Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Martha Heasley Cox: February 26, 1919–September 5, 2015

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/steinbeckreview.13.1.0073

1754-6087

Paul Douglass,

American Literature and Culture

I first met Martha Cox in 1991, not six months after I arrived at San José State University, fresh from Atlanta, where the college for which I was teaching had closed. Feeling unbelievably lucky to have landed a faculty job in the aftermath of that disaster, I was excited to be teaching at SJSU, and very excited that day to attend a reading by Maxine Hong Kingston in the Music Auditorium. Kingston had just survived the Oakland Hills Firestorm which burned her house to the ground, taking with it all of her manuscripts, including her new novel, The Fourth Book of Peace, which she eventually abandoned. We listened, riveted by Kingston's description of the uncontrollable blaze that permanently scarred the psyche of the Bay area, and how she escaped death on her bicycle. I learned that night that Kingston was speaking to us because Martha Cox had endowed a lecture series, one which has hosted Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Wallace Stegner, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, John Barth, E. L. Doctorow, and many other distinguished writers. Martha had retired in 1989, but she was clearly not done with the university where she had taught for thirty-four years and where she had founded the Steinbeck Research Center that now bears her name.She was already a legend at San José, and to meet her was to recognize her steely-eyed focus on the books and authors she loved, including some pretty hard-living and hard-driving individuals, from Ernest Hemingway to Nelson Algren. She also had a passion for Steinbeck, whom she taught by taking her students regularly on tours of Fremont Peak, Salinas, Monterey, and Cannery Row, hoping to bring Steinbeck's characters and environs to life. Although I remember Martha as the woman who made such a difference to SJSU, she had a tremendous impact on Lyon College as well, where she established a faculty chair. Terrell Tebbetts, inaugural holder of the chair, notes that she wanted always to “keep her alma mater well connected to both the literary and the scholarly worlds.”Martha was a self-made woman who built up her personal wealth through hard work, ambitious publishing, and careful investment. She wanted to make every moment and every dollar count. She was a lover of books who bought them for reading, not as collectibles. It was the content of a book that counted to her. When I recently packed up her library in San Francisco to bring the books to the Steinbeck Center, I found that even the autographed ones had been thoroughly thumbed. She was a personal friend and bibliographer of Nelson Algren, and had received books from him with many notes, but these books were worn by use. Most of her Steinbeck books were heavily annotated paperbacks with yellowing pages beginning to fall out.Once Martha decided to focus on Steinbeck, she devoted herself avidly to procuring materials that would bring about her vision of a Steinbeck Research Center at SJSU. She enlisted support from everyone who would listen, including Warren French, Peter Lisca, Robert DeMott, Jackson Benson, and all the members of the John Steinbeck Society founded by Tetsumaro Hayashi. She became friends with Thomas Steinbeck, John's surviving son, and Thom's wife Gail. She got to know the author's widow, Elaine. She martialled her students, such as Ray Morrison, who helped her solicit donations to get SJSU's Steinbeck Collection started, chiefly with photocopies of papers, reviews, and articles from archives at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, the New York Public Library, the Lincoln Center Library, and the archives of Viking Press.In later years, I would pick Martha up for events on campus, such as a reading by Joyce Carol Oates or Norman Mailer, and then-Dean Karl Toepfer would take her back into the city afterward. Frankly, she talked our ears off. She had plans for future Steinbeck events; she wanted to know how her endowment monies were being spent; she fretted that a property she had given the university was sitting on the market too long; she wanted to know who was being considered next for the Cox Lecturer position; she told stories of how sensitively Lyon College was treating her as a donor and wanted to know what SJSU was doing to improve its donor relations; she hoped that a Steinbeck Fellow would someday win the California Book Award for fiction. She also talked about her many other philanthropic ventures.I learned that Martha's generosity extended far beyond SJSU and Lyon. After her retirement in 1989, she moved into an apartment in Opera Plaza on Van Ness in San Francisco and joined the Commonwealth Club, where Jim Coplan was a staff member. Jim became one of Martha's closest friends and did many kindnesses for her. The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco is nationally known for its public affairs programs and its weekly radio broadcast. Martha was excited to get involved in the literary awards program of the Commonwealth Club. She also began to sit on the California Book Award Jury, reading hundreds of books each year and helping decide which authors to honor. I know from personal experience that at times she would take the bus to the Club, pick up a bag of books, lug them home to her condo, and then repeat the process a week or so later, having churned through a book a day in the interim. She committed fifteen years to work on the jury and was horrified that anyone would “skim” some of the 200+ entries. For Martha, each author deserved the same passionate attention and thorough assessment, and she read each book from cover to cover. At the age of ninety-two, she confessed that it was getting hard for her to keep up the pace. The Club recognized her contributions at the 2013 Book Awards ceremony, presenting her with her own Gold Medal for supporting all those winning authors.In 1993–94, I served as the interim Director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies that now bears Martha's name, while Director Susan Shillinglaw (now Director of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas) was on leave.The Center for Steinbeck Studies moved that year from the sixth floor in Wahlquist Library to a cavernous third-floor space, now replaced by the new Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, in which the Center has found its current attractive home on the fifth floor. But in those days the extra space seemed like a godsend. It desperately needed furnishing, and bookshelves—like books and other resources—cost money.And the Center's needs were met, as it benefited greatly from the generosity of Steinbeck Award Winners who did public events—among them Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, and, more recently, Rachel Maddow, Ken Burns, and Dolores Huerta. Martha was very excited by those events, which were planned and executed by dedicated supporters like Ted Cady of the Student Union, Board Member Jim Levitt, and Center Director Susan Shillinglaw. Springsteen kicked off the fund-raising events with a solo concert in 1996 memorializing the release of his Ghost of Tom Joad album. The concert drew the support of Elaine Steinbeck, who attended with Martha and Susan Shillinglaw. As a Steinbeck Center Board Member, I was in the crowd, little guessing that my involvement in the Steinbeck Center would come back on the front burner very shortly.In 1997, Susan Shillinglaw organized a dedication ceremony for the newly refurbished Steinbeck Center in its Wahlquist Library space, to be renamed for Martha, and Shillinglaw honored her by featuring the scrapbook first editions that Martha had collected to found the Center in 1971. Later that same year, I sat down with Martha and Jack Crane, Dean of the College of Humanities and the Arts, to discuss her dream of a Fellowship Program at SJSU that would bring scholars and creative writers together to pursue significant projects under the name of John Steinbeck. It was a fitting name, she felt, since Steinbeck's interests were so broad, covering the sciences, ecology, politics, war, memoir, creative nonfiction, drama, musicals, and short and long fiction, to name some of the most basic genres in which he wrote.Her idea mystified most of her colleagues, because it did not seem like the kind of program a state university could sponsor and promote, but she insisted that someday others would join her in adding to an endowment for scholars and writers. She promised not only to create an initial endowment, but to make further donations during her lifetime and to leave a portion of her estate to the Center for this purpose—all promises she kept. Initially, all she needed was someone who would step up and lead the program. Thinking that I was in for a year or two of reading applications, advertising the program, and leading the meetings of the Fellows during their yearlong stints in San José, I volunteered.Twelve years later, I was still working in the role, and I had also come back to serve as Director of the Center after Professor Shillinglaw stepped down. I had come to know and respect Martha deeply. As our friendship grew, I learned about her role in the California Book Awards and her activities in the theater scene in San Francisco. She contributed significantly to the small experimental Eureka Theatre, which in 1988 had commissioned playwright Tony Kushner to create Angels in America. She later became a loyal patron of the Magic Theatre in Fort Mason, where Sam Shepard had been writer in residence from 1974 to 1984. Martha gave money to support free public readings of new plays at the Magic, the Exploratorium, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Commonwealth Club. Some of those plays became part of the Magic Theatre season, and Martha would invite guests to attend—my wife, Charlene, and I among them.Her energy was famous at SJSU during her teaching years, and although I came to know her during her retirement years, I could see far more than just the shadow of that professorial persona. She hosted gatherings of the Steinbeck Fellows at her apartment in San Francisco, and she was constantly sending me cuttings and notes relating to her literary passions. In 2000, SJSU honored her with its highest recognition, the Tower Award. She was very proud of that acknowledgment.Over the years, Martha Cox's vision for the Steinbeck Fellows Program has begun to be fulfilled. It has grown in stature based on accomplishments of writers and scholars who comprise its alumni, and whose books have been reviewed in the New York Times and other prestigious media. Now the Center hosts two or three new Fellows each year, and there is an increasing prospect that—as Martha originally dreamed—new donors attracted by their work will enrich the program, ensuring that it will continue to thrive.Martha's legacy is manifold—from SJSU's Center for Steinbeck Studies to the Cox Lectureship, the California Book Awards, and the San Francisco theater scene, to conferences and meetings. Her legacy continues, as Robert DeMott, Acting Director of the Steinbeck Research Center in 1984 and 1985 delivered one of the keynote addresses at SJSU's May 2016 international Steinbeck conference on “John Steinbeck as an International Writer.” How grateful I am to have known Martha Heasley Cox.