Steinbeck (64 page)

It's late but I'm not sleepy so I might as well write you a commencement speech, what the hell! Of course if I had to do it myself I'd cut my throat.

I see you sitting in the front row, robed in academic splendor. It is pretty hot and you are sweating under that cape. You sat on your back tassel and pulled it off and shoved it in your pocket and that got your robe caught in your pocket and you can't get it out so you yank at it and out come your keys and a handful of small change. You keep thinking the tassel of your mortarboard is a fly and you swat at it every time it swings in front of your eyes. You wish you hadn't worn nylon drawers. You itch.

Then you hear the President announce.

“And now, I have the honor to present our honored guest, William D. Pope, who has consented to address you.”

As you stand up you try to work the nylon drawers out of your crevice by dragging against the little hard chair but it sticks. So you say to yourself, “The hell with it,” and you try to get your notes out of your pocket under all the harness you are wearing and you realize that if you did manage to dig them out, you would have to throw your skirts over your head. So what do you do? You advance to the front of the stage and deliver the address I am about to write for you.

 

“President Onassis,” you begin. “Honorable Regents, members of the Faculty, without whose loving care this day could not happen (laughter), ladies and gentlemen:”

(Now draw a big deep breath because it is the last one you are going to get as you become caught up in the fire and thunder of your address. And you don't really have to go to the bathroom. It is just your imagination.)

“I suppose you think I am going to give you one of those ‘You are going out into the world' speeches. (Laughter and cries of ‘Hear, Hear.')

“Well, you are perfectly right. You are going out into the world and it is a mess, a frightened, neurotic, gibbering mess. And there isn't anyone out there to help you because all the people who are already out there are in a worse state than you are, because they have been there longer and a good number of them have given up.

“Yes, my young friends, you are going to take your bright and shining faces into a jungle, but a jungle where all the animals are insane. You are going from delinquency to desuetude without even an interlude of healthy vice. You haven't the strength for vice. That takes energy, and all the energy of this time is needed for fear. That takes energy too. And what energy is left over is needed for running down the rabbit holes of hatred, to avoid thought. The rich hate the poor and taxes. The young hate the draft. The Democrats hate the Republicans and everybody hates the Russians. Children are shooting their parents and parents are drowning their children when they think they can get away with it. No one can plan one day ahead because all certainties are gone. War is now generally admitted to be not only unwinnable but actually suicidal and so we think of war and plan for war, and design war and drain our nations of every extra penny of treasure to make the weapons which we admit will destroy us. Generals argue with Secretaries about how much they've got and how much
we
've got to fight the war that is admitted will be the end of all of us.

“And meanwhile there is no money for the dams and the schools and the highways and the housing and the streets for our clotted and festering traffic. That's what you are going out to. Going out? Hell you've been in it for years. And you have to scrape the bottom to avoid thinking. Some of us hate niggers and some of us hate the people who hate niggers and it is all the same thing, anything to keep from thinking. Make money! Spend all of your time trying to avoid taxes, taxes for the 60,000,000,000 dollars for the weapons for the war that is unthinkable.

“Let's face it. We are using this war and this rumor of war to avoid thought. But if you work very hard and are lucky and have a good tax-man, then when you are fifty, if your heart permits, you and your sagging wife can make a tired and bored but first-class trip to Europe to stare at the works of dead people who were not afraid. But you won't see it. You'll be too anxious to get home to your worrying. You'll want to get your blown prostate home in time for your thrombosis. The only exciting thing you can look forward to is a heart attack. And while you have been in Athens on the Acropolis not seeing the Parthenon, you have missed two murders and the nasty divorce of two people you do not know and are not likely to, but you hate to miss it.

“These are your lives, my darlings, if you avoid cancer, plane crashes and automobile accidents. Your lives! Love? A nervous ejaculation while drunk. Romance? An attempt to be mentioned in a column for having accompanied the Carrot Queen to a slaughter house. Fun? Electric canes at a convention. Art? A deep seated wish to crash the Book-of-the-Month-Club. Sport? A television set and a bottle of the proper beer. Ambition? A new automobile every year. Work? A slot in a corporate chain of command. Religion? A private verbal contract with a Deity you don't believe in and a public front pew in your superior's church. Children? Maybe a psychiatrist can keep them out of the detention home.

“Am I boring you, you nervous sons of bitches? Am I keeping you from your mouldy pleasures? And you, President Booker T. Talmadge, are you restless to get to your rare roast beef? Regents, are you lusting for the urinal? And you, Professors—are you cooking up some academic skullduggery for the Faculty Club?

“Now, you say hopelessly, he is going to give us his science lecture. And you are right again, but it is the last time you will be right.

“Your professors will squabble about how many milleniums ago it was when a man picked up fire and it burned him, and he picked it up again and it burned a forest and he brought it home and it burned his shelter and he threw it on a pile of bones and learned to cook and he found a piece of shining metal under a bonfire and wore it for a while and then hammered it to a cutting edge. It took him hundreds of thousands of years to get used to fire. The very concept of fire so frightened him that he refused to think about it. He called it a god or the property of a god, and gradually over hundreds of thousands of years he reluctantly evolved a set of rules and techniques and mores for thinking about fire. Then he loved it finally and it was first lord of the hearth, the center of his being, the symbol of his ease and safety. Many more people got warm than got burned and so he gradually inspected this extension of himself, this power and found what made it do the things it does. But that was the end of the process, not the beginning. And meanwhile there must have been a good number of men who seeing a forest burning shrieked out that this devil would destroy the world.

“Do you know what is wrong with you? It isn't niggers or Democrats or Russians. The Quantum Theory tumbled your convictions about order, so you refused to think about it. The Expanding Universe blasted your homocentric galaxy, and then the fissionable atom ripped the last of your fire-minded world to ribbons. For the first time you have unlimited power and an unlimited future, the great drama of magic and alchemy. And are you glad? No, you go groveling to analysts to find out what is the matter with you. You will not inspect the new world that is upon you.

“Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could look at your world and say, and hear yourself—‘This was once true but it is no longer true. We must make new rules about this and this. We must abandon our dear war, which once had a purpose, and our hates which once served us.'

“You won't do it. It will have to slip up on you in the course of the generations. But wouldn't it be wonderful if you could greet the most wonderful time in the history of our world with wonder rather than with despair?”

Now you bow coldly and try to get out alive. The audience is silent and as you walk up the aisle working at your suffering crotch you hear whispered comments. “The old fart. Who does he think he is?” “Nigger lover.” “Did you hear him say those Communists weren't dangerous? He must be one.”

 

 

Say—I like that! I may make that speech myself—from a helicopter. But you may borrow it if you like. And invite me to hear you deliver it. I'll cover your exit and bring a few of the boys.

Oh, Elaine will be so mad at me!

yours
John

I told you I was a spastic writer—

Sag Harbor
July 2, 1956

Dear Graham:

Your good letter coincides with a genuine homesickness for London. Not that it is going to do any good for quite a long time. Our daughter is getting married on July fourteenth, and this astonishing occasion is being produced only a little less splendidly than Billy Rose's Aquacade. You can't imagine how many clothes you have to put on a girl when the sole purpose is to get them off.

Meanwhile I have been trying to finish a little book which could be amusing and could get me guillotined also, but the interruptions of more important, i.e. wedding things have made it very difficult. Now my kids have gone to camp and Elaine is running back and forth to New York to stage manage the pageant. Women are very touchy about this. I smiled when they were talking veil and caught hell, and I was so stupid as to suggest that they bring back the kerchief and sheep's blood symbol, but they found that bestial. I wish I had the sense to shut up. If only the intensity of the wedding could guarantee that she would stay married, it would be more than worth it. Do I sound bitter? Well I am a little but I am also philosophic.

 

In the spring we shall go back to Europe. I am going to take Elaine to follow the spring up Scandinavia. I want her to be perhaps in Dalerna for midsummer where they dance and play the violins and do the summerpoles and the wreathes and drink one hell of a lot of schnapps. I find that after six or seven I can sing in old Norsk. At least it sounds like old Norsk. But Elaine says that everything I say after even four akvavits sounds like old Norsk.

We want to see you. Consider very carefully meeting us in Florence. We know lots of people there and places where you can eat little birds and we'll take you to Castle Broglio where the Chianti is golden for a change and twice as strong. Wouldn't that be fine?

yours
John

[Sag Harbor]
[July 1956]

Dear Jim:

If I feel like wringer-juice, what do you think Elaine is like? That's the tiredest white girl I ever saw. I've put her on a diet of bed and vitamins. The wedding was very pretty, the bride truly radiant, the groom handsome and properly frightened, the reception a gala of the youth and gallantry and beauty of Texas and Manhattan. I think I handled myself with the proper mixture of gruffness and tears—a regular Lionel Barrymore. Seemed to me that Elaine was prettier than the bride. Good show from beginning to end and now over, and E. and I alone—really alone for the first time in our lives. I feel new-married myself and when she gets rested up I'm going to make the Lily Maid feel the same way. Chicago will be a kind of wedding trip for us.

Meanwhile, it is so lovely out here with sun and breeze and water that the flowers in the garden are yawping like coon hounds on a moonlight night. What joy! The deadline on my little book which I had hoped to finish before Chicago, I probably won't make. It was my own deadline anyway—but that is the toughest kind. I guess I am telling you all of this out of a kind of effusion.

Meanwhile—the conventions. I'm going to keep the title “O' Both Your Houses.” I like it and it kind of sets the tone.

I guess that's all. I want to thank you for the lovely letter you wrote Elaine. It bloomed her all up and made her happy. Now we have three weeks to rest and kind of get acquainted and that's the very best of all. And I won't be quite so hysterical from now on.

Best to all of you there.

John

[Sag Harbor]
[July 1956]

Dear Jim:

I guess I never saw a more villainous face. The expression seems to be one of planned lechery. It has the open honesty of the weasel and the trustworthiness of the mink. The lumps and erosion are almost geologic as a record of a virtuous and uneventful life. In fact why anyone would want it except for a dart game or a rogues' gallery I don't know.

Working furiously on my French History
[The Short Reign of Pippin IV
] and there's just a teensy-weensy chance I may finish it before Chicago. To this devout end address your prayers, please!

Yours
John

San Francisco
August 23, 1956

Dear Jim and Mark:

I have just finished my last copy which will be filed tomorrow. I have had fun, some of which I hope communicated. And I'm very tired because regardless of the irresponsibility of the copy, I have missed very little and have stood still for every nuance of these fantastic rituals of complexity. I'm pretty sure I shall not want to see another one. Like a fighting bull once fought I know too much and my innocence is being swept up from the floor of the Cow Palace along with the posters.