A not so sweet Thursday at Steinbeck auction

For 50 years, the old box of documents collected dust in Twyla Martin’s West Hollywood garage. She knew the cursive scribblings on stacks of crumbling, sepia-toned pages had something to do with Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, but never looked.

In the 1950s, her husband, producer Ernest H. Martin, had briefly worked with Steinbeck, a longtime friend. Martin died in 1995, and after moving the box to a hallway closet, his widow finally peeked inside.

What she found, literary experts say, was a treasure trove of Steinbeck effects, including the missing first draft of the novel “Sweet Thursday,” the lighthearted sequel to Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” along with other manuscripts, an unpublished short story and letters and postcards.

Known for his tales of Depression-era America, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and is the author of such literary classics as “The Grapes of Wrath,” “East of Eden” and “Of Mice and Men.” He died in 1968.

On Thursday, the archive -- divided into two lots -- was offered at auction at a rare-book gallery here and was expected to fetch as much as $500,000.

But the presumed bidding war between collectors and institutions failed to materialize. Although a manuscript of the Steinbeck work “The Log From the Sea of Cortez” sold for $80,000, the rest went unclaimed.

“What can I say?” Martin said. “The auction house tells me there still may be some interest because institutions often don’t have the time to get that kind of money together so quickly.”

But one Steinbeck scholar said only a well-endowed institution could spend so much to purchase a manuscript of “Sweet Thursday,” which she called one of Steinbeck’s minor works.

“That’s a lot of money,” said Susan Shillinglaw, an English professor at San Jose State and visiting Steinbeck scholar in residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif. “Most libraries don’t have that much. Places like Harvard and Stanford might want to add to their collections, but others would have to have a donor who saw the worth of the documents.”

Whatever the discovery’s monetary value, Steinbeck experts said it has literary significance.

“It’s a gem,” said Mimi Gladstein, president of the National John Steinbeck Society of America, who teaches courses on the author at the University of Texas at El Paso.

“Part of the wonder of Steinbeck is that his works run the gamut from comic to the epic nature of a novel like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ The book ‘Cannery Row’ had a bittersweet tone to it. ‘Sweet Thursday’ had a happily-ever-after tone. But it’s still vintage Steinbeck.”

The garage archive consists of 490 handwritten pages, including the 188-page draft of “Sweet Thursday,” as well as letters and postcards dating from 1953.

Also included is an unpublished eight-page story titled “If This Be Treason,” which details the McCarthy-era investigation of a television star by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Auctioneers described the materials as “a picture window into the mind and soul” of the author. “This archive will help scholars see how Steinbeck wrote and thought,” said Bruce MacMakin, senior vice president of Pacific Book Auction Gallery, which handled the sale. “It’s an opportunity to study the mind of this great writer.”

Shillinglaw said the manuscripts’ value was more limited.

“Steinbeck’s manuscripts frankly didn’t change a lot. They were pretty clean,” she said. “There weren’t a lot of textual issues, comparing the manuscript to the published edition, to learn about the process.”

In the 1950s, Steinbeck and Ernest Martin, who co-produced the musical “Guys and Dolls,” conceived of a musical to be called “The Bear Flag Cafe,” based on “Cannery Row.” Steinbeck worked on the project but later lost interest. He used the notes to write “Sweet Thursday,” which was published in 1954.

“I suspect Steinbeck just left the whole box of stuff with Ernie Martin,” MacMakin said. “He probably expected Ernie to toss them. But Ernie never threw anything away.”

Twyla Martin called an auctioneer about the papers not long after Martin’s death. But when he wasn’t even interested in reviewing the contents, she stored the box in a hall closet.

Then writer Joel Eisenberg called to interview her about her late husband’s work and she brought up the box.

The two finally went through the archive.

“I’m surprised no one bid on it,” Eisenberg said after the auction. “I just hope it gets into the hands of a private collector or a museum that will keep it all in one place. It would be a crime if it were cherry-picked.”

If no offers surface, Martin said, she may donate the works to UCLA’s School of Theater, which her late husband attended.

Copies of the archive are going to be made available to the National Steinbeck Center. But Gladstein of the Steinbeck society said there is no substitute for the real manuscripts.

“ ‘Sweet Thursday’ was not one of Steinbeck’s mega-works but anytime you’ve got a manuscript, you’ve got something significant,” she said.

“When you hold the real thing in your hand, you see the words on paper as Steinbeck wrote them in his tiny handwriting. There’s a certain sense you get that copies just cannot equal.”

john.glionna@latimes.com