Steinbeck (11 page)

Note—in nineteen seventeen this unit was in a physical and psychic condition which made it susceptible to the inroads of the influenza germ. This germ at other times was not deadly, and, when encountered now, causes discomfort but not ordinarily death. It has been shown that at the time mentioned the germ had not changed but the receptivity of the race had.

Note—in Mendocino county a whole community turned against one man and destroyed him although they had taken no harm from him. This will sound meaningless to you unless you could see the hundreds of notes that make them meaningful to me. It is quite easy for the group, acting under stimuli to viciousness, to eliminate the kindly natures of its units. When acting as a group, men do not partake of their ordinary natures at all. The group can change its nature. It can alter the birth rate, diminish the number of its units, control states of mind, alter appearance, physically and spiritually. All of the notations I have made begin to point to an end—That the group is an individual as boundaried, as diagnosable, as dependent on its units and as independent of its units' individual natures, as the human unit, or man, is dependent on his cells and yet is independent of them.

Does this begin to make sense to you? The greatest group unit, that is the whole race, has qualities which the individual lacks entirely. It remembers a time when the moon was close, when the tides were terrific. It remembers a time when the weight of the individual doubled itself every twenty-eight days, and strangely enough, it remembers every step of its climb from the single cell to the human. The human unit has none of these memories.

The nature of the groups, I said, were changeable. Usually they are formed by topographical peculiarities. Sometimes a terrible natural stimulus will create a group over night. They are of all sizes, from the camp meeting where the units pool their souls to make one yearning cry, to the whole world which fought the war. Russia is giving us a nice example of human units who are trying with a curious nostalgia to get away from their individuality and reestablish the group unit the race remembers and wishes. I am not drawing conclusions. Merely trying to see where the stream of all my notes is going.

One could easily say that man, during his hunting period, had to give up the group since all the game hunters must; and now that his food is not to be taken by stealth and precision, is going back to the group which takes its food by concerted action. That if one lives by the food of the lion he must hunt singly, if by the food of the ruminants he may live in herds and protect himself by his numbers.

It can be placed somewhat like this for the moment—as individual humans we are far superior in our functions to anything the world has born—in our groups we are not only not superior but in fact are remarkably like those most perfect groups, the ants and bees. I haven't begun to tell you this thing. I am not ready to.

Half of the cell units of my mother's body have rebelled. Neither has died, but the revolution has changed her functions. That is cruel to say. The first line on this thing came from it though. She, as a human unit, is deterred from functioning as she ordinarily did by a schism of a number of her cells.

And, when the parts of this thesis have found their places, I'll start trying to put them into the symbolism of fiction.

The fascinating thing to me is the way the group has a soul, a drive, an intent, an end, a method, a reaction and a set of tropisms which in no way resembles the same things possessed by the men who make up the group. These groups have always been considered as individuals multiplied. And they are not so. They are beings in themselves, entities. Just as a bar of iron has none of the properties of the revolving, circling, active atoms which make it up, so these huge creatures, the groups, do not resemble the human atoms which compose them.

This is muddled, Dook. I wouldn't send it to anyone else in this form. But you and I have talked so much together that we can fill in the gaps we leave.

We were awfully glad to get both your letters. Write often, this is a deadly time for us. And you might put your mind on the problem I have stated. If you could help me put it into form, I probably would have less trouble finding my symbols for reproducing it. You will find the first beginning conception of it among the anthropologists, but none of them has dared to think about it yet. The subject is too huge and too terrifying. Since it splashed on me, I have been able to think of nothing else.

It is an explanation of so many mysterious things, the reasons for migrations, the desertion of localities, the sudden diseases which wiped races out, the sudden running amok of groups. It would explain how Genghis Khan and Attila and the Goths suddenly stopped being individual herdsmen and hunters and became, almost without transition, a destroying creature obeying a single impulse. It would explain the sudden tipping over of Prohibition, and that ten years ago the constitution of the US was a thing of God and now it is abrogated with impunity. Oh! it is a gorgeous thing. Don't you think so?

I am ignorant enough to promulgate it. If I had more knowledge I wouldn't have the courage to think it out. It isn't thought out yet, but I have a start. Think of the lemmings, little gophers who live in holes and who suddenly in their millions become a unit with a single impulse to suicide. Think of the impulse which has suddenly made Germany overlook the natures of its individuals and become what it has. Hitler didn't do it. He merely speaks about it.

I'll stop before I drive you as crazy as I have become since all my wonderings have taken a stream like force. All the things I've wondered about and pondered about are seeming to make sense at last. Why the individual is incapable of understanding the nature of the group. That is why publishing is unsure, why elections are the crazy things they are. We only feel the emotions of the group beast in times of religious exaltation, in being moved by some piece of art which intoxicates us while we do not know what it is that does it. Are you as nuts as I am now?

love
john

Salinas
June 30, 1933

Dear Dook:

I had your letter in answer to my hectic one. And I was sorry that you went off into consideration of the technique of the novel which will result. I can see how it will be done all right, but I am in more interest just now to get the foundation straight and the physical integrity of it completed.

My sister Beth is coming over for a few days. Perhaps we might get up to Sausalito while she is here to relieve us. Can't tell, though. Everything gets out of hand this year. There's probably something wrong meteorologically.

Nothing is changed here. This is going to be a very long siege. The doctor says it may last for years. There's a sentence for you, for we can't leave while it lasts. There is no way out. I finished one story and it is ready to be typed, about ten thousand words, I guess [The Red Pony]. There was no consecutive effort put on it. If it has any continuity it is marvelous. I can't think of any possible medium which would include it. It was good training in self control and that's about all the good it is. Now I have my new theme to think about there will be few loopholes in my days. I can think about it while helping with a bed pan. I can make notes at any time of the day or night, and I think I shall delay the writing of it until I have the ability for sustained concentration. However, if the time is too long I can't even wait for that. I'll have to go to work on it. The pieces of it are fast massing and getting ready to drop into their places.

I think this is all of this letter.

love
john

[Salinas]
[1933]

Dear George:

I have your letter of this morning. Mary just went home. We liked having her, but she brought her children which took all her time from helping, and the noise they made was out of place in this house of gloom and melancholy. They made us nervous. I like them. They are the best children. But this is no place for any child. We are taking care of a dead person. We work as hard as we can to keep from thinking of it. We try all we can to keep out of her mind.

I can answer all of your questions now. But I hesitate because of the work it entails. I shall try though, because you need help and this will help you, not because it is something I have discovered. I haven't discovered it. The discovery has come as all great ones have, by a little discovery by each of a great number of men, and finally by one man who takes all the little discoveries and correlates them and gives the whole thing a name. The thesis takes in all life, and for that part, all matter. But you are only interested in life and so am I.

We know that with certain arrangements of atoms we might have what we would call a bar of iron. Certain other arrangements of atoms plus a mysterious principle make a living cell. Now the living cell is very sensitive to outside stimuli or tropisms. A further arrangement of cells and a very complex one may make a unit which we call a man. That has been our final unit. But there have been mysterious things which could not be explained if man is the final unit. He also arranges himself into larger units, which I have called the phalanx. The phalanx has its own memory—memory of the great tides when the moon was close, memory of starvations when the food of the world was exhausted. Memory of methods when numbers of his units had to be destroyed for the good of the whole, memory of the history of itself. And the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable. Emotions of destruction, of war, of migration, of hatred, of fear. These things have been touched on often.

Religion is a phalanx emotion and this was so clearly understood by the church fathers that they said the holy ghost would come when
two or three were gathered together.
You have heard about the trickiness of the MOB. Mob is simply a phalanx, but if you try to judge a mob nature by the nature of its men units, you will fail as surely as if you tried to understand a man by studying one of his cells. You will say you know all this. Of course you do. It has to be written in primer language. All tremendous things do.

During the war we had probably the greatest phalanx in the history of the world. If we could devote our study to the greater unit, we would be capable of judging the possible actions of the phalanx, of prophesying its variability, and the direction it might take. We can find no man unit reason for the sudden invasion of Europe by a race of Hun shepherds, who were transformed overnight into a destroying force, a true phalanx, and in another generation had become shepherds again, so weak that an invasion of Tartars overwhelmed them. We can find no man unit reason for the sudden migration of the Mayas. We say Attila did it or Ghenghis Khan, but they couldn't. They were simply the spokesmen of the movement. Hitler did not create the present phalanx in Germany, he merely interprets it.

Now in the unconscious of the man unit there is a keying mechanism. Jung calls it the third person. It is the plug which when inserted into the cap of the phalanx, makes man lose his unit identity in the phalanx. The artist is one in whom the phalanx comes closest to the conscious. Art then is the property of the phalanx, not of the individual. Art is the phalanx knowledge of the nature of matter and of life.

Dr. [Walter K.] Fischer at Hopkins [Marine Station, Pacific Grove] said one day that you could find any scientific discovery in the poetry of the preceding generation. Democritus promulgated an accurate atomic theory four hundred years before Christ. The artist is simply the spokesman of the phalanx. When a man hears great music, sees great pictures, reads great poetry, he loses his identity in that of the phalanx. I do not need to describe the emotion caused by these things, but it is invariably a feeling of oneness with one's phalanx. For man is lonely when he is cut off. He dies. From the phalanx he takes a fluid necessary to his life. In the mountains I saw men psychologically emaciated from being alone. You can't find a reason for doing certain things. You couldn't possibly find a reason. You are dealing with a creature whose nature you cannot know intellectually, of whose emotions you are ignorant. Whose reasons, directions,. means, urges, pleasures, drives, satieties, ecstasies, hungers and tropisms are not yours as an individual.

I can't give you this thing completely in a letter, George. I am going to write a whole novel with it as a theme, so how can I get it in a letter? Ed Ricketts has dug up all the scientific material and more than I need to establish the physical integrity of the thing. I have written this theme over and over and did not know what I was writing. I found at least four statements of it in the God. Old phalanxes break up in a fine imitation of death of the man unit, new phalanxes are born under proper physical and spiritual conditions. They may be of any size from the passionate three who are necessary to receive the holy spirit, to the race which overnight develops a soul for conquest, to the phalanx which commits suicide through vice or war or disease. When your phalanx needs you it will use you, if you are the material to be used. You will know when the time comes, and when it does come, nothing you can do will let you escape.

There is no change with mother nor can there be for a long time to come. I hope this letter will give you something to chew on. Don't quibble about it with small exceptions until the whole thing has taken hold. Once it has, the exceptions will prove unimportant. Of course I am interested in it as tremendous and terrible poetry. I am neither scientist nor profound investigator. But I am experiencing an emotional vastness in working this out. The difficulty of writing the poetry is so great that I am not even contemplating it until I have absorbed and made a part of my body the thesis as a whole.

I corrected and sent back the proofs of the God this week. It reads pretty well. Ballou is rushing it so it may be out among the earliest of the Fall books. And that is all for this time.