Steinbeck (91 page)

Now—the other thing—the Nobel loot. I hadn't thought of it as a commission. We started this thing together and we're going to finish it that way. If along the way you had limited yourself to being an agent, you would not have done the hundreds of things you have done. You have shared the bad times with me and they have been long and many, and if you could do that you are damned well going to share the good ones. You are as responsible for this prize as I am. So, let us not argue and be concerned. Not only do you share in the honor but in the money. Let us not discuss it any more. That's the way it's going to be.

Love to you,
John

New York
November 28, 1962

Dear Dook:

I would like to talk to you about the nature of the award. In some way it has gathered to itself a mystique and I don't know how. What it is is a money prize awarded geographically and sometimes politically. The Swedish Academy of 17 members lay the finger on and presto—everything is changed. I think I've talked to you about this before.

I've always been afraid of it because of what it does to people. For one thing I don't remember anyone doing any work after getting it save maybe Shaw. This last book of Faulkner's was written long ago. Hemingway went into a kind of hysterical haze. Red Lewis just collapsed into alcoholism and angers. It has in effect amounted to an epitaph. Maybe I'm being over-optimistic but I wouldn't have accepted it if I hadn't thought I could beat the rap. I have more work to do and I intend to do it.

 

A couple of days fell in on me so that I come back to this letter with a sense of relief. I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times. I, being a foreigner in Sweden, tried to make it suave and diplomatic and it was a bunch of crap. Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don't know whether or not it's good but at least it's me. I even put some of it in the vernacular. Hell, that's the way I write. Now they can take it or leave it. Only I hope I get the money first. They might have second thoughts after hearing my vocal efforts. I have one advantage. I mumble, so no one is likely to hear it. But it says what I want it to at last.

I can see interruptions coming. So I'd better put this away for a while. It's nice to come back to.

 

Next day—This letter goes on forever. Now to get back to the speech here enclosed. Elaine says I must set it. That's theatre for freeze it. But I'm not theatre and I know I will be picking at it. But it says what I want to say and in as few words as I can make it. It may sound highflown but I think the time and the place require that. I don't know whether or not it is good but it's as good as I can make it. Please don't let anyone see it before I make it on Dec. 10. It would please me to know whether or not it comes over to you but not before I do it. I have to have confidence in it or I couldn't say it.

Hearing from you and writing to you have given me a good sense of rest and continuity.

love
John

New York
December 22, 1962

Dear Bo and Greta:

We arrived home completely pooped and haven't really begun to look around as yet. Then will come weeks of thank you letters but right now the only one I want to get off is to you two. It was a great and fabulous time. We have yet to sort it out. There was a kind of glow hanging over the whole scene. A never to be repeated experience. The thing is so exquisitely managed and paced that it slips in and out of reality.

Of course we thank you first for doing so much, but then you were basically a part of it. Toward the end, my memory is not too strong. Things got wavery. I remember some things with great clarity, particularly that weeping day at Upsala [at the grave of Dag Hammarskjöld] with the dark and dripping trees and the damp stone with wilted roses on it. Have you ever been to Shakespeare's grave in the church near Stratford? I have many times and always there has been some flower put there. That's nice I think.

Now is coming the time for recovery. As soon as Christmas is over and the boys back in school, I am going to withdraw completely into work to prove to myself that this need not be an epitaph. It is a contract I have made with myself.

Meanwhile, a good Christmas to you and again our thanks for everything.

Yours always,
John

New York
December 31, 1962

Dear Howard, and Vakra Fru,

Stockholm was a curious medieval dream. It moved rather majestically along but there was so much that had to be done that a kind of exhaustion settled down and acted as a poultice. I guess it's not like anything else. One thing is interesting. I think I told you I was not afraid of kings but academies scared me. What I had forgotten was that far from being hostile, this academy was for me. After all, it chose me. There was great warmth—almost a kind of affection. I wouldn't have missed it but I wouldn't do it again even if that were possible.

As for the speech—It occurred to me to take my own advice which I put in Fauna's mouth for Suzy in Sweet Thursday—to do everything very slowly. I tried it and it works. Cut everything to half time and you don't panic or knock over things. When it came time to speak, I was so stunned with color and sound and people that I went into slow motion and it worked fine. Elaine easily stole the show. She enjoyed it all so much that everyone around her had a better time. When the master of protocol at the royal dinner planted his ivory staff in front of her and said—“Madame, you will advance to the King, curtsey, take his arm and lead in to dinner,” it is my sworn story that she said, “Yippee, I sure will, honey.” She swears she didn't say anything of the kind. But it is true that before the first course was over, she was trading recipes and gardening secrets with the King. I had the Queen for my dinner partner. She is Mountbatten's sister, with a quick and knife-like wit. I told her the poem I wrote when Elizabeth II recently fixed the name Mountbatten by choice instead of Battenburg. I transposed a little for my English publishers: “When Adam toiled and Eve span, who was then the Mountbattàn?” She laughed and said she would see that it got to ER II immediately. “But,” she said, “She won't understand it. Completely illiterate, you know.”

We got home to the kids and their girls. The boys are in most wonderful shape. Never have they been so thoughtful and such good company.

Anyway, I'll stick in a copy of the speech and let this go as it is.

Love to your sweet lady—

John

New York
January 14, 1963

Dear Dook:

I forget how much or when I have written you. I think that is because I have had so many conversations with you in my head. Does that ever happen to you? The last two months have been full of fog. If I had to pick out what was real and what imagined I should be hard put to know except that little was imagined—there wasn't time for fancies. And if I had needed a lesson in the Vanities, I would have had it ready available.

Oh! the prize is real and the people who awarded it are real. It's the side issues that are hysterically unsubstantial. The mythos is very near the surface and it seems to be unchangeable. When one becomes entangled in a myth, there is no saving one's self. Just go along with it because you can't beat it. It's bigger and older and stronger than you are or one is. The only safe thing, it seems to me, is to be sure that you yourself are not caught up in it. In Hollywood they used to call it believing your own publicity.

Let me give you an example of the perfect myth. In Salinas a neighbor of ours was Joe _. He was partners in a wine and spirits business and I've known him all my life. And he knew my family all of his life. When I was in Salinas a couple of years ago I saw Joe on the street and he was an old, old man. We got to talking and he said, “I remember seeing you as a little boy, coming up Central Avenue one cold frosty morning. I remember well, you were blue with cold and your coat was pinned over your chest with horse blanket pins.” I said, “Joe, that can't be true. My mother was a button fiend. She equated off buttons with sin. She'd have walloped me if I ever used a pin.” “Yes, sir,” Joe said. “Blue with cold and I can still see those horse blanket pins.”

I knew I was licked. Joe knew we weren't poor and that I wasn't a waif but the rags to riches myth was so strong that he couldn't resist it. God knows I've told lots of lies but I never told that one. It was a story that was true in his mind. Every once in a while I come on one like that only I know now that no amount of denying will make a bit of difference. When the myth is needed, the myth will be used.

I've been reading and studying and thinking on the Arthurian myth for a long time. I've never been a good scholar. Too impatient, perhaps, and not careful enough, but in this field I have been better. I've taken many years to learn the field and I have had the very best scholars as godfathers, the really great men in the field.

I believe you completely when you say you never wanted
things
or not enough to do the things required to get them. I've always thought of you as one of the truly contented people I've known for this and for other reasons. You have been calm while I have been jittery and flighty and changeable, and restless, mostly restless. Weren't you ever restless? I still am. It hasn't changed a bit. The wander comes over me and it's hard to hold still. The next peak is the best.

I really tried to go back to Pacific Grove to live after my breakup with my second wife. I stayed nearly a year or maybe more than a year. But it wasn't any good. I didn't belong there. I guess it was there or maybe not very long afterwards that I discovered what I should have known long before, that I don't belong anywhere.

I lived 10 months in Somerset near Glastonbury and felt more at home there than I ever have anywhere. There was something there that I understood and that tolerated me. I loved that place and when my boys are out of what we call education I may well go back there to finish up. When, sitting here in New York, I think of Somerset, my stomach turns over with a curious kind of longing. It's beautiful country, of course, but there's something else that draws me.

Let me tell you one little tale. Some men from the British Museum were digging in the foundations of Glastonbury Abbey trying to establish the outline of the church which burned down in the 14th century. I can't stay out of a hole in the ground so I was in with them with palette knife and whiskbroom. Those men are really fine scholars. One morning we came on a fine stone coffin, of granite and unmarked. “Well, there he is,” they said. “Thought maybe to find him.” “Who is he,” I asked. “The Duke of Somerset.” “How do you know?” “We'll know when we open.” “Let's open!” “No hurry!” they said. “Maybe tomorrow. We're for a foundation not a duke.” “How will you know?” “Why, by the body. If his skull is on his chest, that's the one. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered, you see.” Next day we opened and there was the skull on the chest and the limbs had been chopped apart and then reassembled.

In digging we turned up a great many bones and always we put them back where we found them and when we had established the foundation and written it carefully down, we covered the whole thing in again and reset the sod because a body still has the right to be respected. Those were not peasants. They were scholars. But the people who live there have a great knowledge too or call it a feeling because it is a relationship rather than a set of facts.

Now let me ask some questions. Do you still see Carl Wilhelmson? And has he an address? The same for people like Grove Day and Vernon Given and any of the others. They have disappeared from me completely. Every once in a while they all come back to me and I see them but they must be greatly changed as I am—in appearance anyway. It's a strange thing, the past.

I want to write a small rude book and right away to get the taste of prizes out of my mouth. I'm about ready to start it. Maybe I can next week. It is for my own enjoyment. I've probably bored you to death in this letter, but I wanted to have a wandering talk with you. It feels good.

Yours
John

1963
Made Cultural Exchange trip behind the Iron Curtain.

New York
January 16, 1963

Dear Harald:

It was a purple time, I think you will agree. Now I will have to go quickly to work to get the heady taste of it out of my mouth. I was awfully glad that you were there. It wouldn't have been the same if you had not been.

Now at home and we are shortly selling this house, and moving into a very high apartment in a new building that is going up near here. This four-storey house has just too many stairs for us. We will be up thirty-four floors in the new apartment and will have a look out at all of Manhattan. I hope you will come and see it. It is most spectacular.