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LEGACIES: McPheron says people
"find amazing things in their closets and
give us a call."
Glenn Matsumura |
under dimmed lights in
Green Library’s cool, quiet Charles and Frances
Field Room, curator William McPheron wheels in a cart
laden with papers, photographs and notebooks. He picks
out an album, circa 1905, and points to a black-and-
white photo. It’s John Steinbeck, in short pants
and a Buster Brown haircut.
California’s most famous storyteller begins to
come to life as McPheron opens a hardbound ledger notebook
containing a draft of the 1933 novel, To a God Unknown.
The pages are covered with cursive handwriting
small enough to make one squint. There are few, if any,
cross-outs in the cramped lines of purple ink.
McPheron, curator of British and American literature,
pulls out a small postcard sent to Steinbeck’s
agent in New York in an era before ZIP codes and return
addresses. In that tight, precise hand, Steinbeck credits
his first wife, Carol Henning, with the inspiration
for a title “that I think is swell. THE GRAPES
OF WRATH from the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Try it
over and see how you like it.”
Stanford houses numerous special collections in a temperature-controlled,
high-security vault, including papers of Ernest Hemingway,
Allen Ginsberg, Tillie Olson, Robert Creeley, William
Saroyan, Robert Pinsky, MA ’65, PhD ’67,
and Denise Levertov. But many scholars hold the John
Steinbeck collections in especially high regard. That
may be because Steinbeck attended the University off
and on between 1919 and 1925, or because the archive
continues to grow. McPheron says Stanford hopes to receive
the author’s Nobel Prize medallion and the last
trove of personal correspondence remaining in private
hands—letters from Elaine Steinbeck, the author’s
third wife.
“Elaine told me that John always wanted the Nobel
Prize to go to Stanford,” says Susan Shillinglaw,
director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San
Jose State University, who developed a friendship with
Steinbeck’s widow over the last decade. “Stanford
was his school and he felt a great sense of loyalty.”
After Elaine died in April 2003, a letter of intent
was signed between Steinbeck’s stepdaughter, Waverly
Scott Kaffaga, and President John Hennessy.
Building a significant archive on Steinbeck takes some
doing: his papers are scattered across 10 institutions
from coast to coast. Besides Stanford and San Jose State,
they include UC-Berkeley, Ball State University in Indiana,
Columbia University, the University of Texas, the National
Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif., the Pierpont Morgan
Library in New York, Princeton University and the University
of Virginia. “Steinbeck, and later Elaine, gave
things to many places,” McPheron says. “They
never seemed to be concerned about having everything
together. It’s not like the collected papers of
Gertrude Stein, which are all at Yale, for example.”
But given Steinbeck’s prolific output—22
novels, 12 nonfiction books, three film scripts and
truckloads of newspaper articles and magazine essays—there
is more than enough material for several universities
to have built strong collections. McPheron points out
that Jackson Benson, ’52, author of the definitive
1984 biography John Steinbeck, Writer, cited
four institutions as crucial to his research: Stanford;
the University of Texas, Austin, which has source materials
and early drafts of The Grapes of Wrath and
East of Eden; Pierpont Morgan, which houses
the diaries and the handwritten draft of Travels
with Charlie; and San Jose State, which has The
Long Valley, Of Mice and Men and short stories
from the 1930s.
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| Photo: Glenn Matsumura |
Among Green Library’s holdings are numerous notebooks
and drafts associated with Steinbeck’s earliest
works, including his first novel, Cup of Gold, The
Pastures of Heaven, To a God Unknown and Cannery
Row. The collections include his letters to Elaine
and correspondence with key people with whom he discussed
and developed his work, including his agent, Elizabeth
Otis, and Carlton Sheffield, ’23, MA ’30,
a Stanford classmate and lifelong friend.
Stanford began systematically building its collection
in the 1970s under David Weber, then the library’s
director. Weber cultivated relationships with Steinbeck’s
Stanford classmates, including Sheffield, Katherine
Beswick, ’23, Webster Street, ’26, JD ’28,
Margaret Gemmell, ’25, and Amasa Miller, ’24,
JD ’26, the literary agent for Steinbeck’s
first novel.
During the past two decades, the collection has tripled.
Wells Fargo made a significant gift in 1999 to mark
the California sesquicentennial. The company purchased
a collection of letters and photographs from the estate
of Esther Steinbeck Rodgers, the author’s older
sister. McPheron declines to reveal the price tag of
this gift but offers a point of comparison. “It
costs between $5,000 and $10,000 for a single page of
Hemingway’s correspondence,” he says. “Steinbeck
is not quite as expensive, but he is in a similar league.
One must think in terms of thousands of dollars per
page, even for short notes.”
The University has purchased other Steinbeck material.
The author’s 10-year correspondence with U.S.
diplomat Leslie Brady, beginning in 1954, sheds light
on Steinbeck’s prolific output as a journalist.
At a time when tension was high between Charles de Gaulle
and President Eisenhower, Steinbeck was asked to write
essays for the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro.
Anxious not to inflame Franco-American relations, he
submitted his essays in advance to Brady, the cultural
attaché at the U.S. Embassy. The two continued
to correspond into the 1960s, when Steinbeck was tapped
by President Kennedy to lead a cultural delegation to
Moscow.
“People do find amazing things in their closets
and give us a call,” McPheron adds. That is how
Stanford recently acquired material from one of Steinbeck’s
lesser-known film projects. Two years ago, Alisa Kline,
daughter of the documentary film director Herbert Kline,
found a notebook covered in Steinbeck’s handwriting.
It was the script for a 1941 documentary film called
The Forgotten Village.
“Steinbeck encountered a lot of hostility from
conservatives once he published The Grapes of Wrath
in 1939,” McPheron says, explaining that the author
sought ways to retreat from the fray. “While he
was waiting for the Sea of Cortez project with [marine
biologist] Ed Ricketts to come together, he was approached
by Kline to make a movie about revolution in rural Mexico.”
As McPheron points out, the country held an abiding
fascination for Steinbeck, who agreed to the project
on condition that the story line switch from revolution
to focus on “modern sanitation versus folk medicine.”
Steinbeck wrote the script and flew to Mexico to scout
locations and assist with production.
The archive includes the detailed 36-page screenplay
and correspondence between Kline and Steinbeck about
censorship. (The New York Board of Regents initially
refused to issue a screening license, calling the film
obscene for its shots of a woman giving birth. Eleanor
Roosevelt reportedly intervened and the film premiered
in November 1941.) There are hundreds of production
stills and photos taken by the director’s wife,
Rosa Kline.
Material like this makes Stanford’s collection
invaluable—the “pre-eminent place in America
for research on John Steinbeck,” in the estimation
of Michael Keller, head librarian and director of academic
information resources. Yet McPheron reckons there may
have been only 30 to 50 serious uses of the collection
by scholars in the 20 years he has been at Stanford.
He would like to see that change. “We are, in
a sense, another monument to Steinbeck’s heritage
and influence in California,” the curator says.
“There’s great potential to exploit the
collection, in the best sense of that word. No one has
gone through and written the book based on the material
we now have.” |
