1936 to 1939

Stenluch “Such excitement will never come again.”

 

1936 Moved to Los Gatos, California.

 

Of Mice and Men (novel) published; chosen by 1937 Book-of-the-Month Club. The Red Pony, in three parts, published. Of Mice and Men (play, which won Drama Critics’ Circle award) produced.

 

1938 The Long Valley and the fourth part of The Red Pony published.

 

1939 The Grapes of Wrath published. Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Steinbeck’s involvement with the lives of the migrant workers, which had already provided the subject matter of In Dubious Battle, became even keener in his mid-thirties. During the summer of 1936, he was visiting the Gridley Migrant Camp, north of Sacramento, when he replied to a letter from Lawrence Clark Powell, librarian emeritus of U.C.L.A:

 

“I have to write this sitting in a ditch. I’ll be home in two or three weeks. I’m not working—may go south to pick a little cotton. All this, needless to say, is not for publication—migrants are going south now and I’ll probably go along. I enjoy it a lot. ”

To Louis Paul

POSTCARD

[Pacific Grove]
[1936]

Dear Louis Paul:

Awfully glad to get your letter. I’m very busy now. Doing a Nation article and a series for the S. F. News on migrant labor. I’ve been in the field for the last week. Finished my new little book [Of Mice and Men] and sent it off a week and a half ago and of course have heard nothing from it. I don’t know whether it is any good or not.

Down the country I discovered a book like nothing in the world. So I’ll be busy as a lamp bug for some months. I like to be busy. I’ve been gestating for too long.

I have to write 3,000 words a day for the next five days [“The Harvest Gypsies” for the San Francisco News]. So here goes. I’ll write you a letter as soon as the series is off.

John

 

 

The book he had “discovered” dealt with vigilantes.

To Louis Paul

POSTCARD

Pacific Grove
[1936]

Dear Louis Paul:

I’m delighted that you’re coming out. You’ll see the new house then. It is just being built now. It’s a very beautiful place.

Let me know about when you will arrive so you won’t go looking over the whole state for me.

You say you are afraid of symbols. But you see in this country the deep symbol of security is rain—water. And the symbol of evil is drought. There isn’t any twisting of symbols there. It’s a very real thing. My father lost nearly all his cattle in the year I was writing about. It’s a pretty awful thing to have your herd die of thirst and starvation. I was simply trying to reduce that pattern to utterance.

I’m tied up in the new thing. It’s a most difficult thing.

I’ll be awfully glad to see you.

John Steinbeck

By midsummer the Steinbecks had moved to their new house in Los Gatos.

 

They had seen Ted Miller in New York in the fall of 1935 when they had stopped there on their way home from Mexico to sign contracts with Paramount Pictures for the film of Tortilla Flat. Later, Miller sent an accumulation of letters from the time when he had acted as Steinbeck’s ex-officio agent.

To Amasa Miller

Los Gatos, California
[1936]

Dear Ted:

Thanks for the rejections. They still give me the shivers and always will. Each one was a little doom. Had a personal fight with each one. And it’s such a short time ago and it may be again.

I’m awfully sorry in a way that I didn’t see you more when I was East. And in other ways I am glad. Lord how miserable and rushed and embarrassed I was. I don’t like it there. I liked it better before and God knows I hated it then. I’d much rather see you out here where I have leisure and quiet. We live two miles out of town on a hill and few people come here. They have to want to see us if they come because of the distance. There are no casuals.

This isn’t a farm we’re on. Only two acres. We thought we’d get a farm but that takes attention and I have work to do and I don’t like to hire anyone if I can help it. I always feel too humble with hired people and it ends with me doing all the work.

My God, what a nightmare this publicity is. I don’t mind being a horse’s ass at all. Enjoy it in fact, but I do like to be my own kind—not that it’s a better kind but it’s more comfortable and I know it better.

Don’t you ever come West? It will be a long time before I’m East again.

bye and thanks again.

John

To George Albee

[Los Gatos]
[1936]

Dear George:

I seem to have a terrible time writing letters these days. I don’t know whether you know what a bomb California is right now or not. I can only assure you that it is highly explosive. I want to see it all and hear it all.

I finished a little book sometime ago [Of Mice and Men]. As usual it is disliked by some and liked by some. It is always that way. Covici likes it anyway. It is a tricky little thing designed to teach me to write for the theatre. Now I’m working hard on another book which isn’t mine at all. I’m only editing it but it is a fine thing. A complete social study made of the weekly reports from a migrant camp.

Then I did an article for the Nation and a series of articles for the News on migrant labor but the labor situation is so tense just now that the News is scared and won’t print the series. Any reference to labor except as dirty dogs is not printed by the big press out here. There are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born. I shouldn’t wonder if the thing had begun. I don’t mean any general revolt but an active beginning aimed toward it, the smouldering.

I don’t know what you mean by taking to the woods. The woods aren’t going to save anyone. And if you want to run you had better start now because you aren’t going to have until the end of 1937. You have six months or at most a year. I am not speaking of revolution again, but war. Every news report verifies the speed with which it is coming.

But enough of that sort of thing for the present. This isn’t a new typewriter but we turned in all our old ones and got one that is rebuilt and it is a joy. All the type rightside up and the ribbon reverse works and everything. I have a little tiny room to work in. Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and a little book case. I like to sleep in the room I work in. Just at present there is hammering going on. We are building on a guest room. We had none and really need one. It will have big glass doors and screens so that it will really be an outside porch when we want to open the doors. Dr. McDoughal of Carnegie was up the other day and told us we have six varieties of oaks on the place besides manzanita, madrone and toyon. We’re in a forest you know.

I have to go to work.

John

 

 

The reaction of certain groups who found Steinbeck’s literary activities controversial caused Albee, now in New York, to write in concern for his friend’s physical safety.

To Mr. and Mrs. George Albee

Los Gatos
January II [1937]
Sunday

Dear George and Anne:

Your letter concerning my danger came this morning. The whole thing is changed now. I am not doing any more articles. And they do forget. So there is practically no danger until I commit another overt act. Right now I think my safety lies in the fact that I am not important enough to kill and I’m too able to get publicity to risk the usual beating. Our house is covered by insurance against riots and commotions.

I guess we’ll have to pull in our horns financially. I don’t expect the little book Of Mice and Men to make any money. It’s such a simple little thing.

It is raining hard here now and very dark. I have an electric lantern in my little work room and the rain is pounding on the roof. Very pleasant. bye

John

 

 

And then word came that Of Mice and Men had been chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
January 27, 1937

Dear Miss Otis:

Of course this selection is gratifying but also it is frightening. I shall never learn to conceive of money in larger quantities than two dollars. More than that has no conceptual meaning to me. But a part of the money will be used for a long trip this spring. Both of us are such provincial rabbits and we want to move about a little before the rheumatism gets us. And so we plan quite an extended tripping. However, we’ve planned so many that didn’t come off that our fingers are growing together crossed.

The new book has struck a bad snag. Heaven knows how long it will take to write. The subject is so huge that it scares me to death. And I’m not going to rush it. It must be worked out with great care. That’s one fine thing this selection will do. It will let me work without a starvation scare going on all the time. This may or may not be a good thing.

It has been colder here than I’ve ever known it to be. Whole system of weather seems to be changing. In addition there is an epidemic of pneumonia and influenza out here so we go to town rarely and never to the theater. It is remarkable how cataclysmic human change and natural change work together. Wish I could find a corollary. The point of departure is somewhere and it isn’t as simple as weather. Maybe the old gods are waking up or maybe a new litter of gods is hatching out.

About the Mice book—already, before publication, there has been a lot of nonsense written about it. I’m not sure that I like adulation. I could defend myself against attack. I wish I were as sure I could defend myself against flattery.

This is a rambling letter.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Pascal Covici

Los Gatos
February 28 [1937]

Dear Mr. Covici:

You do such nice things. The [Diego] Rivera book came and I am very grateful for it. It is a valuable thing and a beautiful job. Thank you.

You know, we’ve been married seven years or going on seven and one of the dreams of our marriage was that the moment we could, we would do some traveling. Well we’re going to do it. My wife has never been on a ship. We’re taking booking on a freighter sailing for New York about the first of April. We plan to go on to Europe from there. I’ll give you the ship’s name before we start. We haven’t closed the booking yet. The boat is very slow, 31 days to N. Y.

Joe Jackson told me that you had sold 117,000 copies of Mice. That’s a hell of a lot of books.

Anyway I’ll hope to see you before very long. You couldn’t arrange to sail with us, could you, train here and freighter back. That would be fine.

Anyway thank you again for everything.

John Steinbeck

 

 

A number of playwrights saw dramatic possibilities in Of Mice and Men, but Annie Laurie Williams, the play agent associated with the McIntosh and Otis office, showed the novel to Beatrice Kaufman, Eastern representative of Samuel Goldwyn Pictures and —more to the point—the wife of the well-known playwright and director, George S. Kaufman. He shared his wife’s enthusiasm and enlisting Sam H. Harris as producer, arranged for a fall production of the work, which, as he wrote Steinbeck “drops almost naturally into play form and no one knows that better than you.”

 

“It is only the second act that seems to me to need fresh invention,” he continued. “You have the two natural scenes for it—bunkhouse and the negro’s room, but I think the girl should come into both these scenes, and that the fight between Lennie and Curley, which will climax Act 2, must be over the girl. I think the girl should have a scene with Lennie before the scene in which he kills her. The girl, I think, should be drawn more fully: she is the motivating force of the whole thing and should loom larger.”

 

He made a couple of other specific, small suggestions and asked Steinbeck to send any further ideas he might have. Then Kaufman added:

“Preserve the marvelous tenderness of the book. And—if you could feel it in your heart to include a little more humor, it would be extremely valuable, both for its lightening effect and the heightening of the subsequent tragedy by comparison.”

In considering actors, he wrote that he was undecided as to whether to have “names” or not.

“I have just had a tough experience with Margaret Sullavan—we have had to close her play because of an impending baby. Not that Victor McLaglen could have a baby but he could do something else just as bad. Once you have delivered your play into the hands of a star you are helpless when that star misbehaves. On the other hand, without a decent name we will open to four people when we go out of town.”

To Elizabeth Otis and Annie Laurie Williams

Los Gatos
March 19, 1937

Dear Miss Otis and Annie Laurie Williams:

I have several letters from you this morning. This is the last letter you will get from me so I’d better make it complete. I’ll go over all the questions.

Your check for $1,902 arrived and thank you very much. Please do not divulge the middle name on the check [Ernst]. I only use it at the bank as a safety measure.

I had George Kaufman’s letter and have replied. I hope to have a draft incorporating his suggestions by the time we reach New York.

I hate literary parties and won’t go to any if I can possibly get out of it.

Sailing on the Sagebrush, March 23, due in N.Y. about the 15th of April. Please do not tell anyone the name of the ship or its arrival. Covici knows and a few people out here. This ballyhoo is driving me nuts.

Regarding the College Humor matter—If a story of mine is as well done as I am able to do it, I wouldn’t give a hoot if it were printed in Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Make the price the limit they will pay and if it doesn’t seem enough to you—don’t let them. I really don’t like the idea that my work can only be printed in certain magazines. I’ve broken every literary rule when I wanted to. I’m not conforming to some literary model now.

I’m down to Woollcott. [Alexander Woollcott whose “Town Crier” was a popular radio program.] I think you know my hatred of personal matters. On the other hand, I should like to have him talk about all work. I simply cannot write books if a consciousness of self is thrust on me. Must have some anonymity. I got Mr. Covici to start killing the pictures. I was recognized in S. F. the other day and it made me sick to my stomach. Unless I can stand in a crowd without any self-consciousness and watch things from an uneditorialized point of view, I’m going to have a hell of a hard time. I’m sure Mr. Woollcott will understand this.

Factual material is this. Born Salinas, California, 1902. Died—?

If I said Pasadena, I lied, but I lie easily. Educated Salinas and Stanford and not too pleased with the job of either. Reared in Salinas and Monterey and in and on ranches in vicinity. Live near Los Gatos and no mention of where near Los Gatos.

If Mr. Woollcott will soft-pedal the personal matter I’ll love him to pieces as Mr. Geezil says. If he insists give him the structure I’ve told you of Mice. The experiment of making a play that can be read or a novel that can be played. Trying to make a new form that will take some of the techniques of both. Maybe he can build a story on that and will be able to leave me to my “pack of lumbering dogs.” Did you see that press release? Toby had become a pack. Toby by the way is going to stay with a friend until we get back. Maybe you would do well to show Mr. Woollcott this page. I’m sure that of his own experience he will know that the pressures exerted by publicity are unendurable.

In case of terrible need, you can radio me on the Sagebrush. By the way, if there’s any mess please let me know. A letter would reach me c/o the ship in Philadelphia. If there is a fuss we could get off there and go in on a train. I want to get in and settled quietly.

See you all soon.

John S.

After a visit of several months in the Soviet Union and Scandinavia, John and Carol Steinbeck returned to New York, where preparations for the stage production of Of Mice and Men were going forward. Kaufman invited Steinbeck to his Bucks County home to make final changes in the script before rehearsals began.

 

Meanwhile, the “gift” edition of The Red Pony—a pet project of Pascal Covici’s—had been published.

To Lawrence Clark Powell

Someplace in
Pennsylvania
[Bucks County]
August 23 [1937]

Dear Larry:

Just got in from Sweden a few days ago, hence the delay in answering your letter. Doing some play work down here and in a couple of weeks we’ll start home. rm thoroughly tired of moving around. It’s out of my system for some time, I hope. I was expecting a howl about the price of The Red Pony. I wouldn’t pay ten dollars for a Gutenberg Bible. In this case, I look at it this way. Covici loves beautiful books. These are old stories reprinted and they don’t amount to much anyway so if he wants to make a pretty book, why not? The funny thing is that they’re over-subscribed, about five hundred. I didn’t know there were that many damn fools in the world —with 10 bucks, I mean. I don’t let Covici dictate one word about how I write and I try never to make a suggestion about publishing to him.

Your bibliography is very flattering. I can’t think my work deserves it nor can I believe there would be enough general interest to justify any investment in it. However, I don’t think there would be any objection on Covici’s part. I couldn’t very well do a preface. It would be too much like singing at my own funeral. I mean it would be such an egotistical thing to do and I’m not feeling egotistical.

As for the foreign reprints—maybe McIntosh and Otis could tell you. I don’t know. And campus publications—I can’t remember either. This material is bound to be lousy. There was very little anyway. I wasn’t well liked in college and with reason as I remember it.

I hope I’ll see you before too long. Let me hear from you.

John S.

 

 

While in Sweden, the Steinbecks had become friends of the painter Bo Beskow four years Steinbeck’s junior. They had met in the corridor of the Covici-Friede offices in New York the previous winter: Beskow was there in connection with his mother Elsa Beskow’s widely known children’s books.

 

“Bumped into each other in the corridor,” Beskow recalls in a recent letter. “The publisher said, ‘Mr. Steinbeck has written a book, just out, would you like a copy?’ John mumbled something and the publisher translated: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Steinbeck are going to Russia and will pass Stockholm.’ I gave him my address and went home and read the book in bed to put me to sleep. But it kept me awake to the last word and long after that. I was excited, having Of Mice and Men thrown at me without ever having heard of John Steinbeck. They came to Stockholm that summer and we struck a friendship—what warmth and light and fun, those weeks.”

 

Beskow, at this time, had just won first prize in a nationwide mural competition. Later he was to achieve an international reputation for, among other works, his two murals and his portrait of Dag Hammarskjöld in the United Nations Building, New York, and his stained glass windows in Swedish cathedrals. In the summer of 1937 he did the first of three portraits of Steinbeck.

To Mr. and Mrs. Bo Beskow

Los Gatos
[1937]

Dear Muggins and Bo:

We have missed you very much. We wish you had come with us and were here. Before I left New York I sent three books. Will you let me know when you receive them? I mean with customs and all, I’d like to know they got there. We drove across the country. Our darling dog is well and happy and now we are settled. Muggins’ letter came today and made us happy and sad too. Do write to us. People here marvel at Bo’s portrait. Pat Covici wanted you to try to have it photographed in color at his expense. He said he would write you about it.

The little Wilhelmson boat was a joy. We played poker with the master and the steward all the way to New York. It is hot in N. Y. We went to Pennsylvania and finished up the play—back to N. Y. for casting and then we bought a Chevrolet and drove home. That’s our history. Now I must get to work.

 

Donald Oenslager, who designed the sets and lighting for Of Mice and Men, remembered that

 

“Prior to rehearsals, there was a meeting of the director, George S. Kaufman, John Steinbeck, myself and the producer, Sam H. Harris in Harris’ cubicle office on the second floor of the Music Box Theatre. There were both general and detailed discussions on the production. At the conclusion of the meeting, John Steinbeck rose and said that he felt all was in good hands and that his presence was no longer necessary; whereupon he departed for California.”

 

This departure, and the fact that he never returned were to have repercussions later. Steinbeck continues to Bo Beskow:

 

 

We have a blood hound supposedly on its way here from Chicago by express and it hasn’t come and we can’t go out because it might come in our absence and so we wait here for it.

Autumn came yesterday with little winds and today it is really here and the oaks are beginning to lose their leaves. We are going to do some building, among other things a little swimming pool so you must come soon to jump into it.

I have a lot of work to do, must read proof on the last acting version of Mice which then goes to the printer. And I have written no letters since we got home. This is the first. The war cloud is very heavy now. The Japanese affair is close to us but I don’t think it would be easy to get this people to fight. We aren’t like Europe. The Government can’t start a war and just have the people fall in line. bye and write soon and keep us posted.

I’m sure that our meeting was not one of those things that happens and ends. We are positive of that now. So keep in touch until the time that you will be here. love to both of you jon

 

 

The play, Of Mice and Men, with Wallace Ford as George, Broderick Crawford as Lennie, and Claire Luce in the nameless but pivotal role of Curley’s Wife, opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York on November 23, 1937. It was an immediate success and ran for 207 performances. Steinbeck later recalled that Elizabeth Otis had given a party after the opening for members of the agency staff and other friends, and that they made a telephone call to Los Gatos to report the evening’s triumph. Each, he remembered, said, “Well, we’re all here and we’ve all seen the show.”

To Elizabeth Otis Annie Laurie Williams, and Mavis McIntosh

Los Gatos
[November 24, 1937]
Thursday night

Dear Elizabeth and Annie Laurie and Mavis:

You don’t know how good it was to hear your voices and how sweet it was of you to take the trouble to phone. It was a pretty exciting night even for us, what with Pat sending wires after every act. I didn’t feel it at all until about six that evening and then my stomach began turning loops of stage-fright. I was very glad when it was over and the audience hadn’t stoned the cast and mailed poisoned candy to me. A wire from Kaufman says it seems pretty good but he can’t tell yet how good. I mean a good first night reaction doesn’t mean that it won’t close pretty soon, does it? That’s a kind of a picked audience and the tough ones are the trippers from Ogden who keep Broadway running. I report with pleasure that on the basis of that first night I am going to get a new typewriter. We’ve never had one that wasn’t pretty decrepit. Anyway, I’m glad it had a good opening and I’ll be very anxious to hear the little sidelights that you people can tell. We were all so hysterical over the phone that there wasn’t time for much but squeaks of joy. Do write about it, please.

Joe Jackson wired from the Chronicle for consensus of opinion of critics and it came through and they will run it Sunday. So darned nice of him to do it and the critics didn’t take pot shots at it as I thoroughly expected them to. I think Carol would really have liked to be there but I couldn’t get her to go.

I have a lot of letters to write so I’ll get down to Elizabeth’s letter which was waiting for me when I got back tonight. I’m glad about the stories. I hope that Esquire knows that this story [“The Snake”] was printed in the little Monterey magazine traded for the use of a horse. You know that. I don’t want any kickback. Please make it clear to them. The Murder reprint is swell. Such a lot of money. Now I know I will get a new typewriter. I’ll send pictures of the new dog just as soon as I have some of them developed. It is very quiet here after a very very hectic day. I’m bringing you a new client. Louis Paul. He’s a swell egg and you will like him. And he’s well enough known so that it may not be hard to sell his stories. I like him immensely. Again thank you millions for everything you have all done. I appreciate it and lay out my heart for you to walk on.

John

To George S. Kaufman

Los Gatos
[November 1937]

Dear George:

As the reviews come in it becomes more and more apparent that you have done a great job. I knew you would of course but there is a curious gap between the thing in your hand and the thing set down and you’ve jumped that gap. It’s a strange kind of humbling luck we have. Carol and I have talked of it a number of times. That we—obscure people out of a place no one ever heard of—should have our first play directed and produced by the greatest director of our time—will not bear too close inspection for fear we may catch the gods of fortune at work and catching them, anger them so they hate us. Already I have made propitiation—thrown my dear ring in the sea and I hope no big fish brings it back to me.

 

To say thank you is ridiculous for you can’t thank a man for good work any more than you can thank him for being himself. But one can be very glad he is himself and that is what we are—very glad you are George Kaufman.

It doesn’t matter a damn whether this show runs a long time. It came to life for one night anyway, and really to life, and that’s more than anyone has any right to hope.

Sometimes in working, the people in my head become much realler than I am. I have had letters. It seems that for two hours you made your play far more real than its audience and only the play existed. I wish I could transport into some mathematical equation, my feeling, so that it might be a communication unmistakable and unchanging.

And that’s all.
John

To the McIntosh and Otis staff

Los Gatos
[November 1937]

Dear All:

It is getting to be almost a daily habit to write to you in answer to nice letters. A friend of mine, hearing that the play has run a week without closing, has christened it Abie’s Irish Mice. I like that very much.

If you get any request for stories for Hollywood remember there is still that old Cup which is the only thing I have ever done that would make a good picture. Also, I like the idea of breaking up the Pastures and selling it, but this idea is punitive. It would please me to have them buy little by little what they refused to take as a whole, and when they could have had it very cheaply.

You may notice that I have a new typewriter. We have never had a good one in our lives. Always something of about nineteen twelve. But after we saw this play was going to run a week at least, we went out and got a new one, well—a nearly new one. And look what it has—! n’. A tilda, an exclamation and a grave accent. Or rather an acute. I don’t know where to use a grave and nobody knows where to use a circumflex so we didn’t get them. But isn’t it beautiful? I hadn’t realized that science had done so much while I worked on the 1912 model. This is so wonderful that I just write the first letter and the machine spells the rest of the word out. It is going to be a great boon to my spelling. You will notice too that this letter is longer than usual. That is because I can push down these keys with one hand instead of standing up and using both hands.

I’m suspicious of all these nice criticisms. They are out of character. Even Nathan [George Jean Nathan, drama critic]. I was looking for something better from him. I thought he would maintain his aloofness anyway. But even he won’t disagree.

That’s all I think. And thank you for writing so often.

Love to you all,
John

 

 

Jack Kirkland, adapter of Erskine Caldwell’s phenomenally successful Tobacco Road, had taken an option on Tortilla Flat. When he finished his dramatization, he sent it to Los Gatos for Steinbeck’s reaction.

To Jack Kirkland

Los Gatos
November 31, 1937
Tuesday

Dear Jack:

Your manuscript came this morning and we, Carol and I, got right to it and spent the day in howls of laughter. It is a gorgeously funny thing and I am very much pleased with it. It should keep an audience in hysterics and I imagine it will get you some attention from the police but you have done it in purity of heart and that is what I was anxious about. It doesn’t in the least matter what a man does, it is his manner in doing it. In the criticism I am about to make, some is technical and some, the last scene criticism, is put in because such a thing couldn’t happen, it is out of character and completely socially impossible.

The early technical criticisms are two. First the Spanish. A number of times you have used “A donde vas?” as a greeting and such it could be outside but never in the house for it means “where are you going?” You might say it to a man going by the house. Next, you have referred to Sweets as Senora when she is unmarried. Now she might be called Senora in ridicule but from the attitude of the friends I think they and Mrs. Morales would call her Senorita and do it with emphasis.

Next, check all the Mexican phrases with a Mexican. I can’t go over all of it unless I can talk with you and the nuance of value in every Spanish phrase is tremendous. In Act one you have Sweets call the others “You paisanos.” It wouldn’t be done. Paisano is not a term of opprobrium but a declaration of relationship. You say, “You are my paisano.” Or, to show you have lived here a great while, “I am paisano.” In the first case it means you are my countryman and in the second I am a native to this place.

Next. You have the term “get into bed with” used openly and before two women. I don’t think that would happen. I think some circumlocution would be used probably with gestures to clarify it.

Next—in the first act you have made a half gallon of wine go a hell of a long way. Two gallons would hardly suffice. I could drink the half myself.

Now let me get to the last act and the quarrel between Pilon and the priest which I object to. This could not happen. It is unthinkable that Pilon should be unmannerly toward a priest no matter how much he might hate him and he doesn’t hate him, and it is even more unthinkable for a priest to be curt with a parishioner. The discipline is too great. Third, unless a man has been excommunicated it is not in the power of a priest to refuse him last unction or any sacrament.

I am sending you another version of the scene. Please understand that I am not muscling in and that this is only a suggestion. Use it if you wish or don’t use it.

Don’t think me obstreperous in this matter. I don’t want to be. I think your play is gorgeous. If you can get the proper actors you will roll them in the aisles.

I wish to goodness you could come west and could talk about it. I could lead you to hear the real speech spoken so you could get the tone of it in your head.

We’ll have a telephone in a few days and then we won’t be quite so much out of touch as we have been.

Good bye.

John

To Elizabeth Otis and Annie Laurie Williams

[Los Gatos]
December [1937]

Dear Elizabeth and Annie Laurie:

The dogs of Hollywood are loose. A week ago some one from a Hollywood agency called up and I had to go to town to answer a long distance call and it was a Mr. Marcus of the Myron Selznick office who wanted to come up here to discuss my Hollywood affairs. I told him I had no Hollywood affairs and told him to get in touch with you as my sole agents. I thought that would stop things. But last night there was another long distance call and I had to go to town again to get it and it was Zeppo Marx with a very attractive offer. I didn’t ask what it was. I said no and he said it would please me and I said no again and he said he would write me because Hollywood wasn’t the same as it used to be and my friends like G. Kaufman had changed their attitude and why shouldn’t I? This was funny for George held forth to me for an hour on how he hated Hollywood. Anyway he said he would write and I said you were sole agents and he said he would write anyway. When his letter comes I will send it to you and you can kill that once for all. I don’t intend to go to Hollywood at any price whatever and this is not a hold out.

Our telephone will be in by this week end and then at least I won’t have to make a five mile run into town to say no.

I have never before come in contact with anyone to whom the word no had no meaning whatever but these seem to be people like that. Let them buy stories that were not written for them, except IDB [In Dubious Battle] but I won’t work for them.

This is a mad letter. It was raining when I had to go to town last night and Marx had put in the call and then had gone to dinner so I had to wait for him and I’m still mad.

 

john

To Annie Laurie Williams

TELEGRAM

SAN JOSE [LOS GATOS]
DECEMBER 8, 1937

PLEASE QUERY KIRKLAND REGARDING POSSIBILITY OF COMING WEST TO DISCUSS TORTILLA STOP WILL HELP HIM TWO WEEKS IN REWRITING BETWEEN US PLAY SEEMS LOUSIER EVERY READING DIALOGUE IS OFF TONE VULGARITY CREEPS IN PLAY CHANGES TEMPO AND IN MANY CASES IS DULL BE DISCREETLY PRESSING AND PLEASE WIRE HIS ANSWER

 

JOHN

To Annie Laurie Williams

Los Gatos
[December 9, 1937]

Dear Annie Laurie:

I suppose I shouldn’t have sent that wire. What happened was that we read the thing out loud and it sounded so bad that I got to feeling low and I thought that if only Jack Kirkland would come out we might fix the thing up. You see it doesn’t maintain its tone and there is a terrible matter of talk that doesn’t lead to anything. It is just a series of black-outs now. I would work with him if he would come out.

There are so many little undertones that he has got wrong. I don’t want to maintain my book but I would like to maintain the people as I know them. Let me give you an example. Jack makes them want wine and need wine and suffer for wine whereas they want the thing wine does. They are not drunkards at all. They like the love and fights that come with wine, rather than the wine itself. Many of his scenes are swell. I hope you didn’t hurt his feelings and I know you didn’t. The whole last scene seems like coming back to someplace where you never were. You are told that Danny is a hell of a guy but on the stage he never proves it and the audience is going to wonder what all the shooting is about. I think Danny should be built up. I think the differences between the others should be shown. His casting of the play is excellent. I mean into scenes. It is only in the details, in the dialogue and in the tempo that it seems to me to need working on. Some of it is very very funny and some of it now on the third reading seems tiresome.

But then let it go. I’ll ok the script all except the priest scene just as it stands if he wants me to. But he is going to find that a Mexican with an accent is not going to be able to say many of his speeches.

These are little things but I have a feeling that unless they are taken care of, the play is not going to have any sound of authenticity. You can argue that it doesn’t matter because no one in the east ever heard of these people, anyway. Just remember some of the phony dialect in pictures and you will see that it does matter. No one believes that, in fact scorns it. I wish now I had not acted so precipitately about the wire. But I had hit bottom. I don’t feel quite so badly about it now but I do think it would be better with some more work.

I think that is all and please don’t give Kirkland the idea that I am riding him.

John

In addition to buying several stories that Esquire had previously rejected, Arnold Gingrich, its editor, sent Steinbeck a gift of a watch.

To Arnold Gingrich

Los Gatos
January 5, 1938

Dear Mr. G:

In writing to thank you for the beautiful little watch, I am quite swathed in a kind of wonder and in a little fear. I am quite sure you could not have known that in me you had probably the most profound, double-barrelled, synchromesh, watch tragedy the world has ever known. I have not spoken of this before. It was too sharp.

Watches from the beginning filled me not only with longing but with sorrow and nostalgia and a little despair. But so vital is hope that when I came near to graduating from grammar school, when Elgin and Waltham were explaining in full pages the remoteness of success to a watchless person, I must admit that a little hope flickered. And so I graduated —and I got a signet ring.

All through my two years of first year Latin and my year and a half of second year Latin my time sense was so utterly undeveloped that I rarely got to school on time and sometimes left long before it was dismissed. It was only in the last six months that the little worm of spirit moved. With a surge I finished the last month of second year Latin in six weeks. I think I hoped to bribe some kinds of gods with this sacrifice. And so I graduated. I got a Waterman’s pen and pencil set.

I think you can understand that my interest in higher education was nonexistent. My parents persuaded and cursed and appealed to my pride. I weakened and went to college almost frantically unenthusiastic. I had become so antisocial that I am the only person in the world who was ever blackballed from a journalistic fraternity and at a time when they needed the initiation fee. I dragged through three years not bravely but dully. I thought pain could no longer strike. And then came the time—and I couldn’t take it. I didn’t graduate.

The succeeding years have not been happy but I have been busy. And my sense of time, stunted from the beginning, grew so weak and thin that not only did I not know what time it was nor what day it was but once or twice have been three years out on a check stub.

I am trying to reorganize myself. Am I too old? My bones are brittle. I have sometimes to get up in the night. I feel that my fecundity is not eternal. Oh, I can feel the years a little particularly just before a rain. And now—I get a watch. I wonder if such things always come too late. I wonder if I can go back. I wonder for that matter if I can tell time!

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

Carol Steinbeck went to New York for the opening of the Jack Kirkland adaptation of Tortilla Flat on January 12, 1938.

To Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Henry Jackson IN SAN FRANCISCO

[Pacific Grove]
[January 1938]

Dear Joe and Charlotte:

It would seem that things are piling up which will keep me from going up this week end.

It is pouring rain today. By now you probably know what happened to Tortilla Flat. It was, says Carol, the worst thing she ever saw. The lines were bad but the directing and casting were even worse. The thing closed after four performances, thank God. We are really pretty happy about the whole thing because we think this may be so discouraging to Paramount that they will not try to make a picture at all now.

I get sadder and sadder. The requests and demands for money pour in. It is perfectly awful. WPA worker in pencil from Illinois—“you have got luck and I got no luck. My boy needs a hundderd dollar operation. Please send a hundderd dollars. I will pay it back.” That sort of thing. Getting worse every day. Maybe Cuernavaca isn’t so far off at that if this doesn’t die down. “Liberal negro school going to close if money isn’t forthcoming. Can you stand by and see this school close after fifteen years?” Someone told a Salinas ladies’ club that I had made three hundred thousand dollars this year. It is driving me crazy. “If you will just send me a railroad ticket to Boise I can come to California and get rid of my rheumatism.” They’re nightmarish. Some may be phonys but so damned many of them aren’t. Nearly every one is a desperate catching at a million-to-one chance. The damned things haunt me. There’s no way of getting over the truth and that we have very little money. It’s nibbling me to death.

I think Carol is having a marvelous time. She is so rushed that she can hardly breathe but in spite of that she gets off a letter nearly every day. I think she is taking New York and picking its bones. She is seeing everything and doing everything. We will be poor little provincials to her from now on. I’m really glad she went alone because I am prone to say oh to hell with it and not go the places I’ve wanted to go (my grammar will give you a mild idea of my mental condition).

bye and
thanks for asking me.
john

 

 

It was probably unprecedented in the history of the theatre that an actress, midway in the run of a successful play, should begin to have misgivings about her interpretation of her role. But Annie Laurie Williams reported that this was what was happening to Claire Luce in Of Mice and Men and asked Steinbeck to write the actress about the character of Curley’s Wife.

To Claire Luce

Los Gatos
[1938]

Dear Miss Luce:

Annie Laurie says you are worried about your playing of the part of Curley’s wife although from the reviews it appears that you are playing it marvelously. I am deeply grateful to you and to the others in the cast for your feeling about the play. You have surely made it much more than it was by such a feeling.

About the girl—I don’t know of course what you think about her, but perhaps if I should tell you a little about her as I know her, it might clear your feeling about her.

She grew up in an atmosphere of fighting and suspicion. Quite early she learned that she must never trust any one but she was never able to carry out what she learned. A natural trustfulness broke through constantly and every time it did, she got hurt. Her moral training was most rigid. She was told over and over that she must remain a virgin because that was the only way she could get a husband. This was harped on so often that it became a fixation. It would have been impossible to seduce her. She had only that one thing to sell and she knew it.

Now, she was trained by threat not only at home but by other kids. And any show of fear or weakness brought an instant persecution. She learned she had to be hard to cover her fright. And automatically she became hardest when she was most frightened. She is a nice, kind girl and not a floozy. No man has ever considered her as anything except a girl to try to make. She has never talked to a man except in the sexual fencing conversation. She is not highly sexed particularly but knows instinctively that if she is to be noticed at all, it will be because some one finds her sexually desirable.

As to her actual sexual life—she has had none except with Curley and there has probably been no consummation there since Curley would not consider her gratification and would probably be suspicious if she had any. Consequently she is a little starved. She knows utterly nothing about sex except the mass of misinformation girls tell one another. If anyone—a man or a woman—ever gave her a break—treated her like a person—she would be a slave to that person. Her craving for contact is immense but she, with her background, is incapable of conceiving any contact without some sexual context. With all this—if you knew her, if you could ever break down the thousand little defenses she has built up, you would find a nice person, an honest person, and you would end up by loving her. But such a thing can never happen.

I hope you won’t think I’m preaching. I’ve known this girl and I’m just trying to tell you what she is like. She is afraid of everyone in the world. You’ve known girls like that, haven’t you? You can see them in Central Park on a hot night. They travel in groups for protection. They pretend to be wise and hard and voluptuous.

I have a feeling that you know all this and that you are doing all this. Please forgive me if I seem to intrude on your job. I don’t intend to and I am only writing this because Annie Laurie said you wondered about the girl. It’s a devil of a hard part. I am very happy that you have it.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

Annie Laurie Williams reported that Of Mice and Men continued to play to full houses on Broadway; that the management planned a road tour for the fall; that she had sold English rights, then Scandinavian ; and that Warner Brothers was showing interest for a film because one of its stars, James Cagney, was eager to play George. But success had another face. As Steinbeck had already written to Elizabeth Otis:

 

“My mail has, with the exception of your letters, become a thing of horror. Swarms of people—money, speeches, orders and this autograph business. I didn’t know it was such a mania. Well, I’m through. I’m signing no books for anyone except friends. It’s getting worse all the time.”

 

But these were not the bitterest fruits of success. A young woman, whom Steinbeck had known as a child, claimed to be pregnant by him. The charge proved deeply upsetting. At the same time, a breach with his old friend, George Albee, took place. “You may be sure,” writes his brother Richard Albee, who survives, “that the basic cause was artistic jealousy, and of course it was on the part of George, not John.”

To George Albee

Los Gatos
[1938]

Dear George:

The reason for your suspicion is well founded. This has been a difficult and unpleasant time. There has been nothing good about it. In this time my friends have rallied around, all except you. Every time there has been a possibility of putting a bad construction on anything I have done, you have put such a construction.

Some kind friend has told me about it every time you have stabbed me in the back and that whether I wanted to know it or not. I didn’t want to know it really. If such things had been reported as coming from more than one person it would be easy to discount the whole thing but there has been only one source. Now I know that such things grow out of an unhappiness in you and for a long time I was able to reason so and to keep on terms of some kind of amicability. But gradually I found I didn’t trust you at all, and when I knew that then I couldn’t be around you any more. It became obvious that anything I said or did in your presence or wrote to you would be warped viciously and repeated and then the repetition was repeated to me and the thing was just too damned painful. I tried to sidestep, just to fade out of your picture. But that doesn’t work either.

I’d like to be friends with you, George, but I can’t if I have to wear a mail shirt the whole time. I wish to God your unhappiness could find some other outlet. But I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing. This has been the most difficult time in my life.

I’ve needed help and trust and the benefit of the doubt, because I’ve tried to beat the system which destroys every writer, and from you have come only wounds and kicks in the face. And that is the reason and I think you always knew it was the reason.

john

 

And now if you want to quarrel, it will at least be an honest quarrel and not boudoir pin pricking.

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
February 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

Came yesterday morning the check for royalties. Thank you. It has been raining for one solid week and we are thoroughly sick of it. Of course that will make a rich year but it is the longest and wettest rain I remember and it has sealed us in the house. Carol has a sore throat but seems finally to be licking it. The dogs are nuts for exercise.

Carol had such a good time. It comes out little by little. She couldn’t remember much when she first got home but every day she remembers something. I don’t think it is very real to her now. Just something she dreamed. You were all very wonderful to her. I think it has done something permanent to her ego which never was properly developed.

Unpleasant thing. I finally broke open the thing with George. At least now if he wants to quarrel it won’t be lady quarreling. I feel better about that, but I don’t like such things at all.

I’m so darned glad to have Carol back. She can answer the phone and I am permanently out of town. The crowd of speaking engagements continues. I don’t know why this insistence on speaking. I am not going to do it, but Carol can say no in much nicer ways than I can.

I imagine the—thing will die now [the paternity charge]. It would have been so easy for them if I had kept it from Carol or if I had something to lose so that I would pay rather than fight. Maybe the attorney figured something like that. But even if there had been relations between this girl and me, Carol would have known about it and that would have fallen down in any case. I think Carol’s method in a pinch is good. I have several marks on my body, one at least of them disfiguring, and apparent enough so that a wife or a mistress would be sure to have noticed them. Failure to know them would of course prove something. The worst one, a huge empyema scar, though, could be seen in a bathing suit. But I don’t think—[the girl] would remember that. But I did teach all the kids to swim and she might, but there are others. I hope it never gets that far.

I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them with the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can’t do something to help knock these murderers on the heads. Do you know what they’re afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities, they will organize and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I’m pretty mad about it. No word of this outside because when I have finished my job the jolly old associated farmers will be after my scalp again.

I guess that is all. Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.

John

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
February 14, 1938
Monday

Dear Elizabeth:

Your letter this morning with check and lots of information. Thank you very much. I’m glad the paternity suit matter is nearly over. And I’m desperately sorry for the break with George but I think it is healthier in the open.

I don’t know whether I’ll go south or not but I must go to Visalia. Four thousand families, drowned out of their tents are really starving to death. The resettlement administration of the government asked me to write some news stories. The newspapers won’t touch the stuff but they will under my byline. The locals are fighting the government bringing in food and medicine. I’m going to try to break the story hard enough so that food and drugs can get moving. Shame and a hatred of publicity will do the job to the miserable local bankers. I’ll let you know more about this when I get back from the area. Talk about Spanish children. The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. I’ve got to do it. If I can sell the articles I’ll use the proceeds for serum and such. Codliver oil would give the live kids a better chance. Of course no individual effort will help. Ten thousand people are affected in one area. Anyway, I’ll do what I can.

The whole state is flooded you know. This is the 19th day of rain.

I guess this is all. I’ll let you know what happens.

Bye,
John

To Elizabeth Bailey

[Los Gatos]
[Spring 1938]

Dear Godmother:

I am so sorry you are ill. This continued rain makes for illness. I have a cold but I can’t take it very seriously. I’ve just come from the area where people are not only ill but hungry too. Get well quickly.

Always I hope that sometime I’m not going to be too busy —that sometime I will be able to write a long letter without the feeling that I am playing hookey from work.

Right now with the grass coming up thickly and the mustard beginning to bloom, I am filled with a thousand little memory nostalgias. I’d like to think about them—about how the black birds build nests on the mustard stalks and how Glen Grave’s father was angry with us for tramping down his grain to get to the nests. And how six of us on a sunny morning solemnly burned our names on a fence picket with a burning glass—and said—“In fifty years we’ll come back and look at it.” But you know I did go back (it wasn’t fifty years though) and the picket was gone.

Such nonsense. I hope you are better now. It will be a good spring, I think.

love
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
March 7, 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

Dear Elizabeth:

I shouldn’t have repeated that for the sake of the letter but it was true enough in intention and quite unconscious. I guess unconscious is very correct as an evaluation of my condition. Just got back from another week in the field. The floods have aggravated the starvation and sickness. I went down for Life this time. Fortune wanted me to do an article for them but I won’t. I don’t like the audience. Then Life sent me down with a photographer from its staff and we took a lot of pictures of the people. They guarantee not to use it if they change it and will send me the proofs. They paid my expenses and will put up money for the help of some of these people.

I’m sorry but I simply can’t make money on these people. That applies to your query about an article for a national magazine. The suffering is too great for me to cash in on it. I hope this doesn’t sound either quixotic or martyrish to you. A short trip into the fields where the water is a foot deep in the tents and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because “the problem is so great that we can’t do anything about it.” So they do nothing. And we found a boy in jail for a felony because he stole two old radiators because his mother was starving to death and in stealing them he broke a little padlock on a shed. We’ll either spring him or the district attorney will do the rest of his life explaining.

But you see what I mean. It is the most heartbreaking thing in the world. If Life does use the stuff there will be lots of pictures and swell ones. It will give you an idea of the kind of people they are and the kind of faces. I break myself every time I go out because the argument that one person’s effort can’t really do anything doesn’t seem to apply when you come on a bunch of starving children and you have a little money. I can’t rationalize it for myself anyway. So don’t get me a job for a slick. I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this but I can best do it through newspapers.

I’m going to see the Secretary of Agriculture in a little while and try to find out for my own satisfaction anyway just how much of the government’s attitude is political and how much humanitarian. Then I’ll know what course to take.

I’m in a mess trying to catch up with things that have piled up in the week I was gone. And of course I was in the mud for three days and nights and I have a nice cold to beat, but I haven’t time right now for a cold so I won’t get a very bad one.

 

Sorry for the hectic quality of this letter. I am hectic and angry.

Thank you for everything.

Bye,
John

 

 

Life did not actually publish anything about the migrants’ camps till more than a year later, after The Grapes of Wrath had made its impact. In its issue of June 5, 1939, it ran a picture story with captions by Steinbeck, some of which were quotations from the novel.

 

“I’ve been writing on the novel [about vigilantes] but I’ve had to destroy it several times,” he wrote Elizabeth Otis shortly afterwards. “I don’t seem to know any more about writing a novel than I did ten years ago. You’d think I would learn. I suppose I could dash it off but I want this one to be a pretty good one. There’s another difficulty too. I’m trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong.”

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
May 2, 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

Your letters both to Carol and to me came this morning and were very welcome.

This is the first really free letter I have written for a long time. Yesterday or rather the day before yesterday I finished the first draft of this book. Now just the rewriting, but a lot of it because it is pretty badly done. It is short, just a few thousand over sixty thousand words. We’ll finish it and send it on and if you think it is no good we’ll burn it up and forget it.

It is a mean, nasty book and if I could make it nastier I would.

This morning I got the swellest letter of my life. From a man named Lemuel Gadberry, believe it or not, and he says he bought m and m [Of Mice and Men] and feels that he not only has been degraded in reading it but that he was cheated out of two dollars. I have just written him a long letter praising his high soul and offering to return his two dollars with six percent interest on receipt of the book, that or a copy of When Knighthood Was In Flower.

I have a very good working streak on and, when I finish this rewriting, I think perhaps I will do a few short stories. It is a long time since I have done any. I want to do a few essays too but not necessarily for publication. Feeling very literary these days with words crowding up to come tumbling out and the time between putting them down crowding with them like the forming eggs in a chicken or the spare fangs of a rattlesnake. But I like it even if the words are no good. It is still good fun to write them.

Bye, and
love to you all,
John

Word came that Of Mice and Men, the play, had been given the Critics’ Circle award. Steinbeck responded to the news with a telegram.

To the Critics’ Circle

TELEGRAM

LOS GATOS
APRIL 23, 1938

CRITICS CIRCLE, CARE ANNIE LAURIE WILLIAMS 18 EAST 41 ST NYC

GENTLEMEN: I HAVE ALWAYS CONSIDERED CRITICS AS AUTHORS NATURAL ENEMIES NOW I FEEL VERY MILLENIAL BUT A LITTLE TIMID TO BE LYING DOWN WITH THE LION THIS DISTURBANCE OF THE NATURAL BALANCE MIGHT CAUSE A PLAGUE OF PLAYWRIGHTS I AM HIGHLY HONORED BY YOUR GOOD OPINION BUT MY EGOTISTICAL GRATIFICATION IS RUINED BY A SNEAKING SUSPICION THAT GEORGE KAUFMAN AND THE CAST DESERVE THEM MORE THAN I. I DO HOWEVER TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THANKING YOU.

JOHN STEINBECK

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
May 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

There seem to be so many places for me to put my foot even when I try not to walk about very much. What was the matter with that telegram I sent to the Critics’ Circle? Annie Laurie seemed ashamed of it. I thought it was all right. Carol thought it was all right. Maybe it got mixed up in the sending. It wasn’t abject but I didn’t think a group of men as eminent as that would care for an abject one. I guess I just haven’t any social sense. So many things can happen. I have never submitted a novel to the Commonwealth Club here which gives a medal every year but Pat has. This year he forgot to or something and I understand that it is being spread that I think I am too good to compete in local things now. Just little things like that all the time. And this not going to New York to see this play which is being used everywhere now (it has got to the fourth-rate movie columnists by now). I’d like to have seen the play but I wouldn’t go six thousand miles to see the opening of the second coming of Christ. Why is it so damned important?

 

George Kaufman was offended. Coolness between the two men lasted for many years.

 

I have the letter from George Jean Nathan [President of the Critics’ Circle] but will not answer until the plaque comes. Now what in the world will I do with a plaque? Melt it down perhaps and buy a pair of shoes for someone.

I am sending you one of the sets of articles which were just printed from my articles on migrants. The proceeds go to help these people.

Thanks for the checks. What a terrible lot of money. But there’s some use for it all the time.

Bye,
John

To George Jean Nathan

[Los Gatos]
May 23 [1938]

Dear Mr. Nathan:

After some delay, the Critics’ Circle plaque arrived today. It is a very handsome thing. I thank the Circle again. I like to think there is a perfect line of conduct for every situation. I’ve never met any situation like this before. But I do remember a speech of appreciation made by a rider at a dinner where he had received a pair of silver spurs for a championship in ear notching and castrating calves. Cheered to his feet, the winner stood up blushing violently and made the following speech—“Aw shit, boys—Jesus Christ—why—god-dam it—oh! the hell with it,” and sat down to tremendous applause. You will find that this brief speech has in it every element of greatness in composition—beginning, middle, end, self-deprecation, a soaring quality in the middle and it ends not on a cynical or defeatist note but rather in a realization that nothing he could say could adequately convey his feeling.

It is a beautiful plaque, and I am very proud to have it.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

The vigilante novel was abandoned about this time and destroyed without ever being sent to McIntosh and Otis.

 

Still using the material he had gathered in the migrant camps, he now embarked on a new work, which, though it would remain for several months untitled, would become The Grapes of Wrath.

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
June I, 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

Your letter and $475 check arrived. I think this is the windup [of the New York run of Of Mice and Men] but Carol thinks there is one more [check]. However it is, we’ve had much more than we deserve. And with care it will keep us for a long, long time.

This is a very happy time. The new book is going well. Too fast. I’m having to hold it down. I don’t want it to go so fast for fear the tempo will be fast and this is a plodding, crawling book. So I’m holding it down to approximately six pages a day. That doesn’t mean anything about finishing time since perhaps fifty percent will be cut out. Anyway, it is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive all fall. I like it. I only feel whole and well when it is this way. I don’t yet understand what happened or why the bad book should have cleared the air so completely for this one. I am simply glad that it is so.

Norwegian rights pay more than British. Maybe the income tax is less.

John.

To Annie Laurie Williams

[Los Gatos]
[July 1938]

Dear Annie Laurie:

Your good letter came this morning. I am very much pleased that the cast will remain intact or nearly [for the road tour of Of Mice and Men]. I’m afraid George K. is angry with me for what he must think is a lack of interest. It isn’t, but I had this new book on my soul. When it is done I’ll be free to do a lot of things.

I am quite sure no picture company would want this new book whole and it is not for sale any other way. It pulls no punches at all and may get us all into trouble but if so—so. That’s the way it is. Think I’ll print a foreword warning sensitive people to let it alone. I took three days off over the fourth. Getting back to work today. I’ve just scratched the surface so far. Carol thinks it is pretty good.

Can you get M & M licensed in England? I doubt it for general showing.

Please tell George K. he can make the changes he wishes in script.

 

He was referring to the playing version for the cross-country tour. It was feared that sensibilities might prove too delicate for some of the play’s language, considered at the time dangerously strong for all but urban areas.

 

I hope Pat doesn’t lose money on the short stories. Competing with Hemingway isn’t my idea of good business. [Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories came out this year.]

I’ll bet it is hot there now. Thank goodness I’m not there. But once this work is done I might do anything. It’s the culmination of three years of work.

Have fun. I’m sick of holding a pen. I’ve done 2,200 words today. So long. Write often.

John

 

 

It began to be apparent that Pascal Covici’s firm, Covici-Friede, was having financial difficulties.

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
July 22, 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

Your letter came this morning. I hope to God that Pat survives.

Eight more days and if nothing happens I should have half of my first draft of this novel done. Again that is not to be told. I’m glad about it though. With crossed fingers, I should have the whole first draft done in about two months and a half. But I’ve been lucky this far.

In the event the worst happens to Pat I think it would be just as well to be ready. Please use your own judgment entirely in picking a new publisher. I have no choice. I have one or two dislikes but I don’t even know that they are fair. Get a Bradstreet report on whoever you pick. All things else being equal, pick the one who makes the highest offer. We’ll have to pick up a year of royalties if Pat goes bankrupt. I think that hereafter, if I can get it, it might be a good idea to get all the advance possible. Why shouldn’t we be getting the interest as well as the publisher? I’m not being grabby but printers practically always get paid. Writers are an afterthought.

Frankly this hasn’t worried me a bit. We have enough to eat on for a long time to come. It does stop negotiations we were making for a little ranch in the hills. Have to stop that until the thing clears or doesn’t. This place is getting built up and we have to move. Houses all around us now and so we will get back farther in the country. But next time we’ll be in the middle of fifty acres, not two. I can hear the neighbors’ stomachs rumbling. I hope to God Pat can do it and I will do anything to help him but hereafter I think the publisher will be the natural enemy. Pat is different.

Don’t worry about it. We love you too and trust you and your judgment completely.

Bye. I’m sorry this is being a bother to you.

John

Covici-Friede went bankrupt and Pascal Covici, taking John Steinbeck with him, joined The Viking Press as a senior editor. Both men would remain with this publishing house for the rest of their lives.

 

Now the Steinbecks bought the ranch near Los Gatos that they had been negotiating for earlier. They lived in the existing ranch structure while they built a new house.

To Mr. and Mrs. Louis Paul

POSTCARD

[Los Gatos]
[September 1938]

Dear Louis and Mary:

We have a title at last. See how you like it. The Grapes of Wrath from Battle Hymn of the Republic. I think it is swell. Do you? Now both of us are working. Carol started typing from handwritten ms. She hopes to catch up before I am done. And at the rate she goes she surely will. Then we’ll have a clear copy to work on. I’m even working today—Sat. Hope my energy holds out. Another 6 weeks should do it.

Love
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
September 10, 1938

Dear Elizabeth:

Your letter came this morning—Monday. I don’t much understand the meaning of this new contract arrangement but with you there, thank heaven I don’t have to. About the title —Pat wired that he liked it. And I too am glad because I like it better all the time. I think it is Carol’s best title so far. I like it because it is a march and this book is a kind of march—because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and because in reference to this book it has a large meaning. And I like it because people know the Battle Hymn who don’t know the Star Spangled Banner.

You are quite right, we are nearly nuts. The foundations of the new house are going in. Carol is typing mss (2nd draft) and I’m working on first. I can’t tell when I will be done but Carol will have second done almost at the same time I have first. And—this is a secret—the 2nd draft is so clear and good that it, carefully and clearly corrected, will be what I submit. Carol’s time is too valuable to do purely stenographic work. It will be very easy to read and what more can they want? And still I can’t tell how much longer it will be nor how much time and I don’t intend to think about it but I am fairly sure that another sixty days will see it done. I hope so. I’ve been sitting down so long I’m getting office spread. And I’m desperately tired but I want to finish. And meanwhile I feel as though shrapnel were bursting about my head. I only hope the book is some good. Can’t tell yet at all. And I can’t tell whether it is balanced. It is a slow, plodding book but I don’t think it is dull.

I haven’t left this desk since March, what with the other book and this one. When I’m done I’ll probably go nuts like a spring lamb. Never have worked so hard and so long in my life. Probably good for me but I’m soft now physically and must get in some hard digging work when I finish. To harden up.

Elizabeth, I wish you would come out here to help us celebrate its finish. Couldn’t you and Larry [Lawrence Kiser, Elizabeth Otis’s husband] come out for Thanksgiving? We would have fun. Probably have to camp more or less but it would be a fine thing. You got very little rest this summer.

Love to all,
John

To Pascal Covici

Los Gatos
[October 1938]
Monday

Dear Pat:

We were in S. F. for a few days. Just got back today and found your letter waiting. We’ve been camping in the old kitchen. Carol hasn’t been able to type because of the mess. Today, however, our rooms are done and she began work. I don’t know how long it will take her. There have been delays about the house. I note your suggestion that I send pieces of the ms. Really I’d rather not. I want it all together and will send it all just as soon as I can. If you aren’t planning to publish before April, there’ll be plenty of time. But I’d rather not split it up.

Of course I would like to believe your enthusiasm justified. I’m still tired and it seems. pretty bad. And I am sure it will not be a popular book. I feel very sure of that. I think to the large numbers of readers it will be an outrageous book. I only hope it is better than it seems to me now. I’m rested enough now to start revisions. We’ll get it done just as soon as possible.

Love to Dorothy and Paco [Covici’s wife and his son, Pascal, Jr.] and to you

John

So convinced was Steinbeck that The Grapes of Wrath would have no success that he wrote Elizabeth Otis:

 

“Look, Elizabeth, Pat talked in terms of very large first editions of this next book. I want to go on record as advising against it. This will not be a popular book. And it will be a loss to do anything except to print a small edition and watch and print more if there are more orders. Pat is darling and of course his statements are flattering but he is just a bit full of cheese.”

To Elizabeth Otis

[Los Gatos]
[1938]

Dear Elizabeth:

This afternoon by express we are sending you the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath. We hope to God you like it. Will you let us know first that you received it and second what you think of it. I forgot to put the enclosed in [the words and music of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”]. I should like the whole thing to go in as a page at the beginning. All the verses and the music. This is one of the great songs of the world, and as you read the book you will realize that the words have a special meaning in this book. And I should like the music to be put there in case anyone, any one forgets. The title, Battle Hymn of the Republic, in itself has a special meaning in the light of this book.

Anyway there it is, and we will be hanging on your opinions because we know so well they will be honest and untouched by publicity.

Love to all of you,
John

Elizabeth Otis wrote in November that she and her husband would come out to California to visit the Steinbecks.

 

“We are crazy with joy,” he wrote her. They arrived in December.

To Pascal Covici

Los Gatos
January i, 1939

Dear Pat:

I’m laid low for the first time in twenty years. Have to stay in bed for two weeks. Metabolic rate shockingly low. I think I worked myself past the danger point on that book. Broke out in a neuritis and only a basal metabolism test showed the reason. Anyway I’m in bed and can get some letters written for the first time in ages.

We met Elizabeth and Larry in L.A. and brought them up. Enjoyed having them so much. E. and I went over some parts of the book and made a few minor changes. I’ve never heard whether you like the book so well now that it is finished. I think it is a pretty good job technically. At least I’m not as down-hearted about it as I usually am after finishing.

I hope our wire made sense. The point is this—The fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary. They try to give it the communist angle. However, The Battle Hymn is American and intensely so. Further, every American child learns it and then forgets the words. So if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene from the beginning. Besides it is one of the finest hymns I know.

By the way—are there any cheap editions of In Dubious Battle? It has been made required reading in a number of English courses of the University of California and one of the Professors asked and I didn’t know. I seem to remember that Blue Ribbon was going to do it. Did they?

It is beautiful here. I can look out the window at the valley below. But I want to get out and plant things.

Write when you have time. It’s so long since I’ve been able to write a letter that I’m rusty at it.

love to all
John

 

 

Later, in February, as he returned the proofs, he was to insist once again:

 

“I meant, Pat, to print all all all the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music if you can.”

To Pascal Covici

Los Gatos
January [3] 1939

Dear Pat:

Your wire came this morning and I was going to answer it but it is hard to say anything in a wire and besides the clerks have been getting things pretty garbled lately. Elizabeth and I went over the mss and made some changes. I made what I could. There are some I cannot make. When the tone or overtone of normal speech requires a word, it is going in no matter what the audience thinks. This book wasn’t written for delicate ladies. If they read it at all they’re messing in something not their business. I’ve never changed a word to fit the prejudices of a group and I never will. The words I changed were those which Carol and Elizabeth said stopped the reader’s mind. I’ve never wanted to be a popular writer—you know that. And those readers who are insulted by normal events or language mean nothing to me. Look over the changes and I think they will be the ones you made. The epithet shit-heads used on the people in the hamburger stand, I will not change. There is no term like it. And if it stops the reader the hell with him. It means something precise and I won’t trade preciseness even if it’s colloquial preciseness.

 

Elizabeth Otis recalls that one of the purposes of her visit was to see if he would compromise on some of the strong language. The publishers had urged her to, and she asked him if it would be all right if she found a way to remove offending words while retaining the tone of the characters’ speech. He said she could try. She sat at a desk going over the colloquial obscenities while Steinbeck lay on a couch, in great pain from sciatica. Eventually she produced a version that satisfied him. She had promised to telegraph these modifications to New York so that the book could go to the printer. Dictating the long telegram over the telephone, Miss Otis had to specify the four-letter words for which she was sending substitutes. But the Western Union operator balked. She couldn’t possibly send such language in a telegram, she said. Miss Otis no longer remembers what arguments she used, but she was very firm and finally successful. The proofs were corrected.

 

Steinbeck continues to Covici:

 

Now—about all the other books being practice. It isn’t true. I’ve been working three years on this book. In a sense, everything one does is practice for something else. But Pat, let this book ride or fall on its own story. I think the subject is large enough to get by. Actually if there has been one rigid rule in my books, it is that I as me had no right in them. And if that is so of the text, let it be so of the publicity. You really don’t need me in it. If you do—then the book is a failure.

I’m getting along pretty well. Should be let up in a week or so. It was a surprise to me when I went down. Haven’t been sick since I was sixteen.

I think I wrote everything else in the other letter.

love to you and
Dorothy and Paco
John

On January 9, 1939, Pascal Covici wrote Steinbeck that he, Harold Guinzburg, President of The Viking Press, and Marshall Best, Managing Editor, had been “emotionally exhausted after reading The Grapes of Wrath. Harold Guinzburg had said, “I would not change a single comma in the whole book,” and Marshall Best had called it “the most important piece of fiction on our list” as he announced that the initial advertising appropriation would be $10,000. “It seemed like a kind of sacrilege to suggest revisions in so grand a book,” Covici went on, but:

 

“We felt that we would not be good publishers if we failed to point out to you any weaknesses or faults that struck us. One of these is the ending.

 

“Your idea is to end the book on a great symbolic note, that life must go on and will go on with a greater love and sympathy and understanding for our fellowmen. Nobody could fail to be moved by the incident of Rose of Sharon giving her breast to the starving man, yet, taken as the finale of such a book with all its vastness and surge, it struck us on reflection as being all too abrupt. It seems to us that the last few pages need building up. The incident needs leading up to, so that the meeting with the starving man is not so much an accident or chance encounter, but more an integral part of the saga.”

 

In a postscript, he added:

“Marshall has just called my attention to the fact that de Maupassant in one of his short stories ‘MidSummer Idyll’ has a woman give her breast to a starving man in a railway train. Is it important?”

To Pascal Covici

Los Gatos
January 16, 1939

Dear Pat:

I have your letter today. And I am sorry but I cannot change that ending. It is casual—there is no fruity climax, it is not more important than any other part of the book—if there is a symbol, it is a survival symbol not a love symbol, it must be an accident, it must be a stranger, and it must be quick. To build this stranger into the structure of the book would be to warp the whole meaning of the book. The fact that the Joads don’t know him, don’t care about him, have no ties to him—that is the emphasis. The giving of the breast has no more sentiment than the giving of a piece of bread. I’m sorry if that doesn’t get over. It will maybe. I’ve been on this design and balance for a long time and I think I know how I want it. And if I’m wrong, I’m alone in my wrongness. As for the Maupassant story, I’ve never read it but I can’t see that it makes much difference. There are no new stories and I wouldn’t like them if there were. The incident of the earth mother feeding by the breast is older than literature. You know that I have never been touchy about changes, but I have too many thousands of hours on this book, every incident has been too carefully chosen and its weight judged and fitted. The balance is there. One other thing—I am not writing a satisfying story. I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.

And still one more thing—I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written.

This letter sounds angry. I don’t mean it to be. I know that books lead to a strong deep climax. This one doesn’t except by implication and the reader must bring the implication to it. If he doesn’t, it wasn’t a book for him to read. Throughout I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.

I seem to be getting well slowly. The pain is going away. Nerves still pretty tattered but rest will stop that before too long. I fret pretty much at having to stay in bed. Guess I was pretty close to a collapse when I finally went to bed. I feel the result of it now.

Love to you all,
John

To the McIntosh and Otis staff

[Los Gatos]
January [20] 1939

Dear All:

Actually I’ve been in bed two weeks and the pain getting worse instead of better. This afternoon I went to an osteopath. I have always thought them little better than witch doctors. He said a vertebra was out, flipped it, and the pain went away instantly. I’m holding my breath but that’s six hours ago and it isn’t back yet. I’ll go to him again tomorrow. Pray for me. That pain was getting me nuts.

Mavis’s letter came today with check [royalty from Of Mice and Men on tour]. I was surprised to hear the show was in Philadelphia. Wonder if they are ever coming out here. After the fair opens there will be thousands of stray visitors in S.F. And the coast would welcome that play I’m pretty sure. The check was lots larger this week too.

I feel so good tonight I could yell. It’s the first time without pain in six weeks and I’ll have the first good sleep in that time tonight.

Carol is planting things and I, big slug, just look on. We put 27 goldfish in the new pool today.

Guess that’s all. I wonder if you could get any kind of itinerary from the Sam Harris office. Maybe they haven’t one.

Love to you all,
John

To The National Institute of Arts and Letters

Los Gatos
January 31, 1939

Dear Mrs. Vanamee:

I am grateful for the honor of having been elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Please convey my thanks to the committee.

Sincerely
John Steinbeck

 

 

In February, Pascal Covici asked Steinbeck for the original manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath.

To Pascal Covici

[Los Gatos]
[Received
February 33, 1939]

Dear Pat:

I keep having to say no all the time and I hate it. It’s about the manuscript this time. You see I feel that this is Carol’s book so I gave her the manuscript. For myself I don’t like anything personal to intrude on this or any other book but this one in particular. I think a book should be itself, complete and in print. What went into the writing of it is no business of the reader. I disapprove of having my crabbed hand exposed. The fact that my writing is small may be a marvel but it is also completely unimportant to the book. No, I want this book to be itself with no history and no writer.

Carol has other reasons for not wanting it ever known that the ms exists. Those people who beg things for Spain are after us a good deal. And Carol doesn’t want to give this ms away and she knows the campaign will start if any attention is drawn to the script. And of course it is hers.

I’m sorry Pat, but do you really think we’ve lost a single reader by refusing to do the usual things? By not speaking at luncheons do you think I’ve lost sales? I don’t. And if it were true I’d rather lose that kind of readers. Let’s just keep the whole personal emphasis out. It can be done. I haven’t been to a tea or a dinner in my life and I’m quite sure no one minds, people forget. Let’s have no personality at all. I think the book has enough of its own to carry it. I hope you don’t mind too much. love to Dorothy and to Paco John

 

 

In a later letter to Elizabeth Otis he again refers to the use of the “Battle Hymn” in the make-up of the book:

 

“This song business is very funny. I don’t know what is the matter with Pat. But it makes me wonder whether he got the dedication of this book straight. Will you please see that he did. It is supposed to read:

to Carol
who willed this book
to Tom
who lived it.”

 

Tom was Tom Collins, a psychologist who managed a government camp for migrants near Weedpatch in the Bakersfield area.

To Pascal Covici

[Los Gatos]
[Received March 31, 1939]

Dear Pat:

The books came today [advance copies of The Grapes of Wrath] and I am immensely pleased with them. It is a good job. But what with family and relatives I’ll have to have about five more copies. Will you send them please and bill me? I really need them to prevent hurt feelings.

I think the way you laid in the Hymn on the end papers is swell. The pageage is less than you contemplated, isn’t it? And I’m glad. 850 pages is a frightening length. You know I would like to see the New York reviews. Would you please save them for me? I understand Joe Jackson is going to do it for the Herald Tribune. I’m glad of that. I guess that is all. I just wanted to tell you how much I like the book.

John

 

 

Royalty checks continued to surprise him. “What an awful lot of money,” he wrote Elizabeth Otis on April 17.

 

“I don’t think I ever saw so much in one piece before. Well, Carol will squirrel it away for the lean times that are surely coming.”

 

He had been reading reviews:

 

“Do you notice that nearly every reviewer hates the general chapters? They hate to be told anything outright. It should be concealed in the text. Fortunately I’m not writing for reviewers. And other people seem to like the generals. It’s interesting. I think probably it is the usual revolt against something they aren’t used to.”

 

And next day:

 

“Thanks for the check. I don’t expect these things and they are always surprises. The telegrams and telephones—all day long—speak ... speak... speak, like hungry birds. Why the hell do people insist on speaking? The telephone is a thing of horror. And the demands for money—scholarships, memorial prizes. One man wants 47,000 dollars to buy a newspaper which will be liberal—this is supposed to run with a checkbook. Carol turned down the most absurd offer of all yesterday, to write a script in Hollywood. Carol—over the telephone: ‘What the hell would we do with $5,000 a week? Don’t bother us!’ ”

To Carl Wilhelmson

Los Gatos
[June 7, 1939]

Dear Carl:

Of course I’d like to see you. The ranch is wonderful now and I resent any time spent away from it. Cherries are just getting ripe and the vegetable garden is finally supplying food and we make our own butter and cheese and have lots of milk to drink. I bought a cow and a neighbor takes care of it delivering to us three quarts a day which gives us all the cream and butter we can use. It’s really pretty fine. And the cow just eats pasturage that would go to waste if she weren’t there.

I did a silly thing yesterday, coughed hard and wrenched my back. Down in Salinas there was a man who sneezed and broke his right arm. Everyone laughed to beat hell but his arm was broken just the same. And I get no sympathy about this back either.

I’m glad you like this last book. It was a terrible amount of work. Never worked so hard in my life nor so long before. And I found something I didn’t know about and that is exhaustion. I never thought I could get that way. But I found I could.

Our Toby Dog got to thinking too much and one day he just walked away and never came back. The Thoreau of the dog world, I guess. Now we have another dog. A big Dobermann who doesn’t think much at all and is much happier for it. Also, having short hair, he doesn’t get ticks and burrs.

Yes, please do come down but remember about calling because I would hate to miss you.

affectionately,
john

To Dick Pearce OF THE PRESS CLUB, SAN FRANCISCO

Los Gatos
[June 1939]

Dear Mr. Pearce:

I’m awfully glad of your letter and I wish I could accept your invitation. But I’m working at a job that doesn’t let me stay still long enough to accept anything. Thanks just the same. One of the reasons I would like to accept is that I would like to be in the Press Club and not be thrown out. The only time I ever was there I was thrown out. Happened this way. Dick Oliver and I were in shiny evening clothes and no money and no parties and he said he was a member of the Press Club and we could go sit there until our bus left. It was 2:30 A. M. then. And I thanked him and it was raining. So we went in and it was nice and a fire was burning as I remember. But the attendant didn’t remember Dick and couldn’t find his name on the list of members. He insisted that we go out again and meant it. So we went out. And as you probably know if you’ve ever been put out of a place, you feel a kind of unpleasant feeling about it and I’d like some time to sit by your fire with that fine feeling that no one was going to toss me out. All this was years ago but Jesus, it was a wet night.

Again thanks for your invitation. I wish I could go.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

 

By this time film rights to Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath had been sold, and work on the screenplays of both was going forward.

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
June 22, 1939

Dear Elizabeth:

This whole thing is getting me down and I don’t know what to do about it. The telephone never stops ringing, telegrams all the time, fifty to seventy-five letters a day all wanting something. People who won’t take no for an answer sending books to be signed. I don’t know what to do. Would you mind phoning Viking and telling them not to forward any more letters but to send them to your office? I’ll willingly pay for the work to be done but even to handle a part of the letters now would take a full time secretary and I will not get one if it is the last thing I do. Something has to be worked out or I am finished writing. I went south to work and I came back to find Carol just about hysterical. She had just been pushed beyond endurance. There is one possibility and that is that I go out of the country. I thought this thing would die down but it is only getting worse day by day.

I hope to be home for about five weeks now but I doubt it. I brought [Eugene] Solow and [Lewis] Milestone [author of screenplay and director of film of Of Mice and Men] home with me and we are working on a final script of Mice and it sounds very good to me.

About the Digest thing, I really would be happier if it weren’t done [an abridgement of The Grapes of Wrath]. I don’t like digests. If I could have written it shorter I would have, and even a chunk wouldn’t be good particularly since Pat refused to give material to anybody else but S.R.L. [Saturday Review of Literature] and thereby made a hell of a lot of people mad at me.

I saw Johnson in Hollywood [Nunnally Johnson, who was writing the film script of The Grapes of Wrath] and he is going well and apparently they intend to make the picture straight, at least so far, and they sent a producer into the field with Tom Collins and he got sick at what he saw and they offered Tom a job as technical assistant which is swell because he’ll howl his head off if they get out of hand.

See you all soon, I hope.

Love,
John

To Carlton A. Sheffield

Los Gatos
June 23, 1939

Dear Juk:

I got home three days ago for a little while and found about five hundred letters that had to be answered. So I have been answering them as quickly as possible and have saved yours until last so that I could give some leisure to it, and leisure is a thing I have almost lost track of. Funny darned thing because I have such a fine flair for laziness. The heat is on me now and really going strong. Remember when I used to like to get mail so much that I even tried to get on sucker lists? Well, I wish them days was back.

Carl Wilhelmson phoned that he wanted to come down Sunday. I’ll be glad to see him. He is very changed. Quite gay and looks fine and has filled out. Marriage has been good for him. Haven’t seen anybody else. Toby Street had a fortieth birthday party and I went to it and saw Bob Cathcart there.

Yes, the Associated Farmers have tried to make me retract things by very sly methods. Unfortunately for them the things are thoroughly documented and the materials turned over to the La Follette Committee and when it was killed by pressure groups all evidence went to the Attorney General. So when they write and ask for proof, I simply ask them to ask the Senate to hold open hearings of the Civil Liberty Committee and they will get immediate documentary proof of my statements although some of them may go to jail as a result of it. And you have no idea how quickly that stops the argument. They can’t shoot me now because it would be too obvious and because I have placed certain informations in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover in case I take a nose dive. So I think I am personally safe enough except for automobile accidents etc. and rape and stuff like that so I am a little careful not to go anywhere alone nor to do anything without witnesses. Seems silly but I have been carefully instructed by people who know the ropes.

 

Many years later he wrote to his friend Chase Horton:

 

“Let me tell you a story. When The Grapes of Wrath got loose, a lot of people were pretty mad at me. The undersheriff of Santa Clara County was a friend of mine and he told me as follows—‘Don’t you go into any hotel room alone. Keep records of every minute and when you are off the ranch travel with one or two friends but particularly, don’t stay in a hotel alone.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. He said, ‘Maybe I’m sticking my neck out but the boys got a rape case set up for you. You get alone in a hotel and a dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream and you try to talk yourself out of that one. They won’t touch your book but there’s easier ways.’ ”

 

So they have gone to the whispering campain (how in hell do you spell that) but unfortunately that method only sells more books. I’m due to topple within the next two years but I have that little time left to me. And in many ways I’ll be glad when the turn of the thing comes. As it must inevitably.

Hope it isn’t too hot up there.

love
jon

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
July 20, 1939
Thursday

Dear Elizabeth:

Will you tell Pat please, that if I ever refer anything to him by a second person I want him to refuse it. If I want it I’ll ask him myself.

The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. This made all the papers. Tom Collins says that when his Okies read this smear they were so mad they wanted to burn something down.

I’m frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand—I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy.

About the pictures—I don’t know. [Nunnally] Johnson wrote that he was nearly finished with script. The Hays office will be the tough nut since it is owned outright in N. Y. But the forces that want the picture made are rallying and they are both numerous and voluble. Meanwhile the Associated Farmers keep up a steady stream of accusation that I am first a liar and second a communist. Their vilification has a quality of hysteria too.

I shudder for you in the heat. I detest the New York heat.

Love to you all,

John

To Elizabeth Otis

Los Gatos
October 1939

Dear Elizabeth:

It’s a beautiful morning and I am just sitting in it and enjoying it. Everything is ripe now, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts. Carol has made pickles and chutney, canned tomatoes. Prunes and raisins are on the drying trays. The cellar smells of apples and wine. The berries are ripe and every bird in the country is here—slightly tipsy and very noisy. The frogs are singing about a rain coming but they can be wrong. It’s nice.

Pat is in S.F. We’ll go up and get him on Friday and bring him down here. Will also see the Jacksons—first time in months.

Carol is well and rested. And Grapes dropped from the head of the list to second place out here and about time too. It is far too far when Jack Benny mentions it in his program. Altogether may be some kind of new existence is opening up. I don’t know. The last year has been a nightmare all in all. But now I’m ordering a lot of books to begin study. And I’ll work in the laboratory.

I should go out and shoot some bluejays. They are driving the birds badly. Mean things they are who just raise hell apparently with nothing but mischief in their minds. But I’ll wait until Carol wakes up before I start shooting.

One nice thing to think of is the speed of obscurity. Grapes is not first now. In a month it will be off the list and in six months I’ll be forgotten.

Love,
John