Hampton Style - September 12, 2008 - Steinbeck's Safe Harbor

"I grow into this countryside with a lichen grip," John Steinbeck famously said about Sag Harbor, the place the novelist appears to have felt most at home. For the man who experienced lifelong restlessness, however, John Steinbeck's peace in Sag Harbor was to be equal parts hard-earned pleasure and crutch. In his personal life, Sag Harbor provided him with a full existence. He often sailed his boat, Fayre Eleyne, named for his beloved wife, Elaine, and lazed with his family in the ripe afternoons of late summer. Before writing in the morning, he liked to fraternize with the leathery, salt-caked fisherman, drinking coffee with them over their man's-man talk. It energized him to connect with the locals. John was much beloved by his neighbors here, and the affection was returned.

His adoptive home was the setting for both fictional New Baytown from The Winter of our Discontent and the starting and ending point of Travels with Charley, John's best-selling travelogue chronicling his cross-country voyage with canine companion Charley. He penned The Winter of Our Discontent in Joyous Garde, his studio overlooking the sea at their Bluff Point home, where the writer kept a stack of sharpened pencils in his hexagonal, supremely private work space. "I designed a cute little structure, six-sided, with windows looking in all directions ... It will look like a little lighthouse," beamed John, about the inception of his studio.

In a recent conversation with Jackson Benson, the man credited with writing the definitive John Steinbeck biography, Benson explained some of the draw John felt to Sag Harbor. "He really wanted to go to Sag Harbor after he first visited because it was nothing like the Hamptons. It wasn't ritzy, it wasn't rich. In those days it was a very proletarian situation. He also wanted to be near the sea, he loved the ocean. He grew up near the ocean, Pacific Grove ... To get back to the ocean was important to him, to plug into that again. Another thing, I think, was that he just wanted to sort of fade into the background. One of the great things about buying a house in this community is that everyone protected him-nobody would reveal where he lived. He just kind of melted into the background and he loved it."

While blending in with the town's wind-hewn seamen, he also developed a lifelong friendship with playwright Edward Albee, who still lives in Montauk. For the most part, though, he abstained from becoming a 'society' man. Steinbeck did not embrace bourgeois privilege, despite having acquired sufficient means to do so with his stream of successful novels. With the exception of travel, he eschewed excess. His home on Bluff Point was modest; the one request made to the couple's decorator was that it not look "done."

For Steinbeck, place was always central to his writing. Both the Salinas Valley and the Pacific Grove of his youth grew into his psyche, the chosen environ for many of his most successful novels including the Pulitzer Prize-winning dustbowl saga, The Grapes of Wrath, which also nourished his reputation for being a populist. Having spent most of his youth as rather a failure socially, John focused on developing his inner life, projecting his vivid imagination onto his surroundings. He had a lifelong penchant for naming things, too: "Dorian Gray" and "Chestnut Bay" were suits named for hues of his garb. His early interest in fairy tales was largely influenced by his mother, a commanding presence in her son's early years.

John and Elaine's marriage flourished during their time in Sag Harbor, and, for a period, he was productive as well. He received a sort of guilty satisfaction from the attention given him by his exceptionally loyal and nurturing wife. While he craved the eye and ear and heart of his beloved, the conflicted writer also felt disdain when he accepted it. This struggle ultimately came to a bubbling point, serving as inspiration for "Travels with Charley." Part one of the travelogue describes the "itch," as he called it, to travel-"the sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the ribcage."

A plaguing need to gain experience, to "reconnect" with his country, as he said, took hold of him: complacency, for the writer, was detrimental. He continues: "For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness ... I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby ... in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity."

Steinbeck's gruff manner initially revealed itself in college, when he would recount sexual liaisons to friends, relishing the reaction that a romp on long, dry grass would summon in his audience. Subtlety was not in Steinbeck's repertoire.

The young writer produced compulsively, even in high school, and read aloud his work to anyone who'd listen...even those less than willing to listen. Such bravado was unsurprisingly accompanied by acute self-doubt. When it was time for criticism, he would usually flee the room. Arrogance was slowly replaced by self-possession as Steinbeck grew into manhood, but anxiety over his talent never left him. In his banquet speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Steinbeck dismissed the "pale and emasculated critical priesthood" who dogged him as being washed up, with his best work behind him. The derision tainted what should have been a career-culminating moment, rendering it a bittersweet experience. Yet, to the benefit of his vast readership, John continued to write, his primordial drive winning out.

Steinbeck has his stake in literary immortality already, but the community who took him in seeks too, to give him a lasting dwelling place amongst them. Just a few weeks ago, the Sag Harbor Historic Preservation and the Architectural Review Board (ARB) moved to give the Steinbeck's Bluff Point property status as a historic landmark. Such status prohibits changes from being made to the original structure without the permission of the ARB, which, in Sag Harbor means, it's not changing. Due to complications of historic landmarks in private sectors of the town, however, the motion has been temporarily put on hold, but the village will likely not let their prized writer's homestead be parceled off and rebuilt.