Town That Hated Steinbeck Torn on How to Honor Him

No town celebrates a writer before he’s dead.

--John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck knew this scrabbly little hometown of his didn’t much like him. Matter of fact, folks here hated him.

Hated his ugly stories. Hated his pitiful characters. He wrote of whores and tramps and drunks, and of those wrung-out crop pickers, those miserable migrants. Honored them, he did. Exalted them. And spat on the growers and shippers who built Salinas into something.

The Salinas elite got back at him for his betrayal. They burned “The Grapes of Wrath” on Main Street.

But that was 58 years ago. Now that same Main Street is preparing to host a $9-million National Steinbeck Center, due to open in the summer of 1998, 20 years after his death.

It’s controversial, yes. But the controversy is not about whether to honor Steinbeck. It’s about whether the planned museum does him justice.

With the April 26 groundbreaking ceremony just a few weeks off, Salinas has stumbled into a jealous--and unexpected--debate over how best to pay tribute to its most famous native son, the poet of the paisano who won every major award in literature, including the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.

The town that once reviled Steinbeck now argues over what style of architecture would best reflect his values, over how to craft exhibits that will best convey his truths. The letters page of the local newspaper crackles with the controversy. The debate has even drawn in Steinbeck scholars from outside Salinas who have reviewed plans for the museum. All find themselves tussling with the same questions:

Is an imposing modern building the proper forum to honor a man who recoiled from the “yellow smoke of progress,” a man who spoke for the poor and dispossessed? Can a museum built around stage sets and film clips adequately convey the crusading fire that burns through Steinbeck’s prose? And can this humble town of 110,000, plunked amid horizon-hugging farms, support such a grand and shiny project?

Patricia Leach, the executive director of the National Steinbeck Center, says she welcomes the questions. “Art is controversial,” she said. “I think these are healthy issues to explore.”

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Honors are a curious thing. Some of them are meaningless little pieces of nonsense or advertising and some of them are ostentatious.

--John Steinbeck

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It took a decade for Salinas to work its way up to next month’s groundbreaking.

Tourists from around the world had been making pilgrimages here for years, expecting to learn more about the author who taught them about America. All Salinas had to offer was Steinbeck’s boyhood home--gussied up with new furnishings and converted into a restaurant--and a bleak storefront center featuring a few photos on the wall and several dozen books for sale.

So when city leaders set out to redevelop the sagging downtown in 1987, they decided to include a Steinbeck museum. But year after year, the project stalled. Then, in a bold challenge two years ago, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Harden Foundation offered grants totaling $1.5 million to turn the rhetoric into reality.

The city provided an ample lot at Main Street’s dead end. The council added $3.5 million in funding. And board members approved plans for a 37,000-square-foot museum with a barrel roof, a glass atrium and a long windowless exhibit space fronted in brick.

Critics of that modernistic design have come up with many a creative way to trash it.

They say it looks like an oil refinery or a factory or a soulless suburban airport. They complain that the building is too boastful, too strident, that it clashes with the red brick storefronts of the faded downtown.

Then they pull out their trump card: The new museum, they assert, does not look like John Steinbeck.

“It goes very much against what Steinbeck stood for,” said David Ligare, an artist who has lived in Salinas for 20 years. “He was a man of huge heart and he felt so strongly for the downtrodden and the homeless. This [museum] looks like a government building that excludes people.”

As he dug into beef stew in Steinbeck’s birthplace restaurant, 95-year-old Herb Hinrichs added yet another complaint: The museum will look too generic. Steinbeck cherished the parochial quirks that gave each corner of the country a distinct local flavor; he mourned the standardization of America. So Hinrichs considers it an affront that the proposed center “looks like something you might find . . . anywhere at all.”

Hinrichs grew up with John Steinbeck, played pranks on him in high school--and he believes he knows how his scribbler buddy would react to the center’s architecture. “He’d turn over in his grave if he saw it,” Hinrichs said.

The building’s boosters readily concede that the new center will not look anything like the migrant shacks Steinbeck wrote about in “The Grapes of Wrath” or the stinking sardine factories he described in “Cannery Row.”

But as they point out, Steinbeck wrote not just about Salinas Valley agriculture, but also about marine biology and Russian communism, about Mexican revolutionaries and King Arthur’s Camelot. He hobnobbed with presidents, socialites, film stars and poets as well as with Dust Bowl Okies. Given that enormous range, they say, it would be unfair to design the Steinbeck museum to suit the mood of one particular book.

Instead, they hope that the building will be true to the overall spirit of Steinbeck’s work.

“To us, John Steinbeck’s work is all about strength of character, something we’re trying to embody in the building,” said design architect Kurt Schultz of the Portland, Ore., firm Thompson & Vaivoda. “We think it should be designed very simply and elegantly, with a lot of dignity so it stands the test of time.”

The museum’s focal point will be a glass atrium designed to evoke a reading lamp--and intended to beckon and welcome visitors as they stroll down Main Street.

“It’s going to be a dynamic building,” said Dolores Badham, a member of the board that has raised $7 million for the museum so far. “It’s going to be tremendous.”

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I am scared to death of popularity. It has ruined everyone I know.

--John Steinbeck

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Step into the Steinbeck Center and you will step into John Steinbeck’s most popular novels.

There, in one room, you’ll find a lettuce car straight out of “East of Eden.” Walk close and a blast of ice-cooled air might set you shivering. Breathe deeply and you might nose out the pumped-in smell of fresh-picked iceberg.

Move next into a drafty barn: the barn of “The Red Pony” or “Of Mice and Men.” Look there, hanging on a nail--it’s Lennie’s coat, with a dead mouse dangling limply from the pocket. Stroll on and you’ll hear the uproarious noise of Doc’s birthday party out on Cannery Row. Or duck under a clothesline to explore a migrant camp set up by a family by the name of Joad.

Pause then and goggle at one of the few artifacts on display: the camper Steinbeck drove cross-country in the journey immortalized in “Travels with Charley.”

Throughout the museum, you can watch the films inspired by Steinbeck’s books. Kids can fiddle with science experiments relating perhaps to agriculture or to the marine world of Steinbeck’s “Sea of Cortez.” Everywhere, multimedia computer games will beckon. The idea is simple: to make Steinbeck’s words come alive.

“This museum will be the first of its kind,” executive director Leach said proudly. “It will become a national model.”

But some scholars worry that in its zest to make Steinbeck accessible, the museum may lose sight of his literary accomplishments.

“Is this how students are going to be lured into appreciating a writer, or is [the museum] going to be seen as detached from his work, unrelated to the words and complexity of the text?” asked Susan Shillinglaw, director of the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University. “This may be very innovative and set a new course, or people may find it distracting.”

Bob DeMott, an English professor at Ohio State University, expressed similar concern. “I’m all for things that are hands-on and show and tell, because I can imagine students having Steinbeck opened up to them in ways they would not normally experience,” DeMott said. Still, he said he worries that “Steinbeck has become . . . a marketing concept.”

Steinbeck Center board members do plan an international marketing campaign. And they have already held focus groups on how to stock the gift shop. (The winner so far: writing-related items such as note cards and journals.)

But Leach insists that the center will not turn Steinbeck into a gimmick. “To me, that’s a Chamber of Commerce, Disneyland approach,” she said. “We want to be a museum. We want to provoke.”

The center will become the new repository for the 30,000 tapes, letters, photos, manuscripts and other archives now in storage at Salinas’ public library. A room dubbed “The Art of Writing” will let visitors thumb through copies of Steinbeck’s works in several languages. There will be a biographical film on Steinbeck and a timeline of his life.

A space for rotating exhibits will allow curators to probe issues relevant to Steinbeck’s work, from the Great Depression to ethnic strife to modern-day labor law. And at every stop in the museum, explanations on the wall will explain how the exhibit relates to Steinbeck’s words--and how his words relate to life.

“We want to make sure we make the museum relevant to today,” Leach said, “not just a storybook fantasy land.”

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The blinding flash and mushroom cloud of the suggestion that a Salinas school be given my name is shattering as a compliment.

--John Steinbeck

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Those who knew him or have studied him agree: Steinbeck was very shy about honors. But he was amenable to flattery too.

He was also remarkably low-key about the film and stage adaptations of his books. He rarely meddled with--or complained about--a director’s take on his prose.

The way he figured it, his job was to write; he let others take care of the interpretations.

That is why many here agree with retired archivist Pauline Pearson that Steinbeck would welcome the new museum, though he might quibble a bit with the design or the approach.

In the end, they say, he would be proud to see his hometown do right by him.

“I’m sure,” Pearson said with confidence, “that in his heart, he would love it.”