Steinbeck (77 page)

Is it beyond reason to conjecture that the Cad names as well as the Cead words, the Cedric words, came from Cadiz which came from Cadmus who is the mythical bringer of culture from outside? Why would not these rich and almost mythical people who came in ships and brought curious and beautiful things have names of their origin—the people from Cadiz, the people of Cadmus, the bringer of knowledge, the messengers of the Gods! They must have been God-like to the stone-age people. They would have brought their gods, their robes of Tyrrhenian purple; their designs are still on early British metal and jewelry. Their factors would have lived with the local kids and their memory seeped into the place names. There is little doubt that they brought Christianity to these islands before it even got a start in Rome.

In none of my reference books can I find even a hint of this thesis. It is supposed after fifteen hundred years of constant association with the West Country the one bright and civilized people disappeared, leaving no memory. I just don't believe it. I think the very earth shouts of them.

What do you think?

Yours
John

 

It's interesting anyway, isn't it?

Discove Cottage
[May 1959]

My dear Eugène:

Sometimes I simply want to talk to you, and not having you here, a letter is the next best. I do feel that I much impose on your time, so taken with your work and midge-bitten with undergraduates.

It is my custom, before going to work in the morning, to do some writing, much like an athlete warming his muscles for a match. This I have always done—sometimes notes and sometimes letters. But please to remember, they are not traps for answers.

I always write by hand and my fingers are very sensitive to shapes and textures. Modern pencils and pens are too thick and ill-balanced, and you will understand that five to eight hours a day, holding the instrument can make this very important. The wing quill of the goose is the best for weight and balance, curve and the texture of quill is not foreign to the touch like metal or plastics. Therefore I mount the best fillers from ball points in the stem of the quill and thus have, for me, the best of all writing instruments. When I find some particularly fine quills I will send you one. Besides, some of the finest of writing has been done with a quill. For a time I cut my pens but I don't like the scratching sound. No, this is best and I will like making one for you but I must find a perfect feather from a grandfather goose.

I'm afraid I have fallen a little afoul of the publishing end. Sending some copy to New York I have aroused disappointment. I think they expected something like T. H. White, whose work I admire very much but it is not what I am trying to do.

I am working now on Morgan le Fay—and the plot against Arthur's life—one of the most fascinating parts. And, while it may seem to be magic, it is based on a stern reality. Morgan learned necromancy in a nunnery. What better school for witches—lone, unfulfilled women living together. We can conjecture what must have happened in such places but we don't have to. In my notes I have a number of charges after visitations by inspecting bishops, charges not only of sexual abnormalities but also several demanding the study of magic and necromancy and the celebrations of obscene rites. There were definite reasons for locking the covers of the fonts.

So much to do and think about. A day is ill-equipped with hours. I have been happily digging in the foundations of one of the five cottages of Discove Manor of which the one we live in is the last remaining. I believe that Discove was a Roman religious center, possibly dedicated to Dis Pater and perhaps built on an older ring. Now I know how cottages were built and still are. When a structure burned or was destroyed in war, the stones and bricks and tiles were taken to build something else. Just picking in the foundation of the burned cottage and quite casually, I have found bricks from five different periods, some hardly burned through and some hard, thin, and red, possibly Roman. A hearthstone, coated with modern (last hundred years) cement, when I chipped the coating off, was a shaped stone with just a hint of shallow inscription. Drops of glass, raindrop-shaped, the result of fire but not this recent fire, since they were below the foundation level. Curious stones, some with marine shells and fossils. And these just with my fingers. And when I go down deep—who knows what I shall find? It makes my mind squirm with delight just to think of it.

Now I have done what we call in America bending your ear. I've taken enough of your time.

Love to Betty from both of us. Elaine says she is writing to her.

Yours,
John

Discove Cottage
[June 7, 1959]

Dear Elizabeth:

Yesterday the work seemed to grow wings and start to fly for the first time. This may not show. It is just what I felt. And this morning early I was drawn to work and it continued—the feeling of getting off the ground, I mean. The only proof will lie in what comes out.

I can tell you one thing I have finally faced though—the Arthurian cycle and indeed practically all lasting and deep-seated folklore is a mixture of profundity and childish nonsense. If you keep the profundity and throw out the nonsense, some essence is lost. These are dream stories, fixed and universal dreams, and they have the inconsistency of dreams. Very well, says I—if they are dreams, I will put in some of my own, and I did.

A number of boys from Kings' School Bruton came to see me yesterday—boys working in geology and archeology. Every Wednesday afternoon they excavate on Creech Hill about five miles from here—real knowledgeable boys 15 to 17. They invited me for next Wednesday and I wouldn't miss it.

Now here comes Elaine from church. I can see her halo through the window. I'll join her for a cup of coffee and then go back to work.

 

Mary Dekker is restless as a ghost. She has no place in the world, in fact won't allow herself to have a place. I had long talks with her trying to break into her closed circuit but I don't think I made it. Her world is so full of fancies and so loaded with untruths—not lies—just things that have no relation to any reality that she seems impossible to reach. And she can't be helped because she doesn't want to get well or to be happy or even to be content. There seems to be some Presbyterian self-punishment there. I wanted her to try to see Gertrudis [Brenner] because some of her time-bomb questions might blast out a wall, but Mary said she couldn't be cured and there was no point in it. I said, “Cured be damned. You could maybe be less lonely.” And she said, “Maybe I want to be.”

Now I've talked about myself steadily for months. How are you? More than anything I can think of I wish you could slip over here and settle into the Byre which is a very pleasant room. I have sat sometimes arguing with you, even wrestling with your mind and trying to topple your arguments. “Nonsense. It's expensive. I don't like the country. I have no reason to go.” “Well, it isn't nonsense and it isn't even expensive. It isn't really country. It's the most inhabited place you ever felt and there's a goodness here after travail. There's something here that clears your eyes.” And then you toss your head like a pony the way I've seen so often and you set your chin and change the subject. “Then you won't consider it?” “No.” “I'll keep after you. There's a power here I'll put to work on you.” “Go away.” “Well, I won't. I'll wait until you are asleep and I'll send a squadron of Somerset fairies to zoom around you like mosquitoes—real tough fairies.”

I won't stop. One morning you'll wake up all decided and you won't even know how it happened.

Love,
John

Discove Cottage
June 8, 1959

Dear Chase:

I have been thinking about E.O. [Elizabeth Otis] You know in the many years of our association there has been hardly a moment without a personal crisis. There must be many times when she wishes to God we all were all in hell with our backs broke. If we would just write our little pieces and send them in and take our money or our rejections as the case might be and keep our personal lives out of it. She must get very tired of us. If she should suddenly revolt, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much. I wonder how long it is since one of her clients asked her how she felt—if ever.

Now back to Malory. As I go along, I am constantly jiggled by the arrant nonsense of a great deal of the material. Two-thirds of it is the vain dreaming of children talking in the dark. And then when you are about to throw it out in disgust, you remember that knight errantry is no more crazy than our present day group thinking and activity. Then when I am properly satiric about the matter I think of my own life and how I have handled it and it isn't any different. I am brother to the nonsense and there's no escaping it.

When a knight is so upset by emotion that he falls to the ground in a swound, I think it is literal truth. He did, it was expected, accepted. And he did it. So many things I do and feel are reflections of what is expected and accepted. I wonder how much of it is anything else.

I'm trying to shoot a rabbit from my window. Poor little thing is so innocent and sweet. But he is destroying the lettuces I raised and planted. And so I must kill him or go lettuceless. If I could tell him to go away and he would be safe from me it would be well.

We are living here very happily and simply. I don't remember ever being so content and at home. To a large extent our contentment grows out of a lack of things. Last night in front of the fire I built myself with wood I chopped myself, we were speaking of this, of how the things we think we must have are the causes of most of our unease.

I'll put this aside and mend my fires and prepare us against the night—wood, coal, onions and radishes from the garden, gooseberries fresh picked and tender garden lettuces which I will get before the rabbit gets them. He must know I am watching for him with a gun because he has not come out today and so he has another day and night to live. And so have I.

Yours,
John

Discove Cottage
June 17, 1959

Dear Elizabeth:

This is going to be a short letter by my standards. The trip up Creech Hill with the boys was good and bad. I think the directress grew to dislike me intensely.

I asked her—“Is it not true that in working on these hill forts, you find quantities of shards of pottery and broken stone tools in the ditches of the outworks but no metals, no bronze or coins or bits of iron?”

She leveled at me and said, “How do you know that?” and she was a little angry with me. I said, “Well, it just occurred to me that over the ages the outer ditches would be the garbage disposal, for everything that couldn't be reused. Even broken metal could be remelted but a broken pot is useless.” She was pretty huffy with me. I wanted to tell her to look for hoards not inside the walls but outside, preferably to the right of the entrance going out and low down.

My hoard theory is based on what I would do in case of siege, and all these places have suffered many sieges. I would take my things outside the walls, knowing the inside would be thoroughly searched. I would take it far enough out so that I could creep back and get it. I would do it at night and alone. In the dark, a man leaving a road almost invariably turns to the right, particularly if he is carrying something heavy in his right hand. Twenty to thirty steps is the minimum for safety, and my instinct would tell me to place it on the up side and about chest level and under a large outcropping of stone to prevent water from uncovering it. And even if the fort was lost, I could possibly come back in the dark and get it. If any two permanent features lined up against the sky I would choose that place so I could find it again in the dark.

The night of the 24th, that's next week, we will spend the best part of the night at Cadbury [Camelot]. The tradition, held very widely here, is that Arthur rides that night, the longest day in the year and that certain people can see him. Quite a few people will be there and I wouldn't miss it. You can't imagine how deep this thing is in people's minds. They still believe the hill is hollow and that there is a great cavern underneath. I have letters from people who say they have seen a post sink into the hill in one year, and that a shout in a well on one side can be heard in a well a quarter of a mile away.

The other night I discovered that fifty feet from our house, through a break in the trees, you can see St. Michael's Tor at Glastonbury. Elaine didn't believe it until I showed her and she is so delighted. It makes this house so much richer to have the Tor in sight. Am I in any way getting over to you the sense of wonder, the almost breathless thing?

And now to work and gladly.

Love,
John

 

June 23,1959

Dear Elizabeth:

I have an idea for a little book that could be valuable, could be profitable and would be easy. The idea grows out of our experience here. If you go shopping in Italy or France, you have a little dictionary with the names of things. But there is none for here, and there is hardly a thing in England that has the same name as in America. What I am proposing is an English-American, American-English Lexicon—arranged by subjects and alphabetically—household hardware, foods, meats, sports, clothes, automobiles, telephones, electricity, hotels. To get a double socket I have to describe what it does and it is called, when I find out—a multiple outlet adapter. An electric wire is a flex.

Elaine has only now learned to order a ham for baking. It is of course a smoked gammon. Cheesecloth is butter muslin, hamburger is minced beef, a pot is a basin, a battery is an accumulator, a flashlight is a torch.