Posts Tagged ‘John Steinbeck’

More than two years ago, we wrote of Nobel prizewinning author John Steinbeck‘s 1955 letter to Marilyn Monroe, which sold for more than $3520 at a 2016 auction. In it, the esteemed author begged for a favor from the film goddess: Would she please send a “pensive, girlish” photo to his starstruck nephew, and sign it in her actual handwriting? Said the author of Grapes of Wrath: “He has his foot in the door of puberty, but that is only one of his problems. You are the other.” In fact, he told the blonde bombshell that Steinbeck own stock with his nephew skyrocketed when he learned Steinbeck had met her. Then the writer beseeched Monroe: “He is already your slave. This would make him mine.”

Did it happen? This month, Snopes ruled that it did. But was the famous rumor-smashing organization itself under the sway of star-power when it made the crucial decision? It’s the stuff of which award-winning investigative reporting is made. The Oregonian put its best man on the story, and wine writer Michael Alberty snatched the opportunity, although he admitted his more usual work was “non-wrathful grapes.” (Alberty also gives a thoughtful nod to the Book Haven: “Even esteemed literary critic Cynthia L. Haven wrote on her ‘The Book Haven’ blog, ‘Did she send the photo to the lovestruck boy, Jon Atkinson? We’ll never know, but she valued it enough to keep it till her dying day.’”)

There was nothing for it but to track down nephew the smitten Atkinson, now a retired minister, to his Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he lives quietly with his wife. Quiet … until now. The elderly couple first heard about the fabled letter only a few weeks ago. One thing is certain: Atkinson never got the letter. And the signature doesn’t look like Steinbeck’s, anyway, said his wife.

From the article:

“Joan Atkinson points out that Steinbeck almost exclusively wrote his letters in longhand with a pencil. ‘I could not imagine that John Steinbeck would have had a typist or secretary from the office sign a letter like that for him. As personal as this subject was, it seems strange,’ she said.

“Did Steinbeck write the letter for an assistant to type? All we can say with any degree of confidence is the letter was in Marilyn Monroe’s possession. Unless the typist ‘mf’ can be located, this piece of the mystery may never be solved.

“We do know young Jon Atkinson never received a photograph inscribed with a personal message from Marilyn Monroe. ‘That sure would have been nice, right?’ Atkinson said.

Read the whole story here. The famous letter is below.

Postscript on June 23: Wine writer-cum-detective Michael Alberty wrote to us following Monday’s post. Here’s what he had to say:

Thank you for the kind words in your recent blog post. My email has been blowing up, and I think a good deal of that has to do with you.

Tracking Jon and Joan Atkinson down was a lot of fun. To be able to chat with two people who had personal experiences with the Steinbecks was both surreal and an honor. Unfortunately, I had to leave out so many weird and wonderful things that I feel like I need to write a magazine article.

For now, it is back to wine.

This 1955 letter from John Steinbeck to Marilyn Monroe has been making the rounds on Facebook in the last few days, so we thought we’d join the party. It’s a sweet letter, somewhat bashful, and it was found in the superstar’s personal archive, and sold for $3,250 at Julien’s in 2016. Steinbeck humbly, even grovelingly requests a “girlish” photo for his nephew. Did she send the photo to the lovestruck boy, Jon Atkinson? We’ll never know, but she valued enough to keep it till her dying day.

“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”

So wrote Nobel prizewinner John Steinbeck, Stanford’s most illustrious drop-out, who was born on this day in 1902. “He came to Stanford to mollify his parents, primarily his mother,” explained Kevin Hearle, a visiting scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West a few years ago. “He wasn’t excited about it. He didn’t see why he needed a college education to be a writer.”

Nevertheless, he made some lasting connections here – one of them was Prof. Edith Mirrielees, who would warm and ignite his hope, and also Ed Ricketts, a man who would later be immortalized as “Doc” in Cannery Row. (I’ve written about Ricketts here and here and here and here.) According to a Stanford Daily article a few years ago by Taylor Grossman:

“In a 1964 letter to his good friend Dook, Steinbeck asked, ‘Do you ever go near Stanford? I don’t think I would like to go. It would be kind of embarrassing because I was such a lousy student, I suppose. Anyway, I have no call for the Groves of Academe.’

“The Groves of Academe, however, had housed him well in some regards. In a 1962 letter to Mirrielees, he wrote about her influence on his writing.

“’Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in your class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly,’ Steinbeck said. ‘I was bright-eyed and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb from you the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. You canceled this illusion very quickly.’”

In the six years that he was enrolled at Stanford, starting in 1919, he only accumulated 93 units — becoming equivalent in status to a junior. At the Faculty Club, his photo on the wall with all the Nobel Prize winners even though he refused to take “required” classes…

Slavic scholar Grisha Freidin is a child of Moscow – he and his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was teenager.  So that means he recalls the city’s 800th birthday party on September 7, 1947.  “I remember playing with the colorful commemorative insignia (few things were colorful then) and hearing my parents, probably in answer to my questions, refer to the celebrations with uncharacteristic ebullience. Clearly it was a major landmark of the post-war years in Stalin’s Russia.”

The era’s most famous war photographer, Robert Capa, was on hand to document the event with John Steinbeck – and add a little nuance to the official party line of a a people looking inexorably forward to a glorious future.  Grisha looked up Capa’s photos, and has a compelling essay over at his blog, The Noise of Time:

And yet, whatever the restrictions, this war photographer was able to convey the atmosphere of the 1947 Moscow. Indeed, many images are composed to give expression to the wrenching tension between the ordinary folks’ desire to cash in a little of that great WWII victory – to ease gently into the long-deferred private life – and the unspoken command shouting at them from every poster: “Attention! To the Glory of the Empire, March!”

Capa’s and Steinbeck’s work were serialized in The New York Herald Tribune, later published as A Russian Journal, with Photographs by Robert Capa, a book which is still in print.  I’m not sure even Steinbeck could top Grisha’s observations on the photograph above.  From his blog:

The woman facing the camera is wearing a thick shawl and a heavy coat, the other is in a light dress, epitomizing the two sides of the Russian “Indian summer” and, perhaps also, the desire to use hope to trump the cold reality, for “it was a brilliant cold day,” as Steinbeck noted in his Journal. Both women are young and beautiful and strikingly dignified. But their faces suggest a more complicated story. The furrowed brow, the lines around the mouth, the alarm in the eyes of the woman facing the camera – what is behind them? And what about her dancing partner? Alone in the frame in a white flowery dress, her hair beautifully arranged, but her gaze is fixed on a point in infinity and her  profile is frozen into a classical tragic mask. Her right arm, bare and vulnerable, is gracefully stretched out, and the slight curve of her back is protected by the hand of her partner, apparently, stronger and more practically dressed. The tension is palpable. Were the music to stop at that moment, one of them and perhaps both would hunch over and burst out crying. To make sure your are not imagining all of this emotional dynamite, you check their expressions and posture against the other two female couples in the background: they, too, look tentative, dispirited, and forlorn, though lacking in grace and dignity compared to the couple in the foreground. The out-of-focus smiling faces to the right of the dancers only amplify the grotesque contrast between the intended mood of the festivities and the pain of the city’s post-war life. So much sadness fills this instant captured by Capa that it can never be effaced or redeemed.

Read the rest of Grisha’s post, which includes a dicussion of Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s photos of the city a few years later, is here.

Fate does strange things.

Some time ago I had written a short article on an Islamic prayerbook, “Beauty with an Unknown Past” (it’s here).  A Stanford curator found the mystery book in a small bookshop in Monterey.

The article generated some interesting reaction – but the biggest reaction was mine, when I got a letter from the proprietor of the bookshop (who is also a fan of the Book Haven, incidentally).  It turned out to be a long-lost friend, James Bryant, whom I met over three decades ago in London.  And the bookshop is Carpe Diem Fine Books.  With his wife, Mary Hill, he has been running Carpe Diem since 1995, in a charming 1930s Carmel-stone building in historic Old Monterey.  It’s a few doors down from Robert Louis Stevenson‘s house.

Lunch at the Faculty Club followed a few weeks later, with a long chat to swap memories and bring us up to 2012. He had become an eminent bookseller and patron of the arts, while Humble Moi remains a lowly writer, tapping on a keyboard in the blogosphere, into the wee hours.

Later, he sent me photos from Carpe Diem. Wow. I’m a sucker for the Carmel style – the Robinson Jeffers home is still one of my favorite houses anywhere – and this shop epitomizes it.  No surprise, then, that its “discriminating selection” of out-of-print, signed and unusual books in all fields has a special emphasis on the history and literature of California and the West.  (It also has a special collection of signed John Steinbeck books here.)

The AAA magazine Via wrote, “The entire shop … is a bibliophile’s delight.”  A local magazine, Pebble Beach, claimed it was “simply the Best… featuring a constantly changing inventory – from the classics to the unexpected…”

As for me, I still haven’t seen it yet.  But I hope to sometime between September 13 and 16.  You see, the bookshop is just one of James’s ventures.  He’s also one of the founders of the Art in the Adobes Festival, which is featuring a program, “Rediscovery: Monterey Peninsula Artists at Home and Abroad” this year.

Organizers claim that “influential artists, important paintings, and some of the roots of Western U.S. art will all be rediscovered at the Art in the Adobes Festival weekend.”

How good are the paintings?  You can get an idea from Abel Warshawsky‘s Paris Studio, circa 1930, at left  (courtesy City of Monterey).  But stop and browse Carpe Diem’s shelves while you’re there.

See you in Monterey – Insha’Allah.

 

 

 

I received an email from my publisher at Ohio University Press/Swallow Press earlier this week – the poet Moore Moran, known to his friends as Mike, died on February 27.  He was 79.

I had blogged about the Santa Rosa poet here and here. He had published his first full-length book, Firebreaks, in 1999 – it bagged a National Poetry Book Award.  His newest book, The Room Within, was published last year.

“Imagine a poet who could deal with the experience of Jack Kerouac but with too much intelligence to limit himself to the road. You don’t have to imagine him. He exists. He has many skills, all of them beautifully bright, and on occasions when he looks into the abyss they take him safely over it,” said Turner Cassity of Moran’s poems.

But I was startled when I reread the email a few days later and realized I had overlooked that the memorial would not be in Santa Rosa, but nearby, in Menlo Park – where, it turns out, he had graduated from high school before getting two degrees from Stanford.

So I dropped in on Friday afternoon to pay my respects to a poet in the century-old Church of the Nativity.  But it was not a poet who was being honored so much as  “husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, father-in-law, friend, poet,” according to the program.

He was much loved.  About 150-200 friends and family came to the mass, with bluegrass guitar and bass fiddle performers Dennis and Ehlert Lassen singing “Amazing Grace” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  Not necessarily what one would expect from the poems, with their bleak, spare mystery.

Surprisingly, everyone looked like they had come for the same event – the men were all in jackets and ties, and the women in somber suits and dresses. Banished were all traces of “California casual,” where some people look as if they had wandered in from the garden or the beach or a cocktail party.  Nor did there seem to be any poets on hand from the “Yvor Winters Circle” – but then, the room was crowded and I was in a back corner, and this was a very quiet death, after all.

The priest, referred to only as “Father Davenport,” recalled that Moore Moran, despite disability, was “always smiling” and “a good man.”

His son, businessman Mike Moran, said, “I never stopped amazing my dad, and my dad never stopped amazing me.”  The son, to put it mildly, was not a poet or lit freak.

His father taught the kids Latin and music, as well as Yvor Winters, John Steinbeck, and J.D. Salinger.  He was “an encyclopedia of jokes,” recalled his son.  And, in fact, the program included his poem “Just Joking,” written on his 51st birthday, when he had “maybe a third of a tank left”:

…the bewildered heart in us which,
Year by year, measuring our slim attainments
With mounting despair, still feeds
In its recesses some faint hope, despite
The certain knowledge that what it hopes for
Cannot change the tide…

“He was often lost in afterthought,” said his son.  “I’m certainly no poet, but I came to appreciate my father’s poetry.” He recalled the children’s hesitancy to have their father correct their writing, because “then we’d go back for another hour of writing.”

But sometimes dad came in handy.  Moran Jr. recalled a long discussion his father launched when the son was having trouble “getting” Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales.  The next day in class,  Moran Jr. performed the usual duck-and-hide with averted gaze, to avoid the teacher targeting him with a question.  The teacher targeted him anyway.

Thanks to his dad’s monologue, the so-so student poured forth with a reply “at a depth and level far beyond what my teacher had.”

The class was “absolutely stunned.  The whole room was silent,” he recalled.

“I was bumped up to AP English,” he said, and paused for only an instant. “That lasted about four days.”

On Moran’s memorial page at legacy.com, David Sanders wrote: “A gentleman and a fine poet. It was an honor to edit and publish his last book.”

“Just Joking,” with its rambling style is nice, but my favorite Moran poems are quick and cryptic – like this one:

Ordinary Time in the Pews

Church of the Nativity, Menlo Park

Ordinary days again.
Advent, Pentecost are past;
who now will accept our sins,
raise the dust in which we’re cast?

Cold the God flesh on the tree,
banned the crèche to attic murk,
sheer the silence after prayer.
Nothing seems at all to work.

Yet we try and try again
serving Him we hardly know:
honk if you love Jesus, friend,
beeping blessings as we go.

Here we meet who, somehow, must
rescue meaning from the dust,
where betrayal’s kiss presents
our best hope of relevance.

Postscript:  Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence has added a lovely tribute here.  “Earth only will find him cold.”

Postscript on 3/7: Looking online for others who remember Moore Moran, I found this mini-memoir from Peter Robinson.