Eskişehir, Türkiye
Wednesday 3 April 2024
“What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft, a kind of breaking through to glory.“
(John Steinbeck)
Above: American writer John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968)
“How can we live without our lives?
How will we know it’s us without our past?“
(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)
“Waverly (his stepdaughter) came home (Salinas, California) yesterday and we had a pleasant homecoming party.
She was very tired so as usual Elaine (his wife) and I stayed up for her.
I guess we have no sense.
But in spite of that I am early this morning.
Feeling fine.
Sometimes I get a little panicky – so many things I do not do now that I am writing (on his novel East of Eden).
I put all the burdens on Elaine, of running the house and doing the many hundreds of things living entails.
So far, she hasn’t complained.
I help with what I can but I am very thoughtless – very.
My mind goes mooning away.
I never get very far from my book.
And this must get pretty tiresome.
I am sure that it does.
I guess a writer is only half a man as far as a woman is concerned.
And there is so much violence in me.
Sometimes I am horrified at the amount of it.
It isn’t very well concealed either.
It lies very close to the surface.“
(John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, 3 April 1951)
“He didn’t believe in psychiatrists, he said.
But actually he did believe in them, so much that he was afraid of them.”
(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) has said that when his writing was blocked he would sit down and write a long letter to a friend whom he loved.
Above: American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
John Steinbeck, in writing East of Eden, unblocked himself for the daily stint ahead by writing a “letter” to his close friend and editor, Pascal Covici (1885 – 1964).
Above: Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor Pascal Covici (1885 – 1964)
It was written on the blue-rules pages of a large notebook, size 10 3/4″ X 14″, which Covici had supplied.
After the two opening letters, which filled the first few pages continuously, the letters appeared only on the left-hand pages.
On the right, when Steinbeck felt ready, he proceeded to the text of the novel.
He usually filled two pages of the text a day with a total of about 1,500 words.
Both the letter and text were written in black pencil in Steinbeck’s minute but clear longhand.
The writing covered the period from 29 January to 1 November 1951.
There was a letter for every working day until the first draft of the novel was finished.
The letter was primarily a method of warming up, flexing the author’s muscles both physical and mental.
He sometimes used it to adumbrate the problems and purposes of the passage he was about to embark: “a kind of arguing ground for the story“, as he says once.
If the argument had been worked out in his mind in advance, the material of the letter might consist of random thoughts, trial flights of wordsmanship, nuggets of information and comment for his friend about the surrounding events of the moment, both personal and public.
But the letters were also full of serious thinking about this novel, his longest and most ambitious, about novel writing in general, and about some of Steinbeck’s deepest convictions.
Not a formal act of literary creation for its own sake, this document casts a flood of light on the author’s mind and on the nature of the creative process.
“29 January 1951
Dear Pat:
How did time pass and how did it grow so late?
Have we learned anything from the passage of time?
Are we more mature, wiser, more perceptive, kinder?
We have known each other now for centuries and still I remember the first time and the last time.
We come now to the book.
It has been planned a long time.
I planned it when I didn’t know what it was about.“
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters continues Steinbeck’s working tradition of plucking out his self-awareness (he had volumes) and setting it aside so he could carry on the business of writing.
When he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck kept a personal journal.
Similarly, Steinbeck authorizes these letters to hold dominion over his progress.
The letters begin in confidence and strength but slowly reveal a man troubled.
At the end of February, a few days before his 49th birthday, he writes:
“This morning I am remiss.“
“February 23 [Friday]
This is a sad day at the beginning.
There is no telling what kind of day it will end up.
I can’t write down a sadness, although I know what it comes from.
It is Friday…“
And yet, unlike his experience with Grapes, Steinbeck retains self-control.
When flustered, he digs deeper into figures, dates, word counts and plans and, ultimately, carries on without floundering in the paranoia he experienced while writing Grapes.
Steinbeck wrote that his daily letters to Covici loosened his creative abilities.
Perhaps it was the passage of time and his experience.
Still, the difference between this experience and that a decade earlier was that he was writing to a friend rather than himself.
(He was notoriously self-critical.)
“My nerves are very bad, awful in fact. I lust to get back into it.
Maybe I was silly to think I could write so long a book without stopping.
I can’t.
Or rather, couldn’t.
I’ll try to go on now.
Hope to lose some of the frantic quality in my mind now.”
(John Steinbeck: Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath)
Steinbeck positioned himself in what choreographer Twyla Tharp called a state of “being safe and secure” and what Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) called “a feeling of home“.
Above: Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke
A position from which Tharp always worked, a position that evoked “mother“.
Above: American dancer / chereographer Twyla Tharp
In his first letter, Steinbeck writes:
“But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place — not very often and always unexplainable.
There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell.
This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness.
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.“
“Ideas are like rabbits.
You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.“
Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini
Creativity comes from a deeply vulnerable state, an openness to ideas, what Alan Lightman calls “divergent thinking“.
Above: American physicist / writer / social entrepreneur Alan Lightman
To achieve this, we must feel safe.
Rollo May’s Courage to Create, a ground-breaking study of fear and creativity, details the paradox of creative strength and personal vulnerability.
Above: American psychologist Rollo May (1909 – 1994)
“August 29 [Wednesday]
There’s a real feeling of finality in the air here.
We have two weeks and half more so it is not as near as I seem to indicate but the fall is surely coming.
And I have an autumn feeling in me.
This is one of the best feelings I know.
I have always loved the fall.
No reason.
It is filled with a warm sweet sadness which is a close relative to pleasure and not very far removed.“
Steinbeck lingers in this exceptional space, suffers, and more often than not, draws out greatness.
Above: John Steinbeck, 1962
“March 13, Tuesday
Things do happen and continue to happen on the outside.
Isn’t that odd that I now regard the book as the inside and the world as the outside.
And just as long as that is so the book is firm and the outside cannot hurt it or stop it.
And I must be sure that it remains that way by never letting time go by without working on it.
For it is one thing to have in one’s mind that the book will never be done and quite another to let it stop moving.“
In the draft dedication for East of Eden, Steinbeck recognized his friend’s critical role:
“The dedication is to you with all the admiration and affection that have been distilled from our singularly blessed association of many years.
This book is inscribed to you because you have been part of its birth and growth.”
Journal of a Novel is a wonderful companion to the East of Eden novel.
All of the notes are addressed to Pascal Covici, Steinbeck’s editor.
The author uses them in order to warm up for the day’s writing:
“You must think I waste an awful lot of time on these notes to you but actually it is the warm-up period.
It is the time of drawing thoughts together and I don’t resent it one bit.
I apparently have to dawdle a certain amount before I go to work.
Also if I keep the dawdling in this form I never leave my story.
If I wrote my dawdles some other way I would be thinking all over the map.”
It’s interesting to see ‘behind the curtain’ and read the mental struggles that he went through in the process of creating his book.
It seems that this is a shared experience:
“This is not a morning of great joy for some reason or other.
I don’t understand why some days are wide open and others closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still are days which worry.
And it does not seem to be me but the day itself.
It has a nature of its own quite separate from all other days.
Today is a dawdly day.
They seem to alternate.
I do a whole of a day’s work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle.
That’s today.
Went to bed early last night, read happily, slept happily.
Got up early and suddenly felt terrible — just terrible.
Fought that off and was drained dry.
Then I forced the work and it was as false and labored and foolish as anything I have ever seen.
I tried to kid myself that it only seemed bad but it really was bad.
So out it goes.
And what do you suppose could have caused it?
I just don’t know.”
“January 29, 1951
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through — not ever much.
And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all.
A good writer always works at the impossible.“
“September 3, 1951
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world.
And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.“
He also procrastinates when he has a particularly difficult piece of writing coming up:
“I wish I knew how people do good and long-sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lives going — social, economic, etc.
I can’t.
I seem to have to waste time, so much dawdling to so much work.
I am frightened by this week before it even happens.
I feel just worthless today.
I have to drive myself.
I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness.
I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water.
Really childish.
I know that one of the reasons is that I dread the next scene, dread it like hell.”
It is interesting to read his thoughts on the structure and content of the book which ended up being quite different in the finished novel.
It boggles the mind how this was achieved during a time before word processors and the Internet, with precious handwritten pages being couriered from the author’s home to the publisher, and typed manuscript being reviewed and edited by hand.
East of Eden is long and it seems that Steinbeck knew this would be the case from the start.
He has a theory about the impact of long versus short books on the reader:
“Now — we must think of a book as a wedge driven into a man’s personal life.
A short book would be in and out quickly.
And it is possible for such a wedge to open the mind and do its work before it is withdrawn leaving quivering nerves and cut tissue.
A long book, on the other hand, drives in very slowly and if only in point of time remains for a while.
Instead of cutting and leaving, it allows the mind to rearrange itself to fit around the wedge.
Let’s carry the analogy a little farther.
When the quick wedge is withdrawn, the tendency of the mind is quickly to heal itself exactly as it was before the attack.
With the long book perhaps the healing has been warped around the shape of the wedge so that when the wedge is finally withdrawn and the book set down, the mind cannot ever be quite what it was before.
This is my theory and it may explain the greater importance of a long book.”
“June 28, 1951
I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial.
Above: Bust of Plato (427 – 348 BC), Capitoline Museum, Rome, Italy
Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly.
Above: Portrait of Lao Tzu (5th century BC), Zhang Lu, National Palace Museum, Beijing, China
It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage.
Above: Statue of the Buddha Siddhartha Gautma (563 – 400 BC), Sarnath Archaeological Museum, India
If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this:
Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.
Above: The Christ (4 BC to AD 30) Pantocrator, St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt
And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know.
Above: Paul the Apostle (5 – 65), Peter Paul Rubens (1611)
It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the Earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the Earth.”
Above: Vanity Piece, Hendrick Andriessen (1650), Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium
It was while working on beet farms in the holidays that Steinbeck gained his first insights into the plight of migrant workers – a key theme in his social novels of the 1930s.
He was born into a middle class family in Monterey County, California, where his mother, a former teacher, fostered in him a love of books.
Above: 132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the home where Steinbeck lived in his childhood
He dropped out of Stanford University after erratic studies in literature and biology, then headed to New York, where he worked in construction and as a reporter.
On his return to California, jobs on farms and in forests and fisheries helped to support his writing.
Above: State flag of California
His first three books sold poorly, but success eventually came in 1935 with Tortilla Flat, a story about wine-soaked Mexican-Spanish workers, inspired by the Arthurian legend of the Knights of the Round Table.
“In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme.
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
There are shorter means, many of them.
There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme.
Try to understand each other.“
(Journal entry (1938), quoted in the Introduction to a 1994 edition of Of Mice and Men)
It was followed by Of Mice and Men, an unfolding tragedy of two migrant workers, the childlike giant, Lennie, and his protector, George.
“Ain’t many guys travel around together.
I don’t know why.
Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.“
“His ear heard more than is said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.“
“They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head.
An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it.
Just like heaven.
Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’.
I read plenty of books out here.
Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.
It’s just in their head.”
(Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck)
“I must go over into the interior valleys.
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 were twenty people quarantined for small pox 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 corporate 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.
The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering.
I’ll do what I can.
Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.“
(Letter to Elizabeth Otis (1938), as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch)
“For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.“
(Journal entry (11 June 1938), Working Days : The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath )
A storm broke over his epic work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), hammered out over five months after Steinbeck travelled with the Okies – desperate migrant farmers escaping to California from the Dust Bowl.
After the financial crash of 1929, the US fell into a severe economic depression.
By the mid-1930s, 25% of the population was unemployed.
Crop prices fell by 60% and a combination of overfarming, soil erosion and drought refuced the fertile Great Plains to a dust bowl.
Thousands of smallholders had their homes and plots seized by landowners and banks.
They then migrated west, lured by the promise of work and sustenance on the farms in California’s land of plenty, only to face animosity and rejection when they arrived.
Above: An impoverished American family living in a shanty, Dorthea Lange, 1936
Biblical in tone, Steinbeck’s novel was rooted in the homespun details of the lives of the Joad family.
“I tried to write this book the way lives are being written.“
Above: Migrant Mother, 1936, Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph of Florence Owens Thompson
“Boileau said that kings, gods and heroes only were fit subjects for literature.
The writer can only write about what he admires.
Above: French poet / critic Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux (1636 – 1711)
Present-day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.
And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it.
He finds it in the struggling poor now.“
(Radio interview (1939) quoted in the Introduction to a 1992 edition of The Grapes of Wrath)
At its peak the Grapes of Wrath sold 10,000 copies a week.
It earned a Pulitzer Prize, but there was a backlash against his indictment of the American Dream.
He escaped to the Sea of Cortez to collect marine specimens with his close friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts.
Above: American marine biologist Ed Ricketts (1897 – 1948)
“Let us go,” we said, “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it.
That our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region.
We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.”
And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance.
We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world.
And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool.
Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region.
That isn’t very important in the world.
And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby.
None of it is important or all of it is.“
“We are no better than the animals.
In fact, in a lot of ways, we aren’t as good.“
(John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951)
During WW2, Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.
Above: Masthead of the New York Herald Tribune (1924 – 1966)
During this period, he wrote The Moon is Down (1942), an exploration of the effects of war and occupation on a once peaceable village (a thinly veiled examination of the Nazi occupation of Norway).
Now a settled New York resident, Steinbeck returned to his roots with Cannery Row (1944), based in the sardine-packing district of Monterey, and the epic East of Eden (1952), for which he drew upon his own family history in Salinas.
“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more.
And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.
For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.”
(John Steinbeck, The Pearl, 1947)
In the 1960s, he lost credibility as a liberal voice because of his support for the Vıetnam War – both of his sons by his second marriage were army recruits.
Above: Soldiers of the Army of Vietnam (ARVN) 1st Batallion, 6th Regiment, are airlifted to “Landing Zone Kala” northeast of Khâm Đức, Vietnam, by US Army UH-1H Hueys during Operation Elk Canyon, 12 July 1970.
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which is a penetrating study of moral degeneration in the US, was a return to form that contributed to Steinbeck’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
“No man really knows about other human beings.
The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.“
“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.“
“To be alive at all is to have scars.“
Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a 1962 travelogue which depicts a 1960 road trip around the United States made by Steinbeck, in the company of his standard poodle Charley.
Steinbeck wrote that he was moved by a desire to see his country because he made his living writing about it.
He wrote of having many questions going into his journey, the main one being:
“What are Americans like today?”
However, he found that he had concerns about much of the “new America” he saw.
Steinbeck tells of traveling throughout the United States in a specially made camper he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse.
His travels start in Long Island, New York, and roughly follow the outer border of the United States, from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in Califronia across to Texas, through the Deep South, and then back to New York.
Such a trip encompassed nearly 10,000 miles.
According to Thom Steinbeck, the author’s oldest son, the reason for the trip was that Steinbeck knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time.
The younger Steinbeck has said he was surprised that his stepmother allowed his father to make the trip;
His heart condition meant he could have died at any time.
A new introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book cautioned readers that:
“It would be a mistake to take this travelogue too literally, as Steinbeck was at heart a novelist.“
The author died in December 1968, having written nearly 30 books.
“How do I find time to write?“
Steinbeck averaged 1,500 words a day and this was after he wrote his letter to Pascal moulding his thoughts into the text he wished to create.
Only you can answer that question, but, if you want to be a successful writer, you have just got to find or make time.
Prioritıze your activities.
The real writer cannot not write.
The real writer makes time to write.
You will know your own circumstances.
Try to set aside a regular period each day for writing.
If you only manage to write 300 words each day, you will complete the first draft of a good-sized 100,000-word novel in a year or a couple of short stories per month or one article a week or one blogpost a day.
Make your mind up.
As you have read, Steinbeck was not only born to be a writer, he made himself into a writer.
Perhaps you too have it in you to emulate Steinbeck.
Above: John Steinbeck
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Wikiquote
- Google Photos
- The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor
- “Journal of a Novel“, Andrew Doran, www.andrewdoran.uk
- “Journal of a Novel“, Ellen Vrana, https://www.theexaminedlife.org
- John Steinbeck : A Biography, Jay Parini
- Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, John Steinbeck
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
- Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
- Conversations with John Steinbeck, edited by Thomas Fensch
- Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck
- The Pearl, John Steinbeck
- The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
- Writers’ Questions and Answers, Gordon Wells (Alison & Busby)
- Writers: Their Lives and Works (DK Penguin Random House)