Steinbeck (76 page)

Discove Cottage
April 8, 1959

Dear Bob:

I wish you joy of these noble books and I can think of no more precious gift for a writer. For here is the whole structure and life story of the most glorious of languages—sensi—tive, subtle, strong, catholic, intuitive and formidable. It can truly roar like a lion or sing sweetly like a dove.

These books make me feel very humble against the giant architecture of our speech, astonished at its size and multiplicity, but, looking closer, the life story of each word makes me also feel that it is close and dear, for they are my family and yours. And words are truly people, magic people, having birth, growth and destiny.

May you, in your writing life, add to this glittering tower which was made, added to and kept alive by people like you and me. Good luck and looting and with thanks to you and Jo

from
John Steinbeck

Discove Cottage
[1959]

Dear Gadg:

Don't think you were the only immigrant. I was a stranger in Salinas and always felt alien. I didn't want, nor think, nor admire the things my people did and when I tried to be like them, I was simply ridiculous. As for being rejected by women—I was also, by some. And like you I was accepted by many, maybe more than my share, good women, lovely women and girls. I would be graceless not to remember them because some others did not find me acceptable. Why, that would be like asking that everyone like my books.

You say that you feel guilty about Chris [Kazan's son]. Don't let yourself, or call it by its name. I know there is a strangeness here—as though you two were not related and were trying to make it so. My boys and I are deeply related—so closely that it is probable we will not like each other. If you are able to build a guilt about Chris—you can be sure that there is something you don't understand or don't want to understand. Or you might be seeking to chain him to you with your guilt. Set him free! Only then can you be friends. Jesus, the cruelties we inflict in the name of virtue.

I have a letter from Elizabeth Otis after seeing Sweet Bird of Youth. She says—“I wonder what it would be like to live in Mr. Williams' mind. I don't think I would like it.”

Well, a writer sets down what has impressed him deeply, usually at an early age. If heroism impressed him that's what he writes about and if frustration and degradation, that is it.

Maybe somewhere in this is my interest and joy in what I am doing. There is nothing nastier in literature than Arthur's murder of the children because one of them might grow up to kill him. Tennessee and many others would stop there saying—“There—that's the way it is.” And they would never get through to the heart breaking glory when Arthur meets his fate and fights it and accepts it all in one.

The values have got crossed up. Courtesy is confused with weakness and emotion with sentimentality. We want to be tough guys and forget that the toughest guys were always the wholest guys. Achilles wept like a baby over Patroclus and Hector's guts turned to water with fear. But cleverness has taken the place of feeling, and cleverness is nearly always an evasion.

God almighty, I'm reading you a bloody lecture. But all right, so I am. I will finish it by saying that you should resist letting self-analysis become self-abuse. Perhaps you did get a sense of power from directing but you also put love and loyalty into it. I just don't believe it is that simple and neither do you. My own analysis would be that you are fighting the symptoms of your own greatness out of a curious shyness. And I would strongly suggest that you let yourself go. Stop building the work of limited men where there are giants to play with. I would like to see you direct Medea or The Trojan Women, or turn loose a real Othello. You claim not to like Shakespeare and I think that isn't true. It would be like hating the moon. If you want grandeur of disillusion, do Timon of Athens. I've never seen it produced. I am having a time because I am working with a great man and perhaps catching some of it. That is just as infectious as littleness.

The spring is lovely here and exciting as though it had never happened before.

What am I trying to say? I don't know. Maybe—“Come off it!” Open up and enjoy. Remember those girls who accepted you. Take one whole day as a gift rather than a sentence. But first you will have to be alone.

I hope to be able to go back and still keep something of what I have here.

That's all.

with love
John

Discove Cottage
May 5, 1959
Tuesday

Dear Elizabeth:

The weekly Progress Report and News Letter.

We had a profound shock this week from which it will take some time to recover. Catbird's marks came in from school. He had a I in math—that is good and he passed in everything else. It's not nice of him to put us through this—not friendly. He hasn't ever passed anything in his life—but a I in math is going too far. I have written him a bitter letter about this.

Mary [his sister, who was visiting] and Elaine continue to cover the countryside and for the first time since the War and Bill's death, Mary seems to be coming alive. I think this is largely Elaine's doing and it is wonderful to see. She is going to London tomorrow a new person. I do hope it survives.

Waverly wrote that she was flying to Mexico last weekend to get her divorce.

The last part of the Merlin should be in type today and I will get a carbon off to you right away by air mail. I shall be on needles to know what you think of it.

Now it is afternoon and the Merlin typescript has come back. I think I will go to Bruton a little later and mail it to you because I fervently want you to see it. Am I off on the wrong foot? It seems right to me but I can be very wrong. There must be some reason why no one has done this properly. Maybe it is because it can't be done—but I don't really believe that. I think the reason is that they tried to make it costume instead of universal. Well, anyway, you will know. And good or bad, I have a feeling that the prose is good.

The Post Office is going to go mad when I send it air mail. They think we are terribly extravagant anyway.

Love to all there. I'm sorry I'm so nervous about this but after all, I've been at it a long long time and this is the first and acid test—the hardest story and the first.

John

Discove Cottage
May 13,1959

Dear Elizabeth and Chase: May 13,1959

Your comments and Chase's almost lack of comment on the section sent to you. To indicate that I was not shocked would be untrue. I was. Let me say first that I hope I am too professional to be shocked into paralysis. The answer seems to be that you expected one kind of thing and you didn't get it. Therefore you have every right to be confused as you say and disappointed. All the reading and research is not wasted, because I see and I think understand things in Malory I could not have seen before. Finally, I have had no intention of putting it in 20th century vernacular any more than T.M. put it in 15th century vernacular. People didn't talk that way then either. For that matter, people didn't talk as Shakespeare makes them talk except in the bumpkin speeches.

I know you have read T. H. White's Once and Future King. It is a marvelously wrought book. But that is not what I had wanted and I think still do not want to do.

Where does the myth—the legend start? Back of the Celtic version it stretches back to India and probably before. The people of legend are not people as we know them. They are figures. Christ is not a person, he is a figure. Buddha is a squatting symbol. As a person Malory's Arthur is a fool. As a legend he is timeless. You can't explain him in human terms any more than you can explain Jesus. At any time in the story he could have stopped the process or changed the direction. He has only one human incident in the whole sequence—the lama sabachthani on the cross when the pain was too great. It is the nature of the hero to be a fool. The Western sheriff, the present literary prototype as exemplified by Gary Cooper, is invariably a fool. He would be small and mean if he were clever. Cleverness, even wisdom, is the property of the villain in all myths.

It has been my intention in all of this and still is, to follow each story with an—what can I call it?—essay, elucidation, addendum. I do not know that Merlin was a Druid or the memory of a Druid and certainly Malory never suspected it. In the studies I can speculate that this may have been so, although I suspect that the Merlin conception is far older than Druidism. His counterpart is in every great cycle—in Greece—in the Bible, and in the folk myths, back to the beginning. Chase says wisely that Saxon and Saracen are probably the same thing. Foreigners from far off. They always occur.

Very well, you will say—if that is your intention, where are those comments which intend to illuminate? Well, they aren't written for two reasons. First I'm learning so much from the stories and second I don't want to break the rhythm.

But there are some things I don't understand. You say the killing of the babies is an unkingly retelling of the Herod story. But that is the theme of the whole legend. The Herod story is simply another version of the timeless principle that human planning cannot deflect fate. The whole legend is a retelling of human experience. It is a version of “Power Corrupts.”

You will understand that what saddened me most was the tone of disappointment in your letter. If I had been skeptical of my work, I would simply have felt that you had caught me out. But I thought I was doing well, and within the limits I have set for myself, I still do.

Love,
John

Discove Cottage
May 14,1959

Dear Elizabeth:

Now I have thought a day and throbbed through a night since I wrote the letter. I still feel about the same. Maybe I am not doing it well enough. But if this is not worth doing as I am trying to do it, then I am totally wrong, not only about this but about many other things, and that is of course quite possible. Alan Lerner is making a musical about King Arthur and it will be lovely and will make a million-billion dollars —but that isn't what I want. There's something else. Maybe in my rush to defend myself I've missed what I wanted to say. Maybe I'm trying to say something that can't be said or do something beyond my ability. But there is something in Malory that is longer lived than T. H. White and more permanent than Alan Lerner or Mark Twain. Maybe I don't know what it is—but I sense it. And as I have said—if I'm wrong then it's a real whopping wrongness.

But, can't you see—I must gamble on this feeling about it. I know it isn't the form the present day ear accepts without listening but that ear is somewhat trained by Madison Avenue and radio and television and Mickey Spillane. The hero is almost bad form unless he is in a western. Tragedy—true tragedy—is laughable unless it happens in a flat in Brooklyn. Kings, Gods and Heroes—Maybe their day is over, but I can't believe it. Maybe because I don't want to believe it. In this country I am surrounded by the works of heroes right back to man's first entrance. And if all of this is gone, I've missed the boat somewhere. And that could easily be.

I feel sad today—not desperate but questioning. I know I'll have to go along with my impulse. Maybe it will get better as Malory got better—and he did. If then I've worked the summer away and the fall—if it still seems dull, then I will stop it all, but I've dreamed too many years—too many nights to change direction. I changed myself because I was sick of myself. A time was over, and maybe I was over. I might just possibly be wiggling like a snake cut in two which we used to believe could not die until the sun set. But if that's it, I'll have to go on wiggling until the sun sets.

Nuts! I believe in this thing. There's an unthinkable loneliness in it. There must be.

Love,
John

Discove Cottage
May 22,1959

Dear Chase:

Thank you for your letter of confidence. One can go on in the face of opposition, but it is much easier not to. I am learning something new every day. It is like the wood carving I do—the wood has its way too—and indicates the way it wants to go, and to violate its wishes is to make a bad carving.

I am a bad scholar and moreover have not many references at hand and beyond that find myself sceptical of many of the references that are
blandly accepted
just because they have been printed. Sometimes a truth lies deeper in a name than anywhere else. Now here is a premise, a kind of inductive speculation that should delight your heart. It came to me in the night, dwelling on the fact of Cadbury. Look at the place names—Cadbury, Caddington, Cadely, Cadeleigh, Cadishead, Cadlands, Cadmore, Cadnaur, Cadney, Cadwell. According to Oxford “Place Names” the first element refers to someone named Cada—

Then there are the Chad places—beginning with Chadacre and lots more ending with Chadwick. These are attributed to Ceadvalla—the Celtic counterpart. There are many other variations. Now look at the cad words in the dictionary and see where so many of them point, Caddy, cadet, caduceus. Cadi is Arabic and you come back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, founder of Thebes, bringer of the alphabet to Greece. Caducous—symbol of the herald, later of knowledge, particularly medical, and the snake staff still used on license plates. Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth also, which may be another version of the tower of Babel, but the main thing is that the myth ascribes his origin to Phoenicia. Were the Trojans forerunners of the Phoenicians?

But let's go back to the Cads. We know that in 1,500 to 2,000 years the only foreigners to come to these islands were Phoenicians, that they brought design, probably writing and certainly ideas straight out of the Mediterranean. They also concealed these islands from the world so that their source of metals was not known—this to protect their monopoly of the tin which made all of the bronze in the then known world. And where did these Phoenicians come from? Well, their last stopping place and probably their greatest outland port was Cadiz—a Phoenician word which has never changed.