Working Days Read Free Page B

Ecce Homo! , which ends with a martial version of Howe’s song. (“Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one,” Annie Laurie Williams exulted.) Her role as facilitator is evident throughout this journal and is recorded permanently in one half of the novel’s dedication: “To CAROL who willed this book.” Eventually, however, in the wayward recesses of Steinbeck’s heart, Carol’s brittle efficiency, managerial brusqueness, and violent mood swings (she, too, was exhausted by the novel’s completion and histrionic reception) seemed to cause more problems than they solved. His involvement with a younger woman, Gwyndolyn Conger, whom he met in mid-1939, and who quickly came to represent everything Steinbeck felt romantically lacking in Carol, signaled the beginning of the end of their marriage. 5 They separated rancorously in 1941, sold their beloved Los Gatos mountain home (which Steinbeck had facetiously taken to calling “Carol’s ranch”), and divorced two years later.
    The second part of the novel’s dedication—“To TOM who lived it”—refers to Thomas Collins (1897?-1961), the novelist’s chief source, guide, discussant, and chronicler of accurate migrant information. Collins not only put Steinbeck in touch with the real-life prototypes of the Joads and Jim Casy, but himself served as Steinbeck’s real-life prototype for Jim Rawley, the fictional manager of the “Weedpatch” government camp. (That camp became an oasis of relief for the harried Joads, and is featured in Chapters 22 to 26 of The Grapes of Wrath.) An intrepid, resourceful, and exceptionally compassionate man, Collins was the manager of a model Farm Security Administration camp, located in Kern County at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. The Arvin Sanitary Camp (featured in the fourth installment of Steinbeck’s 1936 San Francisco News reports, “The Harvest Gypsies,” a documentary forerunner of The Grapes of Wrath) was one of several proposed demonstration camps intended to provide humane, clean, democratic—but temporary—living conditions for the growing army of migrant workers entering California from the lower Middle West and Dust Bowl region. (More than two dozen camps were planned in 1935 by the Resettlement Administration, the forerunner of the F.S.A.; by 1940, with New Deal budgets slashed by conservatives in Congress, only fifteen were actually completed or under construction.) 6 Collins possessed a genius for camp administration—he had the right mix of fanaticism, vision, and tactfulness—and he and Steinbeck, both Jacksonian democrats, hit it off immediately in late summer 1936, when the novelist went south on the first of several grueling research trips during the next two years to investigate field conditions. (Contrary to popular belief, Steinbeck never traveled with a migrant family all the way from Oklahoma to California.)
    Fortunately, Collins was a punctual and voluminous report writer. His lively weekly accounts of the workers’ activities, events, diets, entertainments, sayings, beliefs, and observations provided Steinbeck with a compelling documentary supplement to his own researches. In fact, Steinbeck and Collins struck a deal: Collins would guide Steinbeck through the intricacies of the agricultural labor scene, put him in direct contact with migrant families, and supply Steinbeck with valuable information; in return, besides broadcasting news of the workers’ plight in his own writings, Steinbeck would edit Collins’ reports and pave the way for their publication as a full-length book. Toward that end, at his home in Los Gatos in late 1936, Steinbeck introduced Collins to one of his agents, Annie Laurie Williams, who was in California on a business trip. Williams was immediately impressed with Collins’ forthrightness and with the importance of the “social documents” he had compiled. During the ensuing eighteen months she and Mavis