1957 to 1959

Slemluch “... taut as a bowstring... ”

1957 Attended P.E.N. Congress in Tokyo.

1958 Once There Was a War published.

To John Steinbeck IV ELEVEN YEARS OLD, AT EAGLEBROOK SCHOOL, DEERFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

Sag Harbor
August 7, 1957

Dear Catsell:

Finally I got your long and beautiful letter and was properly impressed. There was a laugh in every line. Nancy Brown must be a killer, even if she is “shear jelousy.” Please don’t marry her right away unless she can support you, in which case grab her up even if her name does sound like an item on a police blotter on a Saturday night. As for your ducking of DeeDee Snider in the pool, I seem to detect some catbirdian technique for keeping Nancy off balance. And it is a tried and true method. Don’t ever forget it. And I wonder whether some more of the “shear jelousy” is not attributable to certain catbirdiana. Just remember that you are a poor kid with no prospects and no fortune—in fact a brave but pitiful character. That way you will be loved for yourself rather than for financial tangibles. You had better learn from the experience of others, namely me. Solvency never made a girl less attractive and has been known to improve the appearance of a clubfooted harelip.

I hasten to tell you that our beloved government charges duty or customs on items sent in from outside the country. The twelve dollars duty on the microscope was just such a thing. I am interested in your remark that you had paid for it. I had understood that your grandmother and also your mother paid it so that makes $36 already and since I will inevitably pay it $48 seems to be the final figure. But I will settle for $12 just as soon as I find out who actually disbursed the money.

It strikes me that having a rich brother may be setting you back emotionally so tuck the enclosed bill in your pocket and invest it as you see fit in Nancy Brown, but don’t give her the impression that this is going to last.

Please give my love to Thorn and tell him that next year is Geo-Me year

with love from your
Fa.

 

 

Though ostensibly to Annie Laurie Williams the following letter is really addressed to the creators of a musical play based on Of Mice and Men which was eventually produced off-Broadway. It was adapted by Ira J. Bilowit and Wilson Lehr, with lyrics by Bilowit and music by Alfred Brooks.

To Annie Laurie Williams

New York
August 28, 1957
Wednesday

Dear Annie Laurie:

With reference to the Mice and Men music and plans we heard the night before last—I would not presume to give advice to creative people, which means of course, that I will inundate them with advice.

The company must add a freshness to my play which may well suffer from a kind of mustiness.

First, I like what I heard. I know the pressure they are under and they did it very well and I am grateful. There was freshness and force in what they did. M & M may seem to be unrelieved tragedy, but it is not. A careful reading will show that while the audience knows, against its hopes, that the dream will not come true, the protagonists must, during the play, become convinced that it will come true. Everyone in the world has a dream he knows can’t come off but he spends his life hoping it may. This is at once the sadness, the greatness and the triumph of our species. And this belief on stage must go from skepticism to possibility to probability before it is nipped off by whatever the modern word for fate is. And in hopelessness—George is able to rise to greatness—to kill his friend to save him. George is a hero and only heroes are worth writing about. Boileau said that a long time ago and it is still true.

The other night the word “corn” came up and I said not to be afraid of corn. I want to amend that now. In an otherwise lovely song the words occur “It wasn’t meant to be.” To me this is fake corn. It implies a teleology not inherent in this play. You will find any number of things were not “meant to be” in a lot of successful plays and songs and I hate every pea-picking, Elvis Presley moment of them.

On the other hand a sense of fate expressed as I have heard it “Everything in life is 7 to 5 against”—is good corn. If the protagonists leave a feeling that they never had much of a chance—and in this play that is perfectly true—let them sing that the deck was stacked, the dice shaved, the track muddy, there was too much grease on the pig—corn, sure, but make it corn in the vernacular. I like the idea of a little party when the girl comes to her new home. Let it almost work! Almost! and let the audience feel that it might.

I like the idea that George might get the girl or at least that he might want to get the girl. This would enrich. And also you might let the girl feel that she might want George—all good and all possible.

Now let me finally speak of music. I am pleased with the freshness and unhackneyed tone. I like the hint of the blues. Remember, please, though that music can pull the guts out of an audience. Consider then—hinting at the known—the square dance, the ballad, the ode, again the blues, even the Moody and Sankey hymn form. These are part of all of us and we rise like trout to mayflies to them. Hint at them—because after all this is a ranch. Let your audience almost recognize something familiar and out of that go to your freshness.

My friend Abe Burrows told me a very wise thing once about theatre and I believe him. He said—“Your audience is usually ahead of the play. They get impatient if you tell them something they have already got. Give them a signal and let them do it.” My own plays, most of which have failed, have failed because I told audiences things rather than let them move along. A good mule skinner simply indicates to his lead pair what he wants by a twitch of the jerk line. And the mules do it.

Now finally—I am pleased and excited with this project. I think it can have stature as well as uniqueness. I know the old feeling about never letting the author backstage but I think you will find me a different kind of author. I have no wish to protect my “immortal lines,” I want a play and I’ll go along with anything that works—and help with it too. Just let’s keep it hard and clean and very, very sparse. The emotion is in the situation. Let the audience emote and let the players simply twitch the jerk line.

And there is the advice I said I wouldn’t presume to give you. Believe me please when I say that if I were not stimulated by what you have done—I wouldn’t bother.

Good luck and thanks—

John Steinbeck

 

 

Having been invited to attend the P.E.N. Congress in Tokyo in September, Steinbeck wrote William Faulkner for advice about Japan. Faulkner replied from Charlottesville:

 

“The thing to watch for is their formality, their excessive prolongation of mannerly behavior; I had to watch myself to keep from getting fretted, impatient, or at least from showing it, with the prolonged parade of social behavior, ritual behavior, in even the most unimportant and unscheduled social contacts. They make a ritual of gift-giving—little things, intrinsically nothing. I was always careful to accept each one as if it were a jade Buddha or ivory fan, and return in kind, I mean with the same formality, giving the same importance not to the gift but to the giving, the act.

 

“That’s all you need remember. A culture whose surface manners is important to them; a people already sold in our favor; they will know your work by the time you get there much better than you will ever know theirs. They will really make you believe that being a writer, an artist, a literary man, is very important. Probably the nicest gift you can give is an inscribed book of your own.”

To William Faulkner

New York
February 20, 1957

Dear Bill:

Thank you very much for your advice.

I think possibly I knew these things but it is good to have them underlined. I know what you mean about the continued formality, and it makes me itch a little bit, but I think I will get by with it.

I am particularly glad about the advice about taking books. I get so damned sick of them before they are out that giving them to someone seems a poor present. But if that’s what they want, that’s what they’ll get.

I read in the papers that you are considering going to Greece. I hope you do. Nothing has ever given me the emotional impact like that little country—an earthquake feeling of coming home, a recognition of everything. And the light makes it seem that you can look into the surfaces of things and see them in depth. I have never been quite so moved as I was by my first experience in Greece, and it doesn’t get any less moving. They are wild, crazy, disrespectful, independent people and I think you’ll love them.

I was asking the brother of the Queen something about peasants and he told me a story of walking with the King in the countryside and stopping where a man was tilling a field. They asked him what kind of fertilizer he was using. The man straightened up, looked in the face of his sovereign and said: “You stick to your kinging and let me stick to my farming.”

Again, thanks for your advice. I shall try not to disgrace us and if I succeed in doing that, it will be a success.

Yours,
John Steinbeck

To Elaine Steinbeck

Imperial Hotel
Tokyo
September 1 [1957]

My darling,

We arrived under a barrage of cameras usually reserved for M. M. [Marilyn Monroe] Good room here with air conditioning and the courtesy immaculate. Thirty-eight hours flying. Wake Island a hell hole of heat. Honolulu—Glendale in the Pacific. Hersey and Dos Passos wonderful traveling companions. Typhoon on the way but that means hot weather. If the reception last night at 10 P.M. is an indication, this is going to rival a Roman triumph, including the arches. I’ll write a little to this here and there as I go along. Phone is ringing, phone is ringing.

 

Later—I have been interviewed unendingly all day long. And to put it delicately, my ass is dragging. Remember that piece about how many newspapers there are in Japan? It was an understatement. I must admit one thing though—the men they send are of a much higher caliber than any I have ever experienced. The questions are intelligent and the discussions a pleasure. But it is wearing.

I find now that they have scheduled me for a speech tomorrow. I was not told about this. You can be sure it will be the shortest speech on record.

The beer is excellent and I am sticking to it. The maids fold the end of the toilet paper with a neat little point every time I leave the room—like paper napkins in an Italian restaurant. I’ll show you how to do it. Mighty pretty. I may end up as a toilet paper folder.

I am told that the Emperor has expressed a wish to see me and that I would like to do. He is a darned good marine biologist among other things. Hissing is no longer done socially but bowing is constant. I have bowed so much that my waistline is going down. For the time being I am substituting for Fujiyama as a tourist attraction. Heard a story about a professor, which I am stealing to use on the Ike administration. It was said of him that he was “a sham giant surrounded by real pygmies.” I told a newspaper man that I loved Japanese lanterns, paper fish and kites, and I suspect I am going to be given a crate of them. Never mind. I’ll love them. Someone sent me a plastic pencil box with 6 pencils. A newspaper sent me a box of calling cards with my name on each side. English on one and Japanese on the other. The typhoon has not arrived yet but everyone expects it with a certain pleasure. I am following advice to rest every moment I can. There aren’t many. It will take me months to get the smile off my face and this noon I caught myself bowing to a samovar in the dining room. For your private ear—Elmer Rice is a fool. He is so afraid of doing something wrong that he is going to end up doing nothing, which is the story of all such meetings. I have a little sneaking suspicion that he resents me. So I guess I’ll have to make a pet of him. Egos are in bloom as you might well suspect. And this might well be the worst thing I have ever done. I wish to God the typhoon would strike.

I’ll close this now. It isn’t very gay.

Love,
J

 

 

 

[September 3]
[Tuesday]

Now it’s Tuesday the third of Sept., of the longest week in the world. Yesterday morning I was in the tub reading the paper when I discovered to my horror that I was to make the closing address of the opening session. They had not told me. I went into a blind panic, sat on the stage under blinding light. The Mayor of Tokyo spoke half an hour. The Prime Minister three-quarters of an hour—I thought, in Japanese, but was told later English. The international president of PEN (French) gave an impassioned address, shadow boxing the while. An Indian lady delegate intoned a long prayer in the bell tones of a red coon hound and then there was me, down front and lighted with enough candle power to illumine all Japan. I got a bowling ball grip on the lectern to keep from falling on my face—and plunged. I enclose my address. This is not an excerpt. It is the whole damn thing, accurately quoted. It took, with interpreter, not more than 3 minutes. And at the end all hell broke loose, probably out of relief at its brevity. Every paper has printed it. It has been compared to Japanese poetry and someone has set it to music. Anyway, thank God I didn’t know, or I might have worried up an address and that would have been dreadful.

I’ll have to finish this note later.

 

[September 7]
[Saturday]

Later is right. It is now the following Saturday. The roof fell in on me. I couldn’t keep down things I swear I never ate. Everybody sent doctors. The U. S. Embassy sent a Colonel of Army Medical. So I had to come 7,000 miles to get Asiatic flu. I’m still not sure it wasn’t better than the speeches. I’m up now but weak as 8 cats and the suggestion of a Japanese dinner of raw fish brings hot flashes. The Congress has moved on to Kyoto. My room looks like a combination of Forest Lawn and a garbage dump. I’ve subsisted on tomato soup (Campbell’s) for four days. The only thing I could keep down. I’ve been a perfect guest because I couldn’t get away. From 8 to 12 smiling Japanese hosts have observed my most delicate moments—and they have been real delicate. At some moment of fever I wrote 64 analects on a yellow pad in the manner of Confucius.

Now hear this—I get on the plane at 6:30 P.M. Tuesday the 10th and I arrive in San Francisco 24 hours later at 6:30 P. M. Tuesday the 10th. Don’t think about that. It will just make you mad.

The doctor let me up for two hours yesterday and I bought you two beautiful pearls for earrings—10 ½ centimeters and flawless. And I was very happy to get back to bed as he told me I would be. I plan to spend the weekend opening a bale of letters, mostly in Japanese and one in Japanese braille. The poor things have read my stuff in Japanese and the idea that I didn’t write it that way has not penetrated.

Hersey and Galantière have been wonderful to me. They just phoned from Kyoto 8 hours away to see how I am. We will be on the plane together Tuesday. Dos Passos has been an angel also. What a nice bunch of people.

I’m sorry I didn’t get this letter off to you but I’ve been a little off my rocker. You know what fever does to me.

Typhoon Bess has been raising hell in Japan. She is supposed to strike Tokyo tonight sometime but kind of weakened —only 70 miles instead of 115. It has been raining dogs and very hot and sultry. Anyway the Governor of Tokyo promised us a typhoon and he’d better deliver. It’s kind of dull here with everyone away in Kyoto. I’ll try to save a copy of my analects but they are pretty much in demand. Dos Passos read them to the Congress and apparently they caused a sensation. Congresses aren’t very humorous bodies and some of my dichos are pretty sharp. Anyway, I saw enough of this first Congress to know it is my last. I guess some people just aren’t cut out for them. Another bundle of mail just arrived. I’ve got to open it sometime. The ones I have looked at begin, “I are Japan girl higher student which like you bookings.” Mostly they enclose photos and pretty cute too. I could be a real heller with Japan girl higher student if I having impulse. But not soooo. Hai! I’m going to hit the sack now.

Damndest people. Phone just rang and a man told me a long story in Japanese. When he paused, I said, “Hai” and he hung up. I wonder what Hai means?

Anyway I love you—what’s left of me. And you wouldn’t want the part I threw away.

Yours,
Tokyo Rose

 

Oh! Lord! a letter eight feet long has just come—Japanese. Looks like poetry. Very beautifully written. I’m going to have to send lots of books in English when I get home. I should have brought a suitcase full. They want them in English.

 

After lunch now (Saturday night). I can’t sleep and I miss you. Miss you like the devil. I’ve looked for wind-bells but can find only little ones. Have decided to make my own. I’ll bet I can. I bet I can even pitch them. I’ll copy the little ones bigger—maybe even use plate glass if I find it has a good tone. Or brass tubing might be nice. You can see that I’m getting well. I’m making plans. I’m anxious to get home now. But then, I wasn’t anxious to leave.

Four more vases of flowers came this evening. There’s not much room left for me. It stays hot and muggy and they promised that when the typhoon passed it would cool off. Bess went and missed us so no flying rooftiles or anything, but the southern cities were beat up and the southern rice crop ruined. I saw a 600-year-old cypress a foot and a half tall. Beautiful thing. Haven’t seen the Emperor. He’s tied up with Yugoslavs.

I’ve got to stop this nonsense now but I do miss you.

Love,
Abata Watabe

 

September 8
Sunday

Honey:

I’ll write this and then race across the Pacific and try to beat it to America. Let’s don’t move to Japan. It is charming but I’m fed up with charm. I’ve done the turn, I’ve had the boneless chicken, the tea ceremony is fine but I don’t understand much of it. The Imperial Palace is lovely. It is surrounded by a moat. I asked a Japanese how deep it was and he said deeper than a cab. He knew because he saw one taxi go in and it disappeared.

_, the British delegate, made a long, impassioned speech in a high girlish voice. His interpreter, a real girl, had a low voice. It went on radio and the Japanese are still wondering how it is that the girl spoke in English and the man in Japanese. Is certainly a puzzlement.

The ___ delegation was nearly 100 percent queer. The Americans—Hersey, Dos Passos and me—shockingly masculine. Rice is an old lady but a masculine old lady. Galantière would make passes at a lady streetcar. All in all, we have given P. E. N. a bad name.

I should go out and walk around and I dread it. It’s like swimming in warm blood, humidity 300 percent. You don’t breathe, you bubble. I’m sorry to have to tell you this and crush your hopes, but we will not live in Japan. You can grow your chrysanthemums at home.

Love,
Watanabe

September 9
Monday

Darling:

Back at the old stand. The morning paper says the epidemic has broken out again in Tokyo and schools closing for lack of customers.

The feeling about the bomb is something. It is strange and submerged and always present. It isn’t quite anger and not quite sorrow—it is mixed up with a curious shame but not directed shame. It is an uncanny thing—in the air all the time. The typhoon rain is reported to have an all time high of radioactivity. Every bomb test is salt in the wounds.

 

 

[September 10]
[Tuesday]

Next morning—The hall boy whose name is Yoshiro is a friend of mine and has taken care of me. He came in at about 8:30 and said a girl wanted to see me. I told him that is ridiculous at this time in the morning. He said, “Please see her because she came in from the country to see you and she has been waiting two days. She brought you a present.” So I said, “O. K. Bring her in.” She had a perfectly flat face and rather poor clothes and they were torn. And she was weeping. Her name is Mifuyu Nishikawa. The hotel people would never let her in because of her poor clothes. So this morning she tried to get in through a back entrance and they put up barbed wire and she got caught in the wire and Yoshiro got her loose and brought her in secretly. She brought me two carved figures she made herself. She cried the whole time. I gave her a ballpoint pen and a letter which she particularly asked for and she wouldn’t take any money. She had brought a copy of Grapes in Japanese she wanted signed. Then I got on clothes and took her out through the lobby so she wouldn’t have to go through the wire again, and she cried the whole time.

About 10:30 the President of Tokyo P. E. N. visited me with a bouquet bigger than he was.

A Japanese girl who has been helping us told me that Kyoto was once the capital of Japan and was very beautiful. I asked her why they had moved the capital to Tokyo and she said Kyoto has rowsy crimate. And I guess it has but I can’t see how it could be rowsier than Tokyo. The air is full of damp feathers.

Love,
Tokyo Joe

To Mrs. Donnie Radcliffe OF THE STAFF OF THE SALINAS-CALIFONIAN

New York
December 22, 1957

Dear Mrs. Radcliffe:

The blinding flash and mushroom cloud of the suggestion that a Salinas school be given my name is shattering as a compliment, and I love compliments as well as the next man —maybe better. A heartwarming honor it is, even as a suggestion.

So far only my first name has been given to an institution.

Perhaps it is well to inspect honors in the light of cool reason lest the footprint in the concrete disclose a bunion. Do the proposers of this naming wish to subject my name to the curses of unborn generations of young Salinians? Think of the millions to whom the name Horse Mann is a dirty word.

But the danger of the situation is not only aimed at me. Consider, if you will, the disastrous result if some innocent and talented student should look into my own scholastic record, seeking perhaps for inspiration. Why his whole ambition might crash in flames.

In view of these sober afterthoughts, and being still shaken by the compliment implied, I hope the Board of Trustees will think very carefully before taking this irrevocable step.

If the city of my birth should wish to perpetuate my name clearly but harmlessly, let it name a bowling alley after me or a dog track or even a medium price, low-church brothel —but a school—!

In humble appreciation,

John Steinbeck

At the foot of the page, in his own handwriting, he added:

 

Dear Donnie: This is a copy for you. And of course you may print it in any way you see fit. What fun! Twenty years ago they were burning my books. Makes me feel old and pretty dead and I assure you I am neither.

Yours,
J. S.

 

 

Joseph Bryan III, the writer, had been a friend of the Steinbecks ever since their meeting in Spain in 1954. He lived in Richmond, Virginia.

To Joseph Bryan III

New York
[December 17, 1957]

 

YES, JOE, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS IF YOU BUT LOOK ABOUT. HE IS:

In the wistful eyes of a general writing Santa for one more
star;
In the homeward tread of a call girl whose date wanted to
dance;
In gay, song-driven garbage men;
In the earnest loft burglar with twelve fur coats for his
mother;
In the selflessness of Richard Nixon and of his wife Pat
and of his children whose names I do not know.

 

SANTA IS ALWAYS THERE IF YOU HAVE EYES TO SEE. YOU WILL FIND HIM:

When you hit your funny bone on the bathroom door, Kris
Kringle is nigh;
He dwelleth on the top floor of the FBI Building at 69th and
Third Avenue;
You will glimpse him in the subway at 5:15;
His cheery hand reaches for the cab door you thought you
had;
When your show closes out of town—look for reindeer
droppings;
Santa speaks in the kindly voice of the income tax collector;
He lurketh under the broken filling—peereth from behind
the ulcer and caroleth in the happy halls of Mattewan.

Yes, Joe, there is a Santa Claus if we but seek him—BEFORE HE SEEKS US.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND GOODNIGHT

When you slip in the bath tub and land on your ear
hallelulia in excelcis
Kris Kringle is near
(Sorry, Virginia)

J. and E.

 

 

Throughout this winter the Morte d’Arthur was never far from his mind.

To Elizabeth Otis

New York
March 1958
Friday

Dear Elizabeth:

I enjoyed the other night at dinner very much. Lots of laughter and fun. I do feel to myself as though I were drawn taut as a bowstring and might snap, and I’m afraid I communicate that feeling. I find it almost impossible to discuss the Morte and the more I read the more that is so. It has tunneled so deep in me that I can hardly dredge it up to the word level.

I can’t tell you what solace I get from the new boat [at Sag Harbor]. I can move out and anchor and have a little table and a yellow pad and some pencils. I can put myself in a position so that nothing can intervene. Isn’t that wonderful? I bought a little kerosene lantern with a mantle today so I can even work at night on board. And also a tiny heating thing that works with alcohol which can warm the cabin in the coldest weather. I’m beginning to take health from it long before it is delivered.

To Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton

[New York]
March 14, 1958

 

There seems to be something necessary about pressures. The other night I was lying awake wishing I could get to Malory with a rolling barrage of sling-stones and arrows—which isn’t likely to happen—and suddenly it came back to me that I have always worked better under pressure of one kind or another—poverty, death, emotional confusion, divorces—always something. So maybe I had better pray not for surcease but for famine, plague, catastrophe, and bankruptcy. Then I would probably work like a son-of-a-bitch. I’m comparatively serious about this.

A curious state of suspension has set in, kind of a floaty feeling like the drifting in a canoe on a misty lake while ghosts and winkies, figures of fog go past—half recognized, and only partly visible. It would be reasonable to resist this vagueness, but for some reasons which I will set down later, I do not.

It is all very well to look back at the Middle Ages from a position of vantage. The story, or part of it is finished. We know—to a certain extent—what happened and why and who and what were the causes. This knowledge of course is strained through minds which have no likeness of experience with the mind of the Middle Ages. But the writer of the Morte did not know what had happened, what was happening, nor what was going to happen. He was caught as we are now. In forlornness—he didn’t know finally whether York or Lancaster would win, nor did he know that this was the least important of problems. He must have felt that the economic world was out of tune since the authority of the manors was slipping away. The revolts of the subhuman serfs must have caused consternation in his mind. The whisperings of religious schism were all around him so that the unthinkable chaos of ecclesiastical uncertainty must have haunted him. Surely he could only look forward to these changes, which we find healthy, with horrified misgiving.

And out of this devilish welter of change—so like the one today—he tried to create a world of order, a world of virtue governed by forces familiar to him. And what material had he to build with? Not the shelves of well-ordered source books, not even the public records of his time, not a single chronological certainty, since such a system did not exist. He did not even have a dictionary in any language. Perhaps he had a few manuscripts, a missal, maybe the Alliterative Poems. Beyond this, he had only his memory and his hopes and his intuitions. If he could not remember a word, he had to use another or make one up.

And what were his memories like? I’ll tell you what they were like. He remembered bits and pieces of what he had read. He remembered the deep and terrible forest and the slime of the swamps. He remembered without recalling stories told by the fire in the manorial hall by trouvères from Brittany; but also in his mind were the tellings in the sheep byre in the night—by a shepherd whose father had been to Wales and had heard Cymric tales of wonder and mysticism. In his mind were perhaps some of the triads and also some of the lines from the poems of hidden meaning which survived in him because the words and figures were compelling and spoke to his unconscious mind, although the exact meaning was lost. The writer had also a sky full of cloud-like history, not arranged in time but with people and events all co-existing simultaneously. Among these were friends, relatives, kings, old gods and heroes, ghosts and angels and devils of feeling and of traditions lost and rediscovered.

And finally he had himself as literary material—his vices and failures, his hopes and angers and alarms, his insecurities for the future and his puzzlement about the past. Everyone and every event he had ever known was in him. And his illnesses were there too, always the stomachache, since the food of his time was inadequate for health, perhaps bad teeth —a universal difficulty, maybe arrested syphillis or the grandchildren of the pox carried in distorted genes. He had the strong uninspected fabric of the church, memory of music heard, unconscious observation of nature, since designed observation is a recent faculty. He had all of the accumulated folk-lore of his time—magic and sooth-saying, forecast and prophecy—witchcraft and its brother medicine. All these are not only in the writer of the Morte—they are the writer.

Let us now consider me-who am the writer who must write the writer as well as the Morte. Why has it been necessary to read so much and to accumulate so much—most of which will probably not be used? I think it necessary for me to know everything I can about what Malory knew and how he might have felt, but it is also necessary for me to be aware of what he did not know, could not have known, and could not feel. For example—if I did not know something about contemporary conditions and attitudes toward medieval villeins and serfs, I could not understand Malory’s complete lack of feeling for them. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man—if he were confronted by a fifteenth century man—there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.

I don’t think any of the research on this project has been wasted because while I may not be able to understand all of Malory’s mind, at least I know what he could not have thought or felt.

[unsigned]

To Eugène Vinaver

New York
March 10, 1958

Dear Eugène Vinaver:

It will not have escaped your notice that a mule has foaled in Cornwall, that there has been an unusual appearance of the northern lights, that the weather has been strange and that there have been meteorological manifestations which, in a more enlightened age, would have been justly considered portents.

Those portents refer to Elaine and to me.

We are arriving in London about June ist and will be at the Dorchester. We will be staying in England for the month of June.

I have read until I am blind with reading. I think I have some emotional grasp on the 15th century. And as is natural —the field has widened faster than I could go so that the only thing which has increased is my own ignorance. But there must come a time when one says to oneself: “If I go much further, I will know nothing.” Now, I must feel and taste some few more things—Colchester, Bamburgh, Cornwall. These are stimulations to intuition.

My profound hope is that some time during the month of June, you might be able to join us in a walk about—perhaps to let imagination run free. My associate, Chase Horton, is going to join me.

Elaine sends her finest to you and to your charming wife Betty and so do I.

Yours,
John Steinbeck

To Joseph Bryan III

[New York]
March 15 [1958]

Dear Joe:

This is the kind of letter you write when you just want to talk and haven’t anything to say. Snowing hard outside. Typewriter clacking in the other room with a good girl copying long sections of an article in Speculum-mostly in Latin of the 15th century. That’s one reason for the hand writing. The other is that it is the only kind of writing that comes naturally to me.

Elaine is doing very well [after surgery]. Next Monday she will get out for the first time for Tamara Geva’s birthday. Meanwhile she has the telephone and squads of visitors. It is snowing today—big pieces like white cow flops and the streets a mess already.

I envy you being able to talk with Graves. I have never met him but I want to. Have been going over his White Goddess again. What a man! He knows more about what I am trying to get at than anyone. Scholars have a way of parenthesizing periods and then slipping in behind the safety of the parenthesis. Only Graves seems to have a true sense of continuity. It doesn’t stop on century changes nor tidy up with descriptive drawstrings. One thing grows out of another while keeping a great part of what it grew out of. The American Western is not a separate thing but a direct descendant of the Arthurian legend with all the genes intact and drawn to the surface by external magnets. Nor was the legend ever new. Anyway, I am not going to belabor you with scholastic frustrations. Just tell Mr. Graves, please, that I admire and wish to God I could talk to him.

So many of these scholars are full of holes. Also—they, some of them anyway, are incredibly vain. Also they cover for one another.

But enough of this faculty club bickering. I simply want to know what happened insofar as it can be known.

I’m making a dedication of the Malory work to my sister Mary, who was deeply involved in it. I wrote the opening the other day—funny to write a dedication before anything else. I enclose a copy which I think might amuse you. But it isn’t meant to be funny. It is deadly serious and damned good Middle English, I think you will agree.

For yourself the best. Why don’t you start a boarding house on your inheritance? Might be a new Tom Wolfe.

so long,
J. S.

 

WHAN AS CHYLDE NINE WYNTRE OF
AGE I TOKE SIEGE AT ROUNDE TABLE
MONGST ORGULUS AND WORSHYPPFUL AND
DOUGHTYEST KNYGHTS OF KYNG ARTHUR’S
COMPAGNY-GRATE LACK WAS OF SQUYRES
OF NOBLE BIRTH AND HARDYNESSE TO
BEAR SCHYLDE AND LAUNCE, TO BOCKLE
HARNYSS, TO SALUE PROWYSS AND
SUCCOURE FALLEN.
THAN YT CHAUNCED THAT SQUYRE-LYKE
DUTIS FELL ON MY SYSTIR SIX WYNTRE
OF AGE THAT FOR JANTYL HARDYNES HAD
NO FELLAWE LYVYNGE.
SOMTYMES YT HAPS IN SADDNESSE
AND PYTIE THAT WHO FAYTHFULL SERVYS
YS NOT FAYTHFULL SEEN—MY FAYRE AND
SYKER SYSTER-SQUYRE DURES STYLLE
UNDUBBED.
WHEREFORE THYS DAYE I MAK
AMENDYS TO MY POWER. I MAYKE HIR
KNYGHT AND GIFF HER LONDIS.
AND FRO THYS HOWER SHE SHALL BE
HIGHT—SIR MARY STEINBECK OF THE VALE
SALYNIS.
GOD GYVE HIR WORSHYPP SAUNZ
JAUPARDYE.

A reminiscence of “Sir Mary” occurs in a letter to Mrs. Waverly Anderson, Elaine Steinbeck’s mother:

 

“My youngest sister when she was a little girl didn’t want to be a girl at all. She felt it the greatest insult that she was a girl. And when you consider that she rode like a cockleburr, was the best pitcher anywhere near her age on the West side of town, and was such a good marble player that the season had to be called off because she had won every marble in town, you can understand why she felt that it was unjust that she should wear little skirts. This all gets back to a magic she designed. One that didn’t work—to her sorrow. She felt that if she went to sleep in just such and such a position, she would be a boy when she awakened. For a long time she experimented with positions but she could never arrive at the right one and every morning—there she was, still a girl. This was great sadness to her. And then her girl-ness crept up on her and she became lady-like. She threw a ball with that clumsiness girls have, she ran with little stumbling steps, she cried a great deal—in a word she became a dame.”

To Elizabeth Otis

[Sag Harbor]
April 6, 1958

Dear Elizabeth:

This is really heaven out here. There is only one drawback to it. If there are guests or children here I have absolutely no place to go to work or to be alone. My stuff gets stuffed into closets and drawers and it sometimes takes me several days to find it again. Right now Thorn is with us. I am going to build a little tiny workroom out on the point, too small for a bed so that it can’t be considered a guest room under any circumstances. It will be off limits to everyone. I can take electricity out there on a wire which can be rolled up when we are not here. It doesn’t need plumbing of any kind. I designed a cute little structure, six-sided, with windows looking in all directions. Under the windows will be storage space for paper on three sides and the other two will be a desk so that it will need no furniture except a chair and I will use one of our canvas deck chairs for that. It will look like a little lighthouse. I’m going to get to it right away because Elaine gets too lonely without guests and with no place to go guests throw any work I want to do sky high. I will build most of it myself and then with that and the boat I will have some semblance of privacy. One of its main features will be an imposing padlock on the door. I think I am going to name it Sanity’s Stepchild.

I’m afraid I can’t concentrate today. A thirteen-year-old boy who paces, can’t sit still, doesn’t read, picks up things and puts them down, rattles things and can’t go outside because it is raining and probably wouldn’t want to anyway, is slowly driving me to distraction if I am trying to concentrate. Sanity’s Stepchild looks very good to me at this point.

So that is that.

Love,
John

 

 

Sanity’s Stepchild was only a temporary name. Following his Arthurian bent he soon christened the little work-house Joyous Garde, after the castle to which Launcelot took Guinevere.

To Elizabeth Otis, Chase Horton, and Shirley Fisher

A SEMOR PARTNER AT MCINTOSH AND OTIS

Dorchester Hotel
London
June 5, 1958

Dear Elizabeth

and Chase

and Shirley:

The loveliest weather you can imagine and every flower screaming with joy and splashing color about. Even the British grudgingly approve. This is the nicest trip we have ever had—no press, no telephones, no appointments. We have wandered about, to Pyx and Muniment rooms of the Abbey, to the London Museum in Kensington Palace to see the models of the city down the ages from wattle on a mud flat, to Roman camp to Caesar’s ill-erected Tower—and in the streets following the line of old walls, and the dream memories of the street names, along the Embankment. You have only to squint your eyes a little to see it all in all periods.

I have written John Forman [headmaster of the Forman School, where Thorn was enrolled] a letter of such consummate treachery that any way he turns he will be trapped. I will be interested to see what he has to answer. It is a deadly and jesuitical letter. I wish I could send you a copy but I had no carbon.

Elaine has gone out this morning to tombify. When she gets home we can scrape her for graveyard dust.

Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, came through the other night from lecturing in Warsaw. He had many stories, particularly the jokes being told within the party. My favorite is a solemn definition. A student said: “Under Capitalism man exploits man, whereas under Communism it is just the reverse.”

The month is moving along steadily. It will be time to leave before we know it. But it is a wildly pleasant trip and good even if it were of no value.

I think I’ll go out and walk and look now. I like that.

Love, to all,
John

 

 

This is “the deadly and jesuitical letter” to the Headmaster of Thorn Steinbeck’s school. It dealt with a problem that had come up before. An anonymous letter-writer, signing himself FBI, had called Mr. Forman’s attention to the sentence in Cannery Row in which Steinbeck mentioned that some of the girls in Fauna’s house were Christian Scientists.

To John Forman

[London]
June 3, 1958

My dear Mr. Forman:

Your letter of May 31st arrived this morning and I have considered it very slowly trying to understand both what it says and what is perhaps implied. In this response I hope to leave no room for interpretations.

When I visited the Forman School and enjoyed your hospitality I was quite well aware that you and Mrs. Forman were Christian Scientists. And surely your feeling that there was no hostility was keen and accurate. Indeed the opposite was true, for it seemed to me that we were in agreement that the Christian fabric is a strong and ancient tree out of which a number of branches grew, and that one must know the tree before one is capable of climbing to his own personal branch. I wish my son to know the tree. The branch he chooses will be what his feeling, his thought and his nature make desirable and necessary. In this I think we agreed and I still believe that to be so. But I would no more interfere with his choice than I would rob him of any other freedom so long, at least, as his choice is not dictated by fear or ignorance, or social or economic gain. However, he must have the tools of choice—knowledge, understanding, humility and contemplation.

I have never felt or uttered contempt for any religion. On the other hand, in religion as in politics I have attacked corruption and hypocrisy and I think in this I have the indisputable example of Jesus, if authority be needed.

Let me now go to Page 17 of Cannery Row. I dearly hope that neither you nor your friend read it out of context. The statement that a number of the girls were Christian Scientists was neither contempt nor satire but simply a statement of fact. For eighteen years I lived and worked in that laboratory. The book is only fiction in form and style. I do not know what the organized church felt about it but these girls took comfort and safety in their faith and I cannot conceive of any Christian organization rejecting them. There is no possible alternative interpretation of Jesus’ instructions concerning Mary Magdalene. His contempt was reserved for the stone throwers.

Cannery Row was written in compassion rather than contempt, and a bartender who reads Science and Health (and he did) seems to me no ill thing. Few heroes and fewer saints have sprung into being full blown.

In only one book have I tried to formalize my own personal branch of the ancient tree. That was East of Eden, and while it is long, it is precise.

Finally, I am content that you can and will help my son in the always agonizing search for himself, for I felt that the tone and the overtone of the school were good. And while I am not inclined to be critical, I do feel saddened by the man who, calling himself FBI, used as a weapon a misinterpretation of one sentence of a lifetime of work. It seems to me that it was an unkindly and therefore unChristian impulse.

John Steinbeck

Toward the end of the month, he reported to Elizabeth Otis:

 

“A letter from Forman says—‘What a lovely letter. I feel very happy now about having Thorn with us next year. I hope we are going to have the added pleasure of seeing you as time goes on—’

“I think that took some doing after my letter and it makes me think that he is a better man than I might have. Mine was a tough letter to answer, I think you will agree, and he did it well.”

To Elizabeth Otis

London
June 13, 1958
Friday

Dear Elizabeth and I guess Chase, if he hasn’t taken off before this arrives:

We just got back to London this afternoon. Went by train to Glastonbury on Tuesday. Stayed in Shirley’s pet George and Pilgrim in the room of Henry VIII from the window of which he is supposed to have watched the sacking of the Abbey. We climbed the Tor and sat for a very long time up there seeing how it was and talking to an old Somerset man and a little boy. A lot of time in the Abbey close, just watching. Bought all of the local books and their theories and read them, walked about and more looking. Then the man who wrote the current London hit play Flowering Cherry (Robert Bolt], who teaches school nearby, took us to village cricket and afterwards, with the teams or elevenses if that’s what they are called, for beer and skittles in the village pub and we learned a lot: Of pixilated fields where people will not walk, of witchcraft still practiced so that only last year a man was tarred and feathered as a witch for casting spells. And it is a magical country and it does seem to me that the Somerset people don’t look like the others. They have cats’ eyes, both men and women, and they hide behind their eyes like sleepy cats. I asked for and got some cuttings from the Glastonbury Thorn which flowers at Christmas, and I am going to try to root them. Maybe I can. If Joseph of Arimathea could root his staff I should be able to root a fresh cutting from his staff.

Love to all there,
John

 

 

He was. It still grows in the Sag Harbor garden.

To John O’Hara

London
June 14, 1958

Dear John:

Yours was a good letter. I can’t tell you how glad and warm I felt to get it. There was kindness in it and wisdom and besides it was god damn good writing. I am glad also to see that maturity, which is ordinarily a process or even a synonym for erosion, has not eliminated ferocity in you. I have a very strong feeling that you are about to shoot the moon.

I knew the shock of Belle [O’Hara’s first wife who had died in January 1954] and I was speechless hoping that you would understand that my inability to trap words into a pattern was somehow a measure of my sorrow. But you have a little girl to keep you linked securely to past and future, and a big girl [his second wife, Katherine) to relate future and present. Hell, man, they drive us—else I suppose we wouldn’t move at all.

My boys are moving into the smelly, agonizing glory of manhood. I won’t know the world they will inhabit. I just get glimpses of the life they live now. But the incredible gallantry of a child facing the complication of living with no equipment except teeth and nails, and accumulated instincts and memories that go back to the first activated cell in a house of plasm, never fails to astonish me. And I am amazed at their beauty, pure unadulterated loveliness. My boys have been going through the horror of disintegration about them and handling it with more wisdom and integrity than I could whistle up.

I am springing them from Walpurgis on the East Side this fall. They are going away to school, a new and frightening life also but without the pattern of decay which has been their sentence for the last few years. There is little communication between father and son but a deep and wordless love creeps through I think from both sides of the barricade. I wish we benighted gentiles had a bar mitzvah—a moment when the community accepts them as men—important, responsible and free. The two boys and I had a small Irish version of it recently when I welcomed them as men, told them it was a painful thing and magnificent—tried to explain the slavery of freedom. But I think they know. They have had secretly to wear the toga while pretending to be babies.

I think they need eagles now, the external physical symbol of truth and gallantry with which to identify themselves. I’m having massive signets carved which aim to be the standard of themselves, to tie them to the line and to introduce them to truth and virtue. It must be intensely personal and at the same time relate them. It may be what used to be called corny and probably now has another name but means the same. So I have decided to tie it to the most personal thing we know—our name.

Our name is an old one from Westphalia or the Saxon Baltic before they moved on England. Stein still means a stone but beck is exclusively English as a word. Some time in the 13th century my blood people moved down the map instead of up and got fancy. Probably put a chain across the Rhine and charged toll against the poor bastards who simply wanted to transport goods. This benefaction naturally ennobled them and they began wearing a “von” to prove—whatever they wanted and/or had the power and weapons to prove. However, that was all dropped not because of democracy but because it was too damned hard for their neighbors to spell. But the name in old English and disappeared Saxon means stone stream—or brook or beck. I can’t draw—but the seals are a rapid stream taking the reverse curve of an S and in the stream at the belly of the S a large rock with the water flowing around it on either side and the motto “Aqua petrum vincit.” Poor kids have water and rocks in themselves as well as their name and I think it’s no bad thing for them to know that water does defeat rocks.

We are here for a month. I’m doing final research before beginning a very long and to me a satisfying job.

I hope all is well with you. Your letter had a glow that would have shattered a Geiger counter and I take that to mean that you are deeply at work and you can’t want better than that.

Thank you for the picture. It has gone up in good and proper company. I shall do the same if I ever get one that makes me feel pretty but right now I don’t feel glowy. Maybe that’s because I am going to work but am not actually in the furnace.

We’ll be back July 1st and hope to see you.

Thank you for writing. It is a letter for keeping and going back to.

Yours and with love from both of us to both of you.

John

To Eugène Vinaver

London
June 22, 1958

Dear Eugène:

I had just finished the enclosed and moved some papers and found your gifts which had been placed there while we were away—and your wonderful letter. I love compliments, even, I suspect, if they aren’t true. My father, who was a wise as well as a taciturn man, tried to instruct me and failed as all fathers fail. In defamation, he said, inspect the purpose and the source. In a compliment do the same. And I think he could have found no fault with this except perhaps in my unrestrained pleasure. Your letter goes with a very few other precious ones—which make me alive and proud—a kind one from Mr. Roosevelt on the birth of my first son; a private letter of commendation from General Arnold, commander of our wartime air arm; a letter from a Danish bookseller telling of a woman who rowed a boat in from the outer islands to trade two chickens for one of my books. Those aren’t very many but they are very good to have, and they bridge the times when self-love is at low ebb. Thank you.

 

A year earlier Steinbeck had written to Pascal Covici from Florence:

 

“At a cocktail party I met an Italian man from the underground, a fugitive not only from Mussolini but Hitler. He told me that during the war he came on a little thin book printed on onion skin paper which so exactly described Italy that he translated and ran off five hundred copies on a mimeograph. It was The Moon Is Down. He said it went everywhere in the resistance and requests came in for it from all over even though possession was an automatic death sentence. And do you remember the attacks on it at home from our bellicose critics?”

 

A long time ago I learned a trick—or perhaps it might be called a method for writing. I stopped addressing my work to a faceless reader and addressed one person as though I had only that one to talk to. I gave him a face and a personality. Sometimes I told a book to a real person. Several to Ed Ricketts. East of Eden was addressed to my sons to try to tell them about their roots, both in a family sense and in a human sense. I should like to hold you in image in this new work. You would then be the focusing point, the courts, the jury. Also the discipline of your great knowledge would forbid nonsense while the memory of excited exchanges would keep alive the joy and the explorations. This would be very valuable to me. And I hope you will not forbid it.

Yours,
John

To Professor and Mrs. Eugène Vinaver

London
June 27, 1958
Friday

Dear Eugène and Betty:

Back in Londunium after a successful queste. The defeated should begin trooping in to pray you mercy at any moment now. First to Chester and circumambulated the walls—extra, super et intra, walked in the Rows and peered into crevices and holes, a noble and strange city captured between the warp and woof of Roman and medieval patterns with only a patina of sterling area. Then on by car to the dragon lake and found there our old friend Ingrid Bergman making a Chinese film, a different kind of dragon surely and it did seem odd that neither she nor any member of the company knew that they were living where the dragons fought. Then on to Caernarvon and again the walls and towers and trying with all of my might to rip off the dust-covers of time. It is not hard to do. Then on to Conway and there took our rest until next day at howre of prime. Then across Englonde and to Durham to bend knee to St. Cuthbert and to bow respect to the bones of Bede, and to shudder a little at that mailed and military bishopric, a See of iron. Then back to Alnwick with the sweet meadows behind, sheep in the moat and cows in the bailey, and then finally to the end and the proper end to Bambrugh. The rain was black and then it opened like a torn curtain and the streaks of sun exploded on the battlements as though the original Ina the flame-bearer had come back. In all of these it is necessary to see into and under and around as one must the beast in Peer Gynt. Of course I think I can but that may be self-delusion.

I, as a novelist, am a product not only of my own time but of all the flags and tatters, the myth and prejudice, the faith and filth that preceded me. I must believe that it was the same with Malory. And to understand his stories and his figures, I must, as much as is humanly possible, subject myself to his pattern and background, in all directions. A novelist is a kind of flypaper to which everything adheres. His job then is to try to reassemble life into some kind of order.

To people of our time, unable or unwilling to project into the past, a castle is a kind of lovely dream and armour the clothing of a pageant. But in Malory’s time armour and castles had one major purpose, to protect lives and to serve as a base for counter-attack. The sword was not an ornament. It was designed to kill people. If the towers and curtain walls are beautiful, it is because strength with economy and purpose usually turn out to be beautiful. We do not know it now, because like purposes are involved, but the shape and line of the guided missile will be found to be lovely. It does seem to me that our time has more parallels with the fifteenth century than, let us say, the nineteenth century did, so that we may be able to understand it more nearly accurately than the Pre-Raphaelite guardsmen of the Victorian round table. For we are as unconsciously savage and as realistically self-seeking as the people of the Middle Ages.

We got back at three this morning and I have a great packet of things to remember.

I forgot to hand you some of the vellum we bought. I shall enclose it with some books I have ordered to be sent to you.

I tried soaking some of it in detergent and found the ink comes out readily. I suppose that it should then be ironed dry with a warm iron or boned to smoothness. I am taking some sheets home with me and will experiment with it to recover its original surface.

I hope in the many months to come when this work comes borning that you will not mind my asking for advice and criticism. That is the time when it has value, in the process.

And again our thanks for being so good to us.

yours,
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Sag Harbor
July 9, 1958

Dear Elizabeth:

Yesterday I started the translating, starting from scratch, and continued today.

You remember when I started talking about it, I wanted to keep the rhythms and tones of Malory. When he started, he tried to keep intact the Frenssche books. But as he went along he changed. He began to write for the fifteenth century ear and the English mind and feeling. And only then did it become great. The twentieth century ear cannot take in the fifteenth century form whether in tone, sentence structure or phraseology. A shorter and more concise statement is the natural vehicle now.

An amazing thing happens once you drop the restrictions of the fifteenth century language. Immediately the stories open up and come out of their entombment.

I can give you many examples. Let us take the word worship in the Malorian sense. It is an old English word worth-ship and it meant eminence gained by one’s personal qualities of courage or honor. You could not inherit worship-fulness. It was solely due to your own nature and actions. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the word moved into a religious connotation which it did not have originally. And now it has lost its original meaning and has become solely a religious word. Perhaps the word honor has taken its place or even better, renown. Once renown meant to be renamed because of one’s own personal qualities and now it means to be celebrated but still for personal matters. You can’t inherit renown.

Anyway, I am started and I feel pretty fine and free. I am working in the garage until my new workroom is completed and it is good. Thank God for the big Oxford dictionary. I find myself running to it constantly. And where Malory uses often two adjectives meaning the same thing I am using one. For on the one hand I must increase the writing—on the other I must draw it in for our present day eye and ear. It may be charming to read—“to bring his wyf with him for she was called a fayre lady and passing wyse and her name was called Igrane.” But in our time it is more communicating to say—“to bring his wife, Igrane, with him for she was reputed to be not only beautiful but clever.”

I do hope this doesn’t sound like vandalism to you. If it or rather they (the stories) had been invented in the fifteenth century, it would be another matter—but they weren’t. If Malory could rewrite Chrétien for his time, I can rewrite Malory for mine. Tennyson rewrote him for his soft Victorian audience and pulled the toughness out. But our readers can take the toughness. Malory removed some of the repetition from the Frensshe books. I find it necessary to remove most of the repetition from Malory.

It is my intention to write to you regularly in this vein. It is better than a day book because it is addressed to someone. Will you keep the letters? They will be the basis for my introduction.

Catbird is acting up over at camp. I will have to go this afternoon and try to straighten him out.

Big thunderstorm and rain last night and the wind blew big.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to be at work. Makes me want to sing and I will.

Elaine is fine. Working like mad in her garden.

Love,
John

To Elia Kazan

[Sag Harbor]
[October 14, 1958]

Dear Gadg:

Many thanks for your letter. It was a thoughtful thing to do. One of my main faults is that I take myself too seriously but I have other faults which will run it a close second and third and fourth.

Elaine was sad that you and Mollie saw and heard us blasting away destructively at each other. It doesn’t happen very often and we get over it. It is as though imps got in and took over. They ride on alcohol. I always think I am braced to withstand it and then a school teacher tone comes into Elaine’s voice and I go mad. She gets me every time. Maybe a memory of my Presbyterian grandmother who was always right. I just literally go insane when I hear that didactic tone of voice. But I have learned some things. Such a fight is a kind of purge to a woman. She comes out of it feeling fine. A man is likely to brood about it. And I have learned to brood as little as possible. It’s just imps. And maybe we play into each other’s hands. If I didn’t get mad, Elaine would have to keep trying until I did. Maybe it’s better just to blow up. But E. being more a social creature than I am, hates to have anyone hear it. I’m sorry if we made you unhappy. I just want to assure you that we like each other more than we ever have, if that is possible. And the fights get rarer and rarer. It might be really dangerous if they should stop.

Do you and Mollie ever come to open fighting? We wouldn’t without drink. Maybe it’s better than leaving things bottled. I don’t know.

My work moves on slowly. I kind of like the way it is going down now. I threw out everything I read to you and started fresh before I got your letter. Reading it aloud to you made me aware of things I didn’t like.

I don’t know why I keep on. I have plenty of books for one lifetime. But perhaps because of long conditioning I go right on whether it is lousy or not. The great crime I have committed against literature is living too long and writing too much, and not good enough. But I like to write. I like it better than anything. That’s why neither theatre nor movies really deeply interest me. It’s the fresh clear sentence or thought going down on paper for the first time that makes me pleased and fulfilled. All the rest—rewrite and by-products are mechanical to me but there is nothing mechanical in the joy of the first time.

Did any of your pictures turn out well? I like the way you take them—so casually. If there is a good half humorous and half dignified one, I should like to send it to my boys.

That’s all—thanks again for your nice and helpful letter. There’s nothing wrong with us or our relationship, believe me. Just two brute humans.

love
John

To Pascal Covici

Sag Harbor
October 17, 1958

Dear Pat:

Wyntre ben y commun in loud sing cookoo

Comes time pretty soon to move into town. I love this season but the city will be good too. How very fortunate I am that I can have both and each one as it is needed.

This is the time to put things away. It is strange. In spring and summer we work over the earth as though it belonged to us—plant lawns and cut them, flowers, trees, put in water pipes. We are proprietors. And then the fall comes and the frost and the ice and it is too much for us. We lose our ownership. We scurry to put things away out of danger, drain water, let the leaves be as they fall. The strong forces creep back and we burrow down like moles to wait it out until we can take control again. It’s a fine lesson every year—a lesson in humility. I can sit in my little house on the point and watch the winter come and I guess I am a traitor to my species because I get a sharp sense of joy to see the older gods move back in. I am for them. The wind and the ice taking command again. We can’t fight it. We must retreat as we always have. Almost my favorite season. For some reason it brings a kind of happy energy back to me. It is almost as though I go back to old loyalties. The birds are flocking and flying. The geese go over at night very high. And the air has muscles.

We will be coming in about the ist of Nov. This place though will be waiting. I can come out any time when I need a change from the city. I love the winter storms and the cold. They are much more my friends and relatives than the summer with its lawn mowers and the brown girls greasy with sun tan oil.

My life is coming back now. Strange isn’t it how periodically my life force goes into hibernation very like death and then it stirs very drowsily to life and one day the words begin to rush out and every other consideration dissipates like mist. I am very fortunate in so many ways.

Well, this is nearly all. The words are beginning to flock and fly again like the night birds. I wonder where they will go this time.

See you soon
John

 

 

His delight in the Sag Harbor property was pervasive. As he wrote O’Hara:

 

“I grow into this countryside with a lichen grip.”

 

And to Shirley Fisher:

 

“It is getting lovely and cold out here now. Tonight the bay is smooth as milk and little curls of mist, millions of tiny white pin curls are rising about a foot in the air. It looks a little like a burning stubble field. And in this curly thicket the ducks are hidden, and they speak up now and then in conversational tones and then a fish jumps and plops back. Elayne the Fayre [his boat] is riding so high in the water that maybe she isn’t in at all but hanging a few inches above the surface. And it is so clear that the sky is porcupiny with stars and yet it is a black night. It’s very late but I am wakeful.”

For some time he had been troubled about his inability to find the exact tone for his Arthurian translation. It is possible that this is why he had taken a step unprecedented for him—submitting it for Elizabeth Otis’s and Chase Horton’s opinions, or reading it aloud to Elia Kazan.

To Chase Horton

[Sag Harbor]
October 21, 1958

Dear Chase:

I realize that after all of our months of work together, for me to cut myself off as I have must seem on the prima donna side. And I haven’t been able to explain it simply, not even to myself. Kind of like an engine that is missing fire in several cylinders and I don’t know quite what is causing it. The only thing that will be applicable to you is that the engine doesn’t run. The whole thing must be a little insulting to you and I don’t want it to be. It grows out of my own uncertainties.

You will remember that, being dissatisfied with my own work because it had become glib, I stopped working for over a year in an attempt to allow the glibness to die out, hoping then to start fresh with what might feel to me like a new language. Well, when I started in again it wasn’t a new language at all. It was a pale imitation of the old language only it wasn’t as good because I had grown rusty and the writing muscles were atrophied. So I picked at it and worried at it because I wanted desperately for this work to be the best I had ever done. My own ineptness and sluggishness set me back on my heels. Finally I decided to back off and to try to get the muscles strong on something else—a short thing, perhaps even a slight thing although I know there are no slight things. And that didn’t work either. I wrote seventy-five pages on the new thing, read them and threw them away. Then I wrote fifty pages and threw them away. And then it came to me in a quick flash what that language was. It had been lying around all the time ready at hand and nobody had ever used it as literature. My “slight thing” was about present day America. Why not write it in American? This is a highly complicated and hugely communicative language. It has been used in dialogues, in cuteness and perhaps by a few sports writers. It has also been used by a first person telling a story but I don’t think it has been used as a legitimate literary language. As I thought about it I could hear it in my ears. And then I tried it and it seemed right to me and it started to flow along. It isn’t easy but I think it is good. For me. And suddenly I felt as Chaucer must have felt when he found he could write the language he had all around him and nobody would put him in jail—or Dante when he raised to poetic dignity the dog Florentine that people spoke but wouldn’t dare to write. I admit I am getting a little beyond my peers in those two samples but a cat may surely look at a Chaucer.

And that is what I am working with and that is why I have times of great happiness as well as times of struggle and despair. But it is a creative despair.

Love to you and
to Elizabeth,
John

To John Steinbeck IV TWELVE YEARS OLD, AT SCHOOL

New York
November 6, 1958

Dear Cat,

Of course I was terribly pleased to get your last letter and to hear that you had the second highest mark in “Bugby”. I didn’t even know you were taking it. It sounds fascinating. That and your triumph in mathematics seem to have set your handwriting back a little bit, but we can’t have everything. I have often told you that spelling was fairly unimportant, except that sometimes it can be a little confusing. You said, for instance, that the “wether” up there is cold. A wether is a castrated sheep and I’m sorry he’s cold but there is nothing I can do about it from here. I am also sorry that I will not see your crew cut in full flower, but maybe it will be rather pretty when it leafs out.

The last line in your letter indicates that you want something and by an intuitive approach we believe it says hair tonic. I can’t imagine letting you go without hair tonic, particularly now in these critical days of the crew cut, and Miss Astolat says that she will put some in the mail for you. It’s a little surprising to me that Eaglebrook School dispensary hasn’t any bear’s grease to rub in your hair.

It won’t be long now till we’ll be up to see you, and we’ll have a celebration. And believe me I am pleased that you’re trying. That’s all that’s needed—is just to try and the marks will come. Don’t necessarily try to beat the world in one week. But try pushing at it a little bit every day. That way everybody will be happy, you particularly. We love you and we’ll see you very soon.

Fa

To Thorn Steinbeck FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, AT THE FORMAN SCHOOL, LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT

[New York]
November 10, 1958

Dear Thorn:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistic thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness, and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know that better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I am glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love
Fa

To Stuart L. Hannon

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR, RADIO FREE EUROPE

New York
November 6, 1958

Dear Mr. Hannon:

Thank you for your very kind letter. You may use any part of the following statement you wish or all of it.

The Award of the Nobel Prize to Pasternak and the Soviet outcry against it makes me sad but not for Pasternak. He has fulfilled his obligation as a writer, has seen his world, described it and made his comment. That the product of his art has found response everywhere in the world where it has been permitted to be seen must be a satisfaction to him.

He is not to be pitied however, no matter how cruelly he may be treated. My sadness is for the poor official writers sitting in judgment on a book they are not allowed to read. They are the grounded vultures of art who having helped to clip their own wings are righteously outraged at Flight and contemptuous of Eagles. These are the sad ones at last, the crippled and distorted ones, and it is quite natural that they should be hostile toward one who under equal pressures did not succumb and did not fail. They are the pallbearers of Soviet Literature, and they must now be aware of the weight of the corpse.

No matter how they may quote Pasternak in his absence, no matter what groveling may be reported, his book is here to refute them now and always. The real traitors to literature are Pasternak’s judges, and they will be punished as were the judges of Socrates—their names forgotten and only their stupidities remembered.

Yours,
John Steinbeck

To Henry Fonda

New York
November 20, 1958

Dear Hank,

It is strange but perhaps explainable that I find myself very often with a picture of you in front of my mind, when I am working on a book. I think I know the reason for this. Recently I ran a 16 mm print of The Grapes of Wrath that Kazan had stolen from Twentieth Century Fox. It’s a wonderful picture, just as good as it ever was. It doesn’t look dated, and very few people have ever made a better one—and I think that’s where you put your mark on me. You will remember also that when I was writing Sweet Thursday I had you always in mind as the prototype of Doc. And I think that one of my sharp bitternesses is that due to circumstances personality-wise and otherwise beyond our control you did not play it when it finally came up. I think it might have been a different story if you had.

Now I am working on another story, and again I find that you are the prototype. I think it might interest you. It will be a short novel and then possibly a motion picture, possibly a play—I don’t know. But it’s just the character and the story that remind me so much of you that I keep your face and figure in mind as I write it. I don’t know whether you’re in town or not—but if you are I wish you’d come over some evening, and maybe we can talk. I’d like that very much. And you might be very much interested in the story I am writing. It seems made for you. In fact it’s being made for you—let’s put it that way.

Yours,
John

The story was Don Keehan, one of the two modern works he was using to get distance from Malory. This may have been a contemporary version of Don Quixote; in any case it was abandoned.

To Professor and Mrs. Eugène Vinaver

New York
November 30, 1958

Dear Eugène and Betty:

When one is as neglectful as I have been of you since the wonderful June, it must be obvious that it is not carelessness. It is either guilt or confusion or a combination of both. Actually the second is the more compelling of the two—I came back crammed with Arthur and the flashing lights you did so much to ignite. I sat down lightly and gaily and like our giant missiles, I didn’t get off the ground. I was too full of too much recently absorbed. Digestion had not occurred. Nevertheless, I drove myself like a reluctant mule. It was no good. The lump remained undigested.

Finally, thank heaven, I put it away, back into the dark places of mind and feeling, put it in my personal cave like a wine or a cheese, to mature.

You remember, Eugène, how the wine masters in France say that in the winter the wine sleeps—but when spring comes and the vines cluster with flower then the wine remembers its flowering and it grows restless for a time. It heaves and referments a little—memory of the flower. And if it does not—the wine is dead. And this is so. At that season one can taste the little anguish in the wine. And we have learned no technique nor ingredient to take the place of anguish. If in some future mutation we are able to remove pain from our species we will also have removed genius and set ourselves closer to the mushroom than to God.

Elaine the Fair who is good and loving but more wise than her cousin of Astolat, said very recently, “Are you troubled about not working on Malory?” and I said, “Of course. Always troubled, even when I have explained it to myself.”

Then she, that wise one, said, “Could it be that the dissonance created by the clash of 15th and 20th centuries is making trouble?” My words but her meaning. And I said, “That is certainly part of it. Too many friends, relations, children, duties, requests, parties. Too much drinking-telephones-play openings. No chance to establish the slow rhythm and keep it intact.”

Then she said, “Would it be good to go away—say to Majorca or Positano?”

“Yes.”

“Where would you like to go?”

And I said, “One place. Where it happened—to Somerset.”

And this pleased Fair Elaine. We are moving on it now—asking about renting a small farmhouse in Avalon. Something very simple—kitchen, sitting room, two bedrooms and a cubicle for work. We plan to stay here and finish the little work and in March to move with books and microfilm and all the squirming ferment in my head to Somerset, there to center and to remain until the work is done. We will rent a small car because I will want to move about now and then—to Worcestershire, to Manchester, to York and Durham, to Bamburgh and Alnick, to Sandwich and all of the haunted places in Cornwall. To hear the speech and feel the air, to rub hands on the lithic tactile memories at Stonehenge, to sit at night on the untouristed eyrie at Tintagel and to find Arthur’s mound and try to make friends with the Cornish fayries and the harsh weirds of the Pennines. That’s what I want, so that my book grows out of its natural earth.

Do let me know what you think of this. I’ll want to know.

Our love and greetings to you both.

Affectionately,
John

 

Elaine sends double-love and she can afford it. She’s rich in love.

To Elizabeth Otis

[New York]
December 7, 1958
Sunday

Dear Elizabeth:

We never seem to get things talked out. Every time I have been with you I remember a hundred things I wanted to say or to ask. And as usual I get frantic when I try to do or think more than one thing at a time.

I think the Somerset plan is good. I know it is self-indulgence, but if it works, it is worth it.

There’s the matter of money and in this you and I are very much alike. First I never expected to make any and you didn’t expect me to. When outrageous amounts of money began to come in, both you and I took a very simple course. We didn’t believe it. And we still don’t. There is nothing real about this money. On the other hand we are well prepared for poverty. Our only reaction to money is a kind of panic that we won’t have enough at tax time.

I live in two houses. The expenses are enormous by our old standards. Sometimes I break out in a cold sweat at the size of the monthly bills, but mostly I don’t even think about it. Then if I haven’t worried enough I make it up, wondering how I am going to leave some for the boys. And I do this right alongside of being sure that the worst thing I could do for the boys is to leave them money. And my expenses aren’t enormous at all. I can even whip up a guilt about owning a 22-ft. boat. People with one quarter of my recent income have a 40-ft. boat and want a bigger one. It all goes back to our basic disbelief in the stuff.

Right now I am pounding away at Don Keehan, working much too hard and too fast, and maybe it is because I feel guilty about putting the Malory off.

Now let’s move into the loyalties division. Not the loyalties to you because I don’t have any. I might as well say that I was loyal to my right arm or my heart as to you. No, I feel a responsibility toward Harold. Harold bought my contract to make money. His sense of loyalty has never for one second interfered with Viking’s intention of making a profit. And I feel responsible for Pat. He may love me dearly as I do him but that hasn’t limited his endless attempts to con me. He worries about me if I am not writing and even more if I am writing something which won’t sell. But do we ever think of getting some competitive bidding from other publishers? Never. We are loyal. I’m not against this, Elizabeth, but by every standard of practice in this period we are nuts. Quixotic and crazy. I am not suggesting that we change because I know that even if we decided to, we wouldn’t.

But I wouldn’t mind it if you stirred them up a little. For instance, if you wanted to indicate to Pat and to Harold that I was bravely and secretly nursing a broken heart over the fact that so many letters come in saying my books are out of print. You can say, if you, wish, that I asked you how it is possible for France and Italy and Denmark and Norway to keep them in print while American know-how lets them lapse. Also, we might suggest that the lapsed titles might be of interest to another firm. I was quietly visited by a representative of a rival publisher who wished to publish a complete list. There’s not a word of truth in this of course but we could cause it if we wished.

Now I’ve told you that I had a double life. I must live as though I were going to live forever and at the same time as though I were going to die tomorrow. That’s quite an assignment. And with your knowledge and permission I am going to make some conscious and earnest attempts to change some of my attitudes. I am going to try to abandon my feeling that I am poverty stricken. And I hope you will encourage me in my attempted new attitude. I know that I am not bright about money but one of the real unfortunate tendencies I have is a feeling that I should put in a time of worry about doing something I’m going to do anyway. I would have more time for writing if I gave that up. Anyway, I’m going to try.

I’m taking most of Sunday composing this letter because I think it is important for me to say. Sometimes a kind of quiet weariness settles on me—a listening and a waiting. And when the clamoring from outside goes on too long and too stridently and too repetitiously, the weariness gets sometimes a kind of hunger in it. I’ve heard it too often, like the letters from schoolchildren, or the requests for essays from little magazines which can’t pay—just write anything—you know? So many things are beginning to sound like refrains. This isn’t always. I can get as excited as ever about a high velocity word or a supersonic sentence that comes flying in, unbidden but welcome. But at night too often when sleep does not come, the yammer comes in my ears and I grow lonesome for death. That must happen to everyone. I think I remember it in my father’s eyes. But then the new and exciting comes back and I get up and write the little poems that must and should be thrown away as this letter should be if it were to anyone but you.

One of the hangovers from the old poverty that never loses its impact is a hatred of waste. Locked up and unused and unenjoyed, Sag Harbor represents waste to me. And this did occur to me. The people in your office—they take vacations and they need them. Would it be a good thing if they could use the Sag place? I haven’t discussed this with Elaine but I know she would approve. She doesn’t have my sometimes sense of privacy and possession. I’m going to offer Shirley the use of the boat because she loves it and I trust her with it completely. Maybe some of the people in your office might have a frantic need to dig in a garden. I get that sometimes, a hunger to put my fingers in the soil. It’s such a wonderful place and it should not be locked up if it could give as much joy to someone else as it gives me.

I think that’s all. Maybe this scribbling will be the basis for some good constructive thinking on the part of both of us.

Love,
John

To Pascal Covici

[New York]
December 26, 1958

Dear Pat:

You and I have had crises enough over the years so that a small one is not likely to throw either one of us. I do not intend to finish nor to publish the little book you have been reading parts of.

It isn’t a bad book. It just isn’t good enough—not good enough for me and consequently not good enough for you. It is a nice idea—even a clever idea but that isn’t sufficient reason for writing it. I don’t need it. The danger to me lies in the fact that I could finish it, publish it, and even sell it. The greater danger is that it might even enjoy a certain popularity. But it would be the fourth slight thing in a series.

It would bear out the serious suggestion that my time for good writing is over. Maybe it is but I don’t want that to be for lack of trying.

Frankly this is a hack book and I’m not ready for that yet. To be a writer implies a kind of promise that one will do the best he can without reference to external pressures of any kind. In the beginning this is easier because only the best one can do is acceptable at all. But once a reputation is established a kind of self surgery becomes necessary. And only insofar as I can be a more brutal critic than anyone around me, can I deserve the rather proud status I have set up for myself and have not always maintained.

Anyway, we come to the final thing. In the time left me, I want to do the best I can and I shall look with a very sharp eye on what it is I do. I know you will be glad of this since over the years we have come to be woven of one pattern.

I know that a publishing house must show a profit, but when a writer does, he should be doubly inspected. It’s a strange business. Maybe the fires burn out—surely they burn differently, but in me they burn. I take a very long time with everything. How many years it has been before any decent thing could bear fruit! You remember them—the false starts, the endless searching. And what has emerged may not have been the best but at least it was the best I could do.

It has been a good Christmas. The boys are coming along more satisfactorily than I could have hoped. We have spent too much money, eaten and drunk too much and in every way displayed the intemperance of the season.

Now there will come a little time of getting ready and then we will go to England and there will be quiet and peace I hope and a chance to bring out and inspect the wares I have accumulated. Anyway we’ll see. It’s always that—we’ll see, but we’ll also look.

love to you
John

 

 

Later he went a step further to Covici:

 

“This is a lonely business. The difficulty comes when you begin to think it isn’t. It’s not a social racket at all. It has nothing to do with conversation or criticism or even compliments. It has nothing to do with family or marriage or friends or associates or pleasures. It is and should be the most alone thing in the world. I guess that’s why writers are hard to live with, impossible as friends and ridiculous as associates. A writer and his work is and should be like a surly dog with a bone, suspicious of everyone, trusting no one, loving no one. It’s hard to justify such a life but that’s the way it is if it is done well.”

 

And to Elizabeth Otis, about the same time:

 

“Why this terror of being through, since everyone will inevitably be one day? Is it a race against remaining time, and if so, is it well to race in an inferior machine? Is it an unadmitted passion for immortality? If so, an inferior vehicle is not the answer. Or is it the fumbling motions of a conditioned animal, the dunghill beetle, robbed of his egg which ploddingly pushes a ball of fluff about simply because that is what dunghill beetles do.”

To Elizabeth Otis

New York
January 3,1959

Dear Elizabeth:

I know that what I am going looking for in Somerset I can find right here. What I am wishing for is a trigger rather than an explosion. The explosion is here. But in the haunted fields of Cornwall, in the dunes and the living ghosts of things, I do wish to find a path or a symbol or an approach. And please do know that in turning over the lumber of the past I’m looking for the future. This is no nostalgia for the finished and safe. My looking is not for a dead Arthur but for one sleeping. And if sleeping, he is sleeping everywhere, not alone in a cave in Cornwall. Now there, that’s said and done and I’ve been trying to say it for a long time.

There’s no way of knowing whether the new course is good or bad because the sea is uncharted and a compass is of little use if you don’t know where you’re going. Old navigators, when they had lost a headland for a point of reference, and when wind direction could only be judged by sunrise and set, had then to watch for flights of birds, weed and bits of wood floating in the sea and the high cumulus clouds that signaled land. It wasn’t very accurate but it got people to strange places and there was no turning back because which is back?

If this does seem to be taking a trip to Southernmost England very seriously it is so because it is much more than that to me. There are no figures of speech for what I am trying to say—the “path” but a path on water. Do you see what I’m trying to say at all, or is it all lost in vagueness? Because in my mind it isn’t vague at all.

And now I’ve used you as a well. As I always have.

Love,
John