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Authors: John Steinbeck

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To Carl Wilhelmson
Palo Alto
April 7, 1924
Dear Carl:
Here, on this paper, there are only you and me, and the things that each of us tries so hard to understand, clambering up through long, long researches into the past, and thinking ponderously and seeking, and finding that for which we looked a glorified question mark.
It would be desirable to be flung, unfettered by consciousness, into the void, to sail unhindered through eternity. Please do not think that I am riding along on baseless words, covering threadbare thoughts with garrulous tapestries. I am not. It is the words which are inadequate.
You know so much and I can tell you nothing, and I don't think I can even make you feel anything you have not felt more poignantly than I, who am a mummer in a brocaded boudoir.
I wrote of miners' faces around a fire. Their bodies did not show in the light so that the yellow faces seemed dangling masks against the night. And I wrote of little voices in the glens which were the spirits of passions and desires and dreams of dead men's minds. And Mrs. Russell [an instructor] said they were not real, that such things could not be, and she was not going to stand me bullying her into such claptrap nonsense. Those were not her words but her meaning, and then she smiled out of the corner of her mouth as nurses do when an idiot child makes blunders. And I could not stand that, Carl, so I swore at her because I had been out all night in the making of my pictures. And now she is very cold, and she means to flunk me in my course, thinking that she can hurt me thus. I wish that she could know that I do not in the least care.
And I wish you were back, because you could understand the things I try to say, and help me to say them better, and I know you would, for you did once.
John Steinbeck
 
 
 
Later that spring, again to Carl Wilhelmson:
 
“There have been six short stories this quarter. [Two of these appeared in the Stanford Spectator.] I wonder if you remember the one about the machinist who made engines and felt a little omnipotent until his own machine pulled his arm from him. Then he cursed God and suffered retribution at the hands of God or thought he did. That has finally been done to my half satisfaction. Of the others, one was perfectly rotten, two were fair, three were quite good. About the only thing that can be said for them is that they do not resemble anything which has ever been written.
 
“Miss Mirrielees [his instructor in creative writing] is very kind, she hates to hurt feelings. She says that she thinks my stuff ought to be published but she doesn't know where. Don't get the idea that I am swimming against an incoming tide of approbation, I'm not. For every bit of favorable criticism, I get four knocks in the head. Oh! well, who cares?”
 
Recalling this period later, he wrote his collegemate, Robert Cathcart:
 
“I first read Caesar and Cleopatra about seven or eight years ago, and was so impressed that I immediately wrote a sequel to it concerning the coming of Marc and his battle with the few and carefully misunderstood principles Caesar had left with Cleopatra. It was a failure. I was about seventeen at the time. And as I shall never write another play, I bequeath the idea to you.”
 
“You asked me what I had been reading,” he wrote Mrs. Edith Wagner, mother of two boyhood friends from Salinas. “Here is the last list which we brought from the library, The Book of the Dead from existing papyri, Les Femmes Savantes of Molière, which I had never read in French before and a low detective tale labeled L‘Homme du Dent d'Or by a man of whom I never heard, and who in the French fashion manages to get his murder accomplished in a bedroom; La Barraca of Ibañez, which is shorter and I think more effective than his others; some short stories by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, and she certainly is the master of her kind of short stories. I have just finished the autobiography of Casanova and The Judge by Rebecca West which is a wonderful piece of writing. If you haven't read it you must for it is one of the best things I have read in many a day. In a maniacal period this summer I went through Pushkin and Turgenev.”
 
He left Stanford for good without a degree in June 1925, and managed to get a berth to New York as a “workaway” on a freighter through the Panama Canal. For the next year he lived unhappily in Brooklyn and later in a room overlooking Gramercy Park. “I guess I hate New York,” he was to write in 1935, “because I had a thin, lonely, hungry time of it there. And I remember too well the cockroaches under my wash basin and the impossibility of getting a job. I was scared thoroughly. And I can't forget the scare.”
 
He did eventually get work as a laborer on the construction of Madison Square Garden, on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. Then his mother's brother, Joseph Hamilton, got him a job on the New York
American,
about which he later wrote:
 
“Worked on N. Y. American and from what the city editor said when he fired me, I don't think the American remembers it with any more pleasure than I do.”
 
And even later he recalled:
 
“I worked for the American and was assigned to Federal Court in the old Park Row post office where I perfected my bridge game and did some lousy reporting. I did however perfect a certain literary versatility. This was during Prohibition, and Federal judges as well as others in power were generous with confiscated whiskey to the press room. Therefore it became my duty sometimes, as cadet reporter, to send the same story to Graphic, American, Times, Tribune and Brooklyn Eagle each in its own vernacular when some of my peers were unable to catch the typewriter as it went by. Then I was fired. I learned that external reality had no jurisdiction in the Hearst press and that what happened must in no case interfere with what WR wanted to happen.”
 
Out of funds and discouraged by his inability to sell any of the stories he had been writing, he returned to the West Coast in the summer of 1926, working his way once again on a freighter. For the next two years, when he was twenty-four and twenty-five, he supported himself and his writing by odd jobs in the Lake Tahoe area, like the snowbound one as a caretaker mentioned earlier. He also worked at the local fish hatcheries and as driver of the mail-coach at Fallen Leaf Lodge, which belonged to Toby Street's in-laws.
 
Following is the first of a number of introspective letters written on his birthday. It was written, like many similar ones, to his college roommate, Carlton A. Sheffield, variously called “Duke,” “Dook,” “Juk,” or even “Jook.” Probably Steinbeck's closest male friend, Duke Sheffield is his only correspondent who appears throughout this book, from first chapter to last. He was less than a year older than Steinbeck and had entered Stanford the same semester. “Knew Steinbeck,” Sheffield writes, “but only as a classmate with whom I occasionally boxed, always losing.” Later they roomed together, and sometimes their odd jobs coincided, as when they worked together at the Spreckels factory in Manteca, though Sheffield most often worked as a newspaperman or as a teacher.
To Carlton A. Sheffield
Lake Tahoe
February 25, 1928
Dear Duke:
It is a long time since I have begun a letter such as I mean this to be: an unhurried dissertation in which there is no sense of duty. Perhaps I have lost the power to write such a letter. Of late it has been my habit to write one page of short, tacit observation, which might have given you the idea that I am become nervous and short. And you, of late, have been determinedly cynical. Thus our letters.
My failure to work for the last three weeks is not far to find. I finished my novel and let it stand for a while, then read it over. And it was no good. The disappointment of that was bound to have some devastating, though probably momentary effect. You see, I thought it was going to be good. Even to the last page, I thought it was going to be good. And it is not.
Why are you telling me about the things you go to? Are you ashamed or proud? Do you want me to know you attend such gatherings? I think you think I look down on Rosalind [Rosalind Shepard, a girl friend of Sheffield's], and you want to justify her. You make fun of these things and yet they must impress you to some extent. I know they would impress me. I have always been a little afraid of a woman who wore a dress that cost more than a hundred dollars.
I have a new novel preparing but preparing very slowly. I am not quick about such things. They must roll about in my mind for an age before they can be written. I think it will take me two years to write a full length novel, counting the periods when I walk the streets and try to comb up courage enough to blow out my brains.
Isn't it a shame, Duke, that a thing which has as many indubitably fine things in it as my Cup of Gold, should be, as a whole, utterly worthless? It is a sorrowful matter to me.
As usual I have made a mess of this letter. I didn't finish it the other night. Now it is late the night before the [mail] boat, and I shall get very little written on it. Do you realize that I am twenty-six now? I don't. I don't feel twenty-six and I don't look that old, and I have done nothing to justify my years. Yet I don't regret the years. I have enjoyed them after a fashion. My sufferings have not been great nor have my pleasures been violent. I wish we might resurrect a summer out of the heap of years, but that is not possible at this time. Some other summer we will try.
Am I to be allowed to meet Rosalind, or are you afraid of me now? I should really like to. I feel none of the old antagonism toward her at any rate. I have been cutting wood violently to keep from being lonely. And I am lonely just the same. I wish you would write more often. I am on the point of joining a correspondence club if you don't.
A triumph. I am learning to chew tobacco, not the lowly Star but the lordly Boot Jack, a bit under the tongue you know and swallow the spit. I find I like it. It is snowing again. Confound it, will the winter never be over? I crave to have the solid ground under my feet. You cannot understand that craving if you have never lived in a country where every step was unstable. It is very tiresome and tiring to walk and have the ground give way under you at every step.
I am finishing the Henry ms out of duty [Cup of Gold, a fictionalized biography of Henry Morgan, the pirate], but I have no hope of it any more. I shall probably pack it in Limbo balls and place it among the lost hopes in the chest of the years. Good bye, Henry. I thought you were heroic but you are only, as was said of you, a babbler of words and rather clumsy about it.
I shall make an elegy to Henry Morgan, who is a monument to my own lack of ability. I shall go ahead, but I wonder if that sharp agony of words will occur to me again. I wonder if I shall ever be drunken with rhythms any more. Duke has his Rosalind, but I have no Rosalind nor any Phryne. I am twenty-six and I am not young any more. I shall write good novels but hereafter I ride Pegasus with a saddle and martin-gale, for I am afraid Pegasus will rear and kick, and I am not the sure steady horseman I once was. I do not take joy in the unmanageable horse any more. I want a hackney of tried steadiness.
It is sad when the snow is falling.
love
jawn
 
 
When he suggests meeting Rosalind, and asks, “Or are you afraid of me now?” he is probably referring to the following letter which he had written two years before, to the girl Sheffield had then just married, and who had since died. It is a letter that, among other things, explains and illuminates Steinbeck's friendship with Sheffield. Based on the conviction that Sheffield had been misled into matrimony, it is an early example of that passionate excess, of both loyalty and vindictiveness, which would characterize Steinbeck's behavior about people and issues throughout his life.
To Ruth Carpenter Sheffield
38 Gramercy Park
New York
June 1926
Dear Ruth:
I received notice of your marriage to my friend. I resolved to write you a letter containing a threat, an appeal and an explanation. On your reception of these three I must base my esteem of you. I agree that my esteem may seem of little consequence.
I love this person so much that I would cut your charming throat should you interfere seriously with his happiness or his manifest future. You have in your hands the seeds of a very great genius, be careful how you nourish them. If Duke loves you, then you have qualities which are impeccable, and to which I must bow. But you cannot tear in a day the cloth which was long and careful in the making. Thus I appeal to you, since you were given the honor of being the victim, to sacrifice yourself, not to this person's person, but to the children of his brain. If you are big enough you will have understood this before now, if not, all of my telling will only make you angry.
I have promised some explanation of my position. Neither this person nor myself had a brother. Because of these things, we went through our very young years lonely and seeking. We had no intimates, practically no friends. We made enemies readily because we were far above our immediate associates. In college we met, and at every point the one seemed to supplement and strengthen the other. We are not alike, rather we are opposites, but also we are equals. The combination was put to severe tests. We took the same girl to dances and things, and the friendship grew. We fought bloodily and the matter was strengthened. We worked in a vicious heat and emerged to find a wonderful comradeship. The outcome was a structure of glorious dream. Are you understanding me at all? He was the cathode and I the anode. We laughed, quarreled, drank, were sad, considered life, ethics, philosophies. We did not always agree. More often we openly disagreed. But always in the back of the mind of each there was the thought that the one was not complete without the other and never could be. It would have been easy, from our constant attendance one on the other, to draw obscene conclusions, but our fists quite precluded any such feeling. We were constantly together. Do you wish to interfere in this so that you may have him more surely to yourself, or would you rather attempt to come into the circle? Perhaps you can. I do not know you. Undoubtedly each of us supplies a great need in him, take care that you do not overstep your need and your usefulness.

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