I finished East of Eden last week, and today The East of Eden Letters. Steinbeck wrote East of Eden from January to November 1951, long-hand, wearing down innumerable pencils. He wrote in a bound book, only committing the novel to every other page. On the facing pages he wrote a daily letter to his editor, Pascal (Pat) Covici.
The daily letters weren’t directly functional – Covici would see them every time Steinbeck sent through a batch of writing (usually once a week). Outside of the journal Covici would visit Steinbeck, send letters in the post and have calls with him. So the daily letters are more like morning pages, a warm up, a meditation, on the writing to come in the day ahead, or (less often) a short reflect on the day’s writing done.
I enjoyed East of Eden a lot, but I got more from the journals. It is a privilege to see behind the curtain into the work life of a Nobel Prize winning author (even if he was a compromise choice in what the committee in Stockholm regarded as a bad year). Steinbeck talks about the ebb and flow of his energies, the annoyances and interruptions, his side projects (mostly inventing, crafting and fixing things) and his ambitions for the writing.
A few things become clear about the writing of this great novel, which he regarded, even while writing, as his magnum opus (in the journals he refers it to both has his ‘last book’ – the culmination of all his art – and his ‘first book’ – the time he is finally ready to express his true vision).
It’s clear how much planning went into the writing outside of the activity of writing. He refers several times to the plan of the book, and how closely he stuck to it across the months of writing. He also repeatedly mentions the evenings, weekends and lost nights of sleep he spent thinking over the construction of the book, the characters, plots, scenes and symbols.
Here’s a part (p134 in my edition):
“I did not sleep last night and I look forward to those nights of discovery. I have one about once a week. And after everyone is asleep there is such quiet and peace, and it is during this time that I can explore every quiet land and trail of thinking. Conjecture. Sometime I will tell you about his in detail if you are interested. I split myself into three people. I know what they look like. One speculates and one criticises and the third tries to correlate. It usually turns out to be a fight but out of it comes the whole week’s work. And it is carried on in my mind in dialogue.”
It’s clear too how much discipline and commitment he dedicated to writing. The days when it was nice outside, or he was ill, or badly slept, and he would sit down and warm up to deliver his two pages for the day (which he did, consistently four or five days a week, missing only a few weekdays in 10 months).
Something I’ve noticed myself, in the most negligible of echos of Steinbeck, is the momentum that a writing project has – how the daily habit can build and build. It can get so that the writing sustains itself across the days, and interruptions fade into the background of the one, continuous, effort. There rare times I’ve felt it it has been a great feeling, a privilege to have, and one which ever other commitment threatens. Steinbeck says he feels as if he is living two lives: the life of the book and the life of the man. And he implies that the life of the man is taking second place, leading him to be distant or absent or rely on others to step in for his duties. He reports trouble sleeping, waking early, driven to his desk by the momentum of the story he has been plotting at night. Throughout, he describes the daily excitement he feels for the book, never tiring of writing, regretting the day when he’ll finish.
You might think the journal of a novel could only be worth as much or less than the novel, that nobody would enjoy such a journal unless they really loved the novel or the novelist, but I find that I’d definitely read more writing journals.
