Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

By John Steinbeck and Elaine Steinbeck (Editor)

"Surely his most interesting, plausibly his most memorable, and . . . arguably his best book" The New York Times Book Review

For John Steinbeck, who hated the telephone, letter-writing was a preparation for work and a natural way for him to communicate his thoughts on people he liked and hated; on marriage, women, and children; on the condition of the world; and on his progress in learning his craft. Opening with letters written during Steinbeck's early years in California, and closing with a 1968 note written in Sag Herbor, New York, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters reveals the inner thoughts and rough character of this American author as nothing else has and as nothing else ever will.

"The reader will discover as much about the making of a writer and the creative process, as he will about Steinbeck. And that's a lot." Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

"A rewarding book of enduring interest, this becomes a major part of the Steinbeck canon." The Wall Street Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 1989
• ISBN: 9781440673870

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck ist ein amerikanischer Erzähler deutsch-irischer Abstammung, geboren 1902 in Salinas/Kalifornien, gestorben 1968 in New York. Er studiert Naturwissenschaften an der Stanford University, war Kriegsberichterstatter im Zweiten Weltkrieg und wurde Schriftsteller. Mehrere seiner Romane wurden verfilmt, u. a. »Früchte des Zorns« und »Jenseits von Eden«. 1962 erhielt John Steinbeck den Literatur-Nobelpreis.

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1823 to 1932 Slemluch

... thinking ponderously and secking ...

John Ernst Steinbeck born February 27 in Salinas, 1902 California. His father was manager of a flour mill and treasurer of Monterey County; his mother had been a schoolteacher. He was the third of four children and the only son.

1919 Graduated from high school. Began intermittent attendance at Stanford University.

1924 First publication, two stories in the Stanford Spectator.

1925 Left Stanford. Went to New York City. Wrote short stories but could find no publisher.

1926 Returned to California and continued to write, supporting himself with a variety of jobs.

1929 First novel published, Cup of Gold.

1930 Married Carol Henning and moved to the family cottage in Pacific Grove.

1931 Began permanent association with McIntosh and Otis, his literary agents.

When John Steinbeck was twenty-four and broke, he found a way to support himself while working at what mattered most to him—becoming a writer.

I had a job as caretaker on a large estate at Lake Tahoe [in his native California], he wrote later. It required that I be snowed in for eight months every year. My nearest neighbor was four miles away.

Here he wrote, and several times rewrote, his first novel, Cup of Gold; and it was from here that he wrote to Monterey to Webster F. Street (Toby), who had been a collegemate at Stanford University.

To Webster F. Street

Lake Tahoe

Winter 1926

Monday

Dear Toby:

Do you know, one of the things that made me come here, was, as you guessed, that I am frightfully afraid of being alone. The fear of the dark is only part of it. I wanted to break that fear in the middle, because I am afraid much of my existence is going to be more or less alone, and I might as well go into training for it. It comes on me at night mostly, in little waves of panic, that constrict something in my stomach. But don’t you think it is good to fight these things? Last night, some quite large animal came and sniffed under the door. I presume it was a coyote, though I do not know. The moon had not come up, and when I ran outside there was nothing to be seen. But the main thing was that I was frightened, even though I knew it could be nothing but a coyote. Don’t tell any one I am afraid. I do not like to be suspected of being afraid.

As soon as you can, get to work on the Little Lady [A Green Lady, a play Street was writing]. Keep your eye on cost of production, small and inexpensive scenes, few in the cast and lots of wise cracks, as racy as you think the populace will stand. Always crowd the limit. And also if you have time, try your hand on a melo drahmar, something wild, and mysterious and unexpected with characters turning out to be other people and some of them turning out to be nobody at all.

And if you can find a small but complete dictionary lying about anywhere send it to me. I have none, and apparently the Brighams [his employers] are so perfect in their mother tongue that they do not need one.

I shall send you some mss pretty soon if you wish. I have been working slowly but deliciously on one thing. There is something so nice about being able to put down a sentence and then look it over and then change it, sometimes taking half an hour over two lines. And it is possible here because there seems to be no reason for rush.

If, on going through Salinas, you have the time, you might look in on my folks and tell them there is little possibility of my either starving or freezing. Be as honest as you can, but picture me in a land flowing with ham and eggs, and one wherein woolen underdrawers grow on the fir trees. Tell them that I am living on the inside of a fiery furnace, or something.

It’s time for me to go to the post office now, I will cease without the usual candle-like spluttering. Write to me when and as often as you get a chance. I shall depend on the mail quite a lot.

love

John

Depending on the mail had already become a habit. Midway in his life, in a letter, he recalled his youth in Salinas:

We were poor people with a hell of a lot of land which made us think we were rich people, even when we couldn’t buy food and were patched. Caballeros—lords of the land, you know, and really low church mice but proud.

After graduation from Salinas High School, he entered the freshman class at Stanford University in 1919 when he was seventeen.

He had many of the usual preoccupations of young men of his age. As he wrote one girl:

We have been dancing twice a week in the pavilion. There is a stern and rockbound row of old ladies who have constituted themselves chaperones.

And to another girl:

I cannot step out much, Florence, because I have lots of ambitions and very little money so my fun from now on must be very prosaic.

I am poor, dreadfully poor. I have to feed someone else before I can eat myself. I must live in an atmosphere of dirty dishes and waitresses with soiled ears, if I wish to know about things like psychology and logic. [He was working in the City Café, Palo Alto.]

He held many jobs to finance his education. Sometimes he dropped out of college for whole quarters at a time to earn tuition for the next quarter. Now I will work and go to school and work again.

He clerked in a department store and in a haberdashery shop, he worked as a surveyor in the Big Sur, and as a ranch hand near King City, which later became the setting for Of Mice and Men. And of another job, he wrote years later:

When I was in college I was a real poor kid. I got a job breaking army remounts for officers’ gentle behinds. I got $30 a remount or fifty with basic polo. You know—haunch stops and spins and stick work around head and ears and pastern. I didn’t walk without a limp for months. They must have got some of those remounts out of the chutes on the rodeo circuit. But I needed the dough bad and I figured it was better to limp and eat than to be whole and hungry.

Several times through this period he worked for the Spreckels Sugar Company—Always on the night shift, a friend recalls, apparently as somebody to keep the laboratory open, though he sometimes said he was ‘Night Chemist’; or at the company plant in Manteca, near Stockton, ‘loading and stacking sacks of sugar, twelve hours a day, seven days a week.’

Already it was clear that the most important thing in his life, the driving force, was literature—reading whatever he could, struggling to master language, testing and straining at high-flown imagery and dramatic attitudinizing—what he himself called distinguished writing.

To Carl Wilhelmson, a classmate and another would-be writer:

At times I feel that I am playing around the edges of things, getting nowhere. An extreme and callow youth playing with philosophy must be a pitiable thing from your point of view. Today was a long day, the hours went by so slowly that I thought of many things and finally went into a mental sleep. I sat on a pipe and watched, and spoke in monosyllables to those who were about me, and I knew so many things which they did not know, there were so many worlds open to me whose existence was beyond their powers of comprehension, and I such a young lad.

To Carl Wilhelmson

Palo Alto

April 7, 1924

Dear Carl:

Here, on this paper, there are only you and me, and the things that each of us tries so hard to understand, clambering up through long, long researches into the past, and thinking ponderously and seeking, and finding that for which we looked a glorified question mark.

It would be desirable to be flung, unfettered by consciousness, into the void, to sail unhindered through eternity. Please do not think that I am riding along on baseless words, covering threadbare thoughts with garrulous tapestries. I am not. It is the words which are inadequate.

You know so much and I can tell you nothing, and I don’t think I can even make you feel anything you have not felt more poignantly than I, who am a mummer in a brocaded boudoir.

I wrote of miners’ faces around a fire. Their bodies did not show in the light so that the yellow faces seemed dangling masks against the night. And I wrote of little voices in the glens which were the spirits of passions and desires and dreams of dead men’s minds. And Mrs. Russell [an instructor] said they were not real, that such things could not be, and she was not going to stand me bullying her into such claptrap nonsense. Those were not her words but her meaning, and then she smiled out of the corner of her mouth as nurses do when an idiot child makes blunders. And I could not stand that, Carl, so I swore at her because I had been out all night in the making of my pictures. And now she is very cold, and she means to flunk me in my course, thinking that she can hurt me thus. I wish that she could know that I do not in the least care.

And I wish you were back, because you could understand the things I try to say, and help me to say them better, and I know you would, for you did once.

John Steinbeck

Later that spring, again to Carl Wilhelmson:

"There have been six short stories this quarter. [Two of these appeared in the Stanford Spectator.] I wonder if you remember the one about the machinist who made engines and felt a little omnipotent until his own machine pulled his arm from him. Then he cursed God and suffered retribution at the hands of God or thought he did. That has finally been done to my half satisfaction. Of the others, one was perfectly rotten, two were fair, three were quite good. About the only thing that can be said for them is that they do not resemble anything which has ever been written.

Miss Mirrielees [his instructor in creative writing] is very kind, she hates to hurt feelings. She says that she thinks my stuff ought to be published but she doesn’t know where. Don’t get the idea that I am swimming against an incoming tide of approbation, I’m not. For every bit of favorable criticism, I get four knocks in the head. Oh! well, who cares?

Recalling this period later, he wrote his collegemate, Robert Cathcart:

I first read Caesar and Cleopatra about seven or eight years ago, and was so impressed that I immediately wrote a sequel to it concerning the coming of Marc and his battle with the few and carefully misunderstood principles Caesar had left with Cleopatra. It was a failure. I was about seventeen at the time. And as I shall never write another play, I bequeath the idea to you.

You asked me what I had been reading, he wrote Mrs. Edith Wagner, mother of two boyhood friends from Salinas. Here is the last list which we brought from the library, The Book of the Dead from existing papyri, Les Femmes Savantes of Molière, which I had never read in French before and a low detective tale labeled L‘Homme du Dent d’Or by a man of whom I never heard, and who in the French fashion manages to get his murder accomplished in a bedroom; La Barraca of Ibañez, which is shorter and I think more effective than his others; some short stories by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, and she certainly is the master of her kind of short stories. I have just finished the autobiography of Casanova and The Judge by Rebecca West which is a wonderful piece of writing. If you haven’t read it you must for it is one of the best things I have read in many a day. In a maniacal period this summer I went through Pushkin and Turgenev.

He left Stanford for good without a degree in June 1925, and managed to get a berth to New York as a workaway on a freighter through the Panama Canal. For the next year he lived unhappily in Brooklyn and later in a room overlooking Gramercy Park. I guess I hate New York, he was to write in 1935, because I had a thin, lonely, hungry time of it there. And I remember too well the cockroaches under my wash basin and the impossibility of getting a job. I was scared thoroughly. And I can’t forget the scare.

He did eventually get work as a laborer on the construction of Madison Square Garden, on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. Then his mother’s brother, Joseph Hamilton, got him a job on the New York American, about which he later wrote:

Worked on N. Y. American and from what the city editor said when he fired me, I don’t think the American remembers it with any more pleasure than I do.

And even later he recalled:

I worked for the American and was assigned to Federal Court in the old Park Row post office where I perfected my bridge game and did some lousy reporting. I did however perfect a certain literary versatility. This was during Prohibition, and Federal judges as well as others in power were generous with confiscated whiskey to the press room. Therefore it became my duty sometimes, as cadet reporter, to send the same story to Graphic, American, Times, Tribune and Brooklyn Eagle each in its own vernacular when some of my peers were unable to catch the typewriter as it went by. Then I was fired. I learned that external reality had no jurisdiction in the Hearst press and that what happened must in no case interfere with what WR wanted to happen.

Out of funds and discouraged by his inability to sell any of the stories he had been writing, he returned to the West Coast in the summer of 1926, working his way once again on a freighter. For the next two years, when he was twenty-four and twenty-five, he supported himself and his writing by odd jobs in the Lake Tahoe area, like the snowbound one as a caretaker mentioned earlier. He also worked at the local fish hatcheries and as driver of the mail-coach at Fallen Leaf Lodge, which belonged to Toby Street’s in-laws.

Following is the first of a number of introspective letters written on his birthday. It was written, like many similar ones, to his college roommate, Carlton A. Sheffield, variously called Duke, Dook, Juk, or even Jook. Probably Steinbeck’s closest male friend, Duke Sheffield is his only correspondent who appears throughout this book, from first chapter to last. He was less than a year older than Steinbeck and had entered Stanford the same semester. Knew Steinbeck, Sheffield writes, but only as a classmate with whom I occasionally boxed, always losing. Later they roomed together, and sometimes their odd jobs coincided, as when they worked together at the Spreckels factory in Manteca, though Sheffield most often worked as a newspaperman or as a teacher.

To Carlton A. Sheffield

Lake Tahoe

February 25, 1928

Dear Duke:

It is a long time since I have begun a letter such as I mean this to be: an unhurried dissertation in which there is no sense of duty. Perhaps I have lost the power to write such a letter. Of late it has been my habit to write one page of short, tacit observation, which might have given you the idea that I am become nervous and short. And you, of late, have been determinedly cynical. Thus our letters.

My failure to work for the last three weeks is not far to find. I finished my novel and let it stand for a while, then read it over. And it was no good. The disappointment of that was bound to have some devastating, though probably momentary effect. You see, I thought it was going to be good. Even to the last page, I thought it was going to be good. And it is not.

Why are you telling me about the things you go to? Are you ashamed or proud? Do you want me to know you attend such gatherings? I think you think I look down on Rosalind [Rosalind Shepard, a girl friend of Sheffield’s], and you want to justify her. You make fun of these things and yet they must impress you to some extent. I know they would impress me. I have always been a little afraid of a woman who wore a dress that cost more than a hundred dollars.

I have a new novel preparing but preparing very slowly. I am not quick about such things. They must roll about in my mind for an age before they can be written. I think it will take me two years to write a full length novel, counting the periods when I walk the streets and try to comb up courage enough to blow out my brains.

Isn’t it a shame, Duke, that a thing which has as many indubitably fine things in it as my Cup of Gold, should be, as a whole, utterly worthless? It is a sorrowful matter to me.

As usual I have made a mess of this letter. I didn’t finish it the other night. Now it is late the night before the [mail] boat, and I shall get very little written on it. Do you realize that I am twenty-six now? I don’t. I don’t feel twenty-six and I don’t look that old, and I have done nothing to justify my years. Yet I don’t regret the years. I have enjoyed them after a fashion. My sufferings have not been great nor have my pleasures been violent. I wish we might resurrect a summer out of the heap of years, but that is not possible at this time. Some other summer we will try.

Am I to be allowed to meet Rosalind, or are you afraid of me now? I should really like to. I feel none of the old antagonism toward her at any rate. I have been cutting wood violently to keep from being lonely. And I am lonely just the same. I wish you would write more often. I am on the point of joining a correspondence club if you don’t.

A triumph. I am learning to chew tobacco, not the lowly Star but the lordly Boot Jack, a bit under the tongue you know and swallow the spit. I find I like it. It is snowing again. Confound it, will the winter never be over? I crave to have the solid ground under my feet. You cannot understand that craving if you have never lived in a country where every step was unstable. It is very tiresome and tiring to walk and have the ground give way under you at every step.

I am finishing the Henry ms out of duty [Cup of Gold, a fictionalized biography of Henry Morgan, the pirate], but I have no hope of it any more. I shall probably pack it in Limbo balls and place it among the lost hopes in the chest of the years. Good bye, Henry. I thought you were heroic but you are only, as was said of you, a babbler of words and rather clumsy about it.

I shall make an elegy to Henry Morgan, who is a monument to my own lack of ability. I shall go ahead, but I wonder if that sharp agony of words will occur to me again. I wonder if I shall ever be drunken with rhythms any more. Duke has his Rosalind, but I have no Rosalind nor any Phryne. I am twenty-six and I am not young any more. I shall write good novels but hereafter I ride Pegasus with a saddle and martin-gale, for I am afraid Pegasus will rear and kick, and I am not the sure steady horseman I once was. I do not take joy in the unmanageable horse any more. I want a hackney of tried steadiness.

It is sad when the snow is falling.

love

jawn

When he suggests meeting Rosalind, and asks, Or are you afraid of me now? he is probably referring to the following letter which he had written two years before, to the girl Sheffield had then just married, and who had since died. It is a letter that, among other things, explains and illuminates Steinbeck’s friendship with Sheffield. Based on the conviction that Sheffield had been misled into matrimony, it is an early example of that passionate excess, of both loyalty and vindictiveness, which would characterize Steinbeck’s behavior about people and issues throughout his life.

To Ruth Carpenter Sheffield

38 Gramercy Park

New York

June 1926

Dear Ruth:

I received notice of your marriage to my friend. I resolved to write you a letter containing a threat, an appeal and an explanation. On your reception of these three I must base my esteem of you. I agree that my esteem may seem of little consequence.

I love this person so much that I would cut your charming throat should you interfere seriously with his happiness or his manifest future. You have in your hands the seeds of a very great genius, be careful how you nourish them. If Duke loves you, then you have qualities which are impeccable, and to which I must bow. But you cannot tear in a day the cloth which was long and careful in the making. Thus I appeal to you, since you were given the honor of being the victim, to sacrifice yourself, not to this person’s person, but to the children of his brain. If you are big enough you will have understood this before now, if not, all of my telling will only make you angry.

I have promised some explanation of my position. Neither this person nor myself had a brother. Because of these things, we went through our very young years lonely and seeking. We had no intimates, practically no friends. We made enemies readily because we were far above our immediate associates. In college we met, and at every point the one seemed to supplement and strengthen the other. We are not alike, rather we are opposites, but also we are equals. The combination was put to severe tests. We took the same girl to dances and things, and the friendship grew. We fought bloodily and the matter was strengthened. We worked in a vicious heat and emerged to find a wonderful comradeship. The outcome was a structure of glorious dream. Are you understanding me at all? He was the cathode and I the anode. We laughed, quarreled, drank, were sad, considered life, ethics, philosophies. We did not always agree. More often we openly disagreed. But always in the back of the mind of each there was the thought that the one was not complete without the other and never could be. It would have been easy, from our constant attendance one on the other, to draw obscene conclusions, but our fists quite precluded any such feeling. We were constantly together. Do you wish to interfere in this so that you may have him more surely to yourself, or would you rather attempt to come into the circle? Perhaps you can. I do not know you. Undoubtedly each of us supplies a great need in him, take care that you do not overstep your need and your usefulness.

Meanwhile I congratulate you as one who has found a very precious thing. I give you my utmost respect and allegiance as long as you are worthy of it. I shall regard any attempt at alienation as an act harmful to him, because I know that I am necessary to him as he is necessary to me.

May I not hear your attitude?

Sincerely

John Steinbeck

The following summer he met the girl who was to be his own wife. Carol Henning and her sister, tourists on holiday, visited the Tahoe City Hatchery while he was working there.

Later in 1928 he moved to San Francisco, where Carol had a job. He shared an apartment with Carl Wilhelmson and started a new project. Webster F. Street, unable to complete his play, The Green Lady, to his satisfaction, had turned it over to Steinbeck to do what he would with it. The material went through many mutations in the next several years. After numerous rewrites and title changes, it eventually emerged as Steinbeck’s second published novel, To A God Unknown.

While in New York Steinbeck had looked up a Stanford friend, Amasa Miller (Ted), who was starting a career in the law. Because no professional literary agent had yet shown any interest in Steinbeck’s manuscripts, Miller had offered to try to place them. Not until late January 1929—almost four years later —was he able to wire Steinbeck from New York that at last he had an acceptance: Robert M. McBride and Company would publish Cup of Gold. A notation on the telegram Steinbeck sent back indicates that the novel had been read and rejected by seven other publishers.

In the fall, he learned that another classmate and fellow writer, A. Grove Day, was living in New Jersey.

To A. Grove Day

2953 Jackson Street

San Francisco

[November] 1929

Dear Grove:

At present Carl Wilhelmson and I live in the upper storey of an old house here in S. F. It is a good life and very cheap. Like a squad of fleas, ferocious and very serious, we still make forays and dignified campaigns against the body of art. It is funny and a little sad (for the onlooker) and lots of fun (for us). We take our efforts to write with great seriousness, hammering away for two years on a novel and such things. I suppose in this respect we have changed less than any one you knew in Stanford. It is funny too. We have taken the ordinary number of beatings and I don’t think there is much strength in either of us, and still we go on butting our heads against the English Novel and nursing our bruises as though they were the wounds of honorable war. I don’t know one bit more about spelling and punctuation than I ever did, but I think I am learning a little bit about writing. The Morgan atrocity [Cup of Gold] pays enough for me to live quietly and with a good deal of comfort. In that far it was worth selling. I have a novel about finished [one of the versions of To a God Unknown] and Carl has finished two and is about a third through his third. It is an awful lot of work to write a novel. You know that because you have done it. I have been working on the present one nearly a year and have not completed it. The final draft will not be done before April I’m afraid. We don’t do much else nor think much else.

That’s us. I know no news. Every once in a while I hear a bit of news about somebody I know but when I try to repeat it I find that I have either forgotten it or have mixed it up with something I have heard about some one else. I thought I would be getting to New York this winter, but that seems impossible. I won’t have enough money and in the second place I do not want to move before I have finished this piece of work. There was every excuse for the first being bad, because it was the first I ever did but I lack that excuse now.

That seems to be all there is about me. It is such a simple life to tell about. Most of our tragedies we have to make up and pretend.

But do write and tell me about the things which have happened to you.

Sincerely,

John

To Amasa Miller

[San Francisco]

[November 1929]

Dear Ted;

Your little note came the other day. It came, in fact the day of the big game. Such a game it was. The first half was enough to induce a sort of racial apoplexy in the stands. I think it was the most exciting football game I ever saw.

Ted, I swear to God that if I ever finish this novel I shall take to writing the tritest kind of plot stories or even true confessions. This is so damned hard. I have never worked so hard in my life and I don’t seem to be getting ahead much. I don’t know when this will be finished. There are about three hundred and twenty-five pages done and about seventy-five to do, and I want to let it rest for a while when I get it finished so that I can stand off and get some perspective on it.

You said in a former letter that I had some money coming on the first of November and here it is nearly the first of December and none has shown. I am ashamed to go home.

Carol and I get on as well as always and are together much of the time. Fillmore Street has put red and green and yellow lights on the arches across the street and is very festive. There are mechanical toys in all the store windows. No rain, it is to be another dry year. I can never remember when we did not have a threat of a dry year. The natives cannot remember that this is not a wet country and so about Christmas every year they begin to moan about the dryness of the year and the possible damage to the crops. And the crops never seem to suffer very much, taking, as they do, most of their irrigation from the sea air. It is absurd. Everything is absurd. I wish I weren’t, but I think I am absurder than any of the rest.

I learn from obscure sources that I have paresis, that I am a woman, a Jew, that I, in the Morgan, have written a book aimed at the Catholics, that I have given up writing and am frantically looking for a job so that I can get married. Many are the stories I hear about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.

And that’s all. Write to me soon.

jawn

To A. Grove Day

San Francisco

[December 5] 1929

Dear Grove:

It is a very long time since I have started a letter with any anticipation of enjoying the writing of it.

Long ago I determined that any one who appraised The Cup of Gold for what it was should be entitled to a big kiss. The book was an immature experiment written for the purpose of getting all the wise cracks (known by sophomores as epigrams) and all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system. And I really did not intend to publish it. The book accomplished its purgative purpose. I am no more concerned with myself very much. I can write about other people. I have not the slightest desire to step into Donn Byrne’s shoes. I may not have his ability with the vernacular but I have twice his head. I think I have swept all the Cabellyo-Byrneish preciousness out for good. The new book is a straightforward and simple attempt to set down some characters in a situation and nothing else. If there is any beauty in it, it is a beauty of idea. I seem to have outgrown Cabell. The new method is far the more difficult of the two. It reduces a single idea to a single sentence and does not allow one to write a whole chapter with it as Cabell does. I think I shall write some very good books indeed. The next one won’t be good nor the next one, but about the fifth, I think will be above the average.

I don’t care any more what people think of me. I’ll tell you how it happened. You will remember at Stanford that I went about being different characters. I even developed a theory that one had no personality in essence, that one was a reflection of a mood plus the moods of other persons present. I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. For the moment I was truly the person I thought I was.

Well, I went into the mountains and stayed two years. I was snowed in eight months of the year and saw no one except my two Airedales. There were millions of fir trees and the snow was deep and it was very quiet. And there was no one to pose for any more. You can’t have a show with no audience. Gradually all the poses slipped off and when I came out of the hills I didn’t have any poses any more. It was rather sad, but it was far less trouble. I am happier than I have ever been in my life.

My sister [Mary] is married to Bill Dekker and has two very beautiful children. They are the only children whom I have ever liked at all. They live in Los Angeles and enjoy themselves.

I don’t think I write very interesting letters any more. I have this pelican of a novel hanging about my neck and it is decomposing and bothering me about every hour of the day. I dream about it. I can’t enjoy a party because it is not done. I write two pages and destroy three. It is over-ambitious I think.

I am engaged to a girl of whom I will say nothing at all because you will eventually meet her and I think you will like her because she has a mind as sharp and penetrating as your own.

I think that is all. I hope you will not let a great time pass before answering, though I realize that there is nothing to answer.

Sincerely,

John

To A. Grove Day

2441 Fillmore Street

San Francisco

[December] 1929

I am answering your letter immediately.

I want to speak particularly of your theory of clean manuscripts, and spelling as correct as a collegiate stenographer, and every nasty little comma in its place and preening of itself. Manners, you say it is, and knowing the trade and the Printed Word. But I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read. I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener. There you have it. We are not of the same trade at all and so how can your rules fit me? When my sounds are all in place, I can send them to a stenographer who knows his trade and he can slip the commas about until they sit comfortably and he can spell the words so that school teachers will not raise their eyebrows when they read them. Why should I bother? There are millions of people who are good stenographers but there aren’t so many thousands who can make as nice sounds as I can.

I must have misinformed you about my new book. I never never read Hemingway with the exception of The Killers. I have not lost the love for sound nor for pictures. Only I have tried to throw out the words that do not say anything. I don’t read much when I am working because novels have a way of going right on whether you are writing or not. You’ll be having dreams about it that wake you up in the night, and maybe you’ll be kissing some girl the way she expects it, and all the time your mind will be saying, I’ll do the thing this way, and I’ll transpose these scenes. A novel doesn’t stop at all when your pen is away.

Next week maybe I’ll be moving to Los Angeles with Carol and we’ll have some kind of a little house on the outskirts and you can come to see us. We haven’t much money but it’s very cheap to live out here. Maybe you’d like to settle near to us. I don’t like Stanford and never did. Prigs they are there and pretenders. Maybe you could get a part time job in the south and we could sit in front of a fire and talk, or lie on the beach and talk, or walk in the hills and talk. I’d like you to know Carol. She doesn’t write or dance or play the piano and she has very little of any soul at all. But horses like her and dogs and little boys and bootblacks and laborers. But people with souls don’t like her very much.

Let me hear from you as soon as you can.

john

Later he was to write:

Remember the days when we were all living in Eagle Rock? As starved and happy a group as ever robbed an orange grove. I can still remember the dinners of hamburger and stolen avocados.

To Amasa Miller

2741 El Roble Drive

Eagle Rock, California

[Early 1930]

Dear Ted:

I have been doing so many things that there has been no time to write. I moved down here with many furnitures and then Carol and I got hitched which required some messing about and then there was a great deal to be done on this little house, painting and gardening and fixing of toilets which is always necessary in a tumbled down house. Anyway, merry Christmas and so forth.

By dint of a great deal of labor we have made quite a nice place of this. We pay only fifteen dollars a month for a thirty foot living room with a big stone fireplace, a bed room, a bathroom, kitchen and sleeping porch. It was a wreck when we found it, but it is the envy of all of our friends now.

I have been working quite successfully. Find the need of a new title and am wild about it. I have been trying to get one and it is the hardest thing on earth.

The sun is so warm down here it makes me feel very good. We live on a hill in a very sparsely inhabited place which is heavily wooded. The neighbors are good with the exception of one virago. We have a Belgian shepherd puppy, pure black, which is going to be a monster. And all of the time I am getting work done which makes me more happy than any of the other things.

I hope to hear from you very soon and when I get this draft finished in triplicate I shall send one copy east for the usual criticism. I have already decided to make very definite changes so the criticism will not all be valid.

sincerely

john

To Carl Wilhelmson

Eagle Rock

[Early 1930]

Dear Carl:

I do not know how long it is since I have written to you. Everything has been in a haze pretty much for the past three weeks. I have been working to finish this ms. and the thing took hold of me so completely that I lost track of nearly everything else. Now the thing is done. I started rewriting this week and am not going to let it rest. Also I have a title which gives me the greatest of pleasure. For my title I have taken one of the Vedic Hymns, the name of the hymn—

TO THE UNKNOWN GOD

You surely remember the hymn with its refrain at the end of each invocation Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice? Don’t you think that is a good title? I am quite enthusiastic about it.

Carol is a good influence on my work. I am putting five hours every day on the rewriting of this one and in the evenings I have started another [Dissonant Symphony]. I have the time and the energy and it gives me pleasure to work, and now I do not seem to have to fight as much reluctance to work as I used to have. The start comes much easier. The new book is just a series of short stories or sketches loosely and foolishly tied together. There are a number of little things I have wanted to write for a long time, some of them ridiculous and some of them more serious, and so I am putting them in a ridiculous fabric. It is not the series in Salinas at all. I shall not do that yet. I am too vindictive and harsh on my own people. In a few years I may have outgrown that.

The dog is growing like a weed. He is three times as big as he was when we got him. You can see him grow from day to day. It has been quite cold here for the last few days with a good deal of rain and wind. But we have a big fire place in the house and the hill side behind us is covered with dead wood so we do not suffer. Indeed we enjoy it. You know, we really do not live in a city at all. We are out on a wooded and very sparsely-settled hill side. In three minutes you can climb to the top of the hill and be above everything and away from everything. It is much better than living in a city.

Are you working, and if so on what? It must be wet as hell up there now. You have told me things about the rainy season up there and it seems to be mostly floods. Carol and I thought of taking a run up to Salinas but we got a plumbing bill for about thirty dollars and a stop was put to that.

Duke is well and Maryon [Sheffield’s second wife] has been slightly unwell but has recovered.

Let me know how you are and what you are working on.

Sincerely

John

To Amasa Miller

Eagle Rock

[1930]

Dear Ted:

Herewith enclosed is the ms. [To An Unknown God] which has been taking up so much time in the last year and a half. I know that it will not seem worth the effort. I shall insure it heavily. Please let me hear from you immediately you receive it for I shall be anxious. There is a carbon but it is on inferior paper and is only held for a safeguard in case this is lost.

If McBride should decide to take this tell them that I want a short foreword in which some mention of Toby Street should be made. I shall write that later. He has decided that he didn’t do as much on this as he at first thought he did. But such a foreword is really necessary. On the other book I asked for a dedication and they paid no attention. If the foreword is refused they can go to hell.

Sincerely

john

To Amasa Miller

Eagle Rock

May 28, 1930

Dear Ted:

Your letter was received this morning. I was very glad to hear of the advance in your legal prestige, for it must be very definitely that. It should raise your standing in the firm too if what you told me when you were out here is still true.

Your news of McBrides came as a final touch to a week of disaster, a series of small and tragic incidents leading up to the death of our dog Bruga who died in convulsions which seemed to be the result of poison. The rejection was nothing as compared to that. I wish you had been a bit more full about it though. What reason did they give for rejection if any? Really the rejection is a relief. I think McBride handled the last one as badly as it could well have been handled. A timid half-hearted advertising campaign which aimed at the wrong people by misdescribing the book, slowness, bad taste in jacket and blurb. Reviewers, after reading that it was an adventure story said, quite truly, that it was a hell of a bad adventure story. It was worse than that. It wasn’t an adventure story at all. Am I still held by that clause in the contract, to submit a third ms. to McBride, because I think I should attempt to break it if I were. I am not discouraged at all. Rather am I heartened. The Unknown God remains a pretty fair book and a very interesting book.

Aren’t you rather sick of handling this stuff? You can turn it over to an agent any time you wish. When Day rejects it, I should like it to be submitted to Farrar and Rinehart. Miss Mirrielees of Stanford is a friend of Farrar and she recommended the firm to me very highly. Also Carl Wilhelmson who is here with us now, advises me to give them a try.

I don’t think that John Day will accept this book. That firm has had such a tough time with beginners lately that they will probably be touchy. However this book has merits and should go fairly well in the right circles.

Carol is well but very much broken up about Bruga. She never had a dog of her own before and she had become horribly fond of the little wretch.

I solicit your attention.

sincerely,

John

To Amasa Miller

Eagle Rock

[1930]

Dear Ted:

I have just happened to think, if this God thing is ever published it will be in imitation of somebody or other. My chief reading has been pretty immaculate. I have re-read Xenophon and Herodotus and Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius and that is about all except Fielding, and yet I suppose I shall be imitating Hemingway whom I have never read. Both of us use the English language which is enough to draw down the wrath. And he started using it first too and I merely copied him.

You ask about the new work. I have been gloating and sorrowing in my freedom. It seemed good to be without the curse of a literary foetus and at the same time I have had a feeling of lostness, much, I imagine, like that felt by an old soldier when he has been discharged from the army and has no one to tell him what time to brush his teeth. Bad as novels are, they do regulate our lives and give us a responsibility. While this book was being written I felt that I was responsible for someone. If I stopped, the characters died. But now it is finished and the words of it are being put down in nice black letters on nice white paper, and the words are spelled correctly and the punctuation is sitting about in proper places, and most of the foolishness has been left on other sheets with blue marks through it.

There is something I have wanted to ask you. Did McBride’s sell enough of the Cup to pay for its publication? I know that during the holidays every store sold out completely and I wonder whether that had any effect. I hope they at least made a decent interest on their outlay.

I’m twenty-eight years old now and I must have at least one book a year from now on if I can manage it. The next one will be short as can be and shouldn’t take as long as the last. This one [Dissonant Symphony] offered too many problems, not only psychological but anthropological, to be done quickly. I hope the thing doesn’t read like a case history in an insane asylum. My father was very funny about it or did I tell you this? He was terribly interested from the first but quite disgusted at the end. After my careful work in filling the book with hidden symptoms of paranoia and showing that the disease had such a hold as to be incurable, my father expected Andy to recover and live happily ever after.

Carl Wilhelmson’s Wizard’s Farm is being published by Rinehart and Farrar this summer. I am very anxious to see it. It is a very good book. I think you saw parts of it when you were out here. I am over at the Sheffields’ house using their typewriter because Carol is plugging away on mine.

jawn

To Amasa Miller

[Eagle Rock]

August 6 [1930]

Dear Ted:

I have received Farrar’s rejection of my manuscript. It is terse and to the point. The man makes no bones about his rejection and I like that. But now that I have it, I do not know what to do next. I know nothing whatever about the market.

Aren’t you getting sick of trundling this white elephant around? It is discouraging, isn’t it? Nobody seems to want my work. That doesn’t injure me but it must be having a definite effect on you that you are handling a dud. Let me know what you think about it.

Our house here has been sold over our heads and we are going back north to the Grove. In many ways we are glad to leave the south although we are very fond of this house. It is pretty hot down here now and my mind seems more sluggish than it usually is.

affectionately

john

According to Carlton Sheffield John and Carol Steinbeck had done such a beautiful job of rebuilding the Eagle Rock shack that the owner evicted them and gave it to his daughter as a wedding present.

They moved north to live rent free in the family three-room summer cottage in Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula. This was the home to which Steinbeck kept returning throughout his life. His father gave them a monthly allowance of twenty-five dollars and Carol contributed her earnings from various jobs.

To Amasa Miller

[147-11th Street]

[Pacific Grove]

[Summer 1930]

Dear Ted:

Your letter and Harper’s rejection came this morning. From what you say, I hope the book can get a berth with Little Brown, but I have very small hope of its ever finding a home. On the other hand, the very fear publishers have of it might make it go. Sometimes something of that nature happens.

I started to write to you yesterday and then went to the county fair instead to see the polo ponies and jumpers. That is one advantage to Pacific Grove and Monterey and Del Monte that should pull at you. Carol is secretary to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Monterey so I will ask her to send you bushels of literature on the peninsula. As a matter of fact I think it is a grand place. But in the way of business, the place is growing all the time. There are thirteen fish canneries here, and within a couple of years the new breakwater is going in which will bring a greatly increased population because it will become a deep water port and hundreds of big ships will stop here. Look over the literature and tell your wife that it is the most wonderful place in the world. This sounds like a prospectus. As a matter of fact, I am very much emotionally tied up with the whole place. It has a soul which is lacking in the east.

As you know, or do you, I finished a ms. labelled Dissonant Symphony. I sent it to this here now Scribner’s contest and have received not the slightest word from it. If I had a name, some firm might bring it out as a little book because it is a nice piece of work. It won’t get by Scribner because this contest will doubtless attract the best technicians in the country among which I am by no means numbered.

I’m working on another novel [untitled—later destroyed] which will get some spleen out of my system. Bile that has been sickening me for years.

Now I’m going out to the county fair again to see a polo game. Gawd, I wish you could be here to go with me. The horses are perfectly lovely. The insides of my legs itch for the saddle. I have not ridden for two years.

Affectionately

john

Shortly afterwards, he added about Carol:

She grows visibly in understanding, in culture, in kindness and in erudition. She understands many things more quickly and more thoroughly than I do. And the old defiance, which came from young wounds and disappointments, is wearing off. She is grand. I would have great difficulty in living without her now.

To Carl Wilhelmson

[Pacific Grove]

[Late 1930]

Dear Carl:

And I had about thought you dead from the great silence. I was very glad to get your letter this morning. I have neither seen Midsummer Night nor seen it mentioned but I don’t get papers. Someone told me it was being extremely well received by critics. My God still goes without a master. I got a letter from Little Brown saying it wouldn’t sell but that they wanted to print it anyway and couldn’t this year. That is probably the usual bull.

You are to remember that we can always put you up. I don’t imagine you want to live here but it is a good place. I have uncovered an unbelievable store of energy in myself. The raps of the last couple of years, i.e. the failure of the Cup, and the failure of my other things to make any impression, seem to have no effect on my spirit whatever. For that reason, I have high hopes for myself. Of course, the hundred page ms. flopped heavily. Just now I am busy on another one. Eventually I shall be so good that I cannot be ignored. These years are disciplinary for me.

Financially we are in a mess, but spiritually we ride the clouds. Nothing matters.

Write soon and say what your plans are.

Affectionately,

John

To Carl Wilhelmson

[Pacific Grove]

[Late 1930]

Dear Carl:

It is a gloomy day; low gray fog and a wet wind contribute to my own gloominess. Whether the fog has escaped from my soul like ectoplasm to envelope the peninsula, or whether it has seeped in through my nose and eyes to create the gloom, I don’t know. Last night I read over the first forty pages of my new novel and destroyed them—the most unrelieved rot imaginable. It is very sad.

We went to a party at John Calvin’s in Carmel last week. These writers of juveniles are the Jews of literature. They seem to wring the English language, to squeeze pennies out of it. They don’t even pretend that there is any dignity in craftsmanship. A conversation with them sounds like an afternoon spent with a pawnbroker. Says John Calvin, I long ago ceased to take anything I write seriously. I retorted, "I take everything I write seriously; unless one does take his work seriously there is very little chance of its ever being good work." And the whole company was a little ashamed of me as though I had three legs or was an albino.

I am very anxious to see a copy of Midsummer Night. When I can afford to, I will buy it. It was different with my own first novel. I outgrew that before I finished writing it. I very definitely didn’t want you to have it just as I didn’t want to have it myself. I shall be glad to arrive at an age where I don’t outgrow a piece of work as children outgrow shoes.

This letter would seem to indicate that I am unhappy. Such is not the case. As long as I can work I shall be happy (except during moments of reflection) regardless of the quality of the work. That is a curious thing but true.

There was a great fire last night. The Del Monte bath house burned to the ground. We got up and went to it and stood in the light and heat and gloried in the destruction. When Cato was shouting in the Roman Senate Carthago delenda est, I wondered whether in his mind there was not a vision of the glorious fire it would make. Precious things make beautiful flames. The pyre that Savonarola made of all lovely and profound, wise and beautiful things of northern Italy must have been the finest fire the world has seen. I believe there is an account which says that when Caesar burned the great library at Alexandria, the populace laughed and groaned in exquisite despair.

You say you are striving for tenseness in your ms. I feel increasingly that you and I are the only ones of our entire acquaintance who have retained any literary responsibility and integrity. That is worth while regardless of the badness of my work.

Modern sanity and religion are a curious delusion. Yesterday I went out in a fishing boat—out in the ocean. By looking over the side into the blue water, I could quite easily see the shell of the turtle who supports the world. I am getting more prone to madness. What a ridiculous letter this is; full of vaguenesses and unrealities. I for one arid you to some extent have a great many of the basic impulses of an African witch doctor.

You know the big pine tree beside this house? I planted it when it and I were very little; I’ve watched it grow. It has always been known as John’s tree. Years ago, in mental playfulness I used to think of it as my brother and then later, still playfully, I thought of it as something rather closer, a kind of repository of my destiny. This was all an amusing fancy, mind you. Now the lower limbs should be cut off because they endanger the house. I must cut them soon, and I have a very powerful reluctance to do it, such a reluctance as I would have toward cutting live flesh. Furthermore if the tree should die, I am pretty sure I should be ill. This feeling I have planted in myself,and quite deliberately I guess, but it is none the less strong for all that.

I shall stop before you consider me quite mad.

Sincerely,

John

To Amasa Miller

Pacific Grove

[December 1930]

Dear Ted:

I think the manuscript [Murder at Full Moon] enclosed in this package is self explanatory. For some time now, I have been unhappy. The reason is that I have a debt and it is making me miserable.

It is quite obvious that people do not want to buy the things I have been writing. Therefore, to make the money I need, I must write the things they want to read. In other words, I must sacrifice artistic integrity for a little while to personal integrity. Remember that when this manuscript makes you sick.