Steinbeck (24 page)

I hope to be home for about five weeks now but I doubt it. I brought [Eugene] Solow and [Lewis] Milestone [author of screenplay and director of film of
Of Mice and Men
] home with me and we are working on a final script of
Mice
and it sounds very good to me.

About the Digest thing, I really would be happier if it weren't done [an abridgement of
The Grapes of Wrath
]
.
I don't like digests. If I could have written it shorter I would have, and even a chunk wouldn't be good particularly since Pat refused to give material to anybody else but S.R.L. [
Saturday Review of Literature
] and thereby made a hell of a lot of people mad at me.

I saw Johnson in Hollywood [Nunnally Johnson, who was writing the film script of
The Grapes of Wrath
] and he is going well and apparently they intend to make the picture straight, at least so far, and they sent a producer into the field with Tom Collins and he got sick at what he saw and they offered Tom a job as technical assistant which is swell because he'll howl his head off if they get out of hand.

See you all soon, I hope.

Love,
John

Los Gatos
June 23, 1939

Dear Juk:

I got home three days ago for a little while and found about five hundred letters that had to be answered. So I have been answering them as quickly as possible and have saved yours until last so that I could give some leisure to it, and leisure is a thing I have almost lost track of. Funny darned thing because I have such a fine flair for laziness. The heat is on me now and really going strong. Remember when I used to like to get mail so much that I even tried to get on sucker lists? Well, I wish them days was back.

Carl Wilhelmson phoned that he wanted to come down Sunday. I'll be glad to see him. He is very changed. Quite gay and looks fine and has filled out. Marriage has been good for him. Haven't seen anybody else. Toby Street had a fortieth birthday party and I went to it and saw Bob Cathcart there.

Yes, the Associated Farmers have tried to make me retract things by very sly methods. Unfortunately for them the things are thoroughly documented and the materials turned over to the La Follette Committee and when it was killed by pressure groups all evidence went to the Attorney General. So when they write and ask for proof, I simply ask them to ask the Senate to hold open hearings of the Civil Liberty Committee and they will get immediate documentary proof of my statements although some of them may go to jail as a result of it. And you have no idea how quickly that stops the argument. They can't shoot me now because it would be too obvious and because I have placed certain informations in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover in case I take a nose dive. So I think I am personally safe enough except for automobile accidents etc. and rape and stuff like that so I am a little careful not to go anywhere alone nor to do anything without witnesses. Seems silly but I have been carefully instructed by people who know the ropes.

 

So they have gone to the whispering campain (how in hell do you spell that) but unfortunately that method only sells more books. I'm due to topple within the next two years but I have that little time left to me. And in many ways I'll be glad when the turn of the thing comes. As it must inevitably.

Hope it isn't too hot up there.

love
jon

Los Gatos
July 20, 1939
Thursday

Dear Elizabeth:

Will you tell Pat please, that if I ever refer anything to him by a second person I want him to refuse it. If I want it I'll ask him myself.

The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. This made all the papers. Tom Collins says that when his Okies read this smear they were so mad they wanted to burn something down.

I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand—I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy.

About the pictures—I don't know. [Nunnally] Johnson wrote that he was nearly finished with script. The Hays office will be the tough nut since it is owned outright in N. Y. But the forces that want the picture made are rallying and they are both numerous and voluble. Meanwhile the Associated Farmers keep up a steady stream of accusation that I am first a liar and second a communist. Their vilification has a quality of hysteria too.

I shudder for you in the heat. I detest the New York heat.

Love to you all,

John

Los Gatos
October 1939

Dear Elizabeth:

It's a beautiful morning and I am just sitting in it and enjoying it. Everything is ripe now, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts. Carol has made pickles and chutney, canned tomatoes. Prunes and raisins are on the drying trays. The cellar smells of apples and wine. The berries are ripe and every bird in the country is here—slightly tipsy and very noisy. The frogs are singing about a rain coming but they can be wrong. It's nice.

Pat is in S.F. We'll go up and get him on Friday and bring him down here. Will also see the Jacksons—first time in months.

Carol is well and rested. And Grapes dropped from the head of the list to second place out here and about time too. It is far too far when Jack Benny mentions it in his program. Altogether may be some kind of new existence is opening up. I don't know. The last year has been a nightmare all in all. But now I'm ordering a lot of books to begin study. And I'll work in the laboratory.

I should go out and shoot some bluejays. They are driving the birds badly. Mean things they are who just raise hell apparently with nothing but mischief in their minds. But I'll wait until Carol wakes up before I start shooting.

One nice thing to think of is the speed of obscurity. Grapes is not first now. In a month it will be off the list and in six months I'll be forgotten.

Love,
John

1939
Film of
Of Mice and Men
released.

 

1940
Film of
The Grapes of Wrath
released. Awarded Pulitzer Prize for the novel.

 

1941
The Forgotten
Village and
Sea of Cortez
published. Separated from Carol Steinbeck and moved to New York.

 

1942
The Moon Is Down,
novel published, play produced.
Bombs Away
published. Divorced from Carol Steinbeck.

 

1943
Married Gwyndolyn Conger.

Los Gatos
November 13, 1939

Dear Dook:

It's pretty early in the morning. I got up to milk the cow.

I'm finishing off a complete revolution. It's amazing how every one piled in to regiment me, to make a symbol of me, to regulate my life and work. I've just tossed the whole thing overboard. I never let anyone interfere before and I can't see why I should now. This ultimate freedom receded. I'm keeping more of it than I need or even want, like a reservoir. The two most important [things], I suppose—at least they seem so to me—are freedom from respectability and most important —freedom from the necessity of being consistent. Lack of those two can really tie you down. Of course all this publicity has been bad if I tried to move about but here on the ranch it has no emphasis. People up here—the few we see—don't read much and don't remember what they read, and my projected work is not likely to create any hysteria.

It's funny, Dook. I know what in a vague way this work is about. I mean I know its tone and texture and to an extent its field and I find that I have no education. I have to go back to school in a way. I'm completely without mathematics and I have to learn something about abstract mathematics. I have some biology but must have much more and the twins biophysics and bio-chemistry are closed to me. So I have to go back and start over. I bought half the stock in Ed's lab which gives me equipment, a teacher, a library to work in.

I'm going on about myself but in a sense it's more than me —it's you and everyone else. The world is sick now. There are things in the tide pools easier to understand than Stalinist, Hitlerite, Democrat, capitalist confusion, and voodoo. So I'm going to those things which are relatively more lasting to find a new basic picture. I have too a conviction that a new world is growing under the old, the way a new finger nail grows under a bruised one. I think all the economists and sociologists will be surprised some day to find that they did not forsee nor understand it. Just as the politicos of Rome could not have forseen that the social-political-ethical world for two thousand years would grow out of the metaphysical gropings of a few quiet poets. I think the same thing is happenening now. Communist, Fascist, Democrat may find that the real origin of the future lies on the microscope plates of obscure young men, who, puzzled with order and disorder in quantum and neutron, build gradually a picture which will seep down until it is the fibre of the future.

The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I've worked the novel—I know it 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 which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking. Anyway, there is a picture of my confusion. How is yours?

There is so much confusion now—emotional hysteria which passes for thought and blind faith which passes for analysis.

I suspect you are ready for a change. How would you escape the general picture? We're catching the waves of nerves from Europe and making a few of our own.

Write when you can.

John

[Los Gatos]
December 15, 1939
Thursday

Dear Elizabeth:

I have so much to tell you that it will take some time. I'll go about it slowly. Your letter first. Many thanks for the $13,000. But remember the excitement when the N. American Review actually paid $90 (on The Red Pony)? Such excitement will never come again.

There is no question of a cut version of Grapes in paper covers. I should never consent to it. So that is out. C. [Covici] can get as stubborn as he wants about it.

Pictures—We went down in the afternoon and that evening saw Grapes at Twentieth-Century. Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring. No punches were pulled—in fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true. The next afternoon we went to see Mice and it is a beautiful job. Here Milestone has done a curious lyrical thing. It hangs together and is underplayed. You will like it. It opens the 22nd of December in Hollywood. As for Grapes, it opens sometime in January. There is so much hell being raised in this state that Zanuck will not release simultaneously. He'll open in N.Y. and move gradually west, letting the publicity precede it. He even, to find out, issued a statement that it would never be shown in California and got a ton of mail, literally, in protest the next day. He has hired attorneys to fight any local censorship and is trying to get Thomas Benton for the posters. All this is far beyond our hopes.

Now I come to a very curious thing. [Victor] Fleming the director [
Gone With The Wind
] and Spence Tracy have wanted to make The Red Pony. They are nuts to make it. They talked to me about it and I slept over it but didn't sleep at all. It seemed to me that these men are expensive and good men. I don't know whether anything will come out of it, but here is what I suggested. They were to make the film—no salaries. If necessary, money to make it should be collected by subscriptions. I would not only give the story for nothing but would work on the script. When finished, it would be distributed to any town or city which would guarantee to use the proceeds to endow one or more children's beds in the local hospitals. Tremendous prices would be asked for seats. They were very enthusiastic. Said they thought they could get not only the best people but equipment and film for nothing. Maybe this is nuts but no film has ever been made for a definite purpose. Tracy is particularly moved because his own little son had infantile paralysis which crippled it. Fleming says that such a film would not make less than $2,000,000 and that's a lot of endowed beds.