Steinbeck (38 page)

I think through fatigue and other things I have been down near to the insanity level lately and it is odd how I can feel the tensions roll away from me. I sleep about twelve hours every night and every night it is better, the sleep better and more restful. It is truly a good medicine, something I guess like your trips to the south. One of the best things is being alone.

Give my unrequited love to the beautiful blonde girls in the Swedish Airlines offices, such lovely sweet-smelling girls.

[Monterey]
February 17 [1948]

Dear Honey:

Tuesday already. Again last night to bed at ten. Now quite early morning. Cloudy and likely to rain. This is the driest year anybody ever remembers. Yesterday was like a spring day. I went to Salinas and worked at the paper and then drove out toward the hills and found the old stage road which I haven't been over since I was about ten years old and we went to Hollister that way in the surrey. Went over it to San Juan and do you know there were hundreds of places that I remembered. Kids do retain all right. Stopped in San Juan a while and then drove back over the old San Juan Grade which in the memory of most people is the only one. They have completely forgotten that which was once called the Royal Road and it is now just a country dirt road, which is what it always was, of course. Also working about getting the film made of the paper for later study. This is going to be fairly expensive but it is clearly deductible so it doesn't matter.

No word from you so I guess you are all right.

The enclosed is a letter Ed and I wrote to Stanford Press the other night. This new edition of Between Pacific Tides has been dawdling for two years. Thought you might enjoy the letter.

 

 

I am getting quite homesick. I miss you very much. But more and more I see that this book is the book and it has to be done by me. It may be my swan song but it certainly will be the largest and most important work I have or maybe will do. That's why I don't want to slip up on it in any way. I want all my material to be right and correct. Fortunately for me the owner of the Salinas paper is a foreigner, a good newspaper man from New York State and a man who knows what I am trying to do. I am told that a little quiver of terror has crept through old Salinas at the project. I am on no punitive expedition. I just want it straight.

I have a whole life and adventures in Salinas all of which are new to me. It would be fun to collect them sometime. They are old timers' stories by now. There is one by a grocer about how I engineered the complete cleaning out of his store. Actually I was a very law abiding little boy.

Also I find that the adventures of Max [Wagner] and John Murphy have all been moved over to me, even the throwing of the roast of beef through the glass door at City Hall. They worked so hard and I get all the credit. I have become a giant kind of half criminal, half ape over there. It works all over. Jack [Wagner] told me that it is told as truth in Cuernavaca by the waiters at the Marik that I was taken to jail there after a fight, but that it took fourteen policemen to do it and the blood flowed in the streets. What chance has any true history if this is the way people remember things?

Well that is about all. Let me know whether the valentine ever got there.

love
john

[New York]
[April 1948]

Dear Ed:

I am practicing for the novel very hard and I think I am getting some place. I do not want to start it until I am pretty sure that I have what I want in style and method but I am gradually getting through to the light. It is going to be bitterly resented by critics and the reader starting it may have some kind of hard going until he gets used to it but I do think that once he does, most other things might seem a little pale and bloodless. Anyway I am excited by the experiment.

It will be a hell of a long experiment though, nearly half a million words and by far the most ambitious book I have ever attempted. God help us all, we go on trying to climb that miserable mountain and it is always higher than the last rise we scrabbled onto. It seems to me that I have more than I can do and it frightens me sometimes until I think how it would be if I had less than I can do.

The circus in Madison Square Garden is sold out for the whole season. I want to take Thom. It will be the first circus when he is old enough and he is at the time now when it can be pure dream material. But there are no tickets. I am moving heaven and earth to try to get them for Saturday.

Next Tuesday I shall go into the hospital and have the varicosities in my legs removed. I will have to be in the hospital for a week because it is a large job and they don't want any of the ties to break loose. I should have had it done years ago but now finally I will complete it. The legs are not at all painful but I am told that the burst places are a lovely play ground for potential embolisms.

so long now
jn

Bedford Hotel
New York
April 29, 1948

Dear Bo:

I am just sprung from the hospital yesterday. And I am very weak. Didn't realize how weak I was nor how doped I had been in the hospital. I guess it is a very great shock to the system to have all those veins removed. It took the surgeon four hours to do it and I was very tired before he was through. But it is all over now and although the stitches are still in my legs I shall be all right in a couple of weeks. But I can't do much of any walking before then. I have to sleep in my office now because I can't climb stairs yet. My office is a hotel room at this above address but it has an elevator so I stay the nights here until we are all in order. I have a tank of tropical fish here which amuse me very much and rest me too. Their movement is very fine.

You are right. I am on my marathon book, which is called Salinas Valley. It is what I have been practicing to write all of my life. Everything else has been training. I feel that I am about ready to write it. It will take maybe three years to write and it is going to be the best that I have learned and a lot that I have never even indicated. It is rather like your [stained glass] windows. I wouldn't care if it took all of the rest of my life if I got it done. It is going to take enormous energy.

I am doing something which is secret but I will tell you about it. I am trying to buy or lease the old home ranch about which the Red Pony and many of my stories were written. My family sold it long ago to a man who is very old now and who is very rich. So I wrote to him. I haven't told Gwyn anything about this. I don't know whether she would approve or not. She loves New York and she says she will never leave it but I have to have something too. And the boys should have a chance to find out what they would like. Also the things they can get from the country now they will never be able to get again. So that is my secret.

I wouldn't fix the old house up at all, not even put in electricity. It would just be a place to go to and to get refreshed. I know it is necessary to me because before I went into this health thing I was very close to a crack-up. I was warned that I was by a very good neurosurgeon here and it wasn't just an opinion. That danger is over now, I am pretty sure, but I would love to have the old place to go to for a few months of the year and let the boys find out about animals and horses and grass and smells besides carbon monoxide.

I do not want to run it as a ranch. Just to go to live in the old house and to walk in the night and hear the coyotes howl and the roosters and to see the rabbits sitting along the brush line in the morning sun. I don't know whether it will work out but that is what I am trying. And if you ever mention it in a letter you had better send that letter to this address. I get most of my mail here anyway. Of course it is very possible that the old man will have no part of it. I would like to write parts of my book out there if I could, though it doesn't matter at all where I write it. Down in a manhole if necessary.

I guess that is all for now. I will write more often I think now. So long.

John

Hotel Bedford
New York
May 22, 1948

Dear Bo:

I got back from Monterey to find your letter. You see, Ed Ricketts' car was hit by a train and after fighting for his life for three days he died, and there died the greatest man I have known and the best teacher. It is going to take a long time to reorganize my thinking and my planning without him. It is good that he was killed during the very best time of his life with his work at its peak and with the best girl he ever had. I am extremely glad for that. He had just finished a plankton paper that was masterly. I will over the next few years, if I am able, edit his journals for the last fifteen years which contain his observations in every field. It is very important thinking to my mind.

Naturally this changes all of my plans about the summer and about nearly everything except my big book. You are right in your intuitions about the office and the ranch. There is nothing to do but to sit it out and that I will do, but meanwhile, if I possibly can, I will get the ranch to fall back into. As to the immediate future, I don't know. I may do a picture of the life of Emiliano Zapata if I can find someone to do it honestly. The great danger of Zanuck is that he writes and he can't but he thinks he can. I don't mean Zanuck, of course, I mean Selznick. They all sound alike. But Zanuck did a good picture for me in the Grapes of Wrath and Milestone did a good one in both the Mice and Men and the Red Pony. The last has not been released. The Pearl is a pretty good picture but I could not protect its pace. It is a little slow. I will send you a copy of the book in the next day or so. It has line drawings by Orozco. Many people do not like them but I do and it is the only book he has ever consented to illustrate and that to me is a very great compliment.

I thought for a day or so that I would run to Sweden to lick my wound and that might be a good thing too but that wouldn't be good for you and in the second place I have too much to do. There are certain responsibilities here that I can't shake off.

I haven't asked about your girl because I thought you did not want to talk about her. I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent. Many animals from deer to dogs have no association between the male and the female except in the rutting season or the heat of the female. In this way they may be very biologically wise because the warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.

One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything. That was Ed Ricketts' discovery and he practiced it. He did not pay too much for a clean floor or for family or for luxuries which did not give him a really luxurious feeling. Many people disapproved of this and envied him at the same time. I among them because I am paying much too much for everything. You remember the people who bought real gold watches at country fairs and found that they were not only not gold but had no works either. This is quite a common thing in all directions.

Letters from me turn into long things. The book will be written. I have to get over a number of shocks but it will be written all right and good or bad at that. I have had the death feeling very strongly for some time now as you know but maybe this was it. I am capable sometimes of horrifying clairvoyances. They come out of the air. My mother had the second sight and so has one of my sisters, and I seem to have it a little. But I don't have the death feeling now. I know that my book has to be written, and for many reasons.