Steinbeck (61 page)

Sag Harbor
July 5, 1955

Dear Toby:

This afternoon, we are taking our boat off Montauk Point to fish for blues. They are fine fighting fish and wonderful to eat and they are said to be running well right now. It is about a forty-five minute run in our boat which will do thirty-four miles an hour if it has to. It is a sea skiff, lapstrake, twenty feet long and eight feet of beam and a hundred horse power Grey marine engine. I could cross the Atlantic in her if I could carry the gasoline. Has a convertible top like a car so that you can put it up when green water comes over the bow. Also it only draws eighteen inches so we can take it into little coves and very near the shore if only we watch the charts for rocks and depth. This is fabulous boating country and fishing country too.

We bring them home alive and cook them while they are still kicking and are they delicious. My fear of starvation disappears when I am near the ocean. I figure I can always catch my dinner. And the Atlantic is very much richer in varieties than the Pacific. Lobsters, clams, crabs, oysters and many kinds of fish. I really love it out here. Am going to winterize this little house so I can come up when it is cold. My little harbor freezes over and then you fish through the ice. The house needs double walls and an oil furnace but I'll do a lot of it myself.

I am actually losing some stomach working around here and haven't felt so good in years. Maybe I shall come to a healthy old age rather than a sickly one. Best of all, maybe I shall not come to any old age at all. I remember how Ed Ricketts used to be haunted by thought of age. He was neurotic about it. I've often thought that if he hadn't been killed he would have had a miserable time of it because I do not think he could have accepted change. In himself, I mean.

You know, Toby, I notice something in you that is also true in me. You are sharply critical of any theatre you see. I am also when I don't see much of it but I become much kinder and accepting when I see a lot of it and I become kindest when I have a show myself. Have you ever gone through the putting of a show together with all the work and hope and sweat? I guess that is why professionals are the best audience in the world. Oscar Hammerstein says that when you buy a ticket to the theatre you have more or less contracted to go along with it and furnish your part to the general illusion. God knows it is a hard enough medium and when it clicks it is just great.

The wind is coming up. We're going to have a really rough trip this afternoon and that is when I really love my boat. It is such a good sea boat, just kind of loves itself into the waves instead of fighting them. I guess it is the same hull the Vikings used and they got around.

That's all for this time. I have to write some letters of refusal. I get asked to speak more damned places and word doesn't seem to get around that I don't ever speak any place about anything.

love to you
and all of yours
John

New York
[1955]

Dear Molly and Gadg:

We think you are writing way beyond the call of duty. The picture with the beard came in this morning—formidable. Do you think you will keep it when you get back? The trip sounds fine. I do hope you won't let any business interfere with your trip. I am taking care of all that for you. I have signed you up to direct two plays and I hope you like them. Meanwhile, I am casting and my sincere wish is that you will approve of the people I am getting. I have agreed for you to go into rehearsal on the first one, Dog Island, June 18th. You should be ready for the second one, Blindness Alley, early in September. Do you want me to take on anything else for you after that?

I've made a few changes in your office which I know will please you. I wallpapered it with a gay, flowered pattern and painted the ceiling black. Then I took out all those ugly wood cabinets and put in two breakfronts of Chinese chippendale. It makes the office seem kind of airy. I removed that curved couch which was giving me round shoulders and put in a double bed which speeded up casting immensely. Along the front (Times Square side) I put a row of windowboxes with red geraniums. It brightens the whole neighborhood.

Marie [Kazan's secretary] has made a great comeback. She was married last week and about time. I'm going to be godfather. She married a real nice boy in the artificial limb trade and she seems to be very happy. He gave her a sterling silver kneecap for a wedding present. In your absence I exercise the droit de seigneur. I hate to see beautiful old customs lapse.

Well, old pal, as you can see I'm standing in for you. Don't worry about a thing. The crack down the front of your house is not serious at all. Molly's mother just got excited about it the way women will, but I showed her how to stuff it with newspapers and practically no draft gets in now.

We both send love. This may be the last time I can catch you. Don't take any wooden drachma.

John

Sag Harbor
July 8, 1955

Dear Way:

This letter is just as private as you want to make it. You can do with it what you want including what you just thought of.

Everyone in the world is going to give you advice. That is not my intention. I always suspect advice because the advisor is usually the least equipped person to give it, i.e. child counsellors who have no children, marriage helpers who have never married.

I have a feeling, although this association is pretty damned sexy that it is also pretty carefully thought out. Many times when it was considered that you were romantically stunned, you were just sleepy.

I would like to ask you certain questions and I don't want to know the answers. They are things drawn out of my own messy past. If I had known about them then I probably would have done exactly the things I did, and yet the answers to them bore little disasters.

You know of course without my telling you that no two people can ever like each other all the time under all circumstances. Also, it is equally true that if you know everything that is going to happen to you, you wouldn't get married at all.

I always thought that the marriage was between me and the girl I was marrying and that it isn't anybody's business. And this was true except that anybody makes it his business. You think you are going in as an individual, cut off and free and gradually you find that you have a trail on you like a comet and that the other party has too. You don't lose these trails. There is no way to. I think the service says, “Forsaking all others—” but no one forsakes all others. And doesn't the Old Testament say that first and final loyalty is to wife and husband? That also is not possible. Families have a way of sticking around and background does too.

My questions are simple and terrible. They are not personal and they don't have to do with Jim. Therefore you can show this letter to him if you wish or if you think well.

In the event that you should in the future find that keeping house and participating in Jim's work were not enough for you, would you be capable of taking up some other work or enthusiasm and would Jim tolerate this? There can be much more violent jealousies of interests than of people.

I hope you won't take this letter as one of disparagement. I think this marriage has as good a chance as any of succeeding and a much better chance than most. Jim is a man and that is a very great thing, to be a man, and it is a handy thing in a marriage.

There is only one thing about the wedding I could wish and that is a completely selfish one having nothing to do with your marriage but only with my own participation in the social end of it. I wish you could put it off until Christmas or a little after. We have this show with which I have to be constantly. Elaine naturally will want to be with me and it would limit our participation.

You don't have to answer this, by the way.

love john

New York
September 23 [1955]

Dear Toby:

Summer is over and I am always glad. Now the cool weather is coming and that's my favorite time. We love our little place on Long Island but I love New York too. The show [
Pipe Dream
] is in rehearsal and Lord! it's a good show. Fine score and book and wonderful direction and cast. I was standing with Oscar Hammerstein yesterday when the lines about the Webster F. Street Lay Away Plan came up. And it occurs to me that I have never asked your permission to use your name. Do you mind? It's a lovely line and I would hate to drop it and besides it kind of ties you in with the show. You know in South Pacific Mary Martin took the name of her oldest friend. In the show within a show she says—“The dialogue was written by Bessie May Sue Ella Yeager.” Well Bessie May Sue Ella Yeager used to come up from Texas every three months just to hear Mary Martin declaim her name. I hope you will let me keep your name in this show as a kind of good luck piece.

This is just a note because I am working on a book in the morning and going to rehearsals in the afternoon and it's a pretty full life. But please give me permission to use your name. You won't be ashamed I'm sure.

love to all there—
John

New York
September 23, 1955

Dear Dook:

I'm told it is an ugly business to answer a letter right away. But if I don't, it is likely I never will. Yours came this morning and I do the ugly thing about it.

Your remarks about elastic time caught me with the same thought after a fairly quiet summer. We have a little shack on the sea out on the tip of Long Island at Sag Harbor. It's a whaling town or was and we have a small boat and lots of oak trees and the phone never rings. We run there whenever we need a rest—no neighbors, and fish and clams and crabs and mussels right at the door step. I just got it this spring and I love it. Anyway the summer zipped by. But everything zips by. The pressures come and go. Or maybe it is that sometimes they get me and sometimes they don't. Things don't change really. I am just as restless as ever. And I'm just as scared of my own craft—and attracted to it also. You say you don't know what I'm getting at. Neither do I. I just write what comes into my head and maybe sometimes it's lousy but it's the only thing I know to do. I write lots—perhaps too much but I never had any sense of proportion. I eat too much and drink too much and screw too much also. It's all part of the same pattern and I don't question it any more.