Steinbeck (69 page)

The ___ delegation was nearly 100 percent queer. The Americans—Hersey, Dos Passos and me—shockingly masculine. Rice is an old lady but a masculine old lady. Galantière would make passes at a lady streetcar. All in all, we have given P. E. N. a bad name.

I should go out and walk around and I dread it. It's like swimming in warm blood, humidity 300 percent. You don't breathe, you bubble. I'm sorry to have to tell you this and crush your hopes, but we will
not
live in Japan. You can grow your chrysanthemums at home.

Love,
Watanabe

September 9
Monday

Darling:

Back at the old stand. The morning paper says the epidemic has broken out again in Tokyo and schools closing for lack of customers.

The feeling about the bomb is something. It is strange and submerged and always present. It isn't quite anger and not quite sorrow—it is mixed up with a curious shame but not directed shame. It is an uncanny thing—in the air all the time. The typhoon rain is reported to have an all time high of radioactivity. Every bomb test is salt in the wounds.

 

 

[September 10]
[Tuesday]

Next morning—The hall boy whose name is Yoshiro is a friend of mine and has taken care of me. He came in at about 8:30 and said a girl wanted to see me. I told him that is ridiculous at this time in the morning. He said, “Please see her because she came in from the country to see you and she has been waiting two days. She brought you a present.” So I said, “O. K. Bring her in.” She had a perfectly flat face and rather poor clothes and they were torn. And she was weeping. Her name is Mifuyu Nishikawa. The hotel people would never let her in because of her poor clothes. So this morning she tried to get in through a back entrance and they put up barbed wire and she got caught in the wire and Yoshiro got her loose and brought her in secretly. She brought me two carved figures she made herself. She cried the whole time. I gave her a ballpoint pen and a letter which she particularly asked for and she wouldn't take any money. She had brought a copy of Grapes in Japanese she wanted signed. Then I got on clothes and took her out through the lobby so she wouldn't have to go through the wire again, and she cried the whole time.

About 10:30 the President of Tokyo P. E. N. visited me with a bouquet bigger than he was.

A Japanese girl who has been helping us told me that Kyoto was once the capital of Japan and was very beautiful. I asked her why they had moved the capital to Tokyo and she said Kyoto has rowsy crimate. And I guess it has but I can't see how it could be rowsier than Tokyo. The air is full of damp feathers.

Love,
Tokyo Joe

New York
December 22, 1957

Dear Mrs. Radcliffe:

The blinding flash and mushroom cloud of the suggestion that a Salinas school be given my name is shattering as a compliment, and I love compliments as well as the next man —maybe better. A heartwarming honor it is, even as a suggestion.

So far only my first name has been given to an institution.

Perhaps it is well to inspect honors in the light of cool reason lest the footprint in the concrete disclose a bunion. Do the proposers of this naming wish to subject my name to the curses of unborn generations of young Salinians? Think of the millions to whom the name Horse Mann is a dirty word.

But the danger of the situation is not only aimed at me. Consider, if you will, the disastrous result if some innocent and talented student should look into my own scholastic record, seeking perhaps for inspiration. Why his whole ambition might crash in flames.

In view of these sober afterthoughts, and being still shaken by the compliment implied, I hope the Board of Trustees will think very carefully before taking this irrevocable step.

If the city of my birth should wish to perpetuate my name clearly but harmlessly, let it name a bowling alley after me or a dog track or even a medium price, low-church brothel —but a school—!

In humble appreciation,

John Steinbeck

 

Dear Donnie: This is a copy for you. And of course you may print it in any way you see fit. What fun! Twenty years ago they were burning my books. Makes me feel old and pretty dead and I assure you I am neither.

Yours,
J. S.

New York
[December 17, 1957]

 

 

Yes, Joe, there is a Santa Claus if we but seek him—BEFORE HE SEEKS US.

New York
March 1958
Friday

Dear Elizabeth:

I enjoyed the other night at dinner very much. Lots of laughter and fun. I do feel to myself as though I were drawn taut as a bowstring and might snap, and I'm afraid I communicate that feeling. I find it almost impossible to discuss the Morte and the more I read the more that is so. It has tunneled so deep in me that I can hardly dredge it up to the word level.

I can't tell you what solace I get from the new boat [at Sag Harbor]. I can move out and anchor and have a little table and a yellow pad and some pencils. I can put myself in a position so that nothing can intervene. Isn't that wonderful? I bought a little kerosene lantern with a mantle today so I can even work at night on board. And also a tiny heating thing that works with alcohol which can warm the cabin in the coldest weather. I'm beginning to take health from it long before it is delivered.

[New York]
March 14, 1958

 

There seems to be something necessary about pressures. The other night I was lying awake wishing I could get to Malory with a rolling barrage of sling-stones and arrows—which isn't likely to happen—and suddenly it came back to me that I have always worked better under pressure of one kind or another—poverty, death, emotional confusion, divorces—always something. So maybe I had better pray not for surcease but for famine, plague, catastrophe, and bankruptcy. Then I would probably work like a son-of-a-bitch. I'm comparatively serious about this.

A curious state of suspension has set in, kind of a floaty feeling like the drifting in a canoe on a misty lake while ghosts and winkies, figures of fog go past—half recognized, and only partly visible. It would be reasonable to resist this vagueness, but for some reasons which I will set down later, I do not.

It is all very well to look back at the Middle Ages from a position of vantage. The story, or part of it is finished. We know—to a certain extent—what happened and why and who and what were the causes. This knowledge of course is strained through minds which have no likeness of experience with the mind of the Middle Ages. But the writer of the Morte did not know what had happened, what was happening, nor what was going to happen. He was caught as we are now. In forlornness—he didn't know finally whether York or Lancaster would win, nor did he know that this was the least important of problems. He must have felt that the economic world was out of tune since the authority of the manors was slipping away. The revolts of the subhuman serfs must have caused consternation in his mind. The whisperings of religious schism were all around him so that the unthinkable chaos of ecclesiastical uncertainty must have haunted him. Surely he could only look forward to these changes, which we find healthy, with horrified misgiving.

And out of this devilish welter of change—so like the one today—he tried to create a world of order, a world of virtue governed by forces familiar to him. And what material had he to build with? Not the shelves of well-ordered source books, not even the public records of his time, not a single chronological certainty, since such a system did not exist. He did not even have a dictionary in any language. Perhaps he had a few manuscripts, a missal, maybe the Alliterative Poems. Beyond this, he had only his memory and his hopes and his intuitions. If he could not remember a word, he had to use another or make one up.

And what were his memories like? I'll tell you what they were like. He remembered bits and pieces of what he had read. He remembered the deep and terrible forest and the slime of the swamps. He remembered without recalling stories told by the fire in the manorial hall by trouvères from Brittany; but also in his mind were the tellings in the sheep byre in the night—by a shepherd whose father had been to Wales and had heard Cymric tales of wonder and mysticism. In his mind were perhaps some of the triads and also some of the lines from the poems of hidden meaning which survived in him because the words and figures were compelling and spoke to his unconscious mind, although the exact meaning was lost. The writer had also a sky full of cloud-like history, not arranged in time but with people and events all co-existing simultaneously. Among these were friends, relatives, kings, old gods and heroes, ghosts and angels and devils of feeling and of traditions lost and rediscovered.

And finally he had himself as literary material—his vices and failures, his hopes and angers and alarms, his insecurities for the future and his puzzlement about the past. Everyone and every event he had ever known was in him. And his illnesses were there too, always the stomachache, since the food of his time was inadequate for health, perhaps bad teeth —a universal difficulty, maybe arrested syphillis or the grandchildren of the pox carried in distorted genes. He had the strong uninspected fabric of the church, memory of music heard, unconscious observation of nature, since designed observation is a recent faculty. He had all of the accumulated folk-lore of his time—magic and sooth-saying, forecast and prophecy—witchcraft and its brother medicine. All these are not only in the writer of the Morte—they are the writer.

Let us now consider me-who am the writer who must write the writer as well as the Morte. Why has it been necessary to read so much and to accumulate so much—most of which will probably not be used? I think it necessary for me to know everything I can about what Malory knew and how he might have felt, but it is also necessary for me to be aware of what he did not know, could not have known, and could not feel. For example—if I did not know something about contemporary conditions and attitudes toward medieval villeins and serfs, I could not understand Malory's complete lack of feeling for them. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man—if he were confronted by a fifteenth century man—there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.

I don't think any of the research on this project has been wasted because while I may not be able to understand all of Malory's mind, at least I know what he could not have thought or felt.

[unsigned]

New York
March 10, 1958

Dear Eugène Vinaver:

It will not have escaped your notice that a mule has foaled in Cornwall, that there has been an unusual appearance of the northern lights, that the weather has been strange and that there have been meteorological manifestations which, in a more enlightened age, would have been justly considered portents.