Steinbeck (101 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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.