Steinbeck Read Free Page A

Stanford University in 1919 when he was seventeen.
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    He had many of the usual preoccupations of young men of his age. As he wrote one girl:
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    â€œWe have been dancing twice a week in the pavilion. There is a stern and rockbound row of old ladies who have constituted themselves chaperones.”
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    And to another girl:
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    â€œI cannot step out much, Florence, because I have lots of ambitions and very little money so my fun from now on must be very prosaic.”
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    â€œI am poor, dreadfully poor. I have to feed someone else before I can eat myself. I must live in an atmosphere of dirty dishes and waitresses with soiled ears, if I wish to know about things like psychology and logic.” [He was working in the City Café, Palo Alto.]
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    He held many jobs to finance his education. Sometimes he dropped out of college for whole quarters at a time to earn tuition for the next quarter. “Now I will work and go to school and work again.”
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    He clerked in a department store and in a haberdashery shop, he worked as a surveyor in the Big Sur, and as a ranch hand near King City, which later became the setting for Of Mice and Men. And of another job, he wrote years later:
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    â€œWhen I was in college I was a real poor kid. I got a job breaking army remounts for officers’ gentle behinds. I got $30 a remount or fifty with basic polo. You know—haunch stops and spins and stick work around head and ears and pastern. I didn’t walk without a limp for months. They must have got some of those remounts out of the chutes on the rodeo circuit. But I needed the dough bad and I figured it was better to limp and eat than to be whole and hungry.”
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    Several times through this period he worked for the Spreckels Sugar Company—“Always on the night shift,” a friend recalls, “apparently as somebody to keep the laboratory open, though he sometimes said he was ‘Night Chemist’; or at the company plant in Manteca, near Stockton, ‘loading and stacking sacks of sugar, twelve hours a day, seven days a week.’ ”
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    Already it was clear that the most important thing in his life, the driving force, was literature—reading whatever he could, struggling to master language, testing and straining at high-flown imagery and dramatic attitudinizing—what he himself called “distinguished writing.”
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    To Carl Wilhelmson, a classmate and another would-be writer:
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    â€œAt times I feel that I am playing around the edges of things, getting nowhere. An extreme and callow youth playing with philosophy must be a pitiable thing from your point of view. Today was a long day, the hours went by so slowly that I thought of many things and finally went into a mental sleep. I sat on a pipe and watched, and spoke in monosyllables to those who were about me, and I knew so many things which they did not know, there were so many worlds open to me whose existence was beyond their powers of comprehension, and I such a young lad.”

To Carl Wilhelmson
    Palo Alto
April 7, 1924
    Dear Carl:
    Here, on this paper, there are only you and me, and the things that each of us tries so hard to understand, clambering up through long, long researches into the past, and thinking ponderously and seeking, and finding that for which we looked a glorified question mark.
    It would be desirable to be flung, unfettered by consciousness, into the void, to sail unhindered through eternity. Please do not think that I am riding along on baseless words, covering threadbare thoughts with garrulous tapestries. I am not. It is the words which are inadequate.
    You know so much and I can tell you nothing, and I don’t think I can even make you feel anything you have not felt more poignantly than I, who am a mummer in a brocaded boudoir.
    I wrote of miners’ faces around a fire. Their bodies did not show in the light so that the yellow faces seemed dangling masks