Steinbeck (80 page)

I don't suppose you would be interested in some Old Curmudgeon pieces. I'm in the middle of a book
[The Winter of Our Discontent]
and it is going swell and I wouldn't interrupt it for anything, but there is always that early morning when cantankerousness is the better part of valor.

Have any more capes been draped about your shoulders? I had to turn down another honorary degree the other day with my hackneyed excuse that so long as I had no legitimate degree from my own university, it seemed a little silly to assume a fake one. It's my last virginity, that and television. But then I got badly bit with a prize one time. It was a number of years ago when I was pushing starvation pretty hard. The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco awarded me a gold medal for a book. It was a right sizeable medal and I judged that melted down it would come to something like fifty bucks even if the gold was sort of thinned out with baser metals. I felt real good about it and put it away because it represented about four hundred-pound sacks of beans and enough side meat to go with it to live safely for six months. That medal was a real wolf-chaser and kept me pretty happy and with a sense of security I hadn't felt for a long period. Well—the time came and I took my medal up to the jeweller to convert it into cold cash and thence into beans, and the jeweller said that if he could get the plating off at all it would be worth about thirty cents. And since then I have been suspicious of honors other than pure money in small denominations and unmarked bills.

But honorary degrees are even worse. They mean nobody's scared of you any more. You can't bite the hand that sets a mortarboard on your head. And my trouble is that I am not a jolly old fart watching the passing show. My poison glands are still producing a very high test kind of venom and I'll resist being a classic until they plant me at which time I will automatically cease to be one.

I would like to hear from you, Jim. It would be good to know that somewhere, somebody cared—or didn't for that matter.

Yours
John

 

The fair Elaine is fairer and Elainer than ever. What a dame. When I'm counting my blessings I can stop right there with a profit.

New York
April 12, 1960

Dear Adlai:

Welcome home and well come. Your pictures look healthy and full of beans and we could use some of those instead of this product which has been the campaign so far. For God's sake come out for something real. Both candidates constitute a Popish plot.

You know, I rather liked Nixon when he was a mug. You knew to protect yourself in a dark alley. It's his respectability that scares hell out of me.

Good hunting.
Yours,
John

Sag Harbor
May 25, 1960

Dear Frank and Fatima:

Soraya's letter arrived and about time. I wanted to have intercourse with you, i.e., communication, but somebody gets screwed. Somehow I can't imagine the toy Brunhild in a yashmak. Yes, I do know Marrakech. I spent some disreputable time there during the war. The smell of piss of a thousand years plus a thousand years of saffron that has passed through the Arab body can be smelled deep in the Atlas—but isn't that city wall in the sunset something to see?

I have been in wonder at the word Frank—First a javelin, then a German, then a Christian, then a Western person, once a sty where pigs are fattened, then fat, then pure or good like frankincense, then open, honest, outspoken, bold—in a word Franc or Frank. And now the name describes a little, mean, crooked, evil-eyed, devious, conniving, dark-browed gnome of Jewish extraction. Grimm's law of language mutation will not take care of this situation.

I am delighted that your pocket Valkyrie is loving the trip. And if in the future a bunch of Ayrabs come up with a Middlewestern accent, I wouldn't be surprised.

My new book is known to no one except Elaine. I have told only the title, a great one, I think. The Winter of Our Discontent. It's a strange book that is taking its own pace—part Kafka and part Booth Tarkington with a soup-song of me. It's writing along and I am following mostly amazed. I hope to finish it this summer.

In the fall—right after Labor Day—I'm going to learn about my own country. I've lost the flavor and taste and sound of it. It's been years since I have seen it. Sooo! I'm buying a pick-up truck with a small apartment on it, kind of like the cabin of a small boat, bed, stove, desk, ice-box, toilet —not a trailer—what's called a coach. I'm going alone, out toward the West by the northern way but zigzagging through the Middle West and the mountain states. I'll avoid cities, hit small towns and farms and ranches, sit in bars and hamburger stands and on Sunday go to church. I'll go down the coast from Washington and Oregon and then back through the Southwest and South and up the East Coast but always zigzagging. Elaine will join me occasionally but mostly I have to go alone, and I shall go unknown. I just want to look and listen. What I'll get I need badly—a re-knowledge of my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes and its changes. It's long overdue—very long. New York is not America. I am very excited about doing this. It will be a kind of a rebirth. Do you like the idea? I'm not worried about being recognized. I have a great gift for anonymity.

Frank, when you are in Paris, please show your bride John's Elysee. After that I won't even mind if you take her to the Tour F.L.

And a belated congratulation on M.H.F.
[Most Happy Fella
]. We hear from Londoners that it is terrific and a wild crazy smash. Isn't that a hell of a way to refer to a damn fine piece of work?

Anyway, have fun and write if you don't get work.

Love to you both,
John

Sag Harbor
[June 1960]

Dear Elizabeth:

I've put off answering your other letter about Operation America until last. I have thought of little else all weekend or since I got it. So I will try to tell you what I think about it.

Frequently, of late, I have felt that my time is over and that I should bow out. And one of the main reasons for this feeling is that—being convinced in myself of a direction, a method or a cause, I am easily talked out of it and fall into an ensuing weariness very close to resignation. Once I was sure I was right in certain directions and that very surety made it more likely to be right. But now my malleableness makes it more likely that I am wrong, and one does not fight very hard for a wrongness. Now, concerning my projected trip, I am pretty sure I am right. I only hope I do not succumb to better judgments, and in so doing tear the whole guts out of the project.

I can of course answer every one of your arguments and probably will.

Let me start with your statement that people travel by bus and talk to each other. That they stay in motels. So many of them do but while they are so traveling they are not what I am looking for. They are not
home
and they are not themselves. There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.

Motels and bus routes are on the main highways. One cannot leave the highways. At a motel or tourist house you have made an inroad—your coming is noted—your name registered, your intentions and plans subject to question or curiosity.

I chose a truck for several reasons. First, a truck is a respectable and respected working instrument as apart from a station wagon or an automobile or a trailer. Second—in a truck I can get into a countryside not crossed by buses. I can see people not in movement but at home in their own places. This is very important to me.

Now my reason for wanting to be self-contained is that I also will be at home. I can invite a man to have a beer in my home, thereby forcing an invitation from him.

Next—Any stranger in a rural community is suspect until his purpose is understood. There is one purpose that is never questioned, never inspected and that causes instant recognition and sympathy—that is hunting and fishing. If in my truck I have two fishing rods, two rifles and a shotgun, there will never be any question of my purpose.

Next, I would like it fairly comfortable, if you call a bunk, a butane stove and an ice-box comfortable. If you are driving 10 or 12 thousand miles, it is no sin not to want to break down. I moved about the Okie camps in an old bakery truck with a mattress in it but that was a matter of four counties, not many states.

Next, I do not want to take a sampling of certain states as you suggest—I want the thing in context against its own background—one place in relation to another. My clothing will be khaki hunting clothes, a mackinaw and a Stetson hat. This is a uniform that will get me anywhere.

In your letter you say I should not go as J.S. novelist or journalist but as J.S. American. What I really hope for and believe I can do is to go as nobody, as a wandering car and eye. And the means I have chosen is designed to make it unnecessary for anyone to ask my name. The people I want to listen to are not the high school principal nor the Chamber of Commerce, but the man in a field who isn't likely to know my name even if he heard it, and there are millions of those. By the very mobility I could be gone before my name caught up with me. Besides this, while it is true that my name is fairly widely known, in America it is not, outside of certain cities and certain groups.

Now I feel that what I have written here is true and right. I know it is right for me. But I fear the weariness that might succumb to better judgment.

I am trying to say clearly that if I don't stoke my fires and soon, they will go out from leaving the damper closed and the air cut off.

It is so seldom that you and I disagree that I am astonished when it happens. Between us—what I am proposing is not a little trip or reporting, but a frantic last attempt to save my life and the integrity of my creative pulse. An image of me is being created which is a humbling, dull, stupid, lazy oaf who must be protected, led, instructed and hospitalized. The play will have been stage managed out of existence.

If there is a seething in this letter—do not mistake it for anger. It is not. I don't know that my way is right but only that it is my way. And if I have had the slightest impact in the world, it has been through my way.

 

Love,
John

Sag Harbor
June 1960

Dear Elizabeth:

Your letter made a very great difference. Many thanks. The thing isn't really Quixotic. It undoubtedly is selfish but there are times for that too. Elaine, with your backing, which in our house amounts to public opinion, was dead set against my going until your letter.

My book is moving rapidly now. It's as though the pressures were removed from it. I don't know whether or not it is good but surely it is moving and moving fast. Such an odd book to be coming from me, or maybe not.

Thanks again for your letter. It made all the difference.

Love,
John

Sag Harbor
June 20, 1960

Dear Pat:

Nearly every one I know feels, whether he or she admits it or not, that neglect in favor of my work is a kind of unfaithfulness. I think you are one of the very few exceptions. I think my work to you is me.

I haven't written because I have been writing. Now there's a sentence that could only be said in English.

Winter progresses, often becoming so much more real than any daily life that I seem only to be awake at my desk.

My truck is ordered for the trip I spoke of about the country. It will come in the middle of August. I plan to leave after Labor Day. I know you approve of the trip and know how necessary it is to me but there are others who find it so Quixotic that I am calling it Operation Windmills and have named my truck Rocinante. But regardless of advice, I shall go. Sure I want to go and am excited about it, but more than that—I have to go. And only I can judge that necessity. I know you understand this. I don't know what I shall find nor feel about what I shall find. For that reason I am making no literary plans in advance to warp what I see. As again in the Sea of Cortez—a trip is a thing in itself and must be kept so.