Journal of a Novel

by John Steinbeck

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  January 29, 1951 [MONDAY]

  To Pascal Covici

  JOURNAL OF A NOVEL

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez. He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

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  First published in the United States of America by

  The Viking Press, Inc., 1969

  Published in a Viking Compass Edition 1972

  Published in Pengun Books 1990

  10

  Copyright © The Executors of the Estate of John Steinbeck, 1969 All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.

  Journal of a novel: the East of Eden letters/John Steinbeck.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67331-3

  1. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968. East of Eden. 2. Steinbeck, John,

  1902-1968—Diaries. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Diaries.

  I. Title.

  PS3537.T3234E335 1990

  813’.52—dc20 90—39044

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Publishers’ Note

  Emerson has said that when his writing was blocked, he would sit down and write a long letter to a friend whom he loved. 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. It was written on the blue-ruled pages of a large notebook, size 10¾” 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 fifteen hundred words. Both the letter and the text were written in black pencil in Steinbeck’s minute but clear longhand. The writing covered the period from January 29 through November 1, 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 on which 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. And in its private glimpses of the Nobel Prize-winning writer—his concern about his sons, his hobbies such as wood-carving and carpentry, his passion for invention—it is autobiographical material of the first order. In a sense this is Steinbeck’s Testament.

  Taken simply as a document, which he did not intend for publication and never revised in any way, it is probably unique. Its repetitions, even its seeming irrelevancies, are a part of its documentary interest. The text printed here follows the carefully typed transcription made from the original longhand by Mrs. Dorothy Covici for her husband, and no attempt has been made now to check it back word for word against the original longhand (a task for later scholars) except at a few points where she had been uncertain of the handwriting. It is published here intact as a reading version, without editing except in two minor respects. A few lines here and there, as indicated [...], have been omitted in deference to the feelings of living people, and a few inconsistencies in spelling, obvious slips of the pencil, and hasty punctuation have been corrected. Steinbeck was normally permissive with his editors on such points, though he strongly resisted what he called “collaboration” on more important matters. 1

  The letters, of course, refer to the first draft of East of Eden. After it was copied by a typist, Steinbeck made extensive revisions, omitted whole passages, and rearranged some of the chapters. The task of correlating the letters with the published text of the novel must also await future scholarship. Here, footnotes are supplied only in a few cases where references to the original text might be puzzling.

  The publishers are deeply indebted to Mrs. Elaine Steinbeck for her cooperation in elucidating references not clear in context and supplying identifications added in footnotes. They are also grateful to the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, the present owners, for permitting photographs of the original manuscript to be made for the sample facsimile pages; and to Pascal Covici, Jr., for perm
ission to photograph the box which Steinbeck carved to hold the manuscript and then gave to his editor. Finally they wish to express their gratitude to Steinbeck’s two sons, Thorn Steinbeck (“Tom” in the script) and John Steinbeck IV (“Catbird”). In the first of the letters to Covici, and also in letters addressed to them and intended to go in the book but later omitted, their father made clear to what a great extent he was motivated by the boys, six and four years old when the letters begin, in writing East of Eden.

  Also printed here for the first time is the “dedication, prologue, argument, apology, epilogue and perhaps epitaph all in one” which Steinbeck originally drafted for the book as a prefatory letter to Pascal Covici. In the end he decided to substitute the simpler and more personal dedication that appears in the published novel. The imaginary conversation in this draft was just that—an argument which Steinbeck facetiously set up in anticipation of what he feared might be said about the book by his publishers and the reader. Needless to say, it never took place. But it tells much about author-publisher relationships.

  January 29, 1951 [MONDAY]

  Dear Pat: How did the 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. I developed a language for it that I will never use. This seems such a waste of the few years a man has to write in. And still I do not think I could have written it before now. Of course it would have been a book—but not this book. I remember when you gave me this thick—black—expensive book to write in. See how well I have kept it for this book. Only six pages are out of it. A puppy gnawed the corners of the front cover. And it is clean and fresh and open. I hope I can fill it as you would like it filled.

  The last few years have been painful. I don’t know whether they have hurt permanently or not. Certainly they have changed me. I would have been stone if they had not. I hope they have not taken too much away from me. Now I am married to Elaine and in two days I am moving into the pretty little house on 72nd St. and there I will have a room to work in and I will have love all around me. Maybe I can finally write this book. All the experiment is over now. I either write the book or I do not. There can be no excuses. The form will not be startling, the writing will be spare and lean, the concepts hard, the philosophy old and yet new born. In a sense it will be two books—the story of my county and the story of me. And I shall keep these two separate. It may be that they should not be printed together. But that we will have to see after the book is all over and finished and with it a great part of me.

  I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little. And if the book is addressed to them, it is for a good reason. I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people. One can go off into fanciness if one writes to a huge nebulous group but I think it will be necessary to speak very straight and clearly and simply if I address my book to two little boys who will be men before they read my book. They have no background in the world of literature, they don’t know the great stories of the world as we do. And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable—how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born. I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all that nature requires of them. But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place—not very often and always inexplainable. 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 the wordlessness. 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. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. The same blind effort, the straining and puffing go on in me. And always I hope that a little trickles through. This urge dies hard.

  This book will be the most difficult of all I have ever attempted. Whether I am good enough or gifted enough remains to be seen. I do have a good background. I have love and I have had pain. I still have anger but I can find no bitterness in myself. There may be some bitterness but if there is I don’t know where it can be. I do not seem to have the kind of selfness any more that nourishes it.

  And so I will start my book addressed to my boys. I think perhaps it is the only book I have ever written. I think there is only one book to a man. It is true that a man may change or be so warped that he becomes another man and has another book but I do not think that is so with me.

  February 12 [MONDAY]

  As I said above, we moved into the little house on 72nd St. We have been painting and carrying and arranging for over a week. But there has to come a day when one says—“Now that is over.” I can do many small things after 3:30 but the first part of the day must now be for the book. This is a kind of necessary selfishness—otherwise books do not get written. And so I am taking this Lincoln’s Birthday of 1951 to start my book. I will be 49 in two weeks. I am fairly strong but breathless. I weigh somewhat too much and will try to lose a little weight as I go. Because of all the confusion of the last several years, I will have difficulty in concentrating for a while. That is a conditioned trick. My health is generally good. I have been drinking too much, I think, and a few times in the last months I have had depressions. But it does not seem to me that the depressions are as awful as they used to be. Perhaps some acid juice is drying up. My sexual drive is, if anything, stronger than ever but that may be because it is all in one direction now and not scattered. I don’t know about my thinking. It will take this book to determine whether or not that is any good. My mind seems to me to be young and elastic but perhaps everyone thinks that always.

  I am trying to set down the condition I start with. I intend to keep a double-entry book—manuscript on the right-hand page and work diary on the left. Thus they will be together. I guess that brings me to the end of this opening letter. We will have to see whether the practicing through the years has prepared me for the writing of a book. For this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write. We shall see whether I am capable. Surely I feel humble in the face of this work.

  And as our Roman friends would say when casting outside themselves for help, Ora pro mihi.

  February 12, continued

  Lincoln’s Birthday. My first day of work in my new room. It is a very pleasant room and I have a drafting table to work on which I have always wanted—also a comfortable chair given me by Elaine. In fact I have never had it so good and so comfortable. It does occur to me that perhaps it might be a little too comfortable. I have known such things to happen—the perfect pointed pencil—the paper persuasive—the fantastic chair and a good light and no writing. Surely a man is a most treacherous animal full of hi
s treasured contradictions. He may not admit it but he loves his paradoxes.

  Now that I have everything, we shall see whether I have anything. It is exactly that simple. Mark Twain used to write in bed—so did our greatest poet. But I wonder how often they wrote in bed—or whether they did it twice and the story took hold. Such things happen. Also I would like to know what things they wrote in bed and what things they wrote sitting up. All of this has to do with comfort in writing and what its value is. I should think that a comfortable body would let the mind go freely to its gathering. But such is the human that he might react in an opposite. Remember my father’s story about the man who did not dare be comfortable because he went to sleep. That might be true of me too. Now I am perfectly comfortable in body. I think my house is in order. Elaine, my beloved, is taking care of all the outside details to allow me the amount of free untroubled time every day to do my work. I can’t think of anything else necessary to a writer except a story and the will and the ability to tell it.

  In considering this book and in planning for it I have thought of many great and interesting tricks. I have made new languages, new symbols, a new kind of writing; and now that the book is ready to go, I am throwing them all away and starting from scratch. I want to make this book so simple in its difficulty that a child can understand it. I want to go through it before it is typed and take out even the few adjectives I have let slip in. What then will the style be? I don’t know. Books establish their own pace. This I have found out. As soon as the story starts its style will establish itself. But still I do not think that all the experimenting is wasted that has kept some aliveness. The waggling pencil—the apes with typewriters hitting at a dictionary—this has been all right but it cannot be depended on.