Editor’s Note, Winter 98

There are six streets, one plaza, and three places – most of them alleys – in San Francisco deliberately named after (dead male) writers (Ambrose Bierce, Richard Henry Dana, Dashiell Hammett, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Frank Norris, Kenneth Rexroth, William Saroyan, and Mark Twain); one named after The City’s (living male) poet laureate, Via [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti; and more than a few that accidentally bear the names of writers – Abbey, Addison, Agnon, Anderson, Apollo, Amory, Arnold, Bacon, and so on.

There are also a few statues around town, especially in Golden Gate Park (Goethe/Schiller, Cervantes...) that commemorate authors. And there are tablets bearing the names of the canonic writers of Western Civ still on the façade of the (Old) Main Library now being transmogrified into the Asian Art Museum – these worthies number only one woman, George Eliot, unless you feel that BROWNING includes Elizabeth B. and/or that LOWELL includes Amy; one Hispanic, the aforementioned Cervantes; and one Asian, Tolstoi.

Around the Bay Area there are several houses you can visit to pay homage to the great writers who once lived there: Robinson Jeffers in Carmel, Jack London in Glen Ellen, John Muir in Martinez, Eugene O’Neill in Danville. In Oakland there’s the Bret Harte Boardwalk – his house was nearby – and Joaquin Miller Park. In Monterey, there’s a Robert Louis Stevenson house, in St. Helena a museum devoted to him, and, a few miles further north, an eponymous state park. ("The Henry Miller Library" in Big Sur is not his actual house, which remains in private hands.)

Sadly, there is nothing but a plaque on Market St. to honor San Francisco’s greatest native son, Robert Frost, unless you count a six-bed nursing home bearing his name out in the Sunset. As for the palazzo formerly known as the Spreckels Mansion, now the pied-à-terre of Danielle Steel, it has not yet been made accessible to the public.

Now comes the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, a $10.6 million postmodern – in the sense that it seems comprised of parts of various structures that do not necessarily belong together – mall that stands at the head of Main Street, where it will, the town’s leaders must hope, eventually help revive downtown with cashflow. At the moment, the adjacent blocks of Main consist of 1) a big empty lot and 2) some empty storefronts, although farther away, there are antique stores in ex-banks and restaurants galore.

Like most of the other American writers who’ve won the Nobel Prize, Steinbeck was no fancy pants, and his shrine should hardly be a hushed exercise in belles-lettres presided over by kindly ladies serving tea, which is what he used to have, a few blocks away, namely, his family’s Victorian cottage, where you can still, on certain days, obtain a genteel luncheon. His Center, though, is something else, a milestone in the transformation of what it means to have been a famous writer.

Its guiding principle seems to be edutainment: fun for all ages, for readers at all levels of literacy, fun even and maybe especially for those who’ve never read anything by Steinbeck at all.

My favorite item in this hagiographic hogdepodge is certainly not the Chautauquaesqe right wing of lecture room and art gallery, but, in the left-wing relitquary, a stuffed pony you can climb up on by means of some wooden steps, if you’re small enough to need them. (Thus is made palpable the much-assigned story "The Red Pony.")

I also liked the smellovision mural of Cannery Row; actually, I liked opening a little cabinet beside the mural and seeing that the faint odor of rotting fish was being created by a cannister of smell-chemicals.

I liked the many readings on video, the film clips & posters. (I must rent Viva Zapata! soon.) I read with due diligence the pull quotes stencilled on the walls. I admired the commitment to bilingualism. (A third of Steinbeck’s output dealt with Mexicans or Mexican-Americans.) I loved the big wooden – or are they plastic? – books with a page or two of text you can actually turn! And the faintly typewritten manuscripts under plexi! I even liked the multimedia room, with its searchable databases and the wall where you can rearrange words-on-magnetic-plaques to make your own texts, just like at home on the refrigerator.

Although I bought nothing in that cornerstone of contemporary museology, the gift shop, I’m pleased to report that there are lots of books on sale, including a selection of the classics Steinbeck read as a boy(!) and some of the many translations of the nerve-touching works he wrote as a man. There are also for sale such musts as a baby’s romper bearing the inscription National Steinbeck Center. (Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be authors.)

I must protest, nonetheless, the non-inclusion of Joseph Brodsky in a wall-list of American Nobelists. Brodsky was the third in a string of foreign-born U.S. laureates that began with Bellow, continued with Singer, and makes the overlooking of Updike absolutely ignoble.

I say that even though I don’t think I’d ever be tempted to visit Updike House, should there be one someday in PA or MA. In the matter of writers’ houses, in the end I side with Samuel Johnson, at least in Max Beerbohm’s version. When Dr. J’s house (from 1748 to 1759) was restored and opened to the public in 1914, the incomparable Max, who was one of the original governors of the house, did a presentation caricature, which is apparently still to be seen there – a massive Johnson looms over a diminutive Boswell, and a sturdy text emanates:

BOSWELL: Are you not pleased, Sir, that your house in Gough Square is to be presented to the Nation? JOHNSON: Why, no, Sir. You are to consider that the purpose of a house is to be inhabited by some one. If a house be not fit for tenancy by Tom or Dick, let it be demolished or handed over without more ado to the rats, which, by frequentation, will have acquired a prescriptive right there. I conceive that in Gough Square a vast number of rats will have been disturbed and evicted. (Puffing, and rolling himself from side to side.) Sir, I am sorry for the rats. Sir, the rats have a just grievance. BOSWELL: Nevertheless, Sir, is it not well that the house of the great Samuel Johnson should be preserved? Will it not tend to diffuse happiness and to promote virtue? JOHNSON: Nay, Sir, let us have no more of this foppishness. The house is naught. Let us not sublimify lath and plaster. I know not whether I profited the world while I was in it. I am very sure that my mere tenement will not be profitable now that I am out of it. Alas, Sir, when "tempus edax" [devouring time] has swallowed the yolk of the egg, there is no gain to be had by conservation of the egg-shell...or, (so very much was Lexiphanes a man of moods) the dialogue might run thus...BOSWELL: Are you not glad, Sir, that your house in Gough Square is to be presented to the Nation? JOHNSON: Why, yes, Sir. (In a solemn, faltering tone.) Nothing has pleased me half so well since the Rambler was translated into the Russian language and read on the banks of the Wolga.

Notwithstanding, in a recent note from his new home in Virginia Beach, Tim Farrington (ZYZZYVA 49) reported on his cross-country drive and "a very moving stop at the obscure shack where D.H. Lawrence made his quixotic home in the New World for a while. We were the only ones there that day – it is quite a drive up a dirt road well north of Taos – and had one of those wonderful moments of appreciating the unfathomable nature of life and literature and their practitioners. I still find him very hard to read with pleasure, of course."