Steinbeck (65 page)

I've made a lot of new friends and renewed old friendships with press people. They are not resentful of me once they know I am not competing with them. On the contrary they have been kind and helpful and amused at this dog walking on its hind legs. I've been scared in the matter of copy and hopeful that it might be better than most has turned out. But I guess that's the story of a writer's life. And it was the very best I could do.

Tomorrow we're going down to Monterey for a few days to see my sisters.

Finally—thanks for everything.

Yours,
John

[Sag Harbor]
[1956]

Dear Pat:

I suppose you will be asked why I wrote The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Maybe you will ask it yourself. As an answer I recall a beautiful lady of my acquaintance who was asked by her two young daughters where babies came from. Very patiently she explained the process to them and at the end asked—

“Now—do you understand?”

After a whispered conference, the older girl reported—

“We understand
what
you do, but
why
do you do it?”

My friend thought for a moment and then retired into the simple truth—“Because it's fun,” she said.

And that's the reason for this book. Because it's fun.

Anyone who can go along with it in a spirit of play may have some of the pleasure I had in writing it. On the other hand, the searchers after secret meanings, the dour priesthood of obscurantist criticism and the devout traffic cops of literature will neither like nor approve of The Short Reign.

But anyone who in our humorless times has concealed a sense of play, can, I believe, get an illegal chuckle from this book. In our scowling era, laughter may well be the only counter-revolutionary weapon.

I can imagine that future critics, if any survive, may view our ridiculous antics with hilarious laughter. And to that desirable end, The Short Reign of Pippin IV is dedicated.

Yours conspiratorially
John

[Sag Harbor]
September 21, 1956

Dear Dennis:

I'm sorry you had an argument with your father. But from where I sit, and I sit a little bit along the road you are travelling, you have only one thing in the world to do. You
must
finish this book and then you
must
finish another. If anything at all, saving your own death, stops you, except momentarily, then you are not a writer anyway and there is nothing to discuss. I do not mean that you should not bitch and complain and fight and scrabble but the one important thing for you is to get your work done. If anyone gets hurt in the process, you cannot be blamed.

But don't think for a moment that you will ever be forgiven for being what they call “different.” You won't! I still have not been forgiven. Only when I am delivered in a pine box will I be considered “safe.” After I had written the Grapes of Wrath and it Had been to a large extent read and sometimes burned, the librarians at Salinas Public Library, who had known my folks—remarked that it was lucky my parents were dead so that they did not have to suffer this shame. I tell you this so you may know what to expect.

Now get to work—

Yours
J.S.

New York
November 19, 1956

Dear Dave and Joan:

Today I packed up a bunch of junk and put it in a box and as soon as some one can get over to the post office it will go off to you, oddities and several manuscripts that have never been printed.

Hope you are all well and happy. We are studying Italian, getting nowhere but it is kind of fun and a kind of discipline which I am not used to these many years. A professor comes twice a week and Elaine and I find ourselves fighting to recite when we know the answer and pretending to be busy when we don't. I guess you don't grow up at all. And all the Italian we will learn you can put in you know what. I am trying to get sounds by trying to memorize some of the sonnets of Petrarca. I find that poetry gives you a much better sense of the flow of words than the inkwell of Catarina Rossi, whom I am beginning to detest. We are studying because about the first of April we are going to Florence for a couple of months and I want to know a few words so that as in French I can ask a question even if I can't understand what the answer is.

I finished my little book. Now I am engaged in another thing and I must ask you not to speak about it for reasons that will be obvious. I've thrown out the novel I was going to write because it did not go well and because it arose from a wrong premise. And because I must go on working because I get unhappy when I am not working, I am taking on something I have always wanted to do. That is the reduction of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur to simple readable prose without adding or taking away anything, simply to put it into modern spelling and to translate the obsolete words to modern ones and to straighten out some of the more involved sentences. There has not been an edition of this since 1893, the Dent edition of Caxton, except for a cut version called the Boy's King Arthur in about 1900 which was the one I cut my teeth on. And there is no rendering of it into modern English. In 1934 the Winchester ms of Malory was discovered and is now available in Oxford University Press, three volumes. And the Winchester is much more interesting and indicates some things which Caxton edited out.

It was the very first book I knew and I have done considerable research over the years as my work will show. I loved the old forms but most people are put off by the spellings and obsolescences and the result is that all they have to go on is Prince Valiant and the movie versions. This is odd because I don't know any book save only the Bible and perhaps Shakespeare which has had more effect on our morals, our ethics and our mores than this same Malory. So that is what I am up to and I should be able to have it pretty well in hand before we go to Italy. However, if it is not completely done by then I will put it aside because I would want it to be beautifully done or not to do it at all. I want to make it as simple as possible but not to leave out anything and not to sweeten nor to sentimentalize it.

Anyway, I'll get the box off to you as soon as I can. Love to all there,

love
John

New York
November 19, 1956
Dear Elizabeth: Monday

Dear Elizabeth:

I've finished now the Short Reign. Pat is coming for it today. There's a great unease about it at Viking, but there's an unease all over and maybe one thing transmits to another. Meanwhile, I have been dipping into the Malory. And with delight. As long as I don't know what is going on in the world, I would like to have a try with this.

Now as to method. I am in some wonder about this. When I first read it, I must have been already enamored of words because the old and obsolete words delighted me. However, I wonder whether children now would be so attracted. They are more trained by picture than by sound. I'm going to make a trial run—not removing all of the old forms, nor all the Malory sentence structure, but substituting known simple words and reversing sentences which even now are puzzling.

When I have some of it done, I shall with an opening essay tell of my own interest in the cycle, when it started and where it went—into scholarship and out again on the other side.

Now as for title—I should perhaps like to call the book The Acts of King Arthur. Of course I would explain this in the introduction—the Book is much more Acts than Morte.

Do you have a Caxton edition? I should like you—as you read my version—to compare it, so that recommendations can be made.

Next, what would you think of Chase as a kind of Managing Editor? [Chase Horton, owner of the Washington Square Bookshop and friend of Elizabeth Otis.] His knowledge and interest seem to be great and he could be of help to me when I come a cropper. It would be good to have someone to consult with. And he might have an opening essay to precede mine. Let me know about this.

Let us keep this project to ourselves until I am well along. I don't want Pat or Viking nudging me.

There it is anyway and I find I am anxious to get into it. It could be a peaceful thing in a torn world.

Love
John

New York
December 7, 1956

Dear Mr. Dickey:

I have read with very much interest the book, Steinbeck and His Critics, particularly since I have not seen most of the material before.

It is always astonishing to read a critique of one's work. In my own case, it didn't come out that way but emerged little by little, staggering and struggling, each part alone and separated from the others. And then, after the fact—long after—a pattern is discernible, a clear and fairly consistent pattern, even in the failures. It gives me the pleased but uneasy feeling of reading my own epitaph.

So many of the judgments and arguments in this book of opinions seem to me to be true. I only wonder why I didn't think of them myself. I guess I was so lost in the books I couldn't see the long structure. Of course, in this river of opinion there are special pleaders—men who were backing their own particular horses—but also there seem to me to be many accuracies.

This book does make me aware of how long I have been at it. Good God, I must have been writing for hundreds of years. But I must assure you that it fails to make me feel old or finished or fixed. Perhaps my new book falls into the pattern, and perhaps the two books in process will drift in the inevitable stream—but to me they are new and unique in the world and I am as scared and boastful and humble about them as I was a thousand years ago when I began the first one. And it is just as hard and I am just as excited as I was. The approach to a horizon makes the horizon leap away. And the more one learns about writing, the more unbelievably difficult it becomes. I wish to God I knew as much about my craft, or whatever it is, as I did when I was 19 years old. But with every new attempt, frightening though it may be, is the wonder and the hope and the delight. As the angels said in Petrarca, “Che luce è questa e qual nova beltate?”

Yours sincerely,
John Steinbeck

Sag Harbor
January 3, 1957
(I think it is Jan. 3,
pretty sure in fact.)

Dear Elizabeth:

Just reading and reading and reading and it's like hearing remembered music. The bay is nearly all frozen over with just a few patches of open water and as the tide rises and falls the crushing ice makes a strange singing sound. I've moved my card table to the front window with the telescope beside it so if anything goes on I can tompeep it. Two seagulls right now trying to walk on the ice and falling through every few steps and then looking around to see if anyone noticed. I have a feeling that seagulls hate to be laughed at. Well, who doesn't, for that matter?

Remarkable things in the books. Little meanings that peek out for a moment, and a few scholars who make observations and then almost in fright withdraw or qualify what they have said. Somewhere there's a piece missing in the jigsaw and it is a piece which ties the whole thing together. So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.

It is very easy to see how Malory, steeped as he must have been in the church, could unconsciously pattern the brotherhood after the twelve apostles. That was what people understood. Twelve was the normal number for any group of followers of a man or a principle. The symbolism was inevitable. And whether the Grail was the cup from Golgotha or the Gaelic cauldron later used by Shakespeare doesn't in the least matter since the principle of both was everlasting or rather ever-renewed life. All such things fall into place inevitably but it is the connective, the continuing line with the piece missing in the middle that fascinates me.

Another beautiful thing is how the straggling sentences, the confused characters and events of the early parts smooth out as he goes along so that his sentences become more fluid and his dialogue gets a sting of truth and his characters become more human than symbolic even though he tries hard to keep the symbol, and this I am sure is because he was learning to write as he went along. He became a master and you can see it happening. And in any work I do on this thing I am not going to try to change that. I'll go along with his growing perfection and who knows, I may learn myself. It's a lovely job if I can only lose the sense of hurry that has been growing in me for so long.

Last night when I could neither sleep nor channel my attention on my reading, my nerve ends got to whipping like the whitecaps on the bay and darkness seemed to come close and then to recede and then come close again. This was not only nonsense but fatuous nonsense. And it occurred to me that what was good for squirrels and bears might be good for me so I went out to walk and the cold got through my skin and then through my meat and then right into the center of my bones, and do you know it worked? A soothing and a quieting it was. It was about six above zero and the deep freeze acted like an anaesthetic as of course I knew it must. When I was cold clear through I could come back and read again. I think these squirrels and bears have something. I don't know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate that I didn't find a hollow log and crawl in for the winter.