This last fact once caused me to make two suggestions to my publishers which they have stupidly failed to follow. If leaden covers were used, the weight problem would have been overcome. And if the book were printed on rye bread it would be very much thicker. Further, your bread book would solve two problems. The reader would never lose his place since he would eat each page as he finished it; also the lost profit of the borrowed book would be eliminated. And people do like to read while they eat. A few years ago, a public librarian in Birmingham, England, earnestly requested the subscribers not to use bacon or kippers as bookmarks because the grease soaked through the pages and the odor might repel future readers. I feel that bookmaking is far from completely exploited—cellophane bags of marmalade or liver paste glued to the inside of the front cover, for example.
But I shall return to the business as it is practical. Recently some translations of my own work came in from France. The covers were not of cloth but of a black cardboard and the designs were bright and fresh and charming. One’s first impulse is to say, “Why can’t we do this in America?” The answer is that no one would buy them. We have conditioned our people to look for other values in their purchases.
Original manufacturing costs have increased so greatly that only a temporary publisher can or will take a chance with innovations. Volume is necessary in publishing. This alone will keep our publishers from undertaking any violent experiment. The book clubs, whether they admit it or not, must not go out on a limb. They have entered into a kind of contract with their millions of subscribers not to shock or startle them with great departure from mediocrity. And finally the cost of a book alone will keep innovation out. To buy a book you must have three-fifty or four dollars. If you have four dollars, after taxes and necessities, to spend on a book, you are solvent at least temporarily. If you are solvent for any length of time you are likely to be conservative, and if you are conservative you damn well do not trust newfangled ideas or experiments. The French books mentioned above did not look like other books. They were obviously unsound.
I do not believe that any change can take place quickly. Your historical novel must have jacket blurbs and illustration to indicate that sex was better and more prevalent in those days. Your “sound” novel must be dressed in dour colors with no gaiety to draw the reader away from the solid chore of reading. Your humorous books should have a man, woman or cat laughing on its jacket. This indicates that H. Allen Smith is funny and if you know it is funny, you will laugh.
Perhaps the blurb does set the book. I remember a book which had the following line in the text: “Then they went to bed together.” However, the blurb said “a night of tempestuous love.” The time may come when one will not have to read books. If the blurbs were on sale separately it might be a good and profitable venture and if the blurbs were then digested we would have the ultimate.
I myself am a hater of jackets. My impulse is to get them off and thrown away quickly. They crease and get in the way. I suppose they were originally put on as a wrapping and also to keep the dirty hands of prospective customers from spoiling new books. Why could there not be a display copy in a cellophane jacket? Does the jacket contribute anything to a book beyond adding to the cost? It would be interesting to see. And why is cloth necessary? I have heard that it adds greatly to the cost of manufacturing. Would not a treated board be as durable and much cheaper? Is not the increasing cost of books an actual selling deterrent? The two-fifty book is now four dollars.
It has happened that when I have thrown away the jacket because it was in the way, that I wanted to go back to the account of the author. Could this not be bound in the book so that it is a permanent part of the volume?
For myself, I like the whole theory of the twenty-five-cent book. For one thing the very cost of a trade edition encourages a degree of selfishness. Such a book must be hoarded and put on the shelves. It becomes property and property must be protected. I must know who borrows the book and I must see that it is returned and many friendships have been crushed on the rocks of the unreturned book. With the cheap editions the opposite is true. You load your friends’ arms with books. You say, “When you are through with them, pass them on.” This is a very fine thing.
I don’t know how many writers have the feeling I have about books. I do not love books for themselves. I like to have certain books about me to refer to but only because of the text. I have never collected books for their physical selves. I have never asked for nor wanted an autographed book. Sure I love to see a library walled with the lovely backs of finely bound books, but this is decoration to me, not literature. The prettiest volumes have not been opened, the most valuable firsts have not been cut. I would for myself much rather have thousands of cheap, dog-eared volumes filed in closed cabinets like phonograph records. It is much easier to browse through filing cards than to climb on the arms of a chair looking for a certain book which you remember was green. You think it is on the top shelf. The book turns out to be brown and after you have lost interest, you find it on the bottom shelf behind a bent copy of the London Illustrated you had always intended to go back to. No, for real accessibility, I like the card index.
The book itself took on its magical, sacrosanct and authoritative character at a time when there were very few books and those possessed by the very rich or the very learned. Then the book was the only release of the mind into distant places and into golden thinking. There was no other way of going outside one’s self except through the talisman of the book. And it is wonderful that even today with all competition of records, of radio, of television, of motion pictures, the book has kept its precious character. A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned, the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive. The use of the book as propaganda is more powerful and effective than any other medium. A broadcast has little authority but a book does not lie. People automatically distrust newspapers. They automatically believe in books. This is strange but it is so. Messages come from behind the controlled and censored areas of the world and they do not ask for radios, for papers and pamphlets. They invariably ask for books. They believe books when they believe nothing else. This being true, I wonder that governments do not use books more often than they do. A book is protected and passed on. It is the rarest of things for a man to destroy a book unless he truly hates it. Book destruction is a kind of murder. And in the growing tendency to censor and control for the problematical good of the people, books have escaped more than any form. A picture can be cut to ribbons, but any restraint laid on a book is fought to a finish.
I wonder very much about the future of books. Can they continue to compete with the quick, cheap, easy forms which do not require either reading or thinking? I must say they do, or some of them are trying to do just that. So many books now are written with motion pictures in view. It is said that some publishers will not print a book if there is not a possibility of a motion-picture sale. And even the writer in many cases is concerned as part writer and part salesman. He should stand in a bookstore labeling his product with his name. He should go on television shows and become a performing ape. He should subject his private life, his sex life and his muscle, even his body hair, to the adenoidal stares of his prospective readers. He is said to be letting the book down if he does not do these things. He is being antisocial if he will not permit one of the picture magazines to record his breakfast and his wife or wives on slick paper.
I do not believe that a book can compete with its rivals on their terms. On the other hand, they cannot compete with the book on its terms. No other form save music can so “invite the mind and the emotions.” One cannot conceive of a motion picture as being personal as a beloved book is personal. No television show is a friend as a book is a friend. And no other form, save again music, invites the participation of the receiver as a book does.
What a long way to get around to the subject of format. I do not know much a
bout manufacturing. It seems to me that your physical book should be as like the abstract book as possible. There should be warm books and cool books, gay books and somber books. If a book is full of pain, let it be painful in color and design, if it is beautiful and sharp, these should design its clothing. Just as a title should catch the essence of a book, so should its format.
The yellow-pillbox theory will in the long run contribute little to books for books must be true in one sense or another and merchandising must be largely untrue. The yellow box will subtly force a customer to eat a bread pill and perhaps take some good from it. And perhaps a book can be forced to do this job, but I doubt it. A book is a naked article. A book is only read when you are alone. No group audience starts the laughter or the tears for you. It is a communion of two and as such it is unique.
And so I think that a book should feel good in the hand and gladden the eye. Its shape and size should be designed so that it is not clumsy to hold nor difficult to see. Its price should be low enough so that no crime against economics is committed in buying it. I am not speaking now of the books which are simply pauses on the way to motion pictures but of the books that were written to be books and nothing else but books. There is something untranslatable about a book. It is itself—one of the very few authentic magics our species has created.
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
I THANK the Swedish Academy for finding my work worthy of this highest honor. In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel Award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence—but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer scholarly or personal comment on the nature and the direction of literature. However, I think it would be well at this particular time to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.
Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches—nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tin-horn mendicants of low-calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal physical fear, so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about. Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness.
He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.
This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
The present universal fear has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledge and manipulation of certain dangerous factors in the physical world. It is true that other phases of understanding have not yet caught up with this great step, but there is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast. Indeed, it is a part of the writer’s responsibility to make sure that they do. With humanity’s long, proud history of standing firm against all of its natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory.
Understandably, I have been reading the life of Alfred Nobel; a solitary man, the books say, a thoughtful man. He perfected the release of explosive forces capable of creative good or of destructive evil, but lacking choice, ungoverned by conscience or judgment.
Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may even have foreseen the end result of his probing—access to ultimate violence, to final destruction. Some say that he became cynical, but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a control—a safety valve. I think he found it finally only in the human mind and the human spirit.
To me, his thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these awards. They are offered for increased and continuing knowledge of man and of his world—for understanding and communication, which are the functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstrations of the capacity for peace—the culmination of all the others.
Less than fifty years after his death, the door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice. We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life and death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, Saint John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the word, and the word is man, and the word is with man.
V.
FRIENDS
JOHN STEINBECK had many, many friends. He was drawn to ordinary people, and relished the company of the extraordinary people in his life like Edward Ricketts and Robert Capa and Arthur Miller. He wrote letters to friends daily, and because he was a writer, he was drawn to their stories in return. Although he spent a lot of time writing, “the loneliest job in the world,” he relished company and conversation.
The writer’s loneliest period may have been his high school years, when he spent much of his time in his bedroom reading and working on stories. But college was another matter. He made numerous friends at Stanford, and kept in touch with many through letters for years—roommate Carlton Sheffield, English majors Webster Street and A. Grove Day. A few faculty members helped shape his thinking and writing, particularly Edith Mirrielees, who taught a course in writing the short story. A tough taskmaster, Mirrielees didn’t coddle the young Steinbeck, as he wrote in a preface to her book Story Writing: “If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades you gave my efforts quickly disillusioned me” (vii). He had expected some kind of formula, some secret ingredient, but got none from her. Instead, what he got was frank criticism and encouragement—something he would, in turn, give to young writers who sought his opinion. One of Steinbeck’s friends who also took courses from Mirrielees remembered her as “one of these odd, prissy, little old-fashioned women who you couldn’t imagine John getting along with, and yet he had the greatest admiration for her, and he would take whatever she told him about what he wrote” (Benson 58).
Not until after college, however, did Steinbeck meet the man who became the closest, most influential friend of his life, Edward Flanders Ricketts. It was Ricketts who inspired the writer’s many accounts of friendship, for that was the relationship that Steinbeck explored most consistently in his fiction: Lenny and George, Mack and Jim, Tom and Casy, Mack and the boys, Adam Trask and Lee. In all of these stories of male bonding, there was, either as one of the friends or as a sage looking on, a figure of serene demeanor
and broad understanding. That character was always modeled on Edward Flanders Ricketts. He was a natural object for Steinbeck’s interest. He was self-contained without being arrogant; extremely competent at his work as a marine biologist; knew things that Steinbeck didn’t know well enough, like music and science and poetry and philosophy; was quiet and yet loved parties and conversation and ideas; and was a nonconformist with broad enthusiasms. “His mind had no horizons,” Steinbeck writes in “About Ed Ricketts,” one of the most heartfelt essays that he ever composed, written a few years after Ed’s untimely death in 1948.
Other friends, others he admired, inspired shorter pieces. Tom Collins was the migrant camp manager he met while doing research for his newspaper series on the Dust Bowl migrants, “The Harvest Gypsies” (1936). Collins, like Ricketts, was a thoughtful nonconformist, the kind of creative, unusual person who always attracted Steinbeck. Both Ricketts and Collins were frustrated writers, and Steinbeck attempted to get various works of his two friends published; for Collins he wrote the piece reprinted here, a foreword to the autobiographical novel Bringing in the Sheaves (by Windsor Drake, the pen name that Collins adopted). His words about Woody Guthrie and Henry Fonda also grew out of his work on The Grapes of Wrath. Singer of Dust Bowl ballads, Woody sang “The Ballad of Tom Joad” at a New York benefit. And Fonda’s early and defining film role as Tom Joad began a long friendship between the actor and the writer.
When he moved to New York City, first with his second wife, Gwyn, in 1941, later with Elaine in 1950, he became closer to his agents at McIntosh and Otis and to his lifelong editor, Pascal Covici. But he never wrote much about the loyal women who were his agents, Elizabeth Otis, with him from the beginning; Mavis McIntosh, who handled all film adaptations; or Shirley Fisher, whose husband flew the bomber Mary Ruth out of England in World War II and who herself became a Sag Harbor fishing buddy. But once, giving Elizabeth part of the proceeds from the musical Pipe Dream, he wrote her a letter that suggests much about the quality of his deep friendship and loyalty, to her, to others:
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 20