The Asian Influence on Never-Written Novels

ONE: In 1931, a ne'er-do-well, twenty-seven-year-old named Joseph Campbell drove his mother's Model T Ford across America. In San Jose – at that time, a bucolic agricultural village in a valley known chiefly for its plum and apricot orchards – he stopped to visit his college friend, Adelle Davis.

(Davis went on to become a famous nutritionist, a patron saint of the organic food movement. That's someone else's story.)

Campbell had once been something of a golden boy, although his life had been seasoned with tragedy. He'd grown up on the Long Island Sound, in New Rochelle, at the time a resort. Trips to Manhattan's Museum of Natural History sparked a fascination with American Indian culture. He read every book in the public library on the subject before he was eleven, and began a small collection of artifacts. When he was fifteen, that collection and his family's home was destroyed in a fire.

Transience and rebirth.

He was educated at expensive prep schools and Ivy League universities. He excelled at both academics and athletics. He wrote his Masters Thesis on the quest for the Holy Grail and won a fellowship to study languages in Paris, discovering James Joyce and quite possibly sex. Upon his return to the United States, he announced to his doctoral committee his intention to devote himself to the study of ancient Sanskrit – an ambition they did not support, and so he dropped out of school.

Then the Depression hit. His family lost its money.

He didn't know what to do. Of course, he ended up in California.

Davis introduced him to an unsuccessful writer two years older than himself, a man named John Steinbeck. Also to Steinbeck's wife, a woman named Carol.

Carol is the great cipher here. We don't know much about her; we don't know even what she looked like. We do know that she edited Steinbeck's early work and came up with the title for Grapes of Wrath. We know she supported Steinbeck with her secretarial work after his first novel bombed throughout the six years it took him to write another novel, and that after Steinbeck divorced her to marry a nightclub singer some years later, she went on to become a socialist and a welder.

We also know that some time in the summer of 1932, Campbell and Carol had an affair.

As it happened, the house next door to the Pacific Grove cottage (High Street and 11th -- in 1994, High Street was renamed Ricketts Row) where Steinbeck and Carol lived was available and Campbell took up residence. Seven blocks away lived Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck's other drinking buddy, a self-taught biologist who eked out a living by selling marine specimens to Stanford University. The three made many early morning visits to the tide pools at Cabrillo Point – we can only imagine the hangovers. Steinbeck and Campbell did not sell their specimens, however: they ate them.

Cabrillo Point was sometimes called China Point because until 1906 when the devout Methodist citizenry of Pacific Grove burned it to the ground, it had been the site of a Chinese fishing village.

Even now, twenty-five years later, the three men would sometimes find relics from that village when the waves shifted direction and the sand opened its buried treasure. Pottery shards, rusted metal, glass balls. Perhaps a magic amulet…

Two: the boy is Vietnamese; he lives in a house on East 14th Street – International Boulevard, as I believe the Oakland city fathers have now renamed it. Or maybe the house is in West Oakland. Wherever it is, it was once a mansion, one of those decaying Victorian follies with cupolas and octagonal drawing rooms, a termite's delight. Many families are crowded into the house now but on the very top floor in what was once a maid's room lives the ancient old woman who owns the house, who lived in the house when she was a child. She prepares for her own death by dreaming of that childhood, and like all people who are near death, her dreams are particularly porous and somehow the Vietnamese boy slips through… (Apologies to Tom's Midnight Garden whose plot I so blatantly steal.)