starved and it isnât nearly as bad as is generally supposed. Four days and a half was my longest stretch. Maybe there are pains that come later. Personally I think terror is the painful part of starvation.
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Thirty years later he had not forgotten.
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âTonight I am going to cook my old Pacific Grove Starvation Special,â he wrote his wife Elaine in Texas. âI hope it is as good as I remember it but I must remember that I was awful hungry when it tasted good. I wonât even tell you what it is made of. You have enough problems without nausea.â
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You are sanguine about my inheritance. There will be nothing, you know. Iâll be lucky if I have this house. Noâmoney is not for us. Other people get Phelan Awards [an award of money given in California for writing]. Probably because they want them badly. My one long chance was to have married money and I didnât do that. I have come to be a complete fatalist about money. Even the law of averages doesnât hold with me. Any attempt to get me any kind of an award is pre-doomed to failure. Furthermore I seriously doubt that my brand of literature will ever feed me. And I havenât sense enough to worry about it. If eventually I have to go to work digging ditches, I shall have had my chance.
I read only a page or so of Look Homeward, Angel. The pages I read seemed to be a hodgepodge of quotations. I shall read all of it sometime since you recommend it so highly. I was somewhat deterred from reading it by the overwhelming praise of Sinclair Lewis.
It is a gray day with little dusty spurts of rain. A good day for inwardness. Only I doubt that I have many guts of my own to look inward at. That is one of the great troubles with objective writing. A constant practice of it leaves one no material for introspection. If my characters are sad or happy I reflect their emotions. I have no personal nor definitive emotions of my own. Indeed, when there is no writing in progress, I feel like an uninhabited body. I think I am only truly miserable at such times.
Carol is probably going to work next week. [Her advertising agency had closed.] She looks forward to it. It is not good for her to be housed here with me all day. I am too impatient of movements or noise in the house. And it is such a small house.
You see, my letters are bound to be tiresome because I can talk of nothing but the work I am doing. Monomanial
This probably sounds like a doleful letter and it shouldnât be because I donât feel at all doleful.
John
To George Albee
[Pacific Grove]
[1931]
Monday
Dear George:
Exciting thingsâyesterday we bought two mallard ducks for the garden. The drake has an irridescent green head. They are beautiful. They swim in the pond and eat the bugs in the garden. We are pretty excited. They cost our amusement quota for this month but are worth it. Named Aqua and Vita. Carol hated to go to work this morning and leave them because they are so interesting. They do not ever step on the plantsâjust edge between on their big clumsy feet. They very promptly caught and ate the goldfish but we donât care. Itâs nice to have things like ducks. We wonât ever have to feed them for there are bugs enough in the garden to keep them going. You never saw anything so beautiful in all the greenness of our garden as these luxurious ducks.
I have had a couple of fallow daysâabsolute disgust and lack of faith in my own work and inability to go on. This nearly always happens when a book is nearly done. I shall force it this morning. And the story I am working on charms me more than any of the others. I wish to heaven you could read these things. I need a little encouragement I guess. The other day I asked a young friend to read one and he felt that he should criticise because that was what one did to a ms. So he tore a pretty nice story to pieces and showed me how to do it. It was funny because he hit all the places
Â
Â
Â
Thirty years later he had not forgotten.
Â
âTonight I am going to cook my old Pacific Grove Starvation Special,â he wrote his wife Elaine in Texas. âI hope it is as good as I remember it but I must remember that I was awful hungry when it tasted good. I wonât even tell you what it is made of. You have enough problems without nausea.â
Â
You are sanguine about my inheritance. There will be nothing, you know. Iâll be lucky if I have this house. Noâmoney is not for us. Other people get Phelan Awards [an award of money given in California for writing]. Probably because they want them badly. My one long chance was to have married money and I didnât do that. I have come to be a complete fatalist about money. Even the law of averages doesnât hold with me. Any attempt to get me any kind of an award is pre-doomed to failure. Furthermore I seriously doubt that my brand of literature will ever feed me. And I havenât sense enough to worry about it. If eventually I have to go to work digging ditches, I shall have had my chance.
I read only a page or so of Look Homeward, Angel. The pages I read seemed to be a hodgepodge of quotations. I shall read all of it sometime since you recommend it so highly. I was somewhat deterred from reading it by the overwhelming praise of Sinclair Lewis.
It is a gray day with little dusty spurts of rain. A good day for inwardness. Only I doubt that I have many guts of my own to look inward at. That is one of the great troubles with objective writing. A constant practice of it leaves one no material for introspection. If my characters are sad or happy I reflect their emotions. I have no personal nor definitive emotions of my own. Indeed, when there is no writing in progress, I feel like an uninhabited body. I think I am only truly miserable at such times.
Carol is probably going to work next week. [Her advertising agency had closed.] She looks forward to it. It is not good for her to be housed here with me all day. I am too impatient of movements or noise in the house. And it is such a small house.
You see, my letters are bound to be tiresome because I can talk of nothing but the work I am doing. Monomanial
This probably sounds like a doleful letter and it shouldnât be because I donât feel at all doleful.
John
To George Albee
[Pacific Grove]
[1931]
Monday
Dear George:
Exciting thingsâyesterday we bought two mallard ducks for the garden. The drake has an irridescent green head. They are beautiful. They swim in the pond and eat the bugs in the garden. We are pretty excited. They cost our amusement quota for this month but are worth it. Named Aqua and Vita. Carol hated to go to work this morning and leave them because they are so interesting. They do not ever step on the plantsâjust edge between on their big clumsy feet. They very promptly caught and ate the goldfish but we donât care. Itâs nice to have things like ducks. We wonât ever have to feed them for there are bugs enough in the garden to keep them going. You never saw anything so beautiful in all the greenness of our garden as these luxurious ducks.
I have had a couple of fallow daysâabsolute disgust and lack of faith in my own work and inability to go on. This nearly always happens when a book is nearly done. I shall force it this morning. And the story I am working on charms me more than any of the others. I wish to heaven you could read these things. I need a little encouragement I guess. The other day I asked a young friend to read one and he felt that he should criticise because that was what one did to a ms. So he tore a pretty nice story to pieces and showed me how to do it. It was funny because he hit all the places
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