Steinbeck Read Free Page B

against the night. And I wrote of little voices in the glens which were the spirits of passions and desires and dreams of dead men’s minds. And Mrs. Russell [an instructor] said they were not real, that such things could not be, and she was not going to stand me bullying her into such claptrap nonsense. Those were not her words but her meaning, and then she smiled out of the corner of her mouth as nurses do when an idiot child makes blunders. And I could not stand that, Carl, so I swore at her because I had been out all night in the making of my pictures. And now she is very cold, and she means to flunk me in my course, thinking that she can hurt me thus. I wish that she could know that I do not in the least care.
    And I wish you were back, because you could understand the things I try to say, and help me to say them better, and I know you would, for you did once.
    John Steinbeck
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    Later that spring, again to Carl Wilhelmson:
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    â€œThere have been six short stories this quarter. [Two of these appeared in the Stanford Spectator.] I wonder if you remember the one about the machinist who made engines and felt a little omnipotent until his own machine pulled his arm from him. Then he cursed God and suffered retribution at the hands of God or thought he did. That has finally been done to my half satisfaction. Of the others, one was perfectly rotten, two were fair, three were quite good. About the only thing that can be said for them is that they do not resemble anything which has ever been written.
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    â€œMiss Mirrielees [his instructor in creative writing] is very kind, she hates to hurt feelings. She says that she thinks my stuff ought to be published but she doesn’t know where. Don’t get the idea that I am swimming against an incoming tide of approbation, I’m not. For every bit of favorable criticism, I get four knocks in the head. Oh! well, who cares?”
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    Recalling this period later, he wrote his collegemate, Robert Cathcart:
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    â€œI first read Caesar and Cleopatra about seven or eight years ago, and was so impressed that I immediately wrote a sequel to it concerning the coming of Marc and his battle with the few and carefully misunderstood principles Caesar had left with Cleopatra. It was a failure. I was about seventeen at the time. And as I shall never write another play, I bequeath the idea to you.”
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    â€œYou asked me what I had been reading,” he wrote Mrs. Edith Wagner, mother of two boyhood friends from Salinas. “Here is the last list which we brought from the library, The Book of the Dead from existing papyri, Les Femmes Savantes of Molière, which I had never read in French before and a low detective tale labeled L‘Homme du Dent d’Or by a man of whom I never heard, and who in the French fashion manages to get his murder accomplished in a bedroom; La Barraca of Ibañez, which is shorter and I think more effective than his others; some short stories by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, and she certainly is the master of her kind of short stories. I have just finished the autobiography of Casanova and The Judge by Rebecca West which is a wonderful piece of writing. If you haven’t read it you must for it is one of the best things I have read in many a day. In a maniacal period this summer I went through Pushkin and Turgenev.”
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    He left Stanford for good without a degree in June 1925, and managed to get a berth to New York as a “workaway” on a freighter through the Panama Canal. For the next year he lived unhappily in Brooklyn and later in a room overlooking Gramercy Park. “I guess I hate New York,” he was to write in 1935, “because I had a thin, lonely, hungry time of it there. And I remember too well the cockroaches under my wash basin and the impossibility of getting a job. I was scared thoroughly. And I can’t forget the scare.”
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    He did eventually get work as a laborer on