1955 to 1957

Stembuck “I must say I do have fun with my profession....”

1955 Pipe Dream (musical adaptation of Sweet Thursday) produced. Bought summer cottage in Sag Harbor, Long Island.

 

 

1956 Covered both national conventions for Louisville Courier-Journal and syndicate.

 

 

1957 The Short Reign of Pippin IV published. Correspondent in Europe, again for Louisville Courier-Journal and syndicate. Began research on Malory and Morte d’Arthur.

When the Steinbecks had rented the house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, during the summer of 1953, he was immediately attracted to the village. It was for him an East Coast equivalent of the Monterey Peninsula. In the spring of 1955, he bought a small house outside the village, in an oak grove on a cove. It marked his complete acceptance of the East Coast as his permanent home.

To Webster F. Street

Sag Harbor
July 5, 1955

Dear Toby:

This afternoon, we are taking our boat off Montauk Point to fish for blues. They are fine fighting fish and wonderful to eat and they are said to be running well right now. It is about a forty-five minute run in our boat which will do thirty-four miles an hour if it has to. It is a sea skiff, lapstrake, twenty feet long and eight feet of beam and a hundred horse power Grey marine engine. I could cross the Atlantic in her if I could carry the gasoline. Has a convertible top like a car so that you can put it up when green water comes over the bow. Also it only draws eighteen inches so we can take it into little coves and very near the shore if only we watch the charts for rocks and depth. This is fabulous boating country and fishing country too.

We bring them home alive and cook them while they are still kicking and are they delicious. My fear of starvation disappears when I am near the ocean. I figure I can always catch my dinner. And the Atlantic is very much richer in varieties than the Pacific. Lobsters, clams, crabs, oysters and many kinds of fish. I really love it out here. Am going to winterize this little house so I can come up when it is cold. My little harbor freezes over and then you fish through the ice. The house needs double walls and an oil furnace but I’ll do a lot of it myself.

I am actually losing some stomach working around here and haven’t felt so good in years. Maybe I shall come to a healthy old age rather than a sickly one. Best of all, maybe I shall not come to any old age at all. I remember how Ed Ricketts used to be haunted by thought of age. He was neurotic about it. I’ve often thought that if he hadn’t been killed he would have had a miserable time of it because I do not think he could have accepted change. In himself, I mean.

You know, Toby, I notice something in you that is also true in me. You are sharply critical of any theatre you see. I am also when I don’t see much of it but I become much kinder and accepting when I see a lot of it and I become kindest when I have a show myself. Have you ever gone through the putting of a show together with all the work and hope and sweat? I guess that is why professionals are the best audience in the world. Oscar Hammerstein says that when you buy a ticket to the theatre you have more or less contracted to go along with it and furnish your part to the general illusion. God knows it is a hard enough medium and when it clicks it is just great.

The wind is coming up. We’re going to have a really rough trip this afternoon and that is when I really love my boat. It is such a good sea boat, just kind of loves itself into the waves instead of fighting them. I guess it is the same hull the Vikings used and they got around.

That’s all for this time. I have to write some letters of refusal. I get asked to speak more damned places and word doesn’t seem to get around that I don’t ever speak any place about anything.

love to you
and all of yours
John

To Mr. and Mrs. Elia Kazan IN ISTANBUL

New York
[1955]

Dear Molly and Gadg:

We think you are writing way beyond the call of duty. The picture with the beard came in this morning—formidable. Do you think you will keep it when you get back? The trip sounds fine. I do hope you won’t let any business interfere with your trip. I am taking care of all that for you. I have signed you up to direct two plays and I hope you like them. Meanwhile, I am casting and my sincere wish is that you will approve of the people I am getting. I have agreed for you to go into rehearsal on the first one, Dog Island, June 18th. You should be ready for the second one, Blindness Alley, early in September. Do you want me to take on anything else for you after that?

I’ve made a few changes in your office which I know will please you. I wallpapered it with a gay, flowered pattern and painted the ceiling black. Then I took out all those ugly wood cabinets and put in two breakfronts of Chinese chippendale. It makes the office seem kind of airy. I removed that curved couch which was giving me round shoulders and put in a double bed which speeded up casting immensely. Along the front (Times Square side) I put a row of windowboxes with red geraniums. It brightens the whole neighborhood.

Marie [Kazan’s secretary] has made a great comeback. She was married last week and about time. I’m going to be godfather. She married a real nice boy in the artificial limb trade and she seems to be very happy. He gave her a sterling silver kneecap for a wedding present. In your absence I exercise the droit de seigneur. I hate to see beautiful old customs lapse.

Well, old pal, as you can see I’m standing in for you. Don’t worry about a thing. The crack down the front of your house is not serious at all. Molly’s mother just got excited about it the way women will, but I showed her how to stuff it with newspapers and practically no draft gets in now.

We both send love. This may be the last time I can catch you. Don’t take any wooden drachma.

John

To Waverly Scott ABOUT TO BECOME ENGAGED

Sag Harbor
July 8, 1955

Dear Way:

This letter is just as private as you want to make it. You can do with it what you want including what you just thought of.

Everyone in the world is going to give you advice. That is not my intention. I always suspect advice because the advisor is usually the least equipped person to give it, i.e. child counsellors who have no children, marriage helpers who have never married.

I have a feeling, although this association is pretty damned sexy that it is also pretty carefully thought out. Many times when it was considered that you were romantically stunned, you were just sleepy.

I would like to ask you certain questions and I don’t want to know the answers. They are things drawn out of my own messy past. If I had known about them then I probably would have done exactly the things I did, and yet the answers to them bore little disasters.

You know of course without my telling you that no two people can ever like each other all the time under all circumstances. Also, it is equally true that if you know everything that is going to happen to you, you wouldn’t get married at all.

I always thought that the marriage was between me and the girl I was marrying and that it isn’t anybody’s business. And this was true except that anybody makes it his business. You think you are going in as an individual, cut off and free and gradually you find that you have a trail on you like a comet and that the other party has too. You don’t lose these trails. There is no way to. I think the service says, “Forsaking all others—” but no one forsakes all others. And doesn’t the Old Testament say that first and final loyalty is to wife and husband? That also is not possible. Families have a way of sticking around and background does too.

My questions are simple and terrible. They are not personal and they don’t have to do with Jim. Therefore you can show this letter to him if you wish or if you think well.

1. After the hay, (and believe me I am not knocking it, I love it) is the other person fun? Under ideal conditions the very best time is after when you are fulfilled and content and open. Sex is a kind of war but the quiet time after, if there is love and interest, is about the only time when a man and woman get together and become one thing. Then they merge and their minds as well as their bodies are a unit. This doesn’t happen too often unfortunately but it is one of the diagnostics of success. If it is that way then there is a chance.

2. You can get around and accept big things in another person. It is the tiny things that drive you crazy. Carol picked at her finger nails all of the time and knowing it bothered me she did it more, not out of meanness but simply because she couldn’t control it. I suppose it was unconscious punishment of me for things in me that bothered her. Odors are curious things too. Elaine’s skin smells to me like new grass, a lovely smell. But I knew a girl whose skin smelled like earth under an old house. It bothered me but I thought I could ignore it or get used to it, but the fact of the matter is that you can’t ignore anything. Small things do not disappear. They grow. And small things in yourself grow to the other person. For instance your chewing ice irritates me. If I were marrying you it would irritate me increasingly. And being mad about something else, I might put all the irritation on the ice chewing. Do you see what I mean?

3. This question has to do with families. You may think you can get away from them but you can’t. They are part of the trail of the comet. Do you like Jim’s family to the point that you can associate with them indefinitely? Do they like you or do they want to change you? You see Jim is not just about to abandon his mother when he marries you any more than you are about to abandon yours. Unconsciously a mother is always a danger to a marriage whether she is or not.

4. This is a snob question but it should be asked because everybody is a snob to some degree. Do you approve of Jim socially? Do you approve of Jim’s family intellectually and socially? The only way you can test yourself in this question is to ask whether there is anyone in the world or any group in the world to whom you would hesitate in introducing Jim or Jim’s family—Mrs. Roosevelt? Laurence Olivier? Princess Margaret? Munna [her grandmother, Zachary Scott’s mother]? Mrs. Bacon [a teacher]? Adlai Stevenson?

Does Jim approve of you socially? Does his family approve of you? Would they hesitate in introducing you to anyone in any field? Don’t forget your recent background is actors, gypsies and vagrants. Could they be shy and embarrassed about Zack who is an actor or me who am a writer, and both of these trades are unusual.

5. This is an outside question. If Jim should by illness or accident become incapable of sex for an extended period, would you find him attractive? Are you jealous of him? Do you resent affairs he may have had in the past? Does he resent affairs you may have had in the past? If you were ill and not capable of sex for an extended period, would he find you fun?

6. Jim has to make a living. In a way this is a large part of his life. He has to do it in his own way and within his capacities. Since you will both have to live largely on his efforts, this becomes your business too. Are you capable of going along with it, helping with it?

In the event that you should in the future find that keeping house and participating in Jim’s work were not enough for you, would you be capable of taking up some other work or enthusiasm and would Jim tolerate this? There can be much more violent jealousies of interests than of people.

I hope you won’t take this letter as one of disparagement. I think this marriage has as good a chance as any of succeeding and a much better chance than most. Jim is a man and that is a very great thing, to be a man, and it is a handy thing in a marriage.

There is only one thing about the wedding I could wish and that is a completely selfish one having nothing to do with your marriage but only with my own participation in the social end of it. I wish you could put it off until Christmas or a little after. We have this show with which I have to be constantly. Elaine naturally will want to be with me and it would limit our participation.

You don’t have to answer this, by the way.

love john

The engagement did not take place.

To Webster F. Street

New York
September 23 [1955]

Dear Toby:

Summer is over and I am always glad. Now the cool weather is coming and that’s my favorite time. We love our little place on Long Island but I love New York too. The show [Pipe Dream] is in rehearsal and Lord! it’s a good show. Fine score and book and wonderful direction and cast. I was standing with Oscar Hammerstein yesterday when the lines about the Webster F. Street Lay Away Plan came up. And it occurs to me that I have never asked your permission to use your name. Do you mind? It’s a lovely line and I would hate to drop it and besides it kind of ties you in with the show. You know in South Pacific Mary Martin took the name of her oldest friend. In the show within a show she says—“The dialogue was written by Bessie May Sue Ella Yeager.” Well Bessie May Sue Ella Yeager used to come up from Texas every three months just to hear Mary Martin declaim her name. I hope you will let me keep your name in this show as a kind of good luck piece.

This is just a note because I am working on a book in the morning and going to rehearsals in the afternoon and it’s a pretty full life. But please give me permission to use your name. You won’t be ashamed I’m sure.

love to all there—
John

To Carlton A. Sheffield

New York
September 23, 1955

Dear Dook:

I’m told it is an ugly business to answer a letter right away. But if I don’t, it is likely I never will. Yours came this morning and I do the ugly thing about it.

Your remarks about elastic time caught me with the same thought after a fairly quiet summer. We have a little shack on the sea out on the tip of Long Island at Sag Harbor. It’s a whaling town or was and we have a small boat and lots of oak trees and the phone never rings. We run there whenever we need a rest—no neighbors, and fish and clams and crabs and mussels right at the door step. I just got it this spring and I love it. Anyway the summer zipped by. But everything zips by. The pressures come and go. Or maybe it is that sometimes they get me and sometimes they don’t. Things don’t change really. I am just as restless as ever. And I’m just as scared of my own craft—and attracted to it also. You say you don’t know what I’m getting at. Neither do I. I just write what comes into my head and maybe sometimes it’s lousy but it’s the only thing I know to do. I write lots—perhaps too much but I never had any sense of proportion. I eat too much and drink too much and screw too much also. It’s all part of the same pattern and I don’t question it any more.

I’m starting a new book and it is fun. They are all painful fun while I am doing them. I have a show in rehearsal too. It is a musical and I love to see them put it together. It’s a mystery to me how they do it. The dancers and the singers and the actors. I am very much the spectator in this one. Such pretty people—such pretty girls. We have some show girls who are perfectly exquisite. I’m not afraid of pretty girls as I once was and these kids are real warm and pleasant.

I know my life seems restless and nervous to you and maybe it is. But you were never lazy and I am so lazy that I have to work very hard. Our social life is very easy. Now and then we have people to dinner and we go to dinner now and then. We have a television but never turn it on. Now and then we go to the theatre or to a concert but mostly we have conversation and reading and it’s not a bad life and it’s going by awfully fast.

It’s been a long time since I have been west. Funny that it seems strange and a little foreign to me now. It’s a kind of a sad thing to me that I don’t much want to go back. You get tied to where you are I guess. And instead of the Grove cottage I have the Sag Harbor cottage. But I’ve never seen a national convention so next year I’m going to cover both of them—probably for the Louisville Courier-Journal—and I’ll hope to see you then. We kind of plan to drive around some and see relatives and friends. I’m having fun doing some little pieces for Punch—real crazy ones but the English seem to like them and I like doing them.

Must stop and do some work. It was so good to get your letter. Do it more often—won’t you?

love
John

 

[Marginal note] That eminence stuff is a bunch of crap.

 

 

The book he mentions was an entirely experimental work. He never felt sufficiently satisfied with it to show it to anyone else.

To Richard Rodgers IN MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

New York
September 27, 1955

Dear Dick:

Good reports of you from Oscar and Jerry White [Rodgers and Hammerstein Production Manager]. They say the wickedness goes on behind the bandages, business as usual. I wish I could think of something to make the time go quicker for you.

We talked to your beautiful wife and to your burgeoning daughter and there is a good sign in their voices, which is better than a good report.

You will be glad to know that Elaine is doing a really adequate job in your place in Piece Pipe. She has changed some of the songs around and re-written a few lyrics, but I am sure you will approve. She had to fire three actors but she replaced them with her friends—good ambitious kids who can learn probably. Also, she has changed the ending. It takes place in a submarine putting out into the sunset with the anthem “Atoms Away, My Lads, Atoms Away.” But just rest easy. Everything is being done that can be done.

Yesterday I had lunch with Helen Traubel [star of Pipe Dream] who, as you know, is one helluva woman. She wanted to know more about Fauna. I queried Oscar and he said it would be a good thing to do, so I dredged up some old memories, posture, voice, clothes, gestures, anecdotes, etc., and I remembered some stories about Fauna’s archrival in Salinas, who was universally known and loved, by the name of Fartin’ Jenny.

When I knew her she was an old woman with a patch over her left eye. She smoked black cigars and drank a mixture of whiskey and ether and late at night she would get to crying over her dead husband, Jerry, but through her tears her one eye never left the bedroom doors. Some of those girls weren’t honest. Anyway, when Fartin’ Jenny was a young girl, she was a cook in a whore house beside the Southern Pacific tracks in Salinas. Jerry was a gay and debonair fireman on a switch engine, and as he went by the house, it was his habit to throw coal at Jenny’s cat. This she took as a declaration of love. They met eventually and married and while Jerry moved up the rungs to engineer, Fartin’ Jenny prospered and bought the house and her name went into song and story.

The marriage was not all enchiladas and beans. In fact, the fighting was fairly constant and usually bloody. This love fest went on for twenty-five years. Jerry died peacefully in his bed of an old ball bat wound and as so often happens, Fartin’ Jenny was bereft without him; life had lost its perfume. She wanted to do something spectacular for Jerry’s memory and she remembered that he had wanted to go to sea. Actually, he had said, “I’d rather be in the bottom of the Goddamn ocean than here with this bull bitch.”

She decided to have him cremated and his ashes consigned to the deep. Well, she took the can of ashes and went to Monterey and rented a purse-seiner. Fartin’ Jenny, accompanied by the gallant and beautiful and elite of the red-light districts of both Monterey and Salinas, together with an honor guard from the railroad brotherhoods, put out to sea. She climbed up forward, opened the can and got a handful of Jerry. She cried, “Jerry, mavourneen, I consign thee to the watery elements,” and she let fly with a handful of ashes. Well, the wind caught it and brought it right back in her face. Jenny went into her famous crouch and she yelled, “You black-hearted son-of-a-bitch, I might of known you’d try to get the last word.” There is a moral here somewhere.

We love you
John

 

 

Pipe Dream opened in New Haven, and the initial enthusiasm began to fade. After forcing restraint on himself, Steinbeck wrote the producers (who were also the composer and writer) a series of long letters with suggestions for the show’s improvement. Again after the Boston opening, which was followed by disappointing notices, he wrote:

To Oscar Hammerstein II

[Boston]
[October 1955]

Dear Oscar:

The day after we opened in New Haven I wrote a kind of a report for you, but it wasn’t the proper time. You were heavily preoccupied with getting the show open at all. Now it does seem to me to be the proper time. If changes are to be made, they must be in the works.

There are many very excellent things in Pipe Dream. If I do not dwell on them it is because you hear them everywhere and this letter purports to be a working document and not either a criticism or a flattery. I do not think this is a time to spare feelings nor to mince words. Compliments for the good things have sunk many works including my own late lamented play which you will remember with a certain horror [Burning Bright]. Good people came to me after it had closed and told me what should have been done, and working on it by myself I only discovered completely what was wrong a year and a half later. And the crazy thing was that audiences were telling us all the time. And audiences are telling us now. We should listen! Your face is very well known so it may be that conversations stop when you are near. But mine isn’t. They don’t stop talking when I go by.

Norton [Eliot Norton, Boston critic] used the word conventional to describe his uneasiness. I have heard others describe the same thing as sweetness, loss of toughness, lack of definition, whatever people say when they feel they are being let down. And believe me, Oscar, this is the way audiences feel. What emerges now is an old fashioned love story. And that is not good enough to people who have looked forward to this show based on you and me and Dick. When Oklahoma came out it violated every conventional rule of Musical Comedy. You were out on a limb. They loved it and were for you. South Pacific made a great jump. And even more you were ordered to go ahead. But Oscar, time has moved. The form has moved. You can’t stand still. That’s the price you have to pay for being Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The only thing this story has, besides some curious characters, is the almost tragic situation that a man of high mind and background and culture takes to his breast an ignorant, ill-tempered little hooker who isn’t even very good at that. He has to take her, knowing that a great part of it is going to be misery, and she has to take him knowing she will have to live the loneliness of not even knowing what he is talking about if the subject gets above the belt, and yet each of them knows that the worse hell is the penalty of separation.

I have suggestions for changing every one of the things attacked in this letter, Oscar. I think they are important or I would not go out on a limb for them. Will you think about them and then perhaps submit them to some outside person who is not too close to the show, someone like Josh [Joshua Logan] or maybe Lillian Hellman, or maybe Norton, anyone who knows theatre, whom you respect and whose word you can trust. I hope you will do this. I think we are in danger, not of failure but of pale and half-assed success which to me would be worse than failure. In a word we are in grave danger of mediocrity.

Should I run for the hills now?

yours in the faith
John

 

 

Appended were specific, scene-by-scene, often line-by-line suggestions.

To Elia Kazan

New York
Dear Gadg: December 3, 1955

Dear Gadg:

Well, thank God that is over. We didn’t get murdered but we got nibbled pretty badly. I guess that was the coldest-assed audience I ever saw. They dared us and we lost. Then the notices said just exactly what I have been yelling about for six weeks and I think were completely just. R. and H. thought they could get away with it. And do you know, for the first time in their history, they are going to make some cuts and changes. The crazy thing is that I have written all the changes weeks ago and have turned them in. I don’t know whether they will ever look at them, but they are there.

What really is the trouble is that R. and H. seem to be attracted to my kind of writing and they are temperamentally incapable of doing it. The burden of most of the reviews was that they had left the book.

Tickets are still being bought and so far there are no returns. I don’t understand this but it’s true. I think the thing will run for a while. Another crazy thing is that this is a better show than most of the musicals running now. It just isn’t good enough for R. and H. I told them this in writing in New Haven. Even told them the story of Pickles Moffett in the fifth grade. He was a nice but illiterate little boy and my best friend. When we got the assignment to write a four line poem he went into shock and out of kindness I wrote two instead of one and gave one of them to Pickles to save his sanity. Well he got an A and I got a B. This outraged me because the verses were of about equal quality so I went to the teacher and asked her why. She said, and I remember her words very well, “What Pickles did was remarkable for Pickles, but what you did was inferior for you.”

We’re going to the country on Monday for about three days. I want to get the reek out of my nose. I could do with some solitude. And I could do with some good solid work of my own kind. There are too damned many personalities and egos involved in theatre. I guess I am really tired. And disappointed actors—the poor things. I feel so sorry for them. They can’t work unless we do something. It is the worst of crafts, I guess. Hell, I could take a nail and go out and scratch words on a limestone cliff and have some kind of fun, but actors can’t. I’m going shopping with my kids this afternoon down to a war surplus store. They want tents and sleeping bags and I understand the impulse very well. They want to run away and hide too and that is their symbol.

We go out to the country this afternoon. I guess I had better stop this now. Hope the picture goes well,

love to all there
john

 

 

The Steinbecks flew to Trinidad for the New Year’s holiday, were joined by their friend, John Fearnley, of the Rodgers and Hammerstein staff, and sailed through the Windward and Leeward Islands. They took Calypso names: Inside Straight (Steinbeck) Queen Radio (Elaine Steinbeck) and Small Change (Fearnley).

OLD STYLE AND NEW STYLE ELAINE

 

Calypso written in honor of Trinidad,
New Year’s Eve [1956]
and my darling Elaine
By that new and elegant
CALYPSIST* * * * *
INSIDE STRAIGHT

 

Note
This is a happy wedding of
the Trinidad and the Texas schools

 

Old style Elaine in a time gone by,
Got a red hot yen for a lukewarm guy,
She sit up river in Astolat
Singing the blues for Sir Launcelot.
She love him good and she love him here,
But he buzzing the Queen Bee Guinevere.

Lancy signs for the horse event,
Got a two-squire outfit and a purple tent.
Two-to-one favorite in a jousting bout
A big dam purse and the house sold out.
But the champ sit fidgeting with Guinevere,
Say “What I’m doing a mouldering here?”
The Queen she say, “What I hear tell—
You got you a pigeon and she raisin’ hell.”

Old Miss Elaine make a bad erreur
Got her a man but he ain’t got her.
She a broke heart dame and she die real loud
And they float her down the river in a lace-line
shroud.
Lancy get the message and he say real plain
“I rather be a shroudin’ with Sweet Elaine.”

 

Sugar Hill Guinevere she up her nose
Give the real royal treatment ’til he dam near froze.
Say “Don’t clank around, you poor tin thing.
I got me a certify guarantee King.
He top stock holder and Chairman of the Board
With solid-gold armour an’ a platinum sword,
And you, Sir Honey, you can paw the ground,
But I got another Knighty on the Table Round.”

 

Guinevere a queen and she act like same
But she also a qualified female dame.
Say, “Got me a king and what you got?
A real dead lady at Astolat,
A show boat funeral in a ten foot scow,
Guess I’ll get me to a nunnery now.”
Lance win the title but he feel bad
So he pass on his gauntlet to Galahad.
’Cause love is a double-joint two-way thing
And he shouldn’t made a pass at Mrs. King.

NEW STYLE ELAINE

 

Now my Miss Elaine got a new-style set,
She a high-breasted deep-breathing growed-up brunette.
She tuck her behind in and she walk real proud,
Got a B flat baritone C sharp loud.
Say, “Listen, you rounders, and you’ll agree,
I got me a man and he got me.”
She rustle up her bustle and the folks concur,
That she branded her a wrangler and he earnoched
her.

Signed
INSIDE STRAIGHT

To Pascal Covici

Sag Harbor
[February 1956]
Wednesday

Dear Pat:

I guess you are going to get bombed with notes from out here. I imagine the reason is that a kind of peace is settling over me. Seems to me that I have in the past few years been so nibbled and pushed by light minds and troubled by tiny things that I have been constantly off balance. Large things I can stand up to. I think most people can—I believe that men are destroyed by little things—so little that they can’t be got at or even identified—the nibbling of ducks. A large demand may stimulate—a thousand small ones only confuse and erode.

Out here I get the old sense of peace and wholeness. The phone rings seldom. It is clear and very cold but the house is warm. Elaine is ecstatically happy out here. She cooks and sews and generally enjoys herself. You can’t imagine the change in disposition and approach in both of us.

And it seems to be getting into my work. I approach the table every morning with a sense of joy.

The yellow pages are beginning to be populated both with people and with ideas. This book with its new approach is not going to be long. It is only a practice book because in the back of my mind there is arising a structure like those great cumulus clouds you see over high mountains.

I can feel this rising and preparing the way weather prepares—a long time in the future and far away—a pressure area that breaks up in Greenland and will weeks later influence a rain storm in Manhattan.

Technique should grow out of theme—not dictate it. I think I told you that I want to leave the past and the nostalgic. It is the disease of modern writing. In the work I am doing, the past is used only in so far as it affects the present. Anyway it is a very pleasant thing to be doing. I want to get maybe fifty or a hundred pages done before you see it—otherwise my method will not be apparent.

Meanwhile if you should see a second hand big Oxford 12 vol.’s—I would like to have it for out here. I know no book I use more—nor value more. I hate to be away from it.

Another request. Does Viking still subscribe to that service which answers questions—you know the one which will do any kind of research? I want to ask it a question. Maybe you will do it for me. I want to know how soy sauce is made. I know it is fermented from the soy bean but I want to know the exact method—step by step and like a recipe so that from the directions it could be made. I promised this to some people in Dominica. I’m always giving you odd requests.

Well all of this is keeping me from my book. But it is fun and you see? I have time. Isn’t that wonderful? No gnawing that I should be doing something else. For six hours every day I have nothing to do but think and write. May it go on for a long time. I seem to be reborn.

See you Monday at 12—noon.

love
John

 

 

Peter Benchley, son of Steinbeck’s friend Nathaniel Benchley, wrote from Exeter asking for a contribution to a special issue of the school newspaper. Steinbeck replied:

 

“Here are some lines. You’re welcome to them if you want them. In a first draft I usually put in lots of generalities and in rewriting hunt them down and kill them.”

To Peter Benchley

[Sag Harbor]
[1956]

 

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. Of course there are dishonest writers who go on for a little while, but not for long—not for long.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—

“Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”

It is so hard to be clear. Only a fool is wilfully obscure.

Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends and this is arbitrary because there are no beginnings nor any ends. We do have curtains—in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man’s birth, growth and death. These are curtain rise and curtain fall, but the story goes on and nothing finishes.

To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

[unsigned]

To Webster F. Street

Sag Harbor
March 20 [1956]
Tuesday

Dear Toby:

We’ve been out here on the end of Long Island during this storm which you may have read about. It was beautiful and violent—18 inches of snow and high drifted by the wind.

Two weeks ago, Jimmy Costello [Editor of the Monterey Herald] called me and told me Ritch [Lovejoy] had been operated on for a brain tumor and had very little chance to live and if he did live had no chance of regaining his mind. I wrote to Tal but of course have had no answer. We are getting to the age when the obit pages have a great deal of news. And this has been a bad year in the loss of friends. About seven in the last few months. Two days ago Fred Allen. A wonderful man and one of the true humorists I have ever known. He was Catbird’s godfather and took it very seriously. I guess it is a symptom of our ages. But it seems to me a lot of what I think of as the young ones of my friends have toppled over—like John Hodiak and Lemuel Ayers. In some cases, one feels a little guilty for being alive. But that is silly too.

I’ve finally got my life in shape to go to the National Conventions. I have about 12 papers I will file for. And I intend to have fun with this writing. I am going out with the attitude of a Curse on Both Your Houses and I will do no punditry so Walter Lippmann need not shudder in his elevated position. Also I am going to the Kentucky Derby this year and I’ve never seen it. The editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal has invited us.

I started out gaily on my novel and then, without warning an idea happened that so charmed me that I couldn’t shake it out. It seemed easier to write it than to lose it. It is the wrong length, the wrong subject and everything else is wrong with it except that it is fun and I could not resist writing it [The Short Reign of Pippin IV]. I must say I do have fun with my profession, if that’s what it is. I get real cranky when too many things interfere with it.

I guess I’d better get out and shovel some snow now. Maybe I can get into town tomorrow.

All the best
John

 

 

Mark Ethridge, the publisher of the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, and Steinbeck had become acquainted on a trans-Atlantic crossing, and in the correspondence that followed, “Steinbeck confessed to an ambition to cover the conventions.” He was hired by the Courier-Journal which then offered his dispatches to its syndicate. About thirty-four newspapers accepted, from the Arkansas Gazette to the Washington Post, and, as Steinbeck wrote Ethridge and James S. Pope, Editor-in-Chief of the Courier-Journal:

 

“I am composing a letter to the papers which have done me the honor of accepting my highly speculative copy. When it is finished I will send it to you and hope that you will send it out to them.”

To the Syndicated Newspaper Editors

Sag Harbor
April 1956

 

Thank you for accepting my convention copy sight unseen, but I think I owe you an explanation and an out. I have never been to a National Convention. That is my main reason for wanting to go.

When I first suggested that I go conventioning I was told that I had no training as a political reporter. This was true and I began to study the techniques of my prospective colleagues who were so trained. I was particularly interested in the analysis of one paragraph of a Presidential news conference by four politically trained reporters. Each one experted it differently. Walter Lippmann, the Alsops and David Lawrence have nothing to fear from me.

I have no sources—dependable or otherwise. If I should make a prediction, it will probably be assembled out of information from the wife of the alternate delegate from San José, California, plus whispers from the bell-hop who has just delivered a bucket of ice to “usually dependable sources.”

A new political phrase is “running scared.” This is presumed to be good because it means the candidate is running hard. Well, I’m writing scared. A good writer always writes scared.

I have promised to give you printable copy. I think I can, but if this boast should turn out to be so much grass roots, I don’t think you should take the rap. I shall write what I see and hear and what I find amusing or illuminating. If you do not find it so, all bets are off. If on the other hand I succeed in interesting you and your subscribers, I shall insist, in addition to the simple money agreed on, that I be given honorary police, military, social, civic and tree planting honors.

Yours very truly,
John Steinbeck

 

 

Steinbeck stated his view of journalism in a letter to John P. McKnight, of the United States Information Service in Rome:

 

“What can I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap. In many cases it is the only history we have and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and because it is the product of so many men, it is perhaps the purest thing we have. Honesty has a way of creeping in even when it was not intended.”

Pascal Covici, Jr., at Harvard, wanted to do some critical writing and had sent Steinbeck some samples of his work.

To Pascal Covici, Jr.

New York
[April 13, 1956]
Friday

Dear Pascal:

We’re running to Washington this morning. Haven’t been there since the war. I do hope they have cleared the rubble.

I had your letter yesterday and that is exactly what I mean. But say it as roughly as you have in the letter. Make your point and make it angrily. I think of a number of pieces which should be done but that I as a novelist can’t or should not do. One would be on the ridiculous preoccupation of my great contemporaries, and I mean Faulkner and Hemingway, with their own immortality. It is almost as though they were fighting for billing on a tombstone.

Another thing I could not write and you can is about the Nobel Prize. I should be scared to death to receive it, I don’t care how coveted it is. But I can’t say that because I have not received it. But it has seemed to me that the receivers never do a good nor courageous piece of work afterwards. It kind of retires them. I don’t know whether this is because their work was over anyway or because they try to live up to the prize and lose their daring or what. But it would be a tough hazard to overcome and most of them don’t. Maybe it makes them respectable and a writer can’t dare to be respectable. Anyway it might be a very interesting little essay. The same thing goes for any kind of honorary degrees and decorations. A man’s writing becomes less good with the numbers of his honors. It might be that fear in me that has made me refuse those L.L.D.’s that are constantly being put out by colleges. It may also be the reason why I have never been near the Academy even though I was elected to it. It may also be the reason I gave my Pulitzer Prize money away. I think you might well make a good piece of it.

It is usual that the moment you write for publication—I mean one of course—one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.

Consider also writing some criticisms of critics. The few pieces I have written against critics have been gobbled up. And it is not considered sporting for a novelist to attack his critics. But it would be perfectly valid for you to do it.

I am in a rush but I did want to get this off because your letter was very good.

Love to you all
jn

 

 

James Pope had mentioned that he had to write a commencement address for delivery at Emory University. Alone one evening in Sag Harbor, Steinbeck amused himself by dashing off a letter to Pope and a commencement address for him to deliver.

To James S. Pope

Sag Harbor
May 16, 1956

Dear Jim:

The Lillymaid has gone to Astolat for a couple of days to do for her daughter what her daughter had better pretty soon learn to do for herself or this marriage isn’t for eternity [Waverly Scott’s forthcoming marriage to Francis M. Skinner]. Also she has a yen to get her hair washed. Ain’t she a doll? I like that dame. But being left alone, this mouse got to playing and wrote twenty-five pages of dialogue today. It was raining anyway.

A letter from Alicia [Alicia Patterson, publisher of Newsday, wife of Harry Guggenheim] today enclosed an interview with Bill Faulkner which turns my stomach. When those old writing boys get to talking about The Artist, meaning themselves, I want to leave the profession. I don’t know whether the Nobel Prize does it or not, but if it does, thank God I have not been so honored. They really get to living up to themselves, wrapped and shellacked. Apparently they can’t have any human intercourse again. Bill said he only read Homer and Cervantes, never his contemporaries, and then, by God, in answer to the next question he stole a paragraph from an article I wrote for the Saturday Review eight months ago. Hell, he’s better than Homer. Homer couldn’t either read or write and the old son of a gun was blind. And Cervantes was broke, a thing Bill never let happen to him while he could go to Hollywood and turn out the Egyptian. THE ARTIST—my ass! Sure he’s a good writer but he’s turning into a god damned phoney. I guess that got rid of my nastiness and Elaine wouldn’t approve of my saying it. That will teach her not to go away.

It’s late but I’m not sleepy so I might as well write you a commencement speech, what the hell! Of course if I had to do it myself I’d cut my throat.

I see you sitting in the front row, robed in academic splendor. It is pretty hot and you are sweating under that cape. You sat on your back tassel and pulled it off and shoved it in your pocket and that got your robe caught in your pocket and you can’t get it out so you yank at it and out come your keys and a handful of small change. You keep thinking the tassel of your mortarboard is a fly and you swat at it every time it swings in front of your eyes. You wish you hadn’t worn nylon drawers. You itch.

Then you hear the President announce.

“And now, I have the honor to present our honored guest, William D. Pope, who has consented to address you.”

As you stand up you try to work the nylon drawers out of your crevice by dragging against the little hard chair but it sticks. So you say to yourself, “The hell with it,” and you try to get your notes out of your pocket under all the harness you are wearing and you realize that if you did manage to dig them out, you would have to throw your skirts over your head. So what do you do? You advance to the front of the stage and deliver the address I am about to write for you.

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS BY JAMES S. BISHOP

 

“President Onassis,” you begin. “Honorable Regents, members of the Faculty, without whose loving care this day could not happen (laughter), ladies and gentlemen:”

(Now draw a big deep breath because it is the last one you are going to get as you become caught up in the fire and thunder of your address. And you don’t really have to go to the bathroom. It is just your imagination.)

“I suppose you think I am going to give you one of those ‘You are going out into the world’ speeches. (Laughter and cries of ‘Hear, Hear.’)

“Well, you are perfectly right. You are going out into the world and it is a mess, a frightened, neurotic, gibbering mess. And there isn’t anyone out there to help you because all the people who are already out there are in a worse state than you are, because they have been there longer and a good number of them have given up.

“Yes, my young friends, you are going to take your bright and shining faces into a jungle, but a jungle where all the animals are insane. You are going from delinquency to desuetude without even an interlude of healthy vice. You haven’t the strength for vice. That takes energy, and all the energy of this time is needed for fear. That takes energy too. And what energy is left over is needed for running down the rabbit holes of hatred, to avoid thought. The rich hate the poor and taxes. The young hate the draft. The Democrats hate the Republicans and everybody hates the Russians. Children are shooting their parents and parents are drowning their children when they think they can get away with it. No one can plan one day ahead because all certainties are gone. War is now generally admitted to be not only unwinnable but actually suicidal and so we think of war and plan for war, and design war and drain our nations of every extra penny of treasure to make the weapons which we admit will destroy us. Generals argue with Secretaries about how much they’ve got and how much we’ve got to fight the war that is admitted will be the end of all of us.

“And meanwhile there is no money for the dams and the schools and the highways and the housing and the streets for our clotted and festering traffic. That’s what you are going out to. Going out? Hell you’ve been in it for years. And you have to scrape the bottom to avoid thinking. Some of us hate niggers and some of us hate the people who hate niggers and it is all the same thing, anything to keep from thinking. Make money! Spend all of your time trying to avoid taxes, taxes for the 60,000,000,000 dollars for the weapons for the war that is unthinkable.

“Let’s face it. We are using this war and this rumor of war to avoid thought. But if you work very hard and are lucky and have a good tax-man, then when you are fifty, if your heart permits, you and your sagging wife can make a tired and bored but first-class trip to Europe to stare at the works of dead people who were not afraid. But you won’t see it. You’ll be too anxious to get home to your worrying. You’ll want to get your blown prostate home in time for your thrombosis. The only exciting thing you can look forward to is a heart attack. And while you have been in Athens on the Acropolis not seeing the Parthenon, you have missed two murders and the nasty divorce of two people you do not know and are not likely to, but you hate to miss it.

“These are your lives, my darlings, if you avoid cancer, plane crashes and automobile accidents. Your lives! Love? A nervous ejaculation while drunk. Romance? An attempt to be mentioned in a column for having accompanied the Carrot Queen to a slaughter house. Fun? Electric canes at a convention. Art? A deep seated wish to crash the Book-of-the-Month-Club. Sport? A television set and a bottle of the proper beer. Ambition? A new automobile every year. Work? A slot in a corporate chain of command. Religion? A private verbal contract with a Deity you don’t believe in and a public front pew in your superior’s church. Children? Maybe a psychiatrist can keep them out of the detention home.

“Am I boring you, you nervous sons of bitches? Am I keeping you from your mouldy pleasures? And you, President Booker T. Talmadge, are you restless to get to your rare roast beef? Regents, are you lusting for the urinal? And you, Professors—are you cooking up some academic skullduggery for the Faculty Club?

“Now, you say hopelessly, he is going to give us his science lecture. And you are right again, but it is the last time you will be right.

“Your professors will squabble about how many milleniums ago it was when a man picked up fire and it burned him, and he picked it up again and it burned a forest and he brought it home and it burned his shelter and he threw it on a pile of bones and learned to cook and he found a piece of shining metal under a bonfire and wore it for a while and then hammered it to a cutting edge. It took him hundreds of thousands of years to get used to fire. The very concept of fire so frightened him that he refused to think about it. He called it a god or the property of a god, and gradually over hundreds of thousands of years he reluctantly evolved a set of rules and techniques and mores for thinking about fire. Then he loved it finally and it was first lord of the hearth, the center of his being, the symbol of his ease and safety. Many more people got warm than got burned and so he gradually inspected this extension of himself, this power and found what made it do the things it does. But that was the end of the process, not the beginning. And meanwhile there must have been a good number of men who seeing a forest burning shrieked out that this devil would destroy the world.

“Do you know what is wrong with you? It isn’t niggers or Democrats or Russians. The Quantum Theory tumbled your convictions about order, so you refused to think about it. The Expanding Universe blasted your homocentric galaxy, and then the fissionable atom ripped the last of your fire-minded world to ribbons. For the first time you have unlimited power and an unlimited future, the great drama of magic and alchemy. And are you glad? No, you go groveling to analysts to find out what is the matter with you. You will not inspect the new world that is upon you.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could look at your world and say, and hear yourself—‘This was once true but it is no longer true. We must make new rules about this and this. We must abandon our dear war, which once had a purpose, and our hates which once served us.’

“You won’t do it. It will have to slip up on you in the course of the generations. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could greet the most wonderful time in the history of our world with wonder rather than with despair?”

Now you bow coldly and try to get out alive. The audience is silent and as you walk up the aisle working at your suffering crotch you hear whispered comments. “The old fart. Who does he think he is?” “Nigger lover.” “Did you hear him say those Communists weren’t dangerous? He must be one.”

 

 

Say—I like that! I may make that speech myself—from a helicopter. But you may borrow it if you like. And invite me to hear you deliver it. I’ll cover your exit and bring a few of the boys.

Oh, Elaine will be so mad at me!

yours
John

I told you I was a spastic writer—

To Graham Watson

Sag Harbor
July 2, 1956

Dear Graham:

Your good letter coincides with a genuine homesickness for London. Not that it is going to do any good for quite a long time. Our daughter is getting married on July fourteenth, and this astonishing occasion is being produced only a little less splendidly than Billy Rose’s Aquacade. You can’t imagine how many clothes you have to put on a girl when the sole purpose is to get them off.

Meanwhile I have been trying to finish a little book which could be amusing and could get me guillotined also, but the interruptions of more important, i.e. wedding things have made it very difficult. Now my kids have gone to camp and Elaine is running back and forth to New York to stage manage the pageant. Women are very touchy about this. I smiled when they were talking veil and caught hell, and I was so stupid as to suggest that they bring back the kerchief and sheep’s blood symbol, but they found that bestial. I wish I had the sense to shut up. If only the intensity of the wedding could guarantee that she would stay married, it would be more than worth it. Do I sound bitter? Well I am a little but I am also philosophic.

 

To James Pope, at the same time:

 

“Where do you seat the grandparents of the bride when the bride’s father has gone to England and the grandparents hate the stepfather for having stolen the bride’s father’s wife? If I can get by this wedding I think the conventions will be a breeze.

 

so long ...

 

Where the hell would you put the chrysanthemums on the St. Regis Roof if the bride’s uncle-in-law owns the King Ranch?”

 

In the spring we shall go back to Europe. I am going to take Elaine to follow the spring up Scandinavia. I want her to be perhaps in Dalerna for midsummer where they dance and play the violins and do the summerpoles and the wreathes and drink one hell of a lot of schnapps. I find that after six or seven I can sing in old Norsk. At least it sounds like old Norsk. But Elaine says that everything I say after even four akvavits sounds like old Norsk.

We want to see you. Consider very carefully meeting us in Florence. We know lots of people there and places where you can eat little birds and we’ll take you to Castle Broglio where the Chianti is golden for a change and twice as strong. Wouldn’t that be fine?

yours
John

To James S. Pope

[Sag Harbor]
[July 1956]

Dear Jim:

If I feel like wringer-juice, what do you think Elaine is like? That’s the tiredest white girl I ever saw. I’ve put her on a diet of bed and vitamins. The wedding was very pretty, the bride truly radiant, the groom handsome and properly frightened, the reception a gala of the youth and gallantry and beauty of Texas and Manhattan. I think I handled myself with the proper mixture of gruffness and tears—a regular Lionel Barrymore. Seemed to me that Elaine was prettier than the bride. Good show from beginning to end and now over, and E. and I alone—really alone for the first time in our lives. I feel new-married myself and when she gets rested up I’m going to make the Lily Maid feel the same way. Chicago will be a kind of wedding trip for us.

Meanwhile, it is so lovely out here with sun and breeze and water that the flowers in the garden are yawping like coon hounds on a moonlight night. What joy! The deadline on my little book which I had hoped to finish before Chicago, I probably won’t make. It was my own deadline anyway—but that is the toughest kind. I guess I am telling you all of this out of a kind of effusion.

Meanwhile—the conventions. I’m going to keep the title “O’ Both Your Houses.” I like it and it kind of sets the tone.

I guess that’s all. I want to thank you for the lovely letter you wrote Elaine. It bloomed her all up and made her happy. Now we have three weeks to rest and kind of get acquainted and that’s the very best of all. And I won’t be quite so hysterical from now on.

Best to all of you there.

John

On receipt of a photograph of himself to be used for the syndicated stories from Chicago:

To James S. Pope

[Sag Harbor]
[July 1956]

Dear Jim:

I guess I never saw a more villainous face. The expression seems to be one of planned lechery. It has the open honesty of the weasel and the trustworthiness of the mink. The lumps and erosion are almost geologic as a record of a virtuous and uneventful life. In fact why anyone would want it except for a dart game or a rogues’ gallery I don’t know.

Working furiously on my French History [The Short Reign of Pippin IV] and there’s just a teensy-weensy chance I may finish it before Chicago. To this devout end address your prayers, please!

Yours
John

To James S. Pope and Mark Ethridge

San Francisco
August 23, 1956

Dear Jim and Mark:

I have just finished my last copy which will be filed tomorrow. I have had fun, some of which I hope communicated. And I’m very tired because regardless of the irresponsibility of the copy, I have missed very little and have stood still for every nuance of these fantastic rituals of complexity. I’m pretty sure I shall not want to see another one. Like a fighting bull once fought I know too much and my innocence is being swept up from the floor of the Cow Palace along with the posters.

I’ve made a lot of new friends and renewed old friendships with press people. They are not resentful of me once they know I am not competing with them. On the contrary they have been kind and helpful and amused at this dog walking on its hind legs. I’ve been scared in the matter of copy and hopeful that it might be better than most has turned out. But I guess that’s the story of a writer’s life. And it was the very best I could do.

Tomorrow we’re going down to Monterey for a few days to see my sisters.

Finally—thanks for everything.

Yours,
John

To Pascal Covici

[Sag Harbor]
[1956]

Dear Pat:

I suppose you will be asked why I wrote The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Maybe you will ask it yourself. As an answer I recall a beautiful lady of my acquaintance who was asked by her two young daughters where babies came from. Very patiently she explained the process to them and at the end asked—

“Now—do you understand?”

After a whispered conference, the older girl reported—

“We understand what you do, but why do you do it?”

My friend thought for a moment and then retired into the simple truth—“Because it’s fun,” she said.

And that’s the reason for this book. Because it’s fun.

Anyone who can go along with it in a spirit of play may have some of the pleasure I had in writing it. On the other hand, the searchers after secret meanings, the dour priesthood of obscurantist criticism and the devout traffic cops of literature will neither like nor approve of The Short Reign.

But anyone who in our humorless times has concealed a sense of play, can, I believe, get an illegal chuckle from this book. In our scowling era, laughter may well be the only counter-revolutionary weapon.

I can imagine that future critics, if any survive, may view our ridiculous antics with hilarious laughter. And to that desirable end, The Short Reign of Pippin IV is dedicated.

Yours conspiratorially
John

 

 

Dennis Murphy, the writer-son of Steinbeck’s old school friend, John Murphy of Salinas, was in the middle of his first book, The Sergeant, and had apparently written Steinbeck about certain difficulties.

To Dennis Murphy

[Sag Harbor]
September 21, 1956

Dear Dennis:

I’m sorry you had an argument with your father. But from where I sit, and I sit a little bit along the road you are travelling, you have only one thing in the world to do. You must finish this book and then you must finish another. If anything at all, saving your own death, stops you, except momentarily, then you are not a writer anyway and there is nothing to discuss. I do not mean that you should not bitch and complain and fight and scrabble but the one important thing for you is to get your work done. If anyone gets hurt in the process, you cannot be blamed.

But don’t think for a moment that you will ever be forgiven for being what they call “different.” You won’t! I still have not been forgiven. Only when I am delivered in a pine box will I be considered “safe.” After I had written the Grapes of Wrath and it Had been to a large extent read and sometimes burned, the librarians at Salinas Public Library, who had known my folks—remarked that it was lucky my parents were dead so that they did not have to suffer this shame. I tell you this so you may know what to expect.

Now get to work—

Yours
J.S.

 

 

David Heyler, Jr., was beginning a collection of Steinbeckiana.

To Mr. and Mrs. David Heyler, Jr.

New York
November 19, 1956

Dear Dave and Joan:

Today I packed up a bunch of junk and put it in a box and as soon as some one can get over to the post office it will go off to you, oddities and several manuscripts that have never been printed.

Hope you are all well and happy. We are studying Italian, getting nowhere but it is kind of fun and a kind of discipline which I am not used to these many years. A professor comes twice a week and Elaine and I find ourselves fighting to recite when we know the answer and pretending to be busy when we don’t. I guess you don’t grow up at all. And all the Italian we will learn you can put in you know what. I am trying to get sounds by trying to memorize some of the sonnets of Petrarca. I find that poetry gives you a much better sense of the flow of words than the inkwell of Catarina Rossi, whom I am beginning to detest. We are studying because about the first of April we are going to Florence for a couple of months and I want to know a few words so that as in French I can ask a question even if I can’t understand what the answer is.

I finished my little book. Now I am engaged in another thing and I must ask you not to speak about it for reasons that will be obvious. I’ve thrown out the novel I was going to write because it did not go well and because it arose from a wrong premise. And because I must go on working because I get unhappy when I am not working, I am taking on something I have always wanted to do. That is the reduction of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to simple readable prose without adding or taking away anything, simply to put it into modern spelling and to translate the obsolete words to modern ones and to straighten out some of the more involved sentences. There has not been an edition of this since 1893, the Dent edition of Caxton, except for a cut version called the Boy’s King Arthur in about 1900 which was the one I cut my teeth on. And there is no rendering of it into modern English. In 1934 the Winchester ms of Malory was discovered and is now available in Oxford University Press, three volumes. And the Winchester is much more interesting and indicates some things which Caxton edited out.

It was the very first book I knew and I have done considerable research over the years as my work will show. I loved the old forms but most people are put off by the spellings and obsolescences and the result is that all they have to go on is Prince Valiant and the movie versions. This is odd because I don’t know any book save only the Bible and perhaps Shakespeare which has had more effect on our morals, our ethics and our mores than this same Malory. So that is what I am up to and I should be able to have it pretty well in hand before we go to Italy. However, if it is not completely done by then I will put it aside because I would want it to be beautifully done or not to do it at all. I want to make it as simple as possible but not to leave out anything and not to sweeten nor to sentimentalize it.

Anyway, I’ll get the box off to you as soon as I can. Love to all there,

love
John

To Elizabeth Otis

New York
November 19, 1956
Dear Elizabeth: Monday

Dear Elizabeth:

I’ve finished now the Short Reign. Pat is coming for it today. There’s a great unease about it at Viking, but there’s an unease all over and maybe one thing transmits to another. Meanwhile, I have been dipping into the Malory. And with delight. As long as I don’t know what is going on in the world, I would like to have a try with this.

Now as to method. I am in some wonder about this. When I first read it, I must have been already enamored of words because the old and obsolete words delighted me. However, I wonder whether children now would be so attracted. They are more trained by picture than by sound. I’m going to make a trial run—not removing all of the old forms, nor all the Malory sentence structure, but substituting known simple words and reversing sentences which even now are puzzling.

When I have some of it done, I shall with an opening essay tell of my own interest in the cycle, when it started and where it went—into scholarship and out again on the other side.

Now as for title—I should perhaps like to call the book The Acts of King Arthur. Of course I would explain this in the introduction—the Book is much more Acts than Morte.

Do you have a Caxton edition? I should like you—as you read my version—to compare it, so that recommendations can be made.

Next, what would you think of Chase as a kind of Managing Editor? [Chase Horton, owner of the Washington Square Bookshop and friend of Elizabeth Otis.] His knowledge and interest seem to be great and he could be of help to me when I come a cropper. It would be good to have someone to consult with. And he might have an opening essay to precede mine. Let me know about this.

Let us keep this project to ourselves until I am well along. I don’t want Pat or Viking nudging me.

There it is anyway and I find I am anxious to get into it. It could be a peaceful thing in a torn world.

Love
John

To Roland Dickey DIRECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS

New York
December 7, 1956

Dear Mr. Dickey:

I have read with very much interest the book, Steinbeck and His Critics, particularly since I have not seen most of the material before.

It is always astonishing to read a critique of one’s work. In my own case, it didn’t come out that way but emerged little by little, staggering and struggling, each part alone and separated from the others. And then, after the fact—long after—a pattern is discernible, a clear and fairly consistent pattern, even in the failures. It gives me the pleased but uneasy feeling of reading my own epitaph.

So many of the judgments and arguments in this book of opinions seem to me to be true. I only wonder why I didn’t think of them myself. I guess I was so lost in the books I couldn’t see the long structure. Of course, in this river of opinion there are special pleaders—men who were backing their own particular horses—but also there seem to me to be many accuracies.

This book does make me aware of how long I have been at it. Good God, I must have been writing for hundreds of years. But I must assure you that it fails to make me feel old or finished or fixed. Perhaps my new book falls into the pattern, and perhaps the two books in process will drift in the inevitable stream—but to me they are new and unique in the world and I am as scared and boastful and humble about them as I was a thousand years ago when I began the first one. And it is just as hard and I am just as excited as I was. The approach to a horizon makes the horizon leap away. And the more one learns about writing, the more unbelievably difficult it becomes. I wish to God I knew as much about my craft, or whatever it is, as I did when I was 19 years old. But with every new attempt, frightening though it may be, is the wonder and the hope and the delight. As the angels said in Petrarca, “Che luce è questa e qual nova beltate?”

Yours sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Elizabeth Otis

Sag Harbor
January 3, 1957
(I think it is Jan. 3,
pretty sure in fact.)

Dear Elizabeth:

Just reading and reading and reading and it’s like hearing remembered music. The bay is nearly all frozen over with just a few patches of open water and as the tide rises and falls the crushing ice makes a strange singing sound. I’ve moved my card table to the front window with the telescope beside it so if anything goes on I can tompeep it. Two seagulls right now trying to walk on the ice and falling through every few steps and then looking around to see if anyone noticed. I have a feeling that seagulls hate to be laughed at. Well, who doesn’t, for that matter?

Remarkable things in the books. Little meanings that peek out for a moment, and a few scholars who make observations and then almost in fright withdraw or qualify what they have said. Somewhere there’s a piece missing in the jigsaw and it is a piece which ties the whole thing together. So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.

It is very easy to see how Malory, steeped as he must have been in the church, could unconsciously pattern the brotherhood after the twelve apostles. That was what people understood. Twelve was the normal number for any group of followers of a man or a principle. The symbolism was inevitable. And whether the Grail was the cup from Golgotha or the Gaelic cauldron later used by Shakespeare doesn’t in the least matter since the principle of both was everlasting or rather ever-renewed life. All such things fall into place inevitably but it is the connective, the continuing line with the piece missing in the middle that fascinates me.

Another beautiful thing is how the straggling sentences, the confused characters and events of the early parts smooth out as he goes along so that his sentences become more fluid and his dialogue gets a sting of truth and his characters become more human than symbolic even though he tries hard to keep the symbol, and this I am sure is because he was learning to write as he went along. He became a master and you can see it happening. And in any work I do on this thing I am not going to try to change that. I’ll go along with his growing perfection and who knows, I may learn myself. It’s a lovely job if I can only lose the sense of hurry that has been growing in me for so long.

Last night when I could neither sleep nor channel my attention on my reading, my nerve ends got to whipping like the whitecaps on the bay and darkness seemed to come close and then to recede and then come close again. This was not only nonsense but fatuous nonsense. And it occurred to me that what was good for squirrels and bears might be good for me so I went out to walk and the cold got through my skin and then through my meat and then right into the center of my bones, and do you know it worked? A soothing and a quieting it was. It was about six above zero and the deep freeze acted like an anaesthetic as of course I knew it must. When I was cold clear through I could come back and read again. I think these squirrels and bears have something. I don’t know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate that I didn’t find a hollow log and crawl in for the winter.

Charley is having a wonderful time trying to walk on the ice. He falls through at every step and looks puzzled every time. One day soon it will support him and then he’ll give those seagulls hell.

That’s all for now. I’ll get back to my Legend and I’ll bet it turns out that it isn’t a Legend at all any more than any dream is.

Love
John

To Chase Horton

Sag Harbor
January 12, 1957

Dear Chase:

I come from a line of inventors. Several years ago in a Midlands, I think Birmingham, newspaper I read a bitter request from the local public librarian, asking the subscribers not to use bacon or kippers as book marks because the grease soaked through the paper.

I have never used book marks no matter how pretty or ingenious they were. Therefore you may believe me when I say I was surprised to find I was using your very pretty cloth ones. I couldn’t figure why and so I watched myself and do you know why? I found that I was wiping my glasses with them. They aren’t very good for that but it was better than getting up and finding a kleenex. Hence my invention—a book mark made of cloth designed to wipe glasses, perhaps impregnated with one of those silicate compounds which coat the lens. These could be in bright colors, could have pretty designs, and perhaps an indication of their use such as:

 

A DOGGE EERED BOOKE YS IYL BE SEYNE I KEPE HIR BOOKES AND GLASYS KLENE.

Such a book mark could also have printed on it advertising of publisher or book shop which would remind the reader where he got it. What do you think of this? Want to go partners in it?

And by the way, if in your wandering you should see a stuffed owl—I want one. I need it for a birthday present this summer—almost any kind of owl, screech, barn, fence post, ground, hoot.

Yours,
John

To Arthur Larson DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES INFORMATION AGENCY

[New York]
January 12, 1957

Dear Mr. Larson:

The following notes arise out of a genuine concern about our communications with our neighbors.

Recently the President asked William Faulkner, perhaps the dean of American writers, to form a committee to recommend techniques for what Mr. Eisenhower tellingly called “a People to People program.”

It has been our misfortune to dangle our freedom in front of our neighbors and then to refuse them even the simplest hospitality. Our closed and suspicious borders have not reassured our friends and have given our enemies magnificent propaganda fuel.

Our refusal of a passport to Paul Robeson, for example, was stupid. An intelligent move would have been to let him travel and to send Jackie Robinson with him.

The second item grows out of our uneasiness that we are constantly re-converting our friends who do not need it, and ignoring our enemies who do. In this, of course, we are driven by our hysteria about security.

I believe that commerce is not only the mother of civilization, but the teacher of understanding and the god of peace. And I mean all kinds of commerce—movement of goods and movement of ideas. The first act of a dictator is to close the borders to travel, goods and ideas. It is always a matter of sadness, and of suspicion to me, when we close our borders to any of these.

In 1936, I went as a tourist to Russia and what were then called the Balkans. In 1947, with Robert Capa, I toured Russia and some of the satellites for the Herald-Tribune. We asked many people who had been kind to us what we could send them. The invariable answer was “books.” On returning, we sent books. They never arrived. We sent them again—and again they failed to arrive.

Next—I have had a number of letters from East German students who crossed into West Germany, ostensibly to take part in Communist rallies. These letters asked for books, gave Berlin addresses to which they should be sent, and guaranteed wide distribution. One student said, “I can assure you that at least a thousand people will read each book you send.” Naturally, I sent the books—not only my own books, but many others.

Now—My conclusion is that the book is revered. The book is somehow true, where propaganda is suspected. Denial of the right to read whatever they want to is one of the most bitterly resented of all of the Soviet’s tyrannies.

You will remember the Army editions of books sent to troops during the last war. They were small, compact—designed to fit in the shirt pocket. They were distributed by the millions. Publishers and authors contributed their services. Where are those plates? Could they be reprinted? They could be moved over borders in various ways—by Underground, as the East German students suggested, by balloons as Radio Free Europe has flown pamphlets, and by the inevitable movements across borders, no matter how closed they are. A packet of books thrown over the barbwire fence and picked up by a border guard might be burned, but I swear it is more likely that the books would be hidden, treasured and distributed. During the German occupation of Norway and Denmark, my own books were mimeographed on scraps of paper and distributed.

Now—What kind of books?

Any kind. Poetry, essays, novels, plays—these are the things desired and begged for. Pictures of how it is in America—good and bad. The moment it is all good, it is automatically propaganda and will be disbelieved.

These are some of the conclusions of the best writers in our country, and they are offered out of a simple desire to help in your very difficult task.

Yours very sincerely,
John Steinbeck

To Alexander Frere

THEN DIRECTOR OF HEINEMANN, LTD., STEINBECK’S ENGLISH PUBLISHER

New York
January 18, 1957

Dear Frere and Frau:

Your letter arrived with its charming news that we can lay down our heads at the Dorchester.

First, I and later we have been to Sag Harbor. I’ve been doing some concentrated reading—a lovely thing—and not done by me in recent years. To read and read in one direction night and day; to pull an area and a climate of thinking over one’s head like a space helmet—what a joy that is! No telephones, no neighbors, no decisions except great ones—that is a good way to live for a time.

Working on the Malory is a thing of great joy to me, like coming home. I am having a wonderful time. The Morgan Library has opened its arms and its great manuscripts to me, and I can touch and feel, put a microscope on the vellum. I think I will write a small essay on what one finds on a monkish manuscript under a powerful glass. I am convinced that with practice I could tell when the copyist had a hangover. Every sharpening of the quill is apparent and since cleanliness was not a monkish virtue, the pages are rich—even racy—with fingerprints and smudges and evidences of pork pasty on fingers hastily wiped on nut-brown robes. It is fascinating and some of the scholars down there are a little puzzled and aghast at my own inspection with a sixty-power glass, but they are fascinated too. I haven’t yet dared ask permission to take scrapings for analysis, but maybe later when they find I am not a crank, they may permit it.

 

Later he wrote:

 

“The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of the first known owner dated 1221, the rubric a squiggle of very thick ink. I put a glass on it and there imbedded deep in the ink was the finest crab louse, pfithira pulus, I ever saw. He was perfectly preserved even to his little claws. I knew I would find him sooner or later because people of that period were deeply troubled with lice and other little beasties—hence the plagues. I called the curator over and showed him my find and he let out a cry of sorrow. “I’ve looked at that rubric a thousand times,” he said. “Why couldn’t I have found him?”

 

I am having the time of my life with the work, and although I have a fairly good background, I am learning much in supplemental reading.

My love to your darling wife and whatever you can get for yourself.

Yours,
John

To John Murphy

[New York]
February 21, 1957

Dear John:

After talking to Elizabeth Otis, one of the best judges in the country, who has seen the beginning of Dennis’ book [The Sergeant], I shudder to tell you what I have strongly suspected—that you have a writer in the family. This is sad news, but I can’t think of a thing you can do about it. I can remember the horror which came over my parents when they became convinced that it was so with me—and properly so. What you have and they had to look forward to is life made intolerable by a mean, cantankerous, opinionated, moody, quarrelsome, unreasonable, nervous, flighty, irresponsible son. You will get no loyalty, little consideration and desperately little attention from him. In fact you will want to kill him. I’m sure my father and mother often must have considered poisoning me. There will be no ease for you or for him. He won’t even have the decency to be successful or if he is, he will pick at it as though it were failure for it is one of the traits of this profession that it always fails if the writer is any good. And Dennis is not only a writer but I am dreadfully afraid a very good one.

I hasten to offer Marie and you my sympathy but I must also warn you that you are helpless. Your function as a father from now on will be to get him out of jail, to nurture him just short of starvation, to watch in despair while he seems to be irrational—and your reward for all this will be to be ignored at best and insulted and vilified at worst. Don’t expect to understand him, because he doesn’t understand himself. Don’t for God’s sake, judge him by ordinary rules of human virtue or vice or failings. Every man has his price but the price of a writer, a real one, is very hard to find and almost impossible to implement. My best advice to you is to stand aside, to roll with the punch and particularly to protect your belly. If you are contemplating killing him, you had better do it soon or it will be too late. I can see no peace for him and little for you. You can deny relationship. There are lots of Murphys.

This is a strange phenomenon—No one understands it. In the Middle Ages they ascribed it to evil spirits or the devil and they may not have been far wrong. But there is a heavy penalty for excellence. I have tried to explain this to Dennis—and I think he knows it but knowing some things doesn’t make it easier. And out of all the mess sometimes comes great beauty—the only thing that survives in our species.

We’re on the move again. We go to Italy March 25 and to Japan in September. If I have any complaints with my life, one of them can surely not be that it is dull.

Again my condolences to you and Marie—but you’re stuck with it.

Yours,
John

 

 

In the spring, on the first of three Arthurian “questes,” the Steinbecks and his sister Mary Dekker sailed for Italy, in search of material not available elsewhere on Sir Thomas Malory. Steinbeck believed Malory himself had gone to Italy at one point as a mercenary. Furthermore, as he wrote McIntosh and Otis, he wanted to go to the Florentine archives—

 

“since the economics of fifteenth century England were dominated by Florentine bankers.”

 

At the same time, as he wrote James Pope and Mark Ethridge, for whom he was going to write a series of travel pieces:

 

“I should like to be accredited to the Courier-Journal and to have a cable card. This is for my convenience and self-importance. I will report ship sinkings and keep the paper informed on the Guelph-Ghibelline matter. I promise not to send anything day rate short of the return of Christ to Eboli.”

 

On arrival in Florence he wrote a happy letter to Elizabeth Otis:

 

“We got in last evening in a state of collapse. Farewell parties on the ship lasted three days and did us in. Our apartment looked like Forest Lawn with flowers from Florentine friends and we fell into the mood by going to bed and dying for twelve hours. Yesterday in Naples I told the press that for the first time in two years Naples had a ruin second only to Pompeii, namely me. This remark so delighted them that they forgot to ask me which Italian writers I liked best.”

 

After three weeks in Florence they went to Rome. He wrote Covici:

“A couple of days ago I went into the Vatican Library and archives—what a place! I guess the most exciting I ever saw. Manuscripts by the acre and all beautifully catalogued. I am accumulating a huge fund of Maloryana. I wonder whether I will ever get it written. It is such a huge job and sometimes I get very tired. Sometimes I think I have written too much. But, hell, it’s kind of a nervous tic by now.”

To Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton:

Rome
April 26, 1957

Dear Elizabeth and Chase:

I have been reading all of the scholarly appraisals of the Morte, and all the time there has been a bothersome thought in my brain knocking about just out of reach, something I knew that was wrong in all of the inspection and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it. Why did Launcelot fail in his quest and why did Galahad succeed? What is the feeling about sin, the feeling about Gwynevere? How about the rescue from the stake? How about the relationship between Arthur and Launcelot?

Then this morning I awakened about five o’clock fully awake but with the feeling that some tremendous task had been completed. I got up and looked out at the sun coming up over Rome and suddenly it came back whole and in one piece. And I think it answers my nagging doubt. It can’t be a theory because it won’t subject itself to proof. I’m afraid it has to be completely intuitive and because of this it will never be very seriously considered by scholars.

Malory has been studied as a translator, as a soldier, as a rebel, as a religious, as an expert in courtesy, as nearly everything you can think of except one, and that is what he was—a novelist. The Morte is the first and one of the greatest of novels in the English language. And only a novelist could think it. A novelist not only puts down a story but he is the story. He is each one of the characters in a greater or a less degree. And because he is usually a moral man in intention and honest in his approach, he sets things down as truly as he can.

A novel may be said to be the man who writes it. Now it is nearly always true that a novelist, perhaps unconsciously, identifies himself with one chief or central character in his novel. Into this character he puts not only what he thinks he is but what he hopes to be. We can call this spokesman the self-character. You will find one in every one of my books and in the novels of everyone I can remember. It is most simple and near the surface in Hemingway’s novels. The soldier, romantic, always maimed in some sense, hand—tes—ticles. These are the symbols of his limitations. I suppose my own symbol character has my dream wish of wisdom and acceptance.

Now it seems to me that Malory’s self-character would be Launcelot. All of the perfections he knew went into this character, all of the things of which he thought himself capable. But, being an honest man he found faults in himself, faults of vanity, faults of violence, faults even of disloyalty and these would naturally find their way into his dream character. Oh, don’t forget that the novelist may arrange or rearrange events so that they are more nearly what he hoped they might have been.

For example, if Malory had been at Rouen and had seen the cynical trial, the brutal indictment and the horrible burning, might he not be tempted in his novel to right a wrong by dreaming he had done it differently? If he were affected by the burning of Joan and even more by his failure to save her or even to protest, would he not be likely to have his self-character save Gwynevere from the flames? In a sense he would by this means have protested against the killing of the falsely accused but he would also in a sense have cured it.

And now we come to the Grail, the Quest. I think it is true that any man, novelist or not, when he comes to maturity has a very deep sense that he will not win the quest. He knows his failings, his shortcomings and particularly his memories of sins, sins of cruelty, of thoughtlessness, of disloyalty, of adultery, and these will not permit him to win the Grail. And so his self-character must suffer the same terrible sense of failure as his author. Launcelot could not see the Grail because of the faults and sins of Malory himself. He knows he has fallen short and all his excellences, his courage, his courtesy, in his own mind cannot balance his vices and errors, his stupidities.

I think this happens to every man who has ever lived but it is set down largely by novelists. But there is an answer ready to hand. The self-character cannot win the Quest, but his son can, his spotless son, the son of his seed and his blood who has his virtues but has not his faults. And so Galahad is able to win the Quest, the dear son, the unsoiled son, and because he is the seed of Launcelot and the seed of Malory, Malory-Launcelot has in a sense won the quest and in his issue broken through to the glory which his own faults have forbidden him.

Now this is so. I know it as surely as I can know anything. God knows I have done it myself often enough. And this can for me wipe out all the inconsistencies and obscurities scholars have found in the story. And if the Morte is uneven and changeable it is because the author was changeable. Sometimes there is a flash of fire, sometimes a moody dream, sometimes an anger. For a novelist is a rearranger of nature so that it makes an understandable pattern, and a novelist is also a teacher, but a novelist is primarily a man and subject to all of a man’s faults and virtues, fears and braveries. And I have seen no treatise which has ever considered that the story of the Morte is the story of Sir Thomas Malory and his times and the story of his dreams of goodness and his wish that the story may come out well and only molded by the essential honesty which will not allow him to lie.

Well, that was the problem and that was the settlement and it came sweetly out with the morning sun on the brown walls of Rome. And I should like to know whether you two find it valid at all. In my heart and in my mind I find it true and I do not know how in the world I can prove it except by saying it as clearly as I can so that a reader may say—“Of course, that’s how it had to be. Whatever else could be the explanation?”

Please let me know what you think of this dizzying inductive leap. Does it possibly seem as deeply true to you as it does to me?

I shall dearly like to know what you think.

Love to all there,
John

To Pascal Covici

Florence
May 16, 1957

Dear Pat:

Spring has finally come, and late spring at that. The rains have stopped and the sunshine is beautiful, almost painfully beautiful so that in the morning you look out and take a quick breath as you do when you are quickly, sharply hurt. This afternoon I walked for quite a long time by the Arno and repeopled it. And I can now. I know what the people used to wear and to some extent how they thought, at least in so far as any age can get near another. But I told you I felt that I understood.

Thanks for sending Atkinson’s letter on to me. [Brooks Atkinson, drama critic of The New York Times.] I have answered it.

 

The House Committee on Un-American Activities had investigated Arthur Miller. Steinbeck had written a defense of him published in Esquire.

 

I feel deeply that writers like me and actors and painters are in difficulty because of their own cowardice or perhaps failure to notice. When Artie told me that not one writer had come to his defense, it gave me a lonely sorrow and a shame that I waited so long and it seemed to me also that if we had fought back from the beginning instead of running away, perhaps these things would not be happening now. These committee men are neither very brave nor very intelligent. They would not attack an organism which defended itself. But they have been quite brave in pursuing rabbits and in effect we have been like rabbits. McCarthy [Senator Joseph McCarthy] went down not because Eisenhower faced him. That is a god damned lie. Eisenhower was scared of him. It took one brave man, Ed Murrow, to stand up to him to show that he had no strength. And Artie may be serving all of us. Please give him my respect and more than that, my love. You see, we have had all along the sharpest weapons of all, words, and we did not use them, and I for one am ashamed. I don’t think I was frightened but truly, I was careless.

 

Only two more days in Florence. I’ve had a large and good time here with too much work perhaps but very valuable.

love to all there,
John

 

 

Steinbeck’s feeling for Arthur Miller was reflected in a letter written the year before to Annie Laurie Williams:

 

“Did you ever hear the poem I wrote for Artie Miller? I guess he is the most peaceful man in the world and one of the gentlest. Anyway one time when I was going into Mexico, he asked me to bring him a machete. You know in Oaxaca they make the most beautiful in this hemisphere. The makers are in fact direct descendants of the sword makers who went from Damascus to Toledo in Spain and then brought their secrets to Mexico. They make the great blades which can be tied in a knot and then spring back straight. Arthur wanted the machete, not for murder but to cut brush on his country place. Anyway I bought a beauty and since most of these have some noble statement etched on them I had etched on this blade the following poem which I think is funny, if you know Artie:

Who dares raise war ’gainst Arthur Miller,
Destroys the Lamb, Creates the killer.
Then Leap, Sweet Steel, release the flood,
Until the insult drowns in Blood.

 

Artie loved it and perhaps even once or twice got to believing it.”

The Steinbecks next went to Manchester to meet the eminent scholar and leading authority on Sir Thomas Malory and the Fifteenth Century, Professor Eugene Vinaver, who held the chair of Romance of the Middle Ages at the University of Manchester.

To Professor and Mrs. Eugène Vinaver

The Lord Crewe Arms Hotel
Blanchland [England]
July 20, 1957

 

My dear Professor and Madame Vinaver:

I cannot tell you what pleasure and stimulation I had in meeting and talking with you. I carry a glow from it in the mind as well as well-defined gratitude for your hospitality which was princely. Just as Launcelot was always glad and returned to find that a good fighting man was also a king’s son, so I am gratified to know that the top of the Arthurian pyramid is royal. Having read you with admiration, I could not have believed it to be otherwise for I have been fortunate in meeting a number of great men and it has been my invariable experience that in addition to eminence, superiority has two other qualities or rather three—simplicity, clarity and generosity.

It could not be otherwise with you and is not. There is a final ingredient in the recipe for greatness—enthusiasm—which you have to a superlative degree. I shall carry this glow for a long time.

I hope you will not be bored with me if I write to you occasionally and, if I know myself, at great length, and even presume to ask questions both of fact and of intuition.

Elaine joins me in compliments and gratefulness. Nothing would give us greater pleasure than to be allowed to entertain you in our own querencia.

Finally, my deep thanks for your kindness, your hospitality and your encouragement. It provides a noble pediment for work which I dearly hope will not embarrass you.

Yours in pleasure
John Steinbeck