Sweet Thursday (29 page)

The Playing Fields of Harrow: Harrow School (founded in 1572), an exclusive, elite British men's boarding (public) school near London, was famous for its tradition of Harrow football (begun in the nineteenth century), a unique hybrid game exclusive to the school, which combines elements of both soccer and rugby (but which uses a spherical-shaped leather ball). Because Fauna tutors her girls in social/sexual gamesmanship as a route to victory in matrimony, Steinbeck might also be alluding to a statement, allegedly by the Duke of Wellington, that “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

Parcheesi: Brand name of a once-popular board game based on Pachisi, an ancient royal game of India created around 500 BCE, which utilized slave girls and concubines as red, yellow, blue, and green pawns on palace grounds. The trademark name was registered in 1870 by a New York game manufacturer.

high Elk: The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the USA (B.P.O.E.), which began modestly in 1868 as a private drinking club to circumvent New York City laws governing the opening hours of public taverns, has evolved into a major American fraternal, charitable, and ser vice order. Headquartered in Chicago, it has local lodges throughout the nation. Both Monterey and Salinas had active Elk Lodges.

haute monde
: French for “fashionable society.”

A and P: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, is a North American supermarket chain. The company was founded in 1859 by George Huntington Hartford and George Gilman in Elmira, New York, as The Great American Tea Company. It was renamed “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” in 1870, and over the next eighty years went on to become one of the dominant grocery chains in the United States.

Arbor Day: American holiday, first observed in 1872, that encourages the planting and care of trees. National Arbor Day is observed on the last Friday of April, but each state has its own date. California's observation occurs March 7–14.

Watch and Ward: Steinbeck was both intrigued by and suspicious of civic, social, professional, or special-interest organizations, whether real (Woodmen of the World and I.O.O.F.) or imagined (Rattlesnake Club and Forward and Upward Club). In
America and Americans
(1966), he said, “Elks, Masons, Knight Templars, Woodmen of the World, Redmen, Eagles, Eastern Star, Foresters…the
World Almanac
lists hundreds of such societies and associations, military and religious, philosophic, scholarly, charitable, mystic, political, and some just plain nuts. All were and perhaps still are aristocratic and mostly secret and therefore exclusive. They seemed to fulfill a need for grandeur against a background of commonness, for aristocracy in the midst of democracy” (p. 360). His satire on civic hypocrisy is especially sharp here, for he refers to what was probably a local chapter of the New En gland Watch and Ward Society, founded in Boston in 1878 as the New En gland Society for the Suppression of Vice, and in 1890 renamed the Watch and Ward Society. It functioned as a watchdog agency against vice and led successful censorship campaigns against books it deemed obscene or pornographic.

Breeder's Journal
: Perhaps
The Guernsey Breeder's Journal
, the oldest dairy breed magazine published by a U.S. breed organization.

Sterling North: Thomas Sterling North (1906–74), author of numerous books for adults and children, including the best seller
So Dear to My Heart
(1947).

CHAPTER
16

The Little Flowers of Saint Mack:
The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi
, the name given to a classic collection of popular legends about the life of St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1256) and his early companions as they appeared to the Italian people at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

CHAPTER
17

Suzy Binds the Cheese: An early step in the cheese-making process requires the addition of rennet (plant-or animal-derived substance that contains the enzyme rennin), which binds or coagulates milk.

“I love true things…”: Cf. Steinbeck's appraisal of Ed Ricketts in “About Ed Ricketts” (1951): “He loved true things and believed in them” (p. xv1).

CHAPTER
18

“Home Sweet Home”…“Harvest Moon”: “Home, Sweet Home” was composed in 1852 by Sir Henry Bishop (1786–1855) from an adaptation of
Clari, or the Maid of Milan
(1823) by American dramatist John Howard Payne (1791–1852); “Old Black Joe” was composed in 1860 by Stephen C. Foster (1826–64). The other two songs Steinbeck mentions here have resonance for the romantic plot of
Sweet Thursday
. Tell Taylor (1876–1937) wrote the words and melody of “Down by the Old Mill Stream” in 1910. Its chorus goes: “Down by the old mill stream where I first met you, / With your eyes of blue, dressed in gingham too, / It was there I knew that you loved me true, / You were sixteen, my village queen, by the old mill stream.” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” a popular song written by entertainer Nora Bayes (1880–1928) and her husband, songwriter Jack Norworth (1879–1959), debuted in Florenz Ziegfeld's
Follies of 1908
: “Shine on, shine on harvest moon / Up in the sky, / I ain't had no lovin' / Since January, February, June or July / Snow time ain't no time to stay / Outdoors and spoon, / So shine on, shine on harvest moon, / For me and my gal.”

Woodmen of the World: Widespread national fraternal organization founded in 1890 in Omaha, Nebraska, by Joseph Cullen Root. Lodges, whose members are eligible for a wide array of insurance coverage, conduct volunteer, patriotic, and charitable activities that benefit individuals and communities. The organization is one of the leading donors of U.S. flags to schools and nonprofit groups.

Jiggs and Maggie:
Bringing Up Father
, a comic strip created by George McManus (1884?–1954) that ran from 1913 to 2000, was often called “Jiggs and Maggie,” after its two main characters.

CHAPTER
19

Sarajevo…Pearl Harbor: World War I was precipitated by the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. The roots of Europe's entrance into World War II occurred on September 29, 1938, when Adolf Hitler orchestrated the Munich Agreement (signed by Germany, Italy, France, and Britain), which allowed the Third Reich to expand its control over the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. The Battle of Stalingrad, during which Soviet troops defeated the German Sixth Army and other Axis troops, began on August 21, 1942, and lasted over five months. On December 19, 1777, George Washington's ragtag Continental Army entered their winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they remained for seven months while being rigorously retrained and reorganized. Japan's surprise air attack on the United States' Pacific naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, took place on December 7, 1941.

Down Beat
: American magazine devoted to jazz. The publication was established in 1935 in Chicago, Illinois. It is named after the “downbeat” in music, also called the “one beat.”

“
Tío mio
”: Spanish for “my uncle.”

CHAPTER
20

Hediondo Cannery: Steinbeck's joke: “hediondo” means “stinky” in Spanish.

CHAPTER
21

Imp of the Row: Perhaps a comic and reductive echo of Edgar Allan Poe's theory of human perverseness (“overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake”) sketched out in “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845).

tom
-wallager: Slang term that means humdinger, whopper, etc.

CHAPTER
23

Orient Express: The Orient Express, which connects Calais, France, on the English Channel, with Istanbul, Turkey, on the Black Sea, is one of the most legendary luxury trains in Europe, and a symbol of exotic adventure.

Webster F. Street Lay-Away Plan: An inside joke: The drink was named for Steinbeck's former Stanford classmate and Monterey friend, attorney Webster “Toby” Street (1899–1984).

CHAPTER
24

Seconal: Registered name of secobarbital, a barbiturate sedative that reduces anxiety by slowing down brain and nervous system activity. Supposedly available only by prescription.

Bohemia beer: Extensive research proves Doc's assessment to be correct. Alcoholic haze that pervades this novel aside, there is something fitting about bohemian Doc preferring this aptly named brand of beer. Brewed exclusively in Mexico since 1900 and named for the beer-brewing region of Czechoslovakia, Bohemia is a smooth, medium-bodied pilsner-style beer with some pronounced hops flavor.

CHAPTER
25

Buxtehude…Palestrina: Dietrich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707) was a German-Danish organist and a highly regarded composer of the Baroque period. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525–94) was an influential Italian composer of Renaissance music.

Mozart's
Don Giovanni
: Opera in two acts, based on the legend of Don Juan, with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), and libretto in Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), first performed in Prague on October 29, 1787. At the opera's end, Don Giovanni, unrepentant seducer, is visited by the ghost of a man he has murdered, and is offered the opportunity to save his soul. When he refuses, he is dragged to hell while he is still alive. The concluding chorus delivers the opera's moral: “Thus do the wicked find their end, dying as they had lived.”

Giordano Bruno: Italian philosopher, priest, astronomer/ astrologer, and occultist. Bruno (1548–1600) is perhaps best known for his system of mnemonics and as an early proponent of the idea of extrasolar planets and extraterrestrial life. Burned at the stake as a heretic for his theological ideas, Bruno is seen by some as a martyr to the cause of free thought.

Olympus: At 9,570 feet high, Mount Olympus is Greece's tallest mountain. In Greek mythology, it was considered the home of the pantheon of principal Greek deities, led by Zeus, king of the gods.

Armageddon: In the New Testament's Book of Revelation (16:12–16), Armageddon is the site where forces of good and forces of evil assembled for an apocalyptic, climactic battle.

Tehuanos: Inhabitants, predominantly Zapotec Indians, of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, southeastern Mexico.

“Sandunga”: “La Sandunga,” unofficial regional anthem of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, was written by governor and military commander Máximo Ramón Ortiz (d. 1855). It is a sensual, graceful dance song that expresses the grief of a Tehuana (Zapotecan woman) over the death of her mother. The song moves from overwhelming sadness to a sense of acceptance of her loss.

CHAPTER
26

Salinas Rodeo: The California Rodeo has taken place each summer at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds since 1911.

Life
: In 1936, under new owner Henry Luce,
Life
(which began in 1883 as a humor magazine) became the first all-photography news-magazine in the United States. At its most popular, it sold more than thirteen million copies per week. It published a regular feature, “
Life
Goes to a Party.”

the picture:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
a 1937 Walt Disney Productions movie, was the first animated film made in Technicolor.

CHAPTER
27

O Frabjous Day!: From Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” which appears in chapter one of
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
(1871): “‘And, hast thou slain the Jabberwock? / Come to my arms, my beamish boy! / O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' / He chortled in his joy.”

Dementia praecox: Any of several psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, characterized by distortions of reality, disturbances of thought and language, and withdrawal from social contact.

CHAPTER
28

Where Alfred the Sacred River Ran: Parody of “…Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man…” from “Kubla Khan or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (1816), a poem by British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

1914 Willys-Knight: Willys-Knight automobiles were produced between 1914 and 1933 by Willys-Overland Company of Elyria and Toledo, Ohio. In an internal combustion engine, ring gear and pinions connect the car's starter with the motor's flywheel.

“A veritable fairyland”: According to Susan Shillinglaw in
A Journey into Steinbeck's California
(2006), Steinbeck's portrayal of the culminating costume party at the Palace Flop house may owe its inspiration to an outrageous benefit party, “Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest,” thrown by artist Salvador Dalí at Monterey's Hotel Del Monte on September 2, 1941 (pp. 76–77). See also the short film clip, “Dizzy Dali Dinner,” on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg6i4E0Woak.