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John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

Part of a great generation of American writers. Won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature. Author of The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row, Of Men and Mice, The Winter of our Discontent, Tortilla Flat, Viva Zapata plus many others.

"I remember the sorrow at not being part of things in my childhood" Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel.

John Steinbeck's life was influenced most importantly by his childhood, a legacy he would carry with him throughout his life. One of the great problems for John Steinbeck was that his father had put up a thick wall between himself and his children. "He was a distant sort of man", John's sister says. A neighbor recalls "John's father stayed in the background. He didn't play with John or the girls. He seemed always in the shadows in the house, at the edge of things, lonely and depressed. I think John was very angry with him." This anger makes sense: his father did not shield him, even slightly from the intense, even domineering, scrutiny of his mother. "Mrs Steinbeck", says the neighbor, "was stern, even a little cold. John was a little afraid of getting on the wrong side of her. He could never do anything right as far as she was concerned. She was always trying to get him to achieve more than he did". Taking into account his childhood environment, one important feature of Steinbeck's character was his sense of himself as someone who never quite achieved enough. Every book he wrote felt to him like a failure, and he never thought he was going to summon the energy and imagination to complete the project at hand. In his later years, the situation worsened, and in the end he found himself terrified of failure, unable to complete his work. He reacted badly to criticism (and there was a lot of it) and was often plunged into dark moods and acute anxiety. Alcohol was his vent which he often used to take his mind off his problems or to alter his anxiety and depression. He was consistently self-castigating.

The birth of John had been difficult for his mother and his features had been distorted by the harshness of the delivery. By the age of three, however, he had 'come back to normal". His mother called him "my little squirrel" through much of his childhood, while his sisters, somewhat less affectionately called him "muskrat" and "mouse". He did not enjoy any of these nicknames, and he became very self-conscious about his looks. To the end he retained a sense of himself as being somebody unpleasant to look at.

Another childhood memory was of sitting with his mother while she taught him to read. It was not an easy task for him, especially with his mother hovering beside him as he tried to make sense of the marks on the page that supposedly contained meaning. You can imagine his mother coaching her nervous, frightened child, urging him on yet always disappointed by the results. This is a memory that remained with him.

When John was 16 he came down with a deadly flu that quickly turned into pneumonia. He was dangerously close to death. "I went down and down," Steinbeck later remembered, "until the wingtips of angels brushed my eyes." Despite this physically and emotionally traumatic incident, Steinbeck recovered well enough. The psychological damage inflicted by this illness was considerable. It seems to have given him a sense of someone on the edge of life, reinforcing a vulnerability which had it's psychological roots in his troubled childhood. Not surprisingly, in later life Steinbeck would find himself physically ill when under severe psychological stress.

Entering University, John started his long and troubled relationship with alcohol. He was a man who suffered regular bouts of intense anxiety and deep depression. He turned to alcohol, a mood-altering substance, as a way of digging himself out of a trough which, of course, perpetually backfired and sent him deeper into the depths as soon as the temporary high had worn off.

Having not completed University successfully he retreated from the world. He stayed in a cabin in the mountains for two years . He was frightened, darting this way and that in search of a safe place to stand. His mother wrote to him constantly, and wanted him to "make something of himself", as she frequently said. She would allude sarcastically to his failure at Stanford University, always hinting that he might yet "succeed" if he returned. He was an artist, he told her. An artist does nothing other than create.

Steinbeck discovered during this period of self-imposed isolation that his artistic nature was such that he could create only in solitude; indeed, whenever he listened too much to the voices that crowded around him, he became distracted, depressed, uncomfortable, anxious and artistically barren. His later life is marked by serial retreats which were creatively strategic.

When Steinbeck became famous for his masterful writing he was torn within himself. He was now famous and was expected to be a public person, a guest at numerous functions. He was, however, intensely shy and self-conscious in social situations. He would give all sorts of excuses to not attend. He would protest that he didn't have a suit or necktie, but his worries would usually be brushed aside by the social director. It was not uncommon for him to rush out of the social gathering and head for the nearest bar to order a drink. People started to canonize him. He was a brilliant writer. He would say "You say you are afraid of me. I'm afraid of myself. I mean the creature that has been built up". Especially after the publication of "The Grapes of Wrath", he was an international star. More than half a century after it's publication, The Grapes of Wrath remains one of the permanent masterpieces of American literature.

Steinbeck's personal life was one emotional trauma after another. He was married three times. His first two marriages were a disaster. His second marriage ended after the release of The Grapes of Wrath. John felt the pressure of having to write another "big" novel. Americans wanted, demanded, "the great American novel." As his second marriage slid away he was frightened by the problems which would follow from yet another divorce. Where would he live? Would he survive another round of deep emotional turmoil. "He was like a zombie," one friend recalls. The second marriage failure hit him very hard.
"I'm pretty banged up. In fact I have been for quite a long time as you know. I've got to build back up and at the same time I have a lot of work to do," John wrote to a friend.
He was referring to his anxiety and depression that seemed to rise and fall constantly. The emotional pain of his second marriage failing proved to deepen this suffering. Trying to deal with what he was experiencing he decided to go to Mexico to finish Viva Zapata. A friend flew down to visit him and was appalled by the condition in which he found Steinbeck, who understood very well the fragility of his condition.

"The sickness has been worse than I have been able to admit even to myself," he said.

Unable to shake his anxiety and depression he was forced to return to California. All he wanted to do is curl up in front of the fireplace. It took months for him to feel "less unwell". He took long walks on the beach and spent time in nature with his sons, camping and teaching them about the natural world. He erected a kind of emotional scaffolding to hold himself up. His creative energy returned, the first in a long time "I have so much work to do," he exclaimed. He continued his writing life, creating more masterpieces in literature. His third wife started to realise that his personal illness was more psychological than physical.

"He was really sick, I knew that, but he was also creating the sickness from mental pain" she said.

She persuaded him to sign on with a psychologist who helped ease him through this period of anxiety and depression. His wife was pleased he was seeing someone. Steinbeck immersed himself in the life around him, painting and fixing things. The alternating black moods and periods of high anxiety passed; Steinbeck wrote to friends about his sense of well-being. John sailed through life for a while, writing more world acclaimed novels and plays. However, the old demons from childhood arose. His sense of self was precarious at best. It seemed that he couldn't take success well. He didn't believe what others wrote glorifying his books. He despaired that he would ever be able to write again. He would exhaust himself with anxiety.

"He seemed fragile, especially after he had a few drinks in him," wrote the son of his publisher. "His health is really the issue now, though it is not something he liked to discuss."

John felt everything he did was inherently flawed and caused him much inner pain and anxiety. He would say "As you may know, I've been having a bad time - work unacceptable, to me, and a strong feeling that my time is over". In another period of anxiety and depression, he was watching TV, not doing anything. A news flash came on saying John Steinbeck had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He danced around the lounge room with his wife.

When Steinbeck died he had completed a huge mountain of work - some 26 volumes of fiction and non-fiction. "There isn't a night when one of John's plays isn't produced somewhere in the world from Peking to Peoria," says his last wife. Hundreds of thousands of copies of his work are sold each year, while every single book that he wrote remains in print: a version of eternal life granted to very few authors. He did find periods of happiness in his life, although plagued by anxiety and depression. It seems the huge weight of his early childhood remained with him his whole life, never being resolved. No matter how he felt within himself, he never wavered from his pursuit of the creative. He stayed true to his craft.

REF: John Steinbeck -A Biography by Jay Parini

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