By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – Was Steinbeck really a great writer? Growing up comfortably as he did in the middle class, where are his left-wing credentials needed to write "Of Mice and Men," and "The Grapes of Wrath?" Was he a Nazi? He was called one after the publication of "The Moon is Down." At various times he was also called a Communist, a pervert, and even a puritan. Did it deserve the Pulitzer Prize? Did he, the author of such duds as "Burning Bright" and "Pipe Dreams," deserve the Nobel Prize?
He had such flaws and inconsistencies that even his flaws are said to be inconsistent.
Once upon a time I went to California in search - not of answers to these questions, because they don't interest me - but in search of myself and why I was so drawn to his books, so drawn that I read them all. Why, when I had my choice of hundreds of topics on which to write a thesis at college, did I choose him? As a young student, I didn't know this answer. It was just what I wanted to do.
Nearly twenty years later, I thought I could find the answer in Monterey, the center of some of his most memorable prose. I was looking for some part of myself that must be there, if I could just find it. The canneries stood empty in those days, though now I think they have been customized into fine clip shops. There was a small, grotesque bust of Steinbeck there on Cannery Row and a restaurant called The Steinbeck Lobster Grotto. There is a real estate office where the so-called Bearflag brothel once stood. This was not what I was looking for.
Midway down the row and backed up to the bay there was, and still is, a plain clapboard building with a stairway up the front. This was Pacific Biological Laboratories, owned and operated by Steinbeck's friend, Ed Ricketts. He was called "Doc" in "Cannery Row" and other books. Ricketts netted sea life from the tide pools and sold it to Stanford's marine biology department. Steinbeck wrote much of "Cannery Row" inside that building.
It was locked, so I went across the street to where Wing Chong's grocery store used to be. It was an antique store, owned by Alice De Noon. She was the local Steinbeck-Rickett's authority. She gave me the telephone number of a man named Frank Wright, who was one of the owners of the building. I told him I was looking for Steinbeck's ghost and had reason to believe that it may be residing in that building. I was shocked when he said he would come down and let me in.
When I saw it inside, still the way it was when Steinbeck hung out there, I thought I had my answer. Here was a boy's playhouse, a hideaway for a boy who never grew up, a place where a man of deep shyness could go hide forever if he wanted. He could peer out the upstairs windows at the humanity in the street but never have to go among them. A place where he could be alone, drink beer, and watch Doc feed rats to his python and never have to be respectable if he didn't want to be.
My visit inside that building told me a lot about Steinbeck, and myself, in the bargain.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian, Texas.