Journal of a Novel

by John Steinbeck

  Now I come down to exactness. Before too long I am going to have to write Chapter I. And it must have its design made in advance. What is it that I want to say in my opening? First I want to establish the boys—what they are and what they are like. Then I would like to indicate my reason for writing this book to them. Then I would like in general terms to tell them what their blood is. Next I want to describe the Salinas Valley in detail but in sparse detail so that there can be a real feeling of it. It should be sights and sounds, smells and colors but put down with simplicity as though the boys were able to read it. This is the physical background of the book. Next our grandfather2 and his sons and his daughters and his wife and the land they took up near King City and how they lived, and some attempt to give them a quality of their background. And finally I want to mention the neighbors. I do not have the name yet. I think it might be Canable. No, that is a double or rather a triple meaning I don’t want. The name is so important that I want to think about it. I remember a friend of my father’s—a whaling master named Captain Trask. I have always loved the name. It meant great romance to me. Anyway, the last part of the first chapter will refer to the Trasks and their place. Then the second chapter will begin the Trask story. In the opening there must be the techniques of living to a certain extent. Then as the book progresses, it is my intention, every other chapter, to continue the letter to the boys with all of the thinking and the detail necessary for one to understand the main story of three generations of Trasks. The advantage of this will be that the story itself can be increasingly quick and terse and short. Such readers as only like plot and dialogue can then skip every other chapter and meanwhile I can take time for thought, comment, observation, criticism, and if it should seem a good thing to throw it out, I can do that too. Or it could be put in a second book. Actually it will be a kind of parallel biography. And it may well be that a great deal of it may be thrown out. But that we will see as we go along. I don’t want to dawdle too much today and on the other hand I do not want to start the book today. I want to get all the thinking detail of the first chapter done. And that is it. The physical valley—then center down to the little area. But try to relate the reader to the book so that, while I am talking to the boys actually, I am relating every reader to the story as though he were reading about his own background. If I can do that, it will be very helpful. Everyone wants to have a family. Maybe I can create a universal family living next to a universal neighbor. This should not be impossible.

  I am using up such quantities of my free space that I will not have space for the writing. But on my first day, which will be tomorrow, I will have to fill three pages. For tomorrow there will be nothing in this left-hand page except field notes.

  I have a good feeling about this book now and I hope I can keep it. It is a feeling of real relaxation and rest. It would be fine if I could keep such a feeling. I surely intend to try. Next, I want to be so relaxed that the book will soothe and excite at the same time. Also it must not be a dour book but one that has gaiety as well as movement. It has to have a universal quality or there is no point in writing it.

  The writing table is perfect. I have never been so content with anything. And the blue wing-back chair is wonderfully comfortable. It might possibly be too comfortable but this I do not believe. I think that if I can be relaxed, the book has a chance of being relaxed, and I have a very strong feeling about this book being completely at ease and comfortable. Also I have a strong feeling about its being very long. Otherwise I will have lost my whole direction. I want to take a great time with this book. I would like to write on it all year—if that seems good. I know that you, Pat, are anxious to get it done and out but that is because then the work you love will start. But this book is to be the labor that I love and I intend to take full advantage of it. I have often thought that this might be my last book. I don’t really mean that because I will be writing books until I die. But I want to write this one as though it were my last book. Maybe I believe that every book should be written that way. I think I mean that. It is the ideal. And I have done just the opposite. I have written each book as an exercise, as practice for the one to come. And this is the one to come. There is nothing beyond this book—nothing follows it. It must contain all in the world I know and it must have everything in it of which I am capable—all styles, all techniques, all poetry—and it must have in it a great deal of laughter. I can see no reason why I should not tell the family stories. They are just as good as they ever were and maybe as I go I will remember more and more of them. But I do know that I must put in all of the lore and anecdote I can. And many of my family stories amount to folklore and should be used for and by the boys. Then they will know their family. I think I will put a good deal of my mother and my father also. It is time I wrote these things, else they will be gone because no one else will ever do them except me. I am very happy at my new table and with all my things about me. Never have I had such a comfortable layout.

  My choice of pencils lies now between the black Calculator stolen from Fox Films and this Mongol 2⅜ F which is quite black and holds its point well—much better in fact than the Fox pencils. I will get six more or maybe four more dozens of them for my pencil tray. And this is all I am going to do on this my first day of work.

  February 13 [TUESDAY]

  It must be told that my second work day is a bust as far as getting into the writing. I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing. Almost no progress has taken place since it was invented. The Book of the Dead is as good and as highly developed as anything in the 20th century and much better than most. And yet in spite of this lack of a continuing excellence, hundreds of thousands of people are in my shoes—praying feverishly for relief from their word pangs.

  And one thing we have lost—the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute.

  I have a weary little weight on my head today. Last night I could not sleep out of excitement about my story. It was a strange voluptuous excitement and when I dropped off I had a quick sex dream, perhaps because my feeling was exotic. Now I am slipping so far ahead of the pages for narrative but there’s no harm in that. I have said to myself that this book must be unhurried and serene. And if these observations can promote the calm I want, then I am willing to go along with it indefinitely. I am pleased with myself for no reason at all. I have a good golden light in my stomach which is a mesh of happiness. Isn’t that odd and delightful? Every once in a while I get the feeling that this is a secret book like some of the others that were kept in a gloom and burned straight, and a good thing too for they carried uncreative misery and there is no good in that at all. How different now—maybe I’m fooling myself. That is always possible but I do indeed seem to feel creative juices rushing toward an outlet as semen gathers from the four quarters of a man and fights its way into the vesicle. I hope something beautiful and true comes out—but this I know (and the likeness to coition still holds). Even if I knew nothing would emerge from this book I would still write it. It seems to me that different organisms must have their separate ways of symbolizing, with sound or gesture, the creative joy—the flowering. And if this is so, men also must have their separate ways—some to laugh and some to build, some to destroy and yes, some even creatively to destroy themselves. There’s no explaining this. The joy thing in me has two outlets: one a fine charge of love toward the incredibly desirable body and sweetness of woman, and second—mostly both—the paper and pencil or pen. And it is interesting to think what paper and pencil and the wriggling words are. They are nothing but the trigger into joy—the shout of beauty—the cacajada of th
e pure bliss of creation. And often the words do not even parallel the feeling except sometimes in intensity. Thus a man full of a bursting joy may write with force and vehemence of some sad picture —of the death of beauty or the destruction of a lovely town—and there is only the effectiveness to prove how great and beautiful was his feeling.

  You might as well get used to this, Pat. I write many thousands of words a day and some of them go on paper. And of those which are written down, only a few are ever meant to be seen. And it occurred to me that since you bought this fine book for me, I would put most of the writing in it. There is still the secret writing which will be burned but that deals with matters I have no wish for anyone to see, even you. But all that can be seen I will put in this book and it may be that half way through my novel, you may be required to buy me another book. How you would hate that.

  I see now what I am doing and I do not think it is a waste of time. The body of the book is addressed to my children and for them at any age there must be a reduction to complete simplicity —not because they are stupid but because their experience will have been different from mine. Therefore we must meet on some common ground between. But your experience and mine, while not identical, are near enough so that we can meet on the same ground. And that is probably what I am instinctively doing, coming out of the cold of the strange into the warm of the familiar. Such things seem to be a matter of reflex. In this connection—I can find in notebooks many years old ideas and feelings and even stories I did not know about. For this reason it is not well to attempt to analyse too closely at first—an emotion which falls by some accident into edged words, swings the whole brain about and shakes it like a rug. This happens oftener than we know.

  I feel that sometimes when I am writing I am very near to a kind of unconsciousness. Then time does change its manner and minutes disappear into the cloud of time which is one thing, having only one duration. I have thought that if we could put off our duration-preoccupied minds, it might be that time has no duration at all. Then all history and all pre-history might indeed be one durationless flash like an exploding star, eternal and without duration.

  So, we move on. My mind blasted just then with an idea so comely, like a girl, so very sweet and dear that I will put her aside for the book. Oh! she is lovely, this idea.

  And it is odd also, how one with such benevolence as I can have at the same time, layer on layer, a callous cruelty, capable of almost anything, of death, and hurt—an implacable cruelty needing only a direction as the benevolence does. With a channel, this mind can be a destroying angel. And crazily enough—it’s the same mind swinging in the strongest wind, taking its direction from the wind. I don’t know whether all minds are like this. Mine is the only one I know about.

  Sometimes I am impatient with those who think themselves kind when their only thought is to preserve themselves from the discomfort of observed pain.

  February 15 [THURSDAY]

  Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I went to the 78th St. house to take the things to the boys.3 They were withdrawn and cautious [...].

  Time now comes finally to move my book. I have dawdled enough. But it has been a good thing. I don’t yet know what the word rate will be. That will depend on many things. But I do think the hour rate should be fairly constant. I am about finished with these long and characteristic meanderings. It is with real fear that I go to the other. And I must forget even that I want it to be good. Such things belong only in the planning stage. Once it starts, it should not have any intention save only to be written. All is peace now. And all is quiet. What little things there are, are here and good. Posture and attitude are so very important. And since these things have to go on for a very long time, they must become almost a way of life and a habit of thought. So that no one may say, I lost by being lost. This is the last bounce on the board, the last look into the pool. The time has come for the dive. The time has really come. I’ll keep this running comment going but it will be more restricted. Now I must go to the Salinas Valley. And if it can be believed—I am glad to go there on paper rather than in person. Odd how reluctant I am to start. I suppose that everyone hates discipline and fights it off at all costs. How the paper eats up pencil line. How it does.

  My son Tom is in trouble in some way. I only know it because I feel it in his eyes and in the quick frantic and quickly covered emotion of yesterday. I don’t know what to do but I know I must do something to help him. He has become silent and Gwyn says defiant. I know how that is. Then there is the story that I meet him at school every day to meet him. He wouldn’t tell such a story unless he had a definite need of it. And I think I had better go and talk with the people who see him most—the people in school. At least that seems the good thing to me. And now, I must get to work.

  February 16, Friday

  Just as it always does—the work started without warning. It is always that way. I must sit a certain length of time before it happens. Yesterday it began to come and I think the form is set now. I know it is for the alternate chapters. I only hope I can do as well with the other parts of the alternate. Now I have sat a week. It is Friday and I have sweated out one page and a half. If I did not know this process so well, I would consider it a week of waste. But I know better than that now and I am content. I do not think I have wasted this week. In fact I feel a great gain. There is nothing frantic about the book at all. I have never felt this way before. Somehow, Elaine manages to take the pressures off and to keep them off. Last night I read her the opening and she said she liked it. There was hardly enough to judge but some. And you could get tone from it at least. The pipes are tasting very good. I have a feeling to buy a meerschaum and start coloring it as I do this book. Maybe I will do that. By the time the pipe is brown the book should be done. More magics. I think tomorrow I will look for a meerschaum, a small light one. Saw one in a window the other day but I forget where. Oh! I am so happy—so very happy. I think I have never been so happy in my life. It seems absurd to feel so good about anything. Only the boys trouble me—nothing else. Not the war in Korea—it seems remote. In fact not anything. We are spending a lot of money on the house but I want to—and where else should it be spent? I can’t think of a better way to spend it. And I love Elaine unbelievably, incredibly. I think this new life is entirely her doing. What joy.

  February 19 [MONDAY]

  I did not work nor think over the week end and this was done on purpose. I wanted to get my mind clear of the clutter it has been in. There have been so many things to think about and I wanted particularly to let them run their course. [...] I was not happy over the week end for an excellent reason. I drank too much on Saturday night and had a hangover on Sunday, a fine depressed hangover in which nothing seemed any good and I myself seemed the most no good of all. This is a fine example of the depressing quality of alcohol. Today I am over it. If I must do these things I suppose Saturday night is the best time to do them. You, Pat, do not approve of drinking and I don’t know that I do either. But I find myself doing it nevertheless.

  Time impresses me pretty much now. Time and all the fringes and remnants of time. There’s a double aspect to the world—always two and sometimes more faces to external realities. And this increases as we go and the faces become broader and meatier.

  Today the house is full of pounding. I remember in the Grapes of Wrath book how I complained about the pounding. And this does not bother me at all. For some reason, it does not seem important to me. It is not aimed at me. I always felt that the other was definitely designed to disturb me. I am sure it was not entirely but to a certain extent there was a pleasure in disturbing me. And now I am sure there is not. I think I will buy a meerschaum pipe and see whether I can age it a delicate lovely brown while I am working on this book. They are very beautiful when they are well handled. And I am going to be here at this desk for a very long time. I can think of no pleasanter way to spend the rest of my life than in this house, with these people and at this drafting board. And now—this is enough o
f dawdling and I will go to my book.

  Now the day’s work is done and I don’t know whether or not it is good. I can only hope that it is. This book has to be so full of casualness as to be quite disarming. Today I got over the background and appearance and history of the Valley. And tomorrow I must start on the Hamiltons. I can tell all I want about them now because they are all dead and they won’t resent the truth about themselves. I think it might be all right too, but it is just a matter of keeping the whole thing in drawing. This is my most complicated and at the same time, my most simple sounding book. And that’s all for today.

  February 20 [TUESDAY]

  Today I am early at work and I want to boost the work to two pages today. It is time for that. I know this is going very slowly but I want it that way. I don’t want to rush. I am enjoying this work and I truly want it to be the best I have ever done. There is no reason why it should not have the stature I want. I can hear that in my ears and see it with my eyes and there is no reason why my pencil should not write it. Oh! but watch for terseness. Don’t let it ever be adjectivally descriptive. I must hold description to an absolute minimum, must to hold my story and all of its strands together. Just remember that this book is going on forever. I do not intend ever to finish it. And only with this attitude will it progress as I wish it to. I must not let any kind of deadline fall across its pages to change its pace. I know, Pat, that you would like to have it for next winter and that is not possible, or for next spring and that is not quite possible. I have no time to finish this. And I will not make a time.

  It is amazing how little I worry. I suppose I should worry about money and the boys and all such things but I do not. I forget to worry even though I know I should, just to be normal. And right in the middle of the attempt I get to thinking about something else. Now it is time to get down to work. I must introduce Samuel Hamilton and his wife to the Salinas Valley. I am pleased now because the geography and weather are over and I can start with the people. It was my intention, Pat, to give rather an impression of the Valley than a detailed account—more a sense of it than anything else. I do hope I have succeeded but I won’t know that for a long time. But this book is not about geography but about people and I do not want to give the place undue importance. Time to work now.