1961 to 1963
“...I don’t belong anywhere.”
1961 Began ten months’ trip abroad with his family.
1962 Travels with Charley published. Steinbeck received Nobel Prize for Literature.
In September 1961, the Steinbecks set out on what they planned as a round-the-world trip with Thom and John. They took with them as tutor for the boys a recent Columbia graduate named Terrence McNally, who would later become the well-known playwright. He was at this time a student in the playwriting department of the Actors Studio. Here he had come to the attention of the Kazans, who had recommended him to the Steinbecks.
To Elizabeth Otis
The Dorchester
London
September 19, 1961
Dear Elizabeth:
News of D.H.’s [Dag Hammarskjöld] death so devastating it’s hard to think. Two weeks ago last night I had dinner with him.
My hand is shaking pretty badly, isn’t it? Guess Dag’s death hit hard. I’m all shaky inside. Have been reading the appraisals of his character in the paper and I guess I knew a different man than they did. He was neither cold, cool, dispassionate nor neutral. He was a man passionate about what he was doing. He wrote letters all over the world to people he wanted me to talk to. That last night I asked him what I could do for him and he said, “Sit on the ground and talk to people. That’s the most important thing.” And I said, “You keep well. That’s the most important.” He said, “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me.” And as I was leaving he repeated that—“I’m all right! Don’t you worry!” Is that a cold man?
I just can’t seem to write a coherent letter today. I’ll do better later. I’m all shook up.
Love to all there,
John
To Adlai Stevenson
London
September 23, 1961
Dear Adlai:
I had a letter from a friend today which ended thus—“Poor Mr. Stevenson—he must feel like God’s Last Good Man. Wish I could send him a word of cheer.” And so do I. And so I try.
You must have awakened with a sentence in your mind as though it had been spoken. The night after the crash I had such an experience and the words were odd—“Baldus is dead! Loki has won again—but Baldus does not remain dead.”
Once Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, said, on being warned that he would be assassinated—“Then that’s the way it must be and perhaps better, for some men find their real and permanent strength there. I think,” he continued, “of Benito Juarez, of Abraham Lincoln, of Jesus Christ. Death only kills little men.” And he was illiterate.
Friday next we start our wandering. But if you have some small wish for service from me, I can be found through Elizabeth Otis.
Yours,
John
To Elizabeth Otis
The Blue Ball
Bruton, Somerset
October 1, 1961
Dear Elizabeth:
Sunday today and Elaine and the boys churchifying. Wonderful to come back to Somerset.
Terrence is locked in mortal combat with Thorn who has brought out his great arsenal for resisting learning anything. I don’t know who is going to win but he can’t escape a good try this time. But it’s a sad thing to watch.
The weather is that fine combination of sun and rain, probably the best time of the year. We had lunch at Discove yesterday and after went up to our cottage. It looked very pretty and we were very emotional about it. Kai Leslie [of Discove Manor] laid on a great luncheon of Scotch grouse and farmhouse cheddar. The whole thing is like coming home.
The car we have rented is a Ford station wagon but even then we have too much luggage. We shall be out of touch to a certain extent for a time. We are going to try to reserve at Chagford on the edge of Dartmoor on next Wednesday. Tomorrow we will all go to Glastonbury and Wells and the next day move down toward Cornwall.
Love,
John
To Mr. and Mrs. Frank Loesser
Dublin
October 17, 1961
Dear Frank and Jo:
In the dark the other night I wrote in my head a whole dialogue between St. George and the Dragon. Very close relatives those two. Neither could exist without the other. They are eternally tied together—actually two parts of one whole. I guess the Greek had the truest conception of that in the centaurs, the man only partly emerged from the beast. But you will notice that centaurs steal and screw only women, never fillies. So the urge is toward man and away from beast. So St. George must always kill the dragon and it must be repeated because if the dragon were finally killed, there would be no St. George—only a lonely man looking for something to do.
I still want to write a story about Greece. Maybe you Frank, might like to help. It’s about something that happened a little while ago. Some strange fishermen at a harvest festival stole Miss Grape Leaf of 1956 with her help. But she was engaged to the local strong boy. Well, he got his friends and his creditors and his relatives together because not only were his feelings hurt but who could feel safe when strangers steal your dame? So they went to the island where those sponge divers lived and after a lot of pretty dirty fighting they tore the place apart and got the girl back and so right triumphed and everybody got destroyed. And it was fine.
Then there is another one I started a long time ago. Max Anderson and Kurt Weil and I worked on it together but we never got it finished. It’s about a negro soldier demobbed in the north and he wants to go home only the Okefenokee Swamp is in his way. He meets a little old conjure woman and he meets a big son of a bitch with one eye and he meets a pretty nice yellow girl but he still wants to go home. And he does and nobody knows him but a coon hound. Kurt started to write the music of an ode to a hound dog but he never finished it. And Max went haywire and both of them died. But it was my idea in the first place.
So maybe you and I should do it. You always like to do wandering stories and you’ve got the call away in everything you do. But if you are away, the call would be for home. The call is always for where you aren’t. Would you like to do that? You’ve got a great big hit now and if you’re anything like me, and you are a little, you’ll have to do penance for it. Whenever a book of mine gets too biggety, I feel I’ve failed some way. This doesn’t mean I don’t like hits. I love them but I don’t trust them. They carry a poison gland. Anyone can survive a flop but a great big hit has to be paid for with humility and grandeur.
And as you can feel from all this, I do hear the low rumble of poetry. The greatest stories are the oldest ones because they didn’t fall down. We go to see cathedrals, great, freestanding marvels, but there were lots of others that fell down and aren’t there to see. And there’s never been anything truer than Hector coming out to meet Achilles with all the women on the walls watching. And suddenly he got scared and he turned and ran away and Achilles killed him. But that only happened when he found he couldn’t get away and turned to fight. It happened to me when I was a little kid. There was a big black parson’s boy named Laguna and he was after me. I used to sneak home from school to get in our house but I made a wrong turn and he cornered me in our side yard where there was no exit. I was so scared of him that I went mad with fright. My sister Beth pulled me off him. I was on top of him hitting him on the head with a half brick. And if Beth hadn’t saved me, I would have killed him out of pure fear. So I can understand Hector very well. Homer said his blood turned to water, and so did mine. And I guess everyone has lived all of the great stories and that’s why they are great.
Love to you both,
John
To Elizabeth Otis
Dublin
October 17, 1961
Dear Elizabeth:
We had a note from Tom Guinzburg [son of Harold Guinzburg, Steinbeck’s publisher] this morning saying that Harold was dying. We’ve just called Tom and he says it is very soon, perhaps in twenty-four hours. This is a numbing thing. I can’t grow used to the thought. In March we went diving with aqualungs. I guess it’s the speed of the thing. There is no milestone for comparison. It seems uncalled for. But I realize that none of those sentences make any sense whatever.
The fact of the matter is that people of our generation are coming of the age to die. Nothing strange or unusual about that unless we find it strange. The boys had a serious and private meeting and reported that if we wanted to fly home, they would carry on. And they would and would do it well too. Of course the main worry is for Alice [Mrs. Harold Guinzburg]. She has little experience in taking care of herself. Only I suspect that she is much tougher than she looks or seems to be.
[unsigned]
To Pascal Covici
Dublin
October 17, 1961
Dear Pat
We had the appalling news about Harold this morning and it has stunned us. Of course we knew long ago it was inevitable but the speed and ferocity of the attack was not anticipated and we haven’t even come by a way to think about it yet.
We came across to Dublin where we have never been. It’s a city of smells and darkness and now we’ll never know how much of the darkness we have brought to it. We talked to Tom this morning and he told us it would be very soon. There doesn’t seem to be any way to prepare for it. People in the Middle Ages surrounded themselves with the symbols of death and I wonder whether they succeeded. But this particular opponent seems to fight like an enemy. It would be good if one could fight back. Failing that one is left with a kind of rage.
Elaine bewails the fact that we are not there to help. I can’t think what we would help with but probably she would find a way. I guess it’s just putting one foot in front of the other and moving on. That’s the way it’s done until it is over. But here we seem cut off and very far away.
love
John
To Mrs. Harold Guinzburg
The George
Chollerford,
Northumberland
October 23, 1961
Dear Alice—
The times of the most agonizing need for communication are those when there is nothing that can be said in words.
You know how much we are with you and have been, and that the wounds are mutual. I can’t offer any of the usual sops. They don’t mean anything. We love you is about the only thing that has any meaning, even if a small one.
But we do, as you must, honor Harold with a courage approximating his own, and an integrity and honesty he could approve. There isn’t any easy way, dear Alice, dear Alice. No easy way at all. You know how much we wish you could be with us or we with you. And we do love you with everything we have, and that is even more now than it has been before.
May you have some peace soon and may you accept it when it offers.
Love as always,
John
Later he wrote her:
“I know that one seems cut off and alone before one picks up a little thread and draws in a string and then a rope leading back to life again.”
To Elizabeth Otis
[Chollerford,
Northumberland]
[October 23, 1961]
Dear Elizabeth:
Your letter this morning. Thank you for sending the flowers. We had been in communication but had not done that. We feel very bruised about it, even though we knew it must happen. I had a short letter from Pat this morning—rather a formal one except for the last line in which he said he felt that he was waiting for Godot. Yes, this must cut the ground from under him.
Thanks for sending the obits. We wouldn’t have got them. I didn’t know Harold was involved with so many things.
We are loving these few days of quiet. There’s a great rain and wind and the Tyne is swollen with brown peat water. Then there are splashes of blinding sunlight. There’s a great Roman fort near here and a section of the wall we haven’t seen so we’ll probably walk there this afternoon.
Love to all,
John
To Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wallsten
Chollerford,
Northumberland
I think it is about
October 26, 1961
Dear Wallsteaux:
In this sad and mixed up time of Harold’s death, we have lost track of things and time. The boys went on their own to Edinburgh while we stayed here for a few days at Chollerford-on-Tyne to lick our wounds.
Something has just occurred to me—kind of in the nature of a law. The effectiveness of a man’s life can be measured by the depth of the wounds his death leaves on others.
We depended on Harold for so many things and mostly to be there. It’s something like having a navigational star removed. No set of course until you find another point of reference.
So if we have been neglective, that’s why. We went to Dublin. A sad place we thought. Joyce described it. The boys loved it. We are learning every day—our joys and theirs are on a seesaw. This is another law. If we love a place they are forced by a high morality to hate it.
They will come back from Edinburgh today having found it the most, the greatest, the noblest—why? Because they found it themselves. Now that’s not a very complicated lesson. But we’ve taken a long time to learn it.
This place—“The George,” Chollerford, is one of the very most places in England. We look out on Tyne and a wide horizon and the rains and suns chase each other.
love to both
John
To Elizabeth Otis
Nice (my ass)
I think it is
November 23, 1961
Dear Elizabeth:
We are staying at the Brice-Benford, a dismal hotel which required great genius to have everything in bad taste. To the worst of the 19th century they have added the worst of the 20th, stainless steel and plastic. We stopped so the boys could see Vence and St. Paul de Vence. I didn’t go. I stayed in today and it rained. They aren’t back yet. When they came to do the room I wouldn’t move so they dusted my feet. I mean it. They dusted my bare feet. What service. I ache now to get out of France—The new look in girls is disgusting to me. The boys find them incredibly smart with their gray lips and charnel house complexions. I have not been drawn to the Lichen Look.
What a dreadful place this is. If Matisse hadn’t stopped his wheel chair near here we might be in Portofino this moment. Now onward to Milano. The Mondadori rascals are going to remember this year. Nothing like it has happened since Attila swept in.
In some ways I am perfectly resigned. I attribute this to hitting my head on an iron bar in Avignon. It was a window and I struck right on the right temple. It has changed my whole life. If I ever even begin to get better I shall hit myself on the head again.
Everyone says, “Why didn’t you say you didn’t want to come to Nice?” And I say, “I did.” “But you didn’t say it loudly enough or soon enough or often enough.” So we are in Nice. At least I am. They are at Vence and it is raining and beginning to get dark. Did any of you ever have your feet dusted? I just sat still and they dusted my toes with a feather duster.
I suppose you know it here. All the hotels have English names. The Promenade des Anglais is a bitter windswept place with old men taking their exercise. In a shop around the corner they sell vests made of alley cat skin—very pretty. That’s true. I haven’t priced them but they look very warm; calico cats and tiger stripes and angoras—just ordinary cats. I wonder why no one has ever done it before. Certainly there are more cats around here than anyone needs.
Tomorrow the movement starts. It takes two taxis to take us and our luggage to the station. If there are more than five pieces of luggage you must get two porters and they get pretty mad if you carry your own. I think we are down to 12 pieces with John’s trumpet and Terrence’s typewriter. We started with 19. But we have worked out a system when we arrive at a station. Two of us leap out and the others throw the baggage out the window. French trains have no luggage room except over your head, and for us to get eleven pieces over our heads plus coats, hats, etc. is something. One good hard lurch and everyone would be killed.
Now it’s even darker and rainier. Maybe they’re lost. No. That would be too simple.
Well, anyway, happy Thanksgiving. And now I think I’ll go and bang my head again. I can’t explain how wonderful it is.
Love to all,
John
He had warned his Italian publishers, “the Mondadori rascals,” of the family’s imminent descent on Milan:
“With our two sons, fifteen and seventeen, we are travelling very slowly around the world, taking ten months to do it. Their interests are wide and healthy. They like girls and music and Leonardo and girls and automobiles and girls and all machines and girls. I find this encouraging. For myself, I find I like girls also even in my antiquity.”
Toward the end of November in Milan Steinbeck suffered what was later diagnosed as a small stroke or heart failure. Doctors and nurses were in daily attendance in what Elaine Steinbeck recalls as a gloomy hotel. Terrence MacNally and the boys continued their travels in the north of Italy while the senior Steinbecks stayed on quietly in Milan. In a short letter to Elizabeth Otis he described himself as “truly weary,” and ended—
“This is no letter. It never intended to be. It’s just mist on a mirror.”
To Elizabeth Otis
Pensione
Tornabuoni-Beacci
Florence
December 7, 1961
Dear Elizabeth:
I’m afraid I scared Elaine and maybe she scared you. I can’t explain it. My energy just seemed to run out, like pulling the plug of a bath tub. I’m perfectly all right now. And never did show anything in tests. It’s just like an overpowering weariness. These ten days in Florence should pick me up.
With Harold Guinzburg’s death, the presidency of The Viking Press passed to his son, Thomas Guinzburg. Elizabeth Otis wrote of a conference about Travels with Charley; Viking had been advised against the use of the obscenities that Steinbeck had reported in the episode about the black child going to school in New Orleans.
I’m glad you got along with Tom G. I’ve always liked him. And as for the use or non use of the words in New Orleans, I don’t really care. I think I protected the thing pretty well but I also don’t think you can get a sense of the complete ugliness of the scene without the exact words. But then we have protected ourselves from this kind of experience for so long. No, I really don’t care much—and that’s a bad sign. You were very right not to send on the galleys of the last section. It’s a thousand years behind me now.
This afternoon Elaine and I are going over to look at David. Just that one. I can only see one thing at a time but that’s not new. It has always been that way. We had a card from Terrence saying Thom had decided to live his life in Venice. He fell madly in love with the city.
I seem to have stopped there in a kind of tiredness and now it is the 9th of December. My mind is lazy and doesn’t seem to want to work for me much. Then a few minutes ago your letters came and I have to stir myself. The boys came back yesterday and I think some big change has happened. They are suddenly full of enthusiasm. It makes up for my sluggishness. They’ve been out all morning sniffing the city like morning dogs. The sun is bright. Elaine has rushed out to pictures. I’m perfectly all right and not weak or anything, only very lazy.
I’m going to get this off right away. Sorry we alarmed you. Everything is all right now. I’ll be fine as soon as energy comes back and it always does.
Love to all there,
John
To Elizabeth Otis
Hotel de la Ville
Rome
December 20, 1961
Dear Elizabeth:
Of course we will try to phone you on party night but I know how that comes out. “I am fine. How are you?” “Fine, but how are you?”
I will try to put down some of our adventures. Our trip to Rome was pleasant. Then we went to the hotel—the Legazione, presided over by an Ethiopian girl, a serpent of the Nile, an asp, even a half-asp. The halls were beautiful with plants and marble, oh! prince’s daughter, the rooms senza heat, were such as to have given monks pause about religion. But we had a bathroom of bathrooms. Vulgar as it may sound, its technique made it beautiful. To take one’s seat, one slipped sideways under the basin and rested one’s elbow in the basin. This hotel had one great quality. Everybody hated everybody. The asp was the worst. Nearest I have come in years to striking a woman smartly with my bastone (walking stick). So we moved to this hotel which we know from old times and where we are loved. Elaine and I have a sitting room where we can assemble. We will put up a tree here and decorate it. The boys and Fair Terr are writing Christmas revels, I believe all in verse, and allegorical too. There will be music, poems and recitations. They have worked long and hard on it. Meanwhile, we hope you will have a very happy Christmas. We have eliminated presents mostly this year except sillies.
Now to the boring subject of my health. The professore finds that I have a fine body. He uses the most hopeful and encouraging words for saying that the organism is wearing out. I must rest—take it easy, not exert myself. If he could take command he would send me home but anyway etc. The liver—she is not diseased but she do not function with complete felicity. The circulation circulates but tends to be excitable. I must not excite myself. I must control my diet, not smoke nor drink nor do other things of an exciting nature. Thus and so, I will have many happy and contented years of life. And so I go back to think about those many happy years. And I remember the last fifteen or twenty years of John D. Rockefeller. He subsisted on human milk and predigested oatmeal. And I’m sure that he was very happy.
Nuts. I cannot conceive it on a quantitative basis. It must be qualitative. I’m not about to change. To go home just now when the project seems to be working, would be nonsense and very unhealthy. We will make fewer one night stands, will choose a center, and let the boys radiate. They are learning so much you can’t believe it. After the eastern Mediterranean we will reappraise. But I will sit at Delphi and regard the sea below. And I will see whether there is any prophecy left in the Oracle there. No one has asked for a long time. And I utterly refuse to be a sick and careful old man nursing his little restricted time. It isn’t worth it. I believe too deeply in Ecclesiastes: “There is a time to be born and a time to die,” etc. And that’s enough of that.
The weather here is clear and sparkling. The wind is from the north blowing over the snow. But the sun makes the city a wonderful pale gold. The boys are out tumbling over the centuries like kittens. They are being very helpful. I’m afraid they will have to grow up now. The baby time is over. And it’s overdue but I know now that they can do it. We are going to have a very gay and happy Christmas, and I do hope you all will.
Love to you and to you all,
John
Robert and Cynthia Wallsten, worried by Elaine Steinbeck’s reports of her husband’s health, wrote suggesting that it might be wise to abandon the full round-the-world trip that had been planned and to return to the United States.
To Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wallsten
Roma
December 20, 1961
Dear Wallsts:
And a very merry Christmas to you. I haven’t written for quite a long time but I have engulfed your letters. In recent times, too much space has been taken up with “my health.” Let’s forget it. I intend to ignore it.
It has been a curious and unreal time. The illness was not really an illness and yet it was. Hard to understand. We and particularly I am grateful for your concern. It may be that I will find it impossible to continue at some later date. However, the gains are so great and the rewards even greater that I cannot discontinue right now. The boys are growing by leaps. And I think their understanding is also. To stop now for any reason would be to cut the process in two.
This is a very private letter. I must tell you that next February I shall have had sixty years with more joy and more sorrow than is given to most people. I am a fortunate one. I have never been bored and I have always been curious. Therefore I cannot find any reason to complain. No one has ever had more love given nor taken than I. What other product can make this claim? You are not to take this as a giving up nor as a dalliance with the past. It is simply an evaluation. I have whomped a small talent into a large volume of work. And now I see the boys making such strides I am filled with wonder. With the very large help of Elaine and Terrence they are developing that hungry curiosity without which the human is worthless. They are gobbling up knowledge they can never lose and they are beginning to love it for itself. Beginning, I say—but that beginning is the best Christmas present a father could have. And I think you will understand how unthinkable it would be to run home now and fall back to where we started.
We have a little Christmas tree. Elaine and the boys are out getting ornaments. Tonight we will decorate.
I have no present for Elaine. My mind seems to have gone dead. She says she needs and wants nothing. I’ve whipped my brains for a fancy thought and so far have come up with nothing. Wish you were here to consult.
This is all by way of wishing you a fine Christmas and the best of years. And you will have it. But I wish we could be together.
Love to you both. You help so much.
John
But after the New Year travel plans were changed.
To Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wallsten
Roma
January 9, 1962
Dear Robert and Cynthia:
Your very dear letters moved me very deeply as they should have done, for it is a rare and to be savored thing to have such friends. I’ve had to face many things these last few weeks of ceiling staring and one is my sin of pride. I have never before permitted myself the simple admission that there were things I could not do so only my will held out. But here I have an opponent against whom will has no terror. I think I could continue the course I set. Whether I could complete it and at what cost to others is another matter. The giving it up was the hardest thing. Once that was accomplished, other things fell into place. It is very good to have friends but even better, knowing this, not to have to test them. Thank you with all my heart.
I’m sure Elaine has told you of our adjusted plan and how we intend to settle in the sun on Capri for a time. Meanwhile the boys will range about on many side trips and use us for a center. In one way it is perhaps better. They will know a small part of the world much better. Maybe the whole world is too much to gulp down. And they do not seem in the least perturbed at the change in plans. As you said they would, they took it in stride. Right now they range this city like pointers and it is amazing how much they are learning to read, and to like what they are reading.
Elaine, of course, has carried the ball while I languished in a kind of impatience. Well, maybe I can help from now on. Some energy is coming back. And I feel that if I can just look out at the sea for a time certain adjustments may take place.
The last section of Travels With Charley has been giving the publishers trouble. It deals with some rough things in the south. Of course, Holiday will clean it up and even then think they will get cancelled subscriptions. But Viking wants to keep it tough and still not be sued. And I have been so bloody weak that I just don’t give a damn. It seems to me that everybody in America is scared of everything mostly before it happens. I finally sent word that what reputation I had was not based on timidity or on playing safe. And I hope that is over. What I wrote either happened or I am a liar and I am not a liar. And I know that truth is no defense against libel. But there is no way of being safe except by being completely unsafe. And in the succeeding months I don’t think that being careful of my health is likely to improve it. Rather it will give me another sickness called self-preservation. And that’s our national sickness, and I hate it. The whole world is torn up, if the papers tell the truth and the papers themselves may be the paper tiger we hear so much about. Everywhere are paper tigers.
I wish we could see you. I’ve lost all rhythm of words and flow of images. Maybe it’s the boys’ struggles not to understand but to know that is throwing me. Even Terrence I keep forgetting is 23 and at that age understanding is not enough. One must be right as opposed to wrong and white against black. I remember it all so well.
Now as to you. Is there any chance that you might come out to Capri and to Greece? Robert I know has a double job now and how much better that is than not having enough to do. I can imagine no hell like that of an actor waiting by a telephone. I’m glad of anyone who has more than he can do. I am not working on anything and this may well be a large part of my illness—the “doctor, heal thyself” business.
When work is not in me, I think it will never come again. It is always so. And I’ve been in a black funk about it. My pencil has wavered and my hand has been shaky. I know it doesn’t matter a damn whether I ever write another word but it matters to me. For I would be a gelatinous mess without that hope that one time something really and truly good would come of it. And the odds against that, however great, have no effect on the hope for it or the despair of it.
I haven’t said any of the things I intended, I guess. Maybe I implied them. Maybe best said—I value you and I am glad of you.
Let that carry all the charge it can because it is true and you cannot overload the truth. Love to you both,
John
I’m ashamed of my weakness in that last few weeks but there it is. I was weak and very weary and I couldn’t seem to bring up any reserves. But I do feel a small return of vitality.
To Elizabeth Otis
Villa Panorama
Capri
February I, 1962
Dear Elizabeth:
The north wind seems to have blown itself out and this morning is serene and beautiful—silver olive trees on the hill behind us and the glowing oranges below.
Yesterday I got a letter from Pat crying his eyes out about how much money I am going to lose in lawsuits and indicating that I will have to carry it alone, which is probably true.
What has happened here is what has happened all over America. Caution is King. What started out as a simple piece of truth now wears all the clothing of sensationalism and has lost every vestige of its purity. It doesn’t feel clean to me any more. The only value of the passage lay in its shock value. Now it has become that book with the dirty words and by a magical turnabout the dirty words are no longer the cheer leaders’ but mine. When I get the galleys I shall see what I want to do. I know that by simple suggestion I can make them much uglier without saying them. Do you remember when the B.O.M. [Book-of-the-Month Club] suggested the removal of certain words from The Wayward Bus and when I agreed, it was discovered that the words weren’t there? Thousands bought Ulysses for the privilege of seeing one single word in print and didn’t read the rest.
The quiet here is very soothing and healing. It has been so cold that we have simply gone to bed after dark but that has changed now. When the wind stopped, the air grew much warmer.
We are going to walk down to the Piccola Marina this afternoon and get the bus back.
That’s all now—love to all there,
John
To Pascal Covici
Capri
February 10, 1962
Dear Pat:
By now the galleys will have been returned and the old process continued.
The weather here is uncertain which makes me like it more. A few chilled and forlorn tourists come over on the daily boat and wander about disconsolately until the boat takes them back. Meanwhile the shops and workrooms here are going full swing making the things they will sell to the tourists who engulf the Island in the summer.
We live a life of incredible quiet. Although somewhat troubled by vestiges of a Presbyterian conscience, I have succeeded in doing nothing whatsoever, and it seems to be working because I feel much better. We rise late, take a walk, read the papers. Sometimes we have dinner in and at others eat at little restaurants deep in the thick and Moorish walls of the old buildings. At our favorite place, we have a table in front of the opening of the pizza oven which serves instead of a fireplace.
This is no tropic place in the winter. The climate is about northern California. The storms come and the wind blows and then suddenly comes a golden day—very like Monterey. The people here are not like other Italians. They seem to be a separate breed. They are very kind and friendly, physically short and wide and with enormous muscular development from climbing the hills and carrying and pulling loads. There are few motors here because there are only three roads, and no cars are allowed in the town. The result is no noise and absolutely pure air which few people living have ever smelled. I wonder if it could not be shown that most urban populations are systematically poisoned with carbon monoxide. That could easily account for the lung troubles as well as others.
Elaine is loving the life here. As usual she knows everyone and everyone loves her. Also her Italian is growing by leaps and bounds. Our plans are still to remain here until the end of April by which time my health should be well back. There is something very soothing and benign here.
My 60th birthday is this month. I don’t know how it happened but there it is. And I must say I never expected to make it. Carola Guinzburg [Carola Guinzburg Lauro, Thomas Guinzburg’s sister] and her husband are coming over for it and we will cook a big fish.
Ken Galbraith asked us to go to India but we are refusing. Maybe some other time but not now for I know now I cannot do everything. It is enough to be able to do anything.
love
John
Robert Wallsten wrote Steinbeck that he was experiencing a kind of stage fright about actually starting to write a biographical work, which he had been researching for a long time, on the actress Dame Judith Anderson.
To Robert Wallsten
Villa Panorama
Capri
February 13-14, 1962
Dear Robert:
Your bedridden letter came a couple of days ago and the parts about your book, I think, need an answer. By the way, Elaine has a better title than mine. Hers is—There is Nothing Like a Broad, by Dame Judith Anderson.
Now let me give you the benefit of my experience in facing 400 pages of blank stock—the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
Well, actually that’s about all.
I know that no two people have the same methods. However, these mostly work for me.
There’s a great big wind storm blowing. No boats in today. The seas are white. Elaine came in blue with cold. Part of the island has no electricity but we have been lucky so far. When Jove puts on a storm, he does it well.
Oh! it’s a lovely storm. And we’re cooking beans and watching it through our big windows. We’re sheltered by the cliff but we can see the trees whipping and the sea churning white down far below us. Life is very good at this moment.
love to all there
John
He had always maintained a kind of avuncular relationship with Wallsten as a writer.
In 1958 he had given him for his birthday March’s Thesaurus-Dictionary, on the flyleaf of which he had written:
“By reassembling the enclosed words, you can make the prettiest things—and will.”
To Chase Horton
[Capri]
February 13 or
thereabouts [1962]
Dear Chase—
Well this is more like it. Now I feel at home. I’ll write this one letter to you and perhaps one to Elizabeth and then put these two precious [yellow] pads away. And any boy who lays a finger on them is going to get clobbered. They have been known to use a whole pad on false starts of a letter to some snotty little girl. But if they mess with these I’ll let them have it. And as for the pencils—They never know how I know they are using my pencils. I guess they think everyone is a pencil biter and an eraser gnawer. I am not. A bitten pencil drives me mad and a chewed eraser makes me throw the pencil away. All this would indicate a neatness I don’t have.
February 15
That’s how it goes. Today is a great blowy storm. The olive trees are wrestling the wind like girls with their underskirts showing. And the tall pencil cypresses just chuckle and bow. No window in Capri is tight so that the wind moans like cats. The bell is tolling. Someone being buried. Here, instead of death notices, the family sticks up little posters on all the walls and boardings—“Our father—Paliato Pucci, after a long and sweet life, went to his sleep—date—mourned by his family. Obs. date—time.” Bills about 12” by 10”. When we go down for the papers we will see for whom the bell tolls.
Our postman has a lean and hungry look. We know that he was a painter but he has also sent word that he is a painter. It is clearly yet wordlessly understood that we would do better to buy a painting if we want our letters delivered quickly and happily. He does water colors of Caprician architecture or will take a commission. They aren’t very good—in fact they are much worse than that—they aren’t very bad and that’s the worst kind of painting there is. The postman is a living proof that the artist need not be helpless.
Oh! It’s a grim and wonderful day. Nearly everything clouds can do, clouds are doing. In a while there will come a burst of rain and then it will be over. The weather is very formal.
A card from Terrence in Siena says they will be here Monday or Tuesday. They will have been out a month. They will be well informed, well travelled and filthy. They are supposed to wash their clothes as they travel. Boys of that age smell terrible. We’ll probably have to isolate them until they are clean. But they have had adventures, some of which we will hear. If all goes well, we’ll let them rest here for a week before we send them out again.
The little girls downstairs came boiling out last night, with much excitement because they had heard my name on television. It’s the new status. People used to say—“It’s true. I read it in the papers.” Now it has become “I heard it on television.” They were so excited that they could hardly talk.
Well it’s good to have the yellow pads. I’m going to guard them now, in case I have something to write.
Love to all there
John
To Elia Kazan
Capri
February 19, 1962
Dear Gadg:
Your letter received and will begin an answer but never know whether or when it will be finished.
I should think that Molly [Mrs. Kazan] wants to write something for the same reason that you want to make the pictures about your uncle. It may be the tearing desire to prove that we have been here at all. Such is our uncertainty that we have been. Here on Capri on the ruins of old, old walls and buildings you can find names or signs or initials, some of them thousands of years old. Even our kids carve their initials in things. Maybe that’s their way to the same end—just to prove they were here at all. When the cave paintings are found, archeologists always build up some obscure religious emphasis. Maybe those people also were simply writing down their own experiences, to fix them out of time. I even have a name for the impulse. I call it the Fourth Dementia.
When this last illness struck me, it was like a moment of truth. All kinds of things got washed away and my eyes became much clearer because the fogs of purpose and ambition blew away. My own past work fell into place in relation to other people’s work and none of it with few exceptions was as good as those cave paintings. So I will go on working because I like to, but it won’t be like any work I have done before. It won’t be like the way-out theater either. Those people are blinded with a petty hopelessness that has built a very feeble despair—a kind of nastiness. I think I’ll write a play or something to be said, because I don’t know what a play is—dolls on strings mouthing incomplete sentences. Words should be wind or water or thunder. We only learned to speak from what we heard and we’ve got too far from our sources. The prostate is too small a gland to be given center all the time.
Meanwhile, see if you think you need anything of me in your film. Maybe I’ll be glad to help. But my impulse to carve my initials on time is definitely weakened and sometimes non-existent.
That’s all for now. See you soon.
Yours,
John
In April, with his health restored, the Steinbecks continued their travels in Italy and Greece and among the Greek Islands.
To Elizabeth Otis
Leto Hotel
Mykonos, Greece
May 28, 1962
Dear Elizabeth:
We are winding up here now. It is a beautiful place. As usual the boys are putting all their time in on their show-off tans for their girls.
Now this trip is over technically. Thom will fall in love twice more and on ship’s food gain another ten lbs. John will preen and worry about his hair. Terrence will gadfly them with school work. But now an era is over. It must have been good. But we will not be together again in this sense. Actually we haven’t been together much anyway but we have been able to call directions. Now they have to do something for themselves or not as the case may be. I have put this creative year into them and probably have bankrupted us to give them this chance. Now I have to try to pick up my own pieces. This is of course of no interest whatever to the boys nor should it be. But the era is changing for me as well as for them and I no more know my direction than do they.
I am very anxious to get back. It isn’t homesickness. I just want to root down for a time, for a goodly time. The coming year is going to be one in which many decisions will have to be taken, some of them large. I want to be prepared for them.
Thom has developed a passion to go to Athens College—of course he hasn’t a bat’s chance of getting in. And yet there’s something in this boy, which if released would do wonders. John has come out of it I think. We feel that he will sail ahead now. But old Thom is still his own unique enemy. It’s the other thing, the strong creative thing that can’t get loose. I don’t think John has it at all. He has something much easier and better in terms of success—a facility. Well, we’ll see.
But I’m glad we’re coming home. It’s time now. Outland places are losing their sharp outlines and becoming of a sameness.
Love to all there,
John
The Steinbecks returned to the United States. One morning during the tense period of the Cuban missile crisis they turned on their television set at Sag Harbor for the news and heard the words: “John Steinbeck has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.”
To Anders Oesterling SVENSKA AKADEMIEN STOCKHOLM
CABLE
NEW YORK
OCTOBER 25, 1962
AM GRATEFUL AND HONORED AT THE NOBEL AWARD STOP I SHALL BE PLEASED TO GO TO STOCKHOLM
JOHN STEINBECK
To Mr. and Mrs. Bo Beskow
[Sag Harbor]
[October 30, 1962]
Dear Bo and Greta:
Thank you for your wire. It found us in complete confusion. At first I thought I could keep up but now it is like one of those old-fashioned comedies when the character gets deeper and deeper into wet plaster. You will know that I will do what must be done and then retire to the old life. You know, I have always handled things myself and without a secretary but now we must call in help. The mail is coming in sacks. There is utterly no way to take care of it.
Anyway, we will go to Stockholm. Perhaps there will be no escaping to one of our old-fashioned singing and wine-drinking parties but I wish we could. We will not stay very long. Four or five days at the most. Where would you suggest that we stay. The Grand as before? I’m going to ask Bonniers [his Swedish publishers] to get someone to handle telephones, people etc. If this sounds overweening, it is because I have seen what happens here. When we went in to New York we were met by 75 reporters and cameramen and that was the worst day of the Cuban Crisis. This prize is a monster in some ways. I have always been afraid of it. Now I must handle it. I shall rely on you for advice.
Sunday night we saw you on “I remember Dag Hammarskjöld.” I thought it well done and that you were very good.
Anyway, we will be in touch. Do you mind if I ask that you be included in a luncheon at our Embassy?
Isn’t all this silly? We’ll laugh about it soon but right now it seems insufferable.
Love to you both
John
To the deluge of congratulatory messages—four to five hundred a day at one time, he reported—he felt it obligatory to write individual thanks. Herewith, a selection.
To Carlton A. Sheffield
Sag Harbor
November I, 1962
Dear Dook:
When this literary bull-running is over, I can complete some kind of communication, castrated of self-consciousness.
One thing does occur to me. This prize is more negotiable than the America’s Cup although both are the product of wind. Meanwhile pray for me some. I’ve always been afraid of such things. They can be corrosive. This is many times harder to resist than poverty.
love
John
To Natalya Lovejoy
Sag Harbor
[November 1962]
Dear Tal:
Yes, Ed would have grinned and done his mouse dance but also he would have put it in its proper place. And so do I. It is important but other things are more so. Such as that Thorn is finally on his way and doing wonders and so is John. I’m more pleased about that. Please send me Carol’s address and her present name. She sent me the nicest wire and I’d like to answer it. All love from here. We’ve survived poverty and pain and loss. Now lets see if we can survive this.
John
John O’Hara wrote Steinbeck from Princeton, New Jersey, on October 25:
“Congratulations. I can think of only one other author I’d rather see get it.”
To John O’Hara
POSTCARD
Sag Harbor
[October 1962]
Dear John:
Well, I’ll tell you this. It wouldn’t have been nearly as good without your greeting. Not nearly.
Thanks, John. The thing is meaningless alone. But if my friends like it—suddenly it has some dignity and desirability.
Yours
John
To Mr. and Mrs. Howard Hunter
Sag Harbor
October 31, 1962
Dear Howard and Edna:
I don’t know what I’ve answered by now. There has been a mountain of mail. Friends write to me—“What are you going to say?” To Elaine, “What are you going to wear?” The boys reacted wonderfully. Young John made the best crack. He said—“In the words of Mr. Nobel—Bang!”
Love,
John
To Ed Sheehan JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR OF HONOLULU
New York
January 8, 1963
Dear Ed Sheehan:
Thanks for your kind note.
You say you felt you had got the prize. That’s exactly the way I felt when Ernest Hemingway got it. It was completely unreal when I got it—a kind of fantasy.
As for the outraged, forget it. I wonder whether they realize how completely they describe not me but themselves. I have known for years that criticism describes the critic much more than the thing criticized. That’s as it should be. But I don’t think they know it. I met ___ recently—a stooped, coyote-eyed man with small hands, fingers like little sausages and soft as those of an old, old lady. He caresses his fingers in his lap as though they were precious and in danger. To shake hands with him is like touching the teats of an old cow. I have only seen and felt hands like that on one other man—Gen. D. MacArthur. And he mostly wore gloves even in the tropics.
Yours
John Steinbeck
To Bo Beskow
Sag Harbor
November i [1962]
Dear Bo:
I wrote you yesterday, and because my address book was in New York, I addressed it simply to Stockholm. I am sure you will get it though. Short of the King you are probably the best known man in Stockholm.
I am sending our schedule now. Elaine and I are arriving Stockholm airport SAS (Remember those pretty girls?) at 11:00 A.M. Dec. 8. There are four things I want or must do and I shall number them. And one thing I will not do and I shall number it.
1. I shall and want to do everything traditional and dignified as practiced on the occasion of this award.
Compare Beskow’s description of previous visits to Stockholm:
“John, in 1937, was not yet known over here and we had trouble getting into ’nice’ places because of his far from elegant attire. When he came back after the war, we had to avoid nice places because of John’s fame and the press. He played Greta Garbo with the photographers and tried to smash cameras.”
2. I want to see as many old friends as possible. I do not regard you as an old friend but as family.
3. If it is possible, and let’s make it possible, I want to visit Dag’s grave. This means very much to me. If I could find some lavender, I would like to leave it there. Remember how you taught me to make the little lavender bomb. And I made one for him? Maybe a little potted plant of lavender. I always associate lavender with him. If this is sentimental, make the most of it.
4. The requests for me to speak are pouring in. I am no speaker and never intend to be. I will not speak to any group or groups (barring the acceptance speech, of course).
And I guess that is all. I’m told that the Academy will arrange our hotel, probably the Grand.
Please write to me. We will have to make our private arrangements in advance because I am afraid the Stockholm business will be very public. How I wish you could paint a fourth and perhaps last portrait. But that takes time.
I am trying to think of everything in advance knowing my tendency to go haywire in crowds. It will be your job to help me lay off the schnapps. Remember the time I made passes at a Lesbian at a dinner party?
I’m putting a lot on you, but I would do the same for you.
You were my first sponsor in Sweden. Isn’t it good that you still are.
Love to you both. And don’t let me ask you to do anything you don’t want to do.
John.
The Dag thing is important not for him but for me.
To Professor and Mrs. Eugène Vinaver
Sag Harbor
November 6, 1962
Dear Betty and Eugène:
We have just dug ourselves out from under an avalanche of communications but I put your cable at the very last because I liked it so much. So often in the last week I have wished to be with Eugène to discuss and to turn over leaves of thinking. And I am sure I could have found not refuge but enlightenment.
This prize is a good prize—good in intent and valuable if properly used. But it can be a dangerous and engulfing thing. To many within my memory it has been an epitaph and to others a muffling cloaklike vestment that smothers and warps. This would be good if I were ready to die or if I were material for a priesthood or if I could believe what I am expected to believe. However, none of these things is so. I have work to do. I think I am near to ready for not the Morte but for the Acts. And that is a task into which one must be born fresh and new and very humble. It is a job so precious to me that I cannot permit any academy nor any dynamite-maker to look over my shoulder. It would be far better to be in prison as Malory was because there he was free from expectation. Perhaps I am taking this too hard but I have seen it happen to people. My sign at the top is still my sign and in a very short time I shall hope to settle back into the anonymity which is required.
Don’t worry about my gloom. But the danger is a very real danger. Only perhaps an awareness may pull its fangs. Again thanks for your wire. I want the [Glastonbury] thorn to bloom but really to bloom. To that end please help me to plunge my walking staff into a hospitable earth.
Love to you both,
John
To Princess Grace of Monaco
Sag Harbor
November 6, 1962
Her Serene Highness
Princess Grace of Monaco
Palace of Monaco
Principality of Monaco
Dear Madame:
Dear Grace honey:
It was very kind of you to wire congratulations on the Nobel award. We liked that. And I remembered what you said one night at dinner soon after you had an Oscar. Judy Garland, I believe, was your runner up. You said, “I felt so sorry she didn’t win but I felt very glad that I did.” That was a statement of truth. And I feel the same. Maybe I don’t deserve it, but I’m glad I got it.
Thanks again for your telegram.
Yours,
John Steinbeck
His old friend Louis Paul felt this was the moment to return to Steinbeck a batch of his correspondence.
To Louis Paul
Sag Harbor
November 7, 1962
Dear Louis:
Your sending back the letters and cards was a true act of friendship and I appreciate it very deeply. But hell! Louis—when I wrote them they were as honest or as dishonest as I was at the time. I haven’t reread them. Maybe I don’t want to. But they are what they are, and they were written to you because I was and am fond of you.
I have always been afraid of prizes for fear they might have a warping effect—I mean one might try to live up to them, and then get to believing what he was living up or down to. I think the current word is Image. Now I’ve had this award about a week and I don’t feel any different except that I am a little richer. And I don’t mind that at all. No, they are yours if you want them.
You say they might be sold—bring someone a buck. It seems to me if someone could make a buck out of them—good luck to him. I couldn’t.
Let’s face it. In 60 years I’ve left a lot of tracks. To try to cover the trail would be nonsense even if it were possible. I’ve done some pretty silly things but I did them, and they’re my product. The Soviet Union with complete control has tried to clean up some history and has utterly failed at it. What chance would I have, even if I cared? Some of the most convincing stories about myself never happened but I haven’t a bat’s chance in hell of changing them. Besides, some of the stories are better than what really happened. Besides, what the hell difference does it make!
I had a roommate in college who couldn’t read Walt Whit-man because he had heard somewhere that Walt didn’t wash his socks. On such things are images made. I think the best thing is to forget the whole thing.
There’s only one thing. If you would look through these and ink out references that might hurt feelings of some living person, it might be good. Anyway, Louis—do what you want with them. They’re yours and were written to you. They could probably be better written but I can’t help that.
I do hope to see you and meanwhile thank you again for a very generous act.
Yours,
John
To Georg Svensson OF ALBERT BONNIERS FORLAG, STEINBECK’S SWEDISH PUBLISHERS
[New York]
November 10, 1962
Dear Georg:
Now is a weekend of small quiet and I shall try to get your letter of Nov. 9 answered in some detail.
May I say first that I am deeply happy to have this prize. I shall go to Stockholm where, dressed in unaccustomed garments, I shall make one short and, I hope, well-proportioned speech and only one. For myself, I hate all speeches but I hate short ones a little less. So mine will be short. It seems to me that the rostrum brings out certain intolerable tendencies in the human. Also I shall go through the ritual of acceptance and thanks when I know what it is. For this I will need help, but your letter assures me that I will have it. I can only hope that the Foreign Office attaché assigned to me may have a reasonable sense of humor and an abundance of tolerance. Both of us will need it. As for a “nice temporary secretary” —it occurs to me that such a person might be of great help in the field of literary courtesy.
Now one more thing. I believe that Mrs. Guinzburg, the widow of my beloved publisher Harold Guinzburg, will be coming with us. I would be pleased if she can be included in whatever affairs are seemly. She is a lovely woman and one of our dearest friends.
Now Georg—I think you will understand that this letter must be private. This prize, and it is far the greatest honor that can be given a writer, can, if permitted, destroy the climate in which the work for which the prize is given can operate and have its being. And since I still have work to do, I cannot permit this to happen. The requests for time, for money, for appearances are pouring in. One television man went so far as to say that since I have this award, I no longer have the right to refuse to go on his television show. I assure you that he was quickly disabused.
I must tell you that since my illness of last year, my energy is not endless. If some periods of rest can be allowed, I will have a better chance of completing the cycle.
Now finally, I must ask help in carrying out what is expected of me and particularly that I am not permitted to err through ignorance or forgetfulness and for this I must depend on you as well as on others. I should like Bo Beskow to be included in anything he may wish. After all, he is my oldest friend in Stockholm.
I think that is all. I have a feeling of unreality about all of this. Perhaps this is nature’s way of applying shock as an anesthetic.
Yours,
John
To Carlton A. Sheffield
New York
November 8, 1962
Dear Dook:
I can think of a number of people who deserve this prize more than I and many thousands who want it more than I do. Of course I like it but it has a way of kicking people around and that I’m not going to stand. I’ve got some work—quite a lot yet—to do and even more sit-and-stare-into-space to do and they ain’t nobody going to take it away.
You say in your card that I said I wanted to be the best writer in the world. I’ve learned a few things since. I would say now that I want to try to be the best writer in the world. That’s a very different thing. In our basement room in Encino I didn’t know the tendency of horizons to jump back as you move toward them. And I didn’t know that the tired farther you go—the farther there is to go. But these are the realities. This prize business is only different from the Lettuce Queen of Salinas in degree. Basically it’s the same thing. There’s no sadness in this. It’s a kind of a joke. The sad thing would be to believe it.
Meanwhile—thanks for your card. I can’t write little any more because I can’t see that well.
Yours
John
To Bo Beskow
New York
November 14, 1962
Dear Bo:
Your good and warm letter arrived in record time and pleased us very much.
I suppose you know of the attack on the award to me not only by Time Magazine with which I have had a long-time feud but also from the cutglass critics, that grey priesthood which defines literature and has little to do with reading. They have never liked me and now are really beside themselves with rage. It always surprises me that they care so much. If I get the same thing in Stockholm I may just remind them of the things said against Dag—and by people who would now be glad to forget they said them.
All in all I could relax and go along with the little play acting were it not for this damned speech I must make. I never make speeches as you know. I haven’t an idea of what to say. I’ve read Lewis’ wild and ill-considered rambling and I’ve read Faulkner’s which on many readings turns out a mass of dark egotism. But what am I to say? Maybe I’ll ask Adlai Stevenson to write it for me. He makes the best speeches in the world today. It will be short, I know that. I should like to make it as near to the truth as is permissible. Do you have any ideas? The idea of having to stand up there and speak just scares me to death. If I could just get clear on that I wouldn’t have a worry.
One thing is certain and Elaine and I have discussed it. We must be very careful about drinking. It is not so much that I’m afraid of getting drunk but I’m afraid of getting tired. Also, except when we are alone with you, we will be in a goldfish globe and if I am going to do this thing at all, I would like to do it well. Kings don’t bother me but academicians do.
Also I am having to buy tails, a costume I have always found ridiculous. I would rent them but Elaine says they wouldn’t fit well enough. Who do you suppose invented the damn things?
Now let me ask you this very clearly and concisely—are there any events, flummeries in the sacrificial parade, to which you haven’t been invited and to which a request from me would answer? If there are such, please let me know. Probably you feel well out of it. While I, clad in the costume of a penguin, must stand in the dock—you, at your ease, can swill your red wine and laugh.
Oh! This damned speech.
Love to you both.
To Adlai Stevenson
New York
November 20, 1962
Dear Adlai:
In a fairly long and restive association, I think you will agree that I contrived to put you in my debt. Lest you forget, I will list only a few of my contributions:
1. I have written you long and confused letters in an undecipherable script at various times when your mind was occupied elsewhere;
2. My suggestions, criticisms and constant advice may well have contributed to the outcome of your two campaigns for the Presidency;
3. I have parked my disreputable truck in your driveway at Libertyville to the scandal of the neighborhood.
These are only a few of the things I have done for you, and over the years I have never asked anything in return. This vacuum was bound to leak.
I have now to ask a favor of you.
As you may know, I am expected to make a speech in Stockholm on December 10th to the Swedish Academy and a gallery of critics.
Now I, who have always been at anybody’s service as a critic of speeches, have never made one. The whole idea fills me with horror. Then it occurred to me that you are undoubtedly the best speaker in the world; that having made so many speeches, one more would mean nothing to you. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind making this speech for me. And I’m sure the Academy would be more than pleased.
By this single simple favor, you would retire all of your indebtedness to me in addition to saving my life, since I am literally scared to death.
May we consider that settled and may I have a note of confirmation from you?
Thank you. I feel so much better.
Yours,
John
To Elizabeth Otis
New York
[November 1962]
Saturday
Dear Elizabeth:
I had your letter this morning. I’m working on the speech. It is done in that I think it has in it nearly all I want to say and in the proper sequence. Now I am going over it word by word to see whether each word has the value and meaning I want it to have. Then, probably tomorrow, I will record it on tape so that I can hear whether it has the rhythms I want, those and the pronouncability. Some words of great meaning to the mind are utterly unspeakable aloud. Finally, I want to go over it very carefully to be sure there is no single extra word nor any repetition. Probably Monday it will be done, and then I would rather bring it to you than send it to you.
Now—the other thing—the Nobel loot. I hadn’t thought of it as a commission. We started this thing together and we’re going to finish it that way. If along the way you had limited yourself to being an agent, you would not have done the hundreds of things you have done. You have shared the bad times with me and they have been long and many, and if you could do that you are damned well going to share the good ones. You are as responsible for this prize as I am. So, let us not argue and be concerned. Not only do you share in the honor but in the money. Let us not discuss it any more. That’s the way it’s going to be.
Love to you,
John
To Carlton A. Sheffield
New York
November 28, 1962
Dear Dook:
I would like to talk to you about the nature of the award. In some way it has gathered to itself a mystique and I don’t know how. What it is is a money prize awarded geographically and sometimes politically. The Swedish Academy of 17 members lay the finger on and presto—everything is changed. I think I’ve talked to you about this before.
I’ve always been afraid of it because of what it does to people. For one thing I don’t remember anyone doing any work after getting it save maybe Shaw. This last book of Faulkner’s was written long ago. Hemingway went into a kind of hysterical haze. Red Lewis just collapsed into alcoholism and angers. It has in effect amounted to an epitaph. Maybe I’m being over-optimistic but I wouldn’t have accepted it if I hadn’t thought I could beat the rap. I have more work to do and I intend to do it.
A couple of days fell in on me so that I come back to this letter with a sense of relief. I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times. I, being a foreigner in Sweden, tried to make it suave and diplomatic and it was a bunch of crap. Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me. I even put some of it in the vernacular. Hell, that’s the way I write. Now they can take it or leave it. Only I hope I get the money first. They might have second thoughts after hearing my vocal efforts. I have one advantage. I mumble, so no one is likely to hear it. But it says what I want it to at last.
I can see interruptions coming. So I’d better put this away for a while. It’s nice to come back to.
Next day—This letter goes on forever. Now to get back to the speech here enclosed. Elaine says I must set it. That’s theatre for freeze it. But I’m not theatre and I know I will be picking at it. But it says what I want to say and in as few words as I can make it. It may sound highflown but I think the time and the place require that. I don’t know whether or not it is good but it’s as good as I can make it. Please don’t let anyone see it before I make it on Dec. 10. It would please me to know whether or not it comes over to you but not before I do it. I have to have confidence in it or I couldn’t say it.
Hearing from you and writing to you have given me a good sense of rest and continuity.
love
John
The text of Steinbeck’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize can be found on pages 897-898.
After the Nobel ceremonies and a short visit to London, the Steinbecks and Mrs. Guinzburg returned to New York.
To Mr. and Mrs. Bo Beskow
New York
December 22, 1962
Dear Bo and Greta:
We arrived home completely pooped and haven’t really begun to look around as yet. Then will come weeks of thank you letters but right now the only one I want to get off is to you two. It was a great and fabulous time. We have yet to sort it out. There was a kind of glow hanging over the whole scene. A never to be repeated experience. The thing is so exquisitely managed and paced that it slips in and out of reality.
Of course we thank you first for doing so much, but then you were basically a part of it. Toward the end, my memory is not too strong. Things got wavery. I remember some things with great clarity, particularly that weeping day at Upsala [at the grave of Dag Hammarskjöld] with the dark and dripping trees and the damp stone with wilted roses on it. Have you ever been to Shakespeare’s grave in the church near Stratford? I have many times and always there has been some flower put there. That’s nice I think.
Now is coming the time for recovery. As soon as Christmas is over and the boys back in school, I am going to withdraw completely into work to prove to myself that this need not be an epitaph. It is a contract I have made with myself.
Meanwhile, a good Christmas to you and again our thanks for everything.
Yours always,
John
The Swedish words in the salutation of the next letter mean “beautiful wife.” Referring to his own, Steinbeck had added “Mein vakra fru,” quite unexpectedly as well as untraditionally, to the list of dignitaries in Stockholm whom he saluted at the start of his Nobel acceptance speech.
To Mr. and Mrs. Howard Gossage
New York
December 31, 1962
Dear Howard, and Vakra Fru,
Stockholm was a curious medieval dream. It moved rather majestically along but there was so much that had to be done that a kind of exhaustion settled down and acted as a poultice. I guess it’s not like anything else. One thing is interesting. I think I told you I was not afraid of kings but academies scared me. What I had forgotten was that far from being hostile, this academy was for me. After all, it chose me. There was great warmth—almost a kind of affection. I wouldn’t have missed it but I wouldn’t do it again even if that were possible.
As for the speech—It occurred to me to take my own advice which I put in Fauna’s mouth for Suzy in Sweet Thursday—to do everything very slowly. I tried it and it works. Cut everything to half time and you don’t panic or knock over things. When it came time to speak, I was so stunned with color and sound and people that I went into slow motion and it worked fine. Elaine easily stole the show. She enjoyed it all so much that everyone around her had a better time. When the master of protocol at the royal dinner planted his ivory staff in front of her and said—“Madame, you will advance to the King, curtsey, take his arm and lead in to dinner,” it is my sworn story that she said, “Yippee, I sure will, honey.” She swears she didn’t say anything of the kind. But it is true that before the first course was over, she was trading recipes and gardening secrets with the King. I had the Queen for my dinner partner. She is Mountbatten’s sister, with a quick and knife-like wit. I told her the poem I wrote when Elizabeth II recently fixed the name Mountbatten by choice instead of Battenburg. I transposed a little for my English publishers: “When Adam toiled and Eve span, who was then the Mountbattàn?” She laughed and said she would see that it got to ER II immediately. “But,” she said, “She won’t understand it. Completely illiterate, you know.”
We got home to the kids and their girls. The boys are in most wonderful shape. Never have they been so thoughtful and such good company.
Anyway, I’ll stick in a copy of the speech and let this go as it is.
Love to your sweet lady—
John
But he was trying desperately to put his new honor behind him and return to the anonymous life of a working writer. This letter, to his oldest friend, reflects the struggle.
To Carlton A. Sheffield
New York
January 14, 1963
Dear Dook:
I forget how much or when I have written you. I think that is because I have had so many conversations with you in my head. Does that ever happen to you? The last two months have been full of fog. If I had to pick out what was real and what imagined I should be hard put to know except that little was imagined—there wasn’t time for fancies. And if I had needed a lesson in the Vanities, I would have had it ready available.
Oh! the prize is real and the people who awarded it are real. It’s the side issues that are hysterically unsubstantial. The mythos is very near the surface and it seems to be unchangeable. When one becomes entangled in a myth, there is no saving one’s self. Just go along with it because you can’t beat it. It’s bigger and older and stronger than you are or one is. The only safe thing, it seems to me, is to be sure that you yourself are not caught up in it. In Hollywood they used to call it believing your own publicity.
Let me give you an example of the perfect myth. In Salinas a neighbor of ours was Joe _. He was partners in a wine and spirits business and I’ve known him all my life. And he knew my family all of his life. When I was in Salinas a couple of years ago I saw Joe on the street and he was an old, old man. We got to talking and he said, “I remember seeing you as a little boy, coming up Central Avenue one cold frosty morning. I remember well, you were blue with cold and your coat was pinned over your chest with horse blanket pins.” I said, “Joe, that can’t be true. My mother was a button fiend. She equated off buttons with sin. She’d have walloped me if I ever used a pin.” “Yes, sir,” Joe said. “Blue with cold and I can still see those horse blanket pins.”
I knew I was licked. Joe knew we weren’t poor and that I wasn’t a waif but the rags to riches myth was so strong that he couldn’t resist it. God knows I’ve told lots of lies but I never told that one. It was a story that was true in his mind. Every once in a while I come on one like that only I know now that no amount of denying will make a bit of difference. When the myth is needed, the myth will be used.
I’ve been reading and studying and thinking on the Arthurian myth for a long time. I’ve never been a good scholar. Too impatient, perhaps, and not careful enough, but in this field I have been better. I’ve taken many years to learn the field and I have had the very best scholars as godfathers, the really great men in the field.
I believe you completely when you say you never wanted things or not enough to do the things required to get them. I’ve always thought of you as one of the truly contented people I’ve known for this and for other reasons. You have been calm while I have been jittery and flighty and changeable, and restless, mostly restless. Weren’t you ever restless? I still am. It hasn’t changed a bit. The wander comes over me and it’s hard to hold still. The next peak is the best.
I really tried to go back to Pacific Grove to live after my breakup with my second wife. I stayed nearly a year or maybe more than a year. But it wasn’t any good. I didn’t belong there. I guess it was there or maybe not very long afterwards that I discovered what I should have known long before, that I don’t belong anywhere.
I lived 10 months in Somerset near Glastonbury and felt more at home there than I ever have anywhere. There was something there that I understood and that tolerated me. I loved that place and when my boys are out of what we call education I may well go back there to finish up. When, sitting here in New York, I think of Somerset, my stomach turns over with a curious kind of longing. It’s beautiful country, of course, but there’s something else that draws me.
Let me tell you one little tale. Some men from the British Museum were digging in the foundations of Glastonbury Abbey trying to establish the outline of the church which burned down in the 14th century. I can’t stay out of a hole in the ground so I was in with them with palette knife and whiskbroom. Those men are really fine scholars. One morning we came on a fine stone coffin, of granite and unmarked. “Well, there he is,” they said. “Thought maybe to find him.” “Who is he,” I asked. “The Duke of Somerset.” “How do you know?” “We’ll know when we open.” “Let’s open!” “No hurry!” they said. “Maybe tomorrow. We’re for a foundation not a duke.” “How will you know?” “Why, by the body. If his skull is on his chest, that’s the one. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered, you see.” Next day we opened and there was the skull on the chest and the limbs had been chopped apart and then reassembled.
In digging we turned up a great many bones and always we put them back where we found them and when we had established the foundation and written it carefully down, we covered the whole thing in again and reset the sod because a body still has the right to be respected. Those were not peasants. They were scholars. But the people who live there have a great knowledge too or call it a feeling because it is a relationship rather than a set of facts.
Now let me ask some questions. Do you still see Carl Wilhelmson? And has he an address? The same for people like Grove Day and Vernon Given and any of the others. They have disappeared from me completely. Every once in a while they all come back to me and I see them but they must be greatly changed as I am—in appearance anyway. It’s a strange thing, the past.
I want to write a small rude book and right away to get the taste of prizes out of my mouth. I’m about ready to start it. Maybe I can next week. It is for my own enjoyment. I’ve probably bored you to death in this letter, but I wanted to have a wandering talk with you. It feels good.
Yours
John
