Steinbeck (75 page)

We are painting the old cow byre which is just off our sitting room and it is going to make a delicious little guest room. It has its own outside entrance and privacy and easy access to the bathroom. As soon as it is ready, maybe you and Dorothy will come down and see how we country people live.

I ate too much rhubarb last night, forgetting its secondary properties which promptly became primary and it is keeping me jumping today. No wonder it had such a place in medieval medicine. It works.

Love to you both. We are comfortable and happy.

John

Discove Cottage
March 30, 1959

Dear Elizabeth:

I have forgotten how long it is since I have written you. Time loses all its meaning. Work goes on with a slow, steady pace like that of laden camels. And I have so much joy in the work. Maybe the long day off is responsible or perhaps it is only Somerset but the tricks are gone. Instead, the words that gather to my pen are honest sturdy words. There are many more than I will ever need. And they arrange themselves in sentences that seem to me to have a rhythm as honest and unshaken as a heart beat. The sound of them is sweet in my ears so that they seem to me to have the strength and sureness of untroubled children or fulfilled old men.

I move along with my translation of the Morte but it is no more a translation than Malory's was. I am keeping it all but it is mine as much as his was his.

Meanwhile I can't describe the joy. In the mornings I get up early to have a time to listen to the birds. It's a busy time for them. Sometimes for over an hour I do nothing but look and listen and out of this comes a luxury of rest and peace and something I can only describe as in-ness. And then when the birds have finished and the countryside goes about its business, I come up to my little room to work. And the interval between sitting and writing grows shorter every day.

Yesterday, Easter, we went to services in the Bruton church. I found it nostalgically moving because I knew it all from my childhood, but also I found again that there is nothing in it that I need or want. Elaine both needs and wants it and so she may have it. But I'll take my birds any day and the processional of the sun. This letter is a mess. I haven't told you any news. But that's what news I have. That's all of it.

Love,
John

Discove Cottage
April i, 1959

Dear Gadg:

I have your letter this morning and I shall start this, although when it may be finished I do not know. A typewriter stands between me and the word, a tool that has never become an appendage, but a pencil is almost like an umbilical connection between me and the horning letters.

You ask, parenthetically, why I should be interested in your soul. I shall put aside the implications in the fact of your asking. I do not even use the usual reasons, although they are true—that you are valuable, that you are the one continuing triumph of our species, the creative man. No, the reason I am implicated with your soul is that it helps relate me to my own. We must constantly check our evaluations against those of our peers. And I have very few peers and you are one of them. What happens to and in your soul is a kind of map of the countryside of mine.

You say that success is like a candy—quickly eaten. But the analogy is closer. The first piece is wonderful, the second less so. The fifth has little taste and after the 10th, our mouths long for a pickle to clear the sweet cloy away. When people ask me if I am not proud to have written certain things, I reply that I am when the truth is that I am not at all. I don't even remember them very well and very deeply. Now here comes your soul again, because it parallels mine. Two years ago, as you will remember, I discovered that writing had become a habit with me and more than that, a pattern. I had lost the flavor of trial, of discovery, of excitement. My life had become dusty in my mouth. What I did was not worth doing because it gave me no delight. And you remember that I stopped writing. It was very hard to do because I had become a conditioned animal and it was easier to follow the road of my habit than to set off into the bewildering brush country of what is called idleness. Because Elaine's mind deals only with healthy exactnesses, with faces and names, she would say, “What are you doing?” And I would say “working.” “No you aren't,” she said. “I know when you are working.” But even she can be wrong because it was some of the hardest work I ever did, sitting still in a busy world, aching for nothingness or the meaning that could only grow out of non-participation. Here still we are parallel.

Now hear me out because I must go into figures of speech to try to explain. Externality is a mirror that reflects back to our mind the world our mind has created of the raw materials. But a mirror is a piece of silvered glass. There is a back to it. If you scratch off the silvering, you can see through the mirror to the other worlds on the other side. I know that many people do not want to break through. I do, passionately, hungrily. I think you do also.

I wanted peace from the small and to me old or repetitious tensions—the day's breakage in the house to be repaired, the crystal system, very like the solar system, of friendships, responsibilities, associations, mores, duties, empathies all revolving and held in orbit by me, by the fact that I existed, but all of these orbiting at different rates, at different speeds and with no two parabolas the same. And what I wished was to be relieved of this power, this
me
—to sit apart, untroubled with satellites and watch and see and perhaps to understand a world which had blinded and dizzied me. You say you are not tired. Neither am I—only bewildered.

Then there is another place where you and I are very alike. We are blindingly clever. We can twist up a ball of colored yarn, put glass beads in it, hang it from a string, and whirl it so that it seems a real world to many people. Sometimes we even get to believing it ourselves, but not for long. For cleverness is simply a way of avoiding thought. Do you see now why your soul is important to me? It is a pattern of my own.

I had to make a physical sacrifice, a bodily symbol of change and revolt against what was killing me, or rather smothering and turning me down like the damper of a stove. And so I prepared to go away from everything I know and by that means to try to find my way home. When Elaine would say with compassion—“I know you are miserable. What do you want to do?” I could not say the truth which was that I wanted nothing, and wanted to want nothing. That would have made no sense to her. Nothing is an horror to her. Odd that two people could be so different because I thirst for nothing, but because I cannot have that yet I must substitute understanding for a little while. But understanding was warped all out of shape by those rotations of a thousand satellites I spoke of.

And so I came here, to the hills near Glastonbury which has been a holy place since people first came to it maybe forty thousand years ago. Maybe I am telling you this because it seems to be beginning to work. The seed is swelling and the tip is turning green. I feel more at home here than I have ever felt in my life in any place. I perceive things that truly pass all understanding. Sixty to seventy generations have been born and lived, suffered, had fun and died in these walls. The flagstones on the lower floor are smoothed and hollowed by feet. And all of those generations were exactly like me—had hands and eyes, hunger, pain, anxiety and now and then ecstasy. Under my feet there is a great stack of men and women and I am sitting on the top of it, a tiny living organism on a high skeletal base, like the fringe of living coral on the mountain of dead coral rising from the sea bottom. Thus I have the fine integrity of sixty generations under me and the firm and fragrant sense that I shall join that pediment and support another living fringe and we will all be one. I've never known this sweet emulsion of mortality and continuum before.

At about six in the morning a bird calls me awake. I don't even know what kind of bird but his voice rises and falls with the insistence of a bugle in the morning so that I want to answer, “I hear and I obey!” Then I get up, shake down the coal in the stove, make coffee and for an hour look out at the meadows and the trees. I hear and smell and see and feel the earth and I think—nothing. This is the most wonderful time. Elaine sleeps later and I am alone—the largest aloneness I have ever known, mystic and wonderful.

Everyone is related to the world through something. I through words—perhaps inordinately but there it is. But before I stopped writing, words had become treacherous and untrustworthy to me. And then, without announcement they began assembling quietly and they slipped down my pencil to the paper—not the tricky, clever, lying, infected words—but simpler, stately, beautiful, old with dignity and fresh and young as that bird who wakes me with a song as old as the world, and announces every day as a new thing in creation. My love and respect and homage for my language is coming back. Here are proud words and sharp words and words as dainty as little girls and stone words needing no adjectives as crutches. And they join hands and dance beauty on the paper.

This is true—as true as I can think and if you do not believe me, or think this is an effusion you can go fuc. yourself. But if you do believe it or feel that it is so, because we are related, you and I—then you will know that somewhere you will find your home also. That does not mean you must remain in it. Finding it, feeling it and knowing it is there—is more than you can conceive and is enough.

If I could influence you I would tell you to go to Greece or Turkey—to Delphi, Argos, Epidaurus, Lesbos—go alone and see if that is your home. But go alone, so that when the eagles of Zeus fly out from the cliffs above Delphi, they fly for you. I am alone here. Elaine quickly builds a life of neighbors, children, tradesmen, household duties and pleasures and despairs—of friendly, unpoisoned gossip and of endless talk and talk and talk. And because I love her and do not want always to be alone, we meet and associate and enjoy and then each goes to his private home again without anger nor jealousy.

Lift up your mind to the hills, Gadg. Criticise nothing, evaluate nothing. Just let the Thing come thundering in—accept and enjoy. It will be chaos for a while but gradually order will appear and an order you did not know. No one survives in other people more than two weeks after his death unless he leaves something he has much more lasting than himself.

This is a long letter of talk. What difference? I can afford the time and even the possibility of boring you. Your soul? I've been talking about mine and it is the same as yours—not identical but like.

And I watch the words of my translation go down and god damn, I think they are good. They are clean, hard, accentless English prose, exquisitely chosen and arranged and I am overwhelmed with joy because something in me has let go and the clear blue flame of my creativeness is released. I am uplifted but not humbled because I have paid for this with the currency of confusion and little sufferings and it is mine, sealed and registered. And on that whole stack under me, no one could do it as I am doing it. It makes me want to scream with a kind of orgiastic triumph.

Go to Greece, but come by here on your way. The shield of Achilles was made of bronze compounded from the tin mined in the hills of which the diggings are still visible. The Camelot of King Arthur is only four miles from here—a great and frowning fort built thousands of years before there could have been an Arthur, and there are stone rings hereabouts which like Stonehenge bear the crossed axes which prove that the builders came from your own native Anatolia wherefrom the mysterious genius of the Hittite people spread out over the world.

Come to visit me in the place I have come home to. I will not go away from here until Thanksgiving at the earliest. That is a secret between us. I suppose most of this letter is secret between us but largely because who else would understand it? I have spoken to you as I would talk to my own heart.

Yours
John