Working Days (19 page)

Mostly, Steinbeck was sick of being constrained. The two things he wanted above all others, he told Carlton Sheffield, were “freedom from respectability” and “freedom from the necessity of being consistent” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 193). In fact, throughout 1939 and 1940 nearly everything associated with his public fame and private success—including, at times, his marriage—had become a repugnant “nightmare” to him; yet during the period observed in this section of his journal he couldn’t bear to rectify his situation by confronting Carol directly. (The explosion occurred offstage, in April 1941; separated for two years, they finally divorced on March 18, 1943, and eleven days later John married Gwyn). Fatalistically, he wavered in his feelings, waiting for “salvations to be worked out,” though he took little hand in their solution. “Trying to follow the plan I laid out,” he told Wagner, “that of doing nothing” (John Steinbeck/[Max Wagner], letter, [August 22, 1939]; courtesy of Stanford University Library.) Customarily, he threw himself into a variety of writing projects, hoping to resurrect the discipline necessary to become productive again, even though several of his jobs were collaborations, a situation he never fully liked. He resolutely turned his back on the “clumsy” novel (between 1939 and 1945 he published eight books, only half of them fiction). Instead, he tried his hand at a whole new range of genres, including comic drama, documentary film, scientific prose, travel writing, and poetry. As part of his “complete revolution” Steinbeck cast off the straitjacket of novelist and took up the mantle of man of letters. It was an imperfect fit, but the new writing—especially
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research,
which was immersed in his tide pool investigations and his belief that there was a “great poetry in scientific writing”—proved to be a “life saver” (John Steinbeck/Mavis McIntosh, letter [June 1941]; courtesy of University of Virginia Library).

Not all of Steinbeck’s fresh departures reached their destinations on schedule. “The God in the Pipes,” a satiric play written for his own pleasure, as well as that of Carol and of his sister Mary (Entry #114), gave him fits for several years, until he reluctantly gave it up entirely in 1941. “The tide pool hand book,” based on a December 1939 collecting expedition with Ed Ricketts to Tomales Point and Duxbury Reef, was abandoned after Steinbeck failed twice to write a satisfactory introduction (Entries #106-108). But Steinbeck, as one might expect from a writer of profoundly ecological sympathies, rarely wasted his earlier experiences; rather, he frequently found ways to recycle them. He employed the basic metaphor of his “Pipes play”—human beings inhabiting the cast-off boilers and pipes of Monterey’s cannery factories—in Cannery Row (1945) and its 1954 sequel, Sweet Thursday (Elizabeth Otis/Robert DeMott, interview, August 20, 1979). His preparatory exercises on the San Francisco Bay guidebook trained his eye and mind for
Sea of Cortez,
and found expression in his 1948 Preface to the revised edition of Ricketts’s and Calvin’s
Between Pacific
Tides (Entry #119). The apprentice labor on
The Fight for Life
Steinbeck performed for Pare Lorentz in Chicago (and later in Hollywood, where editing took place) gave him a foundation for his “Mexican film,”
The Forgotten Village
(1941), a documentary about the clash of tribal “magic” with modern “medicine,” produced and directed on location by Herbert Kline, and simultaneously published by The Viking Press with 136 photographs from the film (Entries #119 and 120). And though Steinbeck had no way of knowing it then, even his short-lived future marriage to Gwyn (they divorced in 1948; she later summed up their “star-crossed” marriage as “tragic”) would find its way into the bitter characterization of Adam and Kate Trask in
East of Eden
(1952), and—distilled even further—into the immortal words of Fauna, the bighearted madam of
Sweet Thursday’s
Bear Flag: “When a man falls in love it’s ninety to one he falls for the dame that’s worst for him.”

While Steinbeck intermittently appeased his guilt by attempting a play for Carol, buying her a car (a Packard, just like his), and constructing a 60-by-15-foot swimming pool in their backyard (complete with a brass name plaque), he saved the spiritual part of himself for Gwyn. Steinbeck traveled often in 1940, mostly to Mexico, the setting for both
Sea of Cortez
and
The Forgotten Village.
These excursions separated him from Hollywood and Gwyn, for whom he had created an impossibly idealized role, and naturally the absences increased his heart’s longing. In the autumn of 1940, between tedious bouts of revising the final script for
The Forgotten Village
and hammering out the pesky details of the film’s voice-over narration, Steinbeck alleviated some of his boredom and frustration by composing—right under Carol’s nose—a revealing suite of twenty-five love poems for his paramour (Entry #118). “Please tell Gwyn that I am making a song for her and I have never made a song for anyone before,” he announced to Max Wagner, his Hollywood confidant and go-between, in November (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 217). These “songs of fulness /And fulfillment” (roughly in the manner of Petrarch’s “Sonnets to Laura,” but leavened with a mystical, confessional presence, like Whitman’s “Song of Myself”) are bursting with stock romantic notions—“nostalgia,” passionate “longing,” and inconsolable “ache of loneliness” between the speaker and his ethereal “girl of the air,” who is “young and red haired, milk skinned” (Halladay, ed., “’The Closest Witness,’ ”pp. 301-27). Steinbeck’s secret poetry is not lyrically even or linguistically memorable, but it does manifest the alogical coherency of emotional urgency, the quality of bright emotional promise (balanced with despair at their separation) which he projected on Gwyn. Perhaps most telling of all, the poems confer dignity on sexual attraction, and elevate the man’s and the woman’s mutual “chemistries” to a religious level: “The glory of synchronization of ductless glands,” Steinbeck says in Poems 8 and 9, “... has been God in many times to many men. /And it still is God” (See Entry #109).

Steinbeck’s naive propensity to idolize Gwyn suggests that his affair with her was the most intense emotional relationship he ever had; though it ultimately wounded everyone involved, there is no denying that it remained a constant touchstone of his experience for the next decade. Steinbeck was fond of repeating the story of how Ed Ricketts, very much like Lleu Llaw Gyffes, “that enlightened knight in the Welsh tale” of The
Mabinogian,
“manufactured” the women he wanted. But the fact was Math conjured a woman “entirely out of flowers” for Lleu in the medieval
Mabinogian,
just as it was Steinbeck who “built his own woman ... created her from the ground up....” In that telling anecdote in “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), Steinbeck was actually talking about his own propensity to create Gwyn. Small wonder, then, that Carol failed to regain her husband; against Steinbeck’s holy distortion and prayerful magic she didn’t have a mortal’s chance of success.

But significant as it was, Steinbeck’s fatal attraction to Gwyn only helped move his life further along a route he was already traveling. “The world is sick now,” he explained to Sheffield. “There are things in the tide pools easier to understand than Stalinist, Hitlerite, Democrat, capitalist confusion, and voodoo. So I’m going to those things which are relatively more lasting to find a new basic picture. I have too a conviction that a new world is growing under the old” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 193). With the publication of In Dubious
Battle, Of Mice and Men,
and
The Grapes of Wrath
Steinbeck concluded an integrated body of work about his native California, a triology of desire and illusion based on a notion of relatively fixed social reality that he no longer fully believed. With the world massed for war, the best minds of his generation “confused,” and his own eye dazzled by a “blind tropic movement” which threatened to reduce language itself to “nonsense,” Steinbeck felt compelled to look elsewhere for meaning (John Steinbeck /Wilbur Needham, letter [September 29, 1940]; courtesy of University of Virginia Library). He turned to the oceanic tide pool not as a replacement for the world of men, but rather as a place to heal his vision, to begin again at the bedrock of observation. It was not the
subject
of the tide pool that captured his attention so much as the liberating process of observing it, a process that required baptismal immersion in its eddying currents. Only then could he begin to understand how the laws of thought become the laws of things, or “the design” of a scientific travel book becomes “the pattern of reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer.”

A couple of days before this tantalizing journal breaks off, Steinbeck, who had been postponing the “difficult” work for several months, plunged into the writing of
Sea of Cortez
(he finished writing it in July; the book was published in December) with those introductory words of purpose. Ed Ricketts’s notes from the Gulf of California trip were close at hand, and he transformed them so effectively that Ricketts later said: “There is a dual structure of thought and beauty. Contributions from the one side are largely mine, from the other, John’s. The structure is a collaboration, but shaped mostly by John. The book is the result” (“Morphology of
The Sea of Cortez,”
in Hedgpeth,
The Outer Shores,
Part 2, p. 171). Actually, some of the book’s most poignant statements emanated from the writer, not from the marine biologist, as, for example, this assessment of mankind: “Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps ... his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness” (p. 96). It is Steinbeck, writing of himself again, almost—but not quite—from the other side of catastrophe.

 

 

It is one year ago less ten days that I finished the first draft of the
Grapes.
Then we came up here to the ranch and then my leg went bad and I had ten months of monstrous pain until the poison from the infection was gone. This is a year without writing (except for little jobs—mechanical fixings). The longest time I’ve been in many years without writing. The time has come now for orientation. What has happened and what it has done to me. In the first place the
Grapes
got really out of hand, became a public hysteria and I became a public domain. I’ve fought that consistently but I don’t know how successfully. Second, we are rich as riches go. We have money enough to keep us for many years. We have this pleasant ranch which is everything one could desire. It lacks only the ocean to be perfect. We have comfort and beauty around us and these things I never expected. Couldn’t possibly have expected. We have a cow and a Doberman pinscher. The war came but book sales went right on. And it is a curious kind of war, unlike any before. Its pattern will not emerge for a long time. So much for the external things. A straight line progression that can lead only to catastrophe. But let it. I have made powerful enemies
^*
with the Grapes. They will not kill me I think, but they will destroy me when and if they can.

We come now to the dangerous part. Whereas a few years ago I could not sell my work—now it is so in demand that anything with my name on it would be snapped up.* And that is the worst thing of all. That is the goodness of this ranch. Here I can lose the fanfare. Here I become the little creature I really am. One cannot impress our forest.

Now I am battered with uncertainties. That part of my life that made the
Grapes
is over. I have one little job to do for the government, and then I can be born again. Must be. I have to go to new sources and find new roots. I have written simply for simple stories, but now the conception and the execution become difficult and not simple. And I don’t know. I don’t quite know what the conception is. But I know it will be found in the tide pools and on a microscope slide rather than in men. I don’t know whether there is anything left of me. I know that some of my forces are gone. Perhaps others have taken their place. First I want to do two theses for John Cage
^*
to set to percussion music: Phalanx and the Death of the Species. Those are to be trials. I want to do them. I wanted to go into myself in this page and to try to bring out something. But nothing of interest is there. My will to death is strengthened. In a sense, my work is done because there wasn’t much to me in the beginning. But my mind ranges and ranges and searches. If only I wanted money, I could make a great deal of it. The wolves of the reformers are on me, and I

think they are ego islands. I must work alone. That is necessary. I must think alone. The song of the microscope. There is something. Glass tubing—x-ray. These are poems worth writing. These are things that could make for rebirth.

 

 

These notes, as usual, are a prelude to work. The words grow stiff and unruly, like puppies they want to go their own ways—all directions. And the sounds are rough. These notes and comments loosen up the language and make me more able to write it. I’ve wondered whether I could do that pipe play. * I might be lousy. Sorry I committed myself to the Washington thing. My head is humming with this cold today. But the work is crowding me a little. I wouldn’t care if it didn’t. Called Ed today. This is a good place to work—so far, that is. I like to sit here and have this book in front of me. I’ll be glad when I have a straight-away cause. With so many things facing me I get none of them finished. It will be good when I have settled on one. This pipe deal isn’t so bad. The more I think of it, the more it seems it might be fun. Now I don’t know about this play—whether I want to do it, whether it would be any good if I did do it. Its one and greatest advantage would be that it would not be important. It would break this damned posterity thing that is being put on me by my contemporaries. I don’t know whether I could make it. But in these damned pipes is a chance for the broadest kind of satire of nearly everything.