Steinbeck (12 page)

Love to you and Anne and I do wish I could talk to you.

john

[Salinas]
[June 1933]

Dear George:

Nothing is changed here. Mother gets a little stronger but not less helpless. There are terrible washings every day. 9-12 sheets. I wash them and Carol irons them. I try to sneak in a little work, but Mother wants to tell me something about every fifteen minutes. Her mind wanders badly. This story which in ordinary times I could do in four days is taking over a month to write and isn't any good anyway. Carol is working like a dog. She stays cheerful and makes things easier for all of us. It's hard to cook for nurses. If I can have two good days, I'll finish this darn story. It really isn't a story at all.

One of my sisters came last week and took charge, letting us go to the Grove for two days. The weather was fine and the garden beautiful. I got my importance in the picture straightened out. It's hard to break through now I am back. One's ego grows under this pressure until one's feelings are more important than they deserve to be. It's hard to keep scaled down.

A letter from Ballou says he thinks he can get the money for fall publication. He says the other houses are as badly off as he is and M. & O. agree. I really want to stay with him if he can make it.

John

Salinas
[1933]

Dear George:

I presume, since I have an impulse to write to you, you must either be writing to me or contemplating it or have just finished it. Nothing is changed here. I am typing the second draft of the pony story. A few pages a day. This morning is a good example. One paragraph—help lift patient on bed pan. Back, a little ill, three paragraphs, help turn patient so sheets can be changed. Back—three lines, nausea, hold pans, help hang bedding, back—two paragraphs, patient wants to tell me that her brother George is subject to colds, and the house must be kept warm. Brother George is not here but a letter came from him this morning. That is a morning. One page and a half typed. You can see that concentration thrives under difficulties since I have a fear and hatred of illness and incapacity which amounts to a mania. But I'll get the story typed all right sooner or later and then I'll correct it and then Carol will try to find time to finish it and how she is going to do that I haven't any idea.

I have my new theme out of all this [the phalanx theory]. I am scared to death. It is as much huger than the last book as the last book was larger than The Pastures. In fact it has covered my horizon completely enough so there doesn't seem to be anything else to think about, for no possible human thought nor action gets outside its range.

I presume you are swimming every day and basking and generally enjoying yourself. In a way I envy you and in another I don't. I wouldn't miss the ferocious pleasure of this thing of mine for any compensation. The illness (which by the way is the cause of the beginning conception) is worth it —everything is worth it.

I have heard no more from the east. Mc & O are probably mad at me for turning down the comparatively sure ready money from Simon and Schuster. But I can't help that. I feel much safer with Ballou than I would with Simon and Schuster.

I have a great many little blisters on my hands and on my forehead. Ed says it looks like an allergy. It may be a subconscious attempt to escape sick room duty. If it is, I will have to overcome it with some powerful magic of the consciousness—exorcism of some sort or other. I can't have the submerged part playing tricks and getting away with them.

That's all for today. I'll expect a letter in the next.mail.

john

[Salinas]
[1933]

Dear George:

One piece of advice I can offer, and that is that you should never let any one suggest anything about your story to you. If you don't know more about your character and situation than anyone else could, then you aren't ready to write your story anyway. It is primarily a lonely craft and must be accepted as such. If you eliminate that loneliness of approach, you automatically eliminate some of the power of the effect. I don't know why that is.

I can't tell which of the endings you should use. The second sounds very Dostoievsky, and after all you never saw a prisoner flayed. You may argue that your reader never did either and so how can he tell. I don't know, but he can. You might be able to make your second ending ring true, but you would be almost unique in letters if you could. I have somehow the feeling that you will abandon this book. Not because it isn't good but because publishers are in a peculiar condition now. That you are heartily sick of the book is apparent. One thing you will have to do about your genius, though. You will have to give him some dignity and depth. You are writing about Howard Edminster, and while Howard may write superb poetry, his life and acts are those of a horse's ass and a charlatan. Meanwhile your age does not justify that you waste tears over one book. You are growing out from under it and so you can never catch it again. Put it away and, at some time when publishing changes, you will find an out for it. That isn't my advice, you know. I can't tell you how to work and how to think. My method is probably wrong for you. Certainly my outlook and vision of life is completely different from yours.

The pony story is finally finished and the second draft done. I don't know when Carol will find time to type it, but when she does, I'll send you the second draft and then you won't have to bother to send it back. It is an unpretentious story. I think the philosophic content is so buried that it will not bother anybody. Carol likes it, but I am afraid our minds are somewhat grown together so that we see with the same eyes and feel with the same emotions. You can see whether you like it at all. There never was more than a half hour of uninterrupted work put on it, and the nausea between paragraphs had to be covered up. I don't see how it can have much continuity, but Carol says it has some.

I guess that's all. There is no change here. Mother's mind gets farther and farther from its base. She is pretty much surrounded by dead relatives now.

bye
john

Salinas
[1933]

Dear Carl:

This has been a very bad year all around for us. Sometimes I get so shot that I feel like running out on the situation, a thing impossible of course. There are barriers psychological as well as physical. I have never run into so many barriers. It is really the first time I have been unable to run out of danger. I can't get much of any work done, and the few words I do put down are written in the midst of constant interruptions.

In general I guess we are all right. Carol is about ready for a breakdown maybe. You know one publisher after another went broke from underus. My new book [
To A God Unknown]
was held up for a long time and then I got four offers for it, and left it with Ballou because I like him and trust him, and I neither like nor trust the others. And so it will be out in the Fall. I sent the proofs back the day before yesterday. The last one
[The Pastures of Heaven)
seems to be getting a better break in England than it did in this country, but I can't tell much about that for some time.

I wish I could get to see you, but I don't see how I can. I have to help in the office. Isn't it funny, my two pet horrors, incapacity and ledgers and they both hit at once. I write columns of figures in big ledgers and after about three hours of it I am so stupefied that I can't get down to my own work. I can see very readily how office workers get the way they are. There is something soddenly hypnotic about the columns of figures. Once this is over, I shall starve before I'll ever open another ledger. Sometimes we get away over a week end but Palo Alto is quite a long trip away or is it Berkeley where you are living.

I shouldn't be writing to anybody. It is impossible to keep the melancholy out of the tone of the words. I'll put this letter away and if I hear from you I'll add a line or two and send it.

[unsigned]

Salinas
August 9,
1933

Dear Carl:

This loss of contact has been curious. I hope that now it is over. Enclosed is a letter I wrote to you a long time ago [the preceding letter] and never had your address to send it.

This condition goes on, one of slow disintegration. It will not last a great time more, I think. For a long time I could not work, but now I have developed calluses and have gone back to work. It seems heartless when I think of it at all. You are much more complex than I am. I work because I know it gives me pleasure to work. It is as simple as that and I don't require any other reasons. I am losing a sense of self to a marked degree and that is a pleasant thing. A couple of years ago I realized that I was not the material of which great artists are made and that I was rather glad I wasn't. And since then I have been happier simply to do the work and to take the reward at the end of every day that is given for a day of honest work. I grow less complicated all the time and that is a joy to me. The forces that used to tug in various directions have all started to pull in one. I have a book to write. I think about it for a while and then I write it. There is nothing more. When it is done I have little interest in it. By the time one comes out I am usually tied up in another.

I don't think you will like my late work. It leaves realism farther and farther behind. I never had much ability for nor faith nor belief in realism. It is just a form of fantasy as nearly as I could figure. Boileau was a wiser man than Mencken. The festered characters of Faulkner are not very interesting to me unless their festers are heroic. This may be silly but it is what I am. There are streams in man more profound and dark and strong than the libido of Freud. Jung's libido is closer but still inadequate. I take pleasure in my structures but I don't think them very important except in the doing.

Tillie died you know and now we have another dog named Joddi. An Irish terrier and beauty. We like him. He is one of the toughest dogs I have ever seen although only a little over six months old.

Your preoccupation with old age would be shocked out of you by seeing what I see every half hour all day, true age, true decay that is age. A human body that was all dead except for a tiny flickering light that comes on and then seems to go out and then flickers on again. Our life has been uprooted of course, but that doesn't matter if I can find my escape in work.

I have a book coming out in a couple of months. I don't think I would read it if I were you. It might shock you to see the direction I have taken. Always prone to the metaphysical I have headed more and more in that direction.

I have to go to the office now and write a few figures in a ledger. Then I will come home and to my afternoon's work. I'll write again in a little while. And let me hear from you again you old man.

affectionately,
john

Pacific Grove
[November 23, 1933]

Dear Mrs. Wagner:

I am dreadfully sorry you are ill. I hope the treatments work out quickly. Illness doesn't shock me the way it did. There's a saturation point and I seem to have reached it. You'll be well again soon. The pain is another thing. I don't like pain. I hope you will be well soon.

I have been in Salinas. My father is so completely worn out that I sent him over here with Carol and I went to Salinas. Now he is back there while Mary is up, but I'll bring him back next Saturday. He is eating himself with nerves. The Grove seems to quiet him. And mother remains the same—no change at all.

I'm glad you like the book [
To a God Unknown
]
.
The overthrow of personal individual character and the use of the Homeric generalized symbolic character seems to bother critics although a little study of the Bible or any of the writers of antiquity would show that it is not very revolutionary. The cult of so called realism is a recent one, and anyone who doesn't conform is looked on with suspicion. On the moral side—our moral system came in about two hundred years ago and will be quite gone in 25 more.