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Authors: John Steinbeck
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Nipomo. * I really don’t care about the moving picture. Really don’t—but those people who are starving—what can be done? And the people with panaceas of all kinds. Will you lend your name to this and to this? What do I care about my name? It is battered and completely out of shape anyway. It hasn’t any meaning and I haven’t any meaning. “Seen about your luck.” I got no luck. “Send one hundred dollars.” Luck! He thinks it is luck. He is poor and he thinks I am rich. And he seen about my luck. In the cheap welter, he seen about my luck. He seen about my destruction only he couldn’t understand that. The Greeks seem to have known about this dark relationship between luck and destruction. It is so hard to know anything. So impossible to trust oneself. Even to know what there is to trust. My will is low. I must build my will again. And I can do it even as I have done before. The time passes. The thoughts race.
PART II:
The Diary of a Book
(May-October 1938)
But the sureness of touch, the characters that move about, the speech that sounds like speaking, the fact that it happens, that one is never conscious of how a thing is said but only of what is said. I know the why and how of that. It’s the millions of words written, all the short stories, even the ones that weren’t any good. Without the millions of words written it is impossible to write a book like this. And by the same token—those millions of words are a guarantee that the last half will not falter for a moment.
—Steinbeck, on reading the manuscript of Louis Paul’s novel, The Wrong World (1938). ( Courtesy of University of Virginia Library )
Commentary
The following ninety-nine entries, which cover the summer and fall of 1938, constitute the truest story of the making of The Grapes of Wrath. They comprise Steinbeck’s attempt, with a kind of scientific preciseness, “to map the actual working days and hours” of his novel, and they provide an unparalleled record of the shapings and seizings, the naked slidings, of his creative psyche. No other account matches this one for personal intensity, dedication, investment, and drama.
Unlike the sprawling, digressive entries on symbolism, characterization, and philosophy that mark Steinbeck’s daily log for his 1952 novel East of Eden (the entries were published posthumously in 1969 as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters), here Steinbeck is working in a different mode—more focused and sharper, less self-reflexive and expansive, but of course no less revealing about his habitual writerly concerns. Readers accustomed to the tone of familiarity and camaraderie of Journal of a Novel (the entries were daily letters to Pascal Covici) will find this “diary of a book” limited in intention and scope, and hermetic—even claustrophobic—in tone and attitude. Brief, direct, staccato, these daily notes took the place of his normally voluminous “warm-up” correspondence. They helped regulate his discipline in the face of an inordinate number of interruptions— some worthwhile, most merely bothersome—that his growing public fame had brought him. (A cheeky agent for Selznick International Pictures set the tone of the summer by requesting an “advanced reading” of the unwritten novel “to review its motion picture possibilities”; exasperated, Steinbeck directed his agents to reply that “the book will not be for sale!”)
Despite the “leisurely” pace he hoped to establish for his novel, most of these entries have a breathless quality, as though they were written impatiently in shorthand. Steinbeck, it seems, could hardly wait to address the day’s fictive project before his concentration and inspiration waned. Morever, the entries attest to Steinbeck’s covenant with the written word. His subject was incendiary and as contemporaneous as the day’s newspaper headlines, but his compact with the fiction-making process took precedence over sociological or political
PART II:
The Diary of a Book
(May-October 1938)
But the sureness of touch, the characters that move about, the speech that sounds like speaking, the fact that it happens, that one is never conscious of how a thing is said but only of what is said. I know the why and how of that. It’s the millions of words written, all the short stories, even the ones that weren’t any good. Without the millions of words written it is impossible to write a book like this. And by the same token—those millions of words are a guarantee that the last half will not falter for a moment.
—Steinbeck, on reading the manuscript of Louis Paul’s novel, The Wrong World (1938). ( Courtesy of University of Virginia Library )
Commentary
The following ninety-nine entries, which cover the summer and fall of 1938, constitute the truest story of the making of The Grapes of Wrath. They comprise Steinbeck’s attempt, with a kind of scientific preciseness, “to map the actual working days and hours” of his novel, and they provide an unparalleled record of the shapings and seizings, the naked slidings, of his creative psyche. No other account matches this one for personal intensity, dedication, investment, and drama.
Unlike the sprawling, digressive entries on symbolism, characterization, and philosophy that mark Steinbeck’s daily log for his 1952 novel East of Eden (the entries were published posthumously in 1969 as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters), here Steinbeck is working in a different mode—more focused and sharper, less self-reflexive and expansive, but of course no less revealing about his habitual writerly concerns. Readers accustomed to the tone of familiarity and camaraderie of Journal of a Novel (the entries were daily letters to Pascal Covici) will find this “diary of a book” limited in intention and scope, and hermetic—even claustrophobic—in tone and attitude. Brief, direct, staccato, these daily notes took the place of his normally voluminous “warm-up” correspondence. They helped regulate his discipline in the face of an inordinate number of interruptions— some worthwhile, most merely bothersome—that his growing public fame had brought him. (A cheeky agent for Selznick International Pictures set the tone of the summer by requesting an “advanced reading” of the unwritten novel “to review its motion picture possibilities”; exasperated, Steinbeck directed his agents to reply that “the book will not be for sale!”)
Despite the “leisurely” pace he hoped to establish for his novel, most of these entries have a breathless quality, as though they were written impatiently in shorthand. Steinbeck, it seems, could hardly wait to address the day’s fictive project before his concentration and inspiration waned. Morever, the entries attest to Steinbeck’s covenant with the written word. His subject was incendiary and as contemporaneous as the day’s newspaper headlines, but his compact with the fiction-making process took precedence over sociological or political
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