Steinbeck (55 page)

Again, we're glad to have seen you. I think you have some of the things licked now. And you are rapidly breeding a private army which may protect you in the future.

love to you both.
John Steinbeck

Dear Pat and Dorothy:

We just got in here. We're on a hunt for the seat of the Hamiltons. The place they are supposed to have lived is not on any map no matter how large scaled but we have found a taxi driver who thinks he knows where it is and tomorrow we start out to try to find it. It should be a very interesting experience. I can't imagine any of them are still alive since the last I heard of them was fifteen years ago and there were then two old, old ladies and an old, old gentleman and they had none of them been married. However, whatever happens it will be a story to tell.

We are really tired now. Have got kind of dull to everything. Elaine has just figured out that we have been to thirty-eight different hotels since we left. That doesn't count going back to the same hotel or sleeping on boats and such.

We have just completed a drive all around Scotland. That is a lovely country, not a gay country but it is one hell of a lot gayer than England. Elaine's birthday was celebrated in the dourest little hotel by a Scottish lake. I had a magnum of champagne. The dinner was horrible. There was no way properly to ice the champagne. It was bitterly cold, believe it or not. We went to bed and huddled together and drank the whole magnum of wine, no cake, no presents, no nothing. The guests at this hotel were all British and they sat silently as we went through, sat over their papers. They whisper and look at you but look hastily away when you look up. Everybody is so busy respecting each other's privacy that there is a feeling in one of those Common Rooms like that in an undertaking parlour just before the main event. We got to giggling up in our room and probably every one of those holidaying British exchanged glances and made the mental reservation, ‘Ameddicans.'

love from us both
jn

Dear Pascal—

Of course I am flattered. But you give me something to live up to—which maybe I won't try to live up to.

But the name is a good name. It is particularly valuable in school first because there is no rhyme for it and second because at that period when you are desperately trying to disappear into the group, John has no more emphasis than a number. It is not a name to embarrass you when you are little.

There is one other thing about it. If it is not for you, it will reject you. If you are not by nature John—it automatically becomes Jack or Johnny which are very different names, or it leaves and a nickname takes its place. I can remember wishing for a nickname but I never had one.

I hope your John will wear it in health and honor. There have been bad ones like John Lackland and Ivan the Terrible but mostly it has been a kind of nobly humble name. And I need not give you examples of that.

Thank you. It does make me feel shy and inadequate.

Love to all three,
John

New York
September 10, 1952

Dear Dook:

Did I answer your card written last Feb? I think I did but I have come to put little faith in those things I think I did.

Fifty is a good age. The hair recedes, the paunch grows a little, the face—rarely inspected, looks the same to us but not to others. The little inabilities grow so gradually that we don't even know it. My hangovers are less bad maybe because I drink better liquor. But enough of this 50 talk.

We had the grand tour—six months of it and I liked it very well. I'm glad to be back. We have a pretty little house here and every day is full. Very nice and time races by. When you really live in New York, it is more rural than country. Your district is a village and you go to Times Square as once you went to San Francisco. I do pretty much work and as always —90 percent of it is thrown out. I cut more deeply than I used to which means that I overwrite more than I used to. I cut 90,000 words out of my most recent book but I think it's a pretty good book
[East of Eden
]. It was a hard one. But they're all hard. And if I want to know I'm fifty, all I have to do is look at my titles—so god-damned many of them. I'll ask Pat to send you a copy of the last one. To see if you like it or not.

In Paris I wrote a picture script based on an early play of Ibsen's called The Vikings at Helgoland—not very well known—a roaring melodrama, cluttered and verbose but with the great dramatic construction and character relationships he later cleaned up. Anyway—I shook out the clutter and I think it will make a good picture.

Have three more articles to complete for Colliers to finish my agreement with them. Then I want to learn something about plays, so I'm going to try to plunge into that form this winter. You may look for some colossal flops. But I do maintain that gigantic stupidity that will let me try it.

Your life sounds good to me. I have the indolence for it but have never been able to practice it. Too jittery and nervous. And yet every instinct aims toward just such a life. I guess I inherited from my mother the desire to do four things at once.

I am gradually accumulating a library which would delight you I think. It's a library of words—all dictionaries—12 vol. Oxford, all of Mencken, folklore, Americanisms, dic. of slang—many—and then all books and monographs on words. I find I love words very much. And gradually I am getting a series of dictionaries of modern languages. The crazy thing about all this is that I don't use a great variety of words in my work at all. I just love them for themselves. The long and specialized words are not very interesting because they have no history and no family. But a word like claw or land or host or foist—goes back and back and has relatives in all directions. A negro scholar is completing a volume on all the African words in the American language. He has about 10,000 so far, some of them unchanged in meaning or form from their Zulu or Gold Coast sources. I must write to him and try to get a copy.

Just read Hemingway's new book
[The Old Man and The Sea].
A very fine performance. I am so glad. The obscene joy with which people trampled him on the last one was disgusting. Now they are falling too far the other way almost in shame. The same thing is going to happen to me with my new book. It is the best work I've done but a lot of silly things are going to be said about it. Unthoughtful flattery is, if anything, more insulting than denunciation.

This has gone on quite a long time now.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new work.

So long,
J

New York
October 16, 1952

Dear Dook:

Thank you for your good letter. It warmed me and it remembered me of very many things. I guess it was the things we disagreed about that kept us together. Only when we began to agree did we get into trouble. I'm glad you like the book. The Book—it's been capitalized in my mind for so long that it was a kind of a person. And when the last line was finished that person was dead. Rewriting and cutting was like dressing a corpse for a real nice funeral. Remembering the book now is like remembering Ed Ricketts. I remember nice things about both but a finished book and a dead man can never surprise you nor delight you any more. They aren't going any place.

I guess—what may happen is what keeps us alive. We want to see tomorrow. Criticism of the book by critics has been cautious, as it should be. They, after all, must see whether it has a life of its own and the only proof of that is whether people accept it as their own. That's why most critics do not like my present book but love the former one which formerly they denounced. I have felt for some time that criticism has one great value to a writer. With the exception of extreme invention in method or idea (generally disliked by critics because nothing to measure them against) the critic can tell a writer what
not
to do. If he could tell him what
to
do, he'd be a writer himself. What to do is the soul and heart of the book. What
not
to do is how well or badly you did it.

I am interested in Anthony West's review in the New Yorker. I wonder what made him so angry—and it was a very angry piece. I should like to meet him to find out why he hated and feared this book so much.

The book seems to be selling enormously. I am getting flocks of letters and oddly enough, most of them have the sense of possession just as you do. People write as though it were their book. I'll speak of Cathy for a moment and then forget the book. You won't believe her, many people don't. I don't know whether I believe her either but I know she exists. I don't believe in Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Jack the Ripper, the man who stands on one finger in the circus. I don't believe Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great, Leonardo. I don't believe them but they exist. I don't believe them because they aren't like me. You say you only believe her at the end. Ah! but that's when, through fear, she became like us. This was very carefully planned. All of the book was very carefully planned. And I'm forgetting it so soon.

I'm going to do a job that sounds very amusing. Frank Loesser and I are going to make a musical comedy of Cannery Row. It will be a madhouse but getting such a thing together should be great fun.

It is very good to be writing to you again. I hope we can keep it up. I think I'm changed in some ways, more calm, maybe more adult, perhaps more tolerant. But still restless. I'll never get over that I guess—still nervous, still going from my high ups to very low downs—just short of a manic depressive, I guess. I have more confidence in myself now, which makes me less arrogant. And Elaine has taught me not to be afraid of people (strangers) so that I am kinder and better mannered I think.

I think I am without ambition. It isn't that I've got so much but that I want less. And I do have the great pleasure in work —
while it is being done.
Nothing equals that to me and I never get used to it. My marriage is good in all ways and my powers in that direction are less frantic but not less frequent. This seems to be my golden age. I wouldn't go back or ahead a week.

In some things I think I more nearly resemble you than I did. I hope that isn't wishful thinking. I've always admired your ability to take stock of your assets, your wishes and your liabilities and out of them make a life that contains more elements good for you than any other. You used to have a little nagging conscience about contributing to some great world of thought or art. Maybe you have that without knowing it. Thoreau didn't know either. And you are more nearly like him than anyone I know. Elaine asked what you were like and instead I told her how and where you lived: She said you must be very wise. I don't think you are terribly wise—but I do think you have used your life well. I am caught up in the world and full of its frenzies but you are perfectly placed to be a quiet, thoughtful, appraiser of your time. You used to have a crippling self-consciousness—as bad as mine. Mine made me jump in where yours made you stay out. But just as my aches have eased, so must yours have done.

The cards for you and for me have been down a long time. The thing that's natural for you, you drift towards. You drift toward peace and contemplation, and I drift toward restlessness and violence. If either of us forces toward the opposite, it doesn't last long. And we don't learn—at least I don't. I mean learn lessons applicable to myself. I am fully capable of making exactly the same mistake today I did at 16 even though I know better. That's funny isn't it? I need glasses to read now, and I can't even learn to keep track of them.

It's a grey day here. My working room is on the third floor overlooking 72nd Street which is a nice street. And I guess, by count—two-thirds of my working time is looking out the window at people going by. Didn't we used to do that in your car? But then we only looked at girls. Now I look at anyone but I still like to look at girls.

And always I feel that I am living in a dream and that I will awaken to something quite different. It's very unreal but then everything always has been to me. Maybe I never saw anything real. That's what Marge Bailey [one of his professors at Stanford] said about me once very long ago. I do go on, don't I? But it's fun.