John Steinbeck: Novelist At Work - The Atlantic

1

CRITICS have had a holiday detecting exotic symbolisms in John Steinbeck’s work. Perhaps they are there. He would be the last man to affirm or to deny it. To inquirers for biographical data he has been known to reply: “Please feel free to make up your own facts about me as you need them. I can’t remember how much of me really happened and how much I invented. . . . Biography by its very nature must be half fiction.”

Nonetheless, in John Steinbeck’s letters to his literary agents, McIntosh and Otis, covering almost fifteen years of partnership in creative writing, appears a singularly honest and revealing record of what John Steinbeck himself thought about what he was writing, when he was writing it.

Steinbeck has been interested in writing as long as he can remember. When he was four, he discovered, to his flabbergasted delight, that “high” rhymed with “ fly,” and from that day to this the permutations and combinations of words have charmed and fascinated him. He wrote for the Salinas, California, high school paper, El Gabilan, in 1919, when he was president of the senior class and on the basketball and track teams. He wrote during his intermittent sessions at Stanford University. In the early 1920’s he functioned briefly as a reporter for the New York Journal, but he didn’t like that; he wanted to do his own kind of writing. He wrote hard for almost fifteen years before he had his first success. He has always written more than he has published. Indeed, he destroyed two full-length novels before Cup of Gold, his first published novel, made its appearance in 1929.

It was in 1930 that Steinbeck began his long association with his literary agency. It was a new firm then, consisting of Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth Otis, with Annie Laurie Williams as associated theatrical agent. Mary Squire Abbott joined the firm in 1931, Mildred Lyman several years later, and in the 1940’s Miss McIntosh left. The firm’s office became John Steinbeck’s office and home whenever he was in New York. In his early years he consulted its partners for literary advice and sometimes for literary consolation. In later years the firm became his bookkeepers, his guards against an intrusive public, and, most important of all, his friends.

Critic and journalist, LEWIS GANNETT took his A.B. and his A.M. at Harvard and in 1916 broke into print as a reporter on the staff of the New York World. He covered the Peace Conference for the Survey, visited Russia and the Orient for the Nation, and in 1931 became daily book critic of the New York Herald Tribune, a post which he has filled with firmness and distinction.

His letters, at first shyly impersonal, grow increasingly warm; eventually they become comfortable, casual, intimate, family letters. The agents believed in Steinbeck from the first; they tried, mostly in vain, to market his early stories. But Steinbeck no more lost faith in them than they in him; in fact, at times he seems to have had more faith in his agents than in himself.

“I think I told you that the imperfections of The Unknown God [an earlier version of To a God Unknown] had bothered me ever since I first submitted the book for publication,” the young author wrote in August, 1931, before his agents had succeeded in marketing any book of his. “Your announcement of the book’s failure to find a public is neither unwelcome nor unpleasant to me. ... I shall rewrite it. Whether my idea of excellence coincides with editors’ ideas remains to be seen. Certainly I shall make no effort to ‘popularize’ the story. . . . Thank you for your help. I am an unprofitable client,”

Times changed. Six years later, when the tide had turned, Steinbeck wrote a brief note to the same agents: “Dear All: Acknowledging another check. Since I took your course I have sold. Do you want a testimonial?” Many authors, when success comes to them, shift restlessly from one agent and from one publisher to another. Steinbeck has never left a publisher who remained interested in his work; he has never had any agent but McIntosh and Otis.

Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck’s second published book, had a rather bewildering publishing history due to an epidemic of upsets in the New York book world. Robert Ballou, editor for Cape and Smith when he first saw the manuscript, recognized the quality of the book on first reading and accepted it with enthusiasm. Even before it had appeared in America, he wrote Martin Seeker of London that it was “one of the most distinguished novels I have ever read in manuscript.”

Before Pastures of Heaven appeared, Steinbeck had written several drafts of To a God Unknown, which no publisher then wanted. He had also finished a book called Dissonant Symphony, which was equally unmarketable; this he later withdrew, saying that, on rereading, he was ashamed of it. He had even written a murder mystery which he thought “might help pay for coffee.” He had been groping, experimenting, finding his way. In Pastures he first struck what was to become known as the Steinbeck vein.

He announced his theme early in 1931. “There is, about twelve miles from Monterey, a valley in the hills called Corral de Tierra,” he wrote. “Because I am using some of its people I am calling it Las Pasturas del Cielo. The valley was for years known as the happy valley because of the unique harmony which existed among its twenty families. They are ordinary people, ill educated but honest, and as kindly as any. In fact, in their whole history I cannot find that they have committed a really malicious act or an act which was not dictated by humble expediency or out-and-out altruism. There have been two murders, a suicide, many quarrels and a great deal of unhappiness in the Pastures of Heaven, and all of these things can be traced to the influence of the A——s. So much is true. I am using the following method. The manuscript is made up of stories, each one complete in itself, having its rise, climax and ending. Each story deals with a family or an individual. They are tied together only by the common locality and the common contact with the A—s. I am trying to show this peculiar evil cloud which follows the A—s. Some of the stories are very short and some as long as 15,000 words. . . . I wonder whether you think this a good plan.”

McIntosh and Otis didn’t keep carbons in those days, and there is no record to show whether they thought it a good plan. The book, of course, turned out a little differently; everything Steinbeck has ever written has grown and changed in the process of coming to birth. He learns a good deal about his stories, and his characters, in the process of writing.

Pastures of Heaven appeared in 1932; it had a friendly critical reception, but sold few copies. To a God Unknown appeared in 1933; it sold even less well. Robert Ballou had to “remainder” the unsold copies of both books, and neither sold even as well as Cup of Gold. When, after the success of Tortilla Flat in 1935, Pascal Covici bought the remaining unbound sheets and took over rights to the two books, he discovered to his amazement that the sales had not paid even for the pitifully small advances made to Steinbeck. With three published books, Steinbeck’s total sales were fewer than three thousand.

Steinbeck never expected large sales; all his later successes surprised him. When he sent the final version of To a God Unknown to his agents, in February, 1933, he explained: “The book was hellish hard to write. I had been making notes for it for about five years. It will probably be a hard book to sell. Its characters are not ‘home folks.’ They make no more attempt at being human than the people in the Iliad. Boileau insisted that only gods, kings and heroes are worth writing about. I firmly believe that. The detailed accounts of the lives of clerks don’t interest me much unless, of course, the clerk breaks into heroism. But I have no intention of trying to explain my book. It has to do that for itself. I would be sure of its effect if it could be stipulated that the reader read to an obbligato of Bach.”

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AT THAT time Steinbeck was so poor that he could not even afford a dog. He had had a big dog named Omar as a companion when, a hermit in the high Sierras, he wrote Cup of Gold. The first letter from him in the McIntosh and Otis files, after explaining the project for Pastures of Heaven, continued to report that “Tillie Eulenspiegel the Airedale has puppies, as sinful a crew as ever ruined rugs. Four of them found your letter and ate all of it but the address. I should imagine they were awed by the address if I had not learned that they hold nothing in reverence. At present they are out eating each other.”

But in 1933 he needed a dog. That was the year he reread his manuscript of Dissonant Symphony and hastened to advise New York that he wanted it killed. “I reread my copy and was ashamed of it,” he wrote. “The Murder I thought might be sold to a pulp if it were cut down. Even a little money would be better than a bundle of paper. We are very happy. I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of great numbers of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them. Apparently we are headed for the rocks. The light company is going to turn off the power in a few days but we don’t care much. The rent is up pretty soon and then we shall move, I don’t know where.”

He was writing Tortilla Flat then, and, strange as that seems today, Tortilla Flat also proved hard to market. There is a tradition in Steinbeck’s agents’ office that eleven publishers rejected it, but the files preserve copies of only two turndowns. Finally Pascal Covici accepted Tortilla Flat, and ever since he has been John Steinbeck’s publisher.

Steinbeck was puzzled, both before and after publication of Tortilla Flat, at the failure of critics and readers to distinguish his theme. “I want to write something about Tortilla Flat,” he told his agents in March, 1931. “The book has a very definite theme. I thought it was clear enough. I had expected that the plan of the Arthurian cycle would be recognized. Even the incident of the Sangreal in the search of the forest is not clear enough, I guess. The form is that of the Malory version — the coming of Arthur, and the mystic quality of owning a house, the forming of the Round Table, the adventures of the knights and finally, the mystic translation of Danny. The main issue was to present a little known and to me delightful people.

“Is not this cycle or story or theme enough? Perhaps it is not enough because I have not made it clear enough. Then I must make it clearer. What do you think of putting in an interlocutor, who between each incident interprets the incident, morally, aesthetically, historically, but in the manner of the paisanos themselves? This would give the book much the appeal of the Gesta Romanorum, those outrageous tales with monkish morals appended, or of the Song of Solomon in the King James Version, with the delightful chapter headings which go to prove that the Shulamite is in reality Christ’s Church. It would not be as sharp as this, of course. But the little dialogue would at least make clear the form of the book, its tragi-comic theme, and the different philosophic-moral system of these people.

“A cycle is there. You will remember that the association forms, flowers and dies. Far from having a hard theme running through the book, one of the intents is to show that rarely does anything in the lives of these people survive the night.”

Obviously, John Steinbeck as a writer was never quite the naïve primitive discovered by some of his hoity-toity critics.

Fortunately, Steinbeck gave up the plan for an interlocutor; and readers of Tortilla Flat took it to their hearts, with or without the Arthurian cycle. It was Steinbeck’s first experience of success, and that bothered him. He had written Tortilla Flat more rapidly and easily than some of its predecessors, and he remarked to his agents, “ Curious that this secondrate book, written for relaxation, should cause this fuss. People are actually taking it seriously.”

He added, in a vein that ran like a motif through his letters of those years, “I am scared to death of popularity. It has ruined everyone I know. That’s one of the reasons I should like In Dubious Battle printed next. Myths form early, and I want no tag of humorist pinned on me, nor any other kind.”

He was leery of the conventional publishers’ publicity. “ I am never photographed,” he told his agents. “This is not temperament on my part, nor is it self-consciousness. I do not believe in mixing personality with work. It is customary, I guess, but I should like to break the custom. A public nauseated with personal detail would probably be more grateful than otherwise. . . . Please get this point over with enough force to make it stick for some time.”

Steinbeck may have been wrong about the public’s nausea with personal detail, but he stuck to his point. He was so convinced of it that, living out in California, he thought that even Alexander Woollcott must agree with him. After the Book-of-the-Month Club had taken Of Mice and Men and made Steinbeck a national figure, Woollcott asked for material he could use in a broadcast. The agents passed on the request to Steinbeck.

“I think you know my batred of personal matter,” he replied. “I hope you will get some of that impression over to Mr. Woollcott. On the other hand I should like to have him talk about the work. Factual material doesn’t matter, but tell him, please no personalities. I simply can’t write books if a consciousness of self is thrust on me. Must have my anonymity. . . . Unless I can stand in a crowd without self-consciousness and watch things from an uneditorialized point of view, I’m going to have a hell of a hard time. I’m sure Mr. Woollcott will understand this. I’m sure that of his own experience he will know the pressures exerted by publicity are unendurable.”

Mr. Woollcott knew far more than Steinbeck about the pressures exerted by publicity, but he was not the man to find any of them unendurable; he lived for limelight. Steinbeck, unhappy about the ballyhoo over Mice in 1937, could not then dream what pressures would be exerted on him after The Grapes of Wrath. But he was right in his attitude; the writer who becomes a public personality inevitably loses something of his normal attitude to his fellow men. He becomes an Author with a capital A, set apart from common men. It seldom helps.

Still, the royalties from Tortilla Flat and the later, much larger, returns from Of Mice and Men changed the material conditions of Steinbeck’s life. “Life has become very beautiful since I got a kerosene heater for my workroom,” he wrote. “Completely changed attitude toward all kinds of things. Warm hands are fine.”

Tortilla Flat was sold to the movies for $4000, which seemed big money to Steinbeck in those days, and on conventional terms which he later regretted. They gave him no control over changes made in the script. But in 1935 Steinbeck had not yet developed that passionate interest in dramatic forms and in the mass audience of the movies which was so powerfully to affect his career for the next decade. When a possible dramatization of Tortilla Flat was suggested in October, 1935, he instructed his agents to do as they thought best about it; he knew, he said, nothing of he process. When a movie contract was suggested, he again expressed indifference. “On an average,” he wrote, “I go to about one movie a year.”

“My stuff isn’t picture material,” he was still insisting in January, 1936. “If it is bought it is because of some attendant publicity. Tortilla Flat was the exception. There won’t be a nibble on In Dubious Battle and if there were the producers would not use the story, and it is a conscientious piece of work. But there won’t be anything lost. I’m not a popular writer in spite of the recent fluke.”

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In Dubious Battle was the first of three very different Steinbeck books dealing with the migratory farm laborers on the California fruit farms, and it was the bitterest of the three. “I guess it is a brutal book,” he wrote when he was still at work on it, in February, 1935, “more brutal because there is no author’s moral point of view. The speech of workingmen may seem a little bit racy to the ladies’ clubs, but since ladies’ clubs won’t believe that such things go on anyway, it doesn’t matter. I know this speech and I’m sick of workingmen being gelded of their natural expression until they talk with a fine Oxonian flavor. . . . A workingman bereft of his profanity is a silent man.”

A New York editor in Pascal Covici’s office read the manuscript of In Dubious Battle conscientiously and wrote a three-page single-space report indicating points at which Steinbeck’s Communist organizer diverged from the orthodox party line as expressed by the ideologists of New York. Steinbeck took this letter as a rejection and almost went to another publisher, but when Mr. Covici discovered what his assistant had written he hastily assured Steinbeck that he was willing to publish the book if Steinbeck wished, though he was obviously somewhat alarmed at its violence.

“I would rather stay with Covici, Friede than with anyone I know,” Steinbeck informed his agents. “I like the way they worked on Tortilla Flat and I like their make-up and everything about them. This letter this morning from them offers to publish In Dubious Battle if I wish it. Of course I wish it. It is a good book. I believe in it.” As to the Communist ideology, he explained, “My information for this book came mostly from Irish and Italian Communists whose training was in the field not in the drawing-room. They don’t believe in ideologies and ideal tactics. They do what they can under the circumstances.

The book was published as Steinbeck wrote it. Critics, not unnaturally, tended to discuss its politics. Steinbeck was irked. “So far,” he complained to McIntosh and Otis, “Burton Rascoe and Ben Abramson are the only two reviewers who have discovered that In Dubious Battle is a novel and not a tract. Perhaps more will later.”

Of Mice and Men was Steinbeck’s first big success, and Steinbeck had had various troubles in writing it. “The microcosm is rather difficult to handle and apparently I did not get it over,” he remarked when the book was in process — “ the earth longings of a Lennie who was not to represent insanity at all but the inarticulate and powerful yearning of all men.” Another time he spoke of the book as “an experiment in making a play that can be read or a novel that can be played . . . to find a new form that will take some of the technics of both.” This was a problem that was to concern him for years.

By this time, of course, Steinbeck again had a dog, Toby, “a very serious dog who doesn’t care for jokes.” And Toby made trouble for Mice. “Minor tragedy stalked,” he wrote on May 27, 1936. “My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my manuscript book. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a manuscript I’m not sure is good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking.” After the Book-of-the-Month Club had accepted Mice, and critical enthusiasm began to boil, Steinbeck still felt that Toby might have been right. “I’m not sure Toby didn’t know what he was doing when he ate the first draft,” he wrote. “I have promoted Tobydog to be a lieutenant-colonel in charge of literature. But as for the unpredictable literary enthusiasms of this country, I have little faith in them.”

4

HE WAS already mulling over The Grapes of Wrath, and it was hard going. “Having the devil’s own time with this new book, but I am enjoying it,” he wrote in January, 1937. “The new book has struck a bad snag,” he said two weeks later. “Heaven knows how long it will take me to write. The subject is so large that it scares me. And I am not going to rush it. It must be worked out with care. That’s one thing this selection will do. It will let me work without a starvation scare going on all the time. This may or may not be a good thing.”

The success of Of Mice and Men made possible Steinbeck’s first trip to Europe. He sailed on a Swedish ship. He had always been interested in the Scandinavian countries. Scandinavian translations of Tortilla Flat were the only ones he had asked to see, explaining that perhaps his interest was due to his fondness for Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berling.

“This is a fine ship,” he reported cheerfully from shipboard in May, 1937. His agents had sent him a “lovely bottle” as a bon voyage, and he thanked them for it. “The day after we sailed we were invited to a party in honor of the king and queen of Sweden. At least two thirds of the people on board were Swedes. Well, we toasted the king and queen in punch. We listened to stuffy speeches and gave a few half-hearted guttural cheers and we went to bed. Now there are only two Norwegians on board. One at our table. He told us that the seventeenth of May was the Norwegian Fourth of July, the day of independence. Immediately we felt a surge of patriotism. Spiritually we felt Norwegian. And your bottle was the nucleus, With only two Norwegians, and we two as a kind of auxiliary Norwegians, we turned the ship into a fury. We made speeches. Wine, beer and brandy ran like water. All evening we toasted everything we could think of. Gradually the Swedes began to feel a certain love for Norway. At two this morning the riot was still going on. The Swedes are jealous but admiring. Even the two Norwegians don’t know just how it happened. And your bottle of wine started it. I know you will be glad that your gift was the node of a new international brotherhood. I know you will. And I bet you never heard forty Scandinavians rise with their glasses in their hands and solemnly sing

‘Sent Looisss Voomans, vit you diment erringsChessed det men aroun de apron strings.’

It was unique in international feelings. It was very beautiful.”

The Steinbceks returned from Europe sooner than they had planned. On September 12, Steinbeck wrote from Los Gatos, “So very glad to be home.” He went back to work on The Grapes of Wrath.

5

HE HAD written a series of articles on the migrant workers for the San Francisco News in October, 1936, before Of Mice and Men was published. He had worked on the farms of his long valley long ago in his school vacations. He knew the work; he knew the people. He knew the bitternesses. He felt them in the marrow of his bones. He also had a deep affectionate sense of identification with the fruit-pickers; and he was a Californian, and he felt a responsibility.

“I must go over into the interior valleys,” he wrote Elizabeth Otis in the midst of reports on work in progress. “There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.

“Do you know what they’re afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. . . . Talk about Spanish children. The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. . . . I’ll do what I can. . . . Funny how mean and how little books become in the face of such tragedies.”

He did what he could, and returned home to dash off a book that was announced under the title L’Affaire Lettuceburg. And when it was done he sat down and wrote a joint letter to his agent and his publisher, a letter beautifully and painfully illustrative of Steinbeck’s attitude toward his own work: “ Dear Elizabeth and Pat,” he began. “This is going to be a hard letter to write. I feel badly about it. You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire. I’ve written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. The second was the murder novel and this is the third. The first two were written under rather frantic financial pressure, and this last one from an obligation pressure I felt. I know, you could sell possibly 30,000 copies. I know that a great many people would think they liked this book. I, myself, have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the argument, but I don’t like the book. And I would be doing Pat a greater injury in letting him print it than I would by destroying it. Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly. And that I won’t admit — yet. . . .”

So he went back to the grind, plodding his way through The Grapes of Wrath. For a long time the book had no title. In September, 1938, the title went to New York on a postcard, followed by a letter saying that Steinbeck liked the title “because it is a march, because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and because in reference to this book it has a large meaning. And I like it because people know the Battle Hymn who don’t know the Stars and Stripes.”

That autumn he was on the home stretch. “I am desperately tired,” he wrote, “but I want to finish. And mean. I feel as though shrapnel were bursting about my head. I only hope the book is some good. Can’t tell yet at all. And I can’t tell whether it is balanced. It is a slow plodding book but I don’t think that it is dull.” He also didn’t think it would be a popular book.

It wasn’t dull and it was popular. It made history in the publishing world and it changed history in the migrant camps of California, It was wildly praised and even more wildly denounced; what mattered was that it was read. But it left Steinbeck exhausted; it took months for him to recover from the long process of gestation. It was utterly impossible for him to do as he had often done before: to start work on a new book before the last was published. And the success of the book did to him some of the things he had feared success might do: “I’m so busy being a writer that I haven’t time to write,” he complained. “Ten thousand people have apparently put aside all other affairs to devote themselves to getting me to speak. And I’m so increasingly afraid in crowds that I do not talk comfortably to a pair of dice any more.”

Moreover the war was looming on Steinbeck’s, as on the world’s, horizon, changing his course as it changed the world’s. He tried for a time to escape in Mexico, first on the collecting expedition with Edward F. Ricketts which later bore fruit in Sea of Cortez, and subsequently in writing the script for the Mexican movie, The Forgotten Village. He took flying lessons, and was amazed to discover that “far from giving one a sense of power it gives one a sense of humility.” He helped make pictures in Hollywood and out of Hollywood. But all this seemed secondary. “There’s an imminence in the air as though anything not having to do with the war must be quickly done,” he wrote in February, 1942. “If there is a London, I want to be in London this summer.”

He liked writing Sea of Cortez. He had always been something of a biologist at heart, and very much of a craftsman. He had enjoyed the techniques of collecting; he enjoyed applying some of the technique of novel-writing to a book about science. “ Perhaps it is a little crazy,” he explained, “but it is a good clearing-out of a lot of ideas that have been working on me for a long time and they do fit into the loose framework and design of such a book. . . . Pat is getting a darned fine book and one that he probably can’t sell at all. It will be fun to read but not by the take-a-book-to-bed public. . . . The more I consider it the less very wide appeal it seems to me to have. The general public is not given to playful speculation. The rage and contempt of the critics will be amusing and like old times. It will be kind of good too because the work is pretty good. I know it is. It certainly is the most difficult work I’ve ever undertaken.”

6

THE war loomed ever larger. Steinbeck wanted to help, and various agencies of the government asked him to help. He responded eagerly to every opportunity— and was constantly frustrated, as so many others were, by the wide gap between enthusiasm at the top and the ruts of bureaucratic routine. The Moon Is Down actually grew out of a serious discussion with Colonel William J. Donovan of the Office of Strategic Services on techniques for aiding resistance movements in the occupied countries of German-held Europe. Bombs Away was the outgrowth of a series of suggestions made by General “Hap” Arnold of the Army Air Forces. But chasing about the United States of America in pursuit of material usable in wartime about the Army Air Forces was an occupation which involved considerable psychic frustration.

Steinbeck felt more at home when, early in 1943, he crossed to Europe in a convoy packed with soldiers, to do war reporting for the New York Herald Tribune. That was his own idea; he had shyly inquired whether the Herald Tribune would be interested in having him as a correspondent. He worked hard, and at first happily. The restraints of censorship eventually gnawed him, as they gnawed every correspondent. He did a good steady daily job; but when he came home, in October, 1943, he knew that his daily stories were not a book. For him a book was not just a collection of journalistic pieces; it had to have a life of its own; it took time to grow.

Yet so long as the war was on, it was impossible for John Steinbeck to settle down to sustained work on anything not connected with the war. His wartime letters are full of unfinished projects — war and nonwar. All through the years, indeed, odd projects had been appearing in them, then disappearing, and usually reappearing. Cannery Row, however, came suddenly, late in 1944, without preparation in the letters — a nostalgic return to the moods of Tortilla Flat days, a “ mixed-up book,” as Steinbeck himself described it, with a “pretty general ribbing” in it.

A play referred to as The Piper turns up in the letters occasionally, then fades away; various movie projects and temporary government jobs receive passing mention; there is a long saga of excitements and postponements concerned with the moving picture, The Pearl of the World, produced in Mexico in 1945, for which Steinbeck wrote a script that became a magazine story— “a strange piece of work,” according to its author, “full of curious methods and figures. A folktale, I hope. A black-and-white story like a parable.”

“I don’t think I shall ever do another shooting script,” he wrote in July, 1945. “It isn’t my kind of work — this moving a camera around from place to place.”

In the letters there is at first casual, then increasingly excited, talk of a book to be called The Wayward Bus — “it might be quite a book,” Steinbeck thought in mid-1945, adding, “There is no hurry.” There are also, of course, always references in the Steinbeck letters to the Steinbeck dogs — after 1943 to a huge blue-eyed English shepherd dog, Willie, and later to Steinbeck’s son, whose advent changed Willie’s nature. Willie, like his master, had been a bit of a rover, which sometimes complicated the pattern of Steinbeck family life. But after Tom appeared, when Willie could have had complete freedom, he didn’t want it. Willie just wanted to stay at home and take care of the baby.

So there, in fifteen years of letters to an agent’s office that became an author’s permanent home, is the story of a creative writer at work. Certain patterns are recurrent: the restless wandering, when a story is in gestation; the false starts; then the utter absorption in creation, when the letters become sparser and the work is everything; finally, fatigue, uncertainty of the product, and a few wisps of anger at critics’ misunderstanding. The war interrupts, but merely interrupts, t he recurrent pattern; and now the war is over. The rest of the autobiography is for John Steinbeck — aided, of course, by Willie and by Tom and by Gwyn — to write, and it would be presumptuous for a critic to attempt to anticipate it. But there is a suggestive footnote which occurs in a letter written in the spring of 1945: —

“Ed Ricketts says that when he was little he was in trouble all the time until he suddenly realized that adults were crazy. Then, when he knew that, everything was all right and he could be nice to them. He says he has never found occasion to revise that opinion. Tom will probably be going through the same evaluation. And if he doesn’t discover it for himself I will try to help him.”