Steinbeck (41 page)

I debated strongly about whether to dress and go out to dinner or whether to cook something and stay home in quiet and determined on the latter.

So I'll close and I will send you more reports.

 

 

October 18

Dear Pat:

I got to reading Auden's introduction to the Greek portable and it is very fine. He is such a good writer. Have you read Lady Godiva and Master Tom by Raoul Faure? A really blistering study of a woman.

I shall be going to Los Angeles with Kazan about the first of November and to Mexico soon after. Probably be gone for about a month.

 

I have not worked on The Salinas Valley. I don't want to now until everything is clear because I think I am about ready for it and I'm letting it stew. It would be bad if the whole conception turned out no good. But I'll do it anyway. I am really looking forward to the doing of it, good or bad.

I miss Ed and I don't all at the same time. It is a thing that is closed—that might possibly have been closing anyway. Who can tell? Great changes everywhere and every which way. I still get the panic aloneness but I can work that out by thinking of what it is. And it is simply the breaking of a habit which was painful in itself but we hold onto habits even when we don't like them. A very senseless species. There is no future in us I'm afraid. I can hear the music beginning to turn in my head. And by the time the spring comes I hope I will be turning with it like a slow and sluggish dervish or some mushroom Simon Stylites, a fungus on a stone pillar.

 

 

Friday

Dear Pat:

The week I've put in planting—things I'll probably never see flower—either because I won't be here or I won't be looking. I have no sense of permanence. This is a way stopping-place, I think, as every other place is. I've made my tries at “places” and they don't work. But this is a good way stopping-place and a good one to come back to—often.

I awakened the other night with a great sense of change happening somewhere. Could not sleep any more and all night the sense of change, neither pleasant nor unpleasant but happening. It hung on for several days. Gradually my energy is coming back a little at a time. It is so strange that I could lose it so completely. One never knows what he will do ever.

Just now the rain started, very gentle and good. I hope it rains a long time. There has not been enough.

I'm sorry I was so closed in, in New York. But I realized more than any time in my whole life that there is nothing anyone can do. It's something that has to be done alone. Even with women, and that's good, there is largely no companionship except for a very little while.

This has been a long bleak day.

 

 

Saturday

Curious sleepless night after a long time of over-sleeping. There was a great thunder and lightning storm in the night and rain fell. Maybe the changing pressure kept me awake. I know I'm very sensitive to changing pressures.

Beth [his sister] is supposed to come down today. I hope she does. It is a long time since I have seen her. We have a lot to talk over. And she is usually so surrounded that there is no chance to see her alone.

 

 

 

Monday

This is turning into a diary. Beth did come down and I got to see her alone for the first time in a long time. She is well but of course is working too hard as always.

This time I am going to send this

love
John

Pacific Grove
[1948]

Dear Nunnally—:

Your forwarded letter has arrived and I thank you for your spiritual succour spelled any way I wish. Your firm position behind husbands could mean a sense of guilt also but who cares.

 

It is possible that I shall leave my cave and bear skin here for the gilded haunts of beauty namely H'wood, natcherly. I have no longer your telephone number and so I cannot call you. But I will try to sneak up on you some how.

I find myself in a curiously original position, namely with a spanked bottom and in a state of original desuetude. Dames and me don't get along and they always win.

love (phooey)
John Steinbeck

Pacific Grove
October 26, 1948

Dear Joe and Charlotte:

I have been meaning to write for a long time but house fixing has interfered. Strange thing, Joe—tonight I couldn't sleep and I wrote a little story that was so evil, so completely evil that when I finished it I burned it. It was effective, horribly effective. It would have made anyone who read it completely miserable. I don't mind evil if anything else is accomplished but this was unqualifiedly murderous and terrible. I wonder where it came from. It just seemed to creep in from under the door. I suppose the best thing was to write it and the next was to burn it.

It's getting cold so early. There is a nasty light of tomorrow coming through the blinds.

The wind is ashore tonight and I can hear the sea lions and the surf and the whistling buoy and the bell buoy at Point Joe and China Point respectively. China Point is now called Cabrillo Point. Phooey—any fool knows it was China Point until certain foreigners became enamored of our almost nonexistent history. Cabrillo may or may not have first sighted this point, but them Chinks raised hell on it for fifty years, yes, and even buried their people there until the meat fell off and they could ship them cheaper to China. Mary and I used to watch them dig up the skeletons and we stole the punks and paper flowers off the new graves too. I used to like that graveyard. It was so rocky that some of the bodies had to be slipped in almost horizontally under the big rocks. And it has just occurred to me that I'm a talkative bastard. So I'll clip off the qualifying adjectives and relax in the
now.

love to you both
John

 

I've lost your home address.

[Pacific Grove]
November I [1948]

Dear Pat:

Well that is over. Thanks for your letters. They helped. I'm leaving for Hollywood tomorrow and for Mexico on Friday. I'm pretty much relaxed, I think, things have been about as disgusting and nasty as they can get and they didn't kill me. I wish I could thoroughly believe that this is to be a new leaf. I wish I could be sure I have learned something. I am not sure of either. But I can try. At least if I try it again there will be a shudder of apprehension.

Gwyn once told me she could do anything and I would come crawling back. At the time I was very much in love with her but even then I told her not to depend on it. A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred. And nearly no women or men realize that. We will not mention this again in a post-mortem sense. Only if it becomes active will it be necessary. I think I am getting strength back—perhaps more than I have had in 17 years and perhaps more than I ever had. I want the hot words to come out again and hiss on the paper and I think they may. My needs are filled.

I hope you will write to me. I thank you for the fine bale of yellow pads. I shall make good use of them, I hope. And on your next trip out here I will get you drunk on red wine and music and the old ghosts we have neglected will walk again and wail on the wet rocks. This is a time of change and maybe of destruction, but the waves and the tide will not change, no matter how much we blast or are blasted. The black roots of the little species may put out new leaves. It is about time. There has been nothing erected for a long time. Matter is creative, that we have known and studied, but we have forgotten that the grey lobes in the head are creative too —the only and unique creative thing in the whole world of our seeing and hearing and touching.

A lot of high flown language but let it flow. Never again does it have to stoop to critics, or friends or lovers. It can be as good or as silly as it can be, not wise and smart and little.

And that's all for now. I will write to you from Mexico. I'm working on the life of a very great man but primarily a man. It would be good to study him closely. His life had a rare series—beginning, middle and end, and most lives dribble away like piss in the dust.

I'll be talking to you soon.

 

 

 

Dear Pat- November [14, 1948]

Dear Pat:

I came back. Mexico was not right, not good, now. I have to learn in unintelligent ways. I'm breaking certain chains. Maybe they will come right back. I don't know. But I'm home again—at least until restlessness gets me again. No plans except work—I'm so far behind, Pat. The sickness has been worse than I have been able to admit even to myself. Must be getting better because now I am beginning to be able to see that it was there at all. At my advanced age I have to go back to some kind of childhood and learn all over again. This is ridiculous. Telling doesn't make it intelligible, I guess.

 

 

Monday

Dear Pat:

Just a note tonight. I'm going to work pretty soon. Working at night is good here. It is very quiet and it keeps me from going out and it leaves me a good part of the day to work in the garden—enough exercise to keep my bowels turning over.

 

Very brilliant and cold weather—the sun like metal and a fine chill in the air at night. We will have a very wet year later I think. I hope.

You must not worry about me. I am all right. This is the worst season and I am still all right and it will get less bad. That anyone can depend on. That's the law.

My house is now completed but there are the usual million things to be done in the garden. That always is there to work in. I'm going to trim my trees even more tomorrow to let more light in toward the ground so my flowers will be very early. And I have built a little potting shed with plastic on wire over it so I can force the little plants to start particularly early. There has been very much done here and now I can take it more slowly. I have no desire to rush anything.

Affectionately,
John

Pacific Grove
November 19, 1948

Dear Bo:

Your long letter came a couple of days ago and I have waited until tonight to answer it. I wanted not to be interrupted once I started with it. My little house is now done and I am very glad to be in it.

I shall have my boys in the summer and I want to arrange my work so that I can devote all of my time to them. I shall rent a boat and we will look at the little animals on the shore and I will let them look through microscopes, and we may even go camping in the mountains. They will either sleep in a tent or I will build a little bunk house for them in the garden. I thoroughly believe I will have them all the time before too long, but now that I can see them for only two months out of the year I want to make the most out of it, for myself mostly, although I think I can show them a new world quite different from the streets of New York where their mother insists on living. I miss the boys pretty much, particularly the older one who was beginning to think and judge and criticize.

As for the rest I think I am fine. I have moments of rage but less and less often and it will soon fade into a memory of nightmare. It will be all right and I am at peace, without hatred and completely without longing. This is a stranger and the one I loved is dead and released and I released from her. This is not the protest that confesses the opposite. It is as near as I can judge my own feeling, and you know I would try to tell you the truth. Since we went apart I have known a great many women, perhaps fifty, not in boasting or revenge, but because the sexual energy which was dammed up while I waited and waited for Gwyn to be well again, (I thought she was ill and so did she) this energy was suddenly released and a satyric pulse overcame me so that I longed for women and I still do and I have them in great joy and exuberance. There is only one symptom of scar. I cannot sleep in the same bed with them. If I try to my skin itches and if I go to sleep I have nightmares. I have become selfish in many little ways. I have a little gnawing of unknown fear sometimes and at others an utter and grey despair falls on me like a cloth. But mostly I feel well and strong (maybe you will know what this is), curiously full of dignity and sense of myself and a good myself.