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.
Entry #102
Oct[ober] 18 [1939]—[Wednesday]
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.
Entry #103
Oct[ober] 19 [1939]—[Thursday]
Sitting here every day letting my mind go galloping. And that’s a good thing—unproductive but I don’t have to produce until the pressure inside me does it. That’s right. That’s the way it always should be and never is. And if I should spend my whole life at this I don’t care. I am busily fencing out the forces and people who would take my life and work over [it] for their own ends. If Chaplin can get away without ever answering a letter, so can I. And so 1 sit here. Nearly the end of October. That is mad. Carol is paying the bills. Life in one way is narrowing down and in another it is widening out. I’m changeable and skittish. Tasting the work I may do, and discarding. Still this huge picture. But the little comedy of the pipes—I don’t know. It might be fun but I don’t know whether I want that kind of fun.
Mice and Men will soon be released as a picture. * I don’t know whether it is any good or not but I rather suspect it is. It doesn’t make much difference really. Ed and Ritch and Tal are coming this weekend. Must talk to Tal. Carol says one mustn’t play God in peoples’ lives but on the other hand what if one can make the little shift which is the difference between failure and ease? Ben Abramson made it for me. I want to do it for Ritch if he wants, or rather if Tal wants him to want it. I think Tal knows more than any of us. But at least she’ll know whether or not it is right to do.
These maunderings are good to do. The season is turning fast now. Already the rain clouds are beginning to form. We’ll have rain within the week. And the leaves are falling, walnuts gone, box elder going, maples going. The fruit trees are still in leaf. The peaches colored and so are the pears. Apples still green. English walnuts getting kind of moth-eaten. And the ground is so covered with leaves that it does no good to rake them until they are all down. We had Steve and he was no good at all, and Ray was lots better, and now Joe is better than Ray. * We’d like to keep the two of them. Carol is writing letters today. The war is very strange. Russia is fortifying the western end and Germany is bombing British ships and France apparently is doing nothing. It’s a waiting game and I don’t know whether either side knows what it is waiting for. May be.
Entry #104
[October 20 or 27, or November 3] [1939]—Friday
The last two days I have had death premonitions so strong that I burned all the correspondence of years. I have a horror of people going through it, messing around in my past, such as it is. I burned it all. I think now I have left no vestige of writing except the few notes scattered through the ledgers and my work. This doesn’t mean that I feel it is imminent but only that I had a sense of its occurrence strong enough to make this preparation.
Entry #105
November 10 [1939]—[Friday]
No comment.
Entry #106
Jan[uary] 4, 1940—[Thursday]
P.B.L. [Ed.—Pacific Biological Laboratory]
Came down here to try to work on the tide pool hand book.* I discover that there are no easy books to write and that this may well be one of the hardest. Besides, there is the grave and great difficulty in myself which is the real reason for the attempt to write it at all—the crash within myself. The feeling of finish, the destruction of all form and plan. This I can’t explain to anyone, since no one but myself can see either the germ or the growth of it. But there it is. Carol at the ranch. Salvations to be worked out—hers and mine and ours. Maybe this is wrong or right. That it is so is more important than either. But the work is to be done and I must do it. Things are slipping. I can’t stand firm unless there is something to stand on and I am attempting to find the foundation of some new discipline in this book.
Entry #107
Jan[uary] 5 [1940]—[Friday]
Yesterday I slovened out a part of an introduction. It says what I want to say but so clumsily and heavily that I think I’d better do it over again today. Carol phoned. The President doesn’t like The Fight for Life.* Pare will be despondent. But it is right in line with the change Paul [Ed.—de Kruif] spoke of. I wonder whether our Mexican [Ed.—Sea of Cortez] plan will go down for the same reasons. I may have to run east and clear the lines. Hope not. This hand book is hard. It is so long since I have done any disciplined thinking. Well, I’ll get to it. I wired Tracy* to come up here and received no answer at all. It is difficult to deal with such a man and maybe the whole thing should be thrown over. Well, to work.
Entry #108
Jan[uary] 10 [1940]—[Wednesday]
Last night went to Mary’s [Ed.—Dekker]. Her birthday. She looked well and seemed to be happy and thoughtful. Rain constantly. It will be a big year. Must telephone Carol tonight. She is doing her garden book. * Now—lab work. Tracy’s boat deal is entirely off. We wrote American Consulate in Guaymas for information regarding boats* and should have an answer before long. There has been a hell of a lot of talk about the hand book and all good. Out of it comes something, if only we get down to the writing of it. I have more introduction almost ready. Shall start on it today. Lots of good things to think of in this connection and I want to get down the nature and implications of a tide pool. So here goes.
Entry #109
Jan[uary] 12 [1940]—[Thursday]
Carol is coming down today. She has been on the ranch during the long rain. I am so glad. We’ll go maybe to an auto court. The old difficulty arises. I couldn’t sleep last night, but the bottom is psychic despair and then came out of it in a feeling of glory and purged. I know now why I detest my work and I know how to rectify it, I think. As to the hand book, I am constantly down about my lack of specific knowledge. And then again, I know what I know and sometimes it seems good. I don’t know. But this line is set and this deduction is fixed by many factors. Strange how the years go on and some of the struggles remain the same and others change. Very strange. And strange the relationship which shifts and changes, now for the good, now for the bad, but good I think throughout. This must be. What pressures are there, or can it be that a lack of pressure after accustomed pressure is deadly? It doesn’t matter. My reach for some kind of ideal happiness is chemical. I remember how grey and doleful Monday morning was. I could lie and look at it from my bed, through the rusting screen of the upstairs window. It had a quality of grey terror of its own and the washing machine clanking in the basement and Mary playing the dull scales on the piano. What was to come next I knew—the dark corridors of the school and the desks in the ill-lighted rooms shining fiercely with the grey light from the windows, and the teachers’ week end over facing us with more horrors than that with which we faced them. T
hen the subjects in which no one was interested. And then one young teacher who aroused us all to ecstasies over economics when really we were merely aroused to sexual maturity by her light pretty figure and her own new-come maturity. M. [Ed.—Max Wagner] told me he kissed her on a horse and promptly fell off the horse. M. knew about such things while I (dope that I was) thought that I loved sociology when I loved the teacher.
This was not unique for me. Much later I saw many ladies similarly confused with Krishnamurti, and perhaps even he [Ed.—Max Wagner] was confused. I wonder what became of that teacher? She was so pretty. But the long jawed dark ones who were not pretty got no spark from us and taught us very little. At that time, knowing little about the precocity of personality I should have said that Bill Black* would have passed us all because I could not see that his very excellences were the rheostat of his mediocrity. Were I to look again and try to judge a future, I should pick a tortured child, frantic with uncertainties and unhappy in his limitations. Ed riding a milk street car from illicit fornication to stoke a furnace from then to study, cursing a day and night that had no time for sleep. * But Bill did things with ease and assurance. Good grades and the light affection of pretty girls, he ran fast but was beaten by a gnomish sufferer. He would have made good, tender tasty eating meat. And even after all these years I remember the envy at his ease. He must be having a good, thin life, and he will die a peaceful death. I wonder why I go back to this? Can it be that there is something I have not dug out of it? That must be true. Is my work over for a time, or for all time? It might be. I have no longer the great sense of rush. Yet there is immanence. I write easily now but I do not think easily. And only by little do I ever discover the top rocks of the littoral. Perhaps I can get down to the base. I hope so. Promise of what? There’s the problem. I’ve fulfilled little promises. What can I do to large ones, if I want to? And at least I am still honest, and still not too afraid. Working with ease, toward ease. The sad, boastful girl in the bar, finding some justification in the fact that her uncle had lots of money and cursing the government because it took part in taxes. I know in a little while Carol will come rush-tumbling up the stairs, and that will be good and we’ll all be merry. Or she will come slowly with troubles in her hands and we will be sad. So much always depends on Carol. She can and does make the tempo of the house. I wish she knew that. I can help, but she can really do it. I am getting so ugly these days that I shock myself.
Entry #110
Jan[uary] 16 [1940]—[Tuesday]
Now I am at home on the ranch. The whole Tracy boat thing fell through. I don’t know why. Also I am withdrawing the Red Pony matter and will probably give it to Milly* to do. Grapes opens in New York in a couple of weeks. Then all hell will break loose as far as I am concerned. Or maybe not. Mice apparently is just dying on its feet for lack of backing. I have not heard a boo about it. Sunny, sunny day. Carol has the dumps. May be catching a cold. She went to San Jose today. She finished her seed book last night and got it off this morning. I think it is very good and that a little fortune is in the idea. We’ll have to see what New York thinks of it, however. I hope to heaven it goes. Terrible feeling of change in the air. Don’t know what it can be. Beautiful days, lazy days, but storm clouds all about. My sleep is over-shadowed with pain of apprehension as though some frightful thing were imminent. And I don’t know what it can be. Perhaps nothing. My hunches have never been much good.
Entry #111
Jan[uary] 18 [1940]—[Thursday]
The month flies. And I don’t get much done. I think a lot. Due to the tonsils coming out, I am getting fat and it depresses me so that I am starting today to lose it. It will be interesting to see whether I have any willpower. Be hard because I love to eat. Big spreads of pictures on Grapes* which opens next week.
Entry #112
July 20 [19]40—[Saturday]
A long time between. Gulf trip over now and the film trip to Mexico [Ed.—The Forgotten Village]. Went to Washington* and talked about the loss of the south to the Germans. I hope I made some of it stick. Then back here [Ed.—Biddle ranch] simply to rest in the sun awhile before going back to Mexico, and in October setting out on the Gulf Marine book. And then one morning, sitting on the porch the pipe play came back but stronger and funnier. And this time I know I can’t check it. I’ll have to write it. I have six weeks or two months to work with. I’ve already started it. Monday I’m going on with it. And I feel good about it. Can be very funny. [Indecipherable] coming to dinner tonight. I’ll cook steaks. Very strange—the hysteria and fear of the coming war and then it passed off in the night. We know it is coming, but we aren’t afraid any more. Some singular jump in the psyche. And it isn’t that we have hardened. We are as soft and sentimental as always, but the war has become a fact and we accept it. The reasons are good—we want to preserve a little of what we have and are used to—all kinds of intellectual reasons, but the great basic reason is that we have accepted war and it will be our manner of life for the next while. Perhaps treachery will cut us down, but I don’t think so. In my own person I am filled with a lowness that has the physical feeling of a hang over. It bothers me in the night. I wonder what facet of my own folly is responsible for it. Tomorrow is Sunday, and then Monday I am going to work. I’ll work hard but it won’t seem hard. Probably won’t be any good either. But I don’t care. It will be fun. I’ll keep the daily notes because it is good to keep them. A fair chance for the words to break loose. And all such things are good. There is no doubt that this fine old pen is better and smoother than the newer one. I think I’ll keep with this good old pen. I’ve done a lot of writing with it. I only hope it holds up. I wonder with all the books I have now, whether I’ll be able to paragraph my dialogue.* It will seem like a terrible waste of good paper to leave some of it blank. But also it will be much easier to read—much. So I’m going to try to do it any way. The sun is brilliant now. For several days there was fog. Today I ordered a vacuum cleaner for the pool. Dust was getting pretty thick on it. If this is a lot of writing in the note section, it is because I haven’t done much for a long time and wish to get some words down. But I think enough has been done.
Entry #113
July 23 [1940]—[Tuesday]
The days pass and pleasantly. Carl Sandburg* came up for the night and yesterday, a good thinking man. I liked him and got a nice feeling from him. These are nice days, perhaps a lull-before-storm-feeling. And the good work feeling is on me. Words and pictures piling up. I’ll have some fun with this I hope. I know I will even if I am prevented from finishing it. I’ll simply go on the best I can. Hope I am not making the coming men an excuse not to work. But I don’t need an excuse. If I could not work and be happy, I would be idle. But these pipes have just haunted me for too long and I might just as well get them off my mind. It will be great fun and to hell with the critics of all kinds. I’m not working for them, but for my own full joy. A few people will like this as well as I do, and many won’t understand it at all. But I understand it and like it. And here goes—the real and final plunge.
Entry #114
July 24 [1940]—[Wednesday]
In the work diary which had to do with the Grapes, I put down the time of going to work. There was a franticness in that effort—a fear that time would cut me off. Now in the Pipes I want to overcome that frantic quality. I want it to remain easy, leisurely, and fun. If some days go by and I do not work, there is no conscience penalty. If I never finish it, very little will have been lost. This is being done for my pleasure and for Carol’s and for Mary’s. And I don’t care if no one else sees it. In form it is almost like a ballet. In tone it is a serious thing, not too much overdrawn, because the things said must be capable of being listened to even if the background were different. But above all it must be fun. The moment it stops, in that moment I will stop writing it. At this moment my first act is difficult as they always are. Bringing people on the stage is a clumsy process and one not easy to accomplish. And then, too, in spite of the slight
ness of this play, I have the old fear of beginning work that I have always felt. The terror that I could not bring it off. Of course, the main difficulty lies in the fact that between books I soften up both in literary and intellectual discipline, so that with each beginning I must fight soft muscles in the head and in the technique. Naturally, I am frightened. It takes some time for those muscles to harden and for what I now instinctively know about technique to assert itself. Today so far there is no war news. I won’t listen to the radio until my day’s work is over. It is a good, hot day, and when I finish my day’s work, I will go out to the pool and swim and lie in the sun. Congress proposed a universal training act yesterday. It will not be long before I must register for military service. * It will be interesting to see how the nation as a whole reacts to this. It might create a real feeling of the wholeness of the people, and again it might draw out a sullen resentment. Must see it before one can tell. I feel that I would rather serve with common men than to try to get an “office job.” But all that will come as it comes. We’ll just have to see. And now to work.
Entry #115
Working Days Page 15
