Steinbeck (78 page)

I am going to suggest to Bob Wallsten, a good and careful worker whom I am going to see soon, that he do the compiling or oversee it. I would write introductions and it could go out as a collaboration. In that way I wouldn't have to interrupt my work and we would still have a profitable venture.

[July 1959]

Dear Elizabeth:

Now let me tell you about a miracle, of the kind that happens here. Day before yesterday I was writing about a raven, quite a character and a friend of Morgan le Fay. Yesterday morning at eight I was at my desk and there was a great croaking outside my door. I thought it was a giant frog. It awakened Elaine sleeping upstairs. She looked out the window and there was a huge raven pecking at my door and croaking—a monster bird. The first we have seen. Now how do you account for that? I wouldn't even tell it if Elaine the Truthful hadn't seen it also.

 

July 4, 1959

Dear Elizabeth:

Happy Independence Day! I guess we are the only people in Somerset who know about it. We are going to celebrate it by going to two church fetes, Bruton and one in a neighboring parish. We will do the coconut shies, muttering quietly and cautiously under our breaths “Dirty Redcoats, That's for Concord! That's for the Boston Massacre!” And we will donate 5 quid to the war against the death watch beetle, much more serious here than a revolution which took place 200 years ago. Now this is very interesting and I want you to remember it in case you put too much stock in progress and comfort. These churches have been here since the 14th century. And the death watch beetle has been here even longer. Every summer the beetle ate away at the oaken beams and every winter they died of cold and actually they didn't get very far. Then fifty years ago people became conscious of cold feet. The churches all put in heating systems. The result ? No slack period for beetles. Extra generations and no time off. In fifty years they have been able to accomplish what they had failed at in the previous 600 years. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Down with the dirty redcoat beetle. Arise ye prisoners of bad circulation. Up gangrene! I am full of fervor on this glorious Fourth, but you can see the direction is a little confused.

We drive some after work. Went to see the prehistoric giant carved in the chalk above Cerne Abbas. The next village is named Godmanstone. Isn't that wonderful? Then to the Maiden Castle near Dorchester, the greatest prehistoric earthwork of them all. Tell Chase please that the name Maiden Castle has always bothered me. There are several of them and all of them are very old. I don't think they mean maiden which is a Teutonic word and couldn't have been around when they were built. So let the sound maiden get in your ears. I looked the whole sound up. Sanskrit has a root mei, pronounced may—which means change or changed. From it we get make and the past tense made. We also get midden—which means not only refuse but anything heaped up. Now these are great earthworks. The one at Dorchester has eight huge ditches, some of them 60 feet deep. Could not the Saxon seeing these have called them either heaps or midden or maden? Things made by men rather than natural hills? This is far more reasonable than to suppose they referred to maidens.

We go to London on Tuesday, then to Sussex and will be back Sunday. I shall take my work with me. Elaine is busy collecting words for our lexicon and so am I. It's fun and we do it while driving.

Love to all there,
John

Discove Cottage
August 10, 1959

Dear Shirley Elfinheimer:

We couldn't resist sending the wire from Usk [“Happy Birthday to Yousk from Usk”] and were afraid some one would correct it on the way. But once bitten with the silly joke, we were committed. It was like with Erskine Caldwell. I couldn't resist addressing him at Claridges as Erskine Caldwell, Ersk. Who could?

I don't know whether you have read my first book of Lancelot. I hope so. It's a crazy thing but mine own. You see I like Lancelot. I recognize him because in some ways he is me—corny and fallible. Then consider Guinevere. No one has ever made the point that you had to like a guy pretty much to be unfaithful with him because if you got caught, you got burnt and you knew it. The danger wasn't getting divorced or pregnant, it was getting up on a bonfire. It took some courage, did infidelity.

But it's a hard story because you have to believe the enchantments or it is all nonsense. You had to believe it as much as we believe psychiatry and much the same way. I'm trying to write it so that the reader doesn't question necromancy. It is an every day matter. Then you take treason against the king. To Lancelot—that wasn't a crime, it was a sin—the worst a man could commit. When he feels bad toward Arthur it is because he has committed the dirtiest sin he can conceive.

You know, perhaps it is your inspiration but I have been practicing on the harmonica very hard. I could always pick out a tune but not really play. Now I'm trying to learn to play and it's fun. When I get back I'm going to hunt Larry Adler out and ask him to give me some instruction about control of tones.

On the way home from the Wye Valley, we stopped at Berkeley Castle where Edward II was murdered. This is not National Trust but just the Berkeley family. No guides, you are free to walk about but there is a sign asking visitors to respect the property and it ends up with a line I like. It says —“It is the duty of a host to make a guest feel at home. It is the duty of a guest not to.” Isn't that fine? The moment a guest feels at home the host has lost his property.

I hope you had a fine birthday and we are waiting to hear about it. If you are around a music store, will you see whether there is a compendium on harmonica playing?

love
John

Discove Cottage
August 27, 1959

My dear Eugène:

This field and subject is so huge, so vague, so powerful and eternal, that I can't seem to mount it and set spurs. I need badly to talk to you. For the deeper I go, the more profound the subject becomes, always escaping me, so that often I feel that I am not good enough nor wise enough to do this work. I have a dreadful discontent with any efforts so far. They seem puny in the face of a hideous subject and I use the word in a Malorian sense. How to capture this greatness? Who could improve on or change Launcelot's “For I take recorde of God, in you I have had myn erthly joye—” There it is. It can't be changed or moved. Or Launcelot's brother Ector di Maris—“Thou were the curtest knight that ever bare shelde! And thou were the trewest frende to thy lover that ever be-strayed hors and thou were the truest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman—” Good God, who could make that more moving? This is great poetry, passionate and epic and with also the stab of heartbreak. Can you see the problem? Do you know any answer?

Oh! I do need your opinions before I fly to pieces with frustration.

This perplexity is like a great ache to me. You see a writer —like a knight—must aim at perfection, and failing, not fall back on the cushion that there is no perfection. He must believe himself capable of perfection even when he fails. And that is probably why it is the loneliest profession in the world and the most lost. I come toward the ending of my life with the same ache for perfection I had as a child. That doesn't change nor does the soul grow calloused to pain—it only perceives more channels of suffering—as when Launcelot perceived that his courtly love for Guinevere was not that at all and still could not help himself.

Now, I have jawed you into boredom howling this little picayune agony.

Will you let me know your plans and the timing of them? Time creeps on me.

Affectionately,
John

Discove Cottage
[September 28, 1959]

Dear Joe:

It doesn't march because it doesn't jell. If I knew less it would be easier. If I knew more it would be increasingly difficult. This has been a good time—maybe the best we have ever had—not wasted at all. But my subject gets huger and more difficult all the time. It isn't fairy stories. It has to do with morals. Arthur must awaken not by any means only to repel the enemy from without, but particularly the enemy inside. Immorality is what is destroying us, public immorality. The failure of man toward men, the selfishness that puts making a buck more important than the common weal.

Now, next to our own time the 15th century was the most immoral time we know. Authority was gone. The church split, the monarchy without authority and manorial order disappearing. It is my theory that Malory was deploring this by bringing back Arthur and a time when such things were not so. A man must write about his
own
time no matter what symbols he uses. And I have not found my symbols nor my form. And there's the rub.

Language changes fascinate me. We have collected some cockney changes. Elephant and Castle, you know is Infanta de Castile but do you know Goat and Compass—God Encompasseth Us. You know Bloody is By our Lady but do you know Charing Cross, the last stop of the funeral procession of Eleanor of Castile? It is Chere Reine. I love these changes. Some words describe a full circle also. Husband for example is house bound or a hand servant who served in the house. Later he became a farmer and husbandry is still current and now the ordinary husband has become a house servant again —full circle.

Our time here is over and I feel tragic about it. I feel like an egg about to be tossed into an electric fan. The subject is so much bigger than I am. It frightens me. You can call it divine discontent if you want but to me it is divine scared shitless. Maybe I'll find a simplicity somewhere. It must be a simplicity because the whole cycle is getting lost in cleverness and scholarship. Every once in a while I think I have it and write three or four hundred pages and it isn't right.

Maybe I should choose someone to tell it to, a child or better a growing boy—looking desperately for his moral clothing and address it to him with explanation when necessary. I hope I can bring something off. If I can't—I'll break my brushes, and call it a day. The flame can go out, you know. It has happened. But it must be abysmal pain when it does. And faced with the great theme—what sadness. Not that I am going to stop trying. When my brushes break, my heart will go with them. Let us hear from you.

Yours
John

Last days Somerset

The Dorchester
London
[October 1959]

Dear Betty and Eugène:

Now we go both sadly and gladly. My pencil is very restless.

Today I have sent you some books. I hope they may divert you. Perhaps it is vanity to send my own books, but out of a welter of living they are what I have and I must believe the best I have.

In November there will be delivered to you a Glastonbury thorn. I hope it may be planted in some corner, perhaps by the pond at “Malory.” It should blossom at Christmas, this thing from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.

This journey has been a joy and the fifteenth century, neither a dark nor a dead age but living and lusty thanks to you.

“Then my fayre felowys—I must departe oute of thys moste noble realme.”

Yours,
John

New York
[November 5] 1959
Guy Fawkes Day

Dear Adlai:

Back from Camelot, and, reading the papers not at all sure it was wise. Two first impressions. First a creeping, all-pervading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental. Two, a nervous restlessness, a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown-perhaps morality. Then there's the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last the surly, ill-temper which only shows up in humans when they are frightened.

Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence. Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, “Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?”

Then there is the other kind of Christmas with presents piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents thrown down and at the end the child says—“Is that all?”

Well, it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick. And then I think of our “Daily” in Somerset, who served your lunch. She made a teddy bear with her own hands for our grandchild. Made it out of an old bath towel dyed brown and it is beautiful. She said, “Sometimes when I have a bit of rabbit fur, they come out lovelier.” Now there is a
present.
And that obviously male Teddy Bear is going to be called for all time MIZ Hicks.

When I left Bruton, I checked out with Officer 'Arris, the lone policeman who kept the peace in five villages, unarmed and on a bicycle. He had been very kind to us and I took him a bottle of Bourbon whiskey. But I felt it necessary to say—“It's a touch of Christmas cheer, officer, and you can't consider it a bribe because I don't want anything and I am going away.” He blushed and said, “Thank you, sir, but there was no need.”