Steinbeck (50 page)

As soon as this play opens and either goes or fails I want to start on my long novel—the one I have been practicing for all of my life. It is the Salinas Valley one. I think that if I am not ready to write it now, I never will be. I am nearly fifty and I've been practicing for about 33 years. Don't these times sound incredible? How could I have lived so long? Or you. Why, in years we're verging on old age and I don't feel it at all—I'm just as crazy and randy and lacking in judgment as I ever was.

My boys have made such strides this summer. They are such good boys—really nice. They were in pretty bad shape when I got them but they have responded like nothing you ever saw. Elaine has done a lot of that just by loving them. They have some kind of security now which is all they needed anyway. I hope we have given them enough to tide them over what I suspect is going to be a tough year for them. But I will see them often this winter. Thom is old enough now to telephone me if he needs me. That makes me feel better.

I guess this is the end of this letter. It has been kind of good talking to you. Let me hear if you get this.

So long,

John

[New York]
[September 1950]

 

I wish I could think of some way to help, but I don't know any. You have had this haunting for an incredible long time. And it does seem like a haunting to me—maybe tied up with a guilt feeling. Have you or have you thought of taking it to some good professional? Is it possible that finding its seat might help you to cope with it? I had always thought that a man should handle his own problems and take his own punishments but there are some things you can't handle yourself. I know that now. One might as truly say he could remove his own appendix. It is an outsize ego which refuses help. I know, because I have, or had, such a pride and I know it is wrong and unhealthy now. The moment I had deep driven into me the conviction that I was not complete and whole, I began to feel better. There was a kind of humility even in admitting it that relieved the pressure. I can only tell you about myself because that is all I know.

You have undoubtedly looked at your ___ haunting. Even in the years ago when I met her—you did not love her. But worse than not loving her, oh, much worse—you didn't
like
her. You took no health in your physical connections with her nor any joy. Indeed you practiced sex with her as though it were a sin or even a perversion. I am not making this up. You told me almost exactly this. I'm not interfering —Bo, I'm trying to help, helplessly. There is one other.thing besides love which can tie two people together and that is guilt. There are so many destructive relationships—or perhaps more, than there are creative ones.

I have had two destructive ones. I think I have the other kind now. I am working at this one very hard. All of its potential is good. I know that I contributed a great deal to the destructive qualities of the other two. I must not let that happen again. Also I wonder whether your flypaper soul has caught and held a buzzing guilt. Inspect this closely and see whether you do not love the whip. I know my own tendency that way and so I probe for it in you. I know that I am not content to live my own life and think my own thoughts. I must do it for everyone about me. I must take their pains too, even when they don't have any. This I think is my prime selfish egotism. It is a thing I am fighting. It is actually one of the basic symptoms of infantilism. I have not grown up. And I am only two years short of 50. I have very little time. I would like to be an adult part of that time. There are too many disappointments for a child. The world will not give the party he has designed and so he loves no party.

I know I can't help you with my mutual wanderings unless I can start you to wandering in the dark forest and in this way make you find a path. I seem to see a path for me and that is what I am trying to tell you. I am trying to say that the most precious thing in the world is your self—your individual, lonely self and that you can only find it after you have given it up. I won't say that I have found it but I have seen the signs and felt a little of the light. Am I making any sense to you at all?

As for my boys—I will do the best I can all of the time. I will always be available and I will give them all the love in the world, but if I cannot be God, I will not take that blame either. This I am learning very slowly, Bo, but I am learning. It is the first symptom of adulthood—I cannot be God. My work is very important to me because I am an animal conditioned to this kind of work but it is not very important in the world. I must keep these two separate. I wonder whether I can do that. Can't you see, Bo, that I am trying to help in the only way I can?

Elaine and I will probably be married in December. Her divorce is completed on the ist of December. Then I will have been married three times and do you know, I feel almost virginal about it. I do not feel soiled nor worn out nor calloused. I want to get a great piece of my novel done this winter so that when the spring comes we can go wandering. And I assure you that if it is humanly possible I will see you in the coming year. I think that would be good for both of us. You'll want perhaps to paint me again too for even though the usual ten years has not passed I've grown more than in another ten years.

Let me hear from you as soon as you can. I am worried about you.

Love
John

Ritz Carlton Hotel
Boston
October 6, 1950

Dear Annie Laurie—

I know you will be wanting to know how things are going. I have been working on the second act. The new build and curtain goes in tonight and the opening on Monday. I think we have a tight and dramatic second act now but I'll know more when I see it tonight. They have practically chained me by the leg to the hotel radiator.

It is the pleasantest thing working with these people. Elaine, who has had her share of troubles in the theatre is astonished that anything could be so smooth. R. & H. [Rogers and Hammerstein] say they are very pleased. Business is picking up.

There is one curious thing about this play. Many people may not like it but those who do love it passionately and feel that it is somehow theirs. Katharine Cornell who came to the opening told me that this was one of the very few times she wished she were younger. “If I were 20 or even 10 years younger,” she said, “you couldn't keep me out of it.” Lillian Gish called me and told me not to change a line.

Now it is Saturday. The show was better last night than it has ever been. We are all very much heartened.

All of us are determined to bring in a good show. And now I think we really are going to.

love
John

New York
[October 21, 1950]
[Friday]

Dear Gene:

The critics murdered us. I don't know how long we can stay open but I would not think it would be long. But there you are. I've had it before and I will survive. But a book can wait around and a play can't. We are disappointed but undestroyed.

Now I'll get to work again. One good thing about these things—they keep you from getting out of hand but they promote no humility in me. I'll not change my address.

I wish you could have seen the play because it is a good play. I think it will do well in Europe where people are neither afraid of the theme nor the language. The sterility theme may have had something to do with the violence of the criticism. Our critics are not very fecund. Then, the universal, mildly poetic language seemed to enrage them. Garland [Robert Garland, drama critic of the
World-Telegram
]—never quite balanced—wrote a notice of unmixed gibberish. Simply nuts.

Well—there it is anyway. It can happen to anyone—and does.

John

[New York]
November 28 [1950]

Dear Jack and Max:

I must say, I get impatient with your failure ever to write a line. If one wanted to set down a description of the Wagners, one would say, “They are such and such and they do not write.” That is as much as to say, “They are such and such and they have two right feet.” I must think of it not as a failure or a fixation but simply as a symptom or a diagnostic. Some people write and some don't. Most people have two balls, but there are a few who have one and even fewer who have three.

We are having a very busy time. Elaine and I are going to be married Dec. 28th at Harold Guinzburg's house and then we're taking off for ten days for parts unknown and then coming back. I have a house on 72nd St. East but we will not be able to move into it until Feb. ist. Which will be just about right. It is a beautiful little house and I think we will be very happy and productive there.

I guess it isn't that Elaine gets better all the time but rather that I knowing her better am able to see more and more of her goodnesses. She is the best girl I ever knew.

Those stains at the top are shoe polish. I have been shining some shoes.

I have not written you since my play fell on its face. And it really did. It got the shit kicked out of it. It was a good piece of work and a lot of people are pretty mad at the critics for destroying it. I have thought of this a good deal. Here is a play that I, Elaine, Guthrie McClintic [the director] Oscar Hammerstein, Dick Rodgers [the producers] and many others thought was a good play. And God knows they are people who know their theatre. You would think they would know. It is very easy to blame the critics. They were not at fault.

It was not a good play. It was a hell of a good piece of writing but it lacked the curious thing no one has ever defined which makes a play quite different from everything else in the world. I don't know what that quality is but I know it when I hear it on stage. I guess we have to go back to the cliché “magic of the theatre.” This thing read wonderfully but it just did not play. And furthermore I don't know what would make it play. Doctoring a play that will not play is like gagging a movie. It may make it acceptable but it doesn't make a good movie of it. I had the best possible production, the best direction and sets that would break your heart they were so wonderful. And the producers are the finest people I have ever met. I'm telling you all this so you will see that I am not the least bit angry or upset. In fact I am hard at work on my new novel—the perennial Salinas Valley and this time it is going to get done and it is going to be good. Only amateurs are destroyed by bad notices. And more and more I grow to dislike amateurs and to love professionals. There are so very few of them in the world.

Let's see—what else is news?

I see Gwyn fairly often when I go up to see the boys. She does not look well but has that kind of false gaiety you will remember. Only the boys are my business. Gwyn has never mentioned Elaine, nor asked a single question. And naturally I have never offered any information. But G. was at Guys and
Dolls
opening and she really gave Elaine a going over. And when Gwyn will put on her glasses at an opening, she is really curious.

I had a letter from Gene Solow saying that Max was in A.A. Is this so? I hope it is and that all is happy.

There it is. Our marriage will be Dec. 28th. You might write us a note of hope or good wishes or something even at the sacrifice of your principles. You were really in on the inception of this good thing.

love to you both
John

[New York]
[December 8, 1950]

Dear Clifford:

I saw The Country Girl last night, and was moved by the lines and the thinking and the sweetness. And as a semi-pro I know that the pure theatre can't be learned but I could wish that it might and that I could learn from you. I'll have to go back a few times to pick up subtleties I missed seeing square.

It is wonderful and my God it's good to see a fine clean thing in this musty time. I have just such a sense of triumph. personal triumph, as sometimes comes to me when I hear fine music.

Written with love and admiration.

John

[New York]
December 19, 1950

Dear George:

I am going to get a letter off to you on the front edge of the hysteria which is about to set in. Elaine and I are going to be married on the 28th. Relatives are coming, both hers from Texas and mine from California. Christmas eve I have my boys. I don't know whether you ever saw them, they are wonderful. The whole thing is fun but hectic. It's the tight top curls of a spiral.

I was interested in your remarks about success, because I have thought quite a lot about it off and on. I never had a sense of success. Good notices when the reviewer didn't know what I was talking about gave me a great sense of failure. I have a greater sense of goodness in this recent thing that closed than I have had in years. Book Review Section success is a hollow feeling like that one you get in the stomach when you have the skitters.

Of course I want the new book to be good. I have wanted all of them to be good. But with the others—all of them—I had a personal out. I could say—it is just really practice for “the book.” If I can't do this one, the practice was not worth it. So you see I feel at once stimulated and scared. The terror of starting is invariable but I am more terrified now knowing more about technique than I did. There's a kind of nauseated stimulation about going ashore under fire that is not unlike this feeling. You know you're going to do it and it scares the shit out of you. I remember one night I went ashore from a destroyer in pitch darkness. There wasn't a sound. Before I got in the boat I went to the head to take a pee and my penis had disappeared. It had just retired into my abdominal cavity. I don't know whether this is common or not. Anyway it is a really shivery feeling.