Steinbeck (37 page)

Thank you so much for meeting Gwyn. She was really dead tired. Those flights are exhausting. I've only had one letter but there will probably be others waiting in Moscow. I try to cable now and then to relieve her mind. I have no news of America, and it is rather nice. I couldn't change anything and it is good to be away from the turmoil for a little. Why don't you drop me a note and let me know how things are going. Address c/o Joe Newman, Hotel Metropol, Moscow.

Evening is coming now. We are going to a symphony concert in the park on the cliff above the Dnieper. Playing Brahms and Prokofiev. I have a dreadful time with the spelling of Russian names and my language is limited to about 10 words, most of which have to do with drinking.

Please call Gwyn when you get this. I like her to hear from me as often as possible.

The time won't be very long until we will get home, only about six weeks. I'll be glad of a few days in Prague. I have always wanted to see that city which I have heard is very beautiful.

That's all Pat. Do drop me a line.

love
John

Stalingrad, U.S.S.R.
August 20 [1947]

Dearest Doxie:

We are at it again. Got in at two and had to get up at three.

This town really destroyed, not by bombing but by shell fire and the houses pitted and carved by machine gun fire. Every single building is hit. Factories in ruins. This must have been the greatest fight of all time. The hotel is rebuilt and quite comfortable. This is the melon growing section.

It seems to me that I'm going to be very tired of moving around by the time I get home. It will have been 3 months and a half living out of a suitcase. I'll be ready to sit and work or maybe just sit for a little. There will be a lot of impressions to get settled too.

 

All hell has broken loose. I admit our Russian is limited, but we can say hello, come in, you are beautiful, oh no you don‘t, and one which charms us but seems to have an application rarely needed: “The thumb is second cousin to the left foot.” We don't use that one much. So in our pride we ordered for breakfast, an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of water melon and two bottles of cream soda. Something has slipped badly. Also an argument. Our room is full of flies—vicious nervous flies. The attendant called our attention sternly to the fact that the window was open and we retaliated with equal sternness that there is no glass in the window and to keep it closed has only theoretical value in keeping out flies. English is not spoken here. On arriving a young woman in the hotel said “good morning” with a beautiful accent which would have reassured us more if it had not been four o'clock in the afternoon. We have just ordered the vodka in place of the cream soda. If we get a cutlet we are not surprised. God! we got tea.

Capa suggests that the reason there aren't more flies is that they aren't mass produced yet. At the end of the five year plan they will have many more.

Love to you all and most to you my doxie

John

[New York]
November 17, 1947

Dear Toby:

I have a great deal of work to do this year and I would like to get it all done by this summer because then I would like to stop everything to do a long novel that I have been working on the notes of for a long time. It seems to me that for the last few years I have been working on bits and pieces of things without much continuity and I want to get back to a long slow piece of work. I need to go out there for a lot of research so I may be out in California this summer. I'd be glad if I could for a little while. I'm living too hectic a life but then so are you and so is everyone.

Amazing that you should be a grandfather although I don't know why it should be amazing. I could easily be if I had got to work earlier. My kids are thriving and are becoming very interesting to me now. The oldest one is beginning to reason and is lots of fun and the youngest who is a clown by nature is very gay. He may not have much brains but he is going to have a hell of a wonderful life if he keeps the disposition he has now. That's about what it takes, a good disposition. I never had one and that is the reason for the kind of life I lead, I guess, although my disposition is better now than it ever was.

I don't think there is anything too difficult to understand about P—. She is just a natural virgin who can't grow up and never will. Such girls may be wonderful in the hay because they put on an act but not every night and not for long, because the act gets tiresome to them. That is why natural spinsters make much better mistresses than wives. They don't have to do it very often that way and so their interest is kept up not only by the rarity of the stuff but by the self-drama of the situation.

I had a wonderful time in Paris. I had never been there you know, and I wish I had been there years ago. Gwyn didn't like it terribly much but I did and I'm pretty sure I have not seen the last of it.,There is something there, there is really something there.

Winter is coming and that is the season I love in New York. I feel wonderful when it is cold. I guess I was never more healthy in my life than the winters I spent at Tahoe. I am just a cold weather kid and I am miserable in heat.

Well anyway I may be coming out to see you before too long. I would like to. I would like to just sit with you for a few days without any rush. I don't know what the hell I'm rushing about. There is some terrible kind of urgency on me and that is a bunch of nonsense. Maybe I'll get over it when I get this deadline piece out of my system. I hate to write to deadline but I have to on this. My typing never gets any better. I guess it is never going to get any better. That is one of the comforting things about the middle age I am in. Always before I could promise to reform and now I know I'm just never going to do it so I don't bother. The only thing I can really do is work and I might as well face it. I don't have any other gifts but I can work and if it doesn't amount to a damn it was still hard work.

Anyway I am going to plan within the next year to sit with you a while if you still want to. It wouldn't be bad to take some kind of inventory—not that it will change anything because you aren't ever going to change either and the joke is that if we had only known it, we never were from the very beginning. Maybe the self-kidding is part of the process. Maybe I couldn't have stood myself as I am when I was younger and so had to make all the plans about changing.

I guess that will be all now. I've got to get back to work. I have a hundred pages to get out before Thanksgiving. Christ, I remember when an eighteen-page story threw me for weeks. Maybe they were better then but I don't even care about that. The hell with it. I'm doing the best I can with what I've got.

So long and write more often.

jn

New York
January 2, 1948

Dear Mr. Caswell:

I am gathering material for a novel, the setting of which is to be the region between San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz, particularly the Salinas valley; the time, between 1900 and the present.

An exceedingly important part of the research necessary will involve the files of the Salinas papers; will it be possible for me to consult these files? Do you know what has happened to the files of the Index-Journal and would it be possible for you to arrange my access to them?

I expect to be in Monterey soon after January 20th; could you let me know as soon as possible (by collect wire if necessary) if these files can be thrown open to me.

I will very much appreciate your help in this project.

Very truly yours
John Steinbeck

[Monterey]
[February 1948]

Dear Pat:

Arrangements have finally been made for the photographing of the Salinas papers which will give me as fine a reference library on the daily history of a community as it is possible to have. The oblique information in these old papers is enormous in addition to the direct information. I have now checked the stories of old timers against the reports of the papers of the time, and I find that old timers are almost invariably wrong not only in their information but in their attitudes. Time is the most violent changer of people.

I've been into the river beds now and on the mountains and I've walked through the fields and picked the little plants. In other words I have done just exactly what I came out here to do. What will come out of it I don't know but I do know that it will be long. There is so much, so very much. I've got to make it good, hell, I've got to make it unique. I'm afraid I will have to build a whole new kind of expression for it. And maybe go nuts doing it—and pay the price for doing it and climb on it and tromp on it and get my nose rubbed in it. I hope I have the energy to do it and without accidents I think I have. The yellow pads will catch hell for the next few years and nobody better try to rush me because I will not rush this one. I'll make a living at something else while I am doing it. But it's the whole nasty bloody lovely history of the world, that's what it is with no boundaries except my own inabilities. So there.

The country is drying up as badly as the time I wrote about it in To A God Unknown. It is the same kind of drought that used to keep us broke all the time when I was growing up.

I guess that is all. I just wanted to send you a report.

John

[Monterey]
February 12 [1948]

Dear Bo:

You haven't heard from me because I have been resting. I had got pretty badly knotted up with the tiredness but that seems to be dropping away. I have a room in a cottage court and I like it very well. I'm seeing old friends and drinking an occasional toast and going into the hills and looking at bushes and trees and things like that.

We had a very large Christmas and the kids got too many toys, most of which were put away for a little slower issue. There were so many things given them that they were only confused. I don't like this lushness. I am looking forward to the time when Thom can travel with me, and that won't be so very long.

The Russian pieces in the papers were very successful here. I don't know what the book will do. The Russians have been doing such bad things lately with their art stultifications and their silly attacks on musicians and the decree about no Russian being allowed to speak to foreigners that it makes me feel sad. It looks as though we were the last ones in for a very long time. Under the new decree we could not have spoken to any of the people we did. They have already destroyed all good or even interesting painting. There isn't much of any good writing and now they knock over music. The stupid sons of bitches. I wonder whether there is any secret writing or painting being done. It would surprise me if a few creative individuals weren't practising in cellars. And the small Russian people are such nice people.

It is barely possible that I may be in England for a little while this summer but not absolutely sure. I would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.

I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

I'm glad you had Christmas with your kids. I miss mine quite a lot. They are funny little bugs. And there's something terribly sad about them to me. They are such determined little humans with their chins down, living like the devil as hard as they can.

A few of my nieces now in college came down for a vacation from the university. They are very pretty girls and they seem to have so much more sense than girls did when I was that age. I enjoyed them no end and they liked me because I don't try any of the elder statesman stuff on them. It is a strange but genuine friendship.