Steinbeck (70 page)

Those portents refer to Elaine and to me.

We are arriving in London about June ist and will be at the Dorchester. We will be staying in England for the month of June.

I have read until I am blind with reading. I think I have some emotional grasp on the 15th century. And as is natural —the field has widened faster than I could go so that the only thing which has increased is my own ignorance. But there must come a time when one says to oneself: “If I go much further, I will know nothing.” Now, I must feel and taste some few more things—Colchester, Bamburgh, Cornwall. These are stimulations to intuition.

My profound hope is that some time during the month of June, you might be able to join us in a walk about—perhaps to let imagination run free. My associate, Chase Horton, is going to join me.

Elaine sends her finest to you and to your charming wife Betty and so do I.

Yours,
John Steinbeck

[New York]
March 15 [1958]

Dear Joe:

This is the kind of letter you write when you just want to talk and haven't anything to say. Snowing hard outside. Typewriter clacking in the other room with a good girl copying long sections of an article in Speculum-mostly in Latin of the 15th century. That's one reason for the hand writing. The other is that it is the only kind of writing that comes naturally to me.

Elaine is doing very well [after surgery]. Next Monday she will get out for the first time for Tamara Geva's birthday. Meanwhile she has the telephone and squads of visitors. It is snowing today—big pieces like white cow flops and the streets a mess already.

I envy you being able to talk with Graves. I have never met him but I want to. Have been going over his White Goddess again. What a man! He knows more about what I am trying to get at than anyone. Scholars have a way of parenthesizing periods and then slipping in behind the safety of the parenthesis. Only Graves seems to have a true sense of continuity. It doesn't stop on century changes nor tidy up with descriptive drawstrings. One thing grows out of another while keeping a great part of what it grew out of. The American Western is not a separate thing but a direct descendant of the Arthurian legend with all the genes intact and drawn to the surface by external magnets. Nor was the legend ever new. Anyway, I am not going to belabor you with scholastic frustrations. Just tell Mr. Graves, please, that I admire and wish to God I could talk to him.

So many of these scholars are full of holes. Also—they, some of them anyway, are incredibly vain. Also they cover for one another.

But enough of this faculty club bickering. I simply want to know what happened insofar as it can be known.

I'm making a dedication of the Malory work to my sister Mary, who was deeply involved in it. I wrote the opening the other day—funny to write a dedication before anything else. I enclose a copy which I think might amuse you. But it isn't meant to be funny. It is deadly serious and damned good Middle English, I think you will agree.

For yourself the best. Why don't you start a boarding house on your inheritance? Might be a new Tom Wolfe.

so long,
J. S.

[Sag Harbor]
April 6, 1958

Dear Elizabeth:

This is really heaven out here. There is only one drawback to it. If there are guests or children here I have absolutely no place to go to work or to be alone. My stuff gets stuffed into closets and drawers and it sometimes takes me several days to find it again. Right now Thorn is with us. I am going to build a little tiny workroom out on the point, too small for a bed so that it can't be considered a guest room under any circumstances. It will be off limits to everyone. I can take electricity out there on a wire which can be rolled up when we are not here. It doesn't need plumbing of any kind. I designed a cute little structure, six-sided, with windows looking in all directions. Under the windows will be storage space for paper on three sides and the other two will be a desk so that it will need no furniture except a chair and I will use one of our canvas deck chairs for that. It will look like a little lighthouse. I'm going to get to it right away because Elaine gets too lonely without guests and with no place to go guests throw any work I want to do sky high. I will build most of it myself and then with that and the boat I will have some semblance of privacy. One of its main features will be an imposing padlock on the door. I think I am going to name it Sanity's Stepchild.

I'm afraid I can't concentrate today. A thirteen-year-old boy who paces, can't sit still, doesn't read, picks up things and puts them down, rattles things and can't go outside because it is raining and probably wouldn't want to anyway, is slowly driving me to distraction if I am trying to concentrate. Sanity's Stepchild looks very good to me at this point.

So that is that.

Love,
John

Dorchester Hotel
London
June 5, 1958

Dear Elizabeth

and Chase

and Shirley:

The loveliest weather you can imagine and every flower screaming with joy and splashing color about. Even the British grudgingly approve. This is the nicest trip we have ever had—no press, no telephones, no appointments. We have wandered about, to Pyx and Muniment rooms of the Abbey, to the London Museum in Kensington Palace to see the models of the city down the ages from wattle on a mud flat, to Roman camp to Caesar's ill-erected Tower—and in the streets following the line of old walls, and the dream memories of the street names, along the Embankment. You have only to squint your eyes a little to see it all in all periods.

I have written John Forman [headmaster of the Forman School, where Thorn was enrolled] a letter of such consummate treachery that any way he turns he will be trapped. I will be interested to see what he has to answer. It is a deadly and jesuitical letter. I wish I could send you a copy but I had no carbon.

Elaine has gone out this morning to tombify. When she gets home we can scrape her for graveyard dust.

Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, came through the other night from lecturing in Warsaw. He had many stories, particularly the jokes being told within the party. My favorite is a solemn definition. A student said: “Under Capitalism man exploits man, whereas under Communism it is just the reverse.”

The month is moving along steadily. It will be time to leave before we know it. But it is a wildly pleasant trip and good even if it were of no value.

I think I'll go out and walk and look now. I like that.

Love, to all,
John

[London]
June 3, 1958

My dear Mr. Forman:

Your letter of May 31st arrived this morning and I have considered it very slowly trying to understand both what it says and what is perhaps implied. In this response I hope to leave no room for interpretations.

When I visited the Forman School and enjoyed your hospitality I was quite well aware that you and Mrs. Forman were Christian Scientists. And surely your feeling that there was no hostility was keen and accurate. Indeed the opposite was true, for it seemed to me that we were in agreement that the Christian fabric is a strong and ancient tree out of which a number of branches grew, and that one must know the tree before one is capable of climbing to his own personal branch. I wish my son to know the tree. The branch he chooses will be what his feeling, his thought and his nature make desirable and necessary. In this I think we agreed and I still believe that to be so. But I would no more interfere with his choice than I would rob him of any other freedom so long, at least, as his choice is not dictated by fear or ignorance, or social or economic gain. However, he must have the tools of choice—knowledge, understanding, humility and contemplation.

I have never felt or uttered contempt for any religion. On the other hand, in religion as in politics I have attacked corruption and hypocrisy and I think in this I have the indisputable example of Jesus, if authority be needed.

Let me now go to Page 17 of Cannery Row. I dearly hope that neither you nor your friend read it out of context. The statement that a number of the girls were Christian Scientists was neither contempt nor satire but simply a statement of fact. For eighteen years I lived and worked in that laboratory. The book is only fiction in form and style. I do not know what the organized church felt about it but these girls took comfort and safety in their faith and I cannot conceive of any Christian organization rejecting them. There is no possible alternative interpretation of Jesus' instructions concerning Mary Magdalene. His contempt was reserved for the stone throwers.

Cannery Row was written in compassion rather than contempt, and a bartender who reads Science and Health (and he did) seems to me no ill thing. Few heroes and fewer saints have sprung into being full blown.

In only one book have I tried to formalize my own personal branch of the ancient tree. That was East of Eden, and while it is long, it is precise.

Finally, I am content that you can and will help my son in the always agonizing search for himself, for I felt that the tone and the overtone of the school were good. And while I am not inclined to be critical, I do feel saddened by the man who, calling himself FBI, used as a weapon a misinterpretation of one sentence of a lifetime of work. It seems to me that it was an unkindly and therefore unChristian impulse.

John Steinbeck

London
June 13, 1958
Friday

Dear Elizabeth and I guess Chase, if he hasn't taken off before this arrives:

We just got back to London this afternoon. Went by train to Glastonbury on Tuesday. Stayed in Shirley's pet George and Pilgrim in the room of Henry VIII from the window of which he is supposed to have watched the sacking of the Abbey. We climbed the Tor and sat for a very long time up there seeing how it was and talking to an old Somerset man and a little boy. A lot of time in the Abbey close, just watching. Bought all of the local books and their theories and read them, walked about and more looking. Then the man who wrote the current London hit play Flowering Cherry (Robert Bolt], who teaches school nearby, took us to village cricket and afterwards, with the teams or elevenses if that's what they are called, for beer and skittles in the village pub and we learned a lot: Of pixilated fields where people will not walk, of witchcraft still practiced so that only last year a man was tarred and feathered as a witch for casting spells. And it is a magical country and it does seem to me that the Somerset people don't look like the others. They have cats' eyes, both men and women, and they hide behind their eyes like sleepy cats. I asked for and got some cuttings from the Glastonbury Thorn which flowers at Christmas, and I am going to try to root them. Maybe I can. If Joseph of Arimathea could root his staff I should be able to root a fresh cutting from his staff.