Steinbeck (5 page)

You surely remember the hymn with its refrain at the end of each invocation “Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice?” Don't you think that is a good title? I am quite enthusiastic about it.

Carol is a good influence on my work. I am putting five hours every day on the rewriting of this one and in the evenings I have started another [
Dissonant Symphony
]. I have the time and the energy and it gives me pleasure to work, and now I do not seem to have to fight as much reluctance to work as I used to have. The start comes much easier. The new book is just a series of short stories or sketches loosely and foolishly tied together. There are a number of little things I have wanted to write for a long time, some of them ridiculous and some of them more serious, and so I am putting them in a ridiculous fabric. It is not the series in Salinas at all. I shall not do that yet. I am too vindictive and harsh on my own people. In a few years I may have outgrown that.

The dog is growing like a weed. He is three times as big as he was when we got him. You can see him grow from day to day. It has been quite cold here for the last few days with a good deal of rain and wind. But we have a big fire place in the house and the hill side behind us is covered with dead wood so we do not suffer. Indeed we enjoy it. You know, we really do not live in a city at all. We are out on a wooded and very sparsely-settled hill side. In three minutes you can climb to the top of the hill and be above everything and away from everything. It is much better than living in a city.

Are you working, and if so on what? It must be wet as hell up there now. You have told me things about the rainy season up there and it seems to be mostly floods. Carol and I thought of taking a run up to Salinas but we got a plumbing bill for about thirty dollars and a stop was put to that.

Duke is well and Maryon [Sheffield's second wife] has been slightly unwell but has recovered.

Let me know how you are and what you are working on.

Sincerely
John

Eagle Rock
[1930]

Dear Ted:

Herewith enclosed is the ms. [
To An Unknown God]
which has been taking up so much time in the last year and a half. I know that it will not seem worth the effort. I shall insure it heavily. Please let me hear from you immediately you receive it for I shall be anxious. There is a carbon but it is on inferior paper and is only held for a safeguard in case this is lost.

If McBride should decide to take this tell them that I want a short foreword in which some mention of Toby Street should be made. I shall write that later. He has decided that he didn't do as much on this as he at first thought he did. But such a foreword is really necessary. On the other book I asked for a dedication and they paid no attention. If the foreword is refused they can go to hell.

Sincerely
john

Eagle Rock
May 28, 1930

Dear Ted:

Your letter was received this morning. I was very glad to hear of the advance in your legal prestige, for it must be very definitely that. It should raise your standing in the firm too if what you told me when you were out here is still true.

Your news of McBrides came as a final touch to a week of disaster, a series of small and tragic incidents leading up to the death of our dog Bruga who died in convulsions which seemed to be the result of poison. The rejection was nothing as compared to that. I wish you had been a bit more full about it though. What reason did they give for rejection if any? Really the rejection is a relief. I think McBride handled the last one as badly as it could well have been handled. A timid half-hearted advertising campaign which aimed at the wrong people by misdescribing the book, slowness, bad taste in jacket and blurb. Reviewers, after reading that it was an adventure story said, quite truly, that it was a hell of a bad adventure story. It was worse than that. It wasn't an adventure story at all. Am I still held by that clause in the contract, to submit a third ms. to McBride, because I think I should attempt to break it if I were. I am not discouraged at all. Rather am I heartened. The Unknown God remains a pretty fair book and a very interesting book.

Aren't you rather sick of handling this stuff? You can turn it over to an agent any time you wish. When Day rejects it, I should like it to be submitted to Farrar and Rinehart. Miss Mirrielees of Stanford is a friend of Farrar and she recommended the firm to me very highly. Also Carl Wilhelmson who is here with us now, advises me to give them a try.

I don't think that John Day will accept this book. That firm has had such a tough time with beginners lately that they will probably be touchy. However this book has merits and should go fairly well in the right circles.

Carol is well but very much broken up about Bruga. She never had a dog of her own before and she had become horribly fond of the little wretch.

I solicit your attention.

sincerely,
John

Eagle Rock
[1930]

Dear Ted:

I have just happened to think, if this God thing is ever published it will be in imitation of somebody or other. My chief reading has been pretty immaculate. I have re-read Xenophon and Herodotus and Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius and that is about all except Fielding, and yet I suppose I shall be imitating Hemingway whom I have never read. Both of us use the English language which is enough to draw down the wrath. And he started using it first too and I merely copied him.

You ask about the new work. I have been gloating and sorrowing in my freedom. It seemed good to be without the curse of a literary foetus and at the same time I have had a feeling of lostness, much, I imagine, like that felt by an old soldier when he has been discharged from the army and has no one to tell him what time to brush his teeth. Bad as novels are, they do regulate our lives and give us a responsibility. While this book was being written I felt that I was responsible for someone. If I stopped, the characters died. But now it is finished and the words of it are being put down in nice black letters on nice white paper, and the words are spelled correctly and the punctuation is sitting about in proper places, and most of the foolishness has been left on other sheets with blue marks through it.

There is something I have wanted to ask you. Did McBride's sell enough of the Cup to pay for its publication? I know that during the holidays every store sold out completely and I wonder whether that had any effect. I hope they at least made a decent interest on their outlay.

I'm twenty-eight years old now and I must have at least one book a year from now on if I can manage it. The next one will be short as can be and shouldn't take as long as the last. This one
[Dissonant Symphony]
offered too many problems, not only psychological but anthropological, to be done quickly. I hope the thing doesn't read like a case history in an insane asylum. My father was very funny about it or did I tell you this? He was terribly interested from the first but quite disgusted at the end. After my careful work in filling the book with hidden symptoms of paranoia and showing that the disease had such a hold as to be incurable, my father expected Andy to recover and live happily ever after.

Carl Wilhelmson's Wizard's Farm is being published by Rinehart and Farrar this summer. I am very anxious to see it. It is a very good book. I think you saw parts of it when you were out here. I am over at the Sheffields' house using their typewriter because Carol is plugging away on mine.

jawn

[Eagle Rock]
August 6 [1930]

Dear Ted:

I have received Farrar's rejection of my manuscript. It is terse and to the point. The man makes no bones about his rejection and I like that. But now that I have it, I do not know what to do next. I know nothing whatever about the market.

Aren't you getting sick of trundling this white elephant around? It is discouraging, isn't it? Nobody seems to want my work. That doesn't injure me but it must be having a definite effect on you that you are handling a dud. Let me know what you think about it.

Our house here has been sold over our heads and we are going back north to the Grove. In many ways we are glad to leave the south although we are very fond of this house. It is pretty hot down here now and my mind seems more sluggish than it usually is.

affectionately
john

[147-11th Street]
[Pacific Grove]
[Summer 1930]

Dear Ted:

Your letter and Harper's rejection came this morning. From what you say, I hope the book can get a berth with Little Brown, but I have very small hope of its ever finding a home. On the other hand, the very fear publishers have of it might make it go. Sometimes something of that nature happens.

I started to write to you yesterday and then went to the county fair instead to see the polo ponies and jumpers. That is one advantage to Pacific Grove and Monterey and Del Monte that should pull at you. Carol is secretary to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Monterey so I will ask her to send you bushels of literature on the peninsula. As a matter of fact I think it is a grand place. But in the way of business, the place is growing all the time. There are thirteen fish canneries here, and within a couple of years the new breakwater is going in which will bring a greatly increased population because it will become a deep water port and hundreds of big ships will stop here. Look over the literature and tell your wife that it is the most wonderful place in the world. This sounds like a prospectus. As a matter of fact, I am very much emotionally tied up with the whole place. It has a soul which is lacking in the east.

As you know, or do you, I finished a ms. labelled Dissonant Symphony. I sent it to this here now Scribner's contest and have received not the slightest word from it. If I had a name, some firm might bring it out as a little book because it is a nice piece of work. It won't get by Scribner because this contest will doubtless attract the best technicians in the country among which I am by no means numbered.

I'm working on another novel [untitled—later destroyed] which will get some spleen out of my system. Bile that has been sickening me for years.

Now I'm going out to the county fair again to see a polo game. Gawd, I wish you could be here to go with me. The horses are perfectly lovely. The insides of my legs itch for the saddle. I have not ridden for two years.

Affectionately
john

[Pacific Grove]
[Late 1930]

Dear Carl:

And I had about thought you dead from the great silence. I was very glad to get your letter this morning. I have neither seen Midsummer Night nor seen it mentioned but I don't get papers. Someone told me it was being extremely well received by critics. My God still goes without a master. I got a letter from Little Brown saying it wouldn't sell but that they wanted to print it anyway and couldn't this year. That is probably the usual bull.

You are to remember that we can always put you up. I don't imagine you want to live here but it is a good place. I have uncovered an unbelievable store of energy in myself. The raps of the last couple of years, i.e. the failure of the Cup, and the failure of my other things to make any impression, seem to have no effect on my spirit whatever. For that reason, I have high hopes for myself. Of course, the hundred page ms. flopped heavily. Just now I am busy on another one. Eventually I shall be so good that I cannot be ignored. These years are disciplinary for me.

Financially we are in a mess, but “spiritually” we ride the clouds. Nothing matters.

Write soon and say what your plans are.

Affectionately,
John

[Pacific Grove]
[Late 1930]

Dear Carl:

It is a gloomy day; low gray fog and a wet wind contribute to my own gloominess. Whether the fog has escaped from my soul like ectoplasm to envelope the peninsula, or whether it has seeped in through my nose and eyes to create the gloom, I don't know. Last night I read over the first forty pages of my new novel and destroyed them—the most unrelieved rot imaginable. It is very sad.

We went to a party at John Calvin's in Carmel last week. These writers of juveniles are the Jews of literature. They seem to wring the English language, to squeeze pennies out of it. They don't even pretend that there is any dignity in craftsmanship. A conversation with them sounds like an afternoon spent with a pawnbroker. Says John Calvin, “I long ago ceased to take anything I write seriously.” I retorted, “I take
everything
I write seriously; unless one does take his work seriously there is very little chance of its ever being good work.” And the whole company was a little ashamed of me as though I had three legs or was an albino.

I am very anxious to see a copy of Midsummer Night. When I can afford to, I will buy it. It was different with my own first novel. I outgrew that before I finished writing it. I very definitely didn't want you to have it just as I didn't want to have it myself. I shall be glad to arrive at an age where I don't outgrow a piece of work as children outgrow shoes.