Steinbeck (59 page)

Next week I have to go to a formal dinner being given to me by the French Academy. Don't I get to do the damnedest things?

Love to all,
John

Paris
June 17, 1954

Dear Elizabeth:

The short stories languish. I have been thinking about them a lot, heaven knows.

It seems to me that most writers in America, and I myself among them, have gone almost entirely in the direction of the past. We are interested in setting down and celebrating old times. It is almost as though we wanted to define a past which probably never did exist. The stories of childhood, the stories of the frontier, the novels of one's old aunts, etc. This is fine but there can be enough of it. There are very few American writers, notably writing for the New Yorker, who write about today or even today projected into the future. With something of a shock I realize that I have written about nothing current for a very long time. It has occurred to me that we may be so confused about the present that we avoid it because it is not clear to us. But why should that be a deterrent? If this is a time of confusion, then that should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time. For instance, the effect on young people of the McCarthy hearings is going to be with them all their lives. The responses to this spectacle, whatever they are, are going to be one of the keys to our future attitudes toward everything. If such things are not written as fiction, a whole pattern of present-day thinking and feeling will be lost. We will have the records but not what people felt about them. Do you have any thinking about this? I really wonder whether I am able to write such things. Might be very good to try.

Love,
jn

Paris
July 24, 1954

Dear Gwyn:

I had your letter this morning and hasten to answer so you will get this before you go away. I think it would be ridiculous, given the chance, that the boys should not see some of Italy before they go back. While they are looking, you don't think they are getting anything and then it comes out later that they got a very great deal. So of course I will send them down to Rome.

I don't think there will be any difficulty here about travelling alone, and besides the kids are getting really good about doing things. I make a practice of letting them go out in the neighborhood alone and they are very careful about streets. It gives them a great sense of responsibility and besides they are learning a lot both of French and of Paris that way. Cat has made friends in the park right around the corner from us, both American and French kids. Yesterday he strolled down to the American Embassy which is two blocks away, walked up to the Marine Guard and said, “I hope you don't mind my saying so, but haven't you got very thick glasses?” And the guard said, “Hell, son, I got to see some way.”

We are getting a boat on the Seine for Thom's birthday and for his main present I got in Munich a racing car which runs with a real diesel engine. You may find that this he will want to carry in his hand but I can't help that. It is a wonderful thing. No one could resist it, and of course he doesn't know about it yet. Don't you think as long as you are going to see them within a very few weeks of Thom's birthday, that a letter telling them of your plans for them and the statement that you will have a kind of second birthday for both of them in Rome, might not be the answer? Then they would have that to look forward to.

Thom has dropped some stomach, but not as much as he should. They are swimming every day and walking for miles and that probably has as much to do with it as anything else. They are fine boys and very sweet and I think the summer has been very good for them.

I do hope you will get at Thom's block against reading and writing because that is what it is, a kind of a panic. He has told me that he knows things, which he does, but that he simply cannot write them down. When it is insisted that he write answers he goes into a blue funk, but he is quite capable of reciting in great detail anything he has been told. If the block could be removed, he would be ahead of his age, not behind.

If you want them earlier than we had thought, that will be all right too. I wish I could have seen Paris and Rome at their ages.

So long, and let me hear from you.

John

Paris
July 24, 1954

Dear Gadg:

A letter from Annie Laurie this morning with wonderful things she has heard about the film
[East of Eden].
I am eager to see it and I probably won't until we go home in December. But it is good to have reports. Our summer is going fast and I am conscious of a stirring of restlessness. I shall not be averse to moving on when the time comes. The small short pieces I have been doing for Figaro are all right but not really satisfying. They must of necessity be so guided at the French that perhaps they suffer from a special, almost precious quality. Here we have a whole nation with its feelings hurt and doubly touchy because of it. In conquered Germany you find the treacherous slavishness that will knife you when it can. But France is hurt in its pride, hurt in its whole conception of itself. I have said some pretty brutal things in the pieces but I have coated them so that they could be received at all. And I am getting just a little tired of them. Treading lightly has never been one of my gifts. I want to build a life again and hell catch the hindmost. I am not a good diplomat. The role wears thin with me. We will have fun the rest of the time but I think right at this moment, I am a little homesick for 206.

Waverly and her friend set out on their trip to Greece in a rented car. The boys have about six more weeks with us before they have to go.

It's along in the summer now so that we begin to think Greeceward. Are you so thinking? We haven't really made any plans yet. In fact we are kind of holding up ours so they can match yours if that is possible.

I know how busy you are but I do like to hear from you and your Moll. Would you care to dig a secret tunnel between the houses? We went to a chateau the other night that has four or five of them. And we think we live in dangerous times.

So long
John

[Paris]
July 25, 1954

Dear Dorothy:

I have an invention which I would like to submit for your consideration, while your husband is undertaking his various artistic assignments (surely a desirable practice but not a money maker as we more practical people understand it).

There should be several approaches to an invention. First, is it needed, second, can you make people believe it is needed, third, are replacements needed? I believe that my invention fulfills nearly all of these.

Many millions of women wash out their underwear and stockings every night usually in the wash basin of the bath rooms. A goodly number of them leave the clothing soaking in the basin so that a male getting up a little earlier, has to wash his razor in the bath tub. There is nothing glamourous about washing stockings, panties and bras.

One night haying nothing to do, I put a couple of pairs of my own nylon socks in a fruit jar with one third water and a little detergent, replaced the cap and shook the jar about twenty times like a cocktail shaker. It worked very well. I then added four marbles to the thing and it worked doubly well because the marbles did the rubbing thing and greatly speeded up the process. This is the whole principle but a fruit jar is much too simple.

I have considered a plastic jar made like an hour glass with a screw cap on one of the ends, wide mouth for the introduction of the intimate garments. The narrow part of the hour glass to serve as a handle for the whole thing and also to cause the water and soap to cause a minor tornado when the whole is shaken. Instead of marbles the activators should be round balls of some semi-hard wood like beech wood, so smooth that they could not injure fabric and not heavy enough to crush. The lower part of the thing is filled with warm water, and on top of this a tiny envelope of detergent rather beautifully perfumed should be added. The top is then put on and the whole thing shaken say thirty times. This will completely wash ordinarily dirty things. If they are more than ordinarily dirty the clothing may be left in the container over night, in the morning a little more shaking and rinsed in the basin.

The containers should be made of a plastic in the colors to match various bath rooms, pink, yellow, blue, green or black. The packets of soap should be distinctive, (just ordinary soap or detergent but perfumed, sandalwood, lavender, etc.). The packets should not be expensive but should be exactly the proper amount so that one envelope washed one set of clothing. This is the replacement so necessary to any paying invention. The advertising should say that you keep your hands out of soap and keep your husband from blowing his brains out. The container itself should be rather handsome so that it would be one more of those bits of clutter which we love so well.

It is that simple and darn me if I don't think it would work. A little advertising magic about the gentle swirling of water, the caressing of the soap and the clean soapless hands. It should have a gay name like the socktail shaker and the indication that the thirty shakes of the thing reduced weight and built up the bust while with the other hand one washed ones teeth.

Please give my hearty regards to Richard and Oscar and all others there. And we will see you just before Christmas.

Yours in invention
John

 

P.S. If you don't believe my invention, put some stockings in a fruit jar and try it.

Paris
August 20, 1954

Dear Marcia and Sol:

I am writing you a joint letter because there are a number of things I want to say and to ask in a number of fields, financial, spiritual, aesthetic, economic, pragmatic and you will probably add psychotic.

A letter from Sol recently said I only had forty-five hundred dollars in the bank, left out of seventy thousand that had come in this year so far. I do not think it is very good policy to scare me. I have not spent any money I could have avoided spending except possibly for the car. I could have bought one of those second hand dogs which do not work. Anyway, I went into a tailspin and for a week was so concerned with my brokeness and with the seeming impossibility of ever pulling out that I was incapable of working. In other words, the time taken out for worry about my shaky financial status took the time and more than the effort of three short stories or one long one. I imagine this could be estimated in money from previous performance.

At the end of the tailspin I pulled myself out with the following self-indulgence. OK, I had 4,500 dollars in the bank. But I have money coming in regularly. I have 24% of the movie East of Eden just finished. I have a best-selling novel which is doing very well and a percentage in the musical which will be made of it. I am not in debt except for the mortgage on the house which I am told is simple good business. I do have to pay alimony and that apparently is a permanent situation but it comes off the top before taxes.

In other words, in resources and futures I am not only in better shape than I have ever been but in better shape than anyone I know, but if I can be made to worry enough the work that is at the source of this income can be dried up at the source.

Now I can skimp worriedly along.

 

I am getting to feel guilty if I even consider buying a pair of pliers. My glasses are mended with wire because I don't want to spend the money for new frames. I can't control the kitchen or the number of people who eat here. Do you realize that this is all a bunch of bloody nonsense? I have a life expectancy which is dwindling and I'm not having any fun. I am living in the most beautiful city in the world working my ass off. For what? For whom? And when I'm not working it off I'm worrying it off.

So I can't get insurance. My insurability is not going to be improved by worry. I have to make up my mind whether I am going to be a bookkeeper or a writer. I don't think I can be both and if I am not a writer there will not be anything to keep books about. I get a to hell with it feeling pretty often now. The more money I make the more trouble I'm in. I actually feel guilty to ask for four hundred dollars to buy a magnificent painting because I can't see any way to deduct it. I must kill this growing fixation pretty quickly or I'm not going to be around very long.

Since I am about to set out on traveling and since Elaine will have to close this house, I think the next draft should be sizable. I am gathering almost inexhaustible material and I can't buy it with peanuts.

Every trip may be the last and I'm not going to spend the rest of my life to make my heirs happy. There has never been in the history of the world enough money to make heirs happy.

I do not mean this letter to be a charge of anything or an attack on anything. I just want to let you know that I have to get rid of an attitude which is poisoning me and killing off not only my work but my desire to work.

Now that is as ill-tempered a letter as I ever remember writing but it is only aimed at a state of mind I must get rid of.

Love to all there and please don't take this too much to heart. But I also hope you will know how serious I am about it.

John

Paris
August 26, 1954

Dear Dorothy:

Thank you for your letter about inventions. Maybe I'd better stick to my last or even my first. My grandfather Sam Hamilton was always inventing things and patenting them. Mother claimed he kept the family broke with fees to patent lawyers. When he got a good one it was stolen so fast it whistled. And then he kept us broke with an infringement suit which he lost through running out of money.