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Authors: John Steinbeck

BOOK: Steinbeck
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I'm feeling low this morning. I'd like to be west and God knows when that will be—maybe not until the war is over. I guess Carol hates me very much and I don't like to be hated. I'd like to go to that little house and settle for a while. No soap. I guess you'd better have the telephone cut off.
Gwyn is well. This suitcase life is not very satisfactory to her. She wants some place to light but there is none in sight. She doesn't complain at all though. And when I do get called I don't know where it will be—maybe Washington, maybe not. The new little book
[The Moon Is Down,
novel] will be out the end of Feb or early in March. Viking Press thinks it will sell a lot of them. The Sea is moving very slowly and it will never make any money. I'm awfully glad we did it and that way.
It's nice in New York now—a light snow on the tops of buildings and the air is crisp and wonderful to walk in. I've had too much on my mind to let go and just walk in it. Maybe I should.
Anyway the physical clearness of my own personal life should come out in or within two weeks. Then I'll let you know. Meanwhile Gwynnie sits on a bag of dynamite, but she is good about it. I think she wants security more than anyone I ever knew. Carol thought she did and didn't. But Gwyn who has never had any has really a gift for it—an inner security which could make an outer one if given half a chance. And so far she hasn't had that chance. If we could even take a house or an apartment in Washington that's all she wants. She wants to cook. She doesn't talk about any of these things. Do you know that the little time in the Grove is the only time since she was a little girl that she ever had a home? And oddly enough it is the only time I ever had one either.
You know it's a funny thing—I've written myself out of my lowness in this letter. I feel better and clearer. I can see this director today without dreading it. The sun has come out on the snowy roofs and there's a barrel organ playing in the street. Maybe there's some gaiety in the world. That need have nothing to do with comfort. But I'm more patient than when I started writing this letter.
After the war is done, if I can, I know what I want if my domestic difficulties and my finances will permit it. I want about ten acres near the ocean and near Monterey and I want a shabby comfortable house and room for animals, maybe a horse, and some dogs and I want some babies. Maybe I can't ever get that but it's what I want. And I'm pretty sure it's what Gwyn wants too. Then maybe I want a small boat. I suppose there isn't a chance in the world of having these. Something will come up but I'm going to try and get them just as soon as the war is over. And I may not even wait for that to start getting the babies. I know now that Gwyn can run a hospitable house where I am welcome. That's the astonishing thing. I've never been welcome. That's why our houses were so doleful. There was no hospitality in them. It is curious that I sit here and plan what is probably an impossible future. My earning years in terms of money are nearly over. Not that I won't work and probably do good work. But the years of a writer financially are very few. And there will be no chance of picking up another reserve. But that is all right too. We'll get along. There's love in the house even here.
I guess that's all. I've run off at the mouth a good deal. A kind of babbling. But seems to have been necessary.
Love
John
Webster Street was Steinbeck's only correspondent through the winter of 1942. Because of problems of his own, he had moved into Steinbeck's house.
 
“I can't tell you how glad I am that you are in the house with fires going and somebody enjoying it,” Steinbeck wrote him. “It is a pleasant little house and we miss it, but we miss the people out there even more, among whom you are paramount. You'll find you get a lot of thinking done in that house.”
 
In almost every letter he writes something about the house.
 
“You will look after the rabbits, won't you? Gwynnie worries that they will be hurt or hungry.”
 
And:
 
“I don't imagine we will get out there to see the nice garden before it is all weed grown again. Would you get my guns out of the study and oil them a little if they are getting rusty? I wish we could be out there with you sitting beside the fire.”
 
He reverts to the immediate past—the horrors, as he calls them.
 
“I still get them all the time. Kind of something that goes on in the back of my mind—what could I have done to save it? I think I still have the desire to be good. And hurting people isn't good and I've hurt C. —consequently I'm not good. This apart from the fact that we were destroying each other.”
 
He champs with impatience at the delays of bureaucracy.
 
“Washington is still letting me dangle here and I'm getting pretty disgusted about it. They won't let me go away. I'm going to the country tomorrow because I am so fed up with the city I am nearly nuts. I know if I get fifty miles away I'll be called back.”
 
And:
 
“I'm finding curious things about gov't. My outfit does not assign me and will not release me for other work. Some very pleasant jobs are offered me and I can't take them. I'm getting angry about it. This has been a year in which I've been held in suspension, but I've got a lot of work done in spite of it.”
 
He reports with satisfaction and awe about the success of The Moon Is Down in book form.
 
“The new book is doing frighteningly well. Prepublication it is outselling Grapes two to one. In trade edition there will be a pre-publication sale of 85,000 and Book of the Month Club is ordering 200,000. It is kind of crazy. The hysteria of the bookshops in ordering is very wild. The play is being cast now and should go into rehearsal about the 15th of February and will open about a month later.”
 
And through it all, he is happy.
 
“My
emotional
life has been good. Gwyn works at a relationship and this is a new and lovely thing to me. She likes being a woman and likes being in love. This is a new experience to me.”
 
“I seem to take energy from a good relationship with Gwyn that makes me want to work all the time.”
 
Years later, Steinbeck's old friend, the novelist John O'Hara, said of Gwyn to Elaine Steinbeck: “She had the most beautiful skin I ever saw on a woman.”
To Webster F. Street
[Bedford Hotel}
[New York]
February 14, 1942
Dear
Toby:
I don't want to chisel in any way from Carol. I want to give her everything I can. I don't think she will be single long. She will have a lump of money and she is very pretty. I hope to goodness she is happy. Ed writes that she seems to be having a very good time with the Army set. I hope so. The complaint is just. I was cruel to her physically and mentally and she was cruel to me the same way and neither of us could help it.
I am sad at the passage of a good big slice of my life. It could have been ecstatic. That was the age for it. But I still have energy and I am still capable of loving a woman very much. So it isn't really too late for either of us.
It's the first divorce our family ever had and it makes me sad.
[unsigned]
 
 
They took a house across the river from New York City at Sneden's Landing.
To Webster F. Street
Palisades, Rockland County
New York
[April 8, 1942]
Tuesday
Dear Toby:
The show opens tonight in New York and there is a very scared cast. They were cocky in Baltimore and they took a beating and now they are properly humble and I think will be much better for it. Gwyn and I are not going. I can't seem to get very excited but a curious kind of wave of excitement is going through theatrical New York. I never saw anything like it. I think the publicity has been so great that the critics will crack down on the play.
So far my work for the government is working out nicely. I go on every night and in the daytime.
Not I, of course. I send the stuff in. I had my voice tested the other day and it was just as I knew it would be. My enunciation is so bad and the boom in my voice is so bad that I can't be understood. I am glad too because now they will never ask me again.
Gwyn has gone down the river to get a fresh shad with roe for dinner. Almost my favorite fish in the world and baked it is perfectly wonderful. Gwyn is not going to catch this fish but to buy it fresh caught at the river side.
It is a fine warm day today and the doors are all open and certain baby flies are wandering around helplessly with wet wings and I am so friendly feeling that I do not even club them down and I really should do. I'll let their wings get dry and then I will miss them.
We are going to sit and have stingers tonight and when the show is over they will call from New York and tell us how it went and then at three o‘clock the first reviews will come out and they said they would phone those and I'm not at all sure I want to hear anything at three o'clock. But I can't hurt feelings. And I will answer the phone which fortunately is beside the bed. But I bet there is not much listen about me.
Well, I'll finish this later.
 
Dear Toby:
And now it is two days later. I'm sending you the reviews and as you will see they are almost uniformly bad. Furthermore, they are almost uniformly right. They don't really know what bothered them about the play, but I do. It was dull. For some reason, probably because of my writing, it didn't come over the footlights. In spite of that it will probably run for several months. It is too bad it isn't better. I don't know why the words don't come through. The controversy that has started as to whether we should not hate blindly is all to the good and is doing no harm. What does the harm is that it is not a dramatically interesting play.
Write soon.
John
Toward the end of the month he wrote to Street:
 
“Oddly, the play goes on to crowded houses in spite of the critics. The critics have all stopped being critics and have turned propagandists. They are judging what should be told the people, what is good for the people to know. And the people are doing a better job than the critics. They're taking the war fine and working like hell to get it over. They don't seem to need hatred. It's a mechanical war and this is a pretty good mechanical people. I've seen some of the plants now and the men are doing a hell of a job.”
 
Then, turning to his and Toby's similar personal problems:
 
“I know how you feel and what you go through. Because I'm not done with it by any means. The pain comes from breaking the pattern and from nothing else. You are missing the place you hated to go to but it was a place to go to. Don't let your mind trick you too much. Recapture the memory of the thing that drove you out. That disappears quicker than the other and makes for the unbalance.”
 
In “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck reported receiving at the laboratory various surveys written by Japanese scientists before Pearl Harbor.
 
“Here under our hands were detailed studies of the physical make-up of one of the least-known areas of the world and one which was in the hands of our enemy. Here was all the information needed if we were to make beach landings. We drafted a letter to the Navy Department in Washington. Six weeks later we received a form letter thanking us for our patriotism. I seem to remember that the letter was mimeographed. Ed was philosophical about it, but I got mad. I wrote to the Secretary of the Navy.”
To The Honorable Frank Knox SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
Palisades
May 5, 1942
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I believe that the best way to get information to its proper place is to send it to the chief. I hope you will give the following to the officer of naval intelligence most able to understand and make use of it.
It is not generally known that the most complete topographical as well as faunal information about any given area is found in the zoological and ecological reports of scientists investigating the region.
For a number of years, my partner Edward F. Ricketts and I have been charting the marine animals of the coast of North America and through this work have looked into the publications from other parts of the world, including the Japanese Mandated Islands.
No Occidentals have been allowed to land in the Mandated Islands since they were taken under Japanese control.
The only publications or information to come from these Islands have been the reports of Japanese biologists, who are fine research men and truly pure members of the international scientific fraternity.
The reports are found to contain maps, soundings, reefs, harbors, buoys, lights and photographs of these areas. The information, if not already in the possession of Naval Intelligence, could be very valuable.
Yours truly,
John Steinbeck
“Nothing happened for two months,” Steinbeck recalled in “About Ed Ricketts.” “I was away when it did happen. One afternoon a tight-lipped man in civilian clothes came into the laboratory and identified himself as a lieutenant commander of Naval Intelligence.”
 
The officer asked if Ricketts or Steinbeck spoke Japanese.
 
‘No—why do you ask?'
‘Then what is this information you claim to have about the Pacific Islands?'
“Only then did Ed understand him. ‘But they're in English—the papers are all in English! The Japanese zoologists wrote them in English—sometimes quaint English but English.'
“That word tore it. The lieutenant commander looked grim. ‘Quaint!' he said. ‘You will hear from us.' But we never did. And I have always wondered whether they had the information or got it. I wondered whether some of the soldiers whose landing craft grounded a quarter of a mile from the beach and who had to wade ashore under fire had the feeling that bottom and tidal range either were not known or ignored.”

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