Steinbeck (4 page)

Meanwhile I congratulate you as one who has found a very precious thing. I give you my utmost respect and allegiance as long as you are worthy of it. I shall regard any attempt at alienation as an act harmful to him, because I know that I am necessary to him as he is necessary to me.

May I not hear your attitude?

Sincerely
John Steinbeck

2953 Jackson Street
San Francisco
[November] 1929

Dear Grove:

At present Carl Wilhelmson and I live in the upper storey of an old house here in S. F. It is a good life and very cheap. Like a squad of fleas, ferocious and very serious, we still make forays and dignified campaigns against the body of art. It is funny and a little sad (for the onlooker) and lots of fun (for us). We take our efforts to write with great seriousness, hammering away for two years on a novel and such things. I suppose in this respect we have changed less than any one you knew in Stanford. It is funny too. We have taken the ordinary number of beatings and I don't think there is much strength in either of us, and still we go on butting our heads against the English Novel and nursing our bruises as though they were the wounds of honorable war. I don't know one bit more about spelling and punctuation than I ever did, but I think I am learning a little bit about writing. The Morgan atrocity
[Cup of Gold]
pays enough for me to live quietly and with a good deal of comfort. In that far it was worth selling. I have a novel about finished [one of the versions of
To a God Unknown]
and Carl has finished two and is about a third through his third. It is an awful lot of work to write a novel. You know that because you have done it. I have been working on the present one nearly a year and have not completed it. The final draft will not be done before April I'm afraid. We don't do much else nor think much else.

That's us. I know no news. Every once in a while I hear a bit of news about somebody I know but when I try to repeat it I find that I have either forgotten it or have mixed it up with something I have heard about some one else. I thought I would be getting to New York this winter, but that seems impossible. I won't have enough money and in the second place I do not want to move before I have finished this piece of work. There was every excuse for the first being bad, because it was the first I ever did but I lack that excuse now.

That seems to be all there is about me. It is such a simple life to tell about. Most of our tragedies we have to make up and pretend.

But do write and tell me about the things which have happened to you.

Sincerely,
John

[San Francisco]
[November 1929]

Dear Ted;

Your little note came the other day. It came, in fact the day of the big game. Such a game it was. The first half was enough to induce a sort of racial apoplexy in the stands. I think it was the most exciting football game I ever saw.

Ted, I swear to God that if I ever finish this novel I shall take to writing the tritest kind of plot stories or even true confessions. This is so damned hard. I have never worked so hard in my life and I don't seem to be getting ahead much. I don't know when this will be finished. There are about three hundred and twenty-five pages done and about seventy-five to do, and I want to let it rest for a while when I get it finished so that I can stand off and get some perspective on it.

You said in a former letter that I had some money coming on the first of November and here it is nearly the first of December and none has shown. I am ashamed to go home.

Carol and I get on as well as always and are together much of the time. Fillmore Street has put red and green and yellow lights on the arches across the street and is very festive. There are mechanical toys in all the store windows. No rain, it is to be another dry year. I can never remember when we did not have a threat of a dry year. The natives cannot remember that this is not a wet country and so about Christmas every year they begin to moan about the dryness of the year and the possible damage to the crops. And the crops never seem to suffer very much, taking, as they do, most of their irrigation from the sea air. It is absurd. Everything is absurd. I wish I weren't, but I think I am absurder than any of the rest.

I learn from obscure sources that I have paresis, that I am a woman, a Jew, that I, in the Morgan, have written a book aimed at the Catholics, that I have given up writing and am frantically looking for a job so that I can get married. Many are the stories I hear about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.

And that's all. Write to me soon.

jawn

San Francisco
[December 5] 1929

Dear Grove:

It is a very long time since I have started a letter with any anticipation of enjoying the writing of it.

Long ago I determined that any one who appraised The Cup of Gold for what it was should be entitled to a big kiss. The book was an immature experiment written for the purpose of getting all the wise cracks (known by sophomores as epigrams) and all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system. And I really did not intend to publish it. The book accomplished its purgative purpose. I am no more concerned with myself very much. I can write about other people. I have not the slightest desire to step into Donn Byrne's shoes. I may not have his ability with the vernacular but I have twice his head. I think I have swept all the Cabellyo-Byrneish preciousness out for good. The new book is a straightforward and simple attempt to set down some characters in a situation and nothing else. If there is any beauty in it, it is a beauty of idea. I seem to have outgrown Cabell. The new method is far the more difficult of the two. It reduces a single idea to a single sentence and does not allow one to write a whole chapter with it as Cabell does. I think I shall write some very good books indeed. The next one won't be good nor the next one, but about the fifth, I think will be above the average.

I don't care any more what people think of me. I'll tell you how it happened. You will remember at Stanford that I went about being different characters. I even developed a theory that one had no personality in essence, that one was a reflection of a mood plus the moods of other persons present. I wasn't pretending to be something I wasn't. For the moment I was truly the person I thought I was.

Well, I went into the mountains and stayed two years. I was snowed in eight months of the year and saw no one except my two Airedales. There were millions of fir trees and the snow was deep and it was very quiet. And there was no one to pose for any more. You can't have a show with no audience. Gradually all the poses slipped off and when I came out of the hills I didn't have any poses any more. It was rather sad, but it was far less trouble. I am happier than I have ever been in my life.

My sister [Mary] is married to Bill Dekker and has two very beautiful children. They are the only children whom I have ever liked at all. They live in Los Angeles and enjoy themselves.

I don't think I write very interesting letters any more. I have this pelican of a novel hanging about my neck and it is decomposing and bothering me about every hour of the day. I dream about it. I can't enjoy a party because it is not done. I write two pages and destroy three. It is over-ambitious I think.

I am engaged to a girl of whom I will say nothing at all because you will eventually meet her and I think you will like her because she has a mind as sharp and penetrating as your own.

I think that is all. I hope you will not let a great time pass before answering, though I realize that there is nothing to answer.

Sincerely,
John

2441 Fillmore Street
San Francisco
[December] 1929

 

I am answering your letter immediately.

I want to speak particularly of your theory of clean manuscripts, and spelling as correct as a collegiate stenographer, and every nasty little comma in its place and preening of itself. “Manners,” you say it is, and knowing the “trade” and the “Printed Word.” But I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read. I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener. There you have it. We are not of the same trade at all and so how can your rules fit me? When my sounds are all in place, I can send them to a stenographer who knows his trade and he can slip the commas about until they sit comfortably and he can spell the words so that school teachers will not raise their eyebrows when they read them. Why should I bother? There are millions of people who are good stenographers but there aren't so many thousands who can make as nice sounds as I can.

I must have misinformed you about my new book. I never never read Hemingway with the exception of The Killers. I have not lost the love for sound nor for pictures. Only I have tried to throw out the words that do not say anything. I don't read much when I am working because novels have a way of going right on whether you are writing or not. You'll be having dreams about it that wake you up in the night, and maybe you'll be kissing some girl the way she expects it, and all the time your mind will be saying, “I'll do the thing this way, and I'll transpose these scenes.” A novel doesn't stop at all when your pen is away.

Next week maybe I'll be moving to Los Angeles with Carol and we'll have some kind of a little house on the outskirts and you can come to see us. We haven't much money but it's very cheap to live out here. Maybe you'd like to settle near to us. I don't like Stanford and never did. Prigs they are there and pretenders. Maybe you could get a part time job in the south and we could sit in front of a fire and talk, or lie on the beach and talk, or walk in the hills and talk. I'd like you to know Carol. She doesn't write or dance or play the piano and she has very little of any soul at all. But horses like her and dogs and little boys and bootblacks and laborers. But people with souls don't like her very much.

Let me hear from you as soon as you can.

john

2741 El Roble Drive
Eagle Rock, California
[Early 1930]

Dear Ted:

I have been doing so many things that there has been no time to write. I moved down here with many furnitures and then Carol and I got hitched which required some messing about and then there was a great deal to be done on this little house, painting and gardening and fixing of toilets which is always necessary in a tumbled down house. Anyway, merry Christmas and so forth.

By dint of a great deal of labor we have made quite a nice place of this. We pay only fifteen dollars a month for a thirty foot living room with a big stone fireplace, a bed room, a bathroom, kitchen and sleeping porch. It was a wreck when we found it, but it is the envy of all of our friends now.

I have been working quite successfully. Find the need of a new title and am wild about it. I have been trying to get one and it is the hardest thing on earth.

The sun is so warm down here it makes me feel very good. We live on a hill in a very sparsely inhabited place which is heavily wooded. The neighbors are good with the exception of one virago. We have a Belgian shepherd puppy, pure black, which is going to be a monster. And all of the time I am getting work done which makes me more happy than any of the other things.

I hope to hear from you very soon and when I get this draft finished in triplicate I shall send one copy east for the usual criticism. I have already decided to make very definite changes so the criticism will not all be valid.

sincerely
john

Eagle Rock
[Early 1930]

Dear Carl:

I do not know how long it is since I have written to you. Everything has been in a haze pretty much for the past three weeks. I have been working to finish this ms. and the thing took hold of me so completely that I lost track of nearly everything else. Now the thing is done. I started rewriting this week and am not going to let it rest. Also I have a title which gives me the greatest of pleasure. For my title I have taken one of the Vedic Hymns, the name of the hymn—