Working Days (7 page)

13. Letter in the Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

14. An uncut version of Steinbeck’s letter can be found in Lewis Gannett, “Steinbeck’s Way of Writing,” which served as his Introduction to Pascal Covici’s enlarged second edition of
The Portable Steinbeck
(New York: The Viking Press, 1946), pp. xxi-xxiii, and in Tedlock and Wicker, eds.,
Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-five Years
(pp. 32—34). Until now little has been known about New York’s response. On May 24, 1938, Annie Laurie Williams replied: “I admire you for having the courage of your convictions and know you would feel better if you could have heard what Elizabeth and Pat both said when they read your letter ... [W]e all admire you more than ever for sticking by your instincts about your work.” (Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)

15. Years later, Steinbeck told a British interviewer that, following his experiences at Visalia, he had written
The Grapes of Wrath
“protesting at what I had seen ... during the migration of thousands of dispossessed families. I saw people starve to death. That’s not just a resounding phrase. They starved to death. They dropped dead.” Quoted in “The wrath
hasn’t
left Steinbeck,” London
Daily Mail,
September 18, 1961, p. 8. Furthermore, Steinbeck had apparently agreed to collaborate with Horace Bristol, not simply on a piece for
Life
magazine, which has commonly been supposed (in his letters to Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck talked only of invited assignments for
Life,
which he agreed to, and for
Fortune,
which he rejected as being the wrong audience for his efforts), but on an entire book devoted to the Okies’ travail. The book would incorporate Steinbeck’s text and Bristol’s photographs, in the manner of Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s 1937 book,
You Have Seen Their Faces
(Horace Bristol/Robert DeMott, letter, April 26, 1988). After his traumatic encounter at Visalia, however, Steinbeck knew he had witnessed the stuff of tragedy, and he decided once again to terminate a proposed collaboration. Some of his sentences from
The Grapes of Wrath
were later chosen to accompany Bristol’s photographs of Visalia, published in
Life,
June 5, 1939 (pp. 66-67). Bristol’s photographs appeared a second time in
Life,
on February 19, 1940 (pp. 10-11), in order to prove the authenticity of John Ford’s movie version: “These photographs, here republished, were taken by
Life
Photographer Horace Bristol in March 1938, when he and Author John Steinbeck toured the Okie camps in search of material for a picture book and a story for
Life.
The picture book was dropped to make way for the best-selling novel called
The Grapes of Wrath.
Never before had the facts behind a great work of fiction been so carefully researched by the newscamera.” Although Bristol and Steinbeck participated in the same devastating events at Visalia, they “saw” things far differently (despite
Life
’s contentions), and ultimately used their experiences in wholly opposite ways. Bristol’s photographs speak for themselves; Steinbeck’s visual realism became a means to a symbolic end. Bristol’s brilliant photograph of a young mother nursing her child was obviously the prototype for maternal Rose of Sharon, but Steinbeck’s “use” of that image, by having her give her breast to a total stranger, represented a leap beyond facticity, a leap Bristol himself admitted he did not fully understand: “So far as I know, this event was a figment of Steinbeck’s imagination. I won’t say it didn’t happen—just that it didn’t happen in my presence. I still look with compassion at the print of the young mother who was Rose of Sharon’s prototype, her breasts swollen with milk, but nursing a young infant instead of an old man. My impression was that Steinbeck wrote this episode to shock and titillate his readers....” See “Faces of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” Photographs and story by Horace Bristol, photo captions by John Steinbeck,
This World
(San Francisco
Examiner
Magazine), October 25, 1987, p. 14, and a glossier portfolio in his “Documenting
The Grapes of Wrath,” The Californians,
January/February 1988, pp. 40-47. Also consult Carol Shloss,
In Visible Light, Photography and the American Writer: 1840-1940
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 201-29, for an intriguing look at Steinbeck’s relatedness to documentary photography, especially Dorothea Lange’s.

16. Letter, December 1950, in the Pascal Covici Archive at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. A stenographer at The Viking Press transcribed Steinbeck’s handwritten journal manuscript, but then destroyed or lost the original holograph version (all efforts to locate it have failed). Although Steinbeck might have reviewed—perhaps even reread—the typed version, he apparently did not make any corrections in it. This present edition (with Steinbeck’s entry numbers normalized) provides an unexcised readable text of the typed journal. Annotations and explanatory notes (indicated by asterisks in the text) appear at the end of the book where they will not impede the narrative flow of Steinbeck’s entries. Grammatical/spelling regularizations have been kept to a silent minimum, a pleasurable result of having a substantially clear and intelligible typescript to work with in the first place.

—Steinbeck, in a 1936 entry in his
Long Valley/Of Mice and Men
ledger book.
(Courtesy of Steinbeck Research Center, San Jose State University)

Steinbeck composed his first journal entry on or about February 7, 1938, shortly after the death of his brother-in-law, and just prior to at least two separate field trips (in February, and again in early March) to observe the horrid conditions at Visalia. He had recently abandoned “The Oklahomans” and in its place had begun “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” an incendiary tract that occupied his attention until May 1938, when—in disgust at having compromised his own ability—he destroyed the 70,000-word manuscript.

The winter of 1938 was a period of intense activity and vexation for Steinbeck. In January and February California was being inundated by torrential rains (“This is the 19th day of rain,” Steinbeck wrote Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent and confidante, on February 14); the deluge provided a symbolic backdrop for Steinbeck’s pessimism. He would be thirty-six years old on February 27, but he hardly felt like celebrating. His growing sense of anger about the plight of Visalia’s starving migrants colored nearly everything in his life, including, temporarily, his will to write. “Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies,” he confessed to his agent. As if that weren’t enough to undercut his emotional equilibrium, several other personal disturbances occurred in February, including a trumped-up paternity charge (which was eventually dropped), and the dissolution of an intimate friendship with George Albee, a fellow novelist who had become jealous of Steinbeck’s artistic achievements. “I’ve needed help and trust and the benefit of the doubt,” Steinbeck told Albee in his characteristically frank way, “because I’ve tried to beat the system which destroys every writer, and from you have come only wounds and kicks in the face” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 157).

Privately, Steinbeck was contending with the ironic fruits of his public success. Deeper yet, he struggled with the paralyzing fear that his talent was inadequate for the writing task at hand. His success had been honorably earned, but Steinbeck, ever his own harshest critic, remained unconvinced. In fact, self-denunciation became a repeated theme throughout the entire journal. His brilliant novella,
Of Mice and Men,
published by Covici-Friede a year earlier, had sold well over 120,000 copies, thanks in part to its being a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. More immediately, the play version (directed by George S. Kauf man, and starring Wallace Ford, Broderick Crawford, and Clare Luce), which had opened at New York’s Music Box Theatre on November 23, 1937, was still packing the house three months later. It eventually ran for 207 performances and won, that April, the prestigious New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award. In addition, Pare Lorentz, whom Steinbeck had been expecting in Los Gatos since January (he finally showed up around February 13), wanted to discuss filming
In Dubious Battle.
And later in the month both Fortune and Life magazines wanted Steinbeck to write essays on migrant conditions. His name had suddenly become a hot property, with all the attendant traps, seductions, and demands that accompany rapid fame. (As bad as things seemed in the winter of 1938, they were only a minor rehearsal for the turbulent drama to come during the next few years.) A month or so before his opening journal entry, Steinbeck complained to Joseph and Charlotte Jackson:

 

Depressed by requests for money, tainted by the public aspects of fame, and shocked by the workers’ plight, Steinbeck felt so tired he wished he were dead. Instead, he threw himself into the writing of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” as a way of exorcising his frustrating anger and reclaiming his discipline.

 

 

Entry #1
February [7?] 1938—[Monday]

It seems to be necessary to write things down. Can’t stop it. February now and raining steadily. The play M & M [Ed.-Of
Mice and Men]
went on and is a success. And with its success, I know there is never to be any ease, any pleasure for me. People I liked have changed. Thinking there is money, they want it. And even if they don’t want anything, they watch me and they aren’t natural any more. Gene
^*
died two weeks ago; it could so easily have been me and I wish so much it had been. I’m tired of living completely tired. I’m tired of the struggle against all the forces that this miserable success has brought against me. I don’t know whether I could write a decent book now. That is the greatest fear of all. I’m working at it but I can’t tell. Something is poisoned in me. You pages—ten of you—you are the dribble cup—you are the cloth to wipe up the vomit. Maybe I can get these fears and disgusts on you and then burn you up. Then maybe I won’t be so haunted. Have to pretend it’s that way anyhow. There’s Lorentz who should be here by now and there are the starving people of Visalia and Nipomo. * I really don’t care about the moving picture. Really don’t—but those people who are starving—what can be done? And the people with panaceas of all kinds. Will you lend your name to this and to this? What do I care about my name? It is battered and completely out of shape anyway. It hasn’t any meaning and I haven’t any meaning. “Seen about your luck.” I got no luck. “Send one hundred dollars.” Luck! He thinks it is luck. He is poor and he thinks I am rich. And he seen about my luck. In the cheap welter, he seen about my luck. He seen about my destruction only he couldn’t understand that. The Greeks seem to have known about this dark relationship between luck and destruction. It is so hard to know anything. So impossible to trust oneself. Even to know what there is to trust. My will is low. I must build my will again. And I can do it even as I have done before. The time passes. The thoughts race.

—Steinbeck, on reading the manuscript of Louis Paul’s novel,
The Wrong World
(1938). (
Courtesy of University of Virginia Library
)

The following ninety-nine entries, which cover the summer and fall of 1938, constitute the truest story of the making of
The Grapes of Wrath.
They comprise Steinbeck’s attempt, with a kind of scientific preciseness, “to map the actual working days and hours” of his novel, and they provide an unparalleled record of the shapings and seizings, the naked slidings, of his creative psyche. No other account matches this one for personal intensity, dedication, investment, and drama.

Unlike the sprawling, digressive entries on symbolism, characterization, and philosophy that mark Steinbeck’s daily log for his 1952 novel
East of Eden
(the entries were published posthumously in 1969 as
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters),
here Steinbeck is working in a different mode—more focused and sharper, less self-reflexive and expansive, but of course no less revealing about his habitual writerly concerns. Readers accustomed to the tone of familiarity and camaraderie of
Journal of a Novel
(the entries were daily letters to Pascal Covici) will find this “diary of a book” limited in intention and scope, and hermetic—even claustrophobic—in tone and attitude. Brief, direct, staccato, these daily notes took the place of his normally voluminous “warm-up” correspondence. They helped regulate his discipline in the face of an inordinate number of interruptions— some worthwhile, most merely bothersome—that his growing public fame had brought him. (A cheeky agent for Selznick International Pictures set the tone of the summer by requesting an “advanced reading” of the unwritten novel “to review its motion picture possibilities”; exasperated, Steinbeck directed his agents to reply that “the book will not be for sale!”)