1932 to 1936

St “...scared and baastful and humble...”

1932 The Pastures of Heaven published.

 

1933 To a God Unknown and the first two parts of The Red Pony published.

 

1934 His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, died. A short story. “The Murder,” won O. Henry prize.

 

1935 His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, died. Tortilla Flat published, his first success.

 

1936 In Dubious Battle published.

Carol Steinbeck’s job was in the laboratory of a friend who was already exerting a vital influence on Steinbeck’s life and thinking: the marine biologist, philosopher, and ecologist, Edward F. Ricketts. Steinbeck had met him in 1930 and had passed many hours on Cannery Row in Monterey at his Pacific Biological Laboratory which collected and distributed West Coast biological specimens to institutions and individuals throughout the country. This laboratory was to become the background for several of Steinbeck’s stories and novels, and Ricketts himself, under varying aliases, would appear as a character in them. He and Steinbeck collaborated on Sea of Cortez and maintained a close friendship till Ricketts’s death in 1948.

To George Albee

Pacific Grove
[March] 1932

Dear George:

Thank you for sending the letter, you see I have nothing but the telegram and I have been afraid the thing had fallen through. The letter reassured me of its acceptance but was also slightly redolent of horse shit. If you believe all the nice things then you ought to believe all the nasty things that will be said later, and then they cancel each other out.

Carol is working now and loves it. She has two rattlesnakes and about 200 white rats to love. She introduced Tillie to the rats and they ignored each other.

I don’t know why the publication of a book should impress you. I’ve met a number of people who publish books and judging from most of them, the fact of publication seems to make a horse’s ass of a man. So forget about it. I’ve never heard of a book that made any money and I have no desire to speak before women’s clubs. Waiting for these contracts has stopped my work a little, that’s all. And you must remember that the moment Mr. Ballou buys a book it’s his property and he has to think it wonderful or he can’t sell it. That’s the first principle of salesmanship: believe in your product no matter how rotten it is.

That’s all

Affectionately
John

 

 

Robert O. Ballou, former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, had joined the publishing firm of Cape and Smith a few years before. It had a distinguished roster of writers who were also published by the parent firm of Jonathan Cape in England. In 1932 company reorganization caused the firm to be rebaptized Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou, Inc. It was at this point that contracts with Steinbeck for The Pastures of Heaven and two subsequent novels were signed.

To Amasa Miller

[Pacific Grove]
March 14, 1932

Dear Ted:

Your letter came this morning for which I thank you. I have read and signed these new contracts. Naturally they seem good to me. A crust would have seemed good. Ballou’s letter was friendly. He seemed over-impressed with the book but that is probably his method of dealing with clients. From all I can learn (which is little) the house is a good, conservative old one. I should have gone on working for twenty years, but I must admit a little encouragement is a lifting thing for the spirit. I am about a third finished with the first draft of the new version of the Unknown God. I think I like it pretty well this time.

Darn it, I thought I had finished and mailed this. I just found it in a book. I’m sorry. My sister is up from Los Angeles and yesterday she presented me with a nice pair of riding breeches so I can ride with her. We are going out tomorrow. I’ll probably be awfully sore but it will be good to cinch a beastie again. It must be over two years since I have had my feet in stirrups. A few months ago, after slight indulgence, I rode a colt bareback and unbridled, me in tweeds. If I’d been sober I’d have been tossed on my can but being pickled, I did a first rate rodeo and only came off when we went under a bush. The colt was trying to crawl into a gopher hole.

Affectionately,
John

To George Albee

Pacific Grove
[March] 1932

Dear George:

You’ll be anxious to hear about these contracts. They seem to me a little crazy. There are three contracts, one for The Pastures of Heaven and one each for two later mss which are simply named by their succession. The publisher binds himself to publish the things sight unseen. If McIntosh hadn’t assured me that he was a good business man I should think he was an angel trying to put some money on art. McIntosh says I will be allowed a drawing account against even the unwritten books. I don’t imagine I shall take advantage of it. She also says that, since Jonathan Cape is an English firm, I am practically guaranteed English publication. Now doesn’t the thing seem a little bit crazy?

All of this sounds impossible to me of course. Nothing so nice has ever happened to me. I still think the man is insane to buy books without seeing them. That’s about all I can think of, I knew you’d want to know.

Affectionately,
John

 

 

Soon afterwards, Ted Miller sent the assignment of McBride’s copyright.

 

“For myself I would hate to see the Cup reissued,” Steinbeck wrote him. “I’ve outgrown it and it embarrasses me. But my father talked continually about the copyright, which he thinks is valuable. Now that he has it in the safe, he is happier.”

In June Steinbeck replied to his publisher’s request for publicity and biographical material.

To Robert O. Ballou

Pacific Grove
June ₁0, 1932

Dear Mr. Ballou:

Your telegram puts a burden of embarrassment on me. I have no reluctance toward writing an “unreticent story of my life.” Immediately there arises a problem of emphasis. Things of the greatest emphasis to me would be more or less meaningless to anyone else. Such a biography would consist of such things as—the way the sparrows hopped about on the mud street early in the morning when I was little—how the noon bell sounded when we were writing dirty words on the sidewalk with red fuchsia berries—how Teddy got run over by a fire engine, and the desolation of loss—the most tremendous morning in the world when my pony had a cold.

What you undoubtedly want is about two paragraphs of facts. I’ve forgotten so many of the facts. I don’t remember what is true and what might have been true. It hasn’t been a story to write about, you see. Nothing much has ever happened.

As for the picture—I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. I am sending you a photograph of a large drawing which I like. I hope it will do.

I can’t say how much I wish this kind of thing weren’t necessary. I feel like a man who has been to a horse race, and who is asked, “What were you doing while the race was on? What were you doing with your hands? How did your face look?” He wouldn’t know, and I don’t know.

There are some things I can prove. If I put them down, will you write this thing? And if you don’t like any of it, you can make one up that you do like. It doesn’t matter to me.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

Through this period Steinbeck had been working on another and final rewrite of The Unknown God. He customarily used a ledger for his writing. Sometimes this contained the manuscript itself and other times notes which preceded the day’s work, and which he called his “daybook” or his “workbook.” At one time he wrote in used ledgers from his father’s office, on the backs of pages already covered on one side with accounts. He actually bought the ledger in which The Unknown God was written, and it is more than likely that poverty at least partly dictated his choice of a bound book of pages instead of separate sheets of manuscript paper. Certainly it was poverty that caused his choice of ink. As he wrote Duke Sheffield:

“A year ago Holman’s department store had an ink sale—ink that had been so long in stock that it was as ripe and rich as Napoleon brandy, cobwebs on the bottles. Two bottles for five cents. I bought two and used them. On page 167 the green was exhausted and I went back, but the sale was over and I bought one bottle of blue for ten cents.”

 

This ledger of The Unknown God also marks the first time he directed the entire concept and approach of his work, not to a faceless and generalized audience, but to a single person. It would be his practice for the rest of his life.

To Carlton A. Sheffield

[Pacific Grove]
[1932

To Dock—[fragments from a ledger]

When I bought this book, and began to fill it with words, it occurred to me that you might like to have it when it was full. You have that instinct so highly developed in magpies, pack-rats and collectors. I should like you to have this book and my reasons are all sentimental and therefore, of course, unmentionable. I love you very much. I have never been able to give you a present that cost any money. It occurs to me that you might accept a present that cost me a hell of a lot of work. For I do not write easily. Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.

 

Now as always—humility and terror. Fear that the working of my pen cannot capture the grinding of my brain. It is so easy to understand why the ancients prayed for the help of a Muse. And the Muse came and stood beside them, and we, heaven help us, do not believe in Muses. We have nothing to fall back on but our craftsmanship and it, as modern literature attests, is inadequate.

May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required, let this be my invocation—may I be strong and yet gentle, tender and yet wise, wise and yet tolerant. May I for a little while, only for a little while, see with the inflamed eyes of a God.

 

I wonder if you know why I address this manuscript to you. You are the only person in the world who believes I can do what I set out to do. Not even I believe that all the time. And so, in a kind of gratitude, I address all my writing to you, whether or not you know it.

 

Now this book is finished, Dook. You will have to work on it; to help straighten out the roughness, to say where it falls short. I wish I valued it more so that it would be a better gift. It isn’t nearly all I hoped it would be. I remember when I finished the earlier book of the same title. I took it to you and you said, “It is very good.” And I knew you knew it was terrible, and you knew I knew you knew it. And if this one is as bad I hope you will tell me. I’ve worked too hard on it. I can’t tell much about it.

Anyway—this is your book now. I hope you’ll like to have it.

love,
John

To George Albee

Pacific Grove
September 27, 1932

 

On the 27 of September 1932 I borrowed from George Albee one hundred dollars on the slightly questionable collateral of a contract held by me from Brewer, Warren and Putnam. I promise to repay this one hundred dollars when contractual obligations are satisfied which is within two weeks of the twerlty-first of October, 1932.

Signed.
John Steinbeck

 

 

Brewer, Warren, and Putnam was the publishing house to which Robert Ballou had moved after the bankruptcy of his former firm. He took Steinbeck’s contracts with him, but the only novel of Steinbeck’s that the new firm would remain solvent long enough to publish in this Depression year would be The Pastures of Heaven.

During a stay of several months in Southern California, Steinbeck continued to work on the final rewrite of To An Unknown God.

To Robert O. Ballou

2527 Hermosa Avenue
Montrose, California
January 3, 1933

Dear Ballou,

Your letter came this morning together with one from Mc & O containing the belated check. It was a relief. Tillie, properly Tylie Eulenspiegel [who had recently died], was an Airedale terrier and a very beautiful one. She was beautifully trained—could point quail, retrieve ducks, bring in hares or clear a road of sheep. More important than these though, she had the most poignant capacity for interest and enjoyment in the world. It was much more important to us that she be alive than that people like Hearst and Cornelius Vanderbilt foul up the planet. She was house broken.

This book draws to a close. It will (if nothing happens) be ready to send before the end of February. I shall be very glad to have it done. I hope to God you’ll like it. I have grave doubts. The title will be To A God Unknown. The transposition in words is necessary to a change in meaning. The unknown in this case meaning “Unexplored.”

This is taken from the Vedic hymns. I want no confusion with the unknown God of St. Paul.

That’s all. Thanks again for routing out the check.

John Steinbeck

To Mavis McIntosh

Montrose
January 1933

Dear Miss McIntosh:

We live in the hills back of Los Angeles now and there are few people around. One of our neighbors loaned me three hundred detective magazines, and I have read a large part of them out of pure boredom. They are so utterly lousy that I wonder whether you have tried to peddle that thing I dashed off to any of them [“The Murder”]. It might mean a few dollars. Could be very much cut to fit, you know. Will you think about it? It would be better than letting it lie around, don’t you think?

I think that, when this is sent off (this new novel) I shall do some more short stories. I always think I will and they invariably grow into novels, but I’ll try anyway. There are some fine little things that happened in a big sugar mill where I was assistant chief chemist and majordomo of about sixty Mexicans and Yuakis taken from the jails of northern Mexico. There was the Guttierez family that spent its accumulated money for a Ford and started from Mexico never thinking they might need gasoline. There was the ex-corporal of Mexican cavalry, whose wife had been stolen by a captain and who was training his baby to be a general so he could get even better women. There was the Lazarus who drank factory acid and sat down to die. The lime in his mouth neutralized the acid but he could never go back to his old life because he had been spiritually dead for a moment. His. will to live never came back. There was the Indian who, after a terrific struggle to learn to tell time by a clock, invented a clock of his own that he could understand. There is the saga of the Carriaga family. Son hanged himself for love of a chippy and was cut down and married the girl. His father aged sixty-five fell in love with a fourteen-year-old girl and tried the same thing, but a door with a spring lock fell shut and he didn’t get cut down. There is Ida Laguna who fell violently in love with the image of St. Joseph and stole it from the church and slept with it and they both went to hell. These are a few as they really happened. I could make some little stories of them I think.

I notice that a number of reviewers (what lice they are) complain that I deal particularly in the subnormal and the psychopathic. If said critics would inspect their neighbors within one block, they would find that I deal with the normal and the ordinary.

The manuscript called Dissonant Symphony I wish you would withdraw. I looked at it not long ago and I don’t want it out. I may rewrite it sometime, but I certainly do not want that mess published under any circumstances, revised or not.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Robert O. Ballou

[Montrose]
February II, 1933

Dear Ballou:

Please don’t mind the pencil. I don’t own a fountain pen. I am lying in the sun, drinking coffee. Of course I could use the typewriter. For the first time in one solid month it is idle. This is a good day. I shipped mss. to Miss O. this morning. You should get it before very long. I hope you will like it. The book was hellish hard to write. I had been making notes for it for about five years. It will probably be a hard book to sell. Its characters are not “home folks.” They make no more attempt at being sincerely human than the people in the Iliad. Boileau (much like your name) insisted that only gods, kings and heroes were worth writing about. I firmly believe that. The detailed accounts of the lives of clerks don’t interest me much, unless, of course, the clerk breaks into heroism. But I have no intention of trying to explain my book. It has to do that for itself. I would be sure of its effect if it could be stipulated that the readers read to an obbligato of Bach.

There are several things in your letter that I must answer. The Hymn to a God Unknown was, of course, written about three thousand years ago. It must have been chanted, but I know of no music. The disadvantage of setting Sanskrit characters in the end papers is that it would give an Eastern look to the book.

Your letter sounds a bit disconsolate. The working of publishing houses must be nerve wracking, but I should think it would be heartening. More and more competitions going out. And the need for books is leaping, not dropping. I know a French boy who started a haberdashery just before the crash. On all sides of him stores went under but he continued merrily. I went to see him the other day and asked him how he did it. He said, “I come from French peasant stock. We waste nothing. I have very little overhead. Such things as ‘service’ and luxury are killing my competition. If I make a dollar it is my dollar.” If you can hold out for a year without falling into the mess the others have, you will be the “Publisher.” Your method is sane. Knopf says that only i percent of the books are sold because of advertising. And advertising is the most expensive item, isn’t it? I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be associated with you.

The Murder I thought might be sold to a pulp if it were cut down. Even a little money would be better than a bunch of grapes. [It was sold to North American Review and was included among the O. Henry Prize Stories the following year.]

We are very happy. I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them. Apparently we are heading for the rocks. The light company is going to turn off the power in a few days, but we don’t care much. The rent is up pretty soon and then we shall move. I don’t know where. It doesn’t matter. My wife says she would much rather go out and meet disaster, than to have it sneak up on her. The attacking force has the advantage. I feel the same way. We’ll get in the car and drive until we can’t buy gasoline any more. Have two more books almost ready to start but a month of messing around won’t hurt. But I do need a dog. Tillie haunts the house terribly.

Please let me hear as soon as you can, what you think of this new book. It was an important piece of work to me. I wanted to make a beautiful and true book.

 

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

His mother’s sudden serious illness would now force John and Carol Steinbeck to divide their time between the family home in Salinas and the little house in Pacific Grove.

To George Albee

Box 6
Salinas, California
[1933]
Wednesday

Dear George:

This is a very sad time. Mother seems to be slipping badly. Every other day she seems to be a little better and then the next she slips back a little weaker. My father doesn’t know how sick she is and we aren’t telling him. He has enough worries as it is. Don’t tell anyone down there what I just said. I am sometimes astounded at the way things get about, unbelievable. Anyway we are expecting the worst and hoping it may not be the very worst, that is a paralysis.

I am taking up the harmonica in my usual thorough way. I decided that there was no future in the peedle pipe, no chords. Besides my new peedle pipe is in B and the accordeen is in D and while we do a fairly good peanut vendor, and the combination hits hearts and flowers as it should be hit, for serious music you just can’t put B and D together and make anything sweet of it. So I got a D harmonica and we are getting hot.

I have the pony story about half written. [The Red Pony] I like it pretty well. It is more being written for discipline than for any other reason. I mean if I can write any kind of a story at a time like this, then I can write stories. I don’t need publication so why should I send it to Story which pays nothing. If I can’t hit a paying magazine I’ll put it away for the future collection that everybody dreams about. It is a very simple story about a boy who gets a colt pony and the pony gets distemper. There is a good deal in it, first about the training of horses and second about the treatment of distemper. This may not seem like a good basis for a story but that entirely depends upon the treatment. The whole thing is as simply told as though it came out of the boy’s mind although there is no going into the boy’s mind. It is an attempt to make the reader create the boy’s mind for himself. An interesting experiment you see if nothing else. I’ll send you a carbon of it when I get it done. It will take about three more days. Maybe four. I have to go to the hospital this afternoon while they draw some blood from mother. It

[unfinished letter]

To Robert O. Ballou

Salinas
June I, 1933

Dear Ballou:

We came to my home because my mother was ill. She has grown steadily worse and five days ago suffered a stroke of paralysis which put her left side out completely and permanently. And there it stays. She has improved now and may live on in this state for a year or even more. Needless to say I shall not be in New York this summer or any other time for a long time in the future. I am badly needed here and I have no regrets about that except that my work seems to be at a standstill. I spend about eight hours a day in the hospital. Thought I would take my little pad and work there, but the tiny scratching of the pen is irritating to the patient. I have been very ill myself and I know how such a sound can be utterly maddening. If this continues, she will be brought home and then I shall continue in another room just out of her ear shot. I have been trying to go on at night but find it very slow. It is difficult to concentrate. I guess we are all pretty tired. But it is good discipline. Perhaps you can see now, why I was insistent on the dedication last year. I have sisters who might help out but they all have children who get something every time anything happens. Besides I have no inclination to go away. That is a curious thing. I’ve always thought I would want to run away but I don’t. That is the end of a paragraph of woe.

We have a new dog. I will send you his picture when I take it. He is an Irish terrier pup, a beauty. His owner died and we bought him from the dog hating wife. A great bargain. He is not nervous nor noisy the way so many terriers are. I will surely photograph him when I get the direction to do anything.

I wish you would tell me whether you are going to publish this book and when. In weaker moments I imagine a conspiracy of silence.

Please let me hear from you before too long.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To George Albee

[Salinas]
[1933]

Dear George:

I have forgotten how long ago I wrote to you and what I told you. Did I write very frequently? I can’t remember. I have your letter this morning. I don’t know whether I told you that mother is now paralysed and will linger perhaps a year. It has been a bad time. The pony story, you can understand has been put off for a while. But now I spend about seven hours a day in the hospital and I am trying to go on with it, but with not a great deal of success, because partly I have to fight an atmosphere of blue fog so thick and so endless that I can see no opening in it. However, if I can do it, it will be good. Anyone can write when the situation is propitious. I’d like to prove to myself that I can write in any circumstance.

I hate to think what a year here will do to us. Perhaps nothing. I am pretty rubber. Carol is the one who will suffer. She takes things harder than I do, but she has been wonderful about the whole thing.

Went to the hospital and got a few pages of the pony story done although I suspect it is pretty rotten. But between bed pans and calling relatives I got some done. I shall hate to spoil it because it is really a fine story. Carol is going bicycling this afternoon. She had her bicycle fixed up and skids about the streets on it. Poor kid, she needs some kind of relaxation. She hasn’t had any fun in a long time. And I don’t see much chance that she will have any for some time to come. I would send her away for a while if she would go. I imagine that the English edition of The Pastures is out because I have begun to get letters from clipping bureaus.

I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world. But that will have to be sometime in the future. I would take so very long. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say. bye jon

 

 

It was while observing the course of his mother’s illness that notes which Steinbeck had been making at random for many years suddenly came into focus —with the collaboration of Ed Ricketts—and a turning point in his creative life was reached. Even at the time it seemed so important to him that, contrary to his custom, he dated in full the letter in which he first wrote about it.

To Carlton A. Sheffield

Pacific Grove
June 21, 1933

 

This is not a letter to read unless you have so much time that you just don’t care. I just want to talk and there is no one to talk to. Out of the all encircling good came a theme finally. I knew it would. Until you can put your theme in one sentence, you haven’t it in hand well enough to write a novel. The process is this (I am writing this at the risk of being boring. One can refuse to read a letter and the writer of it will never know.) The process is this—one puts down endless observations, questions and remarks. The number grows and grows. Eventually they all seem headed in one direction and then they whirl like sparks out of a bonfire. And then one day they seem to mean something.

When they do, it is the most exciting time in the world. I have three years of them and only just now have they taken a direction. Suddenly they are all of one piece. Then the problem begins of trying to find a fictional symbolism which will act as a vehicle.

Let me quote a few of the notes. The coral insect working with hundreds of billions of others, eventually creates a strange and beautiful plant-like formation. In the course of time numberless plants create the atoll. Architecturally the atoll is very beautiful and good. Certain groups in Europe at one time created the Gothic spire. They seem to have worked under a stimulus as mysterious, as powerful and as general as that which caused the coral insects to build.

Note—in nineteen seventeen this unit was in a physical and psychic condition which made it susceptible to the inroads of the influenza germ. This germ at other times was not deadly, and, when encountered now, causes discomfort but not ordinarily death. It has been shown that at the time mentioned the germ had not changed but the receptivity of the race had.

Note—in Mendocino county a whole community turned against one man and destroyed him although they had taken no harm from him. This will sound meaningless to you unless you could see the hundreds of notes that make them meaningful to me. It is quite easy for the group, acting under stimuli to viciousness, to eliminate the kindly natures of its units. When acting as a group, men do not partake of their ordinary natures at all. The group can change its nature. It can alter the birth rate, diminish the number of its units, control states of mind, alter appearance, physically and spiritually. All of the notations I have made begin to point to an end—That the group is an individual as boundaried, as diagnosable, as dependent on its units and as independent of its units’ individual natures, as the human unit, or man, is dependent on his cells and yet is independent of them.

Does this begin to make sense to you? The greatest group unit, that is the whole race, has qualities which the individual lacks entirely. It remembers a time when the moon was close, when the tides were terrific. It remembers a time when the weight of the individual doubled itself every twenty-eight days, and strangely enough, it remembers every step of its climb from the single cell to the human. The human unit has none of these memories.

The nature of the groups, I said, were changeable. Usually they are formed by topographical peculiarities. Sometimes a terrible natural stimulus will create a group over night. They are of all sizes, from the camp meeting where the units pool their souls to make one yearning cry, to the whole world which fought the war. Russia is giving us a nice example of human units who are trying with a curious nostalgia to get away from their individuality and reestablish the group unit the race remembers and wishes. I am not drawing conclusions. Merely trying to see where the stream of all my notes is going.

One could easily say that man, during his hunting period, had to give up the group since all the game hunters must; and now that his food is not to be taken by stealth and precision, is going back to the group which takes its food by concerted action. That if one lives by the food of the lion he must hunt singly, if by the food of the ruminants he may live in herds and protect himself by his numbers.

It can be placed somewhat like this for the moment—as individual humans we are far superior in our functions to anything the world has born—in our groups we are not only not superior but in fact are remarkably like those most perfect groups, the ants and bees. I haven’t begun to tell you this thing. I am not ready to.

Half of the cell units of my mother’s body have rebelled. Neither has died, but the revolution has changed her functions. That is cruel to say. The first line on this thing came from it though. She, as a human unit, is deterred from functioning as she ordinarily did by a schism of a number of her cells.

And, when the parts of this thesis have found their places, I’ll start trying to put them into the symbolism of fiction.

The fascinating thing to me is the way the group has a soul, a drive, an intent, an end, a method, a reaction and a set of tropisms which in no way resembles the same things possessed by the men who make up the group. These groups have always been considered as individuals multiplied. And they are not so. They are beings in themselves, entities. Just as a bar of iron has none of the properties of the revolving, circling, active atoms which make it up, so these huge creatures, the groups, do not resemble the human atoms which compose them.

This is muddled, Dook. I wouldn’t send it to anyone else in this form. But you and I have talked so much together that we can fill in the gaps we leave.

We were awfully glad to get both your letters. Write often, this is a deadly time for us. And you might put your mind on the problem I have stated. If you could help me put it into form, I probably would have less trouble finding my symbols for reproducing it. You will find the first beginning conception of it among the anthropologists, but none of them has dared to think about it yet. The subject is too huge and too terrifying. Since it splashed on me, I have been able to think of nothing else.

It is an explanation of so many mysterious things, the reasons for migrations, the desertion of localities, the sudden diseases which wiped races out, the sudden running amok of groups. It would explain how Genghis Khan and Attila and the Goths suddenly stopped being individual herdsmen and hunters and became, almost without transition, a destroying creature obeying a single impulse. It would explain the sudden tipping over of Prohibition, and that ten years ago the constitution of the US was a thing of God and now it is abrogated with impunity. Oh! it is a gorgeous thing. Don’t you think so?

I am ignorant enough to promulgate it. If I had more knowledge I wouldn’t have the courage to think it out. It isn’t thought out yet, but I have a start. Think of the lemmings, little gophers who live in holes and who suddenly in their millions become a unit with a single impulse to suicide. Think of the impulse which has suddenly made Germany overlook the natures of its individuals and become what it has. Hitler didn’t do it. He merely speaks about it.

I’ll stop before I drive you as crazy as I have become since all my wonderings have taken a stream like force. All the things I’ve wondered about and pondered about are seeming to make sense at last. Why the individual is incapable of understanding the nature of the group. That is why publishing is unsure, why elections are the crazy things they are. We only feel the emotions of the group beast in times of religious exaltation, in being moved by some piece of art which intoxicates us while we do not know what it is that does it. Are you as nuts as I am now?

love
john

To Carlton A. Sheffield

Salinas
June 30, 1933

Dear Dook:

I had your letter in answer to my hectic one. And I was sorry that you went off into consideration of the technique of the novel which will result. I can see how it will be done all right, but I am in more interest just now to get the foundation straight and the physical integrity of it completed.

My sister Beth is coming over for a few days. Perhaps we might get up to Sausalito while she is here to relieve us. Can’t tell, though. Everything gets out of hand this year. There’s probably something wrong meteorologically.

Nothing is changed here. This is going to be a very long siege. The doctor says it may last for years. There’s a sentence for you, for we can’t leave while it lasts. There is no way out. I finished one story and it is ready to be typed, about ten thousand words, I guess [The Red Pony]. There was no consecutive effort put on it. If it has any continuity it is marvelous. I can’t think of any possible medium which would include it. It was good training in self control and that’s about all the good it is. Now I have my new theme to think about there will be few loopholes in my days. I can think about it while helping with a bed pan. I can make notes at any time of the day or night, and I think I shall delay the writing of it until I have the ability for sustained concentration. However, if the time is too long I can’t even wait for that. I’ll have to go to work on it. The pieces of it are fast massing and getting ready to drop into their places.

I think this is all of this letter.

love
john

Now he began using the word “phalanx” for the “group” or “group unit” he had been describing.

To George Albee

[Salinas]
[1933]

Dear George:

I have your letter of this morning. Mary just went home. We liked having her, but she brought her children which took all her time from helping, and the noise they made was out of place in this house of gloom and melancholy. They made us nervous. I like them. They are the best children. But this is no place for any child. We are taking care of a dead person. We work as hard as we can to keep from thinking of it. We try all we can to keep out of her mind.

I can answer all of your questions now. But I hesitate because of the work it entails. I shall try though, because you need help and this will help you, not because it is something I have discovered. I haven’t discovered it. The discovery has come as all great ones have, by a little discovery by each of a great number of men, and finally by one man who takes all the little discoveries and correlates them and gives the whole thing a name. The thesis takes in all life, and for that part, all matter. But you are only interested in life and so am I.

We know that with certain arrangements of atoms we might have what we would call a bar of iron. Certain other arrangements of atoms plus a mysterious principle make a living cell. Now the living cell is very sensitive to outside stimuli or tropisms. A further arrangement of cells and a very complex one may make a unit which we call a man. That has been our final unit. But there have been mysterious things which could not be explained if man is the final unit. He also arranges himself into larger units, which I have called the phalanx. The phalanx has its own memory—memory of the great tides when the moon was close, memory of starvations when the food of the world was exhausted. Memory of methods when numbers of his units had to be destroyed for the good of the whole, memory of the history of itself. And the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable. Emotions of destruction, of war, of migration, of hatred, of fear. These things have been touched on often.

Religion is a phalanx emotion and this was so clearly understood by the church fathers that they said the holy ghost would come when two or three were gathered together. You have heard about the trickiness of the MOB. Mob is simply a phalanx, but if you try to judge a mob nature by the nature of its men units, you will fail as surely as if you tried to understand a man by studying one of his cells. You will say you know all this. Of course you do. It has to be written in primer language. All tremendous things do.

During the war we had probably the greatest phalanx in the history of the world. If we could devote our study to the greater unit, we would be capable of judging the possible actions of the phalanx, of prophesying its variability, and the direction it might take. We can find no man unit reason for the sudden invasion of Europe by a race of Hun shepherds, who were transformed overnight into a destroying force, a true phalanx, and in another generation had become shepherds again, so weak that an invasion of Tartars overwhelmed them. We can find no man unit reason for the sudden migration of the Mayas. We say Attila did it or Ghenghis Khan, but they couldn’t. They were simply the spokesmen of the movement. Hitler did not create the present phalanx in Germany, he merely interprets it.

Now in the unconscious of the man unit there is a keying mechanism. Jung calls it the third person. It is the plug which when inserted into the cap of the phalanx, makes man lose his unit identity in the phalanx. The artist is one in whom the phalanx comes closest to the conscious. Art then is the property of the phalanx, not of the individual. Art is the phalanx knowledge of the nature of matter and of life.

Dr. [Walter K.] Fischer at Hopkins [Marine Station, Pacific Grove] said one day that you could find any scientific discovery in the poetry of the preceding generation. Democritus promulgated an accurate atomic theory four hundred years before Christ. The artist is simply the spokesman of the phalanx. When a man hears great music, sees great pictures, reads great poetry, he loses his identity in that of the phalanx. I do not need to describe the emotion caused by these things, but it is invariably a feeling of oneness with one’s phalanx. For man is lonely when he is cut off. He dies. From the phalanx he takes a fluid necessary to his life. In the mountains I saw men psychologically emaciated from being alone. You can’t find a reason for doing certain things. You couldn’t possibly find a reason. You are dealing with a creature whose nature you cannot know intellectually, of whose emotions you are ignorant. Whose reasons, directions,. means, urges, pleasures, drives, satieties, ecstasies, hungers and tropisms are not yours as an individual.

I can’t give you this thing completely in a letter, George. I am going to write a whole novel with it as a theme, so how can I get it in a letter? Ed Ricketts has dug up all the scientific material and more than I need to establish the physical integrity of the thing. I have written this theme over and over and did not know what I was writing. I found at least four statements of it in the God. Old phalanxes break up in a fine imitation of death of the man unit, new phalanxes are born under proper physical and spiritual conditions. They may be of any size from the passionate three who are necessary to receive the holy spirit, to the race which overnight develops a soul for conquest, to the phalanx which commits suicide through vice or war or disease. When your phalanx needs you it will use you, if you are the material to be used. You will know when the time comes, and when it does come, nothing you can do will let you escape.

There is no change with mother nor can there be for a long time to come. I hope this letter will give you something to chew on. Don’t quibble about it with small exceptions until the whole thing has taken hold. Once it has, the exceptions will prove unimportant. Of course I am interested in it as tremendous and terrible poetry. I am neither scientist nor profound investigator. But I am experiencing an emotional vastness in working this out. The difficulty of writing the poetry is so great that I am not even contemplating it until I have absorbed and made a part of my body the thesis as a whole.

I corrected and sent back the proofs of the God this week. It reads pretty well. Ballou is rushing it so it may be out among the earliest of the Fall books. And that is all for this time.

Love to you and Anne and I do wish I could talk to you.

john

 

 

“The fictional symbol which will act as a vehicle” for the phalanx theory appeared in several guises after this period, among them in The Leader of the People with its description of the “westering” migration ; in In Dubious Battle; and, notably, in The Grapes of Wrath. Professor Richard Astro of Oregon State University mentions the famous turtle in Chapter Three of that novel, “symbolically representing the Joads’ weary trek westward,” and points out that an ancient Roman phalanx in close-order advance with shields locked overhead was called a testudo or tortoise. Was Steinbeck aware of this? There is no way of knowing.

 

Meanwhile, earlier and throughout that summer of 1933, he had been writing frequently to Albee.

To George Albee

[Salinas]
[June 1933]

Dear George:

Nothing is changed here. Mother gets a little stronger but not less helpless. There are terrible washings every day. 9-12 sheets. I wash them and Carol irons them. I try to sneak in a little work, but Mother wants to tell me something about every fifteen minutes. Her mind wanders badly. This story which in ordinary times I could do in four days is taking over a month to write and isn’t any good anyway. Carol is working like a dog. She stays cheerful and makes things easier for all of us. It’s hard to cook for nurses. If I can have two good days, I’ll finish this darn story. It really isn’t a story at all.

One of my sisters came last week and took charge, letting us go to the Grove for two days. The weather was fine and the garden beautiful. I got my importance in the picture straightened out. It’s hard to break through now I am back. One’s ego grows under this pressure until one’s feelings are more important than they deserve to be. It’s hard to keep scaled down.

A letter from Ballou says he thinks he can get the money for fall publication. He says the other houses are as badly off as he is and M. & O. agree. I really want to stay with him if he can make it.

John

To George Albee

Salinas
[1933]

Dear George:

I presume, since I have an impulse to write to you, you must either be writing to me or contemplating it or have just finished it. Nothing is changed here. I am typing the second draft of the pony story. A few pages a day. This morning is a good example. One paragraph—help lift patient on bed pan. Back, a little ill, three paragraphs, help turn patient so sheets can be changed. Back—three lines, nausea, hold pans, help hang bedding, back—two paragraphs, patient wants to tell me that her brother George is subject to colds, and the house must be kept warm. Brother George is not here but a letter came from him this morning. That is a morning. One page and a half typed. You can see that concentration thrives under difficulties since I have a fear and hatred of illness and incapacity which amounts to a mania. But I’ll get the story typed all right sooner or later and then I’ll correct it and then Carol will try to find time to finish it and how she is going to do that I haven’t any idea.

I have my new theme out of all this [the phalanx theory]. I am scared to death. It is as much huger than the last book as the last book was larger than The Pastures. In fact it has covered my horizon completely enough so there doesn’t seem to be anything else to think about, for no possible human thought nor action gets outside its range.

I presume you are swimming every day and basking and generally enjoying yourself. In a way I envy you and in another I don’t. I wouldn’t miss the ferocious pleasure of this thing of mine for any compensation. The illness (which by the way is the cause of the beginning conception) is worth it —everything is worth it.

I have heard no more from the east. Mc & O are probably mad at me for turning down the comparatively sure ready money from Simon and Schuster. But I can’t help that. I feel much safer with Ballou than I would with Simon and Schuster.

I have a great many little blisters on my hands and on my forehead. Ed says it looks like an allergy. It may be a subconscious attempt to escape sick room duty. If it is, I will have to overcome it with some powerful magic of the consciousness—exorcism of some sort or other. I can’t have the submerged part playing tricks and getting away with them.

That’s all for today. I’ll expect a letter in the next.mail.

john

To George Albee

[Salinas]
[1933]

Dear George:

One piece of advice I can offer, and that is that you should never let any one suggest anything about your story to you. If you don’t know more about your character and situation than anyone else could, then you aren’t ready to write your story anyway. It is primarily a lonely craft and must be accepted as such. If you eliminate that loneliness of approach, you automatically eliminate some of the power of the effect. I don’t know why that is.

I can’t tell which of the endings you should use. The second sounds very Dostoievsky, and after all you never saw a prisoner flayed. You may argue that your reader never did either and so how can he tell. I don’t know, but he can. You might be able to make your second ending ring true, but you would be almost unique in letters if you could. I have somehow the feeling that you will abandon this book. Not because it isn’t good but because publishers are in a peculiar condition now. That you are heartily sick of the book is apparent. One thing you will have to do about your genius, though. You will have to give him some dignity and depth. You are writing about Howard Edminster, and while Howard may write superb poetry, his life and acts are those of a horse’s ass and a charlatan. Meanwhile your age does not justify that you waste tears over one book. You are growing out from under it and so you can never catch it again. Put it away and, at some time when publishing changes, you will find an out for it. That isn’t my advice, you know. I can’t tell you how to work and how to think. My method is probably wrong for you. Certainly my outlook and vision of life is completely different from yours.

The pony story is finally finished and the second draft done. I don’t know when Carol will find time to type it, but when she does, I’ll send you the second draft and then you won’t have to bother to send it back. It is an unpretentious story. I think the philosophic content is so buried that it will not bother anybody. Carol likes it, but I am afraid our minds are somewhat grown together so that we see with the same eyes and feel with the same emotions. You can see whether you like it at all. There never was more than a half hour of uninterrupted work put on it, and the nausea between paragraphs had to be covered up. I don’t see how it can have much continuity, but Carol says it has some.

I guess that’s all. There is no change here. Mother’s mind gets farther and farther from its base. She is pretty much surrounded by dead relatives now.

bye
john

To Carl Wilhelmson

Salinas
[1933]

Dear Carl:

This has been a very bad year all around for us. Sometimes I get so shot that I feel like running out on the situation, a thing impossible of course. There are barriers psychological as well as physical. I have never run into so many barriers. It is really the first time I have been unable to run out of danger. I can’t get much of any work done, and the few words I do put down are written in the midst of constant interruptions.

In general I guess we are all right. Carol is about ready for a breakdown maybe. You know one publisher after another went broke from underus. My new book [To A God Unknown] was held up for a long time and then I got four offers for it, and left it with Ballou because I like him and trust him, and I neither like nor trust the others. And so it will be out in the Fall. I sent the proofs back the day before yesterday. The last one [The Pastures of Heaven) seems to be getting a better break in England than it did in this country, but I can’t tell much about that for some time.

I wish I could get to see you, but I don’t see how I can. I have to help in the office. Isn’t it funny, my two pet horrors, incapacity and ledgers and they both hit at once. I write columns of figures in big ledgers and after about three hours of it I am so stupefied that I can’t get down to my own work. I can see very readily how office workers get the way they are. There is something soddenly hypnotic about the columns of figures. Once this is over, I shall starve before I’ll ever open another ledger. Sometimes we get away over a week end but Palo Alto is quite a long trip away or is it Berkeley where you are living.

I shouldn’t be writing to anybody. It is impossible to keep the melancholy out of the tone of the words. I’ll put this letter away and if I hear from you I’ll add a line or two and send it.

[unsigned]

To Carl Wilhelmson

Salinas
August 9, 1933

Dear Carl:

This loss of contact has been curious. I hope that now it is over. Enclosed is a letter I wrote to you a long time ago [the preceding letter] and never had your address to send it.

This condition goes on, one of slow disintegration. It will not last a great time more, I think. For a long time I could not work, but now I have developed calluses and have gone back to work. It seems heartless when I think of it at all. You are much more complex than I am. I work because I know it gives me pleasure to work. It is as simple as that and I don’t require any other reasons. I am losing a sense of self to a marked degree and that is a pleasant thing. A couple of years ago I realized that I was not the material of which great artists are made and that I was rather glad I wasn’t. And since then I have been happier simply to do the work and to take the reward at the end of every day that is given for a day of honest work. I grow less complicated all the time and that is a joy to me. The forces that used to tug in various directions have all started to pull in one. I have a book to write. I think about it for a while and then I write it. There is nothing more. When it is done I have little interest in it. By the time one comes out I am usually tied up in another.

I don’t think you will like my late work. It leaves realism farther and farther behind. I never had much ability for nor faith nor belief in realism. It is just a form of fantasy as nearly as I could figure. Boileau was a wiser man than Mencken. The festered characters of Faulkner are not very interesting to me unless their festers are heroic. This may be silly but it is what I am. There are streams in man more profound and dark and strong than the libido of Freud. Jung’s libido is closer but still inadequate. I take pleasure in my structures but I don’t think them very important except in the doing.

Tillie died you know and now we have another dog named Joddi. An Irish terrier and beauty. We like him. He is one of the toughest dogs I have ever seen although only a little over six months old.

Your preoccupation with old age would be shocked out of you by seeing what I see every half hour all day, true age, true decay that is age. A human body that was all dead except for a tiny flickering light that comes on and then seems to go out and then flickers on again. Our life has been uprooted of course, but that doesn’t matter if I can find my escape in work.

I have a book coming out in a couple of months. I don’t think I would read it if I were you. It might shock you to see the direction I have taken. Always prone to the metaphysical I have headed more and more in that direction.

I have to go to the office now and write a few figures in a ledger. Then I will come home and to my afternoon’s work. I’ll write again in a little while. And let me hear from you again you old man.

affectionately,
john

 

 

To Robert Ballou at this time he was writing:

 

“My father collapsed a week ago under the six months’ strain and very nearly landed in the same position as my mother. It was very close. Paradoxically, I have started another volume [Tortilla Flat], and it is going like wildfire. It is light and I think amusing but true, although no one who doesn’t know paisanos would ever believe it. I don’t care much whether it amounts to anything. I am enjoying it and I need something to help me over this last ditch. Our house is crumbling very rapidly and when it is gone there will be nothing left.”

 

And on November 20:

 

“He is like an engine that isn’t moored tightly and that just shakes itself to pieces. His nerves are gone and that has brought on numbness and loss of eyesight and he worries his condition all the time. Let it go. We’re going on the rocks rapidly now. If mother lives six months more she will survive him. If she dies soon, he might recover but every week makes it less likely. Death I can stand but not this slow torture wherein a good and a strong man tears off little shreds of himself and throws them away.”

To Edith Wagner

Pacific Grove
[November 23, 1933]

Dear Mrs. Wagner:

I am dreadfully sorry you are ill. I hope the treatments work out quickly. Illness doesn’t shock me the way it did. There’s a saturation point and I seem to have reached it. You’ll be well again soon. The pain is another thing. I don’t like pain. I hope you will be well soon.

I have been in Salinas. My father is so completely worn out that I sent him over here with Carol and I went to Salinas. Now he is back there while Mary is up, but I’ll bring him back next Saturday. He is eating himself with nerves. The Grove seems to quiet him. And mother remains the same—no change at all.

I’m glad you like the book [To a God Unknown]. The overthrow of personal individual character and the use of the Homeric generalized symbolic character seems to bother critics although a little study of the Bible or any of the writers of antiquity would show that it is not very revolutionary. The cult of so called realism is a recent one, and anyone who doesn’t conform is looked on with suspicion. On the moral side—our moral system came in about two hundred years ago and will be quite gone in 25 more.

When we came over here a month ago, I got to work finally and did three fourths of a book. I thought I was going to slip it through, but dad’s decline beat me. This is indeed writing under difficulty. The house in Salinas is pretty haunted now. I see things walking at night that it is not good to see. This last book is a very jolly one about Monterey paisanos. Its tone, I guess, is direct rebellion against all the sorrow of our house. Dad doesn’t like characters to swear. But if I had taken all the writing instructions I’ve been given, I would be insane. I try to write what seems to me true. If it isn’t true for other people, then it isn’t good art. But I’ve only my own eyes to see with. I won’t use the eyes of other people. And as long as we can eat and write more books, that’s really all I require.

We bought a second-hand radio to hear the Fall symphonies and it is a menace, for when dad is over here, he listens to all of the loudest speeches and that kills work. You know I should be writing a cheerful letter if you aren’t feeling well. Instead I write a list of complaints.

Don’t think there is any courage in my work. If you demand little from life you limit its ability to strike at you and you can say what you wish about it.

I do hope you feel better now.

love
John

To George Albee

[Pacific Grove]
February 25, 1934

Dear George:

You remember that when you were up here we asked for a sign and the [ouija] board said that it would come to me on the day of my mother’s funeral. There was no sign except this one, if you can call it a sign. I asked you to pick a day for an attempted communication and without any knowledge you picked the day of my mother’s funeral. I tried to get through to you. I tried to tell you that she had died and that she had been buried that day and that I had been forced to be a pall bearer. I did it by making the words in yellow on a black background. In the middle of the crying, I stopped and wondered whether it was getting through and instantly the black ground was full of yes’s of all sizes. I wondered whether anything did get through. I was pretty much stunned by the terrors of the day and probably didn’t have much force left but I tried with what I did have. Also I tried to tell Miss Otis that I had just sent her a new story that Carol likes immensely.

I think you got out of the murder story about what I wanted you to. You got no character. I didn’t want any there. You got color and a dream like movement. I was writing it more as a dream than as anything else, so if you got this vague and curiously moving feeling out of it that is all I ask. I shall be interested to know what you think of the story, The Chrysanthemums. (This and “The Murder” became part of The Long Valley.] It is entirely different and is designed to strike without the reader’s knowledge. I mean he reads it casually and after it is finished feels that something profound has happened to him although he does not know what nor how. It has had that effect on several people here. Carol thinks it is the best of all my stories. I’ll have some more before long.

Just now my father is with us. Every nerve I have is demanding that I be alone for a little while even for a day to make adjustments, but that has been impossible so far. Maybe later in the week it can be done. I have to figure some things out. I don’t even know what they are yet. I do think I’ll go on with short stories for a little while though until I get my adjustments made. I wish Carol could go off for a little rest. She has taken it on the chin throughout. I can’t use my freedom yet because I can’t conceive it yet. The other has grown to be a habit.

We are going to Laguna with Ed Ricketts next month. He has to get some live octopuses and send by plane to New York, and we are going to make Laguna our base for catching the things. It will be a nice change. We won’t be there much over a week I guess. We have enough money to live two more months so I will have to get busy and make some more I guess. I have thirty pounds coming from England if I ever get it. That will allow some more months but the money to go any place has not showed up nor will it unless I should be lucky enough to sell some short stories. I have kind of yearnings for Alaska but I don’t know. Trying to stave off reaction until maybe there won’t be any. Carol’s book of poems is getting popular and she is swamped with demands for copies. Ballou asked to see them, she sent him a copy as a Christmas present and never heard a word from him even that he had got them. Which was thoughtless of him because it is work to get one of the copies out. She will make a copy for Anne pretty soon. I think they are swell. I guess that is all. It’s all I can think of anyway.

love
john

 

Jesus I wish you two were out here and we could go camping. That’s what I need. The grass is green and all the flowers are out and I’ll just have to get out in the country for a little.

bye.

To George Albee WHO HAD MOVED TO NEW YORK

[Pacific Grove]
[1934]

Dear George:

I think I am in a kind of mood to write you a letter. I got yours a little while ago. I have been writing on my new ms. which I will tell you about later, for a good many hours and I think a change will do me good.

You ask what I want? You know pretty well that I don’t think of myself as an individual who wants very much. That is why I am not a good nor consecutive seducer. I have the energy and when I think of it, the desires, but I can’t reduce myself to a unit from which the necessary formula emanates. I’m going to try to put this down once for all. I like good food and good clothes but faced with getting them, I can’t round myself into a procuring unit. Overalls and carrots do not make me unhappy. But the thing which probably more than anything else makes me what I am is an imperviousness to ridicule. This may be simply dullness and stupidity. I notice in lots of other people that ridicule or a threat of it is a driving force which maps their line of life. And I haven’t that stimulus. In fact as an organism I am so simple that I want to be comfortable and comfort consists in—a place to sleep, dry and fairly soft, lack of hunger, almost any kind of food, occasional loss of semen in intercourse when it becomes troublesome, and a good deal of work. These constitute my ends. You see it is a description of a stupid slothful animal. I am afraid that is what I am. I don’t want to possess anything, nor to be anything. I have no ambition because on inspection the ends of ambition achieved seem tiresome.

Two things I really want and I can’t have either of them and they are both negative. I want to forget my mother lying for a year with a frightful question in her eyes and I want to forget and lose the pain in my heart that is my father. In one year he has become a fumbling, repetitious, senile old man, unhappy almost to the point of tears. But these wants are the desire to restore the lack of ego. They are the only two things which make me conscious of myself as a unit. Except for them I spread out over landscape and people like an enormous jelly fish, having neither personality nor boundaries. That is as I wish it, complete destruction of any thing which can be called a me. The work is necessary since from it springs all the other things. A lack of work for a while and the gases concentrate and become solids and out of the solids a me comes into being and I am uncomfortable when there is a me. Having no great wants, I have neither great love nor great hate, neither sense of justice nor of cruelty. It gives me a certain displeasure to hurt or kill things. But that is all. I have no morals. You have thought I had but it was because immorality seemed foolish and often bad economy. If I objected to accounts of sexual exploits it wasn’t because of the exploits but because of the cause of the accounts.

The reason we want to go away is primarily so that the two things I want may have a chance to be removed. That may be impossible. But forced and common visits to a grave yard are not conductive of such forgetfulness.

You are right when you think I am not unhappy in this new arrangement. I never come up to the surface. I just work all the time. In the matter of money, my conception doesn’t extend beyond two or three hundred dollars. I love Carol but she is far more real to me than I am to myself. If I think of myself I often find it is Carol I am thinking of. If I think what I want I often have to ask her what it is. Sometimes I wish I had sharply defined desires for material things, because the struggle to get them might be very satisfying. If one should want to think of me as a person, I am under the belief that he would have to think of Carol.

I am writing many stories now. Because I should like to sell some of them, I am making my characters as nearly as I can in the likeness of men. The stream underneath and the meanings I am interested in can be ignored.

Between ourselves I don’t know what Miss McIntosh means by organization of myself. If she would inspect my work with care, she would see an organization that would frighten her, the slow development of thought pattern, revolutionary to the present one. I am afraid that no advice will change me much because my drive is not one I can get at. When they get tired of my consistent financial failures, they will just have to kick me out. I’m a bum, you see, and according to my sister, a fake, and my family is ashamed of me, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference at all. If I had the drive of ridicule I might make something of myself.

This is probably a terrible sounding letter. It isn’t meant so. I am working so hard and so constantly that I am really quite happy. I don’t take life as hard as you do. Some very bitter thing dried up in me last year.

And now I want to do one more page today before I sit down and look at the fire. The trouble is that I look at the fire and then get up and go to work again. I get around that by taking down the table and putting my manuscript book under the lower shelf of the book case where I must get a stick to get it out. Usually I am too lazy to get the stick.

I hope this letter does not depress you. It is common that anything which is not optimistic is pessimistic. I am pegged as a pessimistic writer because I do not see the millenium coming.

that’s all
[unsigned]

 

 

In February, he had written Mrs. Wagner:

“I have been doing some short stories about the people of the county. Some of them I think you yourself told me.”

Mrs. Wagner became the source of another story, a personal reminiscence about a meeting she had once had with Robert Louis Stevenson. Steinbeck wrote it under the title “How Edith McGillcuddy Met Robert Louis Stevenson.”

To Edith Wagner

POSTCARD

[Pacific Grove]
June 4, 1934

Dear Mrs. Wagner:

Your letter came this morning. I didn’t know you had done a version of the story and I sent mine off with a lot of other stuff. I will do whatever you wish about the affair, divide in case of publication or recall the manuscript. Please let me know.

Carol is in Salinas working for my father and I am over here trying to write myself out of a hole.

I’m terribly sorry if I have filched one of your stories. I’m a shameless magpie anyway, picking up anything shiny that comes my way—incident, situation or personality. But if I had had any idea, I shouldn’t have taken it. I’ll do anything you like about it.

Thank you for your letter. I get so few. I write so few.

John

To Edith Wagner

[Pacific Grove]
June 13 [1934]

Dear Mrs. Wagner:

I am writing to my agents today, asking them to hold up the story. It is awkward for this reason—they’ve had the story for at least two weeks and since they are very active, it has undoubtedly gone out. However, it can be stopped. I hope you will let me know how yours comes out, as soon as you hear. If it should happen to have been bought by the time my letter reaches New York, it can be held up. Mine, I mean.

Pacific Grove summer has set in, fog most of the day. The people who come over from the Valley love it, but I wish the sun would shine.

Well, I hope nothing untoward happens about this story. In sending it away I enclosed a note saying it had been told me by you. Plagiarism is not one of my sins. I’ll write you when I hear any outcome.

Affectionately,
John

To Mavis McIntosh

Pacific Grove
1934

Dear Miss McIntosh:

I want to write something about Tortilla Flat and about some ideas I have about it. The book has a very definite theme. I thought it was clear enough. I have expected that the plan of the Arthurian cycle would be recognized, that my Gawaine and my Launcelot, my Arthur and Galahad would be recognized. Even the incident of the Sangreal in the search of the forest is not clear enough I guess. The form is that of the Malory version, the coming of Arthur and the mystic quality of owning a house, the forming of the round table, the adventure of the knights and finally, the mystic translation of Danny.

 

 

The Arthurian legend had fascinated Steinbeck since childhood. As he wrote later:

 

“When I first read it, I must have been already enamoured of words because the old and obsolete words delighted me.”

 

However, I seem not to have made any of this clear. The main issue was to present a little known and, to me, delightful people. Is not this cycle story or theme enough? Perhaps it is not enough because I have not made it clear enough. What do you think of putting in an interlocutor, who between each incident interprets the incident, morally, esthetically, historically, but in the manner of the paisanos themselves? This would give the book much of the appeal of the Gesta Romanorum, those outrageous tales with monkish morals appended, or of the Song of Solomon in the King James version, with the delightful chapter headings which go to prove that the Shulamite is in reality Christ’s Church.

It would not be as sharp as this of course. But the little dialogue, if it came between the incidents would at least make clear the form of the book, its tragi-comic theme. It would also make clear and sharp the strong but different philosophic-moral system of these people. I don’t intend to make the parallel of the round table more clear, but simply to show that a cycle is there. You will remember that the association forms, flowers and dies. Far from having a hard theme running through the book, one of the intents is to show that rarely does any theme in the lives of these people survive the night.

I shall be anxious to know your reaction to the Communist idea [which was to become In Dubious Battle].

Thank you for your letter.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

The problem of the theme of Tortilla Flat was solved by chapter headings that clarified the moral points, and by one sentence in the Preface:

“For Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it.”

To George Albee

[Pacific Grove]
January 15 [1935]

Dear George:

This is the first time I have felt that I could take the time to write and also that I have had anything to say to anything except my manuscript book. You remember I had an idea that I was going to write the autobiography of a Communist. Then Miss McIntosh suggested that I reduce it to fiction. There lay the trouble. I had planned to write a journalistic account of a strike. But as I thought of it as fiction the thing got bigger and bigger. It couldn’t be that. I’ve been living with this thing for some time now. I don’t know how much I have got over, but I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.

I’m not interested in strike as means of raising men’s wages, and I’m not interested in ranting about justice and oppression, mere outcroppings which indicate the condition. But man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. The book is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing. I think it has the thrust, almost crazy, that mobs have. It is written in disorder.

In the God I strove for a serene movement like the movement of the year and the turn of the seasons, in this I wanted to get over unrest and irritation and slow sullen movement breaking out now and then in fierce eruptions. And so I have used a jerky method. I ended the book in the middle of a sentence. There is a cycle in the life of a man but there is no ending in the life of Man. I tried to indicate this by stopping on a high point, leaving out any conclusion.

The book is disorder, but if it should ever come to you to read, listen to your own thoughts when you finish it and see if you don’t find in it a terrible order, a frightful kind of movement. The talk, and the book is about eighty percent dialogue, is what is usually called vulgar. I have worked along with working stiffs and I have rarely heard a sentence that had not some bit of profanity in it. And in books I am sick of the noble working man talking very like a junior college professor. I don’t know what will become of this book. It may be too harsh for anyone to buy. It is not controversial enough to draw the support of either the labor or the capital side although either may draw controversial conclusions from it, I suppose. It will take about a month to whip it into shape for sending. If you see Miss McIntosh will you tell her? I should have it off by the fifteenth of February.

It is called Dubious Battle from the lines in the first part of the argument of Paradise Lost:

Innumerable force of Spirits armed,
That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power opposed
In Dubious Battle on the plains of Heaven,
And shook His throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

I was very near collapse when I finished this afternoon. But I’ve been thinking and dreaming it for some months now. Only the mechanical revision is needed. It won’t take much polish. It isn’t that kind of a book.

I suppose in a few days I’ll get out of this lost feeling. Just now I feel that I have come up out of a deep delirium. I must put in the beginning of this book a guarantee that all persons places and events are fictional because it all has happened and I don’t want anybody hurt because of my retelling. Lord, I hope it has in it one tenth of the stuff I tried to put in it. Can’t tell. Can’t ever tell. People who are easily revolted shouldn’t read it. Oh! what the hell. I’m just talking on. And I’m too tired to be writing a letter. I’ve written thirty thousand words in the last eight days. I’ll finish this letter later. I’m going for a walk down by the water.

 

It is the next day. I am luxuriating in laziness, with a fine sense of sin, too, but shall get back to work tomorrow. I got rid of most of the tiredness last night and with the help of a little glass of very nice chartreuse, which beverage I love. The first part of this letter is rather frantic.

Carol’s mother sent her an insurance policy to bury Carol in case of her death. It has brightened our whole day. Had been intended as a Christmas present but got delayed. It would have made a nice Christmas present, don’t you think?

The sun is shining so nice. One of Ed’s collectors got very drunk in the lab the night before last and tipped over a museum jar, left his pants and shoes and disappeared. Ed was angry. The next morning the collector Gabe came in in a long overcoat and a pair of rubber boots. Ed said, “I should think you could at least keep sober on the job.” And Gabe who was very friendly put his arms around Ed and said, “Eddie, I know I have a bawling out coming and I forgive you.” “Forgive, hell!” yells Ed. “Now Eddie, don’t think you can embarrass me,” Gabe says. He turns around and spreads the tails of the overcoat, showing that he had on a pair of blue jeans in which there is no seat and exposed is a large pink tocus. Gabe says, “Eddie, I’ve been visiting people like this. If I can do that, you couldn’t possibly embarrass me and I forgive you for trying.” Ed got down from his chair and everybody had a drink. Ed says, “What can you do with a man like that?”

Ed is fine. And he is feeling pretty fine now too. He was over yesterday afternoon. This is a long letter, I guess. All about me. I haven’t had such a going over for some time. I like this typewriter. It is very fast. I see a cat. You see two cats. Who are the cats. That will be all, sir. You can just take this letter out and put it in an envelope if that’s the way you feel. No tricks, sir. We have our standards and by God sir, no wart hog like you is going to lower them.

I beg your pardon

for being,
sincerely yours

Rabbit Steinbeck

The next letter marks Steinbeck’s first mention of Pascal Covici, then publisher and editor of the firm of Covici-Friede. He would be friend and editor till his death. Originally, Ben Abramson, a bookdealer in Chicago, had called his attention to the young writer and to the two novels he had already published.

To George Albee

[Pacific Grove]
[1935]

Dear George:

The book came this morning two days after your letter [an advance copy of Albee’s novel Not in a Day, published by Knopf]. It found us in a mad manuscript period. Carol batting out finished copy like mad [of In Dubious Battle]. But I’m letting her read the book first. She takes little rests and plunges into it and lets out bellows of laughter. I envy both her and you. She reads very fast and I read very slowly. She’ll be through with it tonight. So I shall only start this letter and finish it when I have read Not in a Day. I don’t like the dust jacket. Saving the back flap, I burned it. But I think the binding and boards and set up and printing is superb. Knopf does that sort of thing so darned well.

Yesterday I went collecting with Ed. The first time I had been out in a long time. It is fine spring now and I enjoyed it a lot. Went over to Santa Cruz. Carol wouldn’t go because she was typing and wouldn’t take the time off. It would have done her good. But we’re broke now and one hamburger was all we could afford. I had been working longer than she had so I took the day off. Today back at revising and proofreading. I’m making dumplings for dinner. I hope they’re good. It’s a dirty shame Carol has to work so hard. She’s putting in nine hours a day at it. I wish I could do it but my typing is so very lousy.

I had a letter from Covici which sounded far from overenthusiastic. I liked it. It gave me some confidence in the man. I like restraint Covici says, “I am interested in your work and would like to arrive at an agreement with Miss McIntosh.” My estimation of him went up immediately. It is nice to know that he is more enthusiastic than that, of course. This morning I got applications on the Phelan Award sent at your request. I shall probably fill out the blank and send it in. I don’t know whom to get to sponsor me but maybe I’ll think of some one. That’s all for now.

Now it’s Monday morning. Carol has gone to work for the S.E.R.A. [State Emergency Relief Administration.] Poor kid has to put in six hours there and then come home and type ms. She has nearly two hundred pages yet to do. What a job. She is taking it awfully well as usual.

I read Not in a Day last night. Finished it about three this morning. I don’t know whether it is high or low comedy but I do know it’s awfully funny. My own work seems stodgy and heavy by comparison. I hope you will read Tortilla Flat some time. That is neither heavy nor stodgy. Anyway I’m glad you wrote this book and I am convinced that it will release you from the necessities for working on fan magazines. I hope it sells a million copies. Congratulations.

I have a great deal of proof reading and correction to do and besides that I am doing the house and the cooking and bedmaking. So I’ll sign off. But I am pleased with Not in a Day. Don’t let it make a slave of you. I mean, if it sells well, people will want another just like it, and don’t let them have it. For right at that point of capitulation is the decision whether the public is going to rule you or you your public.

I simply have to go to work. Goodbye. You have complimented me greatly by sending the book.

jon

 

 

The sponsor he chose for the Phelan Award was Ann Hadden, then librarian of the Palo Alto Public Library. She had known him since his boyhood in Salinas.

 

It has been pointed out that Steinbeck had a unique and personal way with official correspondence, of which he was to write a great deal in the time to come. This is the earliest sample.

To Ann Hadden

Pacific Grove
[1935]

Dear Miss Hadden:

Thank you very much for your offer to help. I shall explain the situation. The James Phelan Award for Literature is coming due, and a friend sent me an application. It is only open to natives of the state. Now there is one space on the application after the following demand: Give names of three persons competent in your field and acquainted with you personally to whom the Trustees may apply for confidential information about your qualifications for the fellowship.

What confidential material they could wish I don’t know. Possibly about my habits. I’m afraid you don’t know much about those. I will tell you.

I have all the vices in a very mild way except that of narcotics, unless coffee and tobacco are classed as narcotics. I have been in jail once for a night a long time ago, a result of a combination of circumstance, exuberance and a reasonable opinion that I could lick a policeman. The last turned out to be undemonstrable. I don’t think the trustees would be interested, but they might. I am married and quarrel violently with my wife and we both enjoy it very much. And last, I am capable of a tremendous amount of work. I have just finished a novel of a hundred and twenty thousand words, three drafts in a little over four months.

I am embarrassed for having to ask any one to vouch for me. It seems to me it would be better if I could simply submit a book and be judged upon the strength of it.

I have a long and very different novel nearly ready to write but I have thought I would have to put it off until I had laid aside enough money to allow for no interruption. This award is for one thousand dollars. It runs for one year but since we ordinarily live on four hundred a year, the money would let me do what I really want to and what the thesis of the novel really deserves, that is take two full years to the work.

I hope this will not cause you to go to any great trouble. I have little hope of being awarded this fellowship. But since it is rather easy to do, I think I shall, if you are willing to help me.

 

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

His letter succeeded in eliciting her sponsorship. In writing to the administration of the Phelan Award, she said:

 

“After he left home for college I saw very little of him, but kept in touch through his parents and friends.

 

“The library of which I was in charge helped him through correspondence with research one winter for his Cup of Gold which he was writing while snowed in at Lake Tahoe.

 

“In my opinion John Steinbeck has decided creative literary ability; his development being quite marked from his first novel Cup of Gold through Pastures of Heaven to his recent book To A God Unknown. I believe he has the qualification in personality and character to justify an investment in his future education.”

 

He did not win the award.

To Mavis McIntosh

Pacific Grove
February 4, 1935

Dear Miss McIntosh:

Herewith the signed contracts [for Tortilla Flat]. They seem fine to me. Thank you. You have been very good to me.

We’ll get the new book off to you about the fifteenth. Title has been slightly changed to include one more word, In Dubious Battle. Much better sound and also gives a kind of an active mood to the thing. I guess it is a brutal book, more brutal because there is no author’s moral point of view. The speech of working men may seem a little bit racy to ladies’ clubs, but, since ladies’ clubs won’t believe that such things go on anyway, it doesn’t matter. I know this speech and I’m sick of working men being gelded of their natural expression until they talk with a fine Oxonian flavor.

There are curious things about the language of working men. I do not mean the local idioms, but the speech which is universal in this country among traveling workers. Nearly every man uses it individually, but it has universal rules. It is not grammatical error but a highly developed speech form. The use of the final g in ing is tricky, too. The g is put on for emphasis and often to finish a short hard sentence. It is sometimes used for purpose of elision but not always. Certain words like “something” rarely lose the final g or if they do, the word becomes “somepin” or “somepm.” A man who says thinkin’ will say morning if it comes on the end of a sentence. I tell you these things so you will understand why, in one sentence having two present participles, one g will be there and the other left off. This is a pretty carefully done ms. If you will read such a sentence over, aloud, you will see that it naturally falls that way.

I hardly expect you to like the book. I don’t like it. It is terrible. But I hope when you finish it, in the disorder you will feel a terrible kind of order. Stories begin and wander out of the picture; faces look in and disappear and the book ends with no finish. A story of the life of a man ends with his death, but where can you end a story of man-movement that has no end? No matter where you stop there is always more to come. I have tried to indicate this by stopping on a high point but it is by no means an ending.

I hope Mr. Covici will be interested in this book. I am very tired. This has been completed quickly.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Wilbur Needham STAFF BOOK CRITIC FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Pacific Grove
[Early 1935]

Dear Mr. Needham:

I am grateful to you for your active interest. It is only a few weeks ago that we heard that Covici-Friede had conceived a rather frantic regard for my work to the extent that he [Covici] has contracted for all of it and is going to reissue some of the old ones. He is bringing out one in May called Tortilla Flat and possibly this one we are now on earlier. It is called In Dubious Battle.

I am very much pleased of course. We have been very close to the end these last couple of years. Thank you for your trouble. You see, it is not needed now, I mean of course, the finding of a publisher. Ballou is a fine man and a sensitive man but I do not think he is fitted to fight the battle of New York. He is a gentleman. He can’t bring himself to do the things required for success.

 

I should like to discuss with you a plan of work so difficult that it will take several years to do and so uncharted that I will have to remake the novel as it is now understood to make it a vehicle. I want to go to Mexico to do it and it may be that we shall be able to go this summer. I hope so, for I am anxious to get at it before very long.

I hope you will come up to see us when you can.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

When he sent the manuscript of In Dubious Battle to McIntosh and Otis, he reminded Miss McIntosh that if Covici refused the book in the contracted time, he had had other offers, and besides:

 

“... you will find a well-aroused interest in my work both at Houghton, Mifflin and at Random House.”

To Mavis McIntosh

Pacific Grove
[April] 1935

Dear Miss McIntosh:

I confess that I am deeply shocked at the attitude of Covici, not from pique but because it is a perfect example of the attitude which makes the situation in I. D. B. what it is. Does no one in the world want to see and judge this thing coldly? Answering the complaint that the ideology is incorrect, this is the silliest of criticism. There are as many communist systems as there are communists. It should be obvious from the book that not only is this true, but that the ideologies change to fit a situation. In this book I was making nothing up. In any statement by one of the protagonists I have simply used statements I have heard used. Answering the second criticism that the book would be attacked by both sides, I thoroughly anticipated such attack in trying to do an unbiased book. And if attack has ever hurt the sale of a book I have yet to hear of it.

That is the trouble with the damned people of both sides. They postulate either an ideal communist or a thoroughly damnable communist and neither side is willing to suspect that the communist is a human, subject to the weaknesses of humans and to the greatnesses of humans. I am not angry in the least. But the blank wall of stupid refusal even to look at the thing without colored glasses of some kind gives me a feeling of overwhelming weariness and a desire to run away and let them tear their stupid selves to pieces. If the fools would only change the name from Communist to, say, American Liberty Party, their principles would probably be embraced overnight.

I guess this is slopping over enough. I am sorry that the book cannot go through. I would do it just the same again. I suppose in the event of an English sale, the censor would clean up my carefully built American language.

As for submitting another book to Covici—you will do as you think best about that. I am so tired. I have worked for so long against opposition, first of my parents who wanted me to be a lawyer and then of publishers who want me to be anything but a writer, that I work well under opposition. If ever I had things my own way I would probably go dry. This will knock out all plans of going to Mexico I guess. I had hoped to be able to start off the big book which would take a long time and would be a very grave attempt to do a first-rate piece of work. However, Covici should know saleability, and obviously I don’t. Oh, the devil. We’ve managed to live thus far and write what we want to write. We can probably go on doing it.

Right today I am discouraged. I won’t be tomorrow.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

Now the correspondence, excepting a few letters to other members of the agency, begins to focus on Elizabeth Otis. She became, as will be evident, far more than a literary representative. He was soon, and always, to trust her as mentor, guide, friend, and confidante.

To Elizabeth Otis

Pacific Grove
May 13, 1935

Dear Miss Otis:

I have your letter this morning, also two from C-F [Covici-Friede].

Mr. Latham of Macmillan’s came to see me. Asked if I were tied to C-F. I said they had just rejected a book. He said he wanted to see it and I told him to apply to you.

Let me say at the beginning of this paragraph that I would rather stay with Covici-Friede than anyone I know. I like the way they have worked on Tortilla and I like their makeup and everything about them. This letter this morning from them offers to publish I. D. B. if I wish it. Of course I wish it. It is a good book. I believe in it, and damn it, we’re living on relief. Why wouldn’t I want to publish it?

 

Shortly before he had written to Miss Otis:

 

“In any re-revision of I. D. B. I hope that you will tell Mr. Covici that neither theme nor point of view will be changed. It might also be well to remind them that an advance is due upon acceptance, an advance which would do much to make my life a merrier affair.”

 

 

Let’s get to this rejection now. I had a letter, unfortunately destroyed, in which they said they didn’t want to print the book and they gave three pages of reasons for not wanting to print it. Between you and me I suspect a strong communist bias in that office, since the reasons given against the book are all those I have heard from communists of the intellectual bent and of the Jewish race. Do you think I am right? My information for this book came mostly from Irish and Italian communists whose training was in the field, not in the drawing room. They don’t believe in ideologies and ideal tactics. They do what they can under the circumstances.

I’m a bit twisted. My father went into his fatal illness two days ago. We don’t know whether it will be a week, or as it was with my mother, ten or eleven months. It is the same thing. Cerebral leakage. I have been running back and forth to Watsonville [where Esther Steinbeck Rodgers, Steinbeck’s sister, lived] so often that I am bewildered and possibly not coherent. Anyway, I hope this is a satisfactory letter in some respects.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Elizabeth Bailey

POSTCARD TO STEINBECK’S GODMOTHER

[Pacific Grove]
May [1935]

Dear Miss Bailey:

It was a lovely letter.

At first I thought I should send the ten dollars back to you but I won’t. I have no place to work. When I do work which is most of the time—Carol has to creep around. For a long time I’ve wanted to build a little work room in the back yard, using second hand lumber. Ten dollars will do it. Thank you.

I should have preferred no service at all for Dad. I can think of nothing for him so eloquent as silence. Poor silent man all his life. I feel very badly, not about his death, but about his life, for he told me only a few months ago that he had never done anything he wanted to do. Worst of all he hadn’t done the work he wanted to do.

Come some time and see the new work room.

 

love
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Pacific Grove
June 13, 1935

Dear Miss Otis:

If you have anything of mine the New Yorker could use, fine. The only things I can think of are the short things like the Vigilante or possibly St. Katy which I would like to make someone print. I’m not being cocky but I have never written “for” a magazine and shan’t start now.

One very funny thing. Hotel clerks here are being instructed to tell guests that there is no Tortilla Flat. The Chamber of Commerce does not like my poor efforts, I guess. But there is one all right, they know it.

My father’s death doesn’t change any plans but does give us freedom of movement for the first time in three years. I can’t get used to having no illness in the family.

While I think of it—I am very much opposed to drawing money from any publisher for work that has not been done. I’d much rather have less and have it without any obligation. The idea of a salary doesn’t appeal to me at all. I intend to write what I want to.

The publicity on TF [Tortilla Flat] is rather terrible out here and we may have to run ahead of it. Please ask CF [Covici-Friede] not to give my address to anyone. Curious that this second-rate book, written for relaxation, should cause this fuss. People are actually taking it seriously.

I had an awfully nice letter from Bob Ballou. Wish I could have stayed with him but I’m so awfully sick of not being able to have shoes half-soled.

In your dealings you need make no compromise at all for financial considerations as far as we are concerned. Too many people are trapped into promises by gaudy offers. And my father’s estate, while small, will keep us for a number of years if necessary. And we’ve gone through too damned much trying to keep the work honest and in a state of improvement to let it slip now in consideration of a little miserable popularity. I’m scared to death of popularity. It has ruined everyone I know. That’s one of the reasons I would like In Dubious Battle printed next. Myths form quickly and I want no tag of humorist on me, nor any other kind. Besides, IDB would reduce popularity to nothing but I do think it would sell.

I suppose it is bad tactics but I am refusing the usual things —the radio talks, the autograph racket, the author’s afternoons and the rest of the clutter—politely, I hope, but firmly.

Will Heinemann buy TF? [This is the British publishing house which would publish all Steinbeck’s work.] I suppose To A God Unknown failed miserably in England as it did here.

By the way, the rainy season is on in Mexico now. We can’t go until August I guess, if then. I’ll leave this open in case anything else occurs to me.

That’s all,
John Steinbeck

 

 

In the O. Henry Prize Stories of 1934 in which “The Murder” had appeared, Steinbeck, reading over the competition, had come on a story by Louis Paul, and had written George Albee:

“Look out for a young man named Louis Paul, who wrote a story in the O. Henry collection, magnificent. That boy is going to do things.”

To Louis Paul

POSTCARD

Pacific Grove
[Late summer 1935]

Dear Louis Paul:

It was good of you to write. I like that. The odd thing is that since I read Jedworth I’ve had a strong impulse to write to you. That was one of the finest stories I ever read. Publishers are all right. They are the natural enemies, though. The wildcats to us quail.

I’m a couple of books ahead—not because I write so quickly but because I’m published so slowly. We’re planning to drive to Mexico soon.

I wish you lived closer. I’d like to talk to you. God willing I’ll never go east again. Don’t worry about my making money. I haven’t the gift.

Anyway, it was swell of you to write. I wish you would again.

John Steinbeck

To Mavis McIntosh

Pacific Grove July 30, 1935

Dear Miss McIntosh:

Your letter and enclosed contracts came today. It is rather sad that now I am being deluged with offers of a lot of nice people who want to be my business representatives, who assure me that they can make more money for me than you are making. And finally who completely fail to understand that I am extremely happy where I am. I don’t want to make much money and I like this contract. Please assure Mr. Covici that I am awfully pleased to stay under his imprint. I enclose both copies of the contract.

Rather an amusing episode. There is a little magazine here run in conjunction with a stable. I gave them a story which Miss Otis had sent back as “outrageous” in return for six months use of a beautiful big bay hunter anytime I want him, day or night. I send you the title page of the story and guarantee you ten percent of six months riding but you will have to come here to get it. I should like that very much indeed. I haven’t had a horse in years and am utterly delighted at this trade.

 

 

The “little magazine” was the Monterey Beacon, and the story, which would become one of Steinbeck’s most famous, was “The Snake.” After the success of In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men, Esquire published it in 1938, and in the same year it appeared in the short story collection, The Long Valley .

 

I have no idea how Tortilla Flat is selling. It has made a lot of noise out here, but whether it was just noise or not I have no idea. I wonder whether you can give me an idea of its sale so I can see whether royalties on that book will cover the Mexican journey.

There were some shorts with you. I have had several letters from editors wanting them. I have referred them to you. I like some of those stories.

I’ll be very glad to see Mr. Covici when he comes out here. If he is alone we shall be happy to have him stay here.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Louis Paul

[Pacific Grove]
[September 1935]

Dear Louis Paul:

Thanks awfully for the copy of Jedwick. Did I call him Jedworth?

You ask why I don’t take Hollywood’s filthy money. Nobody’s asked me, sir. I like to think I wouldn’t take it but I probably would. I’ve been around there quite a bit and I dislike it so much that I wouldn’t want to. On the other hand we’ve been so filthy broke for so long that I would probably go nuts if anyone waved a ten dollar bill. Aren’t these nice straight lines? There’s a lined sheet underneath.

All is fuss in this house. We’re starting for Mexico next week and there’s the packing of thousands of doll rags. Our Ford is a wreck but under the hood is an overhauled engine and the tires are new. Yesterday by the use of oratory I didn’t know I could use, I persuaded a bank to declare me solvent. And I had the local federal judge swear that I had no Syrian, Armenian, Asiatic or negro blood. As our local Mexican consul says, “Sumteems dose pipples doon’t kips the law.”

I heard the other day that Covici is reissuing my two earlier books that failed so miserably. They were better books than this last one too but no one would read them—wurra wurra.

We have a small sail boat here and hate to leave it but we must and it will keep for us.

I wish I could send you a copy of T. F. but I haven’t any. Couldn’t you steal one? If you buy one you will be the first genuine purchaser I know.

I don’t know how long we’ll be away. Maybe six months, maybe two years.

I’m very grateful for the copy of Jedworth.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

In September Miss McIntosh wired Steinbeck in Mexico that the firm had sold the picture rights to Tortilla Flat.

 

“It is rather amusing what the Mexican operator must have thought of your wire,” Steinbeck replied. “‘4000 dollars for Tortilla.’ Probably thought it was either a code word or a race horse.”

To Elizabeth Otis

Manchester 8
Mexico D. F.
November 3 [1935]

Dear Miss Otis:

I really should have wired an appreciation of your wire but wires are expensive. Your letter came this morning. Maybe with this security I can write a better book. Maybe not. Certainly though I can take a little longer and write a more careful one. And it will be possible to contemplate an illness without panic. I do not see what even Hollywood can make of Tortilla with its episodic treatment, but let them try and I won’t go to their picture so that is all right. On an average I go to about one picture a year.

Our plans are fairly jelled by now. I think we will start for home about the seventh of January. I don’t get any work done here. It would be possible to place a blame but it would be more an excuse, I guess. Anyway I can work at home and that’s where we will go. Bad news the other day. Our boat broke its moorings and drifted and was salvaged and the salvage award was so much that we will have to sell the boat to pay it and come out clear. I don’t care much. It was our first experience in owning anything and a lesson. We will not own anything except the cottage and the necessary and small automobile again. We knew we shouldn’t anyway. Maybe a dog.

It is funny that the Irish Free State has me on the censored list. If they knew that my parentage was pure Ulster, they would all the more. The dirty rednecks. Let them be reading their beads and their stomachs full of whiskey, and let them parade under the sun with the chests of them stuck out and their knives between the two shoulders of good men and the dark come. What did they but run off the stern tip of Ireland like the rats they are and Orange after them. Free State indeed, and ask any one of the itching devils are they free of the gray crawlers under their shirts?

I don’t know what it means to be on the bottom of a best seller list. Is it two thousand copies or five or ten? In writing to Mr. Covici I asked him, but have had no answer. Thank you again for your letter and its news.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To George Albee

[Mexico]
[1935]

Dear George:

I am not proud of this sale of Tortilla to pictures but we’ll slap it into government bonds which are cashable and forget about it. It won’t be much when we get it what with splits with Covici and agents’ fees but it will be a nest egg. The old standard of living stays right where it has always been.

The air down here has a feel, you can feel its texture on your finger tips and on your lips. It is like water.

Carol is having a marvelous time. The people like her and she them. Wherever she goes, howls of laughter follow. Yesterday in Tolucca market, she wanted to fill out her collection of pottery animals. She went to a puesta and said I want a bull (quiero un toro). That means I want a stud, colloquially. The whole market roared. Most of her pottery animals have flowers painted on them. The rat, instead of being embarrassed pointed to me and said, Segura, tengo un toro pero el no tiene flores en el estomago (sure I have a bull but he has no flowers on his stomach). Then the market just fell to pieces. You could hear the roars of laughter go down the street as each person was told the story. Half an hour later they were still laughing. And when Carol bargains, a crowd collects. Indians from the country stand with their mouths open. The thing goes from gentle to fury to sorrow to despair. And everyone loves it. The seller as much as any one.

My own bargaining yesterday was triumphant. The ordinary method is to run the product down, to be horrified at the badness of the work or the coarseness of the weave or the muddiness of the colors. But I reversed it. One serape priced at fifteen pesos I said was too beautiful. That it was impossible to give it a value in money because it was beyond any offer at all—by that time the duenno was nearly in tears. However I was a poor man and if ten pesos might be accepted, not as payment for the beautiful thing but as a token of esteem, I would take the thing and love it all my life. The method aroused so much enthusiasm not only with the duenno but with the collected market crowd, that I got it for ten without even a squeak. That will be a story in the market too. I like what one market woman said to Carol. Carol said, I would like to buy this but I am not rich. And the market woman—you have shoes and a hat, of course you are rich.

Oh this is enough of a letter and I want to go to the roof.

love to annie
john

To Joseph Henry Jackson BOOK REVIEWER FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Pacific Grove
[1935]

Dear Joe:

I feel very bad about this Commonwealth Club award [for Tortilla Flat]. I don’t know who offered the book in competition. I assure you that the refusal to go isn’t the small mean thing it seems. I would like you to know exactly why I can’t go.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. The most I have had to dodge has been a literary tea or an invitation from a book shop to lecture and autograph. This is the first and God willing the last prize I shall ever win.

The whole early part of my life was poisoned with egotism, a reverse egotism, of course, beginning with self-consciousness. And then gradually I began to lose it.

In the last few books I have felt a curious richness as though my life had been multiplied through having become identified in a most real way with people who were not me. I have loved that. And I am afraid, terribly afraid, that if the bars ever go down, if I become a trade mark, I shall lose the ability to do that. When I do I shall stop working because it won’t be fun any more. The work has been the means of making me feel that I am living richly, diversely, and, in a few cases and for a few moments, even heroically. All of these things are not me, for I am none of these things. But sometimes in my own mind at least I can create something which is larger and richer than I am. In this aspect I suppose my satisfaction is much like that of a father who sees his son succeed where he has failed. Not being brave I am glad when I can make a brave person whom I believe in.

I am very glad that the book got the prize, but I want it to be the book, not me. Those people in that book were very dear to me, but I feel that if I should accept a reward which in this case belongs to Danny and Pilon and the rest, I should not only be cheating them, but cheating them should cut myself off from their society forever.

This is not clear, concise, objective thinking, but I have never been noted for any of these things. If I were a larger person I would be able to do this and come out of it untouched. But I am not.

And will you help me out of it? Will you please present the committee as much or as little explanation as you think wise or necessary? I don’t know. I have no social gifts and practically no social experience.

Mean while, don’t think too harshly of me for this bolt. I hate to run away but I feel that the whole future working life is tied up in this distinction between work and person. And while this whole argument may seem specious, I assure you it is heartfelt.

Regards
John

While awaiting public and press reaction to In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck began preliminary work on the novel that was to become Of Mice and Men.

To Louis Paul

[Pacific Grove]
[February 1936]

Dear Louis Paul:

I don’t like communists either, I mean I dislike them as people. I rather imagine the apostles had the same waspish qualities and the New Testament is proof that they had equally bad manners. But this dislike is personal. I never knew D. H. Lawrence either. The whole idea of the man turns my stomach. But he was a good writer, and some of these communist field workers are strong, pure, inhumanly virtuous men. Maybe that’s another reason I personally dislike them and that does not redound to my credit. However, that’s not important.

I haven’t an idea what the press will do, nor do I much care. I have enough money now to live and write for three years if we are careful and I can get a hell of a lot of words down in three years.

You ask why you never see my stuff in Esquire. I guess they were never interested. I have a good many stories in New York but no one wants them. I wrote 9 short stories at one sitting recently. I thought some of them were pretty good, too, but that’s as far as it got. The North American Review used to print some at 30 dollars a crack.

I have to start [writing] and am scared to death as usual—miserable sick feeling of inadequacy. I’ll love it once I get down to work. Hope you’ll be out before too long.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Louis Paul

[Pacific Grove]
[March 1936]

Dear Louis Paul:

I’ve started to answer a letter from you for quite a long time. This morning your enclosures came. I had not seen Mary Ann McCarthy’s review in the Nation [of In Dubious Battle]. I’m sorry to see that, like her famous namesake, she didn’t get a goddam clam. The pain occasioned by this review is to some extent mitigated by the obvious fact that she understood Caesar’s Commentaries as little as my poor screed, that she doesn’t know her Plato very well, and that she hasn’t the least idea of what a Greek drama is. Seriously what happened is this—Mary Ann reviewed Tortilla Flat, saying that I had overlooked the fact that these paisanos were proletariats. Joseph Henry Jackson, critic on the S. F. Chronicle took her review and played horse with it. So Mary Ann lay in ambush for me to give me my come-uppance. And boy, did she give it to me. Wurra! Wurra!

I’m looking forward to seeing you this spring. And since I’m stuck here until I finish this job that really isn’t begun, I hope you’ll be able to come through our way. It’s desperately beautiful now and will be more so in another month.

Did you know that Herman Shumlin is to produce In Dubious Battle as a play in the fall? That’s what I hear anyway. Mary Ann will be glad.

What will you be doing—working in Hollywood? It’s time I got back to work. Thanks for the review. It shall be my inspiration.

John Steinbeck

The Nation review of Tortilla Flat had said, among other things:

 

“The subject matter of Tortilla Flat is surely grim enough, but Mr. Steinbeck’s approach to it is wholly in the light-hearted, fantastic tradition; it suggests such novels as Vile Bodies and South Wind ...

 

“Mr. Steinbeck’s attempt to impose a mood of urbane and charming gaiety upon a subject which is perpetually at variance with it is graceful enough, but the odds are against him ...

 

“The situations are rife with possibilities which, despite the amount of indifference to them manifested by Mr. Steinbeck and his characters, it is not always easy to ignore.”

 

Joseph Henry Jackson, “playing horse” with this review in the San Francisco Chronicle, referred to “a patronizing sneer from a reviewer afflicted with the class itch.” It was Steinbeck’s error to believe that this was Mary McCarthy, who had indeed written the review preceeding that of Tortilla Flat, and whose name appeared at the end of her review but ahead of the Tortilla Flat review, which, in fact, was written by one Helen Neville. Nevertheless, it was to mark the beginning of a feud that was to last the rest of Steinbeck’s life.

 

Mary McCarthy, still in her early twenties and a recent graduate of Vassar, did review In Dubious Battle in The Nation under the title “Minority Report.” She called the work: “academic, wooden, inert ... The dramatic events take place for the most part off-stage and are reported, as in the Greek drama, by a breathless observer. Mr. Steinbeck for all his long and frequently pompous exchanges offers only a few rather childish, often reiterated generalizations ... He may be a natural story-teller; but he is certainly no philosopher, sociologist, or strike technician.”

 

Whether this was the result of “lying in ambush to give me my come-uppance” is conjectural. But Steinbeck believed it was.

 

As for Herman Shumlin’s projected production of In Dubious Battle, he contracted with John O‘Hara to do the dramatization. In a letter to Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck reported:

 

“Now for the dramatic thing. John O’Hara stopped on his way to San Francisco. I do not know his work but I liked him and his attitude. I think we could get along well. I do not believe in collaboration. If he will maintain the intention and theme of the book (and I am convinced that he will) I shall not interfere at all. He said he would come up in a month with some script to go over. I am pleased with him as the man to do the job.”

 

Years later, O’Hara reminded Steinbeck of this meeting in characteristic style:

 

“It is a warm and good friendship that began that warm afternoon in Pacific Grove, A.D. 1936, with some Mexican dish cooking on the stove, an English saddle hanging on a peg, your high school diploma on the wall, and you trying to explain about phalanx man.”

 

But Steinbeck’s optimism about the In Dubious Battle dramatization proved unjustified. As he wrote Elizabeth Otis later:

 

“O’Hara has not answered my letter. Anyway, I started blocking I. D. B. several days ago, and today and yesterday finished the first scene. And it is lousy. It sounds just what it is—a re-hashed novel. No life —just dead. Maybe someone else can do it. This story was conceived in its present form. It is so real to me that when I compress, leave out incidents and characters and scenes, I’m just lying about something that really happened.”

To Louis Paul

POSTCARD

Pacific Grove
[1936]

Dear Louis Paul:

I’m answering your letter in haste. After two months of fooling around my new work [Of Mice and Men] is really going and that makes me very happy—kind of an excitement like that you get near a dynamo from breathing pure oxygen and I’m not going Saroyan. Anyway this work is going quickly and should get done quickly. I’m using a new set of techniques as far as I know but I am so illy read that it may have been done. Not that that matters at all, except that the unexplored in method makes the job at once more difficult because I can’t tell what it will get over and more pleasant because it requires more care. I’m not interested in method as such but I am interested in having a vehicle exactly adequate to the theme. Enough of this, when the work is rolling it’s almost impossible not to be a bore.

It is raining hard. The roof of my little house is roaring.

I hope you do manage to come west. I’ll get back to work.

John Steinbeck

To Elizabeth Otis

Pacific Grove
May 27, 1936

Dear Miss Otis:

The check for $94 arrived. Thank you very much. I am enclosing the statement for your records. English criticism always amazes me, mostly because they consider us so foreign. I never think of the English as so strange. There is a Mexican word—Americanado. It means literally Americaned but by connotation queer, unusual, unpalatable, incomprehensible, crazy. That is the way the English think of us too.

Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my ms. book [Of Mice and Men]. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms. I’m not sure is good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter. But there’s the work to do over from the start.

We’re putting up a little shack near Los Gatos to escape the nasty fogs that hang around here all summer. My wife is building it while I stay here and work. It will be ready in about a month and then I will go up there. I’ll send you the change of address when I know what it is.

I should imagine the new little manuscript will be ready in about two months. I hope you won’t be angry at it. I think it has some thing, but can’t tell much yet.

I’ll get this off. I hear the postman.

John Steinbeck