1965 to 1968

Slemluch “Is it a race against remaining time?”

1966 America and Americans published. Late in year began five-month trip through Southeast Asia as correspondent for Newsday.

 

1968 John Steinbeck died December 20 in New York City.

It has been established that Steinbeck’s restless and wide-ranging mind often toyed with gadgets and inventions. In fact, nothing was too bizarre to elicit a letter from him. For instance, to Dr. E. S. Montgomery:

 

“The metronomic puppy weaner can, I imagine, have the works of any standard alarm clock, and would be effective in soothing a sorrowing wean-ling. The Peacemaker (to stop dog fights) may well be patentable. I think of it as being about the size and shape of a fountain pen. The dosage of the hypnotic should be carefully calculated to be effective without injury to the animal. There is only one thing I think of which might be charged against it. Some inventive swain might try to use it on a girl and get the Peacemaker a bad name.”

 

Names fascinated him, as when he wrote to Howard Gossage about the naming of a new model Rover car:

 

“Land Rover is good, but Rover is cornball. What you need is a new name, simple and not to be confused with any other. It needn’t be boastful like Thunder-bird, or Fireball. Better not. It should have a rich, racy but conservative name. Plantaganent is too long, Tudor has been used for everything. Windsor would be good but it refers to a collar. Raleigh is a cigarette but Drake has not been used. Drake might be very good. Sir Francis Drake would be even better, it has some connotation of daring and far ranging.”

 

Or as he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Bruce McWilliams, on becoming attached to “a small, red Land Rover”:

 

“One finds curious things to adore in one’s beloved. Helen looked to Poe like a ship. Another poet, agoggle about a skylark, could, after considerable thought and emotion, only arrive at the conclusion that whatever else it might have been, it was not a bird, and never had been. He said so openly, ‘Bird thou never wert,’ an odd position to take when there it was flying about, feathers and all.”

 

As Steinbeck himself commented:

 

“You know I have far too much to do to go on like this but I do anyway. It is my beastly habit.”

In March 1965, he was awaiting his wife’s return from Texas.

To John Huston and Gladys Hill

New York
March 2, 1965

Dear John and Glades:

Elaine is coming home tonight hurray! hurray! She is just in time to save my waning life that was dreening away in tears of loneliness.

You know I’m a reasonably self-satisfied and self-sufficient bloke. Don’t need much, handy, can take care of myself, cook, sew a little, quite content to read a lot and do my work. And if necessary, which it isn’t, I can still lift a fairly accurate left and counter with a neat, tucked-close right hook. And if worse came to worst, I guess I could rumble somebody who would find me tolerable—you know. My own man.

And then Elaine goes away and all hell comes busting loose like a storm sewer in a cloudburst. I can’t find my clothes, or the frying pan. I’ve forgotten how to light the oven. A light gray film settles over the house, and three-day-old newspapers are on the floor. I don’t know who the laundry man is or where we buy meat. Can’t find the checkbook and when the stamps are gone that is that.

I’m a guy with lots of friends, good friends. After me all the time to save an evening or a weekend. Then Elaine is gone and I can’t think of a soul. Then I scrounge up a girl—nice kid, good company, undemanding—and fun. I look up her number and remember she has been dead for six years. Shot her husband and took pills.

I tell you Elaine being away is the great leveler. When she comes in, in about an hour, I’ll have to tell her a bunch of crap just to hold her interest. It’s like Gadg Kazan as a kid going to confession and making up sins so as not to waste the priest’s time.

But in the two and a half weeks she has been gone I wrote 85 pages of ms.—out of pure despair. And I don’t know how it happened but it’s pretty good.

Glade’s Ark letters have been a joy. [Huston was playing Noah in the film The Bible which he was directing in Rome.] How I wish I could have been there. I particularly like the man who sleeps under lions. Probably not as dangerous as dames but warmer. Once when I was little and hustling a circus in Salinas for a free ticket, a lion licked my hand and just about took the skin off. I never forgot.

Now, she has landed and she must be on her way in from Kennedy Airport.

O‘Toole [Peter O’Toole] was here on a publicity pitch but he didn’t call and by the time I got around to it, he was on his way to Japan. Making a picture Erin go Bragh Hara-kiri, I guess, or Sayonara Mavourneen. How these Micks do get about.

She must be nearly here now.

I hope to finish this present thing by the brink of summer. Then to Sag Harbor for a big swatch of the Arthurian jamboree and then maybe when the autumn comes we can move on to Daly. Or would one dare try to repeat greatness—ask to be asked for Christmas? That would probably be best in point of time but I have a fist on my heart about trying to repeat.

 

SHE’S HERE!

 

Later—As pooped a Poopsie as I ever saw but it’s all right. She’s here. Now we can go on living.

Please give my respect to the man who sleeps under lions.

And for yourselves—

the best,
John

The subject of a new dog had long occupied Steinbeck. He had been in fairly continual correspondence with Dr. Montgomery about various bull terriers. In March 1964:

 

“I want your philosophical advice. Most people want a dog in their own image. But consider someone like me. I am sixty-two years old. My egotisms do not require either a mirror or a slave. Dogs are just as individual as humans. Don’t you think it would be possible to get a dog who is grown up, whose character is established and whose adolescence is past? I find myself impatient with teen-agers. Couldn’t one have such a dog as a friend rather than a servant?”

 

And a month later:

 

“I think you will agree that the only thing to do is to judge with the feelings and not too fast. Some people get along and some don’t. Some of my oldest and most treasured friends couldn’t win worst of show in a Mexican hill town but I love them even more for it. You see, this may well be my last dog. And I would like to associate with one who could go everywhere with me, could be taught to steal chickens if necessary, and observe the first rule never to bring the feathers home. I should like him to be able to fly—to ride—to creep under a table at the Palais Royale or to engage in commerce with a Sicilian burro. I imagine the first requirement is that I like the dog and the dog likes me.”

 

In November, they had settled on a candidate:

 

“I can’t tell you how excited your telephone call made me. I can hardly wait to see this dog. Now, I am going to do something you may think is nonsense, but I kind of believe in it. I am going to send you a sleep shirt I have worn for a number of nights. If you will put it in the dog’s bed or some place where he feels secure and comfortable, I will be glad. It used to be considered the best kind of pre-introduction and one that a young dog got deep in his understanding.”

 

By February 1965, he was writing to Duke Sheffield:

 

“The enclosed is a picture of a new dog. He will come to us in a week or ten days. He is just about perfect of his breed. That left eye is not blue. The blue is from camera flash. His eyes are black as jet and very humorous. He isn’t quite as big as this foreshortened picture makes him but he weighs nearly 60 pounds and will weigh 70 when he is full grown. His name is Angel, working on the principle of Give a dog a good name. But we have been too long without a dog.”

 

And finally to Dr. Montgomery:

 

“All I can tell you is that my cup brimmeth over. I have had lots of dogs, but I never saw one like this. After hours in the crate—it was 9 o’clock before they turned him over to me—and with all the noise and lights and clatter, he was completely relaxed. I brought him to the apartment and he settled in as though he had always lived here. He learns with about two tellings. In the early morning I take him to the roof for a romp and after my work we go for long walks. This, by the way, is awfully good for me. He is not away from me for a second. He sat beside me for a run-through of Frank Loesser’s new musical, the only dog who ever saw a run-through.”

To Joseph Bryan III

New York
March 14, 1965

Dear Joe:

Thank you for the wire reminding me of an ugly event [his sixty-third birthday]. The same to you. Sometimes I do indeed feel like a motherless child.

My grandson, aged eight, [David Farber, Waverly’s son] wanted a padlock to safetify his securities which seemed reasonable enough until he asked, “Why is it called a padlock?” “I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re sure as hell going to find out. Fetch down Volume VII of Oxford’s bleeding dictionary.” And the buggers bugged off. They don’t know. Pad is a big word and means everything from a highway to a harness to a poultice. But why it’s a padlock and has been since before Bede got venerable, O.E.D. just won’t even guess. But I will, cuss it. In O.E.-A.S., O.F., O.N. and Old Teut—the pad word means a turtle, of the land or terrapin persuasion. Now, did you ever see any traditional form that looked more like a turtle? But those cautious bastards won’t guess.

Life goes on. I am writing a book about “The Americans.” We are a very curious people and as far as I know no one has inspected us as we would inspect some other sub-species. It’s most fascinating work—to me—and I hope to have it finished by summer.

My sister Sir Marye died in February and I never got her book written. So I will start it this summer and she will know.

Our new dog came last week—a perfect beauty and a darling—just about a perfect white English bull terrier. I named him Angel, but last night I added a little to his name. He is now Angel Biddle Duke.

The summers do come around very often, don’t they? Here’s a new one on the way. I would like to go back to Ireland next winter. I liked the west country just fine. Galway and Connemara really exist out of time. On the coast it’s rocky poor country. A man has to make a reservation to plant a cabbage in the lee of a stone, but there’s more peat—they call it sod or turf—than it needs to keep them warm. And the people are lovely warm people. I feel good there and I should because I guess I’m related to most of them. The west of Ireland is pure Celt, not black like the south. Past and Future have no meaning at all because they’re all one, and an old lady is as much your daughter as she is your grandmother.

And you know—I talk too much.

Yours,
John

 

 

The next night Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress. Steinbeck watched on television as the President delivered his “We shall overcome” speech, in which he decried “a crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice” that had prevented blacks from voting.

To Lyndon B. Johnson

New York
March 17, 1965

Dear Mr. President:

Always there have been men who had contempt for the “word” although words have survived better than any other man-made things. St. John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” When you have finished using a weapon, someone is dead or injured, but the product of the word can be life and hope and survival. All of the greatness of our species rests on words—Socrates to his judges—the Sermon on the Mount, the introduction to Wyclif’s Bible, later taken by Lincoln for the Gettysburg Address. And all of these great and irretrievable words have the bravery of fear and hope in them. There must have been a fierce but hollow feeling in the members of the Continental Congress when the clerk first read the words, “When in the course of human events—.” Lincoln must have dwelt with loneliness when he wrote the order of mobilization.

In our history there have been not more than five or six moments when the word and the determination mapped the course of the future. Such a moment was your speech, Sir, to the Congress two nights ago. Our people will be living by phrases from that speech when all the concrete and steel have long been displaced or destroyed. It was a time of no turning back, and in my mind as well as in many others, you have placed your name among the great ones of history.

And I take great pride in the fact that you are my President.

Yours in admiration,
John Steinbeck

The President replied:

“Thousands of letters have come to me since my speech to the Congress. But none touched me or affected me to the degree yours did. Thank you, my dear friend. Thank you for your trust and your affection.”

To Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

New York
March 31, 1965

Dear Dr. King:

I am answering your letter, which came last night by special delivery, at once.

May I say first I think the events leading up to the march from Selma to Montgomery may well be one of the great and important things in our country’s history. It was flawless in its conception and in its execution. Even the accidents which could not have been foreseen, tragic though they were, wove themselves into the pattern of this fabric of the future.

But it is your letter of March 29, concerning the proposed boycott of Alabama, and your request that I sponsor it, that gives me pause. Believe me, Dr. King, if I were convinced that a general boycott would bring Alabama to its senses, I would be behind it with everything I have. However, I think the demand for general boycott is like the demand for unconditional surrender.

I have seen more than I have wanted to of war, from the school yard to combat in Europe, and I know full well that an enemy driven into a corner with no chance to escape, becomes triply dangerous because he has nothing to gain. If he is offered an escape corridor, or the slightest consideration for his pride, he will surrender more readily.

In this morning’s Times, you are quoted as having said that you might advocate a selective boycott. Now this makes sense to me. Many white people in the South would come over to our side if they dared. Many others would come over if it were profitable or even non-ruinous to do so. I think that every person against whom a boycott would be dangerous should be allowed to say openly, “I am for you,” or “I am against you.” If the answer is “against”, then I would back the boycott with every bit of influence I could bring to bear. So that is my answer, Sir. I am for a selective boycott but not a blind one.

As for Governor Wallace, he is safe from impeachment in the bosom of a legislature hand-picked and exactly like himself. I have thought, however, and have suggested to friends in the government, that Wallace’s statement that he could not keep the peace constitutes an abdication of which the Federal government might well take cognizance. I have further suggested and I suggest to you, that the governors’ oath in all states includes the promise to defend and carry out the intention of the Constitution of the United States. In his failure to defend the Constitution and indeed in his defiance of the amendments, it seems to me that he could be considered to be in rebellion against his country. Wallace seems to forget that a war was fought on this issue, a war incidentally which people like himself lost. And I do not think that position is so far-fetched.

Finally in the recent sadness at Selma I think Wallace is as guilty of the brutality and of the murders as if he held the clubs in his own hands or pulled the triggers with his own finger.

That is all now. God bless you and keep you and particularly the cause of your devotion.

your friend,
John Steinbeck

To Jack Valenti PRESS SECRETARY DURING THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION

New York
April 23, 1965

Dear Jack:

It must have been rather nice for you to be without me helping. As someone said of Tallulah Bankhead—“An hour away from her is like a month in the country.”

I don’t know how you get it over, but the Boss confuses the words ingenuous and ingenious, and has a number of times in speeches. Ingenuous means open and straightforward, with a connotation of almost child-like sincerity while ingenious means clever, talented, but has the connotation of wiliness, and round-aboutness. You see they are almost opposites. If it will help any—Shakespeare made the same error.

The Vietnam war is troublesome. Groups have been after me to denounce the bombing but I don’t sign anything I don’t write. I wish the bombing weren’t necessary, but I suspect that our people on the ground know more about that than I do. I certainly hope so.

But I do have a couple of ideas. People can get used to anything if it is regular. Change of pace throws them.

But there is another thing I miss in this war. And that is North Vietnam dissent. The papers say there have been desertions from the Viet Cong. But apparently the rule is powerful and unrelenting in the north. There should be a government or junta of North Vietnamese in South Vietnam. This should be set up even if we have to invent it. Its point of dissatisfaction should be fear of the Chinese. We are not making the thousand years of China phobia pay off. It must be there. If such a group of respected men from the North could be set up in Saigon, they might draw intelligence we do not have and it might do something to overturn the idea that the north is without division of opinion. Also, if there should be dissensions there would be some honorable place to desert to.

Everyone wants to make his small contribution and that must be very hard on the Boss. It was nice to be invited to the White House. If in some improbable future there should be a quiet time for contemplation at the ranch we should love that. It would be good to see this man against live oaks and Herefords and ground squirrels with maybe the quail calling in the evening.

The best to you.

Yours,
John

To Carlton A. Sheffield

New York
April 26, 1965

Dear Dook:

You can see what a rogue and peasant slave am I. We went to Sag Harbor for a while and I finished the first draft of my book. I hope to get the thing off by June I, and then—

Well finally I am ready for the Arthur. It was to have been Sir Mary’s book and she had to die to get me to start it. I have to before she fades. And by that I mean before I fade. Sir Mary is permanent now. But I’m not, and so I must get it to her.

I hope that doesn’t sound mystical because I don’t mean it that way. But, do you know, I couldn’t find an approach to get into it until she died. And it’s so very simple. I wonder why it escaped me for so long. It’s almost childishly simple. And now I’m aching to get to it.

 

At about the same time he was telling Elizabeth Otis:

 

“... and then I can get to the Arthur which finally begins to grow and grow in my mind in the manner we spoke of but going much further. For the first time I have some confidence in it. And I can have the whole of the summer and fall to work on it. I am pretty excited about that too. Now it looks like a good year of work. And such a thing always makes me happy.”

 

I’m itching to get out again. Gardens to start and fishing. Last time I painted my boat’s bottom but haven’t put it in the water yet. It’s silly for me to be staying in town. I can’t work as well in town as in the country.

You’ve got to admit that I don’t talk about anyone but myself.

Tonight Terrence McNally, the boy who tutored my boys, is opening his first play [Things That Go Bump in the Night]. I’m going and I hate to. It makes me too nervous. It’s a dreadful play—not in the writing but in what it says. And I am afraid it is going to get clobbered by the critics. I hope not because it is much too good for that.

So long for now.

Love
John

To Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. IN LONDON

Sag Harbor
June 20, 1965

Dear Doug:

I propose to make a request of you which I hope you can find it in your heart to grant.

Perhaps you will remember that for at least thirty-five years and maybe longer, I have been submerged in research for a shot at the timeless Morte d’Arthur. Now Intimations of Mortality warn me that if I am ever going to do it, I had better start right away, like next week.

In my research I have been sponsored by the greatest living scholar in the field, Professor Eugène Vinaver, Sorbonne, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cambridge.

Please to remember that not too long ago at your house, I had as dinner partner the Duchess of Buccleuch, and the following passage occurred as nearly as I can remember.

Me: Madame, there must be a number of fascinating libraries hidden away in your various holdings.

She: Yes, I suppose there are.

Me: How many libraries would you say you have?

She: Oh, I don’t know. No one in our family has read anything for several hundred years.

Me: Is permission ever given to inspect these libraries?

She: I don’t know. What is your interest in the matter?

Me: It is partially selfish, ma‘am. I know something about how such libraries came into being. In the fifteenth century, it became fashionable for eminent families to accumulate books and manuscripts. In 1944 at Winchester College, for example, the only known ms. of the Morte d’Arthur was discovered. It had been there for a long time but because its title was Prince Arthur, no one had ever inspected it. I should love to look through the collections of your family to see whether any other manuscripts on these subjects may not be hiding there.

She (with intense boredom): Yes, yes, quite.

At that moment, if you will remember, one of your footmen spilled a tureen of hot soup over Elaine which naturally changed the conversation and we never got back to it.

At a later date I spoke to Professor Vinaver about this exchange. He agreed that there might well be treasures in our field of research to be found in just such places. There are not many families still existing from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but certainly Buccleuch is one of them.

Now finally I am ready to get to my request. Do you feel it is possible to represent to the Duchess that my interest was far from fleeting? Might I ask the privilege of inspecting some of these libraries by Professor Vinaver? If he did come on anything I would instantly fly over to join him.

Will you let me know what you think of this at your earliest? I shall be at the above address all summer. Christmas we go to Galway to be with J. Huston for the holidays. Of course, being so close, we always will go to London.

I hope this finds you prospering.

That’s all for right now. I look forward to your reaction.

yours
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Sag Harbor
July 14, 1965
Bastille Day

Dear Elizabeth:

It is so beautiful a season. Elaine’s flowers are beautiful. And I can’t find the time to do everything I want to do in the garden. I am protecting and encouraging the grapes you love and there is a sizable crop of them. And by removing some of the shading leaves and bringing the bunches into the open, I think I will be able to make them mature earlier than is usual. Also I am planting a goodly bed of horseradish.

Now, I have something I want to discuss with you.

When I was writing East of Eden, before each day’s work as a kind of warm-up I kept a work diary but addressed to Pat. It is perhaps as complete a record of a book as has ever been done. But I had never seen it since I sent it off in handwriting. Pat and I often discussed publishing it either in conjunction with a complete and uncut E. of E. or by itself. Then Pat died and I wondered what would happen to it. Recently I wrote to Pascal Jr. and told him I would like to see it. He sent me a copy and I have just been reading it. And it is much better than I remembered, a little repetitious and perhaps in some places too personal, but I think very interesting and book length.

Now it occurs to me that someone is going to publish it some time. It is one hell of a lot better than Henry Miller’s letters. I wonder if we should not think of doing it now so that we could take advantage of it if there is any and I do think it would have some currency. Elaine has read it and she agrees. It is a fascinating account of the making of a book. So I am going to give it to Shirley this weekend both to read herself and to take to you to read. And I think it only right that Pascal should edit it. He would do a good and a loving job. Maybe some of the personal things should come out and maybe not. They do give it a bite. [This work-diary was published after Steinbeck’s death as Journal of a Novel.]

The Matter of Arthur moves along slowly as I want it to. I still don’t know that I am on the right track. But increasingly I believe that the Matter of Arthur is a personal matter and that its appeal is just that.

I haven’t been fishing but when I do get to it I will make you some Pâté Souffleur that you used to like and I can promise you some lovely grapes when they ripen.

I feel fine and part of that I attribute to the fact that you feel good. It comes through in your voice over the telephone.

Love,
John

To Mr. and Mrs. Jack Valenti

Sag Harbor
July 16, 1965

Dear Jack and Mary Margaret:

These are sad days. Adlai Stevenson was a great man and he was my friend. My first reaction to his death was one of rage that Americans had been too stupid to avail themselves of his complete ability. Strange how one thinks of such things.

Adlai always said he needed a gadfly. It is quite different with the President. In one way he has been very unfortunate in that he came in high. Those people who sang so tenderly over his successes, will be the first to get out their stingers at the first hint of a failure. He did not need me during the election although he was kind enough to suggest that I had contributed something. But no man can go through this office without setbacks and the smallest setbacks will draw fire. Also, the ambitious who hoped they could use him for their own purposes, when they find they cannot will poison the air with their rage. It would be perhaps well to say now what is true. Elaine and I do not give our allegiance readily, but once given, we do not withdraw it. I think he should know this. He should also know the power a writer has if he has not over-used or mis-used it.

I hope you do not find me egotistic in giving unsolicited advice. But I do share the worry which must be a matter of terror to any head of state. He must have information, and he must often wonder how accurate the information he gets is. It does seem to me that the weakness of our fact-gathering services does not lie in the gatherings but in their evaluation. Every man is bound to temper his facts to his unchanging personality, background, prejudices and desires. And it is up to a president to evaluate both the man and the facts. It must be almost a matter of nightmare.

Why am I talking at this length, Jack? Well, I’m afraid bad days are coming. There is no way to make the Vietnamese war decent. There is no way of justifying sending troops to another man’s country. And there is no way to do anything but praise the man who defends his own land. The real reasons for the war will never come to the surface and if they did most people would not see them. This is primarily a power struggle. The ideal solution for us would be so to shift the war that the Soviet Union would be forced to take a position against China whether openly or secretly and this they would have to do, because I can tell you of my own knowledge that Russia is far more afraid of China than she is of us. Unless the President makes some overt move toward peace, more and more Americans as well as Europeans are going to blame him for the mess, particularly since the government we are supporting with our men and treasure is about as smelly as you can get.

I have a thousand things I would like to talk to you about but if you want me to stop being a gadfly, just let me know and I will stop. We do think kindly on you and Mary Margaret very often. And now I will stop boring the hell out of you and get back to my own work which if successful will succeed in boring people yet unborn or unbored.

Elaine sends love

yours
John

To Carlton A. Sheffield

Sag Harbor
August 5, 1965

Dear Dook:

I can’t tell you how good it is to have you back to talk to. Of late years I have had little impulse to explain things to anyone.

First, I think you know that during the two runs for the Presidency of Governor Stevenson, he became my close and valued friend. He was a lovely man. You would have liked him. The fine sharp informed and humorous quality of his mind was unique in public men whom I have met. He was just the kind of man who could sit in the gutter with a glass of wine and discuss things and he often did. During the campaigns he used to say that I was in charge of keeping him off balance, and he insisted that all public servants should be kept off balance all the time. Over the years, he used to drop in at odd times, wherever we might be living. As ambassador to the UN he used to invite us to dinner at the embassy which was a great suite in the Waldorf Towers but on Thursday night. That was servants’ night out. Then Elaine and Marietta Tree would cook dinner and there was nobody to overhear. He was a very great man but he was also our friend.

And then suddenly he was dead, and we had that sort of hollow grey feeling in the pit of the stomach. I knew very well that the people who treated him the worst would climb on the bandwagon of mourners. And besides, you may remember that when I am hurt, I do not want to foregather. I want to be alone to lick the wounds. So I was not going to attend any of the baked meats affairs. And then a curious thought came to me. If the thing were reversed, if it had been I for whom the memorial were being held, Guv would be there no matter what trouble or inconvenience it might have been. He would have done me that honor. And so I thought I had to go to the UN memorial service.

That was a Friday and the memorial as well as the funeral were for Monday. Friday night the President called and asked me to go to Camp David for the weekend. I explained that I couldn’t because I had to go to the service at the UN. He said, “Don’t jump the gun so, I want you and Elaine to go to Bloomington on Monday with me.”

He knew exactly what he was doing, and I think he does me the honor of realizing that I would also know. He knew he had mistreated Guv for the last few years and he was trying to make it up. But he also knew that he would be more acceptable to the Stevenson family if Elaine and I went with him, because there had never been any question about where I stood in the Stevenson matter. Anyway I made another attempt to get out of it and he said, “I want to talk to you.”

I think you can feel that a Presidential request has somehow the quality of an order.

Anyway we drove to New York at midnight arriving at three. Got up at six and went out to La Guardia to get the ten o’clock plane for Washington. A White House car met us and we whisked in at a quarter to twelve. We left for Camp David at five in the chopper from the lawn.

I had never been to Camp David. It is only twenty minutes from the White House lawn by helicopter. It is very beautiful, a kind of large camp in a deep oak forest on top of a mountain, cool and sunny and wonderful. You can see out over the mountains to Gettysburg. There are individual cabins among the trees so that there is complete privacy. The main lodge is very simple and very comfortable and most meals are taken on a huge veranda overlooking the valley. There is a trout stream and about a hundred yards away a big swimming pool. There is also a bowling alley and a small putting green put in by Eisenhower.

 

At that point an interruption occurred. Do you remember “a person from Porlock” who interrupted the poem “In Xanadu did Kubla etc.”? The poem never got finished.

Mr. Stevenson’s funeral was a matter for wordless memory. Tens of thousands of people lining the roads and his casket was the loneliest thing—set off and cut off from everything. The Unitarian service was bleak and grudging. I wanted for him something like the William Byrd mass. Right there I found myself almost saying “I am not a sentimental person—” Haw! My criticism is that this was not sentimental enough. An Irish wake was indicated. Strange how selfish one becomes about one’s friends. Elaine is smarter than I am about such things. Once I said to her, “I don’t want the barbarity of a funeral for myself.” And she said, “Don’t be silly. A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.” Now this makes so much sense to me that I have never mentioned it again. There’s a realist talking. Anyway, we got home Monday night. We had been on 8 different air craft since that morning.

My work goes very slowly. I seem to have many “persons from Porlock.” Maybe it’s that I don’t want to do it. We do fool ourselves.

 

Today is August 12. Elaine’s birthday is the 14th, Saturday. I gave her a little swimming pool. Just completed and very pretty. I also made a stepping stone and incised it with Launcelot’s last words to Gwinevere—“Ladye, I take reccorde of God, in thee I have myn erthly joye.” The pool couldn’t be a surprise. You can’t sneak a bulldozer on the lawn.

There are times when I wish desperately that you were here to talk to. There are things I can’t discuss with anyone else. Something is coming up soon. And I can’t discuss it with anyone and I don’t quite know what to do about it. [At Camp David the President had asked Steinbeck to go to Vietnam and report to him.] You know how there are things you don’t want to do, but you know that failure to do them will make you miserable. Well, I’ve got a bad one of those. It isn’t one of those things you can avoid by doing nothing either. Everything I can think of is against doing it and yet I am afraid I’m going to have to. Damn! I wish I could be decisionless. I won’t write it so I don’t know why I brought it up. But I do wish I could talk to you. You wouldn’t know the answer. The answer is—don’t do anything you don’t have to do. But it’s that have which is so tricky. It always has the concealed card.

 

Now—so many sentences start with now—it is the next day and a beautiful one full of gold and sun and another day. I’ve beat around bushes and at last must face the last chapter about The Americans—a most difficult one.

This morning I awakened early, full of continued thinking out of sleep. You know that slow and sometimes excellent thinking. You will understand my reluctance to start when I tell you, this section is to deal with morals—not goody-goody morals—but pragmatic morals. I have floundered about with it because it has been such a fragmented subject and I want to put the pieces together. But who am I talking to—Americans? Europeans? or myself. My shadow-of-a-dream thinking said—“Why don’t you write it to Dook and keep a copy? His skepticism will put a bridle on you and the direction will force you to be clear.” Most dream thinking will not stand daylight scrutiny, but this one does. So I will shift pencils so I can keep a carbon and fling my chapter at you. And maybe you will help me with it if I should get out of line. So I will close and send this letter to you and instantly start another to you, comprising this essay—and I would love to have your comments.

Meanwhile love to you.

John

To Max Wagner

[Sag Harbor]
[May 18, 1966]

Dear Max:

Johnny [Catbird] is with us for part of his terminal leave and he has told us about Jack’s death. We didn’t know. I am shocked and sad. And I am concerned that I was not able to say good-bye to him. He would have hated that but there it is.

You know how it is, Max—there are some people who are permanent whether they are here or not and Jack is one of them. His small and humorous complaints, his bristling temper, and always funny.

It seems to me that not only do we die little by little in our friends, but that a time and a place also dies slowly like the closing iris of a camera.

Love to you both,
John

Steinbeck’s personal, almost protective relationship with the President has been reflected in these letters. Now his second son’s imminent departure for Vietnam with the American forces was to reinforce his feeling of identification and across-the-board support of Presidential policies. To many of his friends and intimates this attitude seemed a change of heart and an abandonment of everything he had stood for. Certainly it caused him increasingly to maintain a stand which the criticism he received for it merely served to strengthen.

To Lyndon B. Johnson

Sag Harbor
May 28, 1966

Dear Mr. President:

I am grateful to you for receiving my son and me. It meant a great deal to both of us and I am sure that seeing you reassured him that responsibility is behind him and backing him. He had never been to Washington before. From the plane I took him first to the Lincoln Memorial. He stood for a long time looking up at that huge and quiet figure and then he said, “Oh! Lord! We had better be great.”

You will understand that I am pleased with this boy and proud. He knows what he wants and must do. He is thoroughly trained to do it. He is proud of his uniform and proud of his country. He goes very soon now, and as you must know, my heart goes with him. And I will ask you, Sir, to remember your promise to pray for him.

I know that you must be disturbed by the demonstrations against policy in Vietnam. But please remember that there have always been people who insisted on their right to choose the war in which they would fight to defend their country. There were many who would have no part of Mr. Adams’ and George Washington’s war. We call them Tories. There were many also who called General Jackson a butcher. Some of these showed their disapproval by selling beef to the British. Then there were the very many who denounced and even impeded Mr. Lincoln’s war. We call them Copperheads. I remind you of these things, Mr. President, because sometimes, the shrill squeaking of people who simply do not wish to be disturbed must be saddening to you. I assure you that only mediocrity escapes criticism.

Again my thanks to you, Sir. You gave my boy a pediment of pride, and that a good soldier must have.

As always, faithfully,
John Steinbeck

To Elizabeth Otis

Sag Harbor
June 9, 1966

Dear Elizabeth:

As usual, I sit down to write up a novel—and utter panic sets in. All the lovely plans and techniques run away and hide. I haven’t the slightest idea what a novel is. A piece of fiction longer than a bread box is as close as I can come.

Then—what is fiction? Is it a true thing that didn’t happen as opposed to a false thing that did?

Ninety percent of the items in the morning paper could not be used in a novel because they are false. Can it be that the present popularity of non-fiction lies in the fact that it can recount things not acceptable to fiction readers? Or could it be that fact interpreted becomes fiction. I don’t know. The story I want to write is not a new one. I came across it first in the second grade and so did you. I’ve even taken my title from the first line—“And a piece of it fell on my tail.”

This may well be the most widely read story in the English language.

As I remember it—a character named Henny-Penny comes kayoodling and howling out of a cabbage patch. H-P is in a state of shock. The story has the best opening in all literature —“The sky is falling,” cried Henny-Penny, “and a piece of it fell on my tail.”

Now there is no question that H-P truly believes that the sky is falling. On the other hand, we in the second grade knew it was not falling because it never had fallen—a conclusion in logic far from tenable. By H-P’s very statement it is established that H-P is a fool, and more, an hysterical fool. This is the quickest establishment of character I know.

Our instant perception is verified almost immediately by a person named Chicken Little—an adolescent endowed with the clear vision, the iron nerves and the logical precision of youth. “‘Twas not the sky,” said Chicken Little. “It was a piece of cabbage leaf.”

In the second grade we, who identified ourselves with clear-eyed Chicken Little, chuckled with pleased recognition. H-P was obviously that nervous and wrong-headed adult we knew so well who screamed at us that if we got our feet wet we’d catch our death. H-P was obviously a feather-brained crier of havoc, an alarmist. In the whole second grade there wasn’t one kid who felt anything but contempt for H-P. We were all Chicken Littlers. No, that’s wrong. Dorothy Donahue, come to think of it, was an H-P’er. It was Dorothy who always said, “If four of you get on that raft it will sink.” Well, so it did. So what? That’s what she was—a Henny-Penny, and probably still is.

In the second grade and in the whole world, I guess, no one has ever come to the defense of Henny-Penny. And that should give us some idea of the nature of human observation. “What is” cannot compete with what we want it to be. We wanted H-P to be wrong and as we read, so did the writer of the story.

But let us consider for the sake of contention that she said, “The sky is falling,” in a quiet philosophic tone, as though to impart a piece of interesting information and then to cinch her statement, and referring to the scrap of cabbage leaf, she continued, “and a piece of it fell on my tail.” This would change the whole direction of the story. Far from establishing Henny-Penny as a fool, it would make her an exact and penetrating observer of external reality.

It is hard to give up a position one established in the second grade. For generations Henny-Penny has been held up to ridicule on the advocacy of Chicken Little. And actually what do we know about Chicken Little except that he jumped to a conclusion without proper preparation?

No, the more one thinks of it, the more the judgment of the second grade becomes suspect as thoughtless, headlong and perhaps premature. Even in the second grade we should have remembered that it was Dr. C. S. Little who said the Wright Brothers would not get off the ground.

Actually—this so-called child’s story turns out on inspection to be one of the most profound explorations of external reality in relation to the cabbage patch of human frailty and emotion. And it does seem to me that before one writes a novel it might be well to consider what a novel is. We will be seeing you on Sunday, and perhaps you can tell me—in case you have found out since I last saw you.

Love,
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Sag Harbor
June 22, 1966

Dear Eliz:

I don’t even tell Kazan any more that East of Eden is still paying off. He’d kill himself trying to kick himself in the behind for selling his share.

I’ll try to get this Sag piece done for the Post before going on with—My Tail. Going on is an ambitious word. I haven’t yet anything to go on from. But I know I’ll go on twirling the pencil anyway.

No word from John. He said he would let us know as soon as he had an A.P.O. address. But I know how one gets taken over. On the other hand, he’ll be wanting mail. One always does, that far from home.

We have been plagued with wild ducks getting in the swimming pool and getting it filthy. A couple of days ago, though, I mounted a 10-gauge cannon over the pool with a trigger-string going into the house. When six ducks got in the pool I pulled the string and the great explosion went over their heads. Well, you never saw such a reaction. A kind of heart failure set in. They got up in the air and flew in flip-flops, beating the air and getting nowhere. It was glorious. I think we may win this one. Two or three more shots and they may take the hint. Word may be passed in the duck kingdom that they are not popular in our pool.

I shall be delighted to read Margaret Kennedy’s view on the novel. I have been thinking about it a lot since I am in process of trying to write one. Once it was a long piece of writing attempting to set down a piece of generalized reality. But as with any form, rules began to be made for it and gradually the rules regulating what is permissible in a novel became so strict that it was forced away from reality. A perfect example of this is the criticism by a Communist of In Dubious Battle—“Even if it happened,” he said, “it is not true.” And as these rules became more strict, they pressed the novel farther and farther from everyday reality and in the process lost the interest of readers, who flocked to non-fiction which could still deal with what happens.

What I am trying to say, I guess, is that I should write non-fiction with the freedom the novel once had. Regrettable! It is permitted in non-fiction to see a flying saucer, but let anyone imply that “a piece of the sky” etc.—and he will be denounced.

And that is the end of this letter.

Love,
John

To John Steinbeck IV IN VIETNAM

Sag Harbor
July 16, 1966

Dear John:

I do know what you mean. I remember the same feeling when there were areas of trouble. “What the hell am I doing here? Nobody made me come.” On the other hand, when it was over, I was usually glad I had gone. And one other thing. Once it started the blind panic went away and another dimension took its place. Thinking about it afterward I became convinced that there is some kind of built-in anaesthesia that balances and sets the terror back. Another thing that helps is the fact that you aren’t alone. And everybody feels just as lousy when it is about to be. I don’t know whether or not you took the Sneaky with you—that little leather flask. Fill it with whiskey—brandy is better. And it can be a great comfort to you. There’s no law against false courage. It’s better than none at all.

Now, let me discuss what you call your compulsion to be miserable. You think you had a choice—that you could just as well be in S. F. with all the amenities, comfort, ease and a certain immunity from gunfire. Well, the fact of the matter with you as well as with me is that there wasn’t really any choice. You did and will do what you are. If you had forced yourself to make the opposite choice you would have been in violation of yourself, and I truly believe you would have been much more miserable than you are. Of course I am worried about you, just terribly worried, but I am proud too that you have not violated what you are.

Also check with yourself on this. I know it was true of me. I had deep down convictions that I was a coward. I think everyone has. If I had broken or gone to pieces, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But when it came and I didn’t go haywire, when I was scared but no more scared than those around me, the sense of relief was like a flood of compensation. Because I think a good part of this particular fear is a fear of how you will behave. And no one knows for sure, until he has gone through it.

I was horrified when you asked me to get you orders to go out, but I couldn’t have failed you there. Do you know, that is the only request I have ever made of the President? The only one. And I was not happy about making it. But if I had had to request that you not be sent, I think I would have been far more unhappy.

Please keep in touch. I love you.

Fa

The letters John IV was sending home formed the basis of his book, In Touch, later published by Knopf. It affirmed the son’s divergence from his father’s point of view about the Vietnam war.

To John Steinbeck IV

Sag Harbor
August 16, 1966

Dear John:

Your good long letter arrived yesterday and there is much in it to answer.

You are writing well—good, clean English prose. I thought this was so and let Edward Albee see your letter and he said, “Jesus, this boy can write. This is damn good writing.” Just keep doing it the way you are.

Your orphanage and hospital are very exciting. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. I agree that the less government, the better. There is no reason why the Vietnamese should trust any government with their history. Hell, we don’t really trust ours. But, would it make any sense if I tried to tap private sources for money for your orphanage? Would it make sense if the Authors’ League or the Dramatists Guild or Actors Studio, for that matter, Actors Union—Stage Hands, etc.—couldn’t they, as private organizations, endow beds, or adopt a wing and support it? If you, and your friends, think well of this and could give me some plans and programs, I could turn it loose among people who really care.

Now fo the last, and I confess to a certain shyness about discussing it. I remember our talk about my going over. And you mention it in your letter. Wouldn’t this seem to you a little like “getting in the act”? It seems to me that for years I have been getting in your act, and I know you resented it, as well you might, although at the time I didn’t know what else to do. Now this is very private. You are doing just great on your own. Wouldn’t my coming over inhibit you? There are those on this side who think it would. There is always this damp cloud of publicity which follows me. I hate it. It makes people put on an act for me. They change. On the other hand, on the Charley trip when I was out of context, no one either recognized me or gave a damn and it was wonderful. I believe that if I went over quietly, without ballyhoo and did no writing while I was there, not a soul would bother. Newsday would send me on any terms I want to make. But I want you to tell me what you think.

Bill Attwood, the new Editor-in-Chief of Look, wants me to spend a week with the President and write his daily routine. I think it is a lousy idea. He has too much exposure already. In my opinion he should lie low for a while. So I don’t intend to do that but I will have to see him to tell him why.

Let me know your thinking as soon as possible.

Edward Albee asked for your address. You know, you don’t have to write letters. Just send postcards.

Love, and write soon.

Fa

 

 

The suggestion that Steinbeck visit Vietnam had been made a long time before. His feelings about going had undergone many changes. As far back as August 1965—when the President had first broached the subject—he wrote Howard Gossage:

 

“I’m not draft age, drat it! If only I were, I could probably duck it. But being re-tired and re-treaded and wheezy and crippled, I’ll probably have to go. Life is very hard and very confusing sometimes.”

 

And to Harry F. Guggenheim, publisher of Newaday:

 

“I hope the Far Eastern thing is over as far as I am concerned. Certainly I had no wish to go, but the request had the force of an order, one which I hope is unnecessary. I do hope so.”

 

When finally he did go he went, not as a representative of the President, but as a correspondent for Newsday. He was approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, and had taken a stand that he communicated to Willard Bascom:

 

“I am not going places any more without Elaine. Life is too short to be away from her. But I must say one thing. She’ll go anywhere and lick the other dog when she gets there.”

To Elia Kazan

[New York]
October 28, 1966

Dear Gadg:

As you may be aware, I’ve been having a bad time—work unacceptable, to me, and a strong feeling that my time was over. I brooded a lot because both in breadth and depth I had lost touch with this time and was and am abysmally ignorant of a great part of the world—the whole eastern half.

Now Harry Guggenheim wants us to go to the East. Take our time, go where we want and stay as long as we want to. And it’s like a new life to me.

We don’t know when we will start but it won’t be long. I think we will go first to Vietnam because I think one phase of that war is nearly over. But afterwards the other parts—Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and of course Japan.

The reason I am writing is that we would like to join up with you along the way, particularly Japan which you already know. And maybe you would like to go to some of the others with us. What do you think?

Let me hear from you.

Yours,
John

To Lyndon B. Johnson

New York
November 28, 1966

Dear Mr. President:

I am sorry not to be able to attend the dinner for the Arts Council but as of December 1 we take off for East Asia on a long and, I hope, rewarding trip starting in Saigon. There we will see my young son John, and in California we will see my older son Thom who is now in the army and in training at Ft. Ord. And, since I have now reactivated my old war correspondent’s card, we are all involved, and that’s as it should be.

My compliments, Sir, and our love to you and your family. And if I can be of service to you or to the nation, it is offered with a whole heart.

 

Yours,
John Steinbeck

To Harry F. Guggenheim

[Caravelle Hotel]
[Saigon]
January 4, 1967

PRIVATE AND PERSONAL PLEASE

 

Dear Harry:

I have asked you for some very unusual things during our association. Now I want to ask about a possibility. I’ve been out in the really hairy boondocks, in the waist-deep paddies where your boots suck in mud that holds like glue. The patrols go on at night now down in the Delta area and are really ambushes set up against the V.C. There are caches of weapons everywhere and very few of them are found. All a running V.C. has to do is to sink his weapons in a ditch or in a flooded paddy and later return and retrieve them.

Yesterday, I was out with a really good bunch of men. We climbed out of ditches, went through houses, questioned people. We came on one cache of weapons and ammunition in the bottom of a ditch. They smear grease on the guns and seal the shells in jugs. Every house in the area is surrounded by water—in fact the raised place where the house and its garden stand are made by dredging up the mud in baskets and piling it up to dry to a platform. Our men were moving slowly along in the water feeling for weapons on the muddy bottom —a slow and very fallible method.

The C. O. is a Lt. Col. Hyatt, fine fellow, young and intelligent. I told him about something I use on my dock at Sag Harbor. It is a five-pound Alnico horseshoe-shaped magnet that will lift about a hundred pounds. If anything metallic falls off the dock I tie a line to the magnet and drop it to the bottom. I’ve brought up everything from a pair of pliers to an outboard motor with it. Dragged along these ditches and paddies, it would locate arms that are now missed. But such ideas submitted to the high command rarely get implemented. And surely Col. Hyatt knew it. So I engaged to try to get him a magnet to try out. Of course, if it brings up anything, he can then requisition them.

The other thing is more serious and more sensitive. As you must know, the V.C. are tough and secret. When one is taken he refuses to talk at all. And it’s on information that our lives depend, where are the rest hidden, how many are there—what weapons, what plan of attack, where are the claymore mines set, where are the booby traps? Answers to these questions could save a great many of our kids’ lives.

Yesterday I remembered something from the past. Did you ever see scopolamine used, Harry? I have. First it was called twilight sleep and later truth serum. It doesn’t make a man or woman tell the truth, but it makes him a compulsive talker. He just can’t shut up. It relaxes the inhibitions, causes boastful thinking and everything comes out. Now Col. Hyatt says if he had access to such an injection he thinks he could cut his casualties at least 50 percent. And I have no compunction about using any method whatever to that end.

I am marking this private and very personal but of course Bill Moyers [soon to become publisher of Newsday] can see it. But I wouldn’t let it go farther.

Please let me hear from you.

Yours,
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Saigon
January II, 1967

Dear E. O.:

I haven’t written because I have been moving so fast and writing my heart out when I can catch the time.

I have one more week and a very full one, many missions but next Wednesday—Jan. 18—we are flying to Bangkok. I will complete the war pieces there. I’ve seen just about every part of the country now, every kind of fighting and every kind of equipment except for several which I will see in my last week.

There is so much here that there is little time for sleep. That can come later. And I never felt better in my life.

Your letters gratefully received. But N. Y. seems very far away. I find I’m putting most things in the copy I’m sending.

Love to all there. And I’ll try to write from Bangkok.

Love,
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Bangkok
January 23, 1967

Dear E. O.:

It is a very long time since I have written but I have been trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the work it seems I should do. So many things attract me and there just isn’t time to put them down.

I may have come out of Vietnam too soon. I have a sense of unfinished business there, but I have kept the open visa so that I can go back if it appears good. It was hard on Elaine there and I was and am very proud of her for going. Staying in Saigon alone is kind of awful. But she did it and of course she knows the city far better than I do. I was hardly ever there.

Bangkok is perfectly lovely to look at. Maybe any place would be after Saigon. This hotel is a dream of heaven. They have us in a royal suite overlooking the river. Turns out it is the same suite Somerset Maugham lived in years ago. I haven’t gone out much. Came over the border with so much left to write that I have been chained to the desk. Things have a way of dimming if they aren’t done at once, particularly things as subtle as the small pictures of war.

Next week we are going to the northeast. The V.C. are beginning to dig in there.

We have been singularly well. E. got a spreading itch on her face which worried her. A local doctor took one look at it and said she must have been brushed by a white moth which carries a poison in the powder on its wings. He gave her a salve which relieved it immediately. It smells like gentian and probably is. This interests me, because if one moth has this strong effect, perhaps others have a lesser one which would account for the fear and even horror some people have for moths. So many interesting things I am learning.

And it’s time now for me to get to work if I am to finish before 11 o’clock when Elaine files my copy with Pan American.

Love,
John

 

Maybe when I get the immediacy of this war stuff down I can slow up and stop going at a dead run. But I must admit I never felt better in my life. This is crazy but true.

Again love,
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Penang
February 27, 1967

Dear E. O.:

As E. will doubtless have told you, we are stopping here for a little rest before going on. The nine days in Laos were particularly exhausting. Covered the country in every kind of aircraft. There are no roads and large sections of the country are held by their own brand of V.C. called Pathet Lao, armed, ordered and instructed just like all the rest. But murderous little buggers when they get around to it.

Then flew back to Bangkok for one night because we had an audience with the King and Queen. Then that same afternoon on a train and 27 hours down the Malay Peninsula to Penang. Shades of Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, Kip-ling and Somerset Maugham. Huge room in the Eastern and Oriental Hotel and air conditioned and suddenly the three months caught up with me and I fell to pieces.

Slept all night and the next day and the next night. Tried to work, to write the Laos stuff, but no go. Yesterday a little better luck. I got two pieces written and one or two to go but today—nothing. I seem to be just written out. I’ve sent 52 pieces since Dec. 1. Awful lot. Anyway, I’m in a great big slump, pooped and worn out. I was going to fight away at the ms. all day and then decided the hell with it. What in the devil am I running for?

 

February 28

Your birthday wire came today and I do thank you. First time I ever had one run two days. It was the 27th yesterday here and today there. Shirley will be mad with envy.

Anyway, by now I have had some rest and have even got some copy written. But at first I was really dried up.

I guess I am homesick today because I can’t keep my mind off all of you and of course Angel. And I am wondering if my pier is standing the ice and whether the holly trees will survive. That’s always a sign.

This is a most beautiful and benign island and we have got rested here. Last evening we drove out to Lone Pine—about 10 miles—and had dinner and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape for toasting purposes. Elaine is working at her letter, cursing the while. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ll bet it is good. [McCall’s had asked Elaine Steinbeck for a piece on Vietnam.]

Wednesday we are renting a car to drive two days to Singapore.

Oh, I’m feeling so much better for a little rest. But in Singapore I must find a dentist. Dropped a filling and it aches some.

This little interval has been great for both of us.

Love to all there and thank you for my cable.

Love,
John

To Elizabeth Otis

Jakarta
March 18, 1967

Dear Eliz.:

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day here in Jakarta, so right now today the glory and the earnest sleaze of the New York Irish are forming in the back streets to boast about and to be homesick for a place that never existed. I only wrote that to put this letter in time. In place, we are back in Jakarta, having spent a little time in Bali, without question the most beautiful place I have ever seen and the nicest people.

Elizabeth! I can’t tell you how glad I am and proud too that you all like Elaine’s piece. [McCall’s published it later in the year.] I thought it was wonderful, but then I think she is too. You know how she is, digging her toe and protesting like a roopy old chicken that she can’t write. Yesterday she kept saying, “But I’m an amateur,” until finally I had to say, “So was Madame de Sevigné, so was everybody once, but I’m afraid you have lost that excuse now.”

Not only do I have a sense of conclusion but also I am a little homesick and also I am desperately tired of people in the large and faceless mass. So after Japan we will be going home and I guess that will be in the last quarter of April or the early part of May. This has been worth doing, to me at least, and I think to Elaine. We are even closer than we were. Rough times have a way of doing that.

Love to all there,
John

 

 

From Hong Kong in March he summarized the experience in Asia for friends in Sag Harbor, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Smith:

“This has been a good trip and in many ways a sad one. I haven’t dwelt on the killed and the wounded. I’ve seen other wars and have hated those too. But every dead G.I. (and many of them have been my friends) breaks your heart in a way that can never be repaired. If I could shorten this war by one hour by staying here, I would never come home.”

 

Steinbeck’s back began to trouble him in Hong Kong, and over Memorial Day weekend in Sag Harbor, the condition became acute. After being hospitalized in New York for observation, he returned to Long Island for the summer. During these days of pain and inactivity, his thinking about the war continued to undergo a slow change.

To Elizabeth Otis

Sag Harbor
August 31, 1967
Thursday

Dear Eliz.:

I know I have been greatly remiss about writing or even communicating, but this has been so in all directions. It starts with the stupid or wise feeling that I have nothing I can or want to communicate—a dry as dust, worked-out feeling. The only simile I can think of is those mountains of mine, tailings from which every vestige of value has been drawn. Some people, I know, rework the tailings and get a small amount of very low grade ore.

Now—I can’t tell whether what I write is old or new. Surely the forms I am accustomed to are no longer admired—are, in fact, period pieces, only interesting if they were written a long time ago. Recently I read T. Wilder’s new book [The Eighth Day] and found it tedious. I should reread the earlier ones to see whether it is true of the whole approach. Also I have been reading some of the new ones and most of these I find interesting and ridiculous. I have never known a time when writers were so egocentric. The hippies constantly talk about being “turned on,” when it seems to me obvious that they are turned off and want it that way. Out of this movement something will come probably; but what, it is not now apparent.

I do not mean to imply to you that I have been sitting out here pitying myself. But I am conditioned as a writer and I have been finding it impossible to write. The words will not form or if they do, there is no flavor nor any joy in them. The pain from spine and legs has been quite sharp but I halfway believe that the pain and the verbal impotence are a part of one thing in spite of what the X-rays say. Strange, isn’t it, that none of this happened until after I left Vietnam? I have seriously considered going back there to get rid of my devils, but so far that would only be repetition.

I understand your feeling about this war. We seem to be sinking deeper and deeper into the mire. It is true that we are. I am pretty sure by now that the people running the war have neither conception nor control of it. And I think that I do have some conception but I can’t write it.

I know we cannot win this war, nor any war for that matter. And it seems to me that the design is for us to sink deeper and deeper into it, more and more of us. When we have put down a firm foundation of our dead and when we have by a slow, losing process been sucked into the texture of Southeast Asia, we will never be able nor will we want to get out.

If we should win this war, in the old sense of defeating and deadening the so-called enemy, then we would become just another occupying army, and such an army loses contact with the place occupied. But we are not winning in that sense and we will not. In many directions we are being defeated by more successful techniques and attitudes than our own. We have no choice in the matter.

If we won we could reject but by partially losing or at best just holding our own, we are learning and absorbing. Maybe it is the unformulated sense of this that causes so many men to extend their tour. Something new is happening to them. The French could not change and so they were kicked out, but thousands of our men are changing very rapidly—giving a little but taking a lot. And unless something I cannot conceive should happen—we are there permanently, not as conquerors but as migrants. And when migrants move in they take what they can get but they deposit what they have.

The elections are a joke. They mean nothing in themselves. They are a sop thrown to our Congress for purposes of getting more money. The leaders are venial and short-sighted, but that doesn’t make any difference. In the pages of the East Asian history book, it will be forgotten that the elections are false and foolish.

I don’t know whether or not I told you, but the last time I was in Washington and staying at the White House I had a long and early breakfast with the President and I told him what I thought we are doing wrong and made suggestions for correcting our errors, all based on winning this war. He listened carefully, asked a few questions and asked me to stay over and meet his men at noon. Then I saw McNamara, Rusk, Humphrey and several others and went over the ground again. They listened and made no comment but McNamara asked me to write it down. I couldn’t, so I made a tape of it, which he took to Vietnam on his last trip. Recently he telephoned to say that he had put my suggestions before the field men—that they had accepted some of them and rejected others. It seems to me that the rejected ones were the most important. I would not write what my suggestions were but I would tell them to you. Or maybe I have, or maybe I am right now repeating myself. It is very odd—not to know.

Maybe I should go back. I seem to be becoming a vegetable here and now, thinking little thoughts or no thoughts at all, and I am sure boring the hell out of Elaine. She is conducting a business as usual campaign but with me it is not business as usual. The constant rain is getting tiresome. One can find so many pains when the rain is falling. And I seem to have lost touch with things. This is the first letter I have written in nearly two months. And it is not that I am obsessed with myself. The opposite seems to be true. I cannot seem to draw my mind back to myself. Maybe that is what the pain is trying to do—but it is failing. But the curious retirement to the cave has given me no direction to follow. There is something sly about the whole thing, as though I were the butt of an ancient practical joke.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep in touch from here on in—I hope.

Love,
John

In the autumn his back condition worsened, and he underwent surgery for a spinal fusion—

 

“A really massive job of surgery,” as he wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in mid-November from the University Hospital. “Damned X-ray looked like a snake fence after a tornado.”

 

The operation was successful. As Elaine Steinbeck reported to the Montgomerys at the same time:

 

“Of course he is flat on his back except for three short walks across his room each day. Learning to walk again is a very painful process, but he is of good heart.”

To Carlton A. Sheffield

POSTCARD

New York
January 29, 1968

Dear Dook:

I am gradually coming back or ahead or something. The nervous shock as well as all the sedatives kind of move you into another and rather fuzzy reality. But healing is a slow process except that I know when the process is complete, I will have a stronger back than I ever had. I haven’t written because it is only recently that I could sit in a chair with any comfort and I dare you to write lying flat on your back. I tried and it doesn’t work. Meanwhile I am trying to regroup as does a military unit that has been shot to pieces. Trying to determine if and what I have left to write. Maybe something, maybe not, but if not, then there was no point in the surgery. I’ll try more later.

Love,
John

To Carlton A. Sheffield

New York
March 23, 1968

Dear Dook:

Starting a letter for me is no guarantee of finishing it. My intentions are impeccable but my performance lousy. I think these miserable nerves have not yet grabbed hold and taken their jobs seriously. Without warning, energy and with it intention, just dim and float away. This seems to be the era of lethargy. It’s a drained feeling and I almost enjoy it. Of late years I have come to have a loathing for the mail. 99% of it consists of requests which have the overtones of demands. And even if I have not complied with many, I have had some kind of guilt feeling about the rest. Now I can simply sigh, “Bugger off!” and deposit the whole worm bucket in the waste basket.

I know what you mean about television. I usually look at news or world events and baseball in season sometimes, but that’s about all. In the hospital while I was immobilized I had a little set which was designed to amuse me but I found myself turning it off to escape it. Actually my head doesn’t work so very well. I seem to be pushing clouds ahead of me. I understand this is normal and even if it weren’t, it’s not unpleasant. Pretty soon I will be going to the country to sit in the sun and maybe take my boat out and to do a little fishing with no interest in catching anything. I like that. And if I go alone, I don’t even have to talk.

I wish I could get excited about the election. The direction will change slightly, no matter who is in charge. This whole Asian activity seems to me to have grown and been directed by itself without much guidance. It kind of evolved. And maybe it will mutate. The greatest good for the greatest number is far from being a natural or immutable rule. In fact the opposite has seemed in the past to apply. The fact that I know what we are doing wrong does not imply that I could do it right. Were I in charge, I would probably do exactly the same thing on the lowest level. The highest level seems to be out of everyone’s hands.

Thorn is ticketed for Vietnam April ist. John is busily proving that our troops are all pot heads, and finding a ready market for his wares. In the British navy in 1812 he could prove that they were all rummies. Anyway, he’s got his cause. If he were a pacifist, it would be different, but he’s not. [When John returned from Vietnam and was released from the Army, he became one of the leaders of the peace movement.] Thom is scared to go and I don’t blame him. I was scared when I was there. Be silly not to be. I don’t know how I got into this discussion. I don’t know any more than the people making the mistakes.

Well, I got that much written. Elaine blooms and pretty soon I had better.

 

Yours
John

 

It’s later now and my hand is still wiggling like a chopped snake. Remember how the tripod on the Weejee board staggered around? News this morning that Tal Lovejoy fell down and injured herself and died. What a sadness. The last few times I have seen her there was an air of sadness around her. It’s terrible to survive everything you knew and loved. Everything and everyone went away from her and left her alone in the woods.

Here in New York we live 34 floors up with the whole city below our windows. It is a slender tower and there is an up-draft around the building like a chimney. Right now it is snowing but snowing up because of this up-draft. A startling thing to see. This is what Elaine’s great-aunt used to call “The Easter spell.” The Old Farmer’s Almanac says for these days in March—“Storms for sure of poor man’s manure.” That’s snow. Did you know it? I didn’t, being brought up without snow. But it works. A late snow makes things grow like mad. Here in my work room I have a sill garden. Four cucumber plants growing in pill bottles and one flourishing English Oak I grew from an acorn I picked up in Somerset. I seem to require something growing. The cucumbers are just silly but I’ll plant the oak at Sag Harbor. I have two English oaks out there I raised from acorns. They are about four feet high now. They are named Gog and Magog. Of course there are seventy or more American oaks on our point but I try to keep young ones coming. I don’t know why. If the old farmer is correct—and he usually is—it’s going to be a very rough spring. But why am I writing about weather?

I’m just writing silliness now. So I will stop.

Again
John

 

 

At a restaurant in Sag Harbor—once again it was Memorial Day weekend—Steinbeck had what was probably a small stroke—a momentary one, which did not incapacitate him mentally or physically. There followed a brief hospitalization and tests in Southampton Hospital. He was totally aware of what had happened to him, though for friends—like Alexander Knox, the writer and actor, and his wife Doris who were living in London—he presented it slightly differently.

To Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Knox

Sag Harbor
June 24, 1968

Dear Alex and Doris:

More and more I am guiltier and guiltier of being remisser and remisser about answering letters I really want to answer. I place them in a neat pile and when the pile gets high enough the whole thing slides to the floor. Alex’s good letter was placed on top, with the result that when the pile slid to the floor, it lost precedence. Thank goodness it was on both sides of the same sheet. I know that this is no way to run an office or anything else. God! I’m getting so slipshod. My mind resists any kind of order at all. I think this is the simple deterioration of age. I hope it is anyway.

This has been a year during which I have been a nuisance to myself and to everyone else. Last autumn my back finally succumbed to having been kicked around too much. Three wonderful surgeons built me a new back, a painful process but worth it. But the recovery takes time and I am an impatient type. Then a quick spell of some kind of lung infection with oxygen tents and the lot. All in all I haven’t been a joye to the Feyre Eleyne this past year but she has been a nicely modelled tower of strength to me. Now one more sentence about myself and I’ll have done. The self-care and indulgence and that sort of thing have left me, now that it is no longer necessary, so damned lazy that I am good for nothing.

I should get to work, I know, and I don’t want to. I think the world, not only America, is in a state of very rapid change and I cannot foresee the direction it will take, but I deeply fear that it will get worse before it gets better. My impulse is not to yap about it but to sit very quietly and watch it happen.

I think I know the causes but not the effects. What I do know is that the people most actively involved do not know either the causes nor the effects.

Meanwhile we sit out here at Sag Harbor and it is a very lovely time; the gardens going like fire and the summer coming sweetly in. We have loose plans for next winter. Around Christmas we rather plan to go to England and soon after the first of the year to take a look at the animals in Central Africa where neither of us has ever been, a real dry safari without either gun or camera. I just want to see them while both of us are unextinct.

And I think that is all for right now. We will hope to see you next winter.

Yours,
John

 

 

In July he had an episode of heart failure and was rushed to Southampton Hospital. A few days later he was brought by ambulance to New York Hospital where he suffered another and more severe attack.

To Carlton A. Sheffield

POSTCARD

New York
August 17, 1968

Dear Dook:

Your letter this morning. I don’t know how that item got out [about his serious illness]. I seem to be doing pretty well. Got home from the hospital two days ago and am going back to Sag Harbor next Wednesday. There’s a whole vocabulary in this field—“incidents,” “episodes.” I forget which I had and don’t much care. But whether or not I like it, I seem to be getting better. I’ll write you on the machine when I get back to the country.

love
John

 

 

The return to Sag Harbor was against medical counsel, but Steinbeck wished it so fervently that, after his wife had learned the nursing routine, they went back and stayed there for two months.

 

Four years earlier, on the retirement of his previous physician, he had become a patient of his friend, Dr. Denton Sayer Cox, whose custom it is with all new patients to submit a detailed questionnaire for a “Personal Health History.” On the final page it makes the request: “Please add any other data you think may be of importance.” Steinbeck wrote a letter.

To Dr. Denton Sayer Cox

New York
March 5, 1964

Dear Denny:

I have been filling out my mortal record called a medical passport. There it is—all down there—the past and the future just as plain as the varicosities on my mother’s legs and my father’s vascular difficulties. There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

It does occur to me that clear as this picture is, there may be other matters, some taken for granted and others ignored intentionally or otherwise. What is the reason for having a doctor at all? It is a very recent conception. I suppose the present day reason from the patient’s point of view is to get through his life with as little pain and confusion as possible and out of it neatly and decently. But for the duration the doctor is supposed to listen to frustrations and to cater to various whims of the central nervous system. I am interested in the line in this thesis of disintegration which indicates that on request, you will keep me in sweet ignorance of what is happening to me. I know it is desired in many cases but I can’t understand it from my viewpoint.

What do I want in a doctor? Perhaps more than anything else—a friend with special knowledge. If you had never dived and I were with you, it would be my purpose to instruct you in the depths and dangers, of the pleasant and the malign. I guess I mean the same thing somewhat. We are so made that rascally, unsubtle flares may cause a meaningless panic whereas a secret treason may be nibbling away, unannounced or even pleasant as in the rapture of the deep. Two kinds of pain there are—or rather a number of kinds. I think especially of the teaching pain which counsels us not to hurt ourselves as opposed to the blast that signals slow or fast disintegration. Unskilled, we do not know the difference and, I am told, even the skilled lose their knowledge when the thing is in themselves. It seems to me that one would prepare oneself differently to meet these two approaches, if one knew.

Then there is the signal for the curtain. I think, since the end is the same, that the chief protagonist should have the right to judge his exit, if he can, taking into consideration his survivors who are after all, the only ones who matter.

Then there is the daily regimen and I have always considered this a fake in most people—the diet, the exercise, the pills, the rest, the elimination. It is probably true that careful following of learned instructions will prolong a usually worthless life, but it has been my observation that by the time the subject needs such advice, he is too firmly fixed in his habits to take it. Oh! he’ll do it for a while, but he soon slips back and that is probably a good thing. Pills he will take but little else unless terror should get to him, in which case, many men and women become voluntary invalids and soon find that they love it.

Of course I love to fool myself as well as the next person, but not to the point where I find it ridiculous. I am trying to give you a graph, Denny, so that you will know what you are dealing with.

I do not think of pain as a punishment and I will avoid it as much as I can. On the other hand, to use a common experience, I would rather have the quick and disappearing pain of the dentist’s chair than the drawn out misery of wearing-off novocaine. In most cases, I have been able to separate what hurts from fear of what might hurt.

In reporting effects I am reasonably honest. It is difficult to remember after any trouble has passed. Lastly, I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.

Believe me, I would not go on in this vein, and never do, were it not for the nature of this communication.

I shall probably not change my habits very much unless incapacity forces it. I don’t think I am unique in this.

Now finally, I am not religious so that I have no apprehension of a hereafter, either a hope of reward or a fear of punishment. It is not a matter of belief. It is what I feel to be true from my experience, observation and simple tissue feeling.

Secondly—I have had a good span of life so that from now on in I should not feel short-changed.

Thirdly—I have lived very fully and vividly and there is no possibility of cosmic pique.

Fourthly—I have had far more than my share of the things men strive for—material things and honors and love.

Fifthly, my life has been singularly free of illness or accident. At any rate the wellness has far overbalanced the sick-nesses.

Sixthly—I do not come to you as a sick man.

Oh! I know the heart syncopates and I have fainted twice in my life and a stretch of overindulgence blocked my gall bladder a couple of times, but all in all I am remarkably healthy. And I know that because my curiosity has in no way abated. And as I said before, I would rather live more fully and for a shorter time.

And now the last thing you should know. I love Elaine more than myself. Her well being and comfort and happiness are more important than my own. And I would go to any length to withhold from her any pain or sorrow that is not needful for her own enrichment.

I hope this is of some value to you. Now, we go on from there.

Yours
John

 

 

The approaching moment had been in his mind for a long time. Seven years earlier, he had written to his boyhood friend, John Murphy:

To John Murphy

Sag Harbor
June 12, 1961

Dear John:

All my life has been aimed at one book and I haven’t started it yet. The rest has all been practice. Do you remember the Arthurian legend well enough to raise in your mind the symbols of Launcelot and his son Galahad? You see, Launcelot was imperfect and so he never got to see the Holy Grail. So it is with all of us. The Grail is always one generation ahead of us. But it is there and so we can go on bearing sons who will bear sons who may see the Grail. This is a most profound set of symbols.

The setting down of words is only the final process. It is possible, through accident, that the words for my book may never be set down but I have been working and studying toward it for over forty years. Only the last of the process waits to be done—and it scares the hell out of me. Once the words go down—you are alone and committed. It’s as final as a plea in court from which there is no retracting. That’s the lonely time. Nine tenths of a writer’s life do not admit of any companion nor friend nor associate. And until one makes peace with loneliness and accepts it as a part of the profession, as celibacy is a part of priesthood, until then there are times of dreadful dread. I am just as terrified of my next book as I was of my first. It doesn’t get easier. It gets harder and more heartbreaking and finally, it must be that one must accept the failure which is the end of every writer’s life no matter what stir he may have made. In himself he must fail as Launcelot failed—for the Grail is not a cup. It’s a promise that skips ahead—it’s a carrot on a stick and it never fails to draw us on. So it is that I would greatly prefer to die in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a book and so leave it as all life must be—unfinished. That’s the law, the great law. Principles of notoriety or publicity or even public acceptance do not apply. Greatness is not shared by a man who is great. And by the same token—if he should want it —he can’t possibly get near it.

Yours,
John

 

 

As recently as the trip to Asia, he had written to Elizabeth Otis:

To Elizabeth Otis

Jakarta
March 18, 1967

 

I look forward to Sag Harbor—after seeing you, of course. And, do you know, journalism, even my version of it, gives me the crazy desire to go out to my little house on the point, to sharpen fifty pencils, and put out a yellow pad. Early in the morning to hear what the birds are saying and to pass the time of day with Angel and then to hitch up my chair to my writing board and to set down the words—“Once upon a time....”

Long after the organized search for correspondence for this book had ended, Elaine Steinbeck happened upon this unfinished letter to Elizabeth Otis under the blotter on her husband’s work table in Joyous Garde, the little house on the point at Sag Harbor. It was almost certainly his last letter.

He died in the New York apartment at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, December 20.