Darius Cooper
“I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.” John Steinbeck. Travels with Charley. In Search of America
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here are nineteen steps from my patio to my front door. I am forced to make, on a daily basis, frequent journeys on them. I’ve counted these steps ever since Sherlock Holmes castigated Watson for not counting the stairs that led from his study, upstairs, to Watson’s bedroom in 221 Baker Street. But an ideal journey is the one you embark on where all stairs and steps gradually disappear and become invisible, leaving behind the choice of either abandoning these or inventing them. Retirement is wrongly conceived, in almost all cultures as one’s last journey before succumbing to the inevitable. This is a fallacy, because, as I am recently discovering, retirement provides marvelous opportunities for new journeys, especially those that we do not consciously choose, but in a strange spurt of the moment, are chosen for us.
My son Nikhil, suddenly announced one day, “Dad, you and I are going to drive all the way to meet John Steinbeck at Salinas and Cannery Row. So get ready. We’ll leave Los Angeles early tomorrow morning.” Nikhil had recently stumbled upon and fallen in love with Steinbeck’s memoir Travels with Charly. Charly, by the way, was a poodle with whom Steinbeck drove to rediscover America by car in his autumnal retired years. I was delighted that my thirty-four year old son (so far from retirement) had chosen his seventy-two year old father (freshly retired) as his companion/poodle for this spontaneous John Steinbeck sojourn.
It had to be an ideal journey because neither my son nor I wanted in any way to plan or control it. Miles were not calculated. Neither were precise directions. Once the direction was noted, we set forth, often getting lost. But that was the intention. Getting lost meant awaiting a discovery one had not imagined.
Eventually we would reach Salinas and Cannery Row not as a destination, but as a goal, an adventure, from which hopefully, another journey would rapidly emerge. So, as we started, we negotiated with each other, that our movements would not be towards Salinas and Cannery Row but would be away from Los Angeles. This would involve the temporary abandonment of our familial identities as son and father. What would be the new identities that our journey could progressively impose on us would then form the metamorphosis we looked forward to. Would we become like a Joad family member in search of roots or oranges or would my son hurl large chunks of ice to make fun of me as his father like Cal Trask did? But Jimmy Dean, who played Cal in his first film, East of Eden, made by Elia Kazan, had crashed his car, broken his neck, and died, on the way to Salinas. We didn’t want that history to repeat itself, but there were ‘the others’ in both of us that we somehow spontaneously felt would emerge, fixed, not necessarily only East of Eden since many other directions would intrude.
Since this promised to be a very long and exhausting journey by car, the invigorating trip would definitely produce many hangovers, not so much as punishments, but as pleasant consequences. We knew that driving (on my son’s part) and being driven (in the role of ‘father’) would be strenuous, but that is precisely why we decided to do it immediately without meditating on it. The long-winding tedious non-scenic route was the one we instinctively chose when we left Los Angeles. This left us the option to choose the breath-taking scenic route on our return to Los Angeles. So heading to Steinbeck country, we passed a succession of small American towns that all looked the same; at least a hundred fast-food Denny’s and Burger Kings. No wonder a lot of them have disappeared from the big city which is our Home now. Coming back, we would soak ourselves with the sparkling waters of the deep ocean below us, on one side; and be dazzled by the sunlit vegetation of the mountains and forests above us. Such became then the sanctified moments that one anticipates and experiences on any ideal journey, and this had to be one of them.
If every journey had to have a design, Salinas and Cannery Row were our designs. But if every journey had to have a purpose, John Steinbeck was our purpose. Then only could we bring him all the way back home.
Arriving at Salinas, we promptly confronted the inevitable conflict between myth and fact: had the Steinbeck myth, been wiped out or changed by the Steinbeck facts related to it? The Steinbeck Museum became the first place to visit in order to check out the facts stored and displayed in it. From the factual images of the film documenting his life and achievements as a writer, to the carefully arranged display of his books; from the accurate recreations of actual rooms in which his characters confront their crisis in his novels to their presentations in the films made of his books; these facts proclaimed the pride that Salinas, his hometown, still had for its native son. His Museum bore testimony to that pride.
But we soon learnt that your hometown does not commemorate you by facts alone. It tends to judge you more by the layers of myth that accumulate and here we confronted a different version, distant and remote and in effect, the opposite of the factual. We learnt this, surprisingly, from the man who was in charge of the Steinbeck Family Mansion located a few blocks away from the Steinbeck Museum.
It was way past lunchtime when we arrived there. All the doors were locked. All the windows were closed. We circled it and noticed an open door, at last, at the back. Venturing in we found a pleasant old man who was on the verge of shutting off all the lights of the three small rooms which served as kiosks displaying Steinbeck paraphernalia. “I’m a retired English professor,” I told him as I entered. “This is my son who has just finished reading Steinbeck’s Travels with Charly. We have arrived all the way from Los Angeles to meet John Steinbeck. Just before I retired I was teaching a course on ‘Envy’ and used East of Eden as a convincing filmic validation of Steinbeck’s examination of how envy destroys the Trask family.”
The old man’s eyes twinkled. Leaving the lights on, he slowly came toward us, put his arms around our shoulders, and whispered. “You know, right now, you two are the only two persons who love John, right here, in Salinas. I do too. But this place, his own hometown, really hated him and continues to do so. They said and many still say it today, ‘That son of a bitch should have been hung because he always took the side of the workers and the laborers in his books. He never had any good things to say about the farmers and the owners of our great Salinas farms and agriculture. And then they awarded that bastard the Nobel Literary Prize. No Sir! He clearly did not deserve that. He would not be welcome in my home’.”
This myth shattered completely the commendable architecture of facts consolidated by the Museum earlier. But for us, it opened up miraculously, all the doors of that locked Steinbeck Mansion which was now taken care of by this old man as a non-profit elegant dining place serving lunch and dinner. There was no official staff except volunteers who offered their services, freely, on a daily basis, as servers between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. and worked in the kitchen between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. and some served in the Best Cellar between 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Where they stood in relation to the Steinbeck facts/myth conflict, we would never know.
One door after another was now joyfully opened by our and John’s caretaker, and when he related, in great detail, all “the facts” of how the Steinbeck family actually functioned in each room of their mansion, we absorbed them, not as facts, but as myths, thereby turning ourselves, in those precious moments, into characters inside a Steinbeck novel itself. All the simple gestures that the old man’s memory catalogued for us about the Steinbeck family: how they read, how they ate, how they drank, how they sat on their chairs or rolled on their carpets, how someone paid the bill or wrote down the recipe of a food item, became mythical for us, because it was as if they were there, resurrected by the caretaker, and were including us in their daily familiar routines. He reaffirmed the mythical part to such an extent that the facts evaporated after a while and ceased to exist. They served food here still using the same Steinbeck cutlery. Each dining table was covered by the family’s carefully chosen table-cloths. Food was still cooked on the stoves in the kitchen the family used and it was cooked exactly according to the recipes laid down in the Steinbeck cookbook.
Such myths, we soon realized, are important because they provided us with the small diagnostic truths that are the foundations of the great writer’s larger truth which he spelled out so eloquently in his writings. What these myths also confirmed for us was that facts, usually the ones circulated by the spiteful and hateful, invariably get reduced to fine print, and then disappear.
I am sure the caretaker secretly thanked us for allowing him to take revenge on the facts in such a profound mythical way.
Steinbeck’s Cannery Row stank. The improvised eating houses usually appeared lopsided and threatened to fall down any minute. The planks of the boardwalk came apart at the seam, but the gift to the gastric juices was the food cooked in these dirty smelly kitchens. It was always healthy and tasted good because it was touched by concerned hands and shaped by loving fingers. Today’s Cannery Row has eliminated the stink. The eating places no longer defy gravity. Each one has an ambiance that is friendly, decorative, and respectable. No grease or stain is allowed to be visible on any wall in Cannery Row. The wild population in Steinbeck’s time that frequented it has been replaced by throngs of tourists. So, one has to be clever, even discriminating, in picking the right eating house for food. Some offer oven-fresh, clean, but tasteless food. But there are others that serve up the handmade kind where you eat the fish with its own particular stinks and you know you won’t get sick because it has been touched and fussed over several times in ways no machine could ever come close to duplicating.
Retirement also creates the need, to finally lay down roots. That is why I made my move to stay at my son’s place and close to my ex-wife and her husband in Los Angeles. Even though my son stays directly below me, he is far above me when dealing with life’s daily problems and has become a tremendous ally in helping his awkward and clumsy father negotiate his way through a mal-adjusted technology encrusted world.
But as I drove beside him, I also realized that the deeper and greater impetus of this urge also creates paradoxically another desire, another kind of hunger to be constantly somewhere else, especially in a place dreamed up and conjured, as magically like a Salinas or a Cannery Row. If the Joads came all the way to southern California, wasn’t it my duty to reciprocate and visit that very place and come to know the man and his sensibility that had created them?
One of the aspects that every journey constantly provides is proof of that which has been replaced, but it also makes one touch once again, especially with one’s aroused senses, all those times it cannot fully replace. It is a commonplace that one protests against change especially as one grows older, because the changes one encounters are never entirely for the better. But when a glimpse of that old life is somehow magically revealed one is thankful that one was neither prepared for it or knew anything about its revelation.
Our return drive on the scenic drive brought this miracle about. I had heard about the wild Henry Miller finally settling down and finding his roots in the lovely Big Sur countryside we were driving through. Suddenly we came upon a vast secluded corner of nature announcing itself as The Henry Miller Bookshop. There was a tiny shop in the center of that enclave but no visitors were allowed there. The Swedish caretaker who ran this place had hundreds of books strewn all over in random fashion. Books were spread between flowers and held by the branches and trunks of the tall sequoia trees. They also rested on tables on which leaves from the trees regularly fell.
“Where are you from?” he suddenly addressed me as I played with the leaves, as Miller, I am sure, must have done. “You have a lovely accent.”
“I’m from India and…” he held out his hand and continued. “Then, I must tell you my Indian story. My mother’s mother was sent all the way to India to accompany and escort Rabindranath Tagore to Oslo when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his Gitanjali. Poor woman. She had a very hard time protecting this tall, handsome, graceful man, always dressed in majestic white robes, from the women there.”
A glimpse, a significant one, of that old life was definitively revealed by this wonderful story and it settled on me, once again, like a myth, I would carry all the way with John, when I took him and (now Tagore) all the way home.
Our journey which began with no determined means made us discover so many other means. Did we see an end? Is it necessary to always see an end? It wasn’t really sought for. So, let the means remain in all their certainties and all their ambiguities. It makes bringing John Steinbeck (and Tagore) home all the more authentic.
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Darius Cooper is a Contributing Editor, The Beacon More by Darius Cooper in The Beacon
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