Steinbeck (84 page)

This is a short Stevenson letter. Please let me know whether or not they could embarrass you or the important work you are doing.

Elaine sends love.

Yours,
John

San Diego
[March 23, 1961]

Dear Elaine and Dear Thom and Dear John:

I don't think you ever heard noises like those that are going on around me. Triphammers going and pounding on the steel hull with sledge hammers and the engines all running, hundreds of them. People rushing about with cables and bits of steel and new electronic equipment. We are supposed to sail at dawn and all this has to be cleared by then, and I don't see how in the world they are going to do it. Sailing is a laugh. We are going to be towed by a navy tug and when we turn across the waves we wallow like you couldn't believe. The crew aboard is as crazy as everything else—geologists, zoologists, petrologists, oceanographers, engineers of any kind you want to imagine, and on top of this the toughest crew of oil riggers you ever saw. They look like murderers and have the delicate movements of ballet dancers, and they had better have, because to lower drill string from a heaving ship takes some doing. I watched them work on the experimental hole and they are quite some men. The lightest slip and they kill someone. I wouldn't think of going on deck without a hard hat on. In fact you feel naked without one. Mine is bright yellow and I am getting so fond of it that I may bring it home to go on the hat rack with the other hats.

I know my typing isn't so good but it is worse right now because the ship has a ten-degree list. They are doing something on the port side and so have flooded the starboard tanks to bring her over, so I am writing up hill and my chair which has wheels on it is sliding downhill.

Boys: I hear really fine reports from the Fayre Elayne about you, and it makes me so very glad and happy and relieved to know that you are taking good care of Elaine about whom I have rather strong feelings as I do about you. It is a very nice feeling and makes me want to go home very much. I don't know when I will make it but I will as soon as possible. But it would be a shame to miss this opportunity to see something entirely new in the world. If I don't get back before you go to Sag I will join you there just the moment I can.

It is almost impossible to write with all this noise going on.

Love to all and I will see you very soon and want to dreadfully.

John

At sea
March 25, 1961

My dearest darling family:

We are at sea now since last night, a heavy swell, towed by a tug and heavy weather on us. We are rolling like an old sow pig. We are about go miles west of San Diego traveling at about 4 knots. It will be twenty-four hours before we are on station where the buoys have already been set up. Finally I have found my place, the gyroscope room just under the bridge. No one ever comes here except occasionally to throw a switch. I've tied my chair to the stationary table legs, else it would slide out from under me. I started the piece for Life and will continue it as we go along, in the form of a log. More immediacy I think in that way.

All over the ship there are signs “Danger High Voltage, Danger Explosives, Danger Gasoline, etc.” So I have made a sign for my door which says—Danger Cerebration Area. It looks very pretty in red.

 

Saturday morning

We've shifted course now and going with wind and wave. We have to put out 12,000 feet of drill string before we even touch bottom. We have to hold a position over the drill hole without anchoring, by sonar and radar; if there is the slightest drift the outboards in the direction of drift speed up and keep it on the spot over the hole. It is a great and new piece of engineering. If you want to know how precise it is, try taking a six foot piece of thread and holding it at the top, then try to thread a needle on the floor. Of course if we should, through engine failure, lose a hole, we could never find it again.

The rest of today and tomorrow morning will be the last of leisure. The moment we are on station we will start the drill string down. And then I'll have to be there day and night.

 

[Sunday]

Darling and darlings:

It is Sunday afternoon and we are still about thirty miles from our station. The wind and the weather have all delayed us. Everybody getting a little nervous and overwrought because we should have been drilling yesterday. We will go on station we hope before dark and will start the drill string down right away.

I want to tell you what I should do. Four holes are contemplated, but I should not have to be here for more than two of them. I will get out by air as soon as I can after the second hole. I will telephone you there as soon as I get to San Diego. I'll stand by for the first jet and will get on it. Then I will telephone you from Idlewild. I wish I could tell you how soon, but I can't. I love you and will hie me home the moment I can, no more to rooooaaaammmm.

love,love,love,
Pappy Poseidon

Sag Harbor
June 26, 1961

Dear Elizabeth:

The reviews of Winter have depressed me very much. They always do, even the favorable ones, but this time they have sunk me particularly. Of course I know the book was vulnerable. And I don't know why this time I feel so bad about them. But I do. Of course I'll climb out of it. Maybe as the future shortens, the optimism decreases. I don't know. I wish I did.

Funny thing. Esther telephoned to tell us further news about Beth. [His sister, Mrs. Ainsworth, had broken her hip.] And she said she was canceling her subscriptions to Time and to Saturday Review. I told her she must not but she said quite firmly that they didn't tell the truth. I haven't read either Time or the SRL so I don't quite know what she is talking about. And I don't think I will read them right yet. I feel too badly about the good ones to rub my nose in the bad ones. It's just been one of those weeks—I'll snap back right away. Just feel a little raw now. And so I suppose I'm taking it out on you. The usual letters are beginning to come in. I can't find the energy to answer them. The whole thing has gone into what feels like very painful pleurisy and is probably as Elaine points out, simply psychological. But, I think I said I would probably snap back in a day or so and be as high as I have been low. A pure manic depressive, I guess.

That's all for now.

Love,
John

Sag Harbor
June 28, 1961

Dear Pat:

I am past the usual crisis of fighting back at the critics, even in my mind. It's just a part of the rather tiresome quadrille. It never changes. One Middle Western reviewer said a little sadly about Winter, “I suppose, as usual, the faults we point out as making this book less than a work of art, will in the future turn out to be the factors of its excellence.” At least there was a man who remembered or reread the earlier criticisms.

Two nights ago, I had a singular experience I want to tell you about. As you must know, I am having great difficulty getting back the rhythm and flow of the Travels piece. Every day I have fought it and with no sense of getting anywhere. This is not a new experience with me and it has a painful ally that comes at night. I lie in bed and in the dark try to work out the difficulty. Then other difficulties enter. The worries about John and Thom and Waverly and Elaine and her mother and her aunt—all matters impossible of solution but in the dark they grow to intensity until the skin of my mind begins to crawl and itch. And all sense of proportion disappears. Then I know there is to be no sleep that night. It is a kind of silent ballet of frustration.

Well, two nights ago I went through this silly process and it continued until just before dawn, when I heard a voice. Now I've heard voices before, have been suddenly called sharply—a common experience. This was not like that. I heard it but it was not as though it spoke aloud, although I could hear the tone and timbre. It was a voice which was kind but at the same time heavy with authority. I remember the words very clearly. The voice said—“What difference does it make? You've worked enough. You have twenty-six published book titles and God knows how many stories and essays. That ought to be enough. What are you struggling for —or against? You don't own the world.” It was just like that. Now I can understand this and its origin and its reason but what followed was one of the most remarkable things that ever happened to me.

When the voice stopped I was flooded with a great smooth sense of ease and rest. I don't think I remember such a feeling of well being. Every muscle in my body stretched and felt good and I went to sleep. My alarm awakened me at 6:30 as usual when I go to work. The words were still with me. I turned off the bell and slept two hours more, and awakened more refreshed than I have in a long time. When I came out to my work room I didn't care whether I worked or not. I felt good all day and that night which was last night and I still do today. These words are true. I have no doubt that they came from my beaten and aging tissue and were delivered as a warning. Because, you see, I have never permitted myself the license of comfort. If work did not come, I had to exert just as much force against the page—perhaps more. And it is true. What am I fighting so hard for or against?

And I don't own the world; but apparently I have permitted it to own me. And the feeling of comfort has persisted. The very feeling—“There is a page—but I don't have to fill it” is comforting. In fact a blank page is a very pretty thing. But I have been straining and leaning under the whips. Let's see what this means. When you whip a horse he leans full strength, maybe more than his full strength, into the collar, not to get ahead but to get away from the stinging of the whip. And I have had not one whip but several. First the whip of duty—this is more like a club or a goad than a whip. Second, the whip of inadequacy. I have always recognized that I did not have great talent but rather relied on the whip to make me over-leap my limitations. And third the whip of flattery. This is as delicate and painful as a limber buggy whip with a striker of sharp knotted string. It is applied to me by the wishes and the desires and even the needs of those around me who by expecting of me more than I am, force me to do better than I can. The only whip I do not think I am subject to is that of ambition. I don't think I have that. Vanity yes, but not ambition.

Is this a long and tiresome essay? It may be but if so you are in the path of it and have no more choice than a man in an intersection, run down by a mad car driver. And knowing you are helpless I shall continue.

In the time I have left and that, by the large law, is not a very great amount of time—it would be a pleasant thing if I came to my work moving toward something rather than trying to escape
from something.
The carrot on the stick rather than the whip on the ass. Perhaps the carrot has no more validity than the whip but it is more pleasant.

I think I've overworked my engine and maybe the voice I heard was telling me so. When the invasion barges started for the beaches during the last war—full of huddled frightened men, the sergeants and officers did not address soldiers saying—“Go forth and fight for glory and immortality!” No, they said, “Hit the surf! Do you want to live forever?”

And it does occur to me that those critics who so belabor me for my inadequacies are trying to force me to want to live forever. And I don't. The voice I heard two nights ago was the more valid critic.

In all of this I hope I have not indicated that I will not face the empty page any more but that I hope I will keep the comfort I have now and that some joy will come back. I really hate publication dates very much. They throw the whole thing out of drawing. Do you know what it reminds me of? It is like a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Let us say it is a perfect game, a tight, precise game, perhaps a no-hitter—and then comes the last out of the last inning and the spectators pour out on the field and convert the preciseness into a meaningless ant hill. And that's exactly what a publication date is to me, crowded with people all getting in the act and milling about like ants, hacking up the turf and spoiling the diamond.

And there you have in this letter a kind of ant hill, if you wish.

yr hble svt.
John

Sag Harbor
[July 1961]

Dear Pat:

Another week and into thick summer. We have the breeze of course but the air is heavy. Summer is far from my favorite time. The village fills up with hot angry people, strangers with all the overbearing shyness of strangers. And the highways crawling with aimless cars. The vacationers don't have much fun if any, or if they do it is by contrast with an even more dull and doleful life. And so I go very seldom off my point of land and spend even more hours than usual in Joyous Garde.