REVIEW / BOOK
THE WAYWARD BUS OF STEINBECK'S WRITING CAREER
THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF JOHN STEINBECK, WRITER, A BIOGRAPHY, BY JACKSON
J. BENSON. VIKING. 1116 PP. $35.

Author: By M. R. Montgomery Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, January 15, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: BOOKS

Few would go so far as his contemporary, the best-selling novelist, James Gould Cozzens - "I can't read 10 pages of Steinbeck without throwing up" - but try re-reading, after the age of 21, the vignettes stitched together in "Cannery Row" and find the magic that has trickled away since you first checked it out of the public library under the disapproving eye of Herself the Librarian.

Prof. Benson's biography will, like it or not, tell you everything you ever would need to know about the sources, the experiences, that lie behind Steinbeck's work. The treatment is purely chronological, with just the faintest amount of foreshadowing and retrospection. Everything is of equal importance - Steinbeck's contributions to his high school yearbook, his first drafts, his few surviving personal letters. (Like many a much married, slightly paranoid, man, he burned as many of his own letters as he could get his hands on, after the dance was over.)

Benson is admiring of the quality of Steinbeck's intelligence, yet frank about the element of juvenile taste that runs through Steinbeck, particularly in matters sexual and scatological (e.g., Tom Joad copulating on the back of the old truck next to the dead body of Grandma, the whole flagpole-sitter episode in "Cannery Row," which resolves itself entirely on the reader wondering how the sitter goes to the potty). What also comes through, and is less appealing, is Steinbeck's acquisitiveness of the bizarre as a substitute for his own imagination.

Recall the famous scene in "Grapes of Wrath" where Rose o' Sharon nurses the starving man with her own milk. Steinbeck, while in college, stopped by a hobo camp to buy "humanistic" stories from the bums, and one young man, named Kilkenny, allowed as how he knew what a humanistic story was. And then he told of being lost and starving and being literally nursed back to health by a farm wife: "Kilkenny turned to Steinbeck, who had been taking notes all the time, and asked, Isthat the kind of story you're looking for?' Yes,' he said, I can use that,' and he paid Kilkenny two dollars."

What does become clear from this biography is that the act of writing, the development of the craft, is separate from mental or psychological development. Steinbeck is a marvelous writer, he's just a lousy novelist and a writer of mostly trivial short stories - but still a writer. That he would stop making love in the back seat of a car and scribble a few notes for some later writing is, perhaps, the kind of obsession of which someone else could have made great art, but, of which he made himself a skilled craftsman - at least at writing.

Here is Benson's summary of Steinbeck in his writer's-blocked sixth decade, dropping a life-long plan to translate Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" into modern English: "John sat down at his desk in Joyous Garde (!* to write a novel. This time there was no formal announcement that he was abandoning the Arthur'; he just let it go. Even with a novel, however, the old problems came back to haunt him. What was a novel? What is fiction? What is its relationship to reality?"

These were not philosophical questions for Steinbeck, they were real problems, much as an automobile mechanic might begin the day by wondering what a carburetor was and how it related to the internal combustion of gasoline, whatever that was.

There is one truth to be learned here, perhaps more easily elsewhere, but here, in this book. Steinbeck was a compulsive reader-aloud of his own work - cornering fellow students at Stanford, bothering busy neighborhood wives in Salinas and his own bemused wives thereafter - constantly, without much caring for any criticism, reading aloud:

"(Steinbeck's friend* Dook was surprised to see what care he took in going back over his work to review the phrasing, the rhythm, and the sound of each sentence. He would sound out the vowel sounds of a sentence to isolate the effect, making changes where necessary, and then he would review alliteration in the same way." That is not bad practice, although it is possible to learn to do it while barely moving your lips. Perhaps, with practice, not even that. It is not necessary, unless you are particularly obstreperous, to corral one's fellows."

The book ends on a low and mournful note, a train whistle in the night. Steinbeck is captured, literally, by Lyndon Johnson with some honeyed words and the Medal of Freedom - Steinbeck becomes the Vietnam war booster, the confidential adviser on matters military (about as appalling as, and 25 years later than, Papa Hemingway's escapades in World War II). It is, in many ways, a biography of What Went Wrong - and it suggests that a full life will include some genuine education, some humility about the universe of ideas, some capacity to grow. Odd, that this archetypal American writer would, at the end of his life, be trying to translate the "Morte d'Arthur" - the first book that had ever captured his imagination as a junior high school layabout in sleepy Salinas.

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