Sweet Thursday Read Free Page B

himself; in recasting his portrait of the artist, he did so in an entirely familiar scale, which is perhaps why he confessed to Elizabeth Otis on September 14, 1953, that the new work is “a little self indulgent.”
    Steinbeck took enormous plea sure in producing this blissful novel. He exorcised his painful marriage with second wife Gwyn in Burning Bright and East of Eden , whose characters reflect aspects of his own tortured relationship. In Sweet Thursday he allowed himself the luxury to indulge in the happiness of his present moment and his transformative new life with Elaine. Rationalization or not, as a person who labored with words day in and day out, year after year, he often spoke of his need for his task to be “fun.” “There is a school of thought among writers which says that if you enjoy writing something it is automatically no good and should be thrown out,” he told Elizabeth Otis. “I can’t agree with this.” If Cannery Row represented the way things were, he explained in November 1953 to Harold Bicknell and Grant Mclean (the real-life models of Gabe and Mack), then his new project became the way things “might have happened to Ed and didn’t.” The two propositions (“one can be as true as the other”) are necessary for a holistic view of the novelist’s mind and for an understanding of what the spirit of Ed Ricketts meant to Steinbeck, who didn’t “seem able to get over his death,” as he told former Stanford classmate Carlton A. Sheffield on November 2, 1953.
    Significantly rooted in personal experience, memory, longing, and emotion, Sweet Thursday foregrounds the struggle of individual consciousness in (and through) language. In doing so, Steinbeck keeps a good part of Ed Ricketts and his legacy alive. In chapter 6, “The Creative Cross,” Doc’s tribulations in researching and writing his proposed scholarly essay, “Symptoms in Some Cephalopods Approximating Apoplexy,” mirror aspects of Steinbeck’s preparatory stages in his own creative regime; Doc’s prewriting jitters and inability to concentrate are colored as well by Steinbeck’s wrenching artistic and personal upheavals of the late 1940s and his awareness of the need for emotional fulfillment:
    For hours on end he sat at his desk with a yellow pad before him and his needle-sharp pencils lined up. Sometimes his wastebasket was full of crushed, scribbled pages, and at others not even a doodle went down. Then he would move to the aquarium and stare into it. And his voices howled and cried and moaned. “Write!” said his top voice, and “Search!” said his middle voice, and his lowest voice sighed, “Lonesome! Lonesome!” He did not go down without a struggle. He resurrected old love affairs, he swam deep in music, he read the Sorrows of Werther ; but the voices would not leave him. The beckoning yellow pages became his enemies.
    Writing, like so many other endeavors in life, including romance and courtship, Steinbeck shows, is less a condition of mastery than it is hard work, full of self-doubt, false steps, insecurities, angers, frustrations, and disruptions. Steinbeck suggests that success lies as much in the marshaling of conjunctive forces and ambient fortune as it does in the completion of the scholarly project. Paradoxically, there is a telling difference in ends, because the form Steinbeck adopts for Sweet Thursday takes on a life of its own, borrows heavily from other literary works, and veers away from the kind of objective, autonomous document a practicing scientist would be expected to produce. Steinbeck must have realized, as he reread and reimagined the Doc of Cannery Row and “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), that only by embracing comedy and tragedy, realism and fabulation, the inarticulate “transcendental sadness” of Cannery Row and the “frabjous” expression of joy of Sweet Thursday ,