Cannery Row and Parkside Drive: Compare and Contrast
by Jack Neely
You look at people, and never guess. Take Chris Bryan. She's an affable, soft-featured woman who looks comfortable with a cup of coffee and a pastry at the Atlanta Bread Co. coffee house, a haven from Turkey Creek's parking lots. She drives a Honda Odyssey and lives with her husband and three adolescent (or nearly so) kids in a suburb just outside of Farragut. She has short dark hair, light-brown eyes and a handy smile, and a cheerful, vaguely Midwestern accent. If you were to scrape your knee on the sidewalk outside, she's the one you'd go to for a band-aid and some sympathy.
Bryan's pleasant soccer-mom affect belies some exotic biographical details. To begin with, she was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a few years before the terrors of the Khmer Rouge. Her parents were working for foreign-aid agencies at the time. Her mother died some years ago; her father, a Frenchman, lives outside of Paris.
Beyond that is the reason we came out here to her favorite coffee house to talk to her today. Under the One Book One Community program, Knoxville-area readers have been poring over a short novel about Pacific islanders, called The Pearl. Ask anybody who wrote it, and they'll say, "Steinbeck." Chris Bryan never calls him that. She calls him "Uncle John."
The Nobel-winning novelist was her grandmother Beth's little brother. When Uncle John died in 1968, Chris was eight. By then she lived in the California valley that was already known as Steinbeck Country, but she doesn't recall ever meeting the novelist. One of her aunts, another of John's sisters she knows as Aunt Esther, used to host huge two-turkey Thanksgiving dinners at her Watsonville, Calif., house. The most famous Steinbeck may have been one of the big people seated at one of those feasts; she just doesn't know for certain.
She does know his widow, third wife Elaine, who's now in her 90s. And she grew up with the Steinbeck legacy, mainly in the form of his books. All the ones she encountered were collector's items.
"I read The Red Pony when I was 11 or 12," she says. "I had to wash my hands, because it was a first edition." She has since read most of her uncle's work, but not all of it. She'll get around to The Winter of Our Discontent and The Wayward Bus one of these days.
"I'm proud that Of Mice and Men is always on the banned-book list. I'm also proud that Farragut High always assigns books on that list."
When Knox County began sponsoring the One Book One Community idea, they picked a book and began circulated clues about it on the radio. Bryan was among the first to guess that it was The Pearl. She's pleased with the choice but regrets that it wasn't timed to allow teachers to include it in their literature coursework.
Bryan brought with her one of her most-thumbed Steinbeck books. It's the Steinbeck House Cookbook. Published 18 years ago, it has one of her grandmother's favorite recipes, an unusual one called "Enchiladas Beth." Though her grandmother was no vegetarian, it's a meatless dish that calls for olives and hard-boiled eggs. "It's written in my grandmother's voice," she says. ("This is a messy job," the recipe advises. "Use lots of newspaper.")
Beth Steinbeck, who outlived her little brother by almost 30 years, was nearly 100 when she died a few years ago. She was close to her brother throughout his life. Steinbeck's editor, Pascal Covici, admired her as "honest and forthright," and one of the author's strongest supporters.
Bryan inherited some of Beth's features, and says her own daughter especially resembles her. Bryan herself looks like someone who's plausibly related to Steinbeck. "It's the nose," she says, pointing to her own, which has a slight upward cant. Fortunately, she and her daughter didn't develop the novelist's prominent ears. "That's the first thing my grandmother looked for," when looking at a new family baby. She'd say, "good ears. They lay flat."
Another family legacy is the well-known Pacific Grove house, where Steinbeck worked on The Pearl and other books. It's a few blocks from the beach, near Monterey, and a regular family destination. Bryan has taken her own family there a couple of times since they've lived in Knoxville.
It belongs to Elaine Steinbeck. "She made it clear that after my grandmother died, even though she owns it, it's for the family to keep and enjoy."
The author's widow was never a typical Steinbeck. "She's a New York actress, and a bit more theatrical than my grandmother, who was pretty down-to-earth."
Bryan's fond of the Farragut branch of the public library, the public schools, the West Side Unitarian Church, this coffee house. "I miss having a town center," she says; it's something she has had in all of the other places she and her husband have lived. "Here, we've sort of had to make one for ourselves."
What would her uncle think about West Knoxville? Steinbeck's niece smiles, and hesitates. "He would probably have some strong words," she says. The miller's son had a term for bland things: it wasn't white bread, but "felt bread." Like the fabric, she explains: "Bread like felt, with all the flavor and taste that felt has."
Bryan notes that in Travels With Charley, his famous account of a cross-country road trip with his poodle, Steinbeck expressed his frustration with the bland homogeneity of the American highway.
I-40 is visible out the plate-glass window. Steinbeck may never have passed this way, but he knew it well.
May 16, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 2
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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