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Authors: John Steinbeck

BOOK: Steinbeck
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Now it is later and I have had both sleep and the drink and I still feel confused. Maybe that's the way I will always be. Gwyn had a bad night last night but that is usual the third day after. She is much better this morning. It is still fine and cool here. I don't know how long this can last. Next week I'll have to get back down to work. I don't want to interrupt this book too much. It is going too smoothly. At least it was and I think will again.
Thom is a very fine boy. He has just discovered a shrill shriek that is very piercing. He is experimenting in tones of awfulness. When it gets too bad I whistle on my fingers which is so much more awful than any scream he can give that he gives it all up in pure admiration.
Love,
John
 
 
On the same day he announced the news to Jack Wagner, adding:
“The new baby will be named John and is already called Juanito. Even Thom calls him that although he has never seen him. Thom is completely bilingual so far and prefers Spanish.”
Late in the summer the Steinbecks heard from Ed Ricketts that his mother had died.
To Edward F. Ricketts
New York
[August 1946]
Monday
Dear Ed:
I had your letters this morning, two of them, and I am writing immediately. The matter of death is very personal—almost like an idea—and it has to be discovered and accepted over and over again no matter what the age or the condition of the dying. And there is nothing for the outsider to do except to stand by and maybe to indicate that the person involved is not so alone as the death always makes him think he is. And that is why I am writing this letter.
The enclosed is for anything you want or need it for. It does occur to both Gwyn and me that in all of this there is some necessity of saving yourself, and I don't mean physically, and it is a thing that would occur last to you. We thought that you might like to use it to come on to see us for a couple of weeks. We thought further that a complete change of background and people for a little while might have restorative effects beyond almost anything. Perhaps we are wrong, but believe please that we would be very happy if you would do that. Think it over anyway.
I spoke to Pat about the Guggenheim thing this morning and he suggests that you give Viking Press as one of your sponsors. He says that the interest of a publisher sometimes has some weight. So please remember that, will you?
The book sails on and I must admit that I am fascinated with it. It may be no good at all. I don't know but it holds my interest which is the most important thing.
That good Gwyn is making a lemon pie or two this afternoon than which nothing is lemoner nor nicer nor that I like more. The children are well and getting along nicely.
love to you
from both of us.
jn
There is no record of Ricketts having accepted their invitation.
 
In the fall, John and Gwyn Steinbeck sailed for Denmark, whose proportionately large book-buying public had long been Steinbeck enthusiasts. Otto Lindhardt, his former Danish publisher, recalls that Steinbeck once observed that Denmark was the only country in the world to keep all his books in print.
To the McIntosh and Otis staff
Copenhagen
October 30, 1946
Dear Elizabeth and Mildred and Annie Laurie and all:
We are ensconced in the Hotel and Gwyn has a sore throat and we have been considerably pushed about. Coming in there were about thirty cameramen with flashlights and it was dreadful. The phone started calling while we were still at sea and the only way I saved myself from complete hell was by seeing all the reporters yesterday morning. I didn't know anyone treated writers like this. It is the sort of thing that would greet Lana Turner if it became known that she was going to come into Grand Central Station without any clothes on. And it is all so kind and well meant but it is very embarrassing. Every morning there is a mound of books to be autographed, and presents. Went to a night club last night and the orchestra leader played Stephen Foster in my honor. We've seen old friends and new ones, have had millions of toasts and the trip over was a dream.
Today we went to the legation to lunch. There was a Danish baroness or countess there [Baroness Blixen] with her attorney. It seems that during the war in desperation she turned to writing and in English. She used pseudonyms [Isak Dinesen] and had little idea of publication. She wrote Seven Gothic Tales which caused quite a stir and Random House published it. Now she has another which is Book of the Month selection for January. She has no representative in America and now the picture companies are after her and she came to ask me what to do. Her attorney says he is out of his depth. Naturally I told her about you. She is an incredible little woman. I do recommend her to you. Her work needs the management you can give it. You can reject her if you wish but I think she might be a profitable and pleasant client.
We are really having a good time but we will only know later whether it has been a vacation or not.
We went to see castles yesterday and Gwyn loved them. I got an idea for a wonderful story from it.
Copenhagen has not been physically hit badly. The air raid shelters are everywhere, but they planted grass on them. That is like the Danes. It is a lovely country. And now that they have stopped photographing us we can relax.
Love to you all,
John
 
 
They went on to Sweden, where Steinbeck had a reunion with his old friend, the artist and writer, Bo Beskow. It was during this visit that Steinbeck sat for his second Beskow portrait.
To Bo Beskow
New York
December 16 [1946]
Dear Bo:
The photographs of the portrait arrived and I took one of them over to Viking Press. It has caused a great deal of enthusiasm and makes me all the more anxious to have the original as soon as possible.
Have not been feeling well. I don't know why. I am taking some vitamins to see whether it could be a food deficiency. The depression has lasted too long this time and I don't like it at all.
I have not gone back to work and that bothers me. I shouldn't take these long rests. They aren't good for my soul or whatever it is that makes you sick. I make myself think that I will go back to work right after Christmas and maybe I will. I think Gwyn and the children will go to California for a month or six weeks about the first of February to let the children see their relatives. But I will just stay here and get back to work. Marital vacations are sometimes good things. Not that we need them very much. But just as the trip to Europe made us love our house so we get to liking each other with a little time spent apart.
Relationships are very funny things. I've wondered what I would think if this one were over and I think I would only be glad that it had happened at all. I don't think I would rail at fortune, but then it is impossible to know what you would do in any given situation unless you have experienced it. It was and would be silly of me to make any sort of judgement about your difficulty because I do not know all the factors. But you'll never get out clear no matter which way you go. A man going on living gets frayed and he drags little tatters and rags of things behind him all the rest of his life and his suit is never new after he has worn it a little. I've had such a bad time the last three or four weeks. The complete and meaningless despair that happens without warning and without reason that I can figure unless there happens to be some glandular disarrangement. So I am trying to do what I can about that and to see whether the feeling will go away.
Next Sunday we have our tree decorating party. It will be a fairly large party with at least forty people but they are all nice people. In fact about the best in the city for interest. Gwyn is going to have a midnight supper and I will make a monster bowl of punch and there we will be. The idea is to decorate our Christmas tree in the course of the evening. All sorts of arguments usually develop, aesthetic ones.
It should be a very fine Christmas.
Good luck and come out from under,
The letter is unsigned. Instead it is stamped with a drawing of “Pigasus,” the flying pig which Steinbeck used throughout his life as a symbol of himself, earth-bound but aspiring. Sometimes the pun is spelled with Greek letters, and often it is accompanied by the motto “
Ad Astra Per Alia Porci”
(“To the stars on the wings of a pig”): “a lumbering soul but trying to fly,” he once explained it and another time, “not enough wingspread but plenty of intention.”
 
In February 1947,
The Wayward Bus
was published. An advance copy had gone to Jack Wagner in January:
 
“I hope you will like it although ‘like' is not the word to use. You nor anyone can't
like
it. But at least I think it is effective. It is interesting to me—the following—This book depends on mood, on detail and on all the little factors of writing for its effectiveness. It has practically no story. Yet the picture companies seriously read synopses of it and think that is the book. The Bus, incidentally, has 600,000 Book of the Month and 150,000 trade first edition before publication. And with all that I had to borrow money to pay my income tax.”
 
About the same time, he wrote Bo Beskow in Sweden:
 
“The advance sales of the Bus are stupendous. Something near to a million copies and it is still two weeks to publication date. This is completely fantastic. The people who are going to attack it are buying it like mad.”
 
And to Wagner again, on February 16:
 
“The reviews of the Bus out today. I should never read reviews, good or bad. They just confuse me because they cancel each other out and end up by meaning nothing. I should let them alone. The book is getting good notices mostly here, although a couple of my congenital enemies are sniping. That is good for a book. The more arguments the better.”
 
Even a year later in a letter to Covici he shows some residual irritation at the reception of
The Wayward Bus:
“I hope some time some people will know what the
Bus
was about. Even with the lead, they didn't discover.”
 
The “lead” is undoubtedly the quotation from
Everyman
facing the title page:
I pray you all gyve audyence,
And here this mater with reverence,
Byfygure a morall playe;
The somonynge of Everyman called it is.
That of our lyves and endynge shewes
How transytory we be all daye.
 
The New York
Herald Tribune
now hired Steinbeck to visit the Soviet Union with Robert Capa, the photographer. Steinbeck's dispatches would later be the basis of his book,
A Russian Journal,
published in 1948. But the trip took place in spite of an accident. In the spring of 1947, the Steinbecks had had a piano moved into their house. It was lifted from the street to the second-story window, from which a hip-high protective railing had been removed. This railing was replaced faultily, so that some time later when Steinbeck leaned on it, it gave way. He fell forward into the areaway, injuring his knee and foot seriously enough to be hospitalized for a period.
 
He wrote the Wagner brothers:
 
“I'm very tired of the hospital. I was lucky not to have broken my back. Little John is all well now and Thorn is fine but will probably have mumps in a week. He has been exposed. And I've never had them. That can be bad.”
 
His apprehension was not borne out. A little later he wrote:
 
“I'm pulling out for Paris tomorrow. Gwyn follows Tuesday. She'll be back in 4 weeks but I'm going on to Russia for the Herald Tribune and won't be back until the ist of October. Should be quite a trip and it will be good to get back to straight reporting. My knee is getting better all the time but I will be a number of months with a cane.”
To Pascal Covici
Kiev, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.
August II [1947]
Dear Pat:
A short note anyway. We've been down here for a week and will stay until next Friday. It is beautiful country and a beautiful city but it was brutally, insanely destroyed by the Germans. The rebuilding goes on everywhere but under the great difficulty of no machinery yet. My note book is getting very full and Capa is taking very many pictures, many of them fine I think. These Ukrainians are hospitable people with a beautiful sense of humor. I am setting down whole conversations with farmers and working people for fear I might forget them. We are lucky to be able to come here. We have seen so many things.
 
 
August 13
Just came from a farm. Very good time and lots of information. We are the first foreigners who have been in the country here in many years. The children look at us in wonder for they have only heard of Americans and sometimes not too favorably. The farmers and working people are a pleasure to talk to and even the necessity of talking through interpreters does not eliminate the salt of their speech.

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