Steinbeck (8 page)

This is the day between—one ms. finished yesterday and the next one not quite hatched. It will be by tomorrow though. [He is referring to the separate stories in The Pastures of
Heaven.]
This is a good day to write letters.

I'm pretty happy over these stories. That is because they aren't finished, I guess.

It isn't unusual that you worry about my financial future. Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession. I have starved and it isn't nearly as bad as is generally supposed. Four days and a half was my longest stretch. Maybe there are pains that come later. Personally I think terror is the painful part of starvation.

 

You are sanguine about my inheritance. There will be nothing, you know. I'll be lucky if I have this house. No—money is not for us. Other people get Phelan Awards [an award of money given in California for writing]. Probably because they want them badly. My one long chance was to have married money and I didn't do that. I have come to be a complete fatalist about money. Even the law of averages doesn't hold with me. Any attempt to get me any kind of an award is pre-doomed to failure. Furthermore I seriously doubt that my brand of literature will ever feed me. And I haven't sense enough to worry about it. If eventually I have to go to work digging ditches, I shall have had my chance.

I read only a page or so of Look Homeward, Angel. The pages I read seemed to be a hodgepodge of quotations. I shall read all of it sometime since you recommend it so highly. I was somewhat deterred from reading it by the overwhelming praise of Sinclair Lewis.

It is a gray day with little dusty spurts of rain. A good day for inwardness. Only I doubt that I have many guts of my own to look inward at. That is one of the great troubles with objective writing. A constant practice of it leaves one no material for introspection. If my characters are sad or happy I reflect their emotions. I have no personal nor definitive emotions of my own. Indeed, when there is no writing in progress, I feel like an uninhabited body. I think I am only truly miserable at such times.

Carol is probably going to work next week. [Her advertising agency had closed.] She looks forward to it. It is not good for her to be housed here with me all day. I am too impatient of movements or noise in the house. And it is such a small house.

You see, my letters are bound to be tiresome because I can talk of nothing but the work I am doing. Monomanial

This probably sounds like a doleful letter and it shouldn't be because I don't feel at all doleful.

John

[Pacific Grove]
[1931]
Monday

Dear George:

Exciting things—yesterday we bought two mallard ducks for the garden. The drake has an irridescent green head. They are beautiful. They swim in the pond and eat the bugs in the garden. We are pretty excited. They cost our amusement quota for this month but are worth it. Named Aqua and Vita. Carol hated to go to work this morning and leave them because they are so interesting. They do not ever step on the plants—just edge between on their big clumsy feet. They very promptly caught and ate the goldfish but we don't care. It's nice to have things like ducks. We won't ever have to feed them for there are bugs enough in the garden to keep them going. You never saw anything so beautiful in all the greenness of our garden as these luxurious ducks.

I have had a couple of fallow days—absolute disgust and lack of faith in my own work and inability to go on. This nearly always happens when a book is nearly done. I shall force it this morning. And the story I am working on charms me more than any of the others. I wish to heaven you could read these things. I need a little encouragement I guess. The other day I asked a young friend to read one and he felt that he should criticise because that was what one did to a ms. So he tore a pretty nice story to pieces and showed me how to do it. It was funny because he hit all the places which are simply matters of opinion and tore up some of the nicest writing I have ever done. Such things reassure one in the matter of believing critics.

I wish you could see Aqua and Vita. They are very very charming. Read 25 by Beverly Nichols last night and am still a little sick.

Sincerely
John

Pacific Grove
(1931)

Dear George:

It has rained a great deal. Now it is Monday morning, and, after a Sunday of dissipation I am faced with work. It's a gray morning. There is only the key story to do. Here is a nice and appropriate thing. The ducks were mallard—green irridescent heads, russet of breast—pale blue wings and orange feet, beautiful birds. But they muddied the pond and pulled up lobelias. Also I was flat broke and had no way of finishing my ms. So I sold the ducks to buy paper for the stories. I wish the stories were as beautiful as the ducks.

Yesterday we indulged in the only luxury in months. We bought and charged a chess board and pieces. Two dollars. It will eat up the winter evenings.

One thing I am sorry for. These stories will go out without any expert reading. I wanted Miss McIntosh to read them, but I can't get to Palo Alto and she can't come here yet and I can't wait. I have too many stories to write. Queer about this rush—isn't it? It's as though I knew my days are limited.

There—it's raining again. Our garden is most charming in the rain. To get back to ms. Sometimes I think these stories are very fine. There's material for ten novels in these stories. That was the method, you remember. In the last story of thirty pages I covered three generations. You can see how packed they must be. I should send them to you and to Duke if I had time. I'm fairly convinced that I can't get a publisher for them. They make too much use of the reader and readers don't like to be used.

I guess I'll go back to the Unknown God. That title will have to be changed. Because the story will be cut to pieces and the pieces refitted and changed. It won't be much the same story.

There is no companionship of any kind here. Carol and I are marooned. This is probably a good thing. I throw myself into work. How are monies? Our poverty is tiresome, but I can see no change in it. Only work. I must cut down two trees for fire wood and that will take some time.

Sincerely
John

[Pacific Grove]
[December 1931]

Dear Ted:

After the silence of ages, I have three letters from you all on the same day: To you I say Merry Christmas and Happy 1932. I found several things in your letters which were very amusing. The first is the complete belief of M. and O. that I conceal masterpieces. I have written to them denying this. In the south I have a friend who harbors an immense admiration for my work in spite of the fact that he has seen very little of it [George Albee]. He wrote to them telling them about my bales of mss. and they demanded it. I sent them all I had which they, with great dispatch, sent back to me. I am concealing nothing except a few little things too dirty to print and some stories written for Toby Street's kids. You see I took two years to write the Cup, a year and a half to write the Unknown God. In the last year and a half I have written the Dissonant Symphony, the detective story, six short stories, part of a novel that is too huge for me just now and The Pastures of Heaven. About a hundred and seventy-five thousand finished words since the end of the Unknown God. Where then are the masterpieces? Before the Cup, the stories are so feeble and childish that I destroyed them all as a matter of course. If you should see them again please tell them that the things they are seeing are really the best I can do. If there's nothing in them then there's nothing in me and they'd better give me up as a “writer”.

The Pastures of Heaven I sent off last Saturday. It should be there by the time you receive this. If the reader will take them for what they are, and will not be governed by what a short story should be (for they are not short stories at all, but tiny novels) then they should be charming, but if they are judged by the formal short story, they are lost before they ever start. I am extremely anxious to hear the judgment because of anything I have ever tried, I am fondest of these and more closely tied to them. There is no grand writing nor any grand theme, but I love the stories very much.

Carl Wilhelmson is married. I had his announcement this morning. Is your divorce desirable? I mean will it make a demand of alimony on you? I hope you get it without scars.

I've been working like a dog on this last ms. Now I shall take a little time off before starting the next. There are a number of silly little stories that have been bothering my dreams for some time. I'll get them off my chest without injuring my rest at all.

We're going to S.J. (San José] for Christmas. Toby and Grove Day are
coming down
next weekend to celebrate. Toby with his guitar. The whole bunch of us will probably get horned like owls. Toby gets to singing so loudly that the police interfere. Were you at the beach with us the night he nearly drowned in his soup? I heard a gurgling noise beside me and there was Toby with his nose submerged in his soup snoring it in and gradually drowning. I have a feeling you were there.

Anyway don't please keep aloof so long next time.

affectionately,
John

Pacific Grove
January 25, 1932

Dear Miss McIntosh:

This letter may be pertinent if Miss Phillips [Vice-President of William Morrow and Company] is reading the novel To an Unknown God. I have no intention of trying to patch it up. It would surely show such surgery especially since it was finished nearly two years ago. I shall cut it in two at the break and work only at the first half, reserving the last half for some future novel. With the material in the first half I shall make a new story, one suggested by recent, and, to me, tremendous events.

Do you remember the drought in Jolon that came every thirty-five years? We have been going through one identical with the one of 1880. Gradually during the last ten years the country has been dying of lack of moisture. This dryness has peculiar effects. Diseases increase, people are subject to colds, to fevers and to curious nervous disorders. Crimes of violence increase. The whole people are touchy and nervous. I am writing at such length to try to show you the thing that has just happened. This winter started as usual—no rain. Then in December the thing broke. There were two weeks of downpour. The rivers overflowed and took away houses and cattle and land. I've seen decorous people dancing in the mud. They have laughed with a kind of crazy joy when their land was washing away. The disease is gone and the first delirium has settled to a steady jubilance. There will be no ten people a week taken to asylums from this county as there were last year. Anyway, there is the background. The new novel will be closely knit and I can use much of the material from the Unknown God, but the result will be no rewritten version.

Perhaps it will be as well to let Miss Phillips see this plan. It will give her a better idea of what to expect.

Your letter was encouraging. Thank you.

Sincerely,
John Steinbeck

[Pacific Grove]
February 16 [1932]

Dear Ted:

Thank you for doing all that work. It was a lot of trouble. Miss Me. dismissed the ms. [
The Pastures of Heaven]
by saying the form doesn't interest her, but it may interest someone else. The Pastures has begun its snaggy way. Morrow won't publish as a first novel, but will if a more closely integrated
work
can precede it. Publishers are afraid of short stories unless the writer of them has a tremendous name. And so I presume that the Pastures will go the way of all the others. Miss Mc. was non-committal about it. Meanwhile I work at the Unknown God. I have changed the place, characters, time, theme, and thesis and name so maybe it won't be much like the first book. It's good fun though.

I wonder you don't lose faith in my future. Everyone else does. For myself, I haven't brains enough to quit. Maybe you haven't brains enough to get out from under the wreck. Thirty years hence I'll still be working. I am very happy when I'm working.

Have McBride's relaxed their grip on that copyright?

I'm pretty damn sick of my consistent failure. Everyone says nice things and no one buys my books. Wurra—wurra. M. and O. have been kind and have expended lots of stamps on me. I wonder how soon they'll get sick of it.

Please write more often.

Affectionately,
John

Pacific Grove
[March] 1932

Dear George:

The Pastures has been curiously fortunate. Cape and Smith accepted it with some enthusiasm within three days of its submission to them. According to M. & O. they showed a nice enthusiasm and intend to feature it on their fall list. I am very glad, more for my folks' sake than for my own. They love it so much. Dad's shoulders are straighter for it and mother beams. I am no longer a white elephant, you see. I am justified in the eyes of their neighbors. It is very good. I received the telegram on my birthday. It was nice of Miss O. [Elizabeth Otis] to wire. If this firm will only allow me a dedication to my parents, they will be extremely happy.