Steinbeck (13 page)

When we came over here a month ago, I got to work finally and did three fourths of a book. I thought I was going to slip it through, but dad's decline beat me. This is indeed writing under difficulty. The house in Salinas is pretty haunted now. I see things walking at night that it is not good to see. This last book is a very jolly one about Monterey paisanos. Its tone, I guess, is direct rebellion against all the sorrow of our house. Dad doesn't like characters to swear. But if I had taken all the writing instructions I've been given, I would be insane. I try to write what seems to me true. If it isn't true for other people, then it isn't good art. But I've only my own eyes to see with. I won't use the eyes of other people. And as long as we can eat and write more books, that's really all I require.

We bought a second-hand radio to hear the Fall symphonies and it is a menace, for when dad is over here, he listens to all of the loudest speeches and that kills work. You know I should be writing a cheerful letter if you aren't feeling well. Instead I write a list of complaints.

Don't think there is any courage in my work. If you demand little from life you limit its ability to strike at you and you can say what you wish about it.

I do hope you feel better now.

love
John

[Pacific Grove]
February 25, 1934

Dear George:

You remember that when you were up here we asked for a sign and the [ouija] board said that it would come to me on the day of my mother's funeral. There was no sign except this one, if you can call it a sign. I asked you to pick a day for an attempted communication and without any knowledge you picked the day of my mother's funeral. I tried to get through to you. I tried to tell you that she had died and that she had been buried that day and that I had been forced to be a pall bearer. I did it by making the words in yellow on a black background. In the middle of the crying, I stopped and wondered whether it was getting through and instantly the black ground was full of yes's of all sizes. I wondered whether anything did get through. I was pretty much stunned by the terrors of the day and probably didn't have much force left but I tried with what I did have. Also I tried to tell Miss Otis that I had just sent her a new story that Carol likes immensely.

I think you got out of the murder story about what I wanted you to. You got no character. I didn't want any there. You got color and a dream like movement. I was writing it more as a dream than as anything else, so if you got this vague and curiously moving feeling out of it that is all I ask. I shall be interested to know what you think of the story, The Chrysanthemums. (This and “The Murder” became part of
The Long Valley
.] It is entirely different and is designed to strike without the reader's knowledge. I mean he reads it casually and after it is finished feels that something profound has happened to him although he does not know what nor how. It has had that effect on several people here. Carol thinks it is the best of all my stories. I'll have some more before long.

Just now my father is with us. Every nerve I have is demanding that I be alone for a little while even for a day to make adjustments, but that has been impossible so far. Maybe later in the week it can be done. I have to figure some things out. I don't even know what they are yet. I do think I'll go on with short stories for a little while though until I get my adjustments made. I wish Carol could go off for a little rest. She has taken it on the chin throughout. I can't use my freedom yet because I can't conceive it yet. The other has grown to be a habit.

We are going to Laguna with Ed Ricketts next month. He has to get some live octopuses and send by plane to New York, and we are going to make Laguna our base for catching the things. It will be a nice change. We won't be there much over a week I guess. We have enough money to live two more months so I will have to get busy and make some more I guess. I have thirty pounds coming from England if I ever get it. That will allow some more months but the money to go any place has not showed up nor will it unless I should be lucky enough to sell some short stories. I have kind of yearnings for Alaska but I don't know. Trying to stave off reaction until maybe there won't be any. Carol's book of poems is getting popular and she is swamped with demands for copies. Ballou asked to see them, she sent him a copy as a Christmas present and never heard a word from him even that he had got them. Which was thoughtless of him because it is work to get one of the copies out. She will make a copy for Anne pretty soon. I think they are swell. I guess that is all. It's all I can think of anyway.

love
john

 

Jesus I wish you two were out here and we could go camping. That's what I need. The grass is green and all the flowers are out and I'll just have to get out in the country for a little.

bye.

[Pacific Grove]
[1934]

Dear George:

I think I am in a kind of mood to write you a letter. I got yours a little while ago. I have been writing on my new ms. which I will tell you about later, for a good many hours and I think a change will do me good.

You ask what I want? You know pretty well that I don't think of myself as an individual who wants very much. That is why I am not a good nor consecutive seducer. I have the energy and when I think of it, the desires, but I can't reduce myself to a unit from which the necessary formula emanates. I'm going to try to put this down once for all. I like good food and good clothes but faced with getting them, I can't round myself into a procuring unit. Overalls and carrots do not make me unhappy. But the thing which probably more than anything else makes me what I am is an imperviousness to ridicule. This may be simply dullness and stupidity. I notice in lots of other people that ridicule or a threat of it is a driving force which maps their line of life. And I haven't that stimulus. In fact as an organism I am so simple that I want to be comfortable and comfort consists in—a place to sleep, dry and fairly soft, lack of hunger, almost any kind of food, occasional loss of semen in intercourse when it becomes troublesome, and a good deal of work. These constitute my ends. You see it is a description of a stupid slothful animal. I am afraid that is what I am. I don't want to possess anything, nor to be anything. I have no ambition because on inspection the ends of ambition achieved seem tiresome.

Two things I really want and I can't have either of them and they are both negative. I want to forget my mother lying for a year with a frightful question in her eyes and I want to forget and lose the pain in my heart that is my father. In one year he has become a fumbling, repetitious, senile old man, unhappy almost to the point of tears. But these wants are the desire to restore the lack of ego. They are the only two things which make me conscious of myself as a unit. Except for them I spread out over landscape and people like an enormous jelly fish, having neither personality nor boundaries. That is as I wish it, complete destruction of any thing which can be called a me. The work is necessary since from it springs all the other things. A lack of work for a while and the gases concentrate and become solids and out of the solids a me comes into being and I am uncomfortable when there is a me. Having no great wants, I have neither great love nor great hate, neither sense of justice nor of cruelty. It gives me a certain displeasure to hurt or kill things. But that is all. I have no morals. You have thought I had but it was because immorality seemed foolish and often bad economy. If I objected to accounts of sexual exploits it wasn't because of the exploits but because of the cause of the accounts.

The reason we want to go away is primarily so that the two things I want may have a chance to be removed. That may be impossible. But forced and common visits to a grave yard are not conductive of such forgetfulness.

You are right when you think I am not unhappy in this new arrangement. I never come up to the surface. I just work all the time. In the matter of money, my conception doesn't extend beyond two or three hundred dollars. I love Carol but she is far more real to me than I am to myself. If I think of myself I often find it is Carol I am thinking of. If I think what I want I often have to ask her what it is. Sometimes I wish I had sharply defined desires for material things, because the struggle to get them might be very satisfying. If one should want to think of me as a person, I am under the belief that he would have to think of Carol.

I am writing many stories now. Because I should like to sell some of them, I am making my characters as nearly as I can in the likeness of men. The stream underneath and the meanings I am interested in can be ignored.

Between ourselves I don't know what Miss McIntosh means by organization of myself. If she would inspect my work with care, she would see an organization that would frighten her, the slow development of thought pattern, revolutionary to the present one. I am afraid that no advice will change me much because my drive is not one I can get at. When they get tired of my consistent financial failures, they will just have to kick me out. I'm a bum, you see, and according to my sister, a fake, and my family is ashamed of me, and it doesn't seem to make any difference at all. If I had the drive of ridicule I might make something of myself.

This is probably a terrible sounding letter. It isn't meant so. I am working so hard and so constantly that I am really quite happy. I don't take life as hard as you do. Some very bitter thing dried up in me last year.

And now I want to do one more page today before I sit down and look at the fire. The trouble is that I look at the fire and then get up and go to work again. I get around that by taking down the table and putting my manuscript book under the lower shelf of the book case where I must get a stick to get it out. Usually I am too lazy to get the stick.

I hope this letter does not depress you. It is common that anything which is not optimistic is pessimistic. I am pegged as a pessimistic writer because I do not see the millenium coming.

that's all
[unsigned]

[Pacific Grove]
June 4, 1934

Dear Mrs. Wagner:

Your letter came this morning. I didn't know you had done a version of the story and I sent mine off with a lot of other stuff. I will do whatever you wish about the affair, divide in case of publication or recall the manuscript. Please let me know.

Carol is in Salinas working for my father and I am over here trying to write myself out of a hole.

I'm terribly sorry if I have filched one of your stories. I'm a shameless magpie anyway, picking up anything shiny that comes my way—incident, situation or personality. But if I had had any idea, I shouldn't have taken it. I'll do anything you like about it.

Thank you for your letter. I get so few. I write so few.

John

[Pacific Grove]
June 13 [1934]

Dear Mrs. Wagner:

I am writing to my agents today, asking them to hold up the story. It is awkward for this reason—they've had the story for at least two weeks and since they are very active, it has undoubtedly gone out. However, it can be stopped. I hope you will let me know how yours comes out, as soon as you hear. If it should happen to have been bought by the time my letter reaches New York, it can be held up. Mine, I mean.

Pacific Grove summer has set in, fog most of the day. The people who come over from the Valley love it, but I wish the sun would shine.

Well, I hope nothing untoward happens about this story. In sending it away I enclosed a note saying it had been told me by you. Plagiarism is not one of my sins. I'll write you when I hear any outcome.

Affectionately,
John

Pacific Grove
1934

Dear Miss McIntosh:

I want to write something about Tortilla Flat and about some ideas I have about it. The book has a very definite theme. I thought it was clear enough. I have expected that the plan of the Arthurian cycle would be recognized, that my Gawaine and my Launcelot, my Arthur and Galahad would be recognized. Even the incident of the Sangreal in the search of the forest is not clear enough I guess. The form is that of the Malory version, the coming of Arthur and the mystic quality of owning a house, the forming of the round table, the adventure of the knights and finally, the mystic translation of Danny.

 

However, I seem not to have made any of this clear. The main issue was to present a little known and, to me, delightful people. Is not this cycle story or theme enough? Perhaps it is not enough because I have not made it clear enough. What do you think of putting in an interlocutor, who between each incident interprets the incident, morally, esthetically, historically, but in the manner of the paisanos themselves? This would give the book much of the appeal of the Gesta Romanorum, those outrageous tales with monkish morals appended, or of the Song of Solomon in the King James version, with the delightful chapter headings which go to prove that the Shulamite is in reality Christ's Church.