Steinbeck (46 page)

Do you know, I am putting off ending this letter as though the end would be the end of something I want to hold on to. That's not true of course—just a feeling like the quick one of hexing your trip so you couldn't go. The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want it to or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one. Because a bad child can improve but a good one is a liar and nothing can improve a liar.

A good trip, dear, with fun. And come back after—come back. I can't write any more. But of course I will. I shall think of you.

Altoona V. Eldredge

 

How I hate to stop

I really feel the earthquake thing still. Or some tremendous change.

 

 

July 30
Saturday night

My Belle:

I will be restless until I have your discreet wire. So send it soon, won't you? I wasn't sick darling, except with the sickness you know. It just took symptoms on itself. I feel fine.

Do you know that the luck mark on the palm of my left hand is suddenly getting larger and darker? Isn't that interesting?

It will be a quick month, dear. It has to be. The thunder and lightning and rain came here today. I knew something was coming. That isn't all that's coming though. That's just the world symbol. All hell is going to break loose darling and it will not be your doing or mine. But it won't be easy nor soft. I would be sorry for this except that soft and easy things usually turn out to be just that—soft and easy. We've had it lucky. I don't depend on that. There must be some payment demanded. Believe it, it can't be otherwise and do you not be unhappy or uneased when the god-palm is out for its nickel.

Good-bye, dear. Good flight, good month, good fun and remember!

Joe Artichoke the 3rd

 

 

August 2
Tuesday noon

Darling—

I have no feeling about flying myself but I shall be very nervous until I know you are in. This is odd but not odd.

This is the interval of nap before the great party—there is a mounting hysteria in the house which will break loose at 2 o'clock. I have things that must be done now. The bakery made a mistake and put white frosting on the cakes. But the inside is chocolate anyway. My mind is split up between the party and you in the air.

 

 

[Tuesday] night

The party roared through the day. The kids are still telling jokes in bed to keep from going to sleep. They hate to let go.

The enclosed (I don't know whether you like it) is a picture of a portrait by Bo Beskow, who is the best portrait painter in Scandinavia and one of the best in the world. Gwyn has the painting of course and I don't know whether I can ever get it. I think I will try because it is the only picture of myself I have ever liked. [He was later able to get it.] If you do like it I will some day try to get you the original or have him do another. He paints me every ten years. Someday I hope you will meet him.

I have so many things to say to you and I don't know what they are. But I will. One of them is that I am deeply tired of my inferiors. It seems to me that I have spent a good part of my life reassuring insecure people. And as with a bad tennis player, it ruins your game. What is this common touch that is supposed to be so goddamned desirable? The common touch is usually an inept, stupid, clumsy, unintelligent touch. It is only the uncommon touch that amounts to a damn.

I doubt whether you can fool Annie Laurie or even that it would be good to try. She will know and approve whether you tell her anything or not. I'm sure of that. She knows everything and tells absolutely nothing. If you ever need a shoulder, she is it. I'd like her to know all about you and she'll be glad because she loves me.

This is something I want to tell you very strongly.
Don't do anything
. I am sure it will all be done for you and that will probably be much better. The most powerful magic in the whole world is working for us. Relax and let it work and make no overt moves. I know you do not like to be a mystery woman but I think it will be good for you to try for a little while.

My dear, when I asked you for a present, I think I meant something of yours, that you liked and that could be a bunch of ribbons or a glove whose mate you left in a bar. That's what I meant. I suppose it is some fetishism but not the psychiatric kind. You see? Something that feels like you and smells like you. And did you lose a little silver button that looks like braided strings? Didn't you have silver buttons on a sweater?

It's nearly time for sleep. It's been a big day and I feel fine but very tired.

Good night my very dear.

 

To New York:

 

 

August 16
Tuesday noon

Dear—

I thought I would tell you this when I saw you but I will now because—

As you may have gathered, there was quite a beating involved in this last thing—not so much to ego because I don't seem to have that kind of ego but rather fatalistically. You see I have never admitted that anything but dying could defeat me and stop me coming back. And then at the end of the long howl of this last thing I felt the possibility. I don't mean that I gave up but I saw for the first time in my life that I could. There was in back of the dark fringe of consciousness not only possible defeat but acceptance. Almost the words—“Well there it is and it's over and it was silly.” All winter that went on. And it got in and in. As with a fighter —when he is about to go down he puts up a great flurry just on the outside chance of landing one. I think that was my life last winter—that and a drying up of the spirit and a kind of dark and deathly cynicism which is the most sterile thing in the world. In that is pleasure but no joy. It is like intercourse with a condom, or stroking fine marble with a glove on.

Once when I was young I had pleural pneumonia and I was very near dying and what I remember is that in that state I had no feeling nor desire
either
for life or death. And that is somewhat the feeling I have had, fall, winter, spring. And it was so unusual for me that I had no weapons with which to fight it. There's no way of knowing but I think it was a near thing. During the war I went out definitely to be killed and this was with foreknowledge of what was going to happen. I knew it surely with my mother's second sight. I knew it and thought it would be all right to offer myself and see what the coin did. So I took really miraculous chances, with every kind of weapon and warfare and outside of getting smacked with a gasoline can I couldn't even get scratched. But that was an active creative death while, when it finally happened, it was a rusting, corroding waste away. And more horrible because there was no way to get at it to fight it. The energy, of which I have always had too much, wasted away and left me almost without strength. Of course I protested to myself and to everyone I loved that it wasn't true. But they knew and that's why they worried about me. They hadn't during the war. And I don't know of course, but I think it was a near thing. And the danger did not lie in that I was afraid but in that I wasn't. That's what I meant by acceptance.

And the reason for telling you this dismal chronicle is that it is not true anymore. It is gone and the energy is washing back into me and I'm not dried up. And I feel wonderful.

And now you know.

Good night, dear. I'll kick some worlds around now.

[unsigned]

[Pacific Grove]
August 19, 1949

Dear Gwyn:

By now you will have had the letter written a couple of days ago. Naturally I should be very pleased if the boys didn't go back to the East until all the danger is over for this year.

Thom caught two fish today and in the excitement I dropped my rod and reel in the ocean. He dragged them home on his line and they were pretty sandy but he didn't want to eat them. Cat wanted to go back to fish just as I put them to bed.

When Thom dropped a tooth yesterday he swallowed it but the birthday mouse forgave him and put a half dollar under his pillow. He awakened me at six to show me. But there was a hole in his pocket so he lost the money and now he has worked it out that it was because he swallowed the tooth.

I shall be glad if you take the boys home yourself. But I must know your plans. I so arranged things that I could spend all of my time with them for these two months.

Do
please
let me know your plans. It is extremely necessary to me.

J

[Pacific Grove]
August 20-21 [1949]

 

Fishing again today. Catbird wasn't good at it with his new rod. I tied a live fish to his line without his seeing and he caught it all afternoon. My letters are turning into a diary of a nursemaid.

 

 

Dear, my dear, the reading of Oz, the playing, the baths are over and birdlets are asleep. Your letter came this afternoon. What a good thing you are, what a double extra good thing. Oh! darling we're going to have fun at last, At Last!

Oh! darling, Thorn needs a pet so badly and today one of his friends offered him a kitten and he wants it so dreadfully. He brought it up very casually and offhand—and kind of deadly. I mean in a dead manner as though he knew I would refuse to let him have it. His mother had refused. And he really needs it. And I had to make a judgment. The richness of having the kitten against the heartbreak of not being able to take it to New York with him. In the morning if he wants it, he can have it even if he does have to give it up. To refuse him would be like refusing love because you might get hurt and that's the best I can do.

Dear, I'm not afraid of anything now. And surely I won't force anything and surely I'll let it go on happening. And I know it will work out. I'm sure of it. Completely sure.

I'm covering flight 5 with the bird.

Good night, dear.

[unsigned]

[Pacific Grove]
[October II, 1949]
[Tuesday]

Darling—

You know sporadically I keep a kind of diary day book. It is written in a kind of Pepysian shorthand. It is valuable sometimes. Looking back through it I came to the reference to your first trip here. And it is amazing how quickly I knew. Almost immediately. I put things in it I don't even know, and only much later do I realize that they are in there. Actually it is a kind of warm-up book. When I am working it is good to write a page before going to work. It both resolves the day things that might be distracting and warms up my pen the way a pitcher warms up. It's a matter of long practice. I have made no entries all summer but now will begin it again. Very soothing to raw nerves.

Last night in one of the times I awakened I got a flock of foreknowledge that was like a landscape on a dark night suddenly created by a flash of lightning. There it was. Maybe I'll write it and put it away. But it was all there. And it was good.

Everyman [working title for what was to become
Burning Bright
] continues to grow in my mind. My Christ! it's a dramatic thing. Now it has beginning, middle and end and that's what three acts are and that's why there are three acts. The 5-act play is still three acts. And the form was imposed by the human mind, not by playwrights or critics. This doesn't mean that external reality has beginning, middle and end but simply that the human brain perceives it so. This letter is growing pedagogic, isn't it?

 

 

October 14
Friday night

My dearest Belle:

Toby S. [Street] came in and sat with me for an hour and then went along. He is a very nice guy.

Tonight I am playing a game I have used before. It is to go over the times when I have been with you and to pick up little things that happened that were unnoticed because there was so much else at the time.

And then projection—I am so looking forward to sitting in Notre Dame with you and watching the light change through the rose window. And sitting on the steps of that ugly church on the mountain of the martyr and seeing daylight come over Paris. And of walking through Fontainebleau where Louis walked. Such places are so charged for me. The deep walls of the Conciergerie where Marie came out to go to the knife. Somehow they keep their charge. You will see. Or to sit on an island in the Archipelago near Stockholm where the Viking ships assembled to start for America before America was officially discovered.

Oh! so many things and so many I haven't seen. I sat in the room in Albany where Carlyle wrote his history. My publisher lives there now. [The famous block of flats off Picadilly usually referred to without the definite article.] But do you know—I've never been to the Tower? nor to Stratford. Fleet St. I know pretty well and the Inns of Court and the Temple which was bombed and burned. But so many I haven't seen. I want to see the house my people came from in Ireland. It's a hovel I guess. And I don't think this will be so long in the future either. My mind is popping with excitements tonight. You haven't been to Europe so you don't know how remembered things come out of the earth like gas and there you are. And only then do you realize how close we are—no matter how many generations we are away from it. Funny, I can see it now in my mind—little farms in Denmark which are the picture in the Easter egg, storks and all. I wonder how I got on this. Do you suppose I am getting restless?