Steinbeck doing research. Kazin and Edmond Wilson suggested that it is impossible for any novelist writing out of and about California to produce great literature “because California is so superficial.”

Benson as yet didn’t know enough about Steinbeck to ask good questions. Elaine Steinbeck, during their initial talks, helped “not only with the answers but occasionally with the questions."

A professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, Jackson J. Benson (looking more like a football coach than an English professor) put the kettle on for coffee, apologizing for its being “instant,” then led me downstairs to a basement workroom. I had read Benson’s meticulous, detailed 1116-page biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (Viking Press, 1984) and his recent Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). In the latter, Benson tells of his own “education and misadventure” in writing the Steinbeck biography. I knew that Benson — like Steinbeck – was shy, that interviewing strangers had not come easily to him. (He tells, in Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, of needing to carry a towel in his car, in order to wipe nervous perspiration of his face before he knocked on doors behind which interview subjects waited.) I knew he had worked on the biography for 15 years, some one-quarter of his life. I guessed, but didn’t know, the biography had been more a labor of love, a matter of defense and advocacy of Steinbeck the writer, than one that garnered much fiscal reward.

We sat across from one another, over a long table on which Benson’s wife, a calligrapher, had been blocking out posters. From the back yard’s green lawn, a golden Lab named Tess gazed in through French doors and moaned.

The Grapes of Wrath, said Benson, is far more than a propaganda novel or a social document. “It has too much art to it, too much depth."

A third-generation Californian, born and reared in San Francisco, Benson “hated school, loved reading.” On his own, apart from the schoolroom, he read Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens. He came upon Steinbeck’s books in the public library when he was in junior high school (“Which I hate to tell you,” said Benson, “was in World War II”). No one recommended Steinbeck to Benson, and he wasn’t sure which book he read first, but guesses it was Of Mice and Men.

“It was about a world that was so different than the world of English or American 19th –century novel. It was shocking to read not only about your own country, but about something that was happening at the time, near you. And then I just kept on reading.” Benson intoned titles: “The Long Valley, Tortilla Flat, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row.”

In college, in the army, in graduate school, Benson continued to read and reread Steinbeck. But in academia, Steinbeck was scorned. He had taken Thomas Wolfe’s place as “the writer that we disdain.” A rancorous edge rasping his normally even tone, Benson said, “There existed, against Steinbeck, the typical Eastern establishment bias against the Western writer.”

After he received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1965, Benson came to San Diego State to teach. From research done on his dissertation, he wrote a book, Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense. That done, he began to search for another project. Some eight month before Steinbeck died in 1968, Benson decided he would “‘save’ his writer from the savage scorn of mocking critics.” He’d write a critical assessment of Steinbeck’s work.

“My mother-in-law has a close friend who was a very good friend of Steinbeck’s sister who lives in Pacific Grove. She said to me one day, ‘Would you like to talk to Steinbeck’s sister?’ I hadn’t planned, of course, to do any interview, but I thought, ‘What the heck, I might as well.’’

In Pacific Grove, Steinbeck’s sister took Benson through the house in which Steinbeck and his first wife Carol had lived during the ‘30s. The house had been without heat. “She showed me the fireplace he built. In the garden, some of the plants were plants that he planted.”

Benson returned, several times, to Pacific Grove. He visited Steinbeck’s birthplace in nearby Salinas. He met Steinbeck’s childhood friends. They told him stories. Young John, even as a toddler, had been a defender of smaller, weaker boys against the larger and more powerful; as an adolescent he had been a “hell raiser,” Benson thought, “This is getting too good to pass up.” He decided perhaps he should not write a book re-evaluating Steinbeck’s work but a critical biography, a book that would mix literary criticism with biography.

In 1970, Steinbeck’s sister recommended Benson as a biographer to Steinbeck’s widow, Elaine (his third wife, whom he married in 1949). “Elaine Steinbeck said she’s like to meet me. So I flew back to New York. Which was very expensive at that time. Coach seats were $950. And I barely had the money to get back there and talk to her.”

They were to meet on Long Island, at Sag Harbor, where the Steinbecks had kept a summer house. Benson had read as much about Steinbeck’s life as he could, but there wasn’t that much to read. Steinbeck had opposed the publicity often given writers and had granted few interviews.

Encyclopedia articles about Steinbeck were filled with errors, some giving even his birthdate (1902) incorrectly. One article stated that Steinbeck and his parents were born in Oklahoma. They got wrong the name of his second wife Gwyndolyn, mother of Steinbeck’s two sons, Thom and John. (Errors persist, noted Benson, adding that there is now “even an idea aloft that Steinbeck’s first wife Carol wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which the feminists are pushing.”)

At the time of his first Sag Harbor visit, Benson as yet didn’t know enough about Steinbeck to ask good questions. Elaine Steinbeck, during their initial talks, helped “not only with the answers but occasionally with the questions. She spoon fed me.” The author’s widow introduced Benson to Steinbeck’s friends. But Benson, not an “aggressive, investigative-reporter type,” said that he “dropped the ball quite a lot.”

In Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, Benson gives an example of his fumbling an interview with a Sag Harbor boatyard owner.

• Benson: “So you knew Steinbeck pretty well?”
• Boatyard Owner: “Yeah.”
• Benson: “For a long time?”
• Boatyard Owner: “Yeah, a long time.”
• Benson: “What did you do … when you happened to see him?”
• Boatyard Owner: “… we went fishing together a few times.”
• Benson: “Did anything unusual or funny ever happen when you were out fishing?”
• Boatyard Owner: “Oh, no. Just the usual stuff, you know.”

Something about Benson — what, Benson never learned — gave Elaine Steinbeck confidence that Benson should be her late husband’s biographer. At the end of Benson’s week in Sag Harbor, she said, “Well, I think I’ll authorize you,”

Recalling that moment, Benson shook his head. “Right out of the back woods, I was. A very minor academic, certainly unknown to anyone, I thought,” Benson shrugged, “’What’s going on here?’”

Benson had not asked for authorization. “I didn’t know, really, what that meant, ‘authorization.’” (In general, when a biography is authorized by the family of literary heirs, the authorization assures cooperation, easy access to all materials to which they have access, giving entrée to interview subjects.) They did talk about Benson’s desire that the book not become “uncritical adulation” of the man. Elaine Steinbeck emphasized that she wished nothing negative about her husband omitted to protect his reputation, (As time passed, she never asked that Benson make any changes in his account.)

Back home in San Diego, Benson realized that he didn’t know anything, or certainly little, about how biographies are written. “It took me a while to get my bearings. I had friends who had done critical biographies. They recommended I do a short 300-page treatment from a thematic point of view rather than the ‘Germanic exhaustive’ biography. But I thought, ‘If I’m authorized, I’ve really got to do the job.’”

He took the “exhaustive” route. When, finally, the book emerged in 1984, it received more than 100 notices, including page-one praise in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. At my request, Benson showed me the book – which I had only in a jacketless and frayed library copy. He ran a hand across the dark blue and cream jacket, which features a photograph of Steinbeck. “It’s already faded, sitting on a bookshelf.”

We talked, then, about Steinbeck’s literary reputation, which after World War II began to flag, and by 1962, the year of Steinbeck’s Nobel award, had so dropped that the New York Times asked whether a worthier recipient couldn’t have been found.

Benson offered five reasons for Steinbeck’s declining reputation. 1) He was a Westerner. 2) He was a popular writer in a nation whose academics look askance at popularity 3) He wrote comedies. 4) He has been accused of sentimentality. 5) He has often been judged on political rather than literary grounds.

Western writers, Benson believes, have tended to suffer at the hands of Eastern critics and reviewers. As example he cited Edmund Wilson (for many years the New Yorker’s principal book critic) and Alfred Kazin (one of the founders of the Partisan Review), both of whom suggested that it is impossible for any novelist writing out of and about California to produce great literature, “because California is so superficial.” Benson’s voice rose. His mild complexion colored. “Come on. How stupid that is. Kazin comes out with this book, A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature. What landscape has he ever had any empathy or understanding of besides Times Square? Just incredible.”

About the sentimentality charge, Benson noted that while Steinbeck was a sentimental man who cared about people, he was a “cold-headed” writer. “Readers like Edmund Wilson and Kazin have mistaken Steinbeck’s compassion for sentimentality.”

Both the Left and the Right attacked Steinbeck on political grounds. The Right attacked Steinbeck for his attacks on powerful growers, for his assertion that all was not well in the United States. Steinbeck’s problems with the Left, however, were already in evidence with the publication of In Dubious Battle, in which Steinbeck valorized neither the union organizers nor the anti-labor ranchers in the strike that forms the book’s action. Disapproval from the Left began in earnest, Benson believes, with Cannery Row. “Which really made [leftist critics] mad because it treated the dispossessed — from their view — in a light way. They looked upon it as trivial. Leftist critics wanted him to keep writing The Grapes of Wrath.”

Conservatives, of course, have continued to attack The Grapes of Wrath, complaining that its language and portrayal of sexuality and religion are offensive. Benson has appeared several times before school boards to defend it. “We had a complaint in the mid-‘70s in the Grossmont District objecting to The Grapes of Wrath as a model for behavior and suggesting instead that the classes be given George P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley.

“What’s really saved the novel are two things. One the love of so many people for the book has kept it going in the culture. People pass it on to their children. The second, of course, is high school teachers, who are really carrying the book right now.

“It’s not being taught in the universities. It’s not being taught in UC anywhere, because UC always wants to make known it’s as good as the Ivy League in every way.” Major universities throughout the nation, Benson feels, do not tend to teach the book because those Ph.D’s assigned now to teach upper-division courses were, as students, taught to scorn Steinbeck.

What, I asked Benson, would he hope that college students would take away from reading The Grapes of Wrath?

“I would hope, above all, that it would expand their sympathy, that they would see that these are people with sensibilities, intelligence, with ambitions, with needs, that they are not in fact, animals.

“A sense of what California is about, what the history of the state is, some of the conflict in it. Also a sense that the state is constantly renewing itself and becoming different, and the struggles between the old and the new, which are constant.”

As illustration of these conflicts between old and new, Benson said that he occasionally tells a story about himself that doesn’t reflect too much to his credit. “I’ve had very negative feelings about people moving into California, especially from the South. People moving into the neighborhood, flying the Confederate flag, which just absolutely frosts me as a third-generation Californian whose great-grandfather fought in the Civil War!

“What brought me up short was, I was out in an intersection one rainy day — if you can remember when it used to rain around here. I was in the middle of an intersection at La Mesa and Grossmont Boulevard. Three feet of water. I had a truck and thought I was high enough I could get through. I of course didn’t. I got halfway across and stalled.

“I sat there for 30 minutes. I wanted someone to call for a tow truck. To push. No one helped. Finally, some guy comes along in a pickup, Confederate flags all over the windshield. He stops, gets out, says, ‘You got some problems here, let me see if I can help you.’

“He pulled me out,” Benson paused, plucked at one knew of his trousers, and said, “I think there’s a tendency to stereotype, to classify, not to think of people as individuals.”

Benson returned to The Grapes of Wrath. “I’d like to have them be aware of Steinbeck’s interest in biology. The fact that Steinbeck saw the environmental problem way back in the early ‘30s and that he saw man as a species among other species. Steinbeck is always saying, ‘If man perishes, some other species will come and take over. We’re not all that special. It’s a process, and we’re all a part of that process.’

“I can’t think of any other 20th century novel that touched the land as much as does The Grapes of Wrath, that gives the sense of westering which is so important to Americans throughout the country — not only those who came west, but to our whole way of thinking about ourselves.”

The Grapes of Wrath, said Benson, is far more than a propaganda novel or a social document. “It has too much art to it, too much depth.” It isn’t, however, a perfect novel. “There are parts of it that sound corny. But there are parts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that are bad, of Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage. No classic is perfect. But try,” Benson urged me, “to think of another 20th –century novel that so reaches into the heart of what America is.”