Steinbeck (31 page)

Palisades
July 23, 1942

Dear Toby:

My military status is this. I am appointed Special Consultant to the Secretary of War and assigned to Headquarters of the Army Air Force. The commanding general of the Air Force is writing the Draft Board requesting that I do not be called. I have said that if I were called I would not take a deferment. When this work is done in about three months I will be inducted in the army in the G3 section of the Air Force. I am also a foreign news editor of the Office of War Information. In the early fall probably in September I have to go west to write and oversee a moving picture for the Air Force in Hollywood and after that I take up the G3 work I mentioned. Maybe I am wrong about the number, maybe I mean G2. Intelligence section is the one I mean. I can't keep track of numbers. I am to have a new subsection that has just been authorized.

This coast is completely changed by the gasoline rationing and the dimout. I was in Times Square last night and it is kind of ghostly. Now there are no big signs and the crowds of people seem to be quiet and shadowlike. The streets are very dimly lighted and the traffic signals are blacked out except for thin slits very hard to see. You don't go very fast. You are only allowed to turn on your traffic or rather your parking lights. I don't go into town very often.

I think that is all now.

Love,
John

[Van Nuys, California]
January 8 [1943]

Dear Annie Laurie:

Today Kenneth MacGowan of 20th Century asked me to come out and talk to him. It seems that the Maritime Commission has asked Hitchcock to do a picture about the men of the merchant marine and he wants me to write the story. [This led to
Lifeboat.
] I told them I would like to try it on these terms—that I work a week on it and if I didn't like what I was doing and it didn't seem right for me I would destroy what I had and they could if they wanted pay me for a week's work. If on the other hand I liked what I did and they liked it, then I would finish it and they could deal with you about what they would pay for the story, always understanding that it would be plenty. They accepted that very gladly. I have a number of ideas for such a story. If it should seem to be good then maybe Hitchcock will go east with me and we will talk to some of the seamen who have been torpedoed. I shall write it as a novelette which I will be free to publish if I want to. Of course if the thing on starting doesn't move in my mind and hands I'll simply toss the whole thing out and forget it and Twentieth Century understands that perfectly. They also understand that I may be called to service at any time. Anyway it is exciting and I will enjoy the trying. They are very nice people to deal with as you know.

Love to you all and we'll see you soon.

john

[New York]
March 15, 1943

Dear Toby:

We are going to New Orleans to be married. Gwyn is going next week and I'll go down about the 27th if I can get a plane.

The next is confidential. I'm so tired of government that I'm going to try something else. Am making passes at being accredited a correspondent from the Herald-Tribune or Colliers or A.P. or something and if it works I will go overseas soon after the ist of April. I know what I want to do and see and I'll get somebody to send me. It may not work but neither does the army nor the gov't. I run up against nothing but jealousies, ambitions and red tape in Washington. I want a job with a big reactionary paper like the Herald-Tribune because I think I could get places that way I couldn't otherwise.

From what I have seen so far, if I go into the army I would prefer to be a private. The rest is very like the fraternity system at Stanford. I have not been notified of rejection by the way.

I think a big push is starting soon and I would like to see it. That is why I am trying to go as war correspondent. But maybe no one will want me. I only started on this line a day ago.

Love,
John

NEW YORK
APRIL 5 [1943]

WAR CORRESPONDENT HERALD TRIBUNE ACCREDITED WAR DEPARTMENT EUROPEAN THEATER DEPARTURE MIDDLE APRIL

 

JOHN

1943
War correspondent in European Theater for the New York
Herald Tribune.
First edition of
The Portable Steinbeck
published.

 

 

1944
Lifeboat
(film) released. Birth of son Thorn. Moved back to California.

 

1945
Cannery Row
published.
The Red Pony
published in four parts.
A Medal for Benny
(film) released. Returned to New Yprk.

 

1946
Son John born. Awarded the King Haakon Liberty Cross (Norway) for
The Moon Is Down.

 

1947
The Wayward Bus
published; Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
The Pearl,
story published, film released. Correspondent in Russia with photographer Robert Capa for the New York
Herald Tribune.

 

 

1948
A Russian Journal
published. Separated from Gwyndolyn Steinbeck. Went back to California.

[New York]
April 9, 1943

Dear Toby:

I guess I am not going to be allowed to do anything the easy way. Your wire last night indicates that board 119 is doing its usual shit.

If I seem a little bitter it is because I have never had any trouble with generals, with secretaries of departments, but a year and a half has been made horrible by little men with temporary authority who, armed with envy, have pushed me around, lieutenants and such who could put in secret reports they thought I would never see and so forth. I just get a little frantic at the mess. At my age, my only chance of getting near combat area is in the capacity I am working on, and now if I am cut off by these sons of bitches, shit. I get so god damned disgusted with stupidity.

John

London
July 4 [1943]

My darling:

This is Sunday the Fourth and the streets are full of American homesickness. I have it too. I walked for hours last night and talked to so many of the soldiers. They are angry about the messes in Washington and they are homesick. The reason I have put the date at the top is that I finally have got a calendar. Bob Vining of the navy gave it to me and it is tacked to the wall and I can find out any time I want what the date is, provided of course that I know the day of the week.

I've really got a low time now. Liquor is so expensive and so bad that I do not fall back on it. I guess I've just got what the troops have. It is quite a hot day and hasn't rained in two weeks or more. Already the grass is getting brown. But it looks as though there might be some rain soon. It is getting muggy. This isn't a day to work but I must. I think I'll do a piece today about homesickness in London. That's what is happening here.

I love you and I am homesick too.

 

[July 1943]

 

Darling, you want to know what I want of you. Many things of course but chiefly these. I want you to keep this thing we have inviolate and waiting—the person who is neither I nor you but us. It's a hard thing this separation but it is one of the millions of separations at home and many more millions here. It is one hunger in a great starvation but because it is ours it overshadows all the rest, if we let it. But keep waiting and don't let it be hurt by anything because it is the one really precious thing we have. Later we may have others but so far it is a single unit—and you have the keeping of it for a little while. You say I am busy, as though that wiped out my end, but it doesn't. You can be just as homesick and lost when you are busy. I love you beyond words, beyond containing. Remember that always when the distance seems so great and the time so long. It will not be so long, my dear.

 

July 8 [1943]

Dear Gwyndolyn:

The mails are terrible. Who knows, maybe a lot of letters will come over today.

It is a kind of a grey day with big clouds and the city against them is very beautiful. I have become such an assiduous worker that you wouldn't know me. The hulk that sat in the green chair day in and day out is replaced with a medium young executive, well dressed, courteous, clean, on his toes—business as usual and the chin up and nose on the grind stone. This transformation is happily not permanent. This discipline is good but I can't think what for. It is nothing I am sure that the home double bed won't cure.

The grey day is turned to rain now, a very pleasant and necessary rain.

love to baby
john

 

July 12 [1943]

My darling.

I wish I could go with this letter. To see you and to hold you would be so good. I know it will seem a very short time when it is over but now it seems interminable like an illness. I have small magic that I practice. When I go to bed, I build up what you look like and how you speak and some times I can almost feel you curling around my back and your breath on my neck. And sometimes it is so real that I am shocked that it isn't so.

It is raining today and coming on to the time when it will rain nearly all the time. And this morning which is Monday it fills me with gloom. I'm writing the gloom out on you and am loving it. This letter seems much closer than the others.

I love you very deeply and completely—that goes through everything and in everything. Every day I hope I will hear from you and at night I haven't. Maybe today. Some of the mail must come through. Perhaps they have held it up, needing the space. I don't know.

Good bye my darling wife. Keep writing.

I love you.

 

Somewhere in North Africa
August 13 [1943]

Darling:

I haven't written for several days because I've been on the move. It seems silly to head this one “Somewhere in Africa,” like saying just somewhere. Anyway this is a large city on the Mediterranean which I can't even spell [probably Algiers]. I've felt guilty about you taking all the hot weather this year but now you have your revenge. It was 140° when I landed—terrible searing heat. Up here on the sea it is only about 115° and the nights are bearable. The call came suddenly and surprised even me for I had been refused before. So I hopped it while I could. Right now I have the G. I. skitters which come to everyone and is painful but it will be gone tomorrow. Coming from cool England the heat can bowl you over.

Here I made my first error. Instead of applying for a billet from the army and getting, after hours, a cot with sixteen other men, I went up to the desk and in some of the sourest high school French asked for a room and got it. The army doesn't know how it happened. No one ever thought to try that method. I have a bath and a toilette and I am not even a general. The room itself is torn up quite a bit. Blast from bombing has loosened the wall paper. No windows nor mirrors of course. The big window is walled up with only two small holes, left open at the top. There are two small beds covered, believe it or not, with Mexican serapes.