Steinbeck (52 page)

I have purposely put off asking about Zapata because I know you will tell me when you can.

Love to all of you and we miss you very much.

Nantucket
[August 1951]

Dear Pat and Dorothy—

I want to say that I am sorry for my beastly disposition. I guess I threw a pall over your nice dinner last night and I didn't want nor intend to. My nerve ends were spurting hot little flames and sounds crashed on me like waves. It had nothing to do with anyone but me. And I have not Elaine's strength to cover and dissemble such a feeling. I was in a nervous collapse. I'm sorry if I made you sad. Last night all night I had it and today it is better. Please believe that it had absolutely nothing to do with anything but my own insides. It is some inner confusion that comes on me sometimes with a frightening intensity. Forgive it please.

It has been good to have you here. I'm glad you have got to know the boys and they surely share our love for you both. I hope, in spite of my ugliness that you had some joy and rest here. It was a joy to have you.

A book is so long. It takes so much. It must be desperately hard to live with and I do not envy Elaine having to do it. And when it boils over, as it did last night it must be pure hell. I'm all right today. And I have no explanation.

Thank you both for everything, the lovely presents and Thom's birthday and all.

Love to you both and happy landing.

John

Nantucket
August 16, 1951
Thursday

Dear Elizabeth:

The birthday is over and it was a humdinger and I think Elaine was happy with it. I am going to leave birthday telling to Elaine. I worked into Sunday and finished Book III so that now I have just one more book in this novel. And I start it after a rest and a change which is good because it is different from the rest, in time, pace, and everything. I am still not bored with it. And I should be by this time. But it is, if anything, more alive to me than ever. And I feel a hugeness in my chest out of which I hope pigmies do not come. The last book will be between 70 and 80 thousand words or roughly two more months of work if I am lucky. So it is still on schedule even though I have tried to keep schedule out of it. We have just one more month here. It looks now as though Way might be able to come, which will make us very happy. And I'll have to get ready for a whole new kind of life when this book is done (if I am to live at all) because with East of Eden one part of my life is finished. But even that is fun to contemplate. It is a very big book, Elizabeth. I don't know whether or not it is very good but I am sure it is the very best and purest of which I am capable, given my faults and virtues and training. It is going down on paper and there are no complaints or excuses. It's all I have ever learned and it is really good to be out on this gigantic limb. I can't say—“I might have done better—” because I mightn't. And I'm glad.

I'll be ready to go home in a month. I miss you and I like our new house. The boys won't want to go. They have had a fine summer. Isn't it odd that I speak inside myself as though it were over. In a way it is I guess—two thirds of it. The last 10 days have been muggy and thick and foggy, old timers say the longest stretch of it in 10 years. We'll be glad of a change to storm and cold and wind.

Well, I guess that's all. I have many things to discuss with you but they aren't immediate and they are better answered in our living room with the first fires of fall burning. And that won't be long.

Love to you all,
John

[Nantucket]
[September II, 1951]
Tuesday

Dear Pat:

I am so punchy that I forget whether I have written to you or not. I'm saturated with story and with many outside matters. The really deep tiredness is creeping up but I'm pretty sure I have two or three months more of this kind of energy. And it is a very curious kind of energy. I have never used so much of it for so long a period. I have worked more wordage for shorter periods. I have been much longer on this for instance even now than I was on the Grapes of Wrath. I am fascinated with this week's work. As you are becoming aware, I hope—Cal is my baby. He is the Everyman, the battle ground between good and evil, the most human of all, the sorry man. In that battle the survivor is both. I have been trying to think how long it is since a book about morality has been written. That is not to say that all books are not about morality but I mean openly.

Now the summer closes. We will get up at four in the morning on Sunday and tool our way homeward. And we have had our triumphs this summer in addition to the work. Thom has taken great jumps. Elaine almost despaired a number of times but at the end of the summer Thom can read and do his arithmetic. He will start ahead of his class, and more important, he knows he can start. The block is gone. Catbird is the one who might have the trouble. He is so gifted in charm and cleverness and beauty that he will not have to go through the fire for a long time if ever. Poor Thom has it early and will have it long. But he will be fired and there is no fire without heat. We have done well this summer if you were to make a score. I do not feel ashamed. Now if I can only get a good book too, it would be fine.

Your letter came, Pat, and we'll have to take a rain check on that dinner Monday night. The boys won't be with us and we'll be so tired after moving and unpacking that we will probably fall into bed. Besides, I am going to try to get back to work on Tuesday so that I will lose only one day. The book isn't done, remember. I wish the move were over. I kind of dread it.

Anyway—we'll probably talk to you when we get in.

John

[New York]
[September 1951]
Thursday

Dearest A. L.:

I can't tell you how happy my visit with you made me. You not only looked well physically but there was something else even more important. The old fighting flash was in the eyes again and I came away on clouds. As you must know, I have been pretty despondent about you and then yesterday everything seemed to point with a very steady finger at a long fine life.

When I came home Elaine said, “I haven't seen you look so happy for a long time.” We had a drink to you and last night I really slept for the first time in a long time and this morning I awakened with gladness. Now to work. Bless you.

John

New York
November 16 [1951]

Dear Bo:

I finished my book a week ago. Just short of a thousand pages—965,000 words. Much the longest and surely the most difficult work I have ever done. Now I am correcting and rewriting and that will take until Christmas.

Anyway it is done and not quite all a relief. I miss it. You can't live that intimately with anything and not miss it when it dies. Such a thing must be a great strain on a woman but Elaine has stood by wonderfully. What a good wife.

Bo, I am sorry your girl and a new life did not work out and I am particularly sorry because I have such a good life now. Do you know—I will be 50 on my next birthday, isn't that amazing? I don't feel fifty. I've my contemporaries—many of them and they are old and disappointed men. I don't think I feel older than I did 20 or 30 years ago. In many ways I feel younger. The strain is off mostly. But the figures are there and at 50 one's life expectancy has dwindled considerably. So I am going to have as much fun and excitement as it is possible for me to have with the time that remains to me. In my book just finished I have put all the things I have wanted to write all my life. This is “the book.” If it is not good I have fooled myself all the time. I don't mean I will stop but this is a definite milestone and I feel released. Having done this I can do anything I want. Always I had this book waiting to be written. But understand please that this is only half the book. There will be another one equally long. This one runs from 1863 to 1918 The next will take the time from 1918 to the present. But I won't start it for a year or perhaps two years.

I hope you will write to me soon and let me know how it is with you. I want to hear.

John

[New York]
[November 26, 1951]

Dear John:

Don't let these neat, dry, cautious, stupid untalented leeches on the arts get you down. It's a hell of a good book. I wrote a letter to the Times differing with Miss Janeway.

They just won't forgive originality and you'll have to get used to that. Have you found too that the same people who kicked the hell out of Appointment when it came out—now want you to write it over and over?

Hoch der Christmas

love to Belle,
John

 

I've got one hell of a rewrite job to do.

[New York]
December 1951
[Christmas]

Dear Pat—

Do you remember you came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said—

“Why don't you make something for me?”

I asked you what you wanted and you said—

“A box.”

“What for?”

“To put things in.”

“What things?”

“Whatever you have,” you said.

Well here's your box. Nearly everything I have is in it and it is not full. All pain and excitement is in it and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.

And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I bear for you.

And still the box is not full.

John

[New York]
January 21 [1952]

Dear Bo:

I was getting worried to the point of cabling when your letter came—the usual thoughts of illness and disaster. We do inspire ourselves with danger. I was glad to get your letter and to be reassured that it was the windows not the winds.

The year moves frantically. I am working against time rewriting my lor g book. I have one third yet to go—and the hardest part. We have a ship—due to sail between Feb. 25 and March ist. She will be 31 days to Alexandria, if that is still terra grata. I have never been in Egypt. I am learning Shaw's lines to howl at the Sphinx—“Hail Sphinx, I have seen many sphinxes but
no
other Caesar—.” It should be a ridiculous spectacle. You should be there to see—and laugh. I shall peer into tombs not the most pleasant of which is Farouk. We shall be known as the new Hyksos and I may even build a small duplex pyramid which when ruinous and that won't take long, will be known to the Arabs as Selim al Bowery, or Steinbeck's Folly, a veritable hunting box for Ka birds in season. The Egyptians haven't been allowed to have a war of their own since Alexander's chief of staff—Ptolemy McArthur, took up squatter's rights. They are making the most of their new toy war with Israel. This means we have to go to Cyprus to get visa-ed to Israel. In Israel we will turn over the stones of our culture or perhaps some of the prophecies of our future. Then probably back to Greece where we will raise again the Eleusinean chant on the plain of Marathon. In Rome we'll buy a car and move slowly up the continent like a new Ice Age. You will know of our coming by plague and flood and famine and civil commotion. I have the distinct advantage of speaking no language, fluently and loudly. We have no plans after leaving Rome except to see everything. Simple tastes! It's an idiot's voyage and I plan to enjoy it thoroughly. The world has been coming to an end for too many thousands of years for me to hope to be in on the death kick. And I remember my first story of doom. We read it in the first grade. It went: