America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Online Free

place more tolerant of both bohemians and ne’er-do-wells. The whole peninsula, he wrote in the mid- 1940s, “has a soul which is lacking in the east” (SLL 28). In particular, he loved Monterey’s Cannery Row, a street of fish canneries, warehouses, bordellos, groceries, and fishermen’s shacks—a place throbbing with life. Surprisingly, when asked in 1957 to write about redevelopment of the abandoned canneries and warehouses—the sardine industry had collapsed in 1948—he did not endorse nostalgia. He recommended that “young and fearless and creative architects” be hired “to design something new in the world, but something that will add to the exciting beauty” of the Pacific coastline. Steinbeck would later mourn changes in his native turf, but he was realistic about the need for evolutionary growth (Monterey Peninsula Herald, 8 Mar. 1957).
    His time in San Francisco was relatively short. As his memoir recalls, “The City,” as most northern Californians referred to it, was the place where, when he was young, his mother took him for culture—the opera, museums, the theater. His nostalgic memories of his bohemian life in the city as an adult are based on the nearly two years he spent there in the late 1920s, when he relocated to be near his future wife, Carol, who worked as a secretary for the Schilling spice company. His nights on the town with her were idyllic, but he fails to mention his long hours of muscling bales of hemp in a bayfront warehouse. He would never fully embrace urban life. Yet his appreciation of the other great city where he lived for a number of years, New York, suggests that he could adapt and become attached to nearly any environment: “When you really live in New York,” he writes to his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, “it is more rural than country. Your district is a village and you go to Times Square as once you went to San Francisco” (SLL 456). Settled there, first in the early 1940s, permanently from 1950 on, he sometimes embraced it wholeheartedly. “New York is everything,” he wrote for a radio broadcast in 1955. “It is tireless, and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than any place else” (The Saturday Review, 26 Nov. 1955).
    But city life, no matter how enthusiastic his boosterism, was not fully satisfying to a man who needed space, contact with the land, access to the sea. In particular he missed the ocean, the smell of it, the seabirds, and the people who ran boats out to fish. “We have an urban civilization,” remarked Arthur Miller, “and John was not an urban man. He liked to think he was sometimes. . . . He was trying to find a community in the United States that would feed him, toward which he could react in a feeling way, rather than merely as an observer or a commentator. And I don’t know if there is such a place left in the world” (Benson 701-2). With his third wife, Elaine, Steinbeck found in the old whaling village of Sag Harbor on Long Island a place reminiscent of Monterey, a place he could respond to “in a feeling way.” In 1954 they bought a small cottage located on a point overlooking a cove of the bay. They weatherized it so that it could be used in the winter, and it became more than a summer home. They made friends, and Steinbeck could wear his old clothes and his sailor’s cap, and could walk to town for morning coffee. He bought a boat—several boats in time—and would fish, or pretend to fish, with his two boys, agent Shirley Fisher, and guests to the cottage. In Sag Harbor, Steinbeck could shed his fame, talk to the locals, read, spend endless hours inventing small innovations, sail on the bay, and, of course, write in the tiny octagonal study that he had built for himself on the point, “Joyous Garde.” “Out here,” he wrote his editor at Viking,