Steinbeck (63 page)

Sag Harbor
[February 1956]
Wednesday

Dear Pat:

I guess you are going to get bombed with notes from out here. I imagine the reason is that a kind of peace is settling over me. Seems to me that I have in the past few years been so nibbled and pushed by light minds and troubled by tiny things that I have been constantly off balance. Large things I can stand up to. I think most people can—I believe that men are destroyed by little things—so little that they can't be got at or even identified—the nibbling of ducks. A large demand may stimulate—a thousand small ones only confuse and erode.

Out here I get the old sense of peace and wholeness. The phone rings seldom. It is clear and very cold but the house is warm. Elaine is ecstatically happy out here. She cooks and sews and generally enjoys herself. You can't imagine the change in disposition and approach in both of us.

And it seems to be getting into my work. I approach the table every morning with a sense of joy.

The yellow pages are beginning to be populated both with people and with ideas. This book with its new approach is not going to be long. It is only a practice book because in the back of my mind there is arising a structure like those great cumulus clouds you see over high mountains.

I can feel this rising and preparing the way weather prepares—a long time in the future and far away—a pressure area that breaks up in Greenland and will weeks later influence a rain storm in Manhattan.

Technique should grow out of theme—not dictate it. I think I told you that I want to leave the past and the nostalgic. It is the disease of modern writing. In the work I am doing, the past is used only in so far as it affects the present. Anyway it is a very pleasant thing to be doing. I want to get maybe fifty or a hundred pages done before you see it—otherwise my method will not be apparent.

Meanwhile if you should see a second hand big Oxford 12 vol.'s—I would like to have it for out here. I know no book I use more—nor value more. I hate to be away from it.

Another request. Does Viking still subscribe to that service which answers questions—you know the one which will do any kind of research? I want to ask it a question. Maybe you will do it for me. I want to know how soy sauce is made. I know it is fermented from the soy bean but I want to know the exact method—step by step and like a recipe so that from the directions it could be made. I promised this to some people in Dominica. I'm always giving you odd requests.

Well all of this is keeping me from my book. But it is fun and you see? I have time. Isn't that wonderful? No gnawing that I should be doing something else. For six hours every day I have nothing to do but think and write. May it go on for a long time. I seem to be reborn.

See you Monday at 12—noon.

love
John

[Sag Harbor]
[1956]

 

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. Of course there are dishonest writers who go on for a little while, but not for long—not for long.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—

“Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.”

It is so hard to be clear. Only a fool is wilfully obscure.

Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends and this is arbitrary because there are no beginnings nor any ends. We do have curtains—in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man's birth, growth and death. These are curtain rise and curtain fall, but the story goes on and nothing finishes.

To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

[unsigned]

Sag Harbor
March 20 [1956]
Tuesday

Dear Toby:

We've been out here on the end of Long Island during this storm which you may have read about. It was beautiful and violent—18 inches of snow and high drifted by the wind.

Two weeks ago, Jimmy Costello [Editor of the Monterey Herald] called me and told me Ritch [Lovejoy] had been operated on for a brain tumor and had very little chance to live and if he did live had no chance of regaining his mind. I wrote to Tal but of course have had no answer. We are getting to the age when the obit pages have a great deal of news. And this has been a bad year in the loss of friends. About seven in the last few months. Two days ago Fred Allen. A wonderful man and one of the true humorists I have ever known. He was Catbird's godfather and took it very seriously. I guess it is a symptom of our ages. But it seems to me a lot of what I think of as the young ones of my friends have toppled over—like John Hodiak and Lemuel Ayers. In some cases, one feels a little guilty for being alive. But that is silly too.

I've finally got my life in shape to go to the National Conventions. I have about 12 papers I will file for. And I intend to have fun with this writing. I am going out with the attitude of a Curse on Both Your Houses and I will do no punditry so Walter Lippmann need not shudder in his elevated position. Also I am going to the Kentucky Derby this year and I've never seen it. The editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal has invited us.

I started out gaily on my novel and then, without warning an idea happened that so charmed me that I couldn't shake it out. It seemed easier to write it than to lose it. It is the wrong length, the wrong subject and everything else is wrong with it except that it is fun and I could not resist writing it [
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
]
.
I must say I do have fun with my profession, if that's what it is. I get real cranky when too many things interfere with it.

I guess I'd better get out and shovel some snow now. Maybe I can get into town tomorrow.

All the best
John

Sag Harbor
April 1956

 

Thank you for accepting my convention copy sight unseen, but I think I owe you an explanation and an out. I have never been to a National Convention. That is my main reason for wanting to go.

When I first suggested that I go conventioning I was told that I had no training as a political reporter. This was true and I began to study the techniques of my prospective colleagues who were so trained. I was particularly interested in the analysis of one paragraph of a Presidential news conference by four politically trained reporters. Each one experted it differently. Walter Lippmann, the Alsops and David Lawrence have nothing to fear from me.

I have no sources—dependable or otherwise. If I should make a prediction, it will probably be assembled out of information from the wife of the alternate delegate from San José, California, plus whispers from the bell-hop who has just delivered a bucket of ice to “usually dependable sources.”

A new political phrase is “running scared.” This is presumed to be good because it means the candidate is running hard. Well, I'm writing scared. A good writer always writes scared.

I have promised to give you printable copy. I think I can, but if this boast should turn out to be so much grass roots, I don't think you should take the rap. I shall write what I see and hear and what I find amusing or illuminating. If you do not find it so, all bets are off. If on the other hand I succeed in interesting you and your subscribers, I shall insist, in addition to the simple money agreed on, that I be given honorary police, military, social, civic and tree planting honors.

Yours very truly,
John Steinbeck

New York
[April 13, 1956]
Friday

Dear Pascal:

We're running to Washington this morning. Haven't been there since the war. I do hope they have cleared the rubble.

I had your letter yesterday and that is exactly what I mean. But say it as roughly as you have in the letter. Make your point and make it angrily. I think of a number of pieces which should be done but that I as a novelist can't or should not do. One would be on the ridiculous preoccupation of my great contemporaries, and I mean Faulkner and Hemingway, with their own immortality. It is almost as though they were fighting for billing on a tombstone.

Another thing I could not write and you can is about the Nobel Prize. I should be scared to death to receive it, I don't care how coveted it is. But I can't say that because I have not received it. But it has seemed to me that the receivers never do a good nor courageous piece of work afterwards. It kind of retires them. I don't know whether this is because their work was over anyway or because they try to live up to the prize and lose their daring or what. But it would be a tough hazard to overcome and most of them don't. Maybe it makes them respectable and a writer can't dare to be respectable. Anyway it might be a very interesting little essay. The same thing goes for any kind of honorary degrees and decorations. A man's writing becomes less good with the numbers of his honors. It might be that fear in me that has made me refuse those L.L.D.'s that are constantly being put out by colleges. It may also be the reason why I have never been near the Academy even though I was elected to it. It may also be the reason I gave my Pulitzer Prize money away. I think you might well make a good piece of it.

It is usual that the moment you write for publication—I mean one of course—one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.

Consider also writing some criticisms of critics. The few pieces I have written against critics have been gobbled up. And it is not considered sporting for a novelist to attack his critics. But it would be perfectly valid for you to do it.

I am in a rush but I did want to get this off because your letter was very good.

Love to you all
jn

Sag Harbor
May 16, 1956

Dear Jim:

The Lillymaid has gone to Astolat for a couple of days to do for her daughter what her daughter had better pretty soon learn to do for herself or this marriage isn't for eternity [Waverly Scott's forthcoming marriage to Francis M. Skinner]. Also she has a yen to get her hair washed. Ain't she a doll? I like that dame. But being left alone, this mouse got to playing and wrote twenty-five pages of dialogue today. It was raining anyway.

A letter from Alicia [Alicia Patterson, publisher of
Newsday,
wife of Harry Guggenheim] today enclosed an interview with Bill Faulkner which turns my stomach. When those old writing boys get to talking about The Artist, meaning themselves, I want to leave the profession. I don't know whether the Nobel Prize does it or not, but if it does, thank God I have not been so honored. They really get to living up to themselves, wrapped and shellacked. Apparently they can't have any human intercourse again. Bill said he only read Homer and Cervantes, never his contemporaries, and then, by God, in answer to the next question he stole a paragraph from an article I wrote for the Saturday Review eight months ago. Hell, he's better than Homer. Homer couldn't either read or write and the old son of a gun was blind. And Cervantes was broke, a thing Bill never let happen to him while he could go to Hollywood and turn out the Egyptian. THE ARTIST—my ass! Sure he's a good writer but he's turning into a god damned phoney. I guess that got rid of my nastiness and Elaine wouldn't approve of my saying it. That will teach her not to go away.