Lit on Old Monterey
My Reading Marathon: 5 Books and 5 Recommendations
By Joe Livernois
I’m coming off a Monterey County reading jag. I did five books recently, all of them set on the Central Coast. All of them depict life in the region back in the old days, from 1786 through 1970. With one notable exception, Monterey County plays a prominent role in the narrative, as if the place propels character and plot.
I didn’t embark on this Monterey County Marathon of Literature with conscious intent; rather, it was a happy accident sparked by a random backlog of accumulated reading material. I started with “East of Eden,” plowing through it for the third time. Last year was the 70th anniversary of its publication, and it never gets old. From “Eden” I moved to an historical diary, two novels and a memoir, all of them featuring the Central Coast as a setting.
That’s a lot of Monterey County on the printed page. It was a great journey, like taking a deep dive into this beautiful place without leaving the house.
I recommend all five books, especially to readers interested in the abundant cultural and historical influences that add to the joy of life on the Central Coast.
EAST OF EDEN, by John Steinbeck, 1952
Steinbeck’s classics crack me over the head, and “East of Eden” is one of my favorites. It reads as though it’s all happening in our front yard, and in our case it is. For those of us with a front-row seat to the dynamics and the historical intrigue of Monterey County, trying to read between the lines in “East of Eden" for clues about Salinas Valley characters is as fascinating as the story itself.
But then there’s the writing, the pure insight. Gems tumble from Steinbeck in “East of Eden:”
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.
There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty.
I wonder how many people I have looked at all my life and never really seen.
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
Speaking of angels and devils, “East of Eden” wickedly details the two favorite extracurricular activities enjoyed by Salinas residents back in the golden olden days. There was the old-time religion, of course. Steinbeck wrote that churches and preachers brought “the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time.” And then there were the fancy women in the brothels. In contrast to the noisome churches, Steinbeck describes the whorehouses as “quiet, orderly and circumspect.”
“Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic conversion under the thumping beat of the melodeon you had stood under the window of a whorehouse and listened to the low decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities of the two ministries,” he wrote.
MONTEREY IN 1786: THE JOURNALS OF JEAN FRANÇOIS DE LA PÉROUSE, with Commentary by Malcolm Margolin
In a nutshell, the Monterey Peninsula of old must have been a godforsaken hellhole, a cultural backwater and a center of spiritual torture. At least as it’s described in "Monterey in 1786.” And, as Jean François de la Pérouse freely admitted, he was giving the place the benefit of the doubt.
For its descriptive prose and its hints of heinous behavior, “Monterey in 1786” is essential reading for anyone interested in the messy business of conquest in the region.
De la Pérouse was a French explorer dispatched by King Louis XVI to collect as much data as his crew might collect from various points of the globe, including the northern edges of the California territory, a region of the world that had scarcely been explored. The two ships were laden with the leading authorities of the day: cartographers, botanists, artists, an ornithologist, physicians, gardeners, engineers and draftsmen. The information they returned with gave Europeans and future explorers some idea what was out there in the great beyond. This was a fact-finding expedition, and Monterey was a stop along de la Pérouse’s road to discovery.
They arrived in on the Central Coast as you might expect, stymied by fog. They were prevented from making landfall by the thick blanket of fog that limited navigation. (Some things never change.) What de la Pérouse found when he did arrive onshore was a sullen mix of unsophisticated religious zealots in the missions, stir-crazy military goons in the presidio and a community of Indians on the edge of total collapse. The place was dingy, wet and hopelessly forbidding.
As to the social conditions, de la Pérouse’s observations are useful as a third-party account of conditions that ultimately annihilated the local tribes. Even then, the French explorer considered the treatment of the Indians at the hands of the Spanish ministry wholly appropriate, if not especially merciful. De la Pérouse considered the “savages" incapable of understanding anything beyond their perfectly sylvan existence, and their mistreatment at the hands of the missionaries was for their own good.
The Spaniards were there to infuse the will of God to pagans, according to the prevailing European narrative. And often it was necessary to employ the wrath of God to make it happen.
“The day consists in general of seven hours labor and two hours prayer, but there are four or five hours of prayer on Sundays and feast days, which are entirely consecrated to rest and divine worship,” de la Pérouse wrote. “Corporal punishment is inflicted on the Indians of both sexes who neglect the exercises of piety, and many sins, which in Europe are left to Divine justice, are here punished by irons and the stocks.”
Baptized Indians who escaped to return to their families were dragged back to the mission, “condemned to receive a certain number of lashes with the whip.”
Malcolm Margolin’s introduction and commentary provides contextual depth and fills in maddening blanks left by de la Pérouse’s omissions. This edition was published by Margolin’s Heyday Books of Berkeley in 1989. Margolin has devoted his life to the study of the Ohlone-Rumsen civilization, and his authority shines through.
THE AUTHENTIC DEATH OF HENDRY JONES, by Charles Neider, 1956
As unique and bodacious as this cowboy book he wrote, Charles Neider’s own biography is a hoot. Born in Ukraine in 1915, he made a name for himself in American arts and letters as the go-to scholar for all things Twain.
Neider edited and annotated a dozen anthologies of Mark Twain’s short stories, humorous sketches, essays, travel books, novels and letters. In 1959 he published “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” an exhaustive but lively tome that was named one of the Top 100 nonfiction books by Modern Library. Not only that, but Neider was an explorer himself, of sorts, traveling to Antarctica three times with the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Navy. He claimed to be the first humanist to visit the continent. And he wrote fiction on the side.
His most famous novel is called “The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones,” and it’s a bigger-than-life tale of the Old West, a frontier saga that rivals the best of them. A friend, Patrick O’Hara, told me it is “probably the best western novel I’ve read.” He sent me his copy because the action is all set in Monterey, and he knew I’d be interested.
“Hendry Jones” is a fictional account of the Billy the Kid story, the saga of a notorious gunslinger running out of luck. The title itself is a goof on “The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest,” Sheriff Pat Garrett’s own account of his part in the death of William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.
Billy died in New Mexico, of course. But in “Hendry Jones,” narrator Doc Baker accompanies the fictional outlaw around Monterey County. Much of the action takes place along the coastline, presumably where Pebble Beach is located. Hendry Jones is buried under a “ghost tree” along the rugged “Punta del Diablo,” or Devil’s Point, a landmark that sounds suspiciously like The Lone Cypress.
As frontier cowboy novels go, “Hendry Jones" is on par with Zane Gray’s best. Better yet for those of us who appreciate literary descriptions of the Monterey Peninsula and the Monterey Jail, “Hendry Jones” is great fun.
Here’s Neidler, waxing poetic:
I have often felt that you could not rightly understand those days unless you understood the effect of land on a man. The Punta was like a thumb sticking out into the Pacific, or like a flattened lizard, the head and legs frayed, with countless coves eaten by the sea. The location of the Kid’s grave at Punta del Diablo, the Devil’s Point, is a sacred place, but it’s also a place of death, danger, and organic uncertainty. The fog is isolating and unsettling; and the wind, the barking of the seawolves, the crying of the gulls, the sound of the boiling ocean, the smell of the rotting seaweed, ‘the crazy cypresses that the poet said look like a witch’s fingers, pale gray, with blue shadows …’
By the way, “Hendry Jones” was turned into a Hollywood film called “One-Eyed Jacks,” in 1961. It’s the only movie Marlon Brando ever directed. The novel’s plot was substantially changed for the film, but much of it was shot on location throughout Monterey County, including Del Monte Forest.
A DANGEROUS BUSINESS, by Jane Smiley, 2022.
As I passed the baton from one book to the next during my Monterey marathon, it grieves me to report the latest Jane Smiley book a disappointment, at least in terms of geeking over the local settings. The story is a Gold Rush-era murder mystery, with hints of Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." It features a couple of downtown Monterey hookers who track down a killer and ride horses up and down the surrounding hillsides when they're not turning tricks.
Reviewing “A Dangerous Business,” The Washington Post called it “a mash-up of a Western, a serial-killer mystery and a feminist-inflected tale of life in a bordello.”
It's a fine read, as far as it goes. But "A Dangerous Business" could have been set anywhere. Deadwood would have worked. Or Yuma. Smiley names a couple of streets and a handful of buildings familiar in Monterey. But why mention Colton Hall if nothing is happening there and you don't bother to describe its relevance to the city or the era?
Too bad. Smiley is a treasure, Monterey County is her adopted home, we’re all glad she’s here and I was looking forward to her take on Old Monterey. I’ve since read that the book was meant to be a light read, a departure from Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy. And it was indeed a light departure.
THE HONEY BUS: A STORY OF LOSS, COURAGE AND A GIRL SAVE BY BEES, by Meredith Mae, 2020.
Where have I been for the last three years? Why didn’t I know “The Honey Bus” existed until last month? I mean, cripes!, Mae’s story is very much like an epic story I wrote about my father about 20 years ago and yet I had no idea “The Honey Bus” was a thing. Sure, Mae is a significantly better writer than I am, she possesses significantly greater insight than I, and “The Honey Bus” is a heartbreaking, terrifying, personal, sweet and triumphal work populated by unforgettable Big Sur and Carmel Valley characters. And honeybees.
Mae’s memoir describes what it was like to grow up with a mother lost to the sad-mad symptoms of her mental illness, in her grandparents’ home near the old Carmel Valley Airport. Her grandfather, a beekeeper named Franklin Peace, took Mae under his wing. He and his bees introduced order to her life; they helped Mae untangle the confusion of her young existence.
Think of it as Zen and the Art of Honeybee Maintenance.
“The Honey Bus” is one of the more impactful books I’ve read in a good long while. The descriptions of the shit show Mae lived through as a child triggered me in ways I didn’t expect, but with an insight that guided me through the trauma, the honey bus always to the rescue.
Beyond that, Mae’s descriptions of life in Carmel Valley and Big Sur back in the day are happily familiar. Recalling her childhood home in 1965, she writes, “Carmel Valley was still a country place where real cowboys hunted wild boar and scooped crawdads out of the river, before the tourists started demanding espresso at the Wagon Wheel breakfast counter, and according to Granny, stinking up the place with their cologne and talk of race cars and golf swings. It was a time when people could leave sputtering buses in their backyard, and no one blinked twice.”
Photo: Tiziano Vercellio (Titian) Cain and Abel
From “East of Eden” cover, Penguin Books, 1992.