough to provoke a fight for which he was subsequently fired. Sheffield quit in protest, and the two embarked on their adventure. With the money they’d saved, a long, leisurely trip seemed possible. John and Sheffield launched their trip in high style in San Francisco, both of them celebrating and drinking too much. It did not take two days for San Francisco’s bar-and-brothel district to part them from their money. The voyage of discovery to Mexico ended in retreat to Sheffield’s family home in Long Beach. Through the rest of the summer and fall John and Sheffield worked at jobs ranging from stuffing envelopes to selling radios door-to-door. There were more lucrative positions available, but those called for greater exertion. The young men were saving their energies for the stories and plays they were writing. By January 1925, when John returned to Stanford, he had accumulated a substantial sheaf of manuscripts.
He knew that although his work was improving almost daily, it was still unpublishable beyond the school newspaper. For now, the school was enough audience for John. He honed his skills in order to hold its attention. Everyone on campus now knew that John Steinbeck was a writer. He even lived the way people supposed dedicated young writers lived. This semester John had abandoned the comfortable dormitory and found a five-dollar-a-month shanty. The place was barely six feet square and had no electricity or heat and no running water or kitchen. John was delighted. He laid in a store of wine-making supplies and christened his shack “The Sphincter.” In classes, the English Club, and informal writing groups John read his stories aloud. Unshaven and unbathed, his clothes unkempt, John became a campus celebrity. Students and professors either liked him or loathed him, but no one was indifferent about John Steinbeck. Nor could it be denied that he possessed at least the desire to become a writer. Some of his teachers also thought that John had the talent.
One of them, Elizabeth Smith, herself a published writer of short stories, encouraged John to write a novel. She thought that “A Lady in Infra-Red” showed promise. If John could turn the story of Henry Morgan into a novel, he could probably get it published. By February, John was hard at work. For years he’d seen his father making careful accountant’s notes in large, bound ledgers. John worked the same way now. He sharpened his pencils, opened his ledger, and began working on a novel. The effort excited him. His ambition expanded. More than just a novel about a Caribbean pirate, this book would tell the story of a man’s life. Henry Morgan slowly took shape as a character. John spent hours doing research for the novel, digging through history texts and biographies in search of the sorts of historical detail that would make the book richer and more believable. As he wrote and revised the novel’s opening chapters, John saw that the book would have a great theme as well as a great character. He was writing about ideals and goals, and how life changed and degraded those goals. It was an Arthurian theme, John realized, drawn in part from Malory and other writers he admired. He wrote and revised, filling the ledger’s large pages with his small handwriting.
John’s grades declined weekly. The novel preoccupied him. By the end of the semester John was once more in academic trouble. He knew that he was finally finished with Stanford. John dropped all pretense of plans for a career in journalism and informed his parents that he was working on a novel. His semester’s production had been transcribed into forty pages of typescript, a good beginning. John intended to give the book his full attention until it was done. This time John Ernst put up no argument. Instead, he offered help. John could stay at the Pacific Grove cottage while he completed his novel. Additionally, John Ernst would send John $20 a month on which to live. The arrangement would last for the rest of the year. Under such circumstances, John should be able to discover, one way or another, if he really had a writing career ahead of him.
The novel was now called “The Pot of Gold.” Despite the almost perfect conditions his father had provided, John found himself in difficulty. He knew how to put down the physical details of his story but got lost when trying to give words to his theme. John’s manuscript had doubled in size by the end of summer, but his hopes for it had dwindled to nearly nothing. Soon he was writing more letters than fiction. He corresponded with Sheffield and others, telling them of the collapse of his novel. John knew what was wrong with the book. Its author was still too young and inexperienced. He needed to know more of the world. John felt that he had accomplished as much as he could in California. An eagerness came over him to leave the state. His older sister Elizabeth was married and living in New York. John wrote to her stating his intention to come to the city and try to make a name for himself there. He knew that most writers ended up in New York eventually. Now it would be John’s turn. The city was filled with magazine and book publishers to whom he could show his work. By submitting his stories in person, John reasoned, he stood a better chance of getting them into print. Exposure to the New York literary community might even give him the confidence he needed to undertake “The Pot of Gold” again.
John spent part of the fall working with his friend Webster Street at a lodge in the High Sierra. The resort belonged to Street’s in-laws and was set in majestic scenery. John’s mind was on New York. He contacted a Stanford friend whose father had connections with the large Luckenbach shipping line. There was a berth available on the Katrina, bound from California to New York by way of the Panama Canal and Havana. The Katrina was no cruise ship—John would be expected to work his way through the voyage. That was fine; John accepted the berth and readied himself for a November departure. Before he left, he visited his parents in Salinas. They could not completely mask their disappointment at John’s college performance. John Ernst, though, now understood how completely and passionately his son was committed to becoming a writer. He admired the ambition and drive, if not the behavior that accompanied it. John Ernst gave his son a hundred dollars to help support him during his assault on the publishing world. The money lasted only until Havana, where John spent it on whiskey and women. When the Katrina docked in New York, John Steinbeck had three dollars left.