Steinbeck (102 page)

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

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

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

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

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.