Interlude: Travels with a bunch of snobs
If you admire California authors, you'll hate this post
Author’s note: This post might not meet the standard for high-quality historical content you’ve come to expect from Monterey Neighbors & Friends. This is simply an interlude. This is me thinking out loud about snobs and bindlestiffs, about elitism and clodhoppers, about gibberish and the nature of literary criticism. This is me venting a spleen or two. Thank you in advance for indulging my moment of strident pontification. I hope to do better next time.
I KNEW THERE WAS BAD BLOOD, but I didn’t realize that the well of animosity between John Steinbeck and those gloomy East Coast elites ran so deep and so cold.
I have mentioned this antagonism before in MN&F, about the volumes of snarky bullshit published in all the leading East Coast snob publications whenever another Steinbeck hit the shelves. The critics didn't like Steinbeck one bit and they needed to warn the world of Steinbeck’s fraudulence.
Even as recently as 2008, long after Steinbeck started pushing up daisies at Garden of Memories, publisher Robert Gottlieb of The New York Review of Books made it clear that no literate person with half a brain could possibly think Steinbeck was an author worthy of serious consideration. According to Gottlieb, the only clodhoppers who still cared about Steinbeck were “a handful of Steinbeck academics and some local enthusiasts in Monterey.”
It is baffling to me why Gottlieb was motivated to write many thousands of words to explain why his readers shouldn’t care about somebody he says they already don’t care about. Was it a slow week at the hogwash emporium?
At least Gottlieb was right about the “local enthusiasts.” Californians are compelled to admire John Steinbeck as a function of native fidelity. He’s a Salinas boy, after all, and he put Cannery Row on the map. (Also, Salinas. And bindlestiffs.) So a few of us still despair when we run across passages by critics that remind us that Steinbeck’s entire output is mostly treacle and malarky.
But I recently discovered the nastiest critique of Steinbeck I’ve ever read. This particular shitposting treatise appeared on the front page of The New York Times Review of Books. The author was a snarling critic named Alfred Kazin. It’s an old essay — appearing in the May 4, 1958, edition — but I had never seen it before.
It drips with so much righteously comic scorn that I just had to share it with my friends.
In fewer than 2,500 words, Kazin lumped the entire population of contemporary California authors into the same garbage barge and then torpedoed the barge with nuclear-grade ridicule.
Not only did Kazin bury Steinbeck, he single-handedly destroyed the entire pretense of California culture.
Kazin was a man of letters back in the days when pompous old pedants qualified as “men of letters.” According to his obituaries, Kazin was a prolific and respected intellectual. He devoted his life to exposing the dreck being foisted upon the American public by a debauched publishing industry. In his estimation, the industry hit bottom when it lowered itself to peddling populist smut written by the likes of John Steinbeck.
Having feasted on a breakfast of nettles and borax one morning, Kazin pounded feverishly on his keyboard with the intent of dismissing every word ever published by every author who ever stepped foot inside the state of California.
Kazin’s little composition of pithy venom was headlined:
THE UNHAPPY MAN FROM HAPPY VALLEY
The unhappy man was John Steinbeck, of course, and happy valley was his birthplace. In the essay, Kazin pissed and moaned that Steinbeck’s florid sentimentalism all but cheapened the American tradition of arts and letters. In summary, he argued that Steinbeck’s work “has never been accompanied by the intellectual and creative resources with which to face up to the present world.”
But Kazin was not content to simply extend both his crotchety middle fingers at Steinbeck and be done with it. Instead he unloaded on the rest of California’s sorry cadre of sad-sack vulgarians who posed as “authors.”
Kazin completed his dismissive opus with the following coda:
It is true that Steinbeck no longer lives in his happy valley, but mentally his back is still up against the wall of the Pacific. He shows the same fuzzy mysticism, the same incoherent pseudo-philosophizing, that has been the stock in trade of so many California writers — from George Sterling to Jack London down to Frank Norris, Robinson Jeffers and now Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. California, as a literary region, has markedly failed to give its writers any tradition with which to understand the outside world. It seems to me plain that Steinbeck’s failure to grow is rooted in a deep and tragic American tradition — Eden, once seen, has kept many writers from ever again being able to confront the world east of it without confusion.
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AND YES, I KNOW. I seem to be obsessed with Steinbeck lately. I’d really rather be obsessed with something else. But I’m afraid I must be what Gottlieb referred to, accusingly, as a “local enthusiast.” (Not to be confused with a “Steinbeck academic,” of which I am not.) The region is already crawling with experts who have researched the man to death. My qualifications in the study of Steinbeck are purely counter-academic and reactionary.
Like every local enthusiast worth his salt, a lack of expertise doesn’t stop me from spewing gibberish about Steinbeck with an air of pontificating authority. In that way, I am very much like the East Coast snobs.
And while I’m no expert, my pontification often seizes the attention of those who are. For instance, I was once invited as a distinguished speaker at the National Steinbeck Festival in Salinas. Rather than spewing my usual gibberish, I chose to deliver a slam reading of Of Mice and Men. I sped through an abridged version of the book in less than fifteen minutes, start to finish. It was a memorable performance, if I do say so myself. The audience of honest-to-God Steinbeck scholars didn’t know whether to applaud the accomplishment or to string me up by my bindlestiffs.
But that’s not all. I am proud to say that a framed copy of a ridiculous satire I once wrote about John Steinbeck hangs on a wall in the gentleman’s bathroom at the National Steinbeck Center.
I always wanted to be memorialized in a museum, but I never expected it would be on the men’s room wall.
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I BLAME LARRY PARSONS for my latest Steinbeck fixation. Larry is an old friend, a Salinas character in good standing. He likes to ruminate about the things he observes while roaming the sweet streets of the city he adopted, and he posts his poetic ruminations on Facebook.
Larry recently shared an amusing mini-essay about the Steinbeck statue in front of the Steinbeck Library. He observed that some of the statue’s body parts seem oddly out of proportion. Steinbeck’s head and hands are much larger than they should be, Larry wrote, and Larry wondered about the sculptor’s intent. Also, Larry said he remembered that the bronzed Steinbeck originally held a bronzed cigarette between his fingers. The cigarette is now missing. Whatever happened to the cigarette?
I did a bit of research so I might answer some of Larry’s questions.
But the trouble with research is that research can send me spiraling headlong down the proverbial rabbit warren. And that’s how I happened to spiral upon that POS New York Review of Books piece written by Alfred Kazin.
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PERHAPS Alfred Kazin was right, though. Maybe Steinbeck was a hack.
Personally, I don’t mind saying that Steinbeck’s greatest novels have moved me unlike anything I’ve ever read. Even Gottlieb admits that the “extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck is how good he can be when so much of the time he’s so bad.” And, yes, when a Steinbeck novel is bad, it’s really bad. Really, really bad. As in, I’m-embarrassed-for-the-author bad.
But that is the nature of the beast. Writers sometimes write sucky stuff. I say this from much personal experience.
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THE WIDESPREAD SNARK written about Steinbeck many decades ago doesn’t really bother me that much. I find it illuminating. Stumbling across highbrow critiques by guys like Gottleib and Kazin help fill in the blanks. They provide a context to Steinbeck’s biographies.
The fact that East Coast snobs detested Steinbeck defines and refines the history of literary culture.
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AS DEVASTATING as Alfred Kazin’s ongoing diatribes about Steinbeck might have been, I’d wager the passage that stung the worst was the zinger that compared Steinbeck to George Sterling. Ouch!
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BY THE WAY, that statue of Steinbeck in front of the Salinas municipal library? It was the work of a Long Beach State University graduate student. The student, Tom Fitzwater, was from Greenfield. He drove the statue up from Long Beach in 1970, but his truck struck a tree en route. Fortunately, he and the statue weren’t badly scarred by the accident, and he was able to rescue his Steinbeck from the wrecking yard.
Fitzwater wanted to sell the statue to Salinas in 1970, but city officials declined the offer. When reporting about the offer, a journalist for The Salinas Californian diplomatically referred to the statue as “unusual.”
In 1971, the hunk of bronze was delivered without ceremony to the lawn in front of the library. The idea was that the statue was “on loan” to the city indefinitely. I think it was more like nobody knew what else to do with it. The city didn’t want it, but Fitzwater evidently didn’t want to lug the 350-pound hunk back to Long Beach.
In 1973, the Salinas Soroptimist Club purchased the statue from Fitzwater for $3,500 and donated the thing to the city for permanent display.
I don’t know what happened to the bronze cigarette. — Joe Livernois
Photo above by Larry Parsons, who asked that I “keep his good name out of it.”