Steinbeck (25 page)

 

Now—the collecting. I got a truck and we are equipping it. We don't go to Mexico until March, but we have the handbook to do first and we'll go north in about a week I guess for the solstice tides. It will be a tough job and I'm not at all sure we can get it done by March. And I have a terrific job oi reading to do. Ricketts is all right but I am a
popular
writer and I have to build some trust in the minds of biologists. This handbook will help to do that. The Mexican book will be interesting to a much larger audience, and there is no question that Viking can have it.

Yesterday we went to Berkeley with a design for our traveling refrigeration plant and it is being built. Also ordered a Bausch and Lomb SKW microscope. This is a beauty with a side bar and drum nose piece. Primarily a dissecting microscope. My dream for some time in the future is a research scope with an oil immersion lens, but that costs about 600 dollars and I'm not getting it right now. The SKW will be fine for the trip. But that research model, Oh boy! Oh boy! Sometime I'll have one. It may interest you to know that business at the lab is picking up. I can't tell you what all this means to me, in happiness and energy. I was washed up and now I'm alive again, with work to be done and worth doing.

I guess that's all.

Love,
John

Los Gatos
January 16, 1940

Dear Dook:

I'm home this week cleaning up some copy so I got your letter early. I've been spending the weeks in the Grove and coming home week ends. I've been studying harder than I ever did in school and doing some independent research also.

Reason for this work is pretty obvious, I guess. Apart from the interest I have in it, I like the discipline. I've grown more and more dissatisfied with my work and this will help it, I hope. Besides, it will drop me out of this damnable popularity, for, while it will be a good book, there won't be a hell of a lot of people who will want it. I'm very sick of this prominence business.

Carol gave me Sandburg, Lincoln for Xmas. I already had The Prairie Years. Beautiful job.

After dinner now, and a very nice dinner with curry. Carol made chutney this year with fruit from the orchard and it is wonderful. Tremendous rains almost washed our road out but it held waiting for the next rain. We're so far up that roads are quite a problem.

I have so much to learn and all the time I find holes in knowledge—this isn't known, that has not been investigated. I'm doing (to me) fascinating work trying to relax anemones before killing them. They are terribly retractile and must be thoroughly anaesthetized before the formalin is introduced. Cocaine will do it but that is expensive. Now I have something I think will work but it will have to be carefully worked and quantitatively. It is—heavy mixture of oxygen in the water which gets them very drunk, then a weak solution of aspirin (believe it or not). When they are deeply inert—a shot of epsom salts, fairly strong solution and, after six hours a formalin wick. I foozled it last week with too much aspirin, but I think it will work when I get the amounts worked out and that takes many tries. Sound silly?

John

Los Gatos
February 24, 1940

Dear Elizabeth:

I haven't written for a long time. But I have had a beastly case of intestinal flu, a painful and knockout full dose and am just coming out of it now. Don't know where I picked it up but it was a lovely flower.

There is really a lot to answer and I hope I don't leave anything out. First the enormous check came yesterday and Carol has gone down now to get our income tax out of the way. It will be something like forty thousand dollars with state and federal. But don't think we are crabbing. We're delighted to pay it. It's a terrific amount of money we're making. Carol is putting it away carefully, well knowing that probably we'll have to live on it the rest of our lives.

I'll give you some little idea of how the Mexican trip goes. Our plans have changed. The country we want to get to is so difficult that we now want to take a purse seiner from Monterey and go all the way by boat. Said boat is 76 feet long. Three in the crew and Carol and Ed and I would be the whole personnel. Carol would have to sleep in the wheelhouse and the rest of us in the forecastle. Each of us would have to stand a watch and the other work to be divided.

There is one other thing I would like you to consider for future reference. This boat charter is expensive and as I said we like the thing to pay its own way. If we do go, do you think you could sell the log as a series of articles? It would be just a day-to-day account of what happens, together with description of one of the least known areas in the world. Not fantastic adventure or anything like that but a clear description of such a boat trip. Just think about it and later we can talk it over.

I guess that really is all.

Love to everybody,
John

[Aboard
Western Flyer
]
March 26, 1940

Dear Elizabeth:

Heaven knows when you will get this. We're putting in to Loreto tomorrow and I will mail it. But I don't know how often mail goes out of Loreto. It is a tiny place, the first town of the lot. Its church was built in 1535. We've been working hard, collecting, preserving and making notes. No log. There hasn't been time. It takes about eight hours to preserve and label the things taken at the tide. We have thousands of specimens. And it will probably be several years before they are all identified. So far the trip has been wonderful. Last night we went high into the mountains on muleback to hunt bighorn sheep. Went with a rancher on a little hidden ranch. No sheep and I was glad of that. And yesterday we were collecting in a tiny bay when a huge manta ray came in. He was about 60 feet across so we got out of the water fast.

Good Friday we were in La Paz and went to mass. And they sang for the stations of the cross an ancient Spanish chant like a madrigal. The priest had a beautiful voice, true and clear, and the music had still the hint of North Africa and went to quarter tones. We're over two weeks out now and must be back at the end of six weeks. So one third is gone. I only hope the rest of the trip is as good as the first has been. We'll be in Guaymas in about a week and our mail will be waiting for us there. I'm tired and deep burned with the sun. So I'll let this ride as it is. I hope everything goes well with you.

We haven't heard any news of Europe since we left and don't much want to. And the people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be the better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow but something more vital and surviving than either. From the simple good Indians on the shore to the invertebrates there is a truer thing than ideologies.

Good-bye. I'll write from Guaymas.

Love to you all,
John

[Aboard
Western Flyer
]
Guaymas [Mexico]
April 6, 1940

Dear All:

We got in here yesterday. Your letter was waiting for us at the consulate. And it was awfully good to hear from you. Monday we'll leave here and move down the coast and then run for home. We'll be home two weeks from Monday or the 22nd. Getting a little homesick too. Last night we drank some very old brandy and our crew went on the town. The engineer never did come back. He's probably in jail. I'll go in and look in a little while. There were fights and explosions. The captain got very drunk and isn't up yet. The two seamen are also in their bunks. I just got happy and had fun and so did Carol. Toward the end Carol and an Indian girl were mingling tears at the incredible beauty and terror of life. The Indian girl subsequently passed out and was sent ashore in a rowboat. We sent in for a guitar player and made the whole gulf horrible with song. Well, anyway, it was a party. But we'd been fourteen days at sea and it will do the whole crew good if they are alive at all.

Carol is beginning to be homesick for her garden. But she 201 has been marvelous on this trip. I don't know any other woman who could have done it.

Have to go ashore now.

Love to you all,
John

Los Gatos
April 24, 1940

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt:

I am very sorry I was out of the country when you were last on the coast, for I have looked forward to meeting you with great pleasure. Perhaps on your next swing, I shall be here.

Meanwhile—may I thank you for your words. I have been called a liar so constantly that sometimes I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard in the period of my research.

Again thank you and I hope I may not miss you again.

Sincerely yours,
John Steinbeck

Los Gatos
May 7, 1940

Dear Mr. Birkhead:

I am answering your letter with a good deal of sadness. I am sad for a time when one must know a man's race before his work can be approved or disapproved. It does not seem important to me whether I am Jewish or not, and I know that a statement of mine is useless if an
interested
critic wishes to ride a preconceived thesis. I cannot see how The Grapes of Wrath can be Jewish propaganda but then I have heard it called Communist propaganda also.

It happens that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish blood but it only happens that way. I find that I do not experience any pride that it is so.

If you wish—here is my racial map although you know what an intelligent anthropologist thinks of racial theories. As you will see, I am the typical American Airedale.

My grandfather on my father's side was German, the son of a farming family which lived and still lives on a fairly large farm near Düsseldorf. My grandfather came to America in the late fifties in time to be in the Civil War. There has been little communication with the German branch since then except for a visit to Germany about four years ago by a second cousin of mine. He reports that the family still lives on the same farm and that they appear to be good citizens, intensely blond and quite able to prove the nonsensical thing the Nazis insist on. Their name and ours by the way was Grosssteinbeck but the three s's in a row were an outrage to America so my grandfather dropped the first syllable in the interest of spelling.

My German grandfather married a New England woman whose family name was Dickson who came from Leominster, Massachusetts, where her family had lived since the middle seventeenth century.

On my mother's side my blood is all north Irish, my grandfather whose name was Hamilton having come from Mulkeraugh near Londonderry and his wife whose name was Feaghan from nearby.

Anyway there it is. Use it or don't use it, print it or not. Those who wish for one reason or another to believe me Jewish will go on believing it while men of good will and good intelligence won't care one way or another.

I can prove these things of course—but when I shall have to—the American democracy will have disappeared.

Yours is only one of many letters I have received on the same subject. It is the first I have answered and I think it is the last. I fully recognize your position and do not in the least blame you for it. I am only miserable for the time and its prejudice that prompts it.

 

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

 

P. S. On both sides and for many generations we are blond and blue-eyed to a degree to arouse the admiration and perhaps envy of the dark-complexioned Hitler.