Working Days (18 page)

 

 

157-158

Monday again but because of the nearness of the ending of this book a day of excitement and the reserve was taken up also. Interesting to see if it really is a second wind. I think so. Need the energy now because there has been a great drain of energy and emotion into this book. Pat due in S.F. some time this week. Letter from Pare talking about the picture [Ed.—
In Dubious Battle].
I really think we’ll work on it when I get through. Letter from Louis.
^*
He likes part of the manuscript. And doesn’t like part. Must judge his criticism coldly as valid, but only as one man’s criticism. It is very valuable. I’ve been so tied up that I

don’t know. And I don’t want to know until I am finished. That is going to be difficult to get it in second draft. And I think I shall have to do another draft without fail—not Carol though. She will have done enough. I’ll get a regular stenographer to do it. Probably can get one with ease. But I am sure it must be done. I think I will have to make many changes if only just of tone and word. Sorry, but I could hardly be expected to whip out finished copy. It’ll work out some way. Kind of dull feeling up around the eyes. Clinical I guess. I’ve had a fine rest this week end. And am all ready to go, and there is no time like right now [Ed.—final section of Chapter 28].

 

 

159

Today a single page—the general of the rain, and the last general [Ed.—Chapter 29]. And then one more very long chapter to finish. I expect Pat to call today but he hasn’t so far. The month is flying away. Never saw time go so quickly as this spring and summer and yet the daily time has not been so quick. Not quick at all. I’ll be glad to see Pat. I only hope he is not embarrassed or anything. I should be hurrying to work in case he calls. But I don’t want to hurry this. My nerves are very shaky. Little sleep these nights. But I’m going to finish, by God. I’m sure going to finish and whether it is any good or not it will be done. I wonder how I’ll feel then? Good I hope. And then the whole weight of every one who wants me to do things will fall on me. Well—that’s what I must watch out for. I have the energy to work but I’m not going to be rushed.

160-161

Wednesday today and I am a little early in starting. Play opened last Thursday in Pittsburgh. Haven’t heard how well. May hear later. Wally and Brod are not in it. Then—Pat is in S.F., but very busy. We’ll go up Friday to get him. Another note from Rodman. Still wanting material. I think I’ll tell Pat to let him look over the manuscript and maybe take a general chapter.* I don’t know. McWilliams* wires me to come to meeting in L.A. Request to serve on the board of Dramatists’ Guild. Here are [indecipherable] just for the [indecipherable]. I’m not too hot for work today. Strong reluctance to finish I think. Can’t give myself the allowance of laziness just now. When it is done I can—but not until then. My mind doesn’t want to work—hates to work in fact, but I’ll make it. I’m on my very last chapter now. The very last. It may be fifteen pages long but I can’t help that. It may be twenty. The rain—the birth—the nood—and the barn. The starving man and the last scene that has been ready so long. I don’t know. I only hope it is some good. I have very grave doubts sometimes. I don’t want this to seem hurried. It must be just as slow and measured as the rest but I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do. Now to work on it.

162

A late start. After last night it is no wonder. My nerves blew out like a fuse and today I feel weak and powerless. I wish it hadn’t happened until I was through. Guess I better not press my luck. Just write today until I am tired and not force it. Got to if I don’t want to collapse. About three or four more days and it will be done. Funny to think in such terms. Seems impossible that it should be so near. Maybe it shouldn’t be. I hope the close isn’t controlled by my weariness. I wouldn’t like that. But I think this is really a good tiredness. “Tom! Tom! Tom!” I know. It wasn’t him. Yes, I think I can go on now. In fact, I feel stronger. Much stronger. Funny where the energy comes from. Now to work only now it isn’t work any more.

 

 

Monday again and I think it is my last week. I’m almost dead from lack of sleep. Can’t go to sleep. I don’t know why. Just plan for the ending. Pat was here for the week end. He read the first part—400 pages. He is very volatile. Likes it very much, he said. I hope he doesn’t over sell
^*
it. Too many superlatives can spoil its chances. I hope he lays low and lets people find out about it if they will. Well any way, that’s the story. Saturday and Sunday went out to the ranch. Set a lot of gopher traps. Caught four and have ten traps out now. Can gradually work them out if I keep after them. Word from Pittsburgh that M & M is playing to crowded houses. Hope it gets a little run. It could pay for the whole damned ranch if it wanted to. And also it could pay Viking out on the contract. Well enough of that. My stomach is shot to pieces with tiredness. If I could only get some sleep I’d be all right. Twelve hours I’d like. Carol is back at typing. Poor kid, but there is to be no final draft, thank goodness. Well, I might as well get to the work. No one is going to do it for me.

 

 

163-164

I don’t know whether it was just plain terror of the ending or not. My stomach went to pieces yesterday. May have been nerves. I lay down and slept all afternoon. Went to bed at 10:30 and slept all night. May be some kind of release. At any rate, I feel rested today and that is something. Don’t know how many pages or days to finish. Probably three days. Must get into it today. Beautiful weather. Carol ruined her hand typing yesterday. Can’t work today. I must get through so I can take all the house work. Nice weather for the finish, but I almost wish it would rain. No letters this morning. I have nothing to bother me so there is no reason at all for not continuing. And I think I have every single move mapped out for the ending. I only hope it is good. It simply has to be. Well, there it is, all of it in my mind. And I hesitate to get to it. Maybe I’m afraid I can’t do it. But then I was afraid I couldn’t do any of it. And just day by day I did it. So that is the way to finish it. Forget that it is the finish and just set down the day by day work. And now finally I must get to it.

[165]

Today should be a day of joy because I could finish today—just the walk to the barn, the new people and the ending and that’s all. But I seem to have contracted an influenza of the stomach or something. Anyway I am so dizzy I can hardly see the page. This makes it difficult to work. On the other hand, it might get worse. I might be in for a siege. Can’t afford to take that chance. I must go on. If I can finish today I don’t much care what happens afterwards. Wish—if it was inevitable, that it could have held off one more day. My fault really for having muffed on Monday oddly enough. I feel better—sitting here. I wish I were done. Best way is just to get down to the lines. I wonder if this flu could be simple and complete exhaustion. I don’t know. But I do know that I’ll have to start at it now and, of course, anything I do will be that much nearer the end.

Finished this day—and I hope to God it’s good.

(1939-1941)

... I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel ... as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new thing which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking. Anyway, there is a picture of my confusion. How’s yours?

—Steinbeck, in a letter of November 13, 1939, to Carlton Sheffield. (In Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 194)

In March 1939, when John Steinbeck received copies from one of three advanced printings of
The Grapes of Wrath,
he was “immensely pleased with them,” he told his editor, Pascal Covici, at The Viking Press (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 182). Besides achieving a memorable aesthetic and physical appearance, the result of its imposing size (619 pages long) and captivating Elmer Hader dust jacket illustration, which pictures the Joads “silent and awestruck” by their first view of a lush California valley near Tehachapi (Chapter 18), the novel also became an unprecedented commercial success. Following its official publication date on April 14, 1939,
The Grapes
of Wrath remained atop the best-seller lists for most of the year, selling roughly 428,900 copies in hard cover at $2.75 apiece. (In 1941, when The Sun Dial Press issued a hard-back reprint selling for $1.00, the publisher announced that over 543,000 copies of Steinbeck’s novel had already been sold.)

The steady, unrelenting sale of the novel brought fame, notoriety, and financial success to the Steinbecks which exceeded their wildest dreams. “I don’t think I ever saw so much [money] in one place before,” Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis. By October 1939, however, the dream had turned to “a nightmare,” as Steinbeck confessed to his agent (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
pp. 182, 189). In addition to requests from strangers for money, there were invitations from club program chairmen and civic busybodies to speak publicly, which Steinbeck flatly refused: “Why do they think a writer, just because he can write, will make a good after-dinner speaker, or club committeeman, or even a public speaker? I’m no public speaker and I don’t want to be. I’m not even a finished writer yet, I haven’t learned my craft,” he admonished an Associated Press interviewer in July 1939. More wrenching than that, however, there was constant vilification from the corporate agriculture industry (an August 26, 1939, United Press wire story stated that “The Associated Farmers of California, through its executive council ... would do everything possible to tell the public that ... ‘Grapes of Wrath’ ... cannot be accepted as fact”), and vicious rumors and threats of reprisal circulated by large land-owners and banks (“The latest is a rumor ... that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them,” Steinbeck informed Carlton Sheffield on July 20, 1939). The “rolling might of this damned thing,” the unhealthy “hysteria” of the novel’s reception (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 188), all took their toll on Steinbeck, who became increasingly depressed and withdrawn.

As a result, the final segment of Steinbeck’s journal has a very private, allusive air. It was written sporadically during a period of such chaotic emotional upheaval in his life that it sometimes reads like the notes for an unfinished romantic drama—full of turbulence, brooding signs and portents, but very little resolution. The entries vary in length, frequency, and details, Steinbeck’s pace is less frantic than in the previous section, and his jottings are often more associative and deep-diving than those he made earlier. The motif of self-doubt is still prominent, but is compounded by guilt and tempered by foreshadowing, as though he were hovering on the brink of some enormous “catastrophe” (Entry #101). While the
Grapes of Wrath
section was informed by a terrible immediacy, an obsessive urgency, this section is colored by intimations of paranoia and dark fatality, all the more ominous because never fully articulated.

In fact, Steinbeck writes here as though Carol were looking over his shoulder and might at any moment discover the secret of his love affair with a twenty-year-old singer named Gwyndolyn Conger (“the other,” Steinbeck cryptically calls her). His attachment to the aspiring showgirl (she was working in the chorus line at CBS studios, and in an Irene Dunne movie,
Theodora Goes Wild)
had escalated since their first meeting (instigated by “M,” his childhood friend, Max Wagner) in Hollywood in June 1939. Steinbeck, physically ill, crippled by sciatica, and severely depressed, was “hiding out” from publicity at the Aloha Arms Apartments off Sunset Boulevard. Like “a half-assed Florence Nightingale,” Gwyn brought him chicken soup and “sat talking with him the whole night through.” Steinbeck hated chicken noodle soup, but he loved her talk and tender ministrations. “What happened between us that night was pure chemistry,” Gwyn later recalled in her autobiography (Halladay, ed., “ ‘The Closest Witness,’ ” p. 36). Although their relationship proceeded slowly—now off, now on—Steinbeck was deeply hooked. Gwyn “is all woman, every bit woman,” he crowed to Mavis McIntosh.

Steinbeck began these twenty-three irregular entries one year after completing his novel, while he and Carol were living at the Biddle ranch. They continue until late January 1941, when Steinbeck, on the lam in Pacific Grove with Gwyn, but getting the “horrors” regularly over Carol’s unhappiness, summarily ended his reflections during the third day of writing
Sea of Cortez
with these words: “I think I’ll leave this book now” (Entry #123). The distance between Los Gatos and Pacific Grove was only about sixty miles, but it might as well have been a thousand, because it was the difference—in Steinbeck’s tortured view—between a settled existence of domestic attachment and financial security on the one hand, and an exciting life of uncertain future but passionate feeling on the other. (See Entries #120 and 121.) It is an old story, but one the morally conservative Steinbeck had never acted in before; as the following entries suggest, he vacillated miserably, his head in one place, his heart in another.