Steinbeck (71 page)

Love to all there,
John

London
June 14, 1958

Dear John:

Yours was a good letter. I can't tell you how glad and warm I felt to get it. There was kindness in it and wisdom and besides it was god damn good writing. I am glad also to see that maturity, which is ordinarily a process or even a synonym for erosion, has not eliminated ferocity in you. I have a very strong feeling that you are about to shoot the moon.

I knew the shock of Belle [O'Hara's first wife who had died in January 1954] and I was speechless hoping that you would understand that my inability to trap words into a pattern was somehow a measure of my sorrow. But you have a little girl to keep you linked securely to past and future, and a big girl [his second wife, Katherine) to relate future and present. Hell, man, they drive us—else I suppose we wouldn't move at all.

My boys are moving into the smelly, agonizing glory of manhood. I won't know the world they will inhabit. I just get glimpses of the life they live now. But the incredible gallantry of a child facing the complication of living with no equipment except teeth and nails, and accumulated instincts and memories that go back to the first activated cell in a house of plasm, never fails to astonish me. And I am amazed at their beauty, pure unadulterated loveliness. My boys have been going through the horror of disintegration about them and handling it with more wisdom and integrity than I could whistle up.

I am springing them from Walpurgis on the East Side this fall. They are going away to school, a new and frightening life also but without the pattern of decay which has been their sentence for the last few years. There is little communication between father and son but a deep and wordless love creeps through I think from both sides of the barricade. I wish we benighted gentiles had a bar mitzvah—a moment when the community accepts them as men—important, responsible and free. The two boys and I had a small Irish version of it recently when I welcomed them as men, told them it was a painful thing and magnificent—tried to explain the slavery of freedom. But I think they know. They have had secretly to wear the toga while pretending to be babies.

I think they need eagles now, the external physical symbol of truth and gallantry with which to identify themselves. I'm having massive signets carved which aim to be the standard of themselves, to tie them to the line and to introduce them to truth and virtue. It must be intensely personal and at the same time relate them. It may be what used to be called corny and probably now has another name but means the same. So I have decided to tie it to the most personal thing we know—our name.

Our name is an old one from Westphalia or the Saxon Baltic before they moved on England. Stein still means a stone but beck is exclusively English as a word. Some time in the 13th century my blood people moved down the map instead of up and got fancy. Probably put a chain across the Rhine and charged toll against the poor bastards who simply wanted to transport goods. This benefaction naturally ennobled them and they began wearing a “von” to prove—whatever they wanted and/or had the power and weapons to prove. However, that was all dropped not because of democracy but because it was too damned hard for their neighbors to spell. But the name in old English and disappeared Saxon means stone stream—or brook or beck. I can't draw—but the seals are a rapid stream taking the reverse curve of an S and in the stream at the belly of the S a large rock with the water flowing around it on either side and the motto “Aqua petrum vincit.” Poor kids have water and rocks in themselves as well as their name and I think it's no bad thing for them to know that water does defeat rocks.

We are here for a month. I'm doing final research before beginning a very long and to me a satisfying job.

I hope all is well with you. Your letter had a glow that would have shattered a Geiger counter and I take that to mean that you are deeply at work and you can't want better than that.

Thank you for the picture. It has gone up in good and proper company. I shall do the same if I ever get one that makes me feel pretty but right now I don't feel glowy. Maybe that's because I am going to work but am not actually in the furnace.

We'll be back July 1st and hope to see you.

Thank you for writing. It is a letter for keeping and going back to.

Yours and with love from both of us to both of you.

John

London
June 22, 1958

Dear Eugène:

I had just finished the enclosed and moved some papers and found your gifts which had been placed there while we were away—and your wonderful letter. I love compliments, even, I suspect, if they aren't true. My father, who was a wise as well as a taciturn man, tried to instruct me and failed as all fathers fail. In defamation, he said, inspect the purpose and the source. In a compliment do the same. And I think he could have found no fault with this except perhaps in my unrestrained pleasure. Your letter goes with a very few other precious ones—which make me alive and proud—a kind one from Mr. Roosevelt on the birth of my first son; a private letter of commendation from General Arnold, commander of our wartime air arm; a letter from a Danish bookseller telling of a woman who rowed a boat in from the outer islands to trade two chickens for one of my books. Those aren't very many but they are very good to have, and they bridge the times when self-love is at low ebb. Thank you.

 

A long time ago I learned a trick—or perhaps it might be called a method for writing. I stopped addressing my work to a faceless reader and addressed one person as though I had only that one to talk to. I gave him a face and a personality. Sometimes I told a book to a real person. Several to Ed Ricketts. East of Eden was addressed to my sons to try to tell them about their roots, both in a family sense and in a human sense. I should like to hold you in image in this new work. You would then be the focusing point, the courts, the jury. Also the discipline of your great knowledge would forbid nonsense while the memory of excited exchanges would keep alive the joy and the explorations. This would be very valuable to me. And I hope you will not forbid it.

Yours,
John

London
June 27, 1958
Friday

Dear Eugène and Betty:

Back in Londunium after a successful queste. The defeated should begin trooping in to pray you mercy at any moment now. First to Chester and circumambulated the walls—extra, super et intra, walked in the Rows and peered into crevices and holes, a noble and strange city captured between the warp and woof of Roman and medieval patterns with only a patina of sterling area. Then on by car to the dragon lake and found there our old friend Ingrid Bergman making a Chinese film, a different kind of dragon surely and it did seem odd that neither she nor any member of the company knew that they were living where the dragons fought. Then on to Caernarvon and again the walls and towers and trying with all of my might to rip off the dust-covers of time. It is not hard to do. Then on to Conway and there took our rest until next day at howre of prime. Then across Englonde and to Durham to bend knee to St. Cuthbert and to bow respect to the bones of Bede, and to shudder a little at that mailed and military bishopric, a See of iron. Then back to Alnwick with the sweet meadows behind, sheep in the moat and cows in the bailey, and then finally to the end and the proper end to Bambrugh. The rain was black and then it opened like a torn curtain and the streaks of sun exploded on the battlements as though the original Ina the flame-bearer had come back. In all of these it is necessary to see into and under and around as one must the beast in Peer Gynt. Of course I think I can but that may be self-delusion.

I, as a novelist, am a product not only of my own time but of all the flags and tatters, the myth and prejudice, the faith and filth that preceded me. I must believe that it was the same with Malory. And to understand his stories and his figures, I must, as much as is humanly possible, subject myself to his pattern and background, in all directions. A novelist is a kind of flypaper to which everything adheres. His job then is to try to reassemble life into some kind of order.

To people of our time, unable or unwilling to project into the past, a castle is a kind of lovely dream and armour the clothing of a pageant. But in Malory's time armour and castles had one major purpose, to protect lives and to serve as a base for counter-attack. The sword was not an ornament. It was designed to kill people. If the towers and curtain walls are beautiful, it is because strength with economy and purpose usually turn out to be beautiful. We do not know it now, because like purposes are involved, but the shape and line of the guided missile will be found to be lovely. It does seem to me that our time has more parallels with the fifteenth century than, let us say, the nineteenth century did, so that we may be able to understand it more nearly accurately than the Pre-Raphaelite guardsmen of the Victorian round table. For we are as unconsciously savage and as realistically self-seeking as the people of the Middle Ages.

We got back at three this morning and I have a great packet of things to remember.

I forgot to hand you some of the vellum we bought. I shall enclose it with some books I have ordered to be sent to you.

I tried soaking some of it in detergent and found the ink comes out readily. I suppose that it should then be ironed dry with a warm iron or boned to smoothness. I am taking some sheets home with me and will experiment with it to recover its original surface.

I hope in the many months to come when this work comes borning that you will not mind my asking for advice and criticism. That is the time when it has value, in the process.

And again our thanks for being so good to us.

yours,
John

Sag Harbor
July 9, 1958

Dear Elizabeth:

Yesterday I started the translating, starting from scratch, and continued today.

You remember when I started talking about it, I wanted to keep the rhythms and tones of Malory. When he started, he tried to keep intact the Frenssche books. But as he went along he changed. He began to write for the fifteenth century ear and the
English
mind and feeling. And only then did it become great. The twentieth century ear cannot take in the fifteenth century form whether in tone, sentence structure or phraseology. A shorter and more concise statement is the natural vehicle now.

An amazing thing happens once you drop the restrictions of the fifteenth century language. Immediately the stories open up and come out of their entombment.

I can give you many examples. Let us take the word worship in the Malorian sense. It is an old English word worth-ship and it meant eminence gained by one's personal qualities of courage or honor. You could not inherit worship-fulness. It was solely due to your own nature and actions. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the word moved into a religious connotation which it did not have originally. And now it has lost its original meaning and has become solely a religious word. Perhaps the word honor has taken its place or even better, renown. Once renown meant to be renamed because of one's own personal qualities and now it means to be celebrated but still for personal matters. You can't inherit renown.

Anyway, I am started and I feel pretty fine and free. I am working in the garage until my new workroom is completed and it is good. Thank God for the big Oxford dictionary. I find myself running to it constantly. And where Malory uses often two adjectives meaning the same thing I am using one. For on the one hand I must increase the writing—on the other I must draw it in for our present day eye and ear. It may be charming to read—“to bring his wyf with him for she was called a fayre lady and passing wyse and her name was called Igrane.” But in our time it is more communicating to say—“to bring his wife, Igrane, with him for she was reputed to be not only beautiful but clever.”

I do hope this doesn't sound like vandalism to you. If it or rather they (the stories) had been invented in the fifteenth century, it would be another matter—but they weren't. If Malory could rewrite Chrétien for his time, I can rewrite Malory for mine. Tennyson rewrote him for his soft Victorian audience and pulled the toughness out. But our readers can take the toughness. Malory removed some of the repetition from the Frensshe books. I find it necessary to remove most of the repetition from Malory.

It is my intention to write to you regularly in this vein. It is better than a day book because it is addressed to someone. Will you keep the letters? They will be the basis for my introduction.

Catbird is acting up over at camp. I will have to go this afternoon and try to straighten him out.

Big thunderstorm and rain last night and the wind blew big.

I can't tell you how happy I am to be at work. Makes me want to sing and I will.

Elaine is fine. Working like mad in her garden.

Love,
John