The Insecure Laureate

By John Skow

THE INTRICATE MUSIC, A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STEINBECK by Thomas Kiernan; Little, Brown; 331 pages; $12.95

John Steinbeck worked hard to turn himself into a genius and he almost made it. His youth was a laborious struggle to find his true voice. But as this first full-scale biography shows, the author flourished for a scant dozen years: from the publication of The Red Pony in 1933 to Cannery Row in 1945.

Kiernan (a journeyman who has written books on such disparate personalities as Yasser Arafat and Jane Fonda) met his subject only twice, and he worked without the direct cooperation of Steinbeck's widow. A more thorough account of the career might have provided a less gloomy view of the man, but it seems doubtful. Steinbeck always feared biography. "Writers," he told Kiernan, "are by their very nature private people, in many cases lonely, frightened, insecure, incapable of relating comfortably to other people." The sentence was pure confessional.

The lonely, private, insecure man was an uncongenial native of Salinas, Calif. His parents, a prosperous feed and grain merchant and his wife, did not take kindly to John's literary ambitions. Still, they supported him through repeated failures at Stanford, and helped him out with stipends until he was past 30. He needed them; his income for the first period of steady writing was $870, or about $125 a year. Many years later the senior Stein beck confided the reasons for his generosity. Never in his life, he admitted sadly, had he achieved "any of the things he had dreamed of achieving." This, Kiernan reports, "was the reason he had been so tolerant of John's ambition, and in his last years so supportive; he did not want his son to suffer the bitter regret that he had."

Steinbeck earned his first serious acclaim when The Red Pony appeared in the North American Review. But years afterward, critics still regarded him as a newcomer. Alfred Kazin praised him with faint damns: "After a dozen books Stein beck still looks like a distinguished apprentice, and what is so striking in his work is its inconclusiveness, his moving approach to human life and yet his failure to be creative with it."

Such towering works as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath earned him a Nobel Prize in 1962. But the honor did not bring a revival. Steinbeck declined into illness and disillusion. Kiernan reports that when the author died at 66, in 1968, he "had grudgingly accepted the fact that his own artistic productivity had long ended" -- as evidenced by the potboilers that marred his later years: East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontent.

He need not have fretted so; the early imperishable books retain their power to move readers and influence novelists.

"Man," wrote Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, "unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments." His finest novels were proof of that perception. The other works are simply more evidence that some writers were never meant to grow up.

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