Steinbeck (97 page)

New York
March 2, 1965

Dear John and Glades:

Elaine is coming home tonight hurray! hurray! She is just in time to save my waning life that was dreening away in tears of loneliness.

You know I'm a reasonably self-satisfied and self-sufficient bloke. Don't need much, handy, can take care of myself, cook, sew a little, quite content to read a lot and do my work. And if necessary, which it isn't, I can still lift a fairly accurate left and counter with a neat, tucked-close right hook. And if worse came to worst, I guess I could rumble somebody who would find me tolerable—you know.
My own man.

And then Elaine goes away and all hell comes busting loose like a storm sewer in a cloudburst. I can't find my clothes, or the frying pan. I've forgotten how to light the oven. A light gray film settles over the house, and three-day-old newspapers are on the floor. I don't know who the laundry man is or where we buy meat. Can't find the checkbook and when the stamps are gone that is that.

I'm a guy with lots of friends, good friends. After me all the time to save an evening or a weekend. Then Elaine is gone and I can't think of a soul. Then I scrounge up a girl—nice kid, good company, undemanding—and fun. I look up her number and remember she has been dead for six years. Shot her husband and took pills.

I tell you Elaine being away is the great leveler. When she comes in, in about an hour, I'll have to tell her a bunch of crap just to hold her interest. It's like Gadg Kazan as a kid going to confession and making up sins so as not to waste the priest's time.

But in the two and a half weeks she has been gone I wrote 85 pages of ms.—out of pure despair. And I don't know how it happened but it's pretty good.

Glade's Ark letters have been a joy. [Huston was playing Noah in the film
The Bible
which he was directing in Rome.] How I wish I could have been there. I particularly like the man who sleeps under lions. Probably not as dangerous as dames but warmer. Once when I was little and hustling a circus in Salinas for a free ticket, a lion licked my hand and just about took the skin off. I never forgot.

Now, she has landed and she must be on her way in from Kennedy Airport.

O‘Toole [Peter O'Toole] was here on a publicity pitch but he didn't call and by the time I got around to it, he was on his way to Japan. Making a picture Erin go Bragh Hara-kiri, I guess, or Sayonara Mavourneen. How these Micks do get about.

She must be nearly here now.

I hope to finish this present thing by the brink of summer. Then to Sag Harbor for a big swatch of the Arthurian jamboree and then maybe when the autumn comes we can move on to Daly. Or would one dare try to repeat greatness—ask to be asked for Christmas? That would probably be best in point of time but I have a fist on my heart about trying to repeat.

 

SHE'S HERE!

 

Later—As pooped a Poopsie as I ever saw but it's all right. She's here. Now we can go on living.

Please give my respect to the man who sleeps under lions.

And for yourselves—

the best,
John

New York
March 14, 1965

Dear Joe:

Thank you for the wire reminding me of an ugly event [his sixty-third birthday]. The same to you. Sometimes I do indeed feel like a motherless child.

My grandson, aged eight, [David Farber, Waverly's son] wanted a padlock to safetify his securities which seemed reasonable enough until he asked, “Why is it called a padlock?” “I don't know,” I said. “But we're sure as hell going to find out. Fetch down Volume VII of Oxford's bleeding dictionary.” And the buggers bugged off. They don't know. Pad is a big word and means everything from a highway to a harness to a poultice. But why it's a padlock and has been since before Bede got venerable, O.E.D. just won't even guess. But I will, cuss it. In O.E.-A.S., O.F., O.N. and Old Teut—the pad word means a turtle, of the land or terrapin persuasion. Now, did you ever see any traditional form that looked more like a turtle? But those cautious bastards won't guess.

Life goes on. I am writing a book about “The Americans.” We are a very curious people and as far as I know no one has inspected us as we would inspect some other sub-species. It's most fascinating work—to me—and I hope to have it finished by summer.

My sister Sir Marye died in February and I never got her book written. So I will start it this summer and she will know.

Our new dog came last week—a perfect beauty and a darling—just about a perfect white English bull terrier. I named him Angel, but last night I added a little to his name. He is now Angel Biddle Duke.

The summers do come around very often, don't they? Here's a new one on the way. I would like to go back to Ireland next winter. I liked the west country just fine. Galway and Connemara really exist out of time. On the coast it's rocky poor country. A man has to make a reservation to plant a cabbage in the lee of a stone, but there's more peat—they call it sod or turf—than it needs to keep them warm. And the people are lovely warm people. I feel good there and I should because I guess I'm related to most of them. The west of Ireland is pure Celt, not black like the south. Past and Future have no meaning at all because they're all one, and an old lady is as much your daughter as she is your grandmother.

And you know—I talk too much.

Yours,
John

New York
March 17, 1965

Dear Mr. President:

Always there have been men who had contempt for the “word” although words have survived better than any other man-made things. St. John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” When you have finished using a weapon, someone is dead or injured, but the product of the word can be life and hope and survival. All of the greatness of our species rests on words—Socrates to his judges—the Sermon on the Mount, the introduction to Wyclif's Bible, later taken by Lincoln for the Gettysburg Address. And all of these great and irretrievable words have the bravery of fear and hope in them. There must have been a fierce but hollow feeling in the members of the Continental Congress when the clerk first read the words, “When in the course of human events—.” Lincoln must have dwelt with loneliness when he wrote the order of mobilization.

In our history there have been not more than five or six moments when the word and the determination mapped the course of the future. Such a moment was your speech, Sir, to the Congress two nights ago. Our people will be living by phrases from that speech when all the concrete and steel have long been displaced or destroyed. It was a time of no turning back, and in my mind as well as in many others, you have placed your name among the great ones of history.

And I take great pride in the fact that you are my President.

Yours in admiration,
John Steinbeck

New York
March 31, 1965

Dear Dr. King:

I am answering your letter, which came last night by special delivery, at once.

May I say first I think the events leading up to the march from Selma to Montgomery may well be one of the great and important things in our country's history. It was flawless in its conception and in its execution. Even the accidents which could not have been foreseen, tragic though they were, wove themselves into the pattern of this fabric of the future.

But it is your letter of March 29, concerning the proposed boycott of Alabama, and your request that I sponsor it, that gives me pause. Believe me, Dr. King, if I were convinced that a general boycott would bring Alabama to its senses, I would be behind it with everything I have. However, I think the demand for general boycott is like the demand for unconditional surrender.

I have seen more than I have wanted to of war, from the school yard to combat in Europe, and I know full well that an enemy driven into a corner with no chance to escape, becomes triply dangerous because he has nothing to gain. If he is offered an escape corridor, or the slightest consideration for his pride, he will surrender more readily.

In this morning's Times, you are quoted as having said that you might advocate a selective boycott. Now this makes sense to me. Many white people in the South would come over to our side if they dared. Many others would come over if it were profitable or even non-ruinous to do so. I think that every person against whom a boycott would be dangerous should be allowed to say openly, “I am for you,” or “I am against you.” If the answer is “against”, then I would back the boycott with every bit of influence I could bring to bear. So that is my answer, Sir. I am for a selective boycott but not a blind one.

As for Governor Wallace, he is safe from impeachment in the bosom of a legislature hand-picked and exactly like himself. I have thought, however, and have suggested to friends in the government, that Wallace's statement that he could not keep the peace constitutes an abdication of which the Federal government might well take cognizance. I have further suggested and I suggest to you, that the governors' oath in all states includes the promise to defend and carry out the intention of the Constitution of the United States. In his failure to defend the Constitution and indeed in his defiance of the amendments, it seems to me that he could be considered to be in rebellion against his country. Wallace seems to forget that a war was fought on this issue, a war incidentally which people like himself lost. And I do not think that position is so far-fetched.

Finally in the recent sadness at Selma I think Wallace is as guilty of the brutality and of the murders as if he held the clubs in his own hands or pulled the triggers with his own finger.

That is all now. God bless you and keep you and particularly the cause of your devotion.

your friend,
John Steinbeck

New York
April 23, 1965