Sweet Thursday (30 page)

“Whistle While You Work”: Song featured in Walt Disney's animated movie
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937), with music by Frank Churchill (1901–42) and lyrics by Larry Morey.

threshold of a great career: Old Jingleballicks echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson's salutation to Walt Whitman, after the philosopher had read the first edition of the younger man's
Leaves of Grass
(1855): “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote Whitman on July 21, 1855.

Knight Templar's hat: The Knights Templar is a Christian-oriented organization founded in the eleventh century. Originally, the Knights Templar were laymen who protected and defended Christians traveling to Jerusalem. These men took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and were renowned for their fierceness and courage in battle. All Knights Templar are members of the world's oldest fraternal organization, known as “The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons” or, more commonly, “Masons.” The hat Steinbeck refers to is plumed.

“Wedding March”…
Lohengrin
: The Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner's romantic opera
Lohengrin
(1850). Traditionally played at weddings, it is commonly known as “Here Comes the Bride.”

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29

Oh, Woe, Woe, Woe!: From American Modernist expatriate poet Ezra Pound's parodic “Song in the Manner of House man,” which appeared in his fifth collection,
Canzoni
(1911). The final stanza reads, “London is a woeful place, / Shropshire is much pleasanter. / Then let us smile a little space / Upon fond nature's morbid grace. /
Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera
…”

Mr. and Mrs. Sam Malloy: In chapter 8 of
Cannery Row,
the Malloys take up residence in this cast-off cannery boiler.

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30

if the British impressed our sailors: During the administrations of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, the Royal Navy impressed thousands of seamen from American ships, claiming that they were British subjects. (The British refused to recognize American naturalization, and often disregarded protection documents issued to native-born American sailors.) American anger over impressment became one of the causes of the War of 1812.

“Fifty-four-Forty”: In 1844 James K. Polk was elected president on a platform calling for setting the northern boundary of Oregon at 54°40'N. The Anglo-American dispute over the boundary was settled in 1846 by a treaty setting the border at 49°N.

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“My dear Anthony West…”: Steinbeck's satire of Joe Elegant as a novelist continues here in this dig at Anthony West. The British author (1914–87)—novelist, essayist, biographer—published “California Moonshine,” an unflattering review of Steinbeck's
East of Eden,
in the September 20, 1952, issue of the
New Yorker
: “Mr. Steinbeck has written the precise equivalent of those nineteenth-century melodramas in which the villains could always be recognized because they waxed their mustaches and in which the conflict between good and evil operated like a well-run series of professional tennis matches” (p. 125). In a letter to Carlton Sheffield on October 15, 1952, in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1975), Steinbeck registered his dismay: “I am interested in Anthony West's review in the New Yorker [
sic
]. I wonder what made him so angry—and it was a very angry piece. I should like to meet him to find out why he hated and feared this book so much” (p. 458). Clearly, Steinbeck had the last word.

Fafnir: In German composer Richard Wagner's Norse-inspired epic of four linked operas,
Der Ring das Nibelungen
(its first complete production took place in 1876), Fafnir, a giant transformed into a dragon, guards the golden treasure.

James Petrillo: James Caesar Petrillo (1892–1984) was a labor leader who became the influential president of the American Federation of Musicians from 1940 to 1958. He rigorously policed the practice of hiring nonunion musicians, such as the members of Joseph and Mary Rivas's band.

Hopkins Marine Station: The Hopkins Seaside Laboratory of Stanford University opened in 1892 on Lovers Point, north of its current site at 120 Oceanview Boulevard, Pacific Grove. It has been located on Oceanview since 1917, when it was officially renamed Hopkins Marine Station. It is the oldest marine research facility on the West Coast. Steinbeck attended summer classes at Hopkins in 1923.

“Memphis Blues”: A song written in 1909 (published in 1912) by songwriter and bandleader William Christopher Handy, self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues.” “Memphis Blues” played a significant role in bringing African American music into the mainstream.

Henny Penny: English fairy tale of undetermined origin and variable plot, sometimes called “The Sky Is Falling,” “Chicken Little,” “Chicken Licken,” or “Henny Penny.” In one version Henny Penny is hit on the head by a falling acorn and believes that “the sky is falling” and that she must tell the king. The moral of the tale varies from version to version but certainly can be interpreted to mean that danger is imminent.

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Il n'y a pas de mouches sur la grandmère: The English translation of the French is: “There are no flies on Grandmother.”

“no room of my own”: Suzy's lament ironically and meta phorically echoes Virginia Woolf's pioneering feminist essay,
A Room of One's Own
(1929), delivered as lectures at Cambridge University in 1928. In the essay, Woolf claims that in order for a woman writer to be successful, she needs space to work in and money enough to support herself.

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36

Lama Sabachthani?: From Matthew 27:46: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

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38

Monarch butterflies: Steinbeck has taken some license here by timing the arrival of the butterflies (
Danaus plexippus
) in spring. In reality, they appear annually by the thousands in October to begin their crucial overwintering period in the pine and eucalyptus groves in Pacific Grove, which has established a permanent Monarch Grove Sanctuary.

Kinsey Report: Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956), a biologist at Indiana University and the founder of its Institute for Sex Research, published the studies
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953).

petition for release of Eugene Debs: Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926), four-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, was convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for inciting disloyalty in the armed forces by making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was freed on December 25, 1919, after President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence.

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March Hare: The March Hare appears in chapter seven, “A Mad Tea-Party,” in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865), by British writer and mathematician Charles L. Dodgson (1832–98).

Salinas High School: Steinbeck's alma mater; he graduated in 1918.

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40

I'm Sure We Should All Be as Happy as Kings: Poem 25 (“Happy Thought”) by popular Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) in his
A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods
(1913): “The world is so full of a number of things, / I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.”