Finished this day—and I hope to God it’s good.
PART III:
Aftermath
(1939-1941)
... I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel ... as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new thing which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking. Anyway, there is a picture of my confusion. How’s yours?
—Steinbeck, in a letter of November 13, 1939, to Carlton Sheffield. (In Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 194)
Commentary
In March 1939, when John Steinbeck received copies from one of three advanced printings of The Grapes of Wrath, he was “immensely pleased with them,” he told his editor, Pascal Covici, at The Viking Press (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 182). Besides achieving a memorable aesthetic and physical appearance, the result of its imposing size (619 pages long) and captivating Elmer Hader dust jacket illustration, which pictures the Joads “silent and awestruck” by their first view of a lush California valley near Tehachapi (Chapter 18), the novel also became an unprecedented commercial success. Following its official publication date on April 14, 1939, The Grapes of Wrath remained atop the best-seller lists for most of the year, selling roughly 428,900 copies in hard cover at $2.75 apiece. (In 1941, when The Sun Dial Press issued a hard-back reprint selling for $1.00, the publisher announced that over 543,000 copies of Steinbeck’s novel had already been sold.)
The steady, unrelenting sale of the novel brought fame, notoriety, and financial success to the Steinbecks which exceeded their wildest dreams. “I don’t think I ever saw so much [money] in one place before,” Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis. By October 1939, however, the dream had turned to “a nightmare,” as Steinbeck confessed to his agent (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, pp. 182, 189). In addition to requests from strangers for money, there were invitations from club program chairmen and civic busybodies to speak publicly, which Steinbeck flatly refused: “Why do they think a writer, just because he can write, will make a good after-dinner speaker, or club committeeman, or even a public speaker? I’m no public speaker and I don’t want to be. I’m not even a finished writer yet, I haven’t learned my craft,” he admonished an Associated Press interviewer in July 1939. More wrenching than that, however, there was constant vilification from the corporate agriculture industry (an August 26, 1939, United Press wire story stated that “The Associated Farmers of California, through its executive council ... would do everything possible to tell the public that ... ‘Grapes of Wrath’ ... cannot be accepted as fact”), and vicious rumors and threats of reprisal circulated by large land-owners and banks (“The latest is a rumor ... that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them,” Steinbeck informed Carlton Sheffield on July 20, 1939). The “rolling might of this damned thing,” the unhealthy “hysteria” of the novel’s reception (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 188), all took their toll on Steinbeck, who became increasingly depressed and withdrawn.
As a result, the final segment of Steinbeck’s journal has a very private, allusive air. It was written sporadically during a period of such chaotic emotional upheaval in his life that it sometimes reads like the notes for an unfinished romantic drama—full of turbulence, brooding signs and portents, but very little resolution. The entries vary in length, frequency, and details, Steinbeck’s pace is less frantic than in the previous section, and his jottings are often more associative and deep-diving than those he made earlier. The motif of self-doubt is still prominent, but is compounded by guilt and tempered by foreshadowing, as though he were hovering on the brink of some enormous “catastrophe” (Entry #101). While the Grapes of Wrath section was informed by a terrible immediacy, an obsessive urgency, this section is colored by intimations of paranoia and dark fatality, all the more ominous because never fully articulated.
In fact, Steinbeck writes here as though Carol were looking over his shoulder and might at any moment discover the secret of his love affair with a twenty-year-old singer named Gwyndolyn Conger (“the other,” Steinbeck cryptically calls her). His attachment to the aspiring showgirl (she was working in the chorus line at CBS studios, and in an Irene Dunne movie, Theodora Goes Wild) had escalated since their first meeting (instigated by “M,” his childhood friend, Max Wagner) in Hollywood in June 1939. Steinbeck, physically ill, crippled by sciatica, and severely depressed, was “hiding out” from publicity at the Aloha Arms Apartments off Sunset Boulevard. Like “a half-assed Florence Nightingale,” Gwyn brought him chicken soup and “sat talking with him the whole night through.” Steinbeck hated chicken noodle soup, but he loved her talk and tender ministrations. “What happened between us that night was pure chemistry,” Gwyn later recalled in her autobiography (Halladay, ed., “ ‘The Closest Witness,’ ” p. 36). Although their relationship proceeded slowly—now off, now on—Steinbeck was deeply hooked. Gwyn “is all woman, every bit woman,” he crowed to Mavis McIntosh.
Steinbeck began these twenty-three irregular entries one year after completing his novel, while he and Carol were living at the Biddle ranch. They continue until late January 1941, when Steinbeck, on the lam in Pacific Grove with Gwyn, but getting the “horrors” regularly over Carol’s unhappiness, summarily ended his reflections during the third day of writing Sea of Cortez with these words: “I think I’ll leave this book now” (Entry #123). The distance between Los Gatos and Pacific Grove was only about sixty miles, but it might as well have been a thousand, because it was the difference—in Steinbeck’s tortured view—between a settled existence of domestic attachment and financial security on the one hand, and an exciting life of uncertain future but passionate feeling on the other. (See Entries #120 and 121.) It is an old story, but one the morally conservative Steinbeck had never acted in before; as the following entries suggest, he vacillated miserably, his head in one place, his heart in another.
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. “Th
e 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.
Entry #101
October 16, 1939 [Monday]
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
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