INFORMATION TO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book.

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order.

University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 3 0 0 North Z eeb R oad. Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 06-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9227259

Contexts of development in John Steinbeck’s “The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath” and “Journal of a Novel”

Dillman, Mary Alice, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1992

Copyright ©1992 by Dillman, Mary Alice. All rights reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 CONTEXTS OF DEVELOPMENT IN JOHN STEINBECK'S

THE JOURNALS OF THE GRACES OF WRATH

AND

JOURNAL OF A NOVEL

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Mary Alice Dillman, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1992

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Elsie J. Alberty

Robert B . Bargar Adviser Frank J. Zidonis College of Education& To My Spouse

Tom Dillman ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express sincere appreciation to Dr. Robert B. Bargar

for his interest, guidance and insight throughout the

research. Gratitude goes also to the other members of my

advisory committee, Dr. Elsie J. Alberty and Dr. Frank J.

Zidonis, for their support and advice. To my husband, Tom, I

offer sincere thanks for his computer expertise and his unshakable faith in me.

Thanks needs to go to Mary Jean S. Gamble, Steinbeck

Librarian at the City of Salinas, John Steinbeck Library, for her help in locating materials. Also, the librarians at both

the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University and

the John Steinbeck Special Collections at Stanford University

Library assisted me greatly. I am indebted to Mrs. Elaine

Steinbeck for her willingness to be interviewed in New York

City. VITA

22 June 1930 ...... Born. North Manchester, Indiana

1952 ...... B.A., Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana

19 84 . M.A., The Ohio State University

1981-Present ...... Part time Instructor of English as a Second Language, Ohio Wesleyan University Ohio Dominican College The Ohio State University

1985-1986 ...... Lecturer. Instituto Internacional of Madrid, Spain

1988-Present ...... Instructor. Ohio Wesleyan University

PUBLICATIONS

Instruction for LEP Vocational Students for the United States Department of Education, 1987, at The Ohio State University, National Center for Research in Vocational Education, Columbus, Ohio.

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: Education TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

VITA ...... _...... iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS...... v

CHAPTER I: Introduction ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1 Background Rationale for Research Problem ...... 1 Problem Statement ...... 3 Significance of the Research...... 4 Research Methodology ...... 5 Literature Review ...... 9

CHAPTER II: Research Design ...... 23

Purpose of R e s e a r c h ...... 23 Assumptions Guiding the Research and the Analysis . 24 A Discussion of Sources ...... 25 Research Design ...... 29 Data Collection...... 29 Pilot S t u d y ...... 30 Coding S y s t e m ...... 30 Conception of the Relationship of Writer, Reader, and T e x t ...... '...... 31 Content Analysis ...... 33 Establishing Trustworthiness in Research ...... 33 Credibility...... 35 Transferability ...... 37 Dependability ...... 38 Confirmability ...... 39 Limitations of the S t u d y ...... 42 Concluding Discussion ...... 43

CHAPTER III: The Psychological Context ...... 45

CHAPTER IV: The Physiological Context ...... 72

v CHAPTER V: The Natural Environment: Societal, Cultural, Political and Economical Context ...... 91

CHAPTER VI: The Adult Developmental Context ...... 122

CHAPTER VII: Concluding Discussion ...... 151

Further Research Suggestions ...... 174

APPENDICES

A. A Conceptual Model for Discourse Construction 177

B. Adaptations of Definitions of Coding Categories 179

C. Revised Case Study M o d e l ...... 183

D. Steinbeck Database ...... 185

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 187

vi CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

To develop a theory of human and creative development for

a particular writer, the problem is accessing the author's

intentions. This research will examine John Steinbeck's prior written autobiographical material such as journals and

letters, from which intentions can be inferred from the writer's own words, rather than depending on biographies and

testimonials. Steinbeck's The Journal of The Grapes of Wrath

and Journal of a Novel will be used to delineate developmental

forces associated with his process of writing. This research

is not literary criticism.

Background Rationale for Research Problem

The New Historicism surge in composition research in the

1980's is an interest in literature's non-literary concepts,

for example, tracing the history of texts and tracing the history of the reception of texts. Such an historic study of texts is an attempt by literary historians "to take an objective realistic view of past events, and to 'get inside' the minds of people who had participated in past events" (Angus 31). Angus defines historicism as "a fuller historical

perspective" that includes "daily concerns of everyday

people," "cultural, economic, ideological, political, and

social issues.... studied for the way they shaped literary and

non-literary responses to such matters as the relation of the

individual to his community..." (31). Marilyn Butler (31), a

professor of English literature at Cambridge University,

explains that historicism is what can be known of the writer's

thoughts, and also what an intelligent bystander of the day

thought, and what an intelligent bystander now thinks, of a

literary text. It provides a cultural perspective which gives

researchers a fuller picture of what was going on in the

culture of the writer, and how the writer transcends personal

conflicts provoked by social change. By studying cultural,

economic, ideological, political and social issues influencing

a writer's perspective, the historian can interpret and

reconstruct a literary text as a dominant source of evidence

that a writer's words at any given moment in their historic

existence represents the co-existence of social-ideological

phenomena of the past and present. A writer's consciousness

"can only become a consciousness by being realized in the

forms of the ideological environment proper to it: in

language, in conventionalized gesture, in artistic image, in myth, and so on" (Medvedeve/Bakhtin, qtd. in Booth 1982, 52).

Taken in historic context, the writer's use of the language at

one particular historic time is the sum total of the writer's past and present socio-ideological environment. This

environment patterns, controls and molds the developmental

processes operating in a writer, including socio-historical,

internal psychological, biological and literary.

With the information recorded in a writer's text, the

past text can be read for present research. Thus,

"retrospective ethnography," being used for this research from

John Steinbeck's journals, has emerged as a research method in

historicism for studies in history, English literature and

composition, for example. By examining prior written

biographical and autobiographical materials available from the

past, a retrospective ethnographer studies a writer with a

retrospective view in relation to the literary text. This method of research is not a discovery of new materials, but a

new interpretation of the materials. In Stephen M. North's words in The Making of Knowledge in Composition. "The object

[of ethnography] is to gain some understanding of an

alternative imaginative universe by coming through a kind of

gradual immersion, to inhabit it" (294), that is, to gain a

degree of habitation in the autobiographical accounts of the writer. This is an important research method for discovering

the intentions of individuals inferred from their own words,

not a biography written by someone else.

Problem Statement

In a study of human development for the writer, John Steinbeck, in the process of writing The Grapes of Wrath in

1938 and East of Eden in 1951, this research will investigate

how the following major contexts of influence shaped his

literary responses and affected his creative development

between 1938 and 1951: (a) the natural environment: societal,

cultural, political and economic context in which he wrote;

(b) the psychological context in his individual dynamics; (c)

the physiological context; and (d) the adult developmental

context over time.

Significance of the Research

This research of Steinbeck's journals is important in an

ongoing study of human development among notably creative

persons such as scientists, artists, musicians, psychologists

and writers. Such a study needs to accompany any holistic

look at creativeness, for creative persons are not isolated as human beings outside their art, but they are bound by all the

human developmental processes that operate in the cognitive

and physiological world surrounding them.

Secondly, Steinbeck's cognitive strategies in the process

of writing can validate the composition research already done

and perhaps add to that research. A complex relationship

exists between cognition in the writing process and the

emotional dynamics of an individual writer. Each episode of writing is rooted in human contexts in which there are forces

in the environment. Finally, the individual nature of John Steinbeck is

unique, so no conclusion can define him as a creative person

in relation to others. However, patterns discovered from this

research may indicate common characteristics of creative

writers. Documentary journals and letters are "to discover

variables that seem important for understanding the nature of

writing, its contexts, and its development" (Lauer and Asher

23) . The central aim is to interpret Steinbeck's meaning and

to look for the strategies the writer uses in writing. Trying

to understand Steinbeck's development as a writer and as an

individual in episodes of his writing is the intrigue of

research for knowledge.

Research Methodology

The proposed case study of John Steinbeck's human and

creative development as a writer will use the method of

retrospective ethnography to answer the research question.

This method in composition research is a documentary study

that attempts to interpret and reconstruct the past to answer

questions in the present. Such a study will make visible

"what was previously unseen...; [it is] the effect of using a

magnifying instrument to probe the qualities of the mind of a

writer and to discover how language and culture affect one

another in the mind" (Foucault 50) . The purpose of this model

of retrospective ethnography is to submit historic records written by John Steinbeck, to a new analytical procedure of 6 hypothesis-formation about human and creative development for a writer.

Retrospective ethnography for this study is first, ethnography, 11 [examining] entire environments, looking at a subject in context" (Lauer and Asher 39). Secondly, it is retrospective ethnography because the writer, John Steinbeck, cannot be observed directly, but must be delineated through autobiographical materials from the past. A third defining aspect of retrospective ethnography in this study is that two different historic periods of writing (1938 and 1951) in two separate cultural environments (California and New York City) will be examined. The assumption is that through time and in separate environments, the motives, intentions, involvement, and impulses to write will be different for the author, and the author will indicate these in the journals describing the process of writing each text. A fourth defining aspect is that psychological and physiological processes within the writer affect the writer as an artist and in human development, and thus, will affect the language expressed over time in the journals through a record of the process of writing a novel. Finally, reading a text for its meaning given by the author is like reading the art of a writer in retrospection to confirm or disconfirm the theories of human development.

A disadvantage of this ethnographic method must be recognized. The observation and the analysis are limited and constrained by the ethnographer's interpretations and

analysis. As a researcher, she- has her own cultural

knowledge, values, assumptions, expectations, past experience,

educational background and abilities that influence her

interpretations. The nearer the observed and the observer coincide in meaning-making, the more accurate the

interpretation and analysis will be.

With case studies and ethnography, difficulties and

cautions must be considered. These methods of study seem to

be a problem to those who need to make cause-and-effect

conclusions. Instead, these studies "arise in less formal, more common sense, humanistic, 'global,1 contextual

integrative and qualitative approaches to knowledge" (Lauer

and Asher 92) . According to Sadler, ethnographic studies are

capable of "misinterpretation, misaggregation, and defective

inferences" (46). Sadler lists several problems of

interpreting qualitative data: (1) data overload; the amount

of data to be processed can be overwhelming; (2) first

impressions: the order to which the information is received may dominate the researcher's judgment; and (3) confidence in

judgment: the researcher's profound confidence in the accuracy

of the decisions he or she makes in interpretation, and the

flaw of being unchanged by other contrary or irrelevant

evidence. A fourth problem is .making the information

available to the reader: the researcher's ability to present

the phenomenon so that the reader can understand the reasoning in the reporting. A fifth problem is of positive and negative

instances: researcher unconsciously tend to select evidence

that confirms their hypotheses. "Even careful, intelligent

people tend to adhere to their original beliefs" (47). Other

concerns Sadler lists are internal consistency, redundancy,

the novel being overrated in importance, uneven reliability of

information, and missing information. Base-rate proportion is

another problem: researchers basing impressions on too small

a pool of resources. And finally, co-occurrences and

correlation can be a problem: the misinterpretation of cause-

and-effect relationships; strong correlations provide strong

evidence. All in all, "qualitative research has a limited

ability to generalize to other samples, variables, and

conditions like the ones studied" (48).

Despite these problems and concerns, a case study,

qualitative descriptive research method complements

retrospective ethnography for this research question. Rich written descriptions from a qualitative data base can clarify

problems by having the data constantly available to examine and reexamine.

A case study design allows the retrospective ethnographer

to closely examine one subject within a whole environment.

(Representative case studies with qualitative research designs

are presented by Dr. Robert R. Bargar and Dr. James K. Duncan,

The Ohio State University, in their study of creative

development.) In a 1963 review, Henry Meckel suggests that for writers, "case studies...throw light on the relationship

of different facets of personality to writing behavior" (Emig

2).

Literature Review

Shirley Brice Heath, in an attempt to define the method

of retrospective ethnography, states that "what I did in Wavs

With Words and am applying in my current study of literacy writing in American life is not at all formalized in my own

thinking. The sources I have read for support and inspiration

include the following: The Anthropology of Experience by

Turner and Bruner; The Uses of Argument by Toulmin; "What is

Literature?" and other essays by Sartre; and Actual Minds.

Possible Worlds by Bruner. In addition to these, all the writings of Bakhtin push this kind of thinking and help me in my attempts to get inside habits of language use" (Heath 1).

Human and creative development can be inferred from meanings of a writer's use of the language in a cultural

environment. In Actual Minds. Possible Worlds. Bruner states

that "the nature of human development in a theory becomes an

accepted cultural representation, a social reality...even

protest novels like The Grapes of Wrath" (134). Therefore,

Bruner continues, "a theory of development is not 'culture

free"' (135). As a writer, "learning how to use the language

involves both learning the culture and learning how to express

intentions in congruence with the culture" (65). 10

The role of language and mental development have been

studied by Freud, Piaget and Vygotsky. Freud believed

"language was...a battleground...of warring impulses

[fighting] for their claims (Bruner, Actual Minds. 143). He helped patients release "dark forces" created by an archaic

and repressed historic cultural past, but he gave little

attention to language as a generating power of control over cultural forces. Piaget believed that "mental operations were

a...reinvention of the world constantly as [an individual] progressed by action on the world" (Bruner 140) . And Vygotsky gives language both a cultural past and a generative present.

He claimed that mental development is "readiness to use culturally transmitted language and procedures" (Bruner 141) .

For Vygotsky, a stream of thought and a stream of language work together in human development. In a discussion of the mind and a theory of development, writers are not "islands," entire of themselves. They have the power of language to recreate and reinvent their cultural environments. Vygotsky's

"objective was to explore how human society provided

instruments to empower the individual mind" (Bruner, Search

139) . These authorities lay a foundation for the socio­ cultural theory of language development and human development.

Written Language and Psychological Development. Scinto contends that psychological development in written language is biological and cultural. The biological line of development

is a direct interaction between persons and their environment. A spoken language is acquired without instruction whereas "the

acquisition of a written language is the subject of conscious

(deliberate) instruction" (Scinto 27) . The cultural line

"proceeds by a logic of mediated interaction" using language

(3). Writers are not merely a reflection off a cultural

mirror, but they incorporate cultural norms, individual

beliefs, ideas, principles and attitudes, and their own inner

insights to help them create a symbolic world. Therefore, any

novel may tell the reader about the nature of the writer and

the secrets of his or her creative development. Bruner

suggests that "the worlds of The Secret Sharer or of Stephen

Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man

constitute texts as well as worlds... symbolic worlds that the

writer creates" (Bruner, Actual Minds 4) . In both the

biological and cultural lines of psychological development,

Luria states in 1980, "the highest forms of human mental

activity are socio-historical in origin.... The [social milieu] influences...mental processes.... Human perception

[is] formed under the direct influence of the objective world

of things, themselves of social origin" (Qtd. in Scinto 39).

On this basis, Steinbeck's social and historic origins can be

considered from a cultural line of psychological development.

In studying how writers create, the natural way,

according to D. W. Perkins in The Mind's Best Work, is "to

collect those writings where creative persons have tried to give an account of themselves" (11). Early drafts, notebooks, 12 sketches, discarded versions, journals, letters, diaries and autobiographical materials are physical pieces of evidence of a writer's work at a time and place in history. Such texts are a retrievable set of commentaries that a retrospective ethnographer can return to for re-interpretation and re­ analysis. Examples of similar retrospective accounts by noted writers include Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diarv. The Note-

Books and Papers of Gerard Manlev Hopkins. The Journals of

Andre Gide. Fedor M. Dostoevsky's The Diarv of a Writer. The

Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne

Porter, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Essays in the Art of

Writing.

Woolf and Gide focus on everyday thoughts about writing, about people, about how an author spends time, about the problems of plot, form, and character, and about achieving unity in a written work. Dostoevsky's diary is a collection of essays about his philosophy of life, the government and society, and numerous other selected topics. Katherine Anne

Porter likewise wrote essays on subjects of interest to her.

Essays by Robert Louis Stevenson are about the art of writing with patterns of sound, color and elements of style, on intellectual courage, on the moral duty of the writer, and on the author's need to "know his countryside."

All of these personal accounts in the author's own words cover a long span of the career of a writer, and are about multiple literary works within cultural environments during a socio-historical time. John Steinbeck, however, in his

notebooks and journals accounts for the process of writing a

single work: The Pastures of Heaven notebooks, The Tortilla

Flat notebook, the In Dubious Battle notebook, The Long Valiev

notebook, The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, and Journal of

a Novel: the East of Eden Letters. In these he gives details

of his writing methods, personal philosophy, mental moods and

inspiration, family and social interruptions, and most of all,

he gives an account of the creative writing process. This

makes Steinbeck's two journals, one of writing The Grapes of

Wrath and the other, East of Eden, different from other

journals of writers because each notebook or journal is

directed toward a single literary work, not multiple works

during an entire career of writing.

A period of writing and a lifetime of writing is an

example of a retrospective ethnographic approach in

composition research presented in a lecture at The Ohio State

University on October 18, 1988. Dr. Charles R. Cooper,

Professor of Literature at the University of California, San

Diego, outlined his composition research on narrative writing:

"The Development of Autobiographical Writing." He compared

the narratives of young writers with those of adult writers to

answer the question, how does writing ability develop across

a long span of time? Cooper found that adult narrations have more expanded clause structures, expanded global content, and

an increased amount of reflection and evaluation of social, political, ethical and moral issues, than the narratives of

young writers. For both the young and the adult writer, an

interior monologue was embedded; however, in adult narrations,

an intensified significance was given to integrating the

internal personal world with the external global world, in written form. Cooper concluded that a transformation of

experience from life and a transformation of experience in

syntax between narratives written by the young and those written by the adult, were indications of a mental, syntactic,

and creative developmental process.

Cooper's research is valuable to retrospective

ethnography and the research question being asked in this

study because autobiographical materials from Steinbeck's

journals can be considered "a narrative equivalent," embedded with culture, the milieu, and the exigencies of a writer's

life, and transformed into places, times and characters in a

literary work. Writers' narratives about people and their particular historic period, and what they choose to write about them, reveals something about the writer. In Search of

Mind: Essays in Autobiography. Bruner contends that "a creative 'self' cannot be independent of one's cultural- historical existence" (67). Cooper's research supports a theory that beyond the situational context of a literary work

in youth and that as an adult lies a cultural context with transformed conventions and meaning for a writer. In

Kinneavy's words, "No text is autonomous.... It exists within 15

a biographical and historical stream. Language is after all

only a part of life" (24) . Cooper's research of narrative writing may explain the contents of Steinbeck's two journal in terms of youth and adult development.

Flower's research with adult writers contributes to

Cooper's findings by recognizing that "adults have an enormous repertoire of conceptual frameworks" from many life experiences so that adults have a significant transfer of knowledge available. Adults are forced "to generate new

information or a new conceptual framework, or radically restructure their current knowledge" in their adult development (Flower, et al, July 1989). Perhaps Steinbeck was

forced to restructure patterns of writing between 1938 and

1951, to generate new information and knowledge for the next novel.

After researching composition from 1981 to 1989 in problem-solving, process-based writing, rhetorical planning, and cognition response, in 1989 Flower began studying the writing process as cognition in context. She believes that the study of the writing process should see individual cognition or social and cultural context as motive forces in writing. "We need what ethnographers describe as 'grounded theory'— a vision that is grounded in specific knowledge about real people writing in significant personal, social and political situations...from historical reconstructions" (2).

"If one emphasizes a cultural over a social context, the process of writing might be described as the enactment of the writer's assumptions and prior knowledge, or as the expression of (or resistance to) the political, economic, and historical forces that could be said to write the writer" (3) . Then,

Flower continues, the writing process is the process of making meaning, of constructing knowledge, of working collaboratively with socio-cultural forces, of planning and revising...of entering academic discourse. The writer uses rhetoric to persuade in a public forum. Cognitive action, Flower says, is in response to the world where problem solving is the environment. Mature writers have an enormous repertoire of past experiences, assumptions, and expectations that "cue to action" and interact in the writer's mind to mediate the powers of cognition (goals, criteria, strategies) and the directive cues of the context. Finally, Flower concludes, broad outlines of culture emerge as forces working behind the writing process.

The language of a writer evolves through the development of creative thought, particularly in the form of insights, discussed by Robert B. Bargar and James K. Duncan in "A Study of the Transformational and Transactional Processes at the

Core of Creative Activity." The experience of insight found in descriptive autobiographies seems to be characterized by four qualities: (1) Insights come into the conscious mind at their own timing and least expected times; (2) Insights follow periods of conscious attention to a question or a problem; (3) Insights appear to be significantly affected by prior experience, knowledge, and conscious work on a question or problem; (4) Insights tend to be expressed in more holistic thought forms such as sensory images, analogies and metaphors

(Gordon 1961; Prince 1970); and (5) Insights tend to emerge holistically in a complex field of relationships, simultaneously, not in a linear fashion. The insight more often is in patterned form both reflecting and symbolizing the perceived phenomenon (Bargar and Duncan, "Cultivating" 7) . "A new insight consists of a recombination of pre-existent mediating processes, not the sudden appearance of a wholly new process" (D. O. Hebb qtd. in Koestler 590).

Creative persons, in the research of Bargar and Duncan, are "drawn by the unknown," "by a sense of newness," by a struggle to bring "new realizations into being," and "by being pulled in new directions by insight." Creative individuals realize they can be productive only by cooperating "with processes and forces that move by their own timing and not at the will of the conscious ego" (Bargar and Duncan,

"Cultivating" (10).

Steinbeck's journals of writing two novels may give evidence of thinking creatively from the support of an environment. Torrance and Gupta state that "it is...possible that the way creative abilities develop and function is strongly influenced by the way the environment supports a person's creative needs" (Qtd. in Taylor 19). An environment nourishes a writer's repertoire of experiences, knowledge and expectations. In a study of human development, a theory of creative development emerges. Theoretical studies supporting a theory of creative development are found in the following sources: The Act of Thought (1926) by Graham Wallas, The

Creative Process (1954) by Brewster Ghiselin, The Act of

Creation (1964) by Arthur Koestler, Creativity: Genius and

Other Myth (1986) by Robert Weisberg, edited essays in Taylor and Getzel's Perspectives in Creativity (1975), H. H.

Anderson's Creativity and Its Cultivation (1959), Albert

Rothenberg and Carl R. Hauseman's The Creative Question

(1976), and John D. Roslansky's Creativity (1970).

A theory of human development, Farrell and Rosenberg say in Men at Midlife, "must take into account both the socio- historical environment... and the internal psychological and biological processes on the other" (46). According to

Erickson, a developmental change is "normative, age-graded, organismic, and internal" and "it has a structure that unfolds at an assigned time and is viewed as a series of stages,"

(Rodgers 487). Also, social and historical factors define these stages as internal, external or interactive forces producing change or development within the inner needs of the adult. Making adaptations to an "adult development can be seen as an episodic heightening and diminishing of self- consciousness" (Farrell and Rosenberg 46) which includes challenge and self-insight. In this developmental stage for 19

John Steinbeck between 1938 and 1951, origins of adult development are found in his literary responses to his family and a cultural environment, in individual dynamics, in socio- historical factors, and in psychological and physiological processes of human adult development. Additional literature for a theory of adult development include those of Carl Jung in The Portable Juna. Erik Erickson's Identity and the Life

Cycles, Robert Haviahurst's Developmental Tasks and Education.

George Vaillant's Adaptation to Life. Daniel J. Levinson's The

Seasons of a Man's Life, and Michael Farrell and Stanley D.

Rosenberg's Men at Midlife.

A parallel study of Charles Darwin, Darwin on Man; A

Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, written by

Howard E. Gruber using Darwin's notebooks from 1837 to 1839, gives credence to this study of John Steinbeck's two journals between 1938 and 1951. In the preface, Gruber states that

"the arena in which the fiercer struggle took place was not the public world, but the private world of thought" (x) .

Similarly, Steinbeck's inner struggles of thought can be understood through "his outer hesitations and compromises" recorded in the journals (x). The "supporting structure" in his process of writing was the environment, socio-cultural influences, psychological dynamics, hard work and immense enj oyment.

Gruber suggests that two creative people are not the same in uniqueness. Therefore, a new creative scientific strategy 20 needs to be constructed for each creative person as a "theory of the individual" (xx). The individual nature of every human being is unique so no conclusion can be made that a creative person is XYX. A creative life is episodic, "organized in temporally compact periods within which a given orchestration of effort is played out, and certain projects executed" (xxi) .

In this study, Steinbeck completes one journal for one novel in 1938 and another in 1951. In completely major works,

Gruber believes that insight does not appear at a few "great moments," but "insights occur frequently and express the steady functioning of a productive system...of many knowledge structures, many enterprises, many episodes, many insights" (xx) .

Gruber found that there is a more complex view of the relationship of cognition and emotion (xxi). Negative emotions in creative life such as fear, rage, anxiety, guilt, must be balanced with positive emotions of the passion for truth, the enthusiasm of pursuit, and the tranquility and enjoyment of a steadily cherished object, if a long and arduous creative effort can be sustained. Steinbeck, in his journals, was not afraid to examine his own mental processes, his irrational fears, his inability to discipline his will, his ability to write, and his worry over interruptions; neither was he afraid to discuss the world of critics and the crises in his family matters.

Gruber suggests that "a long growth process must be seen 21 as rooted in its total human context.... In the study of an individual's [development] it seems more directly relevant to consider the personal side of that context. Impersonal historical and social forces have no meaning for the individual until they are brought to bear directly on his life" (6). "The ensemble of these relations form the social and emotional context within which intellectual work goes forward" (xxii).

Andrea A. Lunsford, writing in Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in Composition on "Cognitive Studies and

Teaching Writing," suggests that in teaching writing "the relation among language, social interaction and knowledge" must be recognized to understand students' development and the importance of context in development. "Development...is not linear but recursive and context-dependent" (154). Cognitive development through language is the action that creates meaning in writing. Lunsford refers to Jerome Bruner's statement that teaching writing ‘is "understanding the universals of human development" and "identifying universals of human cognitive development" (Qtd. 153).

Established writers have provided accounts of their self- discovery and expressive modes in diaries, journals, letters, and notebooks. Such accounts are often formal in diction, elaborated, retrospective • and reportorial in*approach to a broad audience. They are more focused upon such aspects as their difficulties in writing or their philosophy of writing. The journals of Steinbeck differ from these in that in addition to the focus of other writers' accounts, Steinbeck engages in an informal, conversational, sincere, and exploratory dialogue about the process of writing. The process was always more satisfying than the finished product.

As he characterizes the process of writing a single work in his journals, other autobiographic materials in the letters and journals become a branch of knowledge about his development, his creative development as an artist in his novel and his human development as a person. Autobiographical literature then is a source of information about the development of creative thought, about the experience of insight, and about the conscious and unconscious forces emerging from society and the culture at a particular time, and working behind the writing process. A theory of development for a writer can be constructed retrospectively from a detailed historical reconstruction of a writer's words recorded in a journal. Then it becomes possible to see the development of the novel and the human development of the writer. CHAPTER II

RESEARCH DESIGN

Purpose of Research

In a study of human development for the writer, John

Steinbeck, in the process of writing The Grapes of Wrath in

1938 and East of Eden in 1951, this research will investigate how the following major contexts of influence shaped

Steinbeck's literary responses and affected his creative development between 1938 and 1951: (a) the natural environment: societal, cultural, political and economic context in which he wrote; (b) the psychological context in his individual dynamics; (c) the physiological context; and

(d) the adult developmental context over time.

The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath and the Journal of a

Novel: The East of Eden Letters were written at two different periods in the cultural history of the United States (the

Depression versus after World War II) , in different milieus

(ranch house, seaside cottage versus New York apartment,

Nantucket Island), in different states (California, New York) , during two different periods of Steinbeck's life (1938 and

1951). Therefore, the journals have the possibility of indicating development during thirteen years between writing

23 24 each journal for each novel.

Assumptions Guiding the Research and the Analysis of the Data:

Within the contexts being investigated, this research will assume the following influences within the coding system:

(1) the personal history and cultural, heritage of the creative person, (2) the milieu and medium agenda, (3) the current status of the writer with his medium, (4) the immediate impinging forces acting upon the creative person, and (5) the broader contemporary culture influencing the milieu and the individual, and (6) the development or use of the medium.

Writing is a dynamic process of creative thought and development. This dynamic process is described in John

Steinbeck's journals.

For this study, each influence is a context interacting with the writer. The set of influences is the totality of dynamic forces having relevance to a particular communicative act, in this case it is writing. Context, according to

Piazza, is "a storehouse of underlying processes made visible only when the writer has the ability and experience to describe inner thoughts...to articulate underlying thought processes (109). Piazza continues that these contexts support and mediate intervention with a text and cannot be separated from the process of writing which is cognitive activity, social activity, and cultural processing. Piazza states that cognitive activity is the writer's "mental context" of knowledge, the mental operations processing information, the resources and structure of a specific task environment, the constraints a writer faces in production and comprehension, and the rhetorical choices that result in texts. Social activity is a response to the spontaneous events that, if seized, are occasions for writing. Writing as a cultural process is "a reflection and manifestation of culture" (117).

Richard Beach and Lillian Bridwell (1984) take a global view of a writer composing. "Studying the writer without taking the many dimensions of context into accounts," they remark,

"is a little like studying animal life by visiting zoo cages.... Writing does not exist in a vacuum" (Qtd. in Brandt

139) .

A Discussion of Sources

Two primary sources of John Steinbeck's autobiographic materials in letters and journals are The Journals of The

Grapes of Wrath published in 1989, and Journal of a Novel; The

East of Eden Letters published in 1969. The letters are a record of what Steinbeck says he is doing as he is composing

East of Eden. It is perhaps as complete a record of writing a book as has ever been done. The Journals of The Grapes of

Wrath (1938-1944) are a diary kept as a warm-up journal for a day's writing, and a second part that is a record of the aftermath of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath. In

Robert DeMott's words, this journal "provides an unparalleled 26 record of the shapings and seizings, the naked slidings of

[Steinbeck's] creative psyche" (Reti 10). For Steinbeck, writing was more a process than the possession of a final product.

In addition to the two primary journal sources, Journal of a Novel and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of

Wrath. three other sources provide autobiographical information that will confirm or disconfirm data from the primary sources. One is Steinbeck; A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallstein. This book is an autobiographic record of sixty years of letter writing.

Another source is a collection of fifteen years of writing letters to Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck's literary critics through the years. Other letters appear in an anthology, Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-

Five Years. which "appears as a singularly honest and revealing record of what John Steinbeck himself thought about what he was writing, when he was writing it. Out of these letters emerges as much of an autobiography as John Steinbeck is likely ever to write" (Gannet 23) . A further source of autobiographical materials is another journal written about the act of writing a translated version of The Acts of Kino

Arthur and His Noble Kniahts from the Winchester Manuscript of

Malory's tales. The excerpts from Steinbeck's letters to

Chase Horton, the publisher, and Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent from 1931 until his death in 1968, describe his thoughts 27 about writing later in life.

To support the two primary sources there are unpublished ledgers in the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State

University. One ledger was addressed to his college friend,

Dook Sheffield while he was writing The Pastures of Heaven.

Peter Lisca has written The Wide World of John Steinbeck, a book that attends to relatively unexplored aspects of

Steinbeck's craftsmanship and a history of his artistic development.

Secondary sources of material about John Steinbeck include critical reviews. Also, Richard Astro, M. H. Cox,

Robert DeMott, Warren French, Tetsumaro Hayashi, Hidekazu

Herose, and Peter Lisca, for example, have written extensively about Steinbeck. But in all these sources, Steinbeck's process of writing has not been examined in relation to his journals.

In 1984, Jackson J. Benson published The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. Writer, a comprehensive biography in which

Benson writes about Steinbeck's influencing contexts behind his writing. Benson's purpose, however, was not to interpret the information as a description of the process of writing, but to discover "referential propositions" derived from it for a full-length study of a man's life. Benson's biography provides valuable clues to Steinbeck's life and work that can be used to confirm or disconfirm data, and for triangulation in the content analysis of this proposed study. But what 28

Benson has failed to do is to explain what presupposes this writing behavior in the author's own words as Steinbeck decides what is so important to him that he writes about it.

In addition to the primary and secondary sources, I have visited the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State

Library, San Jose, California, The Steinbeck Archives of the

John Steinbeck Library in Salinas, California, and The John

Steinbeck Collection at Stanford University, California. I have viewed the U.S. Information Agency film in Washington,

D.C., titled Impressions of John Steinbeck. I have interviewed Mrs. John Steinbeck in New York City. In addition, I have read Steinbeck's novels, short stories, dramas, reports, speeches, and commentaries.

If the scope of inquiry for this study requires extended resources, I will look at other secondary sources such as filmscripts, postcards, unpublished reviews, proceedings of the 1970 Steinbeck Conference (Steinbeck; The Man and His

Work). and the Steinbeck Quarterly. Literary criticisms and book reviews will also be consulted. I will be aware of the political, social, economic, and cultural events affecting the historic times in which Steinbeck lived and wrote. Dr. David

Steigerwald, Professor of U.S. History at Ohio Wesleyan

University, has been consulted for this historic perspective of the Great Depression and Steinbeck's social act of writing

The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck's primary journals are, as Lincoln and Guba 29

suggest, a "rich source of information [for retrospective

ethnography], contextually relevant and grounded in the

contexts they represent..., [appearing] in the natural

language of that setting" (276-277). The primary sources of

data written by Steinbeck are stable sources of information,

accurately reflecting situations that occurred in the past

that can be analyzed and reanalyzed while the research is undergoing changes.

Steinbeck's journals and letters serve as written

protocols. The text of the journals remains unchanged over

time but left open for other inferences and interpretations.

Flower's "Conceptual Model for Discourse Construction"

guides the researcher's interpretation of the journals and the analysis of the data (See Appendix A) . Flower's collaborative

composition research studies on cognition and context (1989)

further contribute to the sources for this case study.

Research Design

Data Collection

Collecting data will primarily be in reference to

linguistic evidence from Steinbeck's journals and letters.

Five major developmental processes will be coded: (a) cultural development, (b) milieu development, (c) individual development, (d) medium development, and (e) linguistic development. Sub-categories fall under each major category.

(See Appendix B) 30

Pilot Study

From the Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, in a pilot-type study, I have extracted categories (variables) which I believe would represent factors influencing the writing process. (See Appendix C)

Quotations from the Journal of a Novel were placed on note cards under the category labels. This was a way of organizing the material from a primary source. Categories were not mutually exclusive; a text could be entered in more than one category.

For each entry (approximately 300), the month and day of the year (1951) were recorded. The page number in the Journal of a Novel was also recorded so that the entries could be relocated in context, if context was needed for a more accurate interpretation.

The information on the note cards was coded into the categories of the adapted coding system developed by Bargar and Duncan. Some entries could be coded within the system and some could not.

Coding System

The coding system used for this research has been used by

Bargar and Duncan, and by four graduate students at The Ohio

State University in the Education: Policy and Leadership

Department. It has proved useful in studies of Frank Lloyd

Wright, Charles Ives, C. G. Jung, and Georgia O'Keefe. I have 31 set up, labeled and imposed a coding that identifies dimensions and aspects that apply to this particular research question.

With computer Notebook Two software, I placed the data from the primary sources in categories, coded according to an adapted version of the Bargar and Duncan coding base (See

Appendix B). The Notebook Two software is bibliographic in form, and allows the researcher to make adaptations to it to fit the need of a particular study. (See Appendix D) This coding system included a special category for dimensions of creativity, but this was abandoned later, after practice with the coding system, because it became an inaccurate, subjective judgment on the part of the researcher.

When all the data has been entered, the computer Notebook

Two has the capacity of calling up each category separately.

This will be a bank of data under the same category but from all the different quoted sources.

Conception of the Relationship of Writer. Reader, and Text

The conception of the relationship of the writer and the text, and the reader (the research ethnographer) and the text is best represented by "The Conceptual Model for Discourse

Construction." (See Appendix A). This model was proposed by

Linda Flower in "Interpretive Acts: Cognition and the

Construction of Discourse" in the September, 1987, Poetics.

The "researcher" becomes "the reader." Linda Flowers explains that in this model the constructive' processes of reader and writer are at the center of the stage. We see an outer circle of external forces, which includes social context and ideology, discourse conventions, language, and so on, which impinges on any given act of writing. These can be distinguished from an inner circle of activated knowledge relevant to this particular act of composition. Since this inner circle symbolizes the active forces which influence a given act of composing, the writer's purpose or goals also figure as a major element in the scheme.

Flower further contends that the key point of this model is that these entities (language, social context, purposes and goals, and activated knowledge) represent substantial lines of force impinging upon the cognition of the writer just as they do upon a reader. When a reader's ideology comes in conflict with the writer's, a negotiation needs to be made. That is, a researcher's conception of the writer's meaning and intentions may be influenced by the researcher's mental representations. Therefore, there is room for error when any researcher assumes to construct the writer's meaning. In a study of language or social studies, the object being studied is affected by the intervention of the observer. Despite this problem in any ethnographic study, I believe this model represents what the researcher will be doing in collecting the data. From the sources used, I will attempt to construct

Steinbeck's mental representations as nearly correct as 33 possible, having read biographical materials and having read

Steinbeck's major works.

Content Analysis

Content analysis is a procedure I will use to analyze the data, notice patterns, identify and define variables and relate them to one another (Lauer and Asher 27). Variables can be quantified if the researcher desires, but for this qualitative descriptive research, I will analyze the variables, "identifying, operationally defining, and relating variables, and then report the results in the form of extensive descriptions, conclusions, hypotheses and questions for further research" (34).

As the data accumulates, the researcher "goes through it, reflects on it, and looks for patterns— events which seem to recur in some sort of connected way— and for explanation of them, ways in which such patterns seem to make sense" (North

303). North labels patterns as "themes." These themes will be "tested against new events and more inscribed data" (304), a continuous process of hypothesis-generating. The retrospective ethnographer becomes a "meaning maker" and interpreter, positing and challenging, refining and discarding themes.

Establishing Trustworthiness in Research

The conventional paradigm for trustworthiness in research 34 is "internal validity," "external validity," "reliability", and "objectivity." Lincoln and Guba suggest that these terms be renamed "credibility," "transferability," "dependability," and "confirmability" in a naturalist paradigm (290). These naturalist terms, like the conventional terms, address the basic issues of trustworthiness: "truth value" or credibility, transferability or applicability, dependability or reliability, and confirmability or objectivity. For this study, these measures of trustworthiness will be defined as follows:

(1) Credibility is defined as "the best available approximation of the truth or falsehood" of the findings for the subjects with which and the context in which the inquiry was carried out (290).

(2) Transferability may be defined as the extend the findings of a particular inquiry are applicable in other contexts or with other subjects.

(3) Dependability is typically held to be synonymous with reliability, "stability, consistency, predictability, accuracy" (Kerlinger, qtd. in Lincoln and Guba 292).

(4) Confirmability is establishing truth and dependability by consulting other scholars or individuals knowledgeable about the subject or the design. The "audit trail" process is a technique of confirmation.

(5) Obiectivitv establishes a degree of assurance that the findings of an inquiry are determined by the subjects and 35 conditions of the inquiry and not by biases, motivations, interests, perspectives, or subjective interpretations of the inquirer.

Lincoln and Guba warn the researcher of threats (291).

Threats to credibility are the passage of time, changes in measurement, incongruent comparisons, and the effect of a certain design. Threats to transferability in this design are history effects and construct effects. Dependability "is threatened by any careless act in the measurement or assessment process, by instrumental decay, by assessments that are insufficiently long, by ambiguities of various sorts, and a host of other factors" (292) . Confirmability often needs

"intersubjective agreement" among "collective judgments" to establish trustworthiness. Objectivity is threatened by using imperfect methods of inquiry that refract the truth of the data, by engaging in inquiry with a predetermined ideological purpose, and "by relying exclusively on the data provided by a single observer" (293). To overcome some of these threats,

I will establish trustworthiness with criteria I will discuss further for clarification. I believe this criteria is best for this inquiry.

Credibility

The credibility of the Steinbeck documents for the data base can be checked across sources (such as letters, interviews, journals and biographies) for the credibility or honesty of the writer. The plausibility of the journal 36 documents can be tested against facts from biographical sources, autobiographic materials, and writings of authoritative sources acquainted with Steinbeck's life and work— a kind of triangulation. Steinbeck's journals can be checked for internal consistency and coherence by examining them in relation to the novels written from the journals and from other critical essays of the novels.

In this study, credibility will be established by

"prolonged engagement," "persistent observation," and

"triangulation." These activities provide an in-depth store of knowledge for making interpretations for the data base

(301-307). Long-term engagement in reading Steinbeck's novels, short stories, dramas, and autobiographical materials, reading biographies of his life and criticisms of his writing, and learning about Steinbeck in’ general, will be an information investment sufficient to test for misinformation or distortions that otherwise might creep into the interpretations of the data. Persistent observation will

"provide depth to prolonged engagement... to identify...characteristics and elements (variables) in the situation that are most relevant to the (question)..and focusing on them in detail" (304).

Credibility will be enhanced by the ability of the retrospective ethnographer to measure what is intended to be assessed. In this study, internal cross-checks of the soundness of the interpretations with the coding system will increase the probability that the data base is indeed credible. To further improve the probability that the retrospective ethnographer's interpretations are credible, suggests North, "the term most commonly used with ethnographic verification is triangulation, and this term is applied to both data collection and analysis" (307). For a single ethnographer in the research, multiple sources, written records of various kinds, and autobiographical materials are the triangulation of different kinds of data to see "how what happens comes to mean" (310). When transformations and transactions are identified as creative development or behavior, this may be the measure of the retrospective ethnographer's theory that "it is not what happens that is at issue, but how what happens comes to mean" (310).

Transferability

To establish transferability for this research, the retrospective ethnographer can provide only "thick descriptions necessary to enable someone interested in making a transfer to reach a conclusion about whether transfer... is possible" (Lincoln and Guba 316). "Thick descriptions" promote transferability if they are clear, accurate, and objective so that the sending and receiving contexts will have a degree of understanding of similarities for other contexts.

The way the writer (the retrospective ethnographer) uses language to write descriptions will make the difference for the reader. To be transferable, the burden of proof lies with 38 the original investigator as well as the receiver who is deciding if the research is indeed transferable to another context.

Credibility and transferability for this research come from "a continual reciprocity between the developing hypothesis about the nature and patterns (in the journals) and the regrounding of these hypotheses" from repeated analysis and interpretations of the sources..."in search of discontinuing evidence" (Lauer and Asher 40). Patterns that repeat enough to confirm or disconfirm evidence can become significant data for analysis. Dependabilitv

Key concepts of dependability are found in the conventional definitions of reliability, stability, consistency and predictability. In conventional studies, reliability is demonstrated by repeating studies. Then, if two or more studies "of essentially similar inquiry processes under similar conditions yield essentially similar findings, the dependability (reliability) of the inquiry is indisputably established" (Lincoln and Guba 299) Since an exact replication of this research is unlikely, I will consult independent observers of similar research, in particular, Dr.

Robert Bargar, to check the internal consistency of my findings. I will also consult Robert DeMott, a Steinbeck authority and author of Working Days. He has the expertise to confirm or disconfirm interpretations I have made from The 39

Journals of The Grapes of Wrath.

Confirmability

"Objectivity exists when the .inquiry is value-free"

(300). That is, the values of the observer (retrospective ethnographer) must not be the values imparted to the observed materials. Objectivity is best judged by "intersubjective agreement." The quantitative sense of objectivity is what a number of individuals experience and agree upon; what a single individual experiences is more subjective. But for the qualitative sense of objectivity, the quality of the reporting and the completeness of the evidence reported become the measure of confirmability. Purely subjective interpretation is unreliable, biased, or a matter of opinion; objective interpretation must be reliable, factual, confirmable or confirmed. For this study, the single observer as a retrospective ethnographer must lend quality and completeness to thick descriptions, and these descriptions must have factual and reliable data as a basis for confirming the most objective interpretation possible for a single observer.

Robert DeMott and Jackson Benson are two Steinbeck experts who can check the interpretations. If they do not agree with my interpretations, I may have reason to disagree or agree with them. In either case, the originality of this research is strengthened when new interpretations are made on the basis of evidence presently available and interpreted for a new purpose. 40

In summary, for this research question, trustworthiness will be established with the following criteria:

(1) Activities that will increase the probability that credible findings will be produced in this- study are the following: prolonged engagement, persistent observation, and triangulation of sources. Sufficient time with all possible sources of information about Steinbeck, and an immersion in the materials to observe the multiple influences affecting

Steinbeck's creative composing, will add the dimension of salience to credibility. The purpose of persistent observation is that characteristics and elements in the situation that are most relevant can be pursued and focused upon in detail. Triangulation of multiple sources will improve the probability that the findings and interpretations will be credible. Cross-checking biographical materials, autobiographical materials and letters of Steinbeck will be one form of triangulation. Another will be the cross-checking of the journals, the novel written from it, and the literary criticisms of the novel.

(2) To establish credibility and dependability I will consult Steinbeck scholars, such as DeMott and Benson, to ask for their judgment and insight into my interpretations and findings from the data base.

(3) I will ask an auditor to follow the "audit trail" technique (Lincoln and Guba 319) for confirming whether the findings are grounded in the data, whether the inferences 41 based on the data are logical, whether the appropriate category labels of the coding system were followed, and whether the interpretations maintain a quality that merits the findings. In this audit process, dependability will be assessed by asking whether the research design is working appropriately to answer the question being asked.

(4) By reporting the widest possible range of information in thick descriptions, I will provide a clear, accurate and thorough background for someone interested in reaching a conclusion about a possible transfer. The clarity and completeness of my descriptions will enable the potential researcher to contemplate transferability.

(5) I will constantly test my interpretations against earlier ones. By making constant comparisons of interpretations between the two primary journal sources, I will be looking for consistent patterns of confirming and discontinuing evidence for making conclusions from the data.

I will keep cross-checking the data against the coding system to see if the categories are adequate and appropriate for the research question. If not, I will make changes to accommodate the needs; I may add or delete categories. Lincoln and Guba suggest keeping a "reflexive journal" on a daily basis to record information, for instance, about methodological changes, coding changes, personal human biases, values and interests appearing, problems in the research design, and speculation about growing insights arising in the research 42

(327). The journal will provide a triangulation between the retrospective ethnographer, the coding system, and the interpretations for the data base.

Limitations of the Study

The results of this study will be presented in qualitative descriptive written form. Lincoln and Guba remind the researcher that "a researcher does not have the freedom to observe without restrictions and to report results in ultimate truth. As in any good scholarship, issues of generalizability of observations and data, and relationships among variables must be considered" (43). When reporting conclusions, the researcher will interpret and report with the truth as she interprets it. Therefore, the integrity of the researcher's interpretations and her descriptive writing skill are crucial in establishing the trustworthiness of this research.

Another limitation of this research is that conclusions based on information about one writer can not be generalized for all writers or creative people. However, patterns may indicate a trend toward a theory.

A precaution in reading the contents of a journal is that the author may not be telling the truth. Perhaps, as in the case of the Journal of a Novel. Steinbeck was conscious of the fact that this journal contained letters to a friend that would be published and read in the future by a larger audience. Therefore, the art of words going down on paper may 43 have prejudiced the author from telling the whole truth.

A final limitation of this study is that the journals are taken out of context with Steinbeck's entire life. They reflect only two periods of writing, not the span of a lifetime.

Concluding Discussion

Steinbeck was chosen as a writer for this research because his journals are among the most complete records of the process of writing. For example, he suggests that

"journal writing rambling" before beginning the actual writing of the text, begins a "smoothness and coordination and rhythm all together"; it is a "dialogue with the mind" and an audience, and it is a "dawdling" with the feel of the pencil against the paper "that moves the idea out of the writer's head onto the paper." Perhaps this rambling is a part of invention that instructors of composition will find important in a method for teaching writing.

William Styron in Writers at Work: The Paris Review

Interviews claims that creative writing cannot be taught in a writing course (270). However, researchers can ask if creativity can be cultivated through instruction in the qualities of perception, reception, curiosity, discernment, alertness, and fluency in scanning thoughts and producing solutions. in addition, can expanded concentration of attention be developed? Can an intuitive mind be identified and encouraged in processing aesthetic appreciation? Finally, researchers must ask if research in composition can ignore the forces of influence in human development behind the process of writing. Perhaps an historical inquiry of Steinbeck's composing process may lead to a present understanding of the creative process of writing. CHAPTER III

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Tetsumaro Hayashi, in his edited collection, Steinbeck's

Literary Dimension, suggests that "the agony and ecstasy of writing, the psychological, emotional and intellectual upheavals" of writing are found in Steinbeck's journals (vii) .

DeMott contends that The Journals of Grapes are "an unparalleled record of the shaping and seizings, the naked slidings, of [Steinbeck's] creative psyche" (Working 9).

Steinbeck tells us in the Journal of a Novel that a writer works "month after month [in] emotional as well as intellectual concentration" (171) . To keep this concentration focused, Steinbeck suggests writing journals or letters. This strategy for him became an inseparable part of the work itself, for it drew Steinbeck's thoughts together on paper, as he said, "[to clarify] things for me to try to explain them"

(Journal of King Arthur 323). " I apparently have to dawdle a certain amount before I go to work.... If I keep the dawdles in this form I never leave my story..." (Novel 33).

"The discussions here in the notes... serve me as a kind of arguing ground for the story" (78). Such "dawdles" kept the

"juices flowing" into the novel, and thus, Steinbeck never

45 46 left the story or his book from the moment he sat down to write until he finished an episode of writing. Furthermore, this "warm-up period" kept his real life separated from his book life. Writing in his journals cleared his mind, his soul, his will and his ability to write.

Steinbeck defended his strategy of writing in journals by saying that "dribbling" words removes fears and disgusts

("burns them up" ) ; it gets back the rhythm and flow of words so they "break loose"; writing down thoughts "gets rid of them on paper." Then, Steinbeck says, a writer has "a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness" (Hughes 144).

More importantly, Steinbeck wrote in a journal to make a gradual transition from his conscious daily life to a focus on the unconscious life inside the book. "Things do happen and continue to happen on the outside...I regard the book as the inside and the world as the outside" (Novel 27) . "I must serve two masters— 1, the book and 2, the other life.. ." (98) .

Steinbeck wrote in journals to make it possible to live two lives simultaneously while writing a novel. Such a documented progress report, talking to and of himself, Howarth suggests, was "his gateway to and from his work, allowing him to pass into the narrative and back out to daily life" (66).

Most significant in the study of Steinbeck's strategy of writing journals and letters is that these preparatory epistles were a literary assurance for the self to go on with writing and creating. In his manuscript ledger to Sheffield and his journal to Covici, Steinbeck wrote to persons who believed in him and his ability. To Sheffield he wrote, "I wonder if you know why I address this manuscript to you. You are the only person in the world who believes I can do what I set out to do. Not even I believe that all the time, and so, in a kind of gratitude, I address all my writing to you, whether or not you know it" (Benson 259) . Similarly,

Steinbeck wrote to Covici: "Your enthusiasm for this book is a great stimulant to me. X know how badly you want it to be good. And you can believe truly that I want it to be good much more than you do" (Novel 40). A "singularly blessed association" with a novel begins with a journal. By supporting Steinbeck day by day, Covici affirms Steinbeck's ability to write East of Eden. Covici is like the tie between the book and Steinbeck's future. Each entry is part of a support system that sustains Steinbeck's hope that he can write another great book. Steinbeck needed a "conversation" with someone before he actually started writing a text. He wanted psychological support for an ego that lacked full confidence in its own creative ability*

Forms of "writer's block" behind the process of writing are psychological handicaps for a writer. In both The

Journals of Grapes and Journal of a Novel Steinbeck is badgered by interruptions that break the dynamics of his writing. Interruptions break his discipline, his rhythm, and his psychological coping with two lives: one inside the book 48 and one outside the book. He never could keep the two lives going at the same time while he was writing a long novel. “I wish I knew how people do good and long-sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lives going— social, economic, and so forth. I can't" (102). In the Journal of a Novel.

Steinbeck says, "This time I am making a distinct and constant effort to keep both lives going..." (67).

The external interruptions that broke Steinbeck's concentration in The Journals of Grapes are, for example, social engagements with friends. "We had dinner at Paul's with Rays" and "Sue and Bob were there. Simply can't have people around on working days" (Journals of Grapes 21) . Other external interruptions are the telephone ringing. Another day he is irritated with people who want to see him, take his picture, and look at the house they were selling while he worked inside. It made him nervous. He confessed that he goes "nuts" if he is not protected from all the outside stuff.

When Lionel Smith, Robert Cathcard and his classmate, Dr.

Margaret Baily come, he writes, "Will get to work and try to forget all this bother" (21). Other "bothers" were the neighbor's radio noise, Covici's financial problems, the rodeo disaster, a request from the Congress of Industrial

Organizations to head a committee of farm workers, Carol's tonsillectomy, Carol's typewriter noise, hammering next door from construction, plans for building a ranch house on Los

Gatos and moving there, and getting caught in ranch affairs. 49

These interruptions cause Steinbeck to write in his The

Journals of Grapes. "Wish I could run away from everything to do my book.... It will be full of jitters at this rate" (43) .

"I hope to God this book isn't suffering from all the inroads to other things" (52). "I'm afraid'I'm losing this book in the welter of other things" (77). Adding to Steinbeck's confusion, all exciting weekends of drinking and dancing, long talks with friends such as Charlie Chaplin, and discussions on the impending war in Europe "split attention" from his writing the book. Interruptions were a serious psychological impediment to the flow of words and ideas going down on paper.

The stages of interruptions in New York City and on

Nantucket Island while writing East of Eden were those again of friends: Rogers and Hammerstein, Frank and Lynn Loesser,

Fred and Portland Allen, and the Eliza Kazans. But often it was his concerns for his family and in particular for his two sons, John and Tom, who came to visit him after his divorce from Gwyn. Tom was refusing to go to school and getting into trouble at school. "I find it difficult to concentrate when this other thing is hanging" (Novel 87) . Steinbeck was

"destroyed by nagging, small bills, telephone (wrong numbers) , athlete's foot, ragweed, the common cold, boredom...all...the tiny frustrations..." (71). Panic set in sometimes when

Steinbeck was away from writing and bothered with interruptions.

In his journals Steinbeck blames external forces— interruptions, requests, time off, family problems— for precipitating destructive internal forces that undermined his writing. These include a lack of discipline with the will, worry, anxiety, depression, lack of confidence, fear of criticism, nervousness, and temperamental violence. Among these external forces, his lack of will and discipline was a second psychological problem that distressed Steinbeck in his writing long novels. "The failure of will even for one day has a devastating effect on the whole.... The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language,... if any of the discipline is gone, all of it suffers" (Journals of Grapes 26). "I simply must establish the discipline again and maintain it" and take a less frantic outlook" (53). Half of the trouble "lies within me" (59). "I am lazy.. .laziness is getting me" (53).

Vacillating and miserable, "I'm so lazy, so damned lazy"; "I must re-establish the discipline" (69). "Where has my discipline gone? Have I lost control?" (61). "I'm slipping.

I've been slipping all my life.... Is this all laziness?"

(62) , or is it the distractions and interferences? The wants and demands of other people, Steinbeck claims, and other external forces break down Steinbeck's discipline into laziness, loss of control, and the lack of will.

Undisciplined behavior makes him lose work days and lose control, even over his temper and rage at external forces. "I have been remiss and lazy, my concentration I have permitted to go under the line of effort..'.. I am always this way... [but] I can do it and must. Nothing must interfere from this time on..." (62). But by October, the month he finished the The Grapes of Wrath, "my laziness is overwhelming. I must knock it over.... I have the energy now. All I need is the force to go ahead" (81) . "My mind doesn't want to work— hates to work in fact, but I'll make it" (92). He felt "sad" when the book was done, but also "glad to finish." The crash within him when The Grapes of Wrath was finished forced

Steinbeck "to find the foundation of some new discipline..."

(110).

Pressure helped discipline Steinbeck's will. "I have always worked better under pressure of one kind or another— poverty, death, emotional confusion, divorces— always something. In fact the only really unproductive times I can remember were those when there were no pressures— pressures are necessary to my creative survival" [Journals of Kina

Arthur 314). In August of 1938, after "undisciplined behavior" has made him lose days, Steinbeck writes, "I have the laziness and the reluctance that is always present in the beginning" (Journals of Grapes 62) . In September, 1938,

Steinbeck got done early in the day, but states, "Today I am going to discipline myself by working all day" (77). In the beginning days of October, the last month of writing The

Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck loses some of the tiredness and he feels energetic: "I feel good about this book now" (81). "And now the foolishness and the self-indulgence is over....

Straight through to the finish now.... Shall gather all my will together and go on" (81). But the next day, October 4,

1938, his "laziness" does not give him the force to go ahead.

"A long slow discipline" is needed two days later (83). When the month ends and the book ends, Steinbeck's energy and emotion are drained. What seems significant is that during great moments of creativeness, the will, the discipline, and creative energy are there. But when there is a breakdown in psychological coping, Steinbeck's control over his writing also breaks down and then he fears that he will not have the forces necessary to finish what he started to do. The journal entries in The Journals of Grapes record more moments of psychological coping than those in the Journal of a Novel, but, nonetheless, Steinbeck still fears that he will not be able to finish what he started if he does not muster the will and discipline of control.

The will to discipline himself seems less intense in the

Journal of a Novel, but it is there. "I have to drive myself...." (Novel 121). I'm like a "stubborn kid" (121). "I have no consistencies.. .and it is not enough to say or to persuade myself that out of my nature I can do work. How much better might I do it if I did have some kind of even keel"

(133). The "failure of will" and the attempts to "re­ establish the discipline" squandered creative hours. This

"undisciplined behavior," as in The Journals of Grapes, was wasted time and made Steinbeck lose days of writing which he counted dutifully throughout both journals. In The Journals of Grapes. Steinbeck blames part of the lack of discipline within himself, but also on the "wants, demands, dissatisfactions" of others around him. In the Journal of a

Novel. he blames his personal qualities and characteristics as the problem of "inadequacy" to willfully take control.

"Always I have been weak" (60) . Many of the irritations that bothered him in writing The Grapes of Wrath in 1938, don't bother him in 1951 writing East of Eden. "It [the irritation] is not aimed at me. I always felt that the other was definitely designed to disturb me. I am sure it was not entirely but to a certain extend there was a pleasure in disturbing me. And now I am sure it is not" (13-14) . This change of attitude for the blame is Steinbeck's psychological look at himself throughout writing the Journal of a Novel in

1951. "East of Eden announced a marked change in Steinbeck's fictional vision, technique and temperament" (DeMott, A Great

Black Book 43).

Steinbeck confesses that often his reluctance to bend to discipline was because of his laziness, worry, and a lack of confidence. All these were "a deep psychic cry of...finding channels of escape from work" (Novel 152). Benson contends that in all Steinbeck's journals, "while [Steinbeck] enjoyed writing smaller pieces, he went through absolute hell whenever he attempted a long, serious work. Not one was started 54 without a great deal of difficulty? not one was written without anguish; and not one did not go through extensive and heart-rending revision. In each case he pushed himself as far as his body and spirit would permit" (669).

A third psychological problem for Steinbeck was "getting started." The persuasion of the empty page of a major work caused panic without starting with the journal entry first.

When he had power over the pen on paper, he had psychological power over the mind to write creatively. "The daily work diary is really working this time and it is a good thing"

(Journals of Grapes 39) . In the Journal of a Novel. Steinbeck remarks, "It is interesting to think what paper and pencil and wriggling words are. They are nothing but the trigger of joy-

-the shout of beauty— the cacaja of the pure bliss of creation" (10). The discipline, the energy, the creative bliss of writing began in the journals. The fear of beginning a difficult chapter or section of a novel, or his "terror that

[he cannot] bring it off" is "dawdled!1 away before he actually starts writing the novel (Journals of Grapes 117).

In the Journal of a Novel. Steinbeck also records problems of getting started. After spending a week moving from their summer home at Nantucket Island to New York City,

Steinbeck writes that it was "very hard to start...need rhythm" (Novel 161). "I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the errors, the images, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. [I am] praying feverishly for relief from.. .word pangs" (9). Even though the story is clear in his mind, in one entry Steinbeck admits that "today's work is so important that I am afraid of it...subtle rhythms both of speech and thought...qualities of poetry... smoothness and coordination and rhythms all together" (38). In an entry on March 26,

1951, Steinbeck says, "I have a virginal reluctance to get to it. I seem to want to think about it and moon about it for a long time before I actually get down to it.... Main reasons are today's work is so important that I am afraid of it" (38) .

"Maybe it was the new section that frightened me off. Like starting a new book or a sequel to an old one" (71) .

Steinbeck was tired and dawdling on July 6, 1951, because, he says, "I dread the next scene, dread it like hell" (121). In

August, after he had been writing for seven months, he was still reluctant to start because "...I don't want to finish...I don't want it finished. It will be a sad day for me when it is done. I have never loved my work more.... And

I don't mean the finished work but the working" (144).

Recorded in both The Journals of Grapes and Journal of a

Novel is a fourth psychological problem facing Steinbeck: a lack of confidence in his creative ability. "I felt very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again..."

(Journals of Grapes 36) . "My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads" (56). "This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy" (76). "I hope this book is some good, but I have less and less hope of it. It has been shot to pieces too much" (63). "I just hope it is good" (65). "I hope it is good" (66) . Steinbeck wrote in The Journals of

Grapes in the final month of writing The Grapes of Wrath.

"Almost prayerful that this book is some good. Maybe it is and maybe not" (88) . "...I am sure of one thing— it isn't the great book I had hoped it would be. It's just a run-of-the- mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do" (90).

The evidence in The Journals of Grapes of self-doubt, lack of confidence, and lack of assurance about his writing is in the words he uses. For example, the words "I wonder" or "I hope" and "maybe" in the journal are not vocabulary of a self- assured individual. "I just hope it is good" (66), "I wonder whether it will be good" (68-69), or "...whether it is good or not..." (89) and "I only hope it is some good" (90) are entries with words that indicate a lack of assurance. In addition, the entries with sentences beginning with "if" indicate a lack of confidence: "If I can do this...," "If I can keep on," "If I could do the book properly." Steinbeck writes other sentences in The Journals of Grapes that keep self-doubt and no confidence serving as psychological blocks to an assurance that he has the ability and adequacy to write this great novel. Steinbeck wrote to Covici in 1950 that The 57

Journals of Grapes were "... an account very personal and in many instances purposely obscure...full of my own weaknesses of complaints and violence. These are just as apparent (in the Journal of a Novell as they ever were" (DeMott, Work xlvii). For psychological reasons, the journals helped

Steinbeck out of his despondency, insecurities and doubts so that the "slumps" in his spirit would not taint the book. In a literary sense, Steinbeck had great expectations and high standards for himself. In The Journals of Graces, he wrote, "My life isn't very long and I must get one good book written before it ends. The others have been make shifts, experiments, practices. For the first time I am working on a real book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have" (26). "If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability" (30) . If he can write for understanding, he says, "it will take all my genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Sometimes I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity" (30). "Some days I think I am getting sour but I don't know. Then comes a day and I am lifted up again. And I can't tell from the opening. Often in writing these lines I think it is going to be all right and then it isn't" (46). The same expectations Steinbeck had for himself are in the Journal of a Novel. In the beginning of the journal,

Steinbeck says, "Whether I am good enough or gifted enough remains to be seen" (Novel 5) . "I don't know if I am good enough or gifted enough" to write it [East] (4). "We will see whether the practicing through the years has prepared me for the writing of a book.... We shall see whether I am capable. Surely I feel humble in the face of this work" (5) . But as he nears the end of writing East of Eden, he writes in the journal, "[I feel] some timidness now. It is fear that I am not accomplishing what I want to. I guess that is inevitable"

(154). At the end, he writes, "I know [East of Edenl is the best book I have ever done. I don't know whether it is good enough" (112).

According to Benson, Steinbeck "had a certain amount of insecurity in regard to his own intellectual stature" (232).

As early as 1924, a Stanford friend, Byron White, recalled that Steinbeck was "somewhat beaten down, with no great self- confidence, and nevertheless a man under great inner tension of an enormous drive" (Benson 68). But he was always afraid of failure and criticism, states DeMott. He was a "lonely idealist," aloof from society, self-sufficient, demanding, individualistic, and with nervous drive and a "loose feeling" of freedom (DeMott, Work 136). With little sense of ego,

Steinbeck did not linger in beliefs of domination and possessiveness, like his father, nor did he desire 59 immortality, he said. "I have none of these whatever" (Novel

89). And for a writer, he was comfortable in qualities that benefitted his writing more than those qualities of ego- consciousness. In a letter to Covici, June 19, 1941,

Steinbeck wrote, "...I find safety in work and that is the only safety I do find. There is no ego in my work and consequently there is no danger for me in it" (Steinbeck and

Wallsten 231).

With the success of The Grapes of Wrath, however,

Steinbeck found a sense of ego-consciousness. But such self- consciousness had "a crippling sense of self" for him. For many years of not recognizing his ego, in fame it was difficult to escape a sense of importance. He could not ignore his fame. Gannett reported in The Atlantic Monthly.

December 1945, that Steinbeck complained, "I simply can't write books if a consciousness of self is thrust on me. Must have my anonymity.... Unless I can stand in a crowd without self-consciousness and watch things from an uneditorialized point of view, I'm going to have a hell of a hard time....

The pressures exerted by publicity are unendurable" (French

33). Also, if he can avoid publicity, he can avoid hearing criticism. Ego or concentrating on self, Steinbeck thought, was detrimental to future work because if he became a public person, an ego-seeking person, it would damage "his ability to immerse himself in his creations" (Benson 324). In June of

1939, John Rice interviewed Steinbeck for the Newspaper 60

Enterprises Association. Steinbeck said, "The publicity and fan-fare are just as bad as they would be for a boxer. One gets self-conscious and that’s the end of one's writing"

(Fensch Interviews 15). Benson contends that as Steinbeck became more famous, "the temptations increased and the problems of escaping from a sense’ of his own importance multiplied. He had an ego, and he was not always able to control it very well, but he tried.... He worked very hard to maintain a modesty that was for the most part genuine" (549).

Fame brought Steinbeck conflict and the inability to

"embrace fame and privileges... or reject it all and withdraw from society, as he had tried to do in the past. He liked people, he liked being recognized..., and enjoyed getting special treatment" (Benson 546). But yet he had "a deep- seated feeling that all the pleasure had a corrupting effect.

He felt there was something corrupting about wanting all the pleasures of the elite and privileged. He feared this activity might ruin him as a writer" (546). Besides, for too long, too many people had told him that he was no good. Being overly sensitive and too modest for his own good, he believed the opinions of others. Under these circumstances, "he had not had enough ego to carry him to artistic greatness" (607-

608) . The psychological conflict for Steinbeck was between accepting fame and privilege to boost ego-consciousness, or rejecting them to withdraw from society to energize his personal creativeness. The fifth psychological force recorded in the journals that seemed to control Steinbeck's creativeness was the pressure he felt from his audience of critics, especially literary critics. Such pressure might have been the result of his lack of confidence in his writing, but possibly it was that he had never been a member of, nor been appreciated by the Eastern Establishment of writers and critics. They had never found Steinbeck's western literature of violence and roughness appealing. When Steinbeck began writing in 1924, he did not have a mentor or prominent literary friends in publishing circles. He was isolated from the East when he wrote about the subjects in California; he never established an amenable audience with the literary giants from the East. He was angry at the critics, but at the same time afraid of their criticism of his literary works. Because Steinbeck's technique and style in the 1930s were his own, and the Eastern

Establishment did not understand them, critics dismissed his work as inferior; the style did not fit the "pattern" of

"classical writers" on the east coast. In 1951, when

Steinbeck began to write East of Eden, he was isolated from his West coast roots, and he could not find the voice and the language to express himself in the Eastern style. The literary critics wanted him to conform to the pattern of The

Grapes of Wrath and keep writing with that same theme over and over. Since Steinbeck was hurt by the opinions of critics,

Benson wrote, "...he was often full of doubt about his work, 62 doubt that grew with exposure and with fame," and "an attack upon his work was an attach upon him personally" because he considered writing a very private act (636).

The audience of critics Steinbeck didn't completely anticipate in his The Journals of Grapes is mentioned in Entry

#101, October 16, 1939, in the "Aftermath" of the journal, when The Grapes of Wrath was published and Steinbeck had fame:

"This is a year without writing.... What has happened and what it has done to me.... The Grapes of Wrath got really out of hand, became a public hysteria and I became a public domain" (Journals of Grapes 105). Benson comments that the novel found "a large audience [in the United States] unused to a book of its kind...tens of thousands of readers who had never been exposed" to a bumbling turtle and "a new mother who shockingly gave her breast to a full-grown man" (418) .

Audiences of critics in Buffalo, New York, East Saint Louis,

Illinois and Kern County, California, banned or burned The

Grapes of Wrath on the pretext of "filth," the product of the

"twisted, distorted mind" of a writer who is a "liar" and a

"communist." The Associated Farmers of California began an hysterical personal attack upon Steinbeck, labeling him a Jew, a pervert, a drunk, and a dope fiend. The people of Oklahoma claimed the name "Okies" and the description of them was defamatory. Even though Steinbeck had written a best seller for 1939 and had received critical acclaim that The Grapes of

Wrath was a masterpiece in American literature, the adverse 63 criticism destroyed Steinbeck's spirit of creativeness between

1938 and 1951.

The powerful personal, social, political and cultural attacks upon The Grapes of Wrath put Steinbeck in a "chaotic emotional upheaval" about writing. From that point on he had a "curious feeling that I must not be a disappointment"

(Journal of Grapes 121). When he turned to writing East of

Eden, he wrote to a single person in his journal, not a faceless crowd, and he wrote to his sons first of all.

"Perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people" (Novel 4). Since the book is addressed to his sons, Steinbeck finds it necessary "to speak very straight and clearly and simply" as he tells them "one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all— the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness..., these doubles [that] are inseparable.. .how out of their groupings creativeness is born" (4) . But the generation gap that separated Steinbeck from his sons worries him because he is afraid his book will be "an old-fashioned book," slow­ paced, philosophical, and allegorical, and it will not appeal to young people, including his sons. The rhetorical problem of audience for Steinbeck in writing East of Eden was the wide divergence between the modern audience of readers for whom he is writing, and the personal audience of his imagination.

East of Eden cannot converge in meaning to both audiences separated by a generation of differences. The epilogue to the Journal of a Novel predicts all the criticism his critical audience will concur is the problem with East of Eden. "...this book is going to catch the same hell that all the others did and for the same reasons. It will not be what anyone expects and so expecters will not like it. And until it gets to people who don't expect anything and are just willing to go along with the story, no one is likely to like this book" (Novel 26). Perhaps this is Steinbeck's reaction to the memories of past audiences for other manuscripts he has written. He is "[wrestling] with critical readers of the past" (Elbow 189) and "locked into some kind of combat with an audience... ready to pounce" (189). He is confronting the enemy by getting mad. Such a reaction "may find unexpected power in strong and coherent words," writing what is true and needs to be written by this writer without being drained of "language power" (190). Steinbeck believes his method for writing East of Eden is impossible with straight-line narrative, but he realizes "...I am going to catch critical hell for it. My carefully worked out method will be jumped on by the not too careful critic as slipshod— this is my own invention" (Novel 31). Steinbeck has disdain, and at the same time fear, of the critics, "these curious sucker fish who live with joyous vicariousness on other men's work and discipline with dreary words the thing which feeds them" (165). "...I have noticed so many of the reviewers of my work show a fear and hatred of ideas and speculations" 65

(167). This fear that he will not meet the expectations of his critical audience of readers is a psychological problem for Steinbeck, especially after The Grapes of Wrath was published and he is writing East of Eden. He is in doubt of his ability, and he can not distance himself from his critical audience. He is paranoid about releasing East of Eden "first to the lions— editors, publishers, critics, copy readers, sales department. It is kicked and slashed and gouged. And its bloodied father stands attorney" (Dedication of East of

Eden. Novel 180).

In the literature of this period of 1951, Steinbeck contends, people cannot infer from "parables [not] fully clothed with flesh," so therefore, East of Eden will take "a bad beating because it is full of such things" (167).

Steinbeck hopes that the audience of readers of East of Eden, however, will be ready for something as "open and honest."

"Readers [in 1951] do not inspect very closely and when they do, like as not they find things which aren't there. The hell with it" (147). He wants to be creative in his own way and say to the critics, "The hell with it," or "This is my invention."

"Almost without exception, Steinbeck's critics have condemned all his writing [in] the mid-1940s, charging that

[it is] contrived, hastily written, and best forgotten"

(Astro, Bittersweet 204). The critics had stereotyped

Steinbeck and would not allow him the freedom to write as he 66 wanted. Steinbeck's capitulation to these pressures from his audience of critics had "disastrous consequences for his art"

(Astro, John Steinbeck and Ricketts 149).

Steinbeck's self-doubt and lack of confidence is discussed in the Journal of a Novel as coming from his mother and father's attitude about him with a writer's career. "In my struggle to be a writer, it was [my father] who supported and backed me and explained me— not my mother" (Novel 103).

She wanted her son to be "decent like a banker." If he were a successful writer, she wanted him to be like Tarkington,

"but this she didn't believe I could do. But my father wanted me to be myself. Isn't that odd. He admired anyone who laid down his line and followed it undeflected to the end. I think this was because he abandoned his star in little duties and let his head go under in the swirl of family and money and responsibility. To be anything pure requires an arrogance he did not have, and a selfishness he could not bring himself to assume. He was a man intensely disappointed in himself. And

I think he liked the complete ruthlessness of my design to be a writer in spite of mother and hell" (103). Steinbeck "never quite measured up to the standards of self-discipline and hard work his father expected of him" (Benson 9) . He had a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness in his parents' expectations.

His mother did not believe he could be a great writer, and he did not measure up to the example of a "hard working" person like his father. Thereupon, he doubted his design to be a 67 noted writer, and he carried this burden of a lack of confidence in himself as a writer.

So much of the psychological support Steinbeck had for writing The Grapes of Wrath depended on Carol, Steinbeck's wife, editor, typist and confidante. "Carol will come rushing up the stairs...be merry...or be sad. So much always depends on Carol. She can and does make the tempo of the house. I wish she knew that" (Journals of Grapes 111). She discovered the title for The Grapes of Wrath from Julia Ward Howe's

"Battle Hymn of the Republic," written in 1862. "...it is

Carol's best title so far— because it is in our own revolutionary tradition" (Steinbeck and Wallsten 171). Besides discovering the title of his greatest novel, Carol edited and typed the entire manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath.

In September, two months before The Grapes of Wrath was finished, Steinbeck records that "Carol handles things better than I do.... Carol will cross 300 typed pages today. Poor kid is tired. Another week and she should be nearly through so that she can go on with the house and leave me to finish this book.... I think this is harder on Carol than...on me.

Because I am so thoroughly broken in on it that it seems normal to me while to her it is just work" (Journals of Grapes

74). At the end of writing The Grapes of Wrath, however, in the aftermath, Carol's loneliness and disappointment from a psychological separation from Steinbeck throughout the writing of The Grapes of Wrath began to separate them further, and Steinbeck feels intense pain in the deterioration of their relationship (Benson 198). Steinbeck attempts to be compassionate but can only describe it in the journal as Carol being lost, insecure, unhappy, and lonely. But his great novel had "bludgeoned and beaten" his "staggered mind"; he was lonely and lost, too, so that he couldn't think of writing anything for a year. Furthermore, "I don't seem to have the knack of living any more" (Journals of Grapes 127). Carol and

Steinbeck were married in 1930, separated in 1941, and divorced in 1943.

For relief from his psychological depth of depression after The Grapes of Wrath, and his ache of loneliness after his separation from Carol, Steinbeck turned to a romantic

"young, red-haired, milk skinned" singer and dancer in

Hollywood, Gwyn Conner. He made "a holy distortion and prayerful magic" out of his "fatal attraction for Gwyn"

(DeMott, Working 103). In this new.relationship, Steinbeck didn't want competitiveness as he had felt with Carol's abilities as a talented writer, "versifier, satirist, prose writer, painter and caricaturist" (xxv). Gwyn was a "romantic love." But he built a life around Gwyn that had little to do with what Gwyn wanted as a career (Benson 494). He misunderstood that she did not want a traditional marriage, one in which Steinbeck would be dominant and she would "cater to his needs" and cook for him? instead, he denied her of her career, left her alone many months while he was abroad during the war, and he gave her full responsibility for the care of their two sons. After only five years of marriage (1943-

1948), mostly in New York, Gwyn asked for a divorce and told

Steinbeck she had not been in love with him for several years

(617). The psychological devastation hearing this from Gwyn made Steinbeck lose his will to write, and that frightened and disturbed him. He wrote to Covici on October 18, 1948, after his second divorce that he had "accomplished nothing with time elapsing" (624). The recovery from Gwyn "dramatically influenced the direction of his writing" (620) . "He never had peace from Gwyn" (739) . He became a cold, detached and vague person while writing. He was angry and bitter, so he retreated to California where he began drinking heavily. He was bitter and lonely, and in need of money. He wasn't thinking clearly and "nothing went well" (Kazan 784).

After the war, French relates, Steinbeck "remained frozen in outmoded patterns of thinking" (Preface, John Steinbeck^.

He struggled to speak "with new relevance to an unfamiliar and distasteful postwar world..." (Preface, French, John

Steinbeck) . He became moralistic and abstract in his writing.

Out of this psychological turmoil of the war years in

1943-44, two divorces (1943 and 1948), and a dearth of writing, Steinbeck began an "unbelievable, incredible new life" when he married Elaine Scott in 1948 and began living in

New York. His life forces were "shriveling" until Elaine came along. "Elaine manages to take the pressures off and to keep 70 them off" (Novel 13). "I put all the burdens on Elaine, of running the house and doing the many thousands of things living entails (46). "I have Elaine and what better luck could there be" (16). In his marriage to Elaine, Benson claims, "he had become a happier, more confident, more sociable man" (738). This confidence inspired him to begin writing another long novel, East of Eden.

The Journal of a Novel is filled with the resplendent joy of writing. "I have a gold light in my stomach which is a mess of happiness" (Novel 10). When writing, "I am near to a kind of unconsciousness" (11). "I've worked long today but happily" (15). "As I go on, my happiness increases" (20).

The last chapter was violent, he writes, but "maybe the best writing about people I have ever done in my life" (124). "I have never enjoyed my own worry as I have this book" (124).

"I feel so good today— just wonderful. I have a kind of soaring, joyousness" (150). "The spots of gold on this page are the splatterings from beautiful thoughts" (158).

Steinbeck ends with, "I have liked this book— living with it and going along with it" (167).

Steinbeck overcame his "writer's block" that he so cogently verbalizes in the journals. For him, in the process of writing, first, the external forces of reality in the outside world must be rationalized with internal forces of the mind and soul to create harmony for composing. All forces affect the other in writing. Second, Steinbeck is saying that some days of writing go very well while others are lazy mental days, emotionally disturbing days, empty creative days. The type of day cannot be predicted before the day begins. What seems inspired, creative work at the beginning of the day may or may not be by the end of a day. Each day has a different

"character." Therefore, writing has its "ups and downs" and the writer must make "life force" adjustments to the task environment. A third idea Steinbeck's journals suggest is that the medium develops in collusion with individual development within the medium. The individual writer must be in control of the medium environment as well as the medium, and that requires a strong will to write, the discipline to propel the will, self-confidence to persevere, strength to overcome obstacles, and the ability and creative power to write. Fourth, on any day of writing, a book will "take on the quality" of personal feelings and emotions of the writer, and this "can so easily taint a book" (44). Finally, every writer has some form of "writer's block" whether it is of internal forces such as anxiety, worry, or fear, or from external forces of interruptions, imposed deadlines, fear of criticism, or one's own standards and expectations. These are inherent in the process of writing. CHAPTER IV

THE PHYSIOLOGICAL CONTEXT

In the journals, a physiological context cannot be separated from its influence on a mental context. First, the physical touch of the pen on paper, for Steinbeck, was the close affinity the hand had with the mind. Especially in the

Journal of a Novel, the pencil and paper are instruments that physically transform the ideas of the mind onto paper.

Metaphorically speaking, "the paper eats up pencil line"

(Novel 12) . In a letter to Eliza Kazan, April 1, 1959,

Steinbeck wrote, "...a pencil is almost like an umbilical connection between me and the borning letters" (Steinbeck and

Wallsten 624) . in a Journal of a Novel entry on May 11, 1951,

Steinbeck metaphorically speaks of the closeness of the mind, words, the pencil and paper: "I am ready and the words are beginning to well up and come crawling down my pencil and drop on the paper. I am filled with excitement..." (83). "...the joys [of writing] come in the words going down and the rhythms crowding in the chest and pulsing to get out" (132) .

Releasing "word pangs" is a release from pain. Writing is

"the warm emotion" of words physically going down on paper.

On March 27, 1951, Steinbeck was "clutching the pencil

72 very [tightly] and this is not a good thing. It means I am not relaxed.... I want calmness to settle on me that feels good...almost like a robe of cashmere feels" (40). On foggy days the paper became "clammy" in his hands. In October, when the Journal of a Novel was finished, Steinbeck had a hugh callus on one knuckle and also "a large one on my little finger simply from moving over the paper" (172) . The physical direction the pen moved— "even almost by itself"— and the feel of the pen in Steinbeck's hand empowered Steinbeck with a magical, therapeutic release of creativeness.

One's physical act of writing, Steinbeck advises, reflects one's mood. For example, Steinbeck writes in the

Journal of a Novel on March 23, 1951, that he felt rushed and his handwriting was rushed. Some days when he is angry, he has to sharpen many broken, soft, fine pencil points. On

April 11, the writing was going slowly: "All my processes are slow.... My mind is jumbled and slow.... The mind can't take an overload" (Novel 55-56). On April 26, Steinbeck had a terrible, bumbling day. He threw away the day's work after a

"calamitous...start." He felt drained and terrible because his writing all day had been "cut in pieces." On May 14, he felt "sick with a bug" and had to stop writing because of "the utterly despicable quality of my mind.... Better to think them through and so lose them" (84). While writing in the

Journal of a Novel on June 4, he says, "My handwriting...is full of lumps and hollows which means that I am not yet set in my mind to work" (99). "I guess that is the best justification of these notes. They get all or most of the kinks out before I start with the book" (85). Later in the same entry of June 4, Steinbeck writes, "My handwriting has settled down and so I know it is time for me to go to work"

(99). When the handwriting is "haywire," the working rhythm is gone for Steinbeck and he must "dawdle" some more in the journal to get the rhythm reestablished. On days when tenseness must be written into the scene, Steinbeck finds that he lives in the tense tempo of what he writes. If the tempo is fast and pressured, the writing "will show that pressure"

(139) . On good thinking nights he would let "the mind go galloping...unproductive" but ready to produce the words on paper when the pressure inside was right (Journals of Grapes

108). On any particular day of writing, Steinbeck knew that the feel of the pen on paper was influenced by the mood of the writer's mind. In the bliss of creation, the "perfect pointed pencil" in Steinbeck's hand "wriggled words" like the "trigger into joy...the pure bliss of creation" (Novel 10), whereas over vehemence from the hand breaks the points and "all hell is let loose.... I am stabbing the paper.... I need...(two] kinds of pencils for hard writing days and soft writing days" (35).

Evidence from Steinbeck's journals support the theory that "artistic creation" heightens internal nervous tension, weariness, worry and depression. These tendencies create "writer's block" for Steinbeck, accompanying or causing psychological blocks. In the fifth day of writing The Grapes of Wrath (June 5, 1938), Steinbeck records in The Journals of

Grapes. "Have a loose feeling that makes me nervous" (22).

Following this, in the same entry, are the words, "I am very happy in this work, I do know that. It satisfies me so far"

(22). On the following day (June 6, 1938), he writes, "My whole nervous system is battered...I hope I am not headed for a nervous breakdown. Lack of solitude is doing it I think"

(23). Later in the same month, his nerves are "jittery and weak" and he feels "near exhaustion and collapse...with physical drive that goes into writing. Take it easier.

Conserve strength.... Take time. Don't write less forcefully but keep the frantic quality out of my approach" (31) . By the end of June, "My system is collapsing towards the end of Book

One" (36) . On July 7, "the despair came on me for a while but although still nervous from it I think I am recovering.

Confidence in me again. Stopping work does the damage" (39) .

By August 1, his nerves are bad, the frantic quality of his mind has "panic," and he is nearly "crazy." By the end of the book and the end of the month of October, Steinbeck is

"terribly nervous... nervous as a cat" (87). "My mind doesn't want to work" (90). His "nerves blew," he felt weak and powerless, he couldn't sleep, his stomach was "shot with tiredness," and his nerves and stomach were in "terror of the end." At the end, Steinbeck was crippled by sciatica, and by 76 being severely depressed, withdrawn and near a nervous breakdown. His journals in the aftermath are full of turbulence and brooding filled with self-doubt, intimations of paranoia and "dark fatality," and compounded with guilt about his treatment of Carol, his wife. Public fame and private success were "a nightmare" that made Steinbeck physically ill.

The physiological manifestations of physical stress— weariness, tiredness, exhaustion, and manic depression—

Steinbeck mentions in his The Journals of Grapes of 1938 and in the Journal of a Novel in 1951. But scattered among more entries in the Journal of a Novel are signs of joy and contentment in writing East of Eden. However, the first mention of worry and stress appears in a March entry of his journal, three months into writing East of Eden: "Take things in stride...don1t anticipate trouble before it happens. One of my very worst habits is the anticipation of difficulties and vicariously to go through them in advance. Then, if they happen I have to do it twice, and if they don't happen I have done them unnecessarily.... I am a worrier" (Novel 28).

Worry can't always be controlled, Steinbeck confesses.

"Little evil things rise up like gas bubbles out of a swamp.

And maybe it is a good thing for it to come out now and then.

Who knows what poisons in the mind can do. But what silliness to mourn over lost time. I have a feeling impossible of verification that worry is a pathological function of some time required by the human soul for its well-being in greater or less degree. I think that worry is a constant and that only after it rises to the conscious mind do we find a direction for it to take. If this were not so, we would not worry about such ridiculous things" (69). "I think the human thrives best when he is a little worried and unhappy and this is implemented with needles in the brain" (83) . "The cosmic ulcer [worry] comes not from great concerns, but from little irritations" (70). "Little things can upset me completely with fear and nervousness or rage. But big things freeze me.

My mind goes...cold...and moves...slowly" (99). "My inner woes" made every "nerve end...on fire" and I know "when this nervous horror" is in me (140). For Steinbeck, writing, especially in the journals, carries tension and worry away.

But the worry Steinbeck writes about in both journals leads to the same end when each novel is finished: nervous weariness, disgusting exhaustion, near collapse, and a "slow accumulated weariness."

Steinbeck examines certain tired, manic depressive, weary, and lazy tendencies that are like the aches that are

"physical resentments against living" (89). "I refer to the will to live. I have very little of it. This must not be confused with a death wish. I have no will to die but I can remember no time from earliest childhood until this morning when I would not have preferred never to have existed.. .a kind of hunger never to have lived.... Having little will to be alive, I have also very little personal ego— some vanity but 78 little ego" (89). In the final analysis, Steinbeck concludes,

"I think if I were forbidden by some force to [write], I should last a very short time" (157).

In The Journals of Grapes, the entries written in the aftermath of writing The Grapes of Wrath reflect an aura of succumbing to death. On October 20 (27 or November 3), 1939,

Steinbeck records that during the last two days "I have had death premonitions so strong that I burned all the correspondence of years" (Journal of Grapes 109). In

September of 1940, Steinbeck wrote the following: "Life for me is nearly over any way.... [But] I can sit here writing and the words slipping out like grapes out of their skins and I feel so good doing it" (121). In his January 30, 1941 entry, he confesses, "I am ill*— ill in the mind.... My head is a grey cloud in which colors drift about and images half-form.

I feel very lost and lonesome.... I don't seem to have the knack of living any more. The clock is running down, my clock" (12) . Also, "a book is very dead in a short time. And

I'll be dead in a very short time too" (68).

A wish never to have existed is mentioned less in the

Journals of a Novel, but on May 14, 1951, Steinbeck records,

"Monday in Salinas.... I hated it. My will toward death was very great when I was growing up. I remember the screened window of my room looking out on grey fog and beyond that a grey school and a grey week.... It is not so now. I look forward to Mondays. The death wish is not so strong as it 79 used to be and maybe some time it will disappear entirely. Or maybe this is too much to hope for" (84).

The physical and mental "work" of writing a longer novel,

Steinbeck claims, "is the only good thing" (Journals of Grapes

39) . In the first month of writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck is exhausted one Saturday night (June 20) from working too hard. "It's not the amount of work but the physical drive that goes into it that seems to make the difference..." (30). The nervous drive which gives Steinbeck creative drive is a pressure that results in long-term abuse to Steinbeck's health. "I've always worked under some kind of pressure.... This is the only way I make it" (60). He could not sleep some nights because of planning tomorrow's work

(Recorded on June 17 and June 22) . The nervous drive affected even his handwriting: "I notice my handwriting shows that "

(33). His stomach "went to pieces," he felt dizziness and a blend of nausea plus a headache from tenseness and weariness, even the first month of writing The Grapes of Wrath (June 28 and June 29). By August his nerves are so bad, he says, that he has a frantic feeling in his mind, panic set in, and he can't organize his thoughts; he feels hot and he has the

"jumpy jitters" (August 1). His nerves "were going fast" on

August 24, and he was "in danger of collapse" by September

8th. His stomach and nerves were "screaming merry hell in protest" on September 26th. The sickness in his stomach he blames on "weary, shaky nerves." "...nerves blew out like a fuse and...I feel weak and powerless" (October 20). "Stomach shot to pieces with tiredness..." and my "stomach went to pieces" with nervousness. Stomachaches were also from drinking and smoking too much. He often drank champagne or wine the night before and was not sober the next day:

".. .drank with high spirits" (July 5), "must not drink so much

(July 15), and "[I] can drink [only] on Friday" (July 22). In

September he acknowledges he is sick: "I feel very sick today.

Dreamy sleep and coughing from too much smoking and confused by too many things happening and pretty much worn out from too long work on manuscript. Have to cut down smoking or something" (67). On October 26, Steinbeck wrote the last entry for The Journals of Grapes: "Today should be a day of joy because I could finish.... But I seem to have contracted an influenza of the stomach or something. Anyway I am so dizzy I can hardly see the page.... Finished this day— and I hope to God it's good" (93).

The physical collapse Steinbeck felt after writing The

Grapes of Wrath was truly physical illness. He was crippled by the inflammation of the sciatica nerve in his leg, and he was in a state of severe depression. The physical problems contributed to a physical and mental "crash within [him]"

(110). In the aftermath, he states, "My leg went bad and I had ten months of monstrous pain until the poison from the infection was gone" (105). He needed to lose weight, he needed Vitamin B supplements and male hormones, and he began 81 drinking more than usual. Three years after The Grapes of

Wrath was published, he writes in his journal that he has backaches and stomachaches, "a staggered mind," and a

"flogging head." The physiological effects of his journey with The Grapes of Wrath was that he wrote nothing for a whole year (October 26, 1938 through October 16, 1939).

The Grapes of Wrath was published on April 14, 1939. It had "unprecedented commercial success," especially throughout

1939 and 1940. But the fame and fortune turned his "wildest dreams" into "a nightmare." The Associated Farmers of

California accused Steinbeck of distorting facts. There were vicious personal rumors that were spread. Also, the rumor was that the Okies hated him and threatened to kill him "for lying about them." DeMott, in his commentary in Working Davs. explains that "the unhealthy 'hysteria1 of the novel's reception,...took [its] toll on Steinbeck who became increasingly depressed and withdrawn" (98). Steinbeck was weary, nervous, weak, powerless, afraid, lonely and physically ill. His physical illness created a "chaotic emotional upheaval in his life" (98) . Along with the physical ills, the emotional turbulence, brooding, confusion, disintegration, and depression were the cause of an unproductive period of creative writing. Edwards states that Steinbeck most likely completed "his years of fiercest creative struggle" writing

The Grapes of Wrath (413). Weeks believes that "a novel's evolution and the surrounding texture of its author's life" 82 are found in the journals (900).

To add to Steinbeck's physical, mental and creative pain, during this same time in the aftermath of The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck's marriage to Carol Henning could not be rectified.

Ed Ricketts said that Carol was "the backbone of John's writing.... Carol's eyes were the first eyes to see his work"

(Detro 3) . She scrutinized and edited and typed all the pages of The Grapes of Wrath. John took her suggestions seriously because he respected the cuts she made according to her reaction.

He felt intense pain in the deterioration of his relationship with Carol. Confronting Carol to work out their

"salvations" was not possible for Steinbeck. His plan was to do nothing and let fate take its course. In April 1941, they separated for two years and then divorced on March 18, 1943.

During the time of separation, Steinbeck was having an affair with Gwyndolen Conger whom he married eleven days after his divorce from Carol. His marriage to Gwyn was "the most intense emotional relationship he ever had; it ultimately wounded everyone involved...[and] remained a constant touchstone of his experience for the next decade" (DeMott,

Work 103). This short-lived marriage came to a "tragic" end in 1948. For the second time, Steinbeck didn't work out the destinies for both him and Gwyn, nor seek counsel; he didn't even fight when she asked for a divorce, and in the divorce settlement, took all his library of books. Because "he was a 83 man who could care very deeply for others, could be very logical, very sensitive to feelings, and could be sentimental if touched in the right place11 (Benson 198), when he didn't fully articulate a resolution in his personal life, he could not find a resolution for his creative life during the years from 1938 to 1951.

The physical act of writing was "redemptive work" to

Steinbeck. In A Life. Eliza Kazan writes, "When John didn't sharpen twenty wooden pencils every morning and sit to write on his yellow pad, he didn't know why he was living" (784).

Writing was his life. "The confidence is on me again,"

Steinbeck wrote in The Journals of Grapes. "It's stopping work that does the damage" (39) . In September of 1940, in the aftermath of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, he said

"he came home tired and sad. Lack of work does it, I guess"

(120) . Speaking of The Grapes of Wrath. ".. .once this book is done I won't care how soon I die because my major work will be over" (41) . The Grapes of Wrath was the "hardest, most complete work of my life" (60). Work was a vision Steinbeck held that "praises the honorable of labor"; work was the "most committed, the most emphatic, the most resourceful quality of the human psyche," Steinbeck says (DeMott, Working xxxii).

"[I] must do daily work" (Journals of Grapes 27).

Steinbeck admired the "working" people and had seen the migrant workers' issue as central to his book, The Grapes of

Wrath. But in the Journal of a Novel, the process of writing was redemptive and valuable work because Steinbeck found great personal and creative benefits from it. "I get into the most trouble when I am not working actively" (Novel 110). He worried, ached, and felt nervousness when he did not have the good feeling of work. "One is never drained by work but only by idleness. Lack of work is the most enervating thing in the world" (115). For working on East of Eden, it was "not the finished work but the working" that brought redemption to

Steinbeck in 1951 (144). Driven by work, according to The

Journals of Grapes. Steinbeck was productive and creative.

Between 1940 and 1950, Steinbeck published eight books of dubious literary acclaim. He tried comic drama (Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row), a documentary film (The Forgotten Village), scientific prose (Sea of Cortez), travel writing (A Russian

Journal), and poetry he wrote to Gwyn, his second wife. The years between 1948 to 1954 were "a period of literary convalescence and separation" because he had moved from

California to New York, he had separated from two unsuccessful love affairs, and he was separated from his family and the

United States in 1943 for seven months serving as a war correspondent in Europe for The New York Herald Tribune. The malaise he felt "upon returning from the war was but a part, a more intensified episode, of a continuing battle with himself.... The contradictions so apparent in his character were the outward manifestations of this inner struggle for control" over his personal life and his creative life (Benson 549) . He told Dook Sheffield after the war that he had written "crap overseas" and it "profoundly nauseated him to think about it (554) . As a war correspondent at forty-two years old, he had seen killing and maiming, and he had witnessed children starving. Benson records that Steinbeck had been through prolonged bombardment by explosives so both eardrums had been burst and he could barely hear. He twisted an ankle jumping out of landing craft. "What was most frightening to him was that he was subject to periodic blackouts, temporary loss of memory, .[and physical weakness], but he never mentioned his problems to anyone" (540).

According to Gwyn, "one solid year after he came back from the war he had no sense of humor at all. He had a chip on his shoulder the whole time. He was mean, he was sadistic, he was masochistic, he resented everything. The great sense of play that he had, the wit, the kind of happiness that he had [had disappeared]" (Steinbeck and Wallsten 541). He came home from the war in Africa, Benson claims, with a complete personality change (531). He was morose, despondent, and preoccupied. He was depressed and restless when he realized he was tied down with two children. so he did not have the freedom to travel or leave Gwyn without responsibility. Benson records the following: "Emotionally, in response to the horror he had witnessed— particularly the maimed children— and his own disabilities, he seemed to be in a state of prolonged shock. He became acutely aware of his own mortality. His 86 blackouts reminded him of his mother's strokes, and he became obsessed with the idea that he was getting old (he would turn forty-two)...conscious of their (Gwyn and his) difference in age. He hated himself for being sick and worried about being man enough to hold his wife. He tried to ignore his disabilities and hide his pain and fear, but when, after several months, the various symptoms of his injuries did not disappear, he consulted doctors about them. He felt so depressed and exhausted..." (540).

In 1951, however, when Steinbeck begins writing East of

Eden, he feels strong, relaxed and rested. "The book will soothe and excite at the same time" (Novel 8). According to his journal, he still needs to lose weight, is nervous and tired, has a sick stomach, feels the "pests" of worry, and has trouble sleeping. He was smoking too many cigarettes, so he began smoking a pipe while he worked. "I find I smoke fewer and fewer cigarettes. Maybe I can cut them out entirely for a while. That would be a very good thing. Even with this little change [smoking a pipe], my deep-seated and perennial cigarette cough is going away. A few months without that would be a real relief" (17).

Sleep was either too long or too short in length,

"...very sluggish because I seem to have had too much sleep.

Almost drugged with it. I guess I just can't take too much sleep" (22), or, "My mind is not as crystal clear as I could wish it. I slept too long and too hard over the weekend" (21). When he only had two hours of sleep in two nights, he found he didn't need so much time in sleep. Usually he felt he didn't have time to sleep. "Too many things are happening inside and outside me. And I just haven't the time" (22) .

The first day of March, however, he wrote, "I guess my brain was so exhausted as the rest of me.;.. I went to bed early and slept long and feel refreshed today" (21). When he can't sleep, "fatigue slows [him] down" (23) . Steinbeck was afraid of a key scene at the end of East of Eden. "Maybe that is why

I have been so much afraid of it. But two nights of long and restful sleep have put me in a position of inner security so that I think I can finally do it" (168). "...I am very much frightened [of] all these months and years aimed in one direction and suddenly it is over and it seems that the thunder has produced a mouse" (171) . With this disappointment he began to feel complete exhaustion and collapse, a slow accumulated weariness and an emotional reaction to an intellectual concentration of his creative power in East of

Eden. Five entries before the end of the journal, on October

27, 1951, Steinbeck confessed, "I feel weak and miserable today as though the sky were falling on me. Weariness is on me, really creeping in, and I can't give in to it" (174), very much the same exit recorded on October 26, 1938, in the final entry to The Journals of Grapes, when he was dizzy and sick with flu: "I must go on" (93).

Disturbing dreams are recorded many more times in the Journal of a Novel than in The Journals of Grapes. On June 4,

1951, in the Journal of a Novel, he dreams of hopeless debt

(98) , and on June 11, in a moment of nervousness, he remembered a nightmarish college moment when he was behind in his assignments because he was reading what he wanted to read in the library instead of what was required. "I got behind and then I got so far behind that I could not possibly catch up. And I still have bad dreams about that. I must have cut a very deep channel" (102) . At the end of June, when

Steinbeck was deep in Tom Hamilton's problems in East of Eden.

Steinbeck wrote, "Last night I dreamed a long dream of my own paralysis and death. It was objective and not at all sad, only interesting 11 (106) . Steinbeck had horrible dreams one day and a bad cold and nervousness which he blamed on congestion and aches in his body. His bad dreams on October

11, he blamed on "a kind of disgusting exhaustion with many bad dreams thrown in for good measure" (167) . Six days before he finished writing East of Eden, he had a curious dream about the finality of the following days of writing. It was "so complicated, so foreign and strange that I have great difficulty in shaking it off. The dream and the reality won't seem to separate.... The damned dream was so convincing but it just didn't belong to this book" (172).

These dreams were a foreboding of the finish of this last long novel written by Steinbeck. He predicted that "the time passes and I must pass with it" (167). Of the book, three days before "the close to finish," he wrote, "I wish I were finished and at the same time I am' afraid to be finished"

(175), the same comment Steinbeck made in The Journals of

Grapes. With his seemingly healthy state of mind and happy moments of creative enjoyment writing East of Eden. Steinbeck warns on June 5, 1951, that his mind has gone cold and "then it moves very slowly like a sniffing fox" (Novel 99). He had had this curious pattern of coldness during the war in combat and now "it does seem to me to be hemorrhage because of a number of things. It does seem to be heart— perhaps. The first thing for me is to find out from someone who knows....

This will hit me in the night and suddenly, but right now I am frozen and I must know" (99-100). A series of heart attacks with "pains and inconvenience in breathing" were the result of clogged coronary arteries (165). On April 11, 1951, the tone of his mind was "jumbled and slow and like a bad child. It refuses to obey me. I tell it to do something and it won't.... I am a hard master of the mind.... The fact...is that I have several things on my mind at once and that poor instrument cannot take the overload" (56). The long-term stress of excitement and depression in writing was culminating with the weight of nervousness, sleeplessness, weariness, and tiredness, along perhaps with the effects of smoking. Between writing The Grapes of Wrath in 1938 and East of Eden in 1951, especially in the 1940s, the longings, loneliness, discouragement and sadness were "paralyzing his creativity" (Benson 473) so that these personal handicaps produced physical illness. Kazan speaks of Steinbeck's drive to the end of life: "John had...gone on...until his heart, pushed to endure beyond its capacity.... John drove himself to death to preserve his 'self' undiminished. But he never yielded his pride" (817). CHAPTER V

NATURAL ENVIRONMENT: SOCIETAL, CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT

Societal, cultural, political and economic contexts surrounding Steinbeck became the "creative associations" with his works. In childhood, the Salinas Valley brought Steinbeck close to nature at a very young age. The impulse to get on his horse and ride away alone brought him into a "communion with nature" where he discovered "secret excitement" and made

"private discoveries." He named the grasses and flowers, and he "knew where toads may live and what time the birds awaken in summer— and what trees and seasons smelled like" (Benson

7) . Steinbeck inherited this special regard for nature from his father who was a gardener and an outdoor man in his spare time, withdrawn from social activity, but comfortable in aloneness in nature. Steinbeck's father explained to his children the "intricate folds of flowers," the cyclical seasons in nature's changes, and the tenderness toward animals.

In addition to the affinity to green grassed land and soothing spring water, Steinbeck had "an affinity for the seashore" where the family's summer cottage at Pacific Grove

91 was located. The California coast was a majestic and powerful landscape of shoreless rocky cliffs, river valleys, rolling hills, windblown cypresses, pines, estuaries and beaches. In the Salinas Valley and along the Atlantic coast in the 1900s, the environment was alive with mountain lions, deer, wild boar, wild fowl, fish, hawks and sea animals. Out of a panoramic setting in nature, Steinbeck found his similes, metaphors, description, allegory, analogies, symbolism, themes and references. For example, in To a God Unknown, over thirty types of plants and animals are mentioned: underbrush of blackberries, manzanita, and scrub oak; giant madrone trees resembling "meat and muscles"; meadowlarks "with yellow vests and light grey coats" (Steinbeck 30) ; wild oat, blue upins, poppies, coyotes, ferrets, the red-tailed hawk, swallows, wild hay, raccoons, leaves of quatros,. red-winged blackbirds, sycamores, blue herons, willows, poison-oak, crickets, grasshoppers, the brush rabbit, tarweed, the skunk, azaleas, redwoods, gooseberries, swordferns, quail and deer. Later, in

The Grapes of Wrath, the interlude about the symbolic journey of the turtle came directly from Steinbeck's close observation of a turtle in motion. Steinbeck recorded in The Journals of

Grapes on Wednesday, June 1, 1938, that "yesterday turtle episode...satisfies me in a number of ways" (20).

Other references made from the natural setting of

California are found in both The Journals of Grapes and

Journal of a Novel. He writes of sleeping under the 93

"darkening plain and stars," "the evening and the cooking of the rabbits" (Journals of Grapes 24) , "the pig killing and salting," "the singing in the trees outside my window" and the woods green and beautiful, and "the snail with a shell and barnacles on its back" (45).

Likewise, in the Journal of a Novel. Steinbeck refers to animals and plants in nature. Of his pencils he wrote, "I must feel as delicate as a rose pedal to use them" (Novel 35) .

Sadness is "like little gauzy mists which hang close down in the water in the spring" (18) . His foreboding in the book

"should rest on it like a crow on a fence" (84) . Other references are the following: "The buds are swelling to a popping size" (68); "a bug is working in my stomach" (84) ; "

If I run out [of paper], I will howl like a wolf" (78); "Keep

Samuel's life partly alive like a frog's heart in saline solution..." (Ill); and "The human mind...is bee-stung with a thousand little details" (66).

Steinbeck was aware that each writer chooses material from a familiar background for imaginative expressions for writing. Steinbeck's imagination was set in California and never left that context in his creative life. Lisca contends that the Salinas Valley "provided Steinbeck with a symbolism and a unique frame of reference for his understanding of the human condition" (John Steinbeck: Nature 2). Benson agrees that California gave Steinbeck "a special regard for nature and man's place in it" (7). 94

Steinbeck claims in The Log from the Sea of Cortez that there is a "creative association between observer and objects" in the environment of the author (Benson 429). But authors observe through their "own looking glass." Therefore,

Steinbeck writes, "all observers viewing [their] external reality through eyes set in a conditioned thinking pattern will...bring some residue of that pattern to the reality" (429).

The intimacy Steinbeck had with his environment in

California nourished his imagination. In fact, Steinbeck

"felt the constant need to be plugged into the soil, to feel its vibrations" (7). These vibrations came from the Pacific

Ocean and its "beats against shaggy cliffs" at Point Lobos, from the fields "straddled" by the Gabilan Mountains to the east of Salinas and the Santa Lucias on the west, from the roads angling through the Santa Lucias, from the towering redwoods balancing in the earth and air, and from the sands of

Monterey Bay focusing "against a sky so blue it hurt the eye"

(Timmerman 282). Above all these influences, Timmerman describes, "in between the Gabilan Mountains, full of bright splashes of sun, and the Santa Lucias, full of arching gloom, lies the Salinas Valley, a bowl of green. Green avocado plants in the north, green pumping arms of the oil stations south of King City, green mists in the air from irrigation.

It is a band of fertility between two high, opposing places"

(282). "Both metaphor and art are nourished by it, twin off­ 95 spring of a xnind homed by his land" (282) .

Within the cultural, middle class societal context of

Steinbeck's home, his mother introduced him to music and classical literature, often literature with adventure or mysticism. Among Steinbeck's favorite childhood stories was the fifteen century Morte d' Arthur written by Thomas Malory.

Also, the Bible. Shakespeare's work and Pilgrim's Progress influenced Steinbeck's later writing. Steinbeck's romance with words and the sounds of words— the vowel sound combinations, the rhythm and phrasing of words, and alliteration— were the product of the cultural rhythms of his cultural environment: the waves of the sea shore, the songs of birds, the tractors rolling down the fields, the factory humming with motors, and the gallop of Steinbeck's pony down the road. Steinbeck took these rhythms he "heard in his ears and set [them] down" (Novel 81). Then he would read aloud to someone to hear the rhythmic sound of words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters going down on paper. He listened for the quality of the combinations for his intended meaning. He heard the "musicality of individual words" arranged to have a rhythm "as honest and unshaken as a heart beat" (Journals of

King Arthur 331) . Timmerman states that "the rhythms of [his] prose became tailored to the rhythms of nature— descriptions of hills, skies, trees, animals [Steinbeck] saw before him.

The rhythms...[were also] of the people, capturing speech patterns that begin to ring with the awesome tone of reality 96 rather than artifice" (32).

Hearing classical music for background as he wrote

"suggests an influence on the rhythm and structure of his work" (Tedlock and Wicker xv) . DeMott notes that "music inspired Steinbeck by setting a mood conducive to writing and by establishing a rhythm for the day's work [in the journal].

Even more important, classical music- provided Steinbeck with formal, harmonic, and lyric analogies for his fiction"

(Working 13) . Benson says that "a song in his head.. .inspired the flow of his writing" (154). "...he put trust in the sound of words, in a kind of lulling with syllables. Sound

[prepared] the way for the impact of ideas" (369) . For example, the sound of words brought The Grapes of Wrath the

"rolling sound of wheels and the clatter of cars and the panting across the country" (Chapter 12, The Grapes of Wraths .

Each book Steinbeck wrote had its own rhythm and whenever the rhythm was broken by interruptions, weekend breaks, or four- day vacations, he had to "get back the rhythm" by writing in his journal (Journals of Grapes 37).

For The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck kept "a large rhythmic structure" alive by listening to Tshaikovsky's ballet Swan

Lake, and Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The themes of hunger, poverty, dignity, and human rights in The Grapes of

Wrath appear like constant variations of a symphonic piece of music. Studs Terkel observes in the introduction to The

Grapes of Wrath that "the novel is constructed like a piece of music rather than mere prose.... [He] was listening to the lushness of Tchaikovsky and the dissonance of Stravinsky, while he traveled with the Joads...and when there was a pause in the recorded music, there was still a sort of rhythm: the incessant bup-bup-bup of the washing machine. Always, there was the beat" (1989, vii).

Steinbeck's pervading structural rhythm from his cultural influences is in the style of the Bible and poetry in The

Grapes of Wrath, for example:

The tractors had lights shining, For there is no day and night for a tractor And the disks turn the earth in the darkness And they glitter in the daylight.

And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn There is a life and vitality left, There is a breathing and warmth, And the feet shift on the straw, And the jaws chomp on the hay, And the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, And the heat and the smell of life.

But when the motor of a tractor stops, It is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it Like the living heat that leaves a corpse. (Lisca, Wide World 162).

In this same poetic style for East of Eden. Steinbeck writes, "I'm trying to implant a counterpoint of poetry just before the harsh rose that has to follow. I want always balances in this book" (Novel 34) . This technique of counterpointing poetry and prose is a natural influence of music, and reading the Bible and Shakespeare in his youth.

The California environment also contributed to 98

Steinbeck's images of people and his themes. The language, spirit, and themes of California were constantly appearing in the images, symbolism, descriptions\ metaphors, similes and analogies. In The Journals of Grapes, the evidence is in the following passages:

"The book moves like a Tide Pool snail with a shell

and barnacles on its back" (45).

"...the night comes with sleeping in the darkening

plain and stars...and the owl and the cats catch a

mouse..." (Transferred to Chapter 6 in The Grapes of

Wrath) (24).

"The tractors...must have a symphonic overtone....

Now must make music" (22).

"My head is a grey cloud in-which colors drift about

and images half-form" (127).

Many more images, analogies and metaphors from socio- socio-cultural references are found in the Journal of a Novel.

Of sons, "they flower and reseed" (4). An emotion "falls by some accident with edged words, swings the whole brain about, and shakes it like a rug" (11). Of people in the book, "I should like the faults to fit the subjects like the iron tires of a wheel-shrunk on and permanent" (20). Sadness is "like little gauzy mists which hang close down in the water in the spring" (18). "A bug is working in my stomach and chest trying to stop me" (84). Of nervousness, "Every nerve end went on fire and little noises crashed on me like waves," and 99 my "ragged nerves" are like " I am over-engined for my chassis..." (140).

The following description written by Steinbeck illustrates the cultural influences and the "spirits" of mysticism: "I wrote of miners' faces around a fire. Their bodies did not show in the light so that the yellow faces seemed dangling masks 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" (Timmerman 5).

The passages in The Journals of Grapes are written in

California while the passages in the Journal of a Novel are written in New York City and Nantucket Island. Those of the

Journal of a Novel, however, are not those of New York; they carry the culture of California. Astro states that in youth,

Steinbeck's imagination was "where the mind is patterned, controlled and molded by a total process" of acculturation

(John Steinbeck and Ricketts 49). When Steinbeck moved permanently from the California environment to the New York environment, he did not have the language to express New York in his writing. This would be a problem for him. Some of his great metaphors of animals, the land, the ocean, and the people he knew in Salinas Valley did not seem appropriate for

New York.

The "American epic," The Grapes of Wrath, is certainly an example of the impact of the culture on a writer, and the permanent aesthetic values Steinbeck incorporated in the 100 materials of a social tragedy in California during the Great Depression. Without the background of experience, observation, and prior knowledge Steinbeck had from his homeland, The Grapes of Wrath could not have been written with such power.

The purpose of The Grapes of Wrath evolved out of earlier years of close and inspired observation "as precise as a documentary" (Lisca, Nature 64) like Tom Collin's records in the federal camps. Steinbeck saw simple decency as one of the social issues. In the Salinas Valley, Bakersville, Visalia and Nipomo, and all the "Hooversvilles" for migrant workers, he witnessed the deplorable conditions, especially at Visalia in the winter of 1938, where families were starving and dying, and he was "transfixed" with the suffering this event in

California history had inflicted upon common, working class people. Thereupon, DeMott says, he became "the writer who was fighting to be heard" (Working xlii).

Steinbeck wrote in a letter to Sheffield on June 21,

1933, that "the process [of collecting information and writing] is this— one puts down endless observations, questions, and remarks.... Eventually they all seem to lead in one direction and then they whirl like sparks out of a bonfire. And then one day they seem to mean something"

(Steinbeck and Wallsten 74). Steinbeck went on to say that

"then the problem begins of trying to find a fictional symbolism which will act as a vehicle" (75). 101

The purpose for writing The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck wrote in The Journals of Grapes, was "to tell the story of people much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am....

To place myself on record as partisan to the common people"

(36). "We have to know these people. Know their looks and their nature...description, detail, looks, clothes, gestures"

(29) . "They must be an over-essence of people" (39) . "I must get these people...get the feel of speech and the flow of action" (65) of the Joad family on their movement West.

In a letter to the San Francisco News in July of 1938,

Steinbeck responded to a request to participate in a nonpartisan forum to end the strikes. He replied with a philosophical view of his purpose for writing The Grapes of

Wrath: "Every effort I can bring to bear is and has been at the call of the common working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, wear what they weave, use what they produce, and in every way or in completeness share in the work of their hands and their heads.... I am actively opposed to any man or group who, through financial or political control of the means of production and distribution, is able to control and dominate the lives of workers" (DeMott, Working

152) . What Steinbeck saw in his observation of California during this Depression era was the social, political and economic context that became the content of his book.

In this literary fiction he wanted to write about the 102

"more immediate social issues of his own world" (The

Depression, Industrialization, the Populist Movement) (Geesmer

255), and about the "disposed people, the little people with virtue and peacefulness" (Davis, Steinbeck 2) . Specifically, he wanted to show the violations of migrants' civil and human rights and the resulting social and economic injustice, to expose the peon status of migrant workers, and to show the loss of dignity among a powerless, poverty-ridden, victimized, fearful people who were willing to work, had an innate resilience and sense of independence, and were kind, wise, intelligent, and socially responsible in a democracy.

Steinbeck wanted to transform the history of the migrants' struggle into art. "I'm trying to write history while it is happening" (Letter to Elizabeth Otis, February 14, 1938,

Steinbeck and Wallsten 162).

DeMott says that "The Grapes of Wrath was a product of

Steinbeck's increasing immersion in the migrant material"

(Working xxxii-xxxiii). As early as age twenty (1918),

Steinbeck worked in the fields as a farm laborer picking fruit and beans for thirty-five cents an hour. He talked with migrants, worked beside them, listened to them and walked among them. His early acquaintance with the migrants' plight was in his hometown of Salinas working at Spreckel's sugar beet ranch, and as a laborer with a dredging crew. Steinbeck wrote to George Albee in 1936 that "there are riots in Salinas and killings in the street" (Steinbeck and Wallsten 132) . 103

This was his "creative association" with the subject for The

Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's intimacy with his subject material contributed to his ability to transform real characters into fictional characterizations. Themes and metaphors grew naturally from these cultural roots and influenced all the artistic fiction in The Grapes of Wrath.

Unlike The Grapes of Wrath, the purpose of East of Eden was to trace Steinbeck's family history for his sons. "I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little.... I want them to know how it was..." (Novel

4) . It is a "Biblical story as a measure of ourselves" (104) .

"[This story] is the basis of all human neurosis...the total of the psychic troubles that can happen to a human" (104).

"We have a new kind of world in the Salinas Valley and our timeless principles must face a new set of facts and react to them" (146).

Steinbeck returns to the Salinas Valley for the setting of East of Eden. Since East of Eden was being written in 1951 in New York City and on Nantuckett Island thirteen years after

Steinbeck left California, Steinbeck went back to Salinas and

Monterey in January 1948 to do research. He traveled around the country "visiting scenes from the past and trying to steep himself in color" (Benson 609). He revisited scenes of his 104 childhood, "quietly and alone, in preparation for his novel"

(611). Going around the country he got reacquainted with trees and bushes that had significance to him. "He took long, leisurely walks around Pacific Grove and Salinas; he visited the old Hamilton ranch" (611). Also, he perused old issues of the Salinas newspaper going back to the turn of the century.

He walked around the area, talking to old friends of the family and "steeping himself in color" from the mountains and ranches he used to know. "It is a fascination to me to dig up all these old things and try to re-evaluate them in light of my greater age. Curious things come out...in my memory" (Novel 106-7).

Steinbeck's memories of events', however, were at odds with the newspaper reports. In the thirteen years, stories had circulated that Steinbeck had offended his parents as a child and in youth, as a California writer, and now as a former citizen in his hometown of Salinas. In his research, he found that Salinas had rejected him as a serious writer representing them. In Tortilla Flat. The Grapes of Wrath. In

Dubious Battle, and Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck had portrayed people who had lived in his hometown as vile, morally debased, lazy derelicts. But now the population and events and issues had changed in Salinas and Monterey. Unlike the Depression era of The Grapes of Wrath. Americans were prosperous in 1948 after World War II. The issues at this time were prosperity for Salinas, the threat of the nuclear bomb, and boredom in 105

American suburban life. "Survival" was not the theme; instead, to Steinbeck, the issues were the need to return to simple decency, the issue of the decay of values, individualism versus collectivism, and the national issue of selfishness, greed and materialism. . A new kind of world in the Salinas Valley faced Steinbeck with a new set of facts to react to.

The Salinas Valley that had given Steinbeck his creative images, language and spirit was so altered that the dissonance of the past and present marred his ability to look at the old

Salinas and California, and react to it anew in New York with a new vision, a new theme, or a new perspective. This inability to find a new vision and purpose affected his ability to tell his story in East of Eden. The accuracy of his facts from memory after thirteen years was questionable.

He had to record the Salinas that no longer existed. From the ocean front home, the lush green of vegetation, and the open plains of California, Steinbeck was now in an environment in

New York of asphalt, high-rise buildings, packed subways, crowded streets, howling traffic, noise and closed spaces of land. Even though all these subjects were available for

Steinbeck to write about, Steinbeck could not find a vision to react to them. In his separation from his California roots that had inspired his greatest works, he had no new vision nor could he find the language, images, impulse, motives, involvement, and perspective to write about the problems of 106

New York City. Thus, he turned back to his California environment for the setting and themes for East of Eden;

As he worked with the material for East of Eden, in the

Journal of a Novel he records that "the work is coming a little easier or maybe I am just getting used to it. And I am getting close to California" (57). "I [feel I am] coming back to the world I know in California.... I know this material.

I am in this book.... I intend to indulge every instinct I have" (53).

To lose his past in California and live in the present moment in New York City writing East of Eden required a change in Steinbeck. Whereas the community of persons in Salinas and

Monterey in 1938 had "fed the material" to Steinbeck earlier in his writing career, now this had to be replaced with memories of that past. Steinbeck couldn't go home to Salinas again "because home [had] ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory" (Astro, John Steinbeck and Ricketts 222) .

"Everything I have seen or heard or thought must go in and feel the necessity for release now" (Novel 131). "Turning away from the past to the present," Benson wrote, "was a constant concern to Steinbeck" (703), so East of Eden was like coming back to California but perceiving it differently at a different age in his life, in a different environment, and after thirteen years away from that environment. The "real" had to have a fictional adaptation of the real. Steinbeck had to rely on what he remembered and the truth of "what seemed to 107 be.11 Moreover, the struggle in East, of Eden was not that of the migrants in California, but the struggle of guilt, evil and good, and the power of choice for individuals.

Steinbeck's inability to meld the past experiences with his present experiences "[was due] to [his] being stuck in the rut of past experiences..." (Weisburg 42). His imagination could not make the transformation from one environment to the other with his artistic style. His writing for East of Eden became sentimental and moralistic.

The effect of New York City began when Steinbeck moved to

New York City for the first time in 1925 where he felt "the heart of the publishing industry beat most powerfully," and, therefore, he could sell his short stories. He hated New York city and called it "a thin, lonely hungry time with cockroaches and no job," and so he went back to California in

1926 (Timmerman, Dramatic 23). In Timmerman's opinion, "few places could have been more uncongenial to a young man from a temperate climate of the Salinas Valley. Instead of the sprawl of hills, he found the endless maze of buildings.

Instead of the warm sun, a steely cold. Instead of familiar faces, the averted glance of strangers" (23).

Arriving in New York city in 1925, Steinbeck describes his first glance from a porthole: "I saw the city, and it horrified me. There was something monstrous about it— the tall buildings looming to the sky and the lights shining through the falling snow. I crept ashore— frightened and cold 108 and with a touch of panic in my stomach" (23). "I was afraid to go out on the street— actually afraid of traffic— the noise. Afraid of the landlord and afraid of people" (24).

Timmerman believes that in 1926, "it is certain that during his time in New York he felt severed from his own roots. New York was an artificial environment to him then, foreign and foreboding. The artificiality affects his work as well. The shaping of his stories is uncertain and tentative.

At his best, Steinbeck revised boldly, adjusting sentences, slicing verbs, phrases and clauses not to his liking" (26).

He was an inexperienced writer at this time, trying to find his style.

In New York City, Steinbeck could not write his stories with "the background of the country I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much" (Novel 4). All his early stories, "Fingers of Cloud," "Adventures in Academy,"

"The Nail," "East Third Street," "The Nymph and Isobel," and

"The Days of Long Marsh" had been written of the people of his homeland rather than people of his imagination. New York City forced him into artificial themes, not the natural themes of

California. Something about New York City in 1925 when he first went there harbored in his mind to affect his writing from there when he returned to write East of Eden in 1951.

Living in New York City in 1951, however, Steinbeck claims, is like living in "a perfect city in which to work; there is so much energy in the air" (Fensch 48) . Metro living 109 is convenient. You can keep friends but not see them for months. "No one cares if you've written a book. The place is running over with people who write books" (48). "Once you've been here no other city is good enough" (61). Steinbeck was feeling "freed of his controversial past" (xii).

But the response to his writing in New York City was critical. Now he was no longer defending the bums, derelicts, drunks, and the poor migrants. Instead, Kazan relates, "he was living in a different world now. He'd pulled up his roots and replanted them in a new soil. Riding high, he was dressed like a man of the city, had a smarter wardrobe, even sported a cane on the street and he was spending weekends with men of equal importance at their country homes in Connecticut and

Bucks County" (785). He was associating with playwrighters, film directors, Broadway producers and Presidents. Timmerman claims that "...the location of settings and people in his personal experience was not reusable material" (37). He could not find the kind of people in New York he was once fond of.

They were people who worked for their bread "in the open air, on a background of fields and mountains" (Beach 327) .

Steinbeck's "aesthetic sense" was situated in these people who were strong, lusty, ready to fight, ready-to-make-love people.

Also, they were women nursing babies and people enjoying eating and sharing and helping each other. He liked brave men who would fight, take punishment, and risk their life with courage and cunning. 110

In New York, Steinbeck does not follow his great crusade for working people. He had been cut off "from these conduits of sympathy and knowledge on what a writer depends" (Benson

701) . Steinbeck looks back, and his history seems like "a durationless flash like an exploding star" ('Novel 11) . To recapture his past history in California in the environment of

New York, he begins his biography in East of Eden so that he returns to the sources of his artistic creativeness. The vision and impulse to write are grounded in that cultural environment.

A friend, Arthur Miller, thought Steinbeck suffered personally and artistically from living in an urban civilization when Steinbeck was not an urban man. Miller recalled that Steinbeck liked to think he was, but "John at heart was a real farmer who was born on the land" (Benson 701-

2). "The story of urban life," Benson writes, "[did] not appear to have been particularly suited to [Steinbeck's] talent" (97). Steinbeck's problem, Miller continues, was that there was no community that he could find "that would feed him, toward which he could react in a feeling way, rather than merely as an observer or a commentator" (701-2). Since he never found this community in New York, he was a foreigner in that city in 1951 as he began writing East of Eden.

Benson tries to answer the question, why did Steinbeck leave his own land? Didn't he change and his work suffer for it? The answer may be that times had changed; Salinas and Ill

Monterey had changed; Steinbeck had changed. Salinas Valley was not the same context, California was not the same place, and Steinbeck was not the same man. Steinbeck had cut away his roots and moved to a new area of- the United States. How does a writer who is a stranger begin to write again? The material for stories and novels was all around Steinbeck in

New York, but nothing engaged his interest for writing a long novel. Wyatt speculates that the decision to leave California may have been due to "the state's failure to right the wrongs exposed in the novel rThe Grapes of Wrathl" (151). He was no longer welcome in California. His labor of anger and love

"failed to redeem his native ground. He leaves a home he is unable to change" (151).

"Steinbeck's dislocation," Benson states, "was not only a problem of space and locale, it was. also a function of time.

In our society in our age, things change so rapidly that there is very little stability except in memory" (703). Steinbeck could not completely turn from his past memories. In fact, he

"could not leave the use of memory" between writing The Grapes of Wrath and writing East of Eden. But his past "dismantled his style" to respond to the present. The moment of "now" must always be in harmony with the past if the information and the interpretation now invokes the imagination to see a new creative way to intermesh past and present. Steinbeck wrote

Covici that past memories and nostalgia were "a disease of modern writing," a critical note of the past's value to 112

Steinbeck. Benson continues that "earlier in [Steinbeck's] life, themes came to him almost as an instinctive reaction to ongoing experience. Now, [in New York City] while he seemed.. .interested in everything, nothing seemed to touch him deeply enough to provoke extended fiction" (703). As Brian

St. Pierre wrote, "The soul is [each individual's] intelligence. [Steinbeck] drew his strength as an artist from his native soil, like Antaeus of Greek myth, he lost it when he left it" (Qtd. in Wyatt 9).

Finally, Benson concludes, Steinbeck's stories could not leave the use of memory. If he left the past and dismantled his style, Steinbeck would need to start all over. In a letter to Elizabeth Otis, September 17, 1954, Steinbeck began to believe that his technique "dictates how a story is to be written [and] also what story is to be written" (Benson 703).

When he turned away from earlier experiences, previous places and his habits of composition, Benson believes, Steinbeck thought he could sweep away the old writer and build the foundations of a new writer. But California, Timmerman remarks, "was the land that had birthed and nourished him, launched his career, and compelled so many stories" (Dramatic

265) . He could not disengage himself, even though he tried many genre to be the writer and the person he wanted to be.

"When he left California," Steinbeck's life-long friend,

Webster Street wrote, "coming back to this question of the soil, I was convinced while John was writing about the people and places he knew, he was writing very well; but when he left

California and started to make it up.. .he fell apart" (Webster and John Steinbeck; Reminiscence 41). Perhaps Steinbeck was like Grandpa in The Grapes of Wrath; "He died the minute you took 'im off the place'" (Grapes 160, Railsback 102).

Railsback believes that Steinbeck was "too rooted in the old land to adapt to the new, and his death [in writing]...[was] inevitable" (102). His great craftsmanship had been in such works as Of Mice and Men, a symbolic representation of a social condition, or Of Dubious Battlef an impartial, cold, but powerful analysis of the struggle between capital and labor, and The Grapes of Wrath, the theme, purpose, scope and language of an American classic. All these crafted pieces of writing included themes of naturalism, of people's dignity, of reverence for life. Steinbeck's transatlantic leap to New

York, says Astro, "robbed him of the natural idiom which characterized his best writing" (John Steinbeck and Ricketts

213) .

The American short story was in a "golden age" of literature during the 1930s. Steinbeck explains in "A Primer on the Thirties" what has made these times so ripe for short stories: "...the terrible, troubled, triumphant, surging

Thirties. I can't think of any decade in history when so much happened in so many directions. Violent change took place.

Our country was modeled, our lives bemolded, our Government rebuilt, forced to functions, duties, and responsibilities it 114 never had before and can never relinquish. The most rabid, hysterical Roosevelt-hater would not dare to suggest removing the reforms, the safeguards and the new concept that the

Government is responsible for all its citizens" (Timmerman, Dramatic 34).

The national and world events engaging Steinbeck's attention and compassion while writing The Grapes of Wrath were Industrialization, The Depression, The Populist Movement, and World War II rumblings. Tulane County, Bakersfield, San

Joaguin Valley and Central Valley of California bred violence, anti-intellectualism and vigilante action, which Steinbeck wrote about. In The Grapes of Wrath he recognized the revolution that was going on between capital and labor, and the inhumanity of Californians against their own fellow

Americans. Part of the problem was Industrialization that put farmers off their land because of the efficiency of motorized machinery. Secondly, the Dust Bowl destroyed farmers economically and they fled to "the land of milk and honey"—

California. Third, the Populist Movement in American history made Americans aware and sympathetic with the destiny of the working class people in the United States who had struggled without due compensation. Steinbeck's subject in The Grapes of Wrath raised social consciousness for working class people.

But the subject was so volatile in California that The Grapes of Wrath itself became a social, political and economic issue for Steinbeck, and he was labeled a radical. The subject of 115

The Grapes of Wrath extended the American conscience about social class structure and the dignity of laborers in a capitalistic system. But not everyone in the country shared

Steinbeck's reaction to the issues nor the solutions offered under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Steinbeck had many political enemies, Burgum contends, because he exposed the internal affairs of California and the desperate needs of a segment of society, and gave common recognition to the country's problems (283).

Steinbeck announces the war in Europe in his September 6,

1938, The Journals of Grapes entry: "Europe still tense.

Hitler waiting for heaven to speak. Maybe war, but I don't think so.... Germans are such nice people" (67). He begins to mention Hitler and the war agreements of the time in his

September 12, 1938, entry in the same journal. "Things get no more peaceful. Today Hitler is to make his war or peace speech. That may toss the world into a mess. Apparently the whole wold is jittery about it. All armies mobilized. It might be a shambles by tomorrow. And it might recede for a while. Can't tell" (70). On the 15th of September, 1938,

Chamberlain goes to see Hitler, Steinbeck records. "Double cross by England seems inevitable.... England is making every effort to avoid war" (71). "[The] war is closer (September

19, 1938). France and England are either selling out or being very clever" (73). The war is about to break out September

27, 1938: "I don't think it will" (77). The next day, 116

September 27, 1938, "Hitler has pulled in his stomach.... The force against him is too great...even for his craziness. I don't think it will come to war, and neither do many. But the preparation goes on and it will take only one word to start it. The Poles can probably do it if they get rough" (78) . On

September 29, 1938, he records, "Today is the big meeting in

Munich for the partition of the Czech republic" (79). When the war begins, Steinbeck's "book sales went right on" (106) as of October 16, 1939. The Grapes of Wrath was very popular in Europe.

In the aftermath section of The Journals of Grapes, on

July 20, 1940, Steinbeck believes that "...hysteria and fear of the coming war...but we aren't afraid any more. Some singular jump in the psyche. And it isn't that we have hardened. We are as soft and sentimental as always, but the war has become a fact and we accept it. The reasons are good-

-we want to preserve a little of what we have and are used to-

-all kinds of intellectual reasons, but the great basic reason is that we have accepted war and it will be our manner of life for the next while" (115). A year later, on September 29,

1940, Steinbeck is "worried about the Japanese situation....

It becomes very dangerous. May blow up any day" (121) .

Another concern for Steinbeck is the hysteria toward the

Japanese in California, and he feared a "witch hunt" and "the formulated and calculated oppression of aliens by men of power..." (DeMott, Working 178). On January 29, 1940, 117

Steinbeck wrote, "The world is tight and knotted" (126).

Steinbeck felt World War II was waiting for the United States. But he did not realize that the war would affect his own life in 1943 and 1944 when he is a reporter in the North

African campaign. Because of his perceived "radical" views in

The Grapes of Wrath, he was refused entry into the military service when authorities discovered he was filed in the FBI records under "communist." In place of military service he wrote Bombs Awav(1942) and Once There Was a War (1943) for the

Air Force, but they were period pieces with "archaic attitudes and romantic impulses." In fact, Gannell says, during the war it was impossible for Steinbeck to settle down to any sustained work except for the war effort (Fensch 40) . He became a war correspondent in Northern Africa and Italy, and returned in 1944 in a physical and mental malaise that halted any long piece of writing until 1951 when he began to write

East of Eden. The war shrouded his creativeness.

The pressure to write another major work between 1939 and

1952 became an expectation Steinbeck held for himself perhaps out of the thwarted creative malaise inflicted by the aftermath of The Grapes of Wrath and after World War II. When he found Elaine Scott and married her in 1948, he found new life forces that gave him creative energy and excitement.

"The pictures have come to me out of some hugeness and sometimes they have startled me (Novel 24-25) ... [in this] time of great joy" (132). "I feel [creative] juices rushing toward 118 an outlet as semen gathers from the four quarters of a man and fights its way into the vesicle" (10) . "Oh, I am so happy— so happy. I think I have never been so happy in my life" (13).

Kazan recalls that "[Elaine] raised his spirits, restored some of his confidence, made him feel like what he was, an exceptional man with an exceptional talent" (785). But,

Timmerman concludes, "for a writer whose work was so closely allied with personal experience, feeling and temperament.. .the artistic difficulties [Steinbeck experienced between 1939 and

1952] had to be linked to personal ones" (262).

To overcome personal and creative difficulties, Steinbeck tells his story of the Salinas Valley in East of Eden. In the

Journal of a Novel many cultural references are made that indicate a social and cultural context behind this biographical, but fictional, novel. The Trasks are the people he knew from a fisherman family in Salinas. "I know them so thoroughly and I have gone into their ancestry. I know their moods and their impulses perhaps better than I know my own"

(Novel 16). "I wonder whether you have been getting a sense of the men as people in this book.. .because in this book people dominate the land, gradually. They strip it and rob it. Then they are forced to try to replace what they have taken out" (39) . As Steinbeck begins to introduce the

Hamiltons to Adam Trask, he "[puts] down the Salinas Valley from a country man's viewpoint. To show the fine hopes of the people and their ingeniousness. To develop the kind of mind Samuel had and to indoctrinate Adam with the flavor of the

Valley.... Relationships in a country are the most revealing part of it" (63). He remembers his grandfather, "...the aliveness of his brain, his mechanical ability and the curious poetry he put about him. I remember the lilt in his speech...[his] fine figures of speech because I see him surrounded with all manner of birds and beasts and qualities of light. I wanted to set down what the soil was like" (64).

To his sons, Steinbeck wants "to describe the Salinas Valley in detail but in sparse detail so that there can be a real feeling of it...smells and color" (7). He has a personal involvement in this book because he must "put in all the lore and anecdote...family stories amount to folklore.... It is time I wrote these things, else they will be gone because no one else will ever do them except me" (9) . The nostalgia, the longing for pleasures, experiences, or events belonging to the past soothe and excite Steinbeck in this book. He has come a full circle in his cultural beginnings in the Salinas Valley to a return to this same valley for inspiration.

Less is recorded in the Journal of a Novel about world affairs. On several occasions Steinbeck mentions parades for

MacArthur. He comments on refrigeration as the reason for the great change in the Valley. "And out of that Valley came a large part of the pioneering which has changed the food supply of the world" (Novel 152), which is more a commentary on past history in the journal rather than of the present. He writes a commentary for the Voice of America about art under a dictatorship: "Of course I feel that any imposed

[institution?], even conditioned, is bad and not conducive to the development of the two great foundations of art and science: curiosity and criticism. If you stifle these two, how can any art emerge?" (14). The Kefauver Committee hearings and the Schuman Plan are mentioned. He predicts that

"it has always been my contention that political world govt, will only follow economic world govt, and that laggingly. The

United Nations tries to reverse the process and I do not believe that is possible" (32). More often in the journal,

Steinbeck talks of people with whom he has contact, such as

Carl Sandburg, Adali Stevenson, Arthur Miller, and friends and family. Family dynamics have become more crucial in his interactions with others and his relationship to his sons and his wife and step-daughter. But the world and national news are not affecting the course of his book nor his life compared to the impact that cultural history had upon The Grapes of

Wrath.

Writing East of Eden was a triumph for Steinbeck in making him whole again as a writer of extended novels from the roots of his culture. Before writing East of Eden. Steinbeck attempted to capture the past by writing Cannery Row (1945),

The Wayward Bus and The Pearl (1947), and Burning Bright

(1950), but all of these were from his familiar cultural roots, renewing his creative ability by returning to his cultural roots. Even writing East of Eden was "saving his soul and his sanity" in his California cultural environment, healing his pangs of creative tragedy, and in it he found victory in a "climb in spiritual, creative power to write again," (Benson 697) imbedded in the magnetic pull of his past cultural context. The environment of New York was not the center of his creativity. CHAPTER VI

THE ADULT DEVELOPMENTAL CONTEXT

Steinbeck's journals give evidence of a theory of adult development as an underlying process influencing his writing at the age of thirty-six in 1938 and the age of forty-nine in

1951. In this mid-life transition, Jung suggests, "internal psychic forces [initiate] developmental changes in the adult personality" (Qtd. in Rodgers 485). George Vaillant, in a thirty-year longitudinal study, found that men in mid-life begin reflecting on their own mortality, experience instinctual reawakenings (especially sexual intimacy), become more honest and able to acknowledge feelings and needs, make career adjustments or changes, give more service to society and people in their lives, and resolve a difficult marriage or find a new partner in marriage (Adaptation to Life 1977) . The accumulated experiences of life undergo a new phase of challenge and self-insight. Farrell and Rosenberg state that

"adult development can be seen as an episodic heightening and diminishing of self-consciousness.... A theory of human development must take into account both the socio-historical environment...and the internal psychological and biological processes on the other" (Men 46). 123

In the aftermath of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck, in his forties, is thrust into thirteen years of crisis in his personal and creative life. First, during his months of writing The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck "found difficulty in getting out of [his] book long enough to be anything but dull"

[Journals of Grapes 24). "I am in the suck hole of work again. Immersed in it" (39). After the second month of writing The Grapes of Wrath, on July 18, 1938, he realizes he has a "terrible feeling of lostness and loneliness" (45). In his isolation, even Carol is an interruption. He had already halted social involvement; he refused requests to speak publicly, to have photographs taken, to go to public meetings, and to answer letters from the public. His isolation in his book brought a psychological separation from Carol and a final, permanent isolation from Carol which filled him with guilt and depression.

Secondly, after a year without writing, the aftermath section of The Journals of Grapes (1939-1941) suggests "a prelude to work." "The words grow stiff and unruly...the sounds are rough. These notes and comments loosen up the language and make me more able to write [again]" (107) . If he could write another novel, "it would break this damned posterity thing that is being put on me by my contemporaries"

(107). Ferrell believes Steinbeck felt constrained by the expectations of others, his obligation to them, and his concern for his already established identity (John Steinbeck 124

30) . In addition, Steinbeck becomes skeptical about his ability to write, even in the past: "Of Mice and Men will soon be released as a picture. I don't know whether it is any good or not but I rather suspect it is" (Journals of Grapes 108).

Through this doubt in the aftermath .of writing The Grapes of

Wrath, however, Steinbeck confesses that "there is the grave and greater difficulty in myself...the crash within me...the feeling of finish, the destruction of all form" (110).

In such a mid-life transition, longstanding conflicts, unfulfilled aspirations, and self-doubt tend to open up a consciousness of self. "It is so long since I have done any disciplined thinking" (110). "I couldn't sleep last night, but the bottom is psychic despair and then [I] came out of it in a feeling of glory and purged" (111). "Why do I go back to

[memories]? Can it be there is something I have not dug out of it?.... Is my work over for a time, or for all time? It might be. I have no longer the great sense of truth. Yet there is imminence. I write easily now but I do not think easily.... I've fulfilled little promises. What can I do to large ones, if I want to?....I am still honest, and still not too afraid.... [But] I am getting so ugly these days that I shock myself" (113). In essence, Steinbeck is ego conscious and is looking at his creativity and asking, do I have talent left? Is this aftermath only a sabbatical from writing? Or is my creative work in writing over for all time? In the

Journal of a Novel. Steinbeck laments that "I think there is 125 only one book to a man" (5) . Perhaps he was referring to The

Grapes of Wrath as his greatest achievement and the highest point he will reach in his career as a writer.

Steinbeck's restlessness to write another novel after The

Grapes of Wrath is manifest in mood swings. One moment he is

"disappointed" and the day is "lonely" and "the world is crazy." But the next sentence in the same entry is that "my head is good still and I can still write.... Oh! Lord, how good this paper feels under this pen.... Here is a strange thing.... You start out putting words down and there are three things— you, the pen, and the page. Then gradually the three things merge until they are all one and you feel about the page as you do about your arm. Only you love it more than you love your arm" (Journals of Grapes 121). But Steinbeck's mind swings back from this elation to, "Some day I will be all alone and lonely— either dead and alone or alive and alone, and what will I do then? Then those things I have now and do not know will become so desperately dear that they will be aches.... There will be no way to cure these aches, no way.

In that coldness nothing will come. Things are leaving me now because they came too fast— too many of them— and being unable to receive them I threw them out and soon they will not come any more. This process is called life and living.... The gray birds of loneliness [are] hopping about.... But in a will toward holiness one goes on— and curiously— the holiness is often evil in a way, mischievous in a way, sometimes 126 destructive.... If only this winter, were a calm sweet time"

(121-122).

Such mood swings are a response to the chaos inside

Steinbeck during these mid-life years. He is experiencing an instinctive awakening in himself, and at the same time, an instinctive conflict within himself and with the people close to him. He is struggling to define, understand, and alter himself, his role as a writer, his relationships with others, and his values. Instinctively, the feel of the pen on paper is a longing for a return to creative writing. This intense period of awakening is filled with suffering, confusion, guilt and disappointment as he is trying to. find himself as a person and as a writer. His drama God in the Pines "was no good" and his film Zapata in Mexico "isn't anything I am going to be very proud of..." (124). And in personal matters, he is leaving Carol after eleven years of marriage, to have a romantic affair with Gwyn. "I must be sure to choose which is love and which sorriness. I'm not a very good person.

Sometimes generous and good and kind and other times mean and short" (123). His evaluation of himself and his writing are in disarray.

On January 16, 1940, two years after he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck experiences "a terrible feeling of change in the air. Don't know what it can be. Beautiful days, lazy days, but storm clouds all about. My sleep is over-shadowed with pain of apprehension as though some frightful thing is 127 imminent. And I don't know what it can be. Perhaps nothing"

(114). Through emotional turmoil and a sense of loneliness and stagnation, Steinbeck anticipates a change. Perhaps the change will work against the existing life structures he has been acguainted with, so he has a "frightful" anticipation of change and of the unknown.

As an assertive writer speaking in The Grapes of Wrath, he again asserts his individuality in these mid-life years between The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. In The Grapes of Wrath he had an intense attachment to the world and felt a part of the context of his world, but afterwards in the years until East of Eden he becomes more separated from the world, independent and introspective in generating personal values that were his own. He never believed in collaboration. "When I think how I am not following orders to do what people think

I should do, I am scared, but then I think that it is my work, if anything, that will be remembered. I can't work for other people. I don't do good work with their ideas" (120).

When Steinbeck starts writing God in the Pipes, in the aftermath of writing The Grapes of Wrath, he has the fear of beginning, the same "terror that I could not bring it off. Of course, the main difficulty lies in the fact that between books I soften up both in literary and intellectual discipline, so that with each beginning I must fight soft muscles in the head and in the technique. Naturally, I am frightened" (117). "I'm afraid of good luck more than bad" 128

(118). But he has "a good feeling" as he begins to write again, and finds that habit in writing has more force than will power or inspiration for him, so he begins "the habit pattern of a certain number of words...down every day whether they are any good or not" (118-119). Steinbeck returns to his old habit of maintaining "rhythm" in life and rhythm in words going down on paper.

A change begins. "The pen writes a little thickly. I hope this isn't a psychic pen" (126). As he sits by a warm fire burning in the fireplace, he admits, "I haven't been or felt so quiet in years" (127). But by the end of the month, on January 30, 1941, he is "ill in the mind," feels beaten, lost and lonesome. "I think I'll leave this book now" (128).

Thus, between 1941 and 1951 an era of journal writing ends.

Steinbeck divorces Carol and marries Gwyn. He has two children, goes overseas during World War II, Gwyn divorces him and he marries Elaine.

One of the personal changes Steinbeck makes after the war is his attempt to truly adjust to the New York City social milieu. Gwyn had made him a more social creature. He had liked gatherings, but those where he knew no one. His circle of friends grew wider because of his fame. "...hardly a prominent figure from the Hollywood or New York scene of that day...didn't claim some acquaintance with him" through his films, dramas and novels (Benson 545-6). But, as in the past, he was more comfortable around more common people of his 129 equal. Around his artistic peers he was awkward and shy.

Under social pressure in the company of superiors, he was a

"bumbling braggart" (545), trying to establish his equality.

"I dislike thinking of myself as different or set aside or separate from other people" (Novel 38). In a later entry in the Journal of a Novel, when Steinbeck was married to Elaine, he went to a South Pacific party with Elaine and had a good time, but he felt a sadness

because very deep in me I can never be a part of such things and I guess I have always wanted to.... I guess I am nearly at the age to be resigned about not being the things I guess as a child I wanted to be.... I remember the sorrow at not being a part of things from very early in my childhood. Maybe from my very first birthday party (53) .

But Elaine made him comfortable in social gatherings. By

1954 this shy, non-social person enjoyed publicity and honor as a writer. He liked the treatment of the privileged. "For a man who had always hated and avoided public occasions, he was coming to enjoy them more and more.... [He] liked fancy dress and ceremony" (Benson 756). He needed appreciation as a public person in his older years. Kazan believes that when

Steinbeck left northern California, "[he] looked a fool in New

York theater society..." (273). In addition, Kazan comments,

"They say you can take the man out of the country, but you can't take the country out of a man. John was a native son, a dirt-road boy, and still a surprisingly naive person" (785) .

Feeling out of place at a New York party was his breaking away from the life he had known in his past in California. 130

After the war and his separation from Gwyn, Steinbeck went to Salinas and Pacific Grove in December 1944 until

January 1945. Benson describes this time: "In order to try and pick up his life as it had been- before, Steinbeck began taking long walks through the drizzle of the gray Monterey winter. He tracked the Bay, up and down, watched the seagulls, inspected the boats, and occasionally stopped for a cup of coffee or a beer along the way. He made it his habit, as in the old days, to stop by the lab...and he and Ed spent a lot of time together, drinking and talking" (560). "These dark moods, occasional shenanigans, heavy drinking and rages against friends suggest...a fundamental discontent, and his frequent moves, a quest for some form of grace...to live harmoniously with himself" (558-559).

In these early years of his forties, Steinbeck considers how to achieve wholeness. Erickson says that such developmental changes are normative, age-graded, organismic and internal; they unfold in stages at assigned times (Rodgers

487). At this time in Steinbeck's life, the accumulation of experiences— biological, psychological and social— from demands of the outside world encourage Steinbeck to resolve his inner life conflicts. The tremendous struggle Steinbeck has had with the external world, his desire to be more creative, and his heightened awareness of mortality, all present a "developmental crisis" in which Steinbeck evaluates what he has done in his life. He asks some of the same 131 questions he had asked in The Journals of Grapes: What are my greatest talents and have I used them? Have I achieved my dreams or is there more? Can I live with my current desires, values and talents or must I break some long-held assumptions and beliefs about myself and the world? Steinbeck has the chance to re-appraise life and what he has done with it.

In The Seasons of Man's Life. Levinson suggests the course of a novelist's thinking:

A man who has won a place for himself during his thirties as a serious novelist is no longer content merely to write another novel. As he comes to the end of Becoming One's Own Man, he wants the next novel to be special: to win the Pulitzer Prize, to be acclaimed by the critics or general public, to mark him as the best contemporary writer of his genre...and a fitting successor to the earlier giants... (201-202).

Also, a qualified success at this time is subjectively not much better than a gross failure. It is likely to evoke a man's worst fears: that he will never realize his potential, or— the most terrifying thought of all— that the potential was never really there. All right, he has proven himself as a competent writer of books...[and] that is not enough. His original Dream was to be much more. What will he leave for posterity? What place will he have in the history of the novel? Whereas earlier his main aim was to establish himself as a novelist, he now has a more formed identity and is concerned with the value of his 'body of work' as a whole (202).

Men in Mid-Life Transition realize that life isn't eternal happiness. ... the hero is a youth who must die.... A man must begin to grieve and accept the symbolic death of the youthful hero within himself. He will gradually discover which of the heroic qualities he can keep, which new qualities he can discover and develop in himself, and how he might be a hero of a different kind in the context of middle adulthood (215). The worst feeling of all is to contemplate long years of meaningless existence without youthful passions, creative efforts, or social contribution (217).

Steinbeck's anxiety is that he will not be able to make his 132 future better than his past in writing.

In 1948, the combination of the death of an influential friend of eighteen years, Ed Ricketts, and Steinbeck's divorce from Gwyn, cause a "severe psychological crisis" in

Steinbeck's life in his forties. Astro contends that "no analysis of Steinbeck's world view, his philosophy of life, can proceed without a careful study of the life, work and ideas of the remarkable human being [Ed Ricketts] who was

Steinbeck's closest personal and intellectual companion for nearly two decades (Steinbeck and Ricketts 4). According to

Benson, "almost all the books considered by critics to be

Steinbeck's major works were written during the time of their friendship.... His ideas, his criticism, his inspiration were responsible for Steinbeck's success" (183).

Steinbeck and Ricketts had explored the Sea of Cortez together in 1941 as a marine biologist and writer, and henceforth, they became important and intellectual collaborators (DeMott, Working 143). "Doc" in Cannery Row

(1945) and in Sweet Thursday (1954) was based on the personality, ideas and character of Ricketts. Between

December 1944 and January 1945, Steinbeck went back to Monterey and spent time with Ricketts, drinking and talking, to work and help Steinbeck pick up his life after The Grapes of Wrath, the war and a second pending divorce. During this time, Steinbeck felt a heavy burden of dissatisfaction that the circumstances in his life couldn't change. He went to 133

Ricketts to quiet his discontent and to direct his quest for some form of grace for the remainder of his life. When

Ricketts was killed in an auto accident, Benson comments,

"throughout his remaining years, [Steinbeck] gave nearly as much attention to the search for a way to live as he did to the continuing search for a way to write, and it may be that his writing suffered for it" (558-559).

Ricketts' influence upon Steinbeck's creative development ended when he symbolically destroyed Doc in his drama, Sweet

Thursday. But to destroy Doc was symbolic of a destruction of

Steinbeck's creative power. The world was sadly altered in the destiny of "a good man." The portrayals of Doc (Ricketts) thus represent the end of a definite stage in Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck had written for a Ricketts' audience "with his artistic conscience," but when Ricketts was gone,

Steinbeck's audience changed. The loss of Ricketts was a break in an intellectual companionship (Lisca, Wide World 291) that had fostered Steinbeck's cognitive and creative development in writing, and may have been a psychological force contributing to the decline of Steinbeck's creativeness.

The impact of these two events, Ricketts' death and

Steinbeck's divorce from Gwyn (October 18, 1948), Benson writes, set Steinbeck "adrift about to enter a long crisis of the soul. He had had such crises before, but never as severe as this one" (617). He "seemed to have lost his will to write, and that frightened him" (624). A great deal of time 134 elapsed without Steinbeck accomplishing anything to speak of, and that worried him (625) . "The destruction of Doc symbolizes a new period in Steinbeck's art..." (Lisca, Wide

World 282). According to Lisca, the destruction of Doc

(Ricketts) in Steinbeck's writing removed the mask Steinbeck had worn that was Ricketts. Now he became his own writer by his own merits and strength. Steinbeck also modified his mask for present day living with a freedom to write about subjects that Ricketts hadn't approved of. Lastly, the violence inflicted on the figure of Doc was Steinbeck's violence toward

Ricketts in the lonesome separation required for Steinbeck to find himself. All this mid-life transition was a normal expectation of maturity through time for Steinbeck.

In the aftermath of The Grapes of Wrath in The Journals of Grapes, Steinbeck eludes to "the present world of cruelty and fierceness of expectancy and greed..." (123). But, in the

Journal of a Novel, when he looks at "how one with such benevolence as I can have [at the same time] layer on layer, a callous cruelty, capable of almost anything, of death, and hurt— an implacable cruelty needing only a direction as the benevolence does" (11), he sees his own benevolence and cruelty. In short pieces of writing, he projects his perspective of the cruelty, decay, greed, and materialism in the United States at this time. Steinbeck has found a different perspective at a different time in life. In his increasing pessimism in the 1940s, Steinbeck finds a moral 135 failure in the nation. In Steinbeck's words, "values had been replaced by a rage of things; the bank vault had become the modern Bible; the aim of the church...had become power over humanity" (Benson 276-277) . The simple times Steinbeck recalls from earlier years in his life, he remembers as

"simple and sweet," but now, as he looks at it in the 1940s, it was full of "anguish and turmoil." Out of a deep sense of anguish, his perspective has changed in mid-life. He has clouded his life with the "self destruction" of alcohol and quick relationships; he is dwelling on the cruelties of divorce and abandoning his sons; he feels a failure as a father though he had genuine love and concern for his sons; and he is struggling personally and creatively through a turbulence in his mid-life.

In these mid-life years, Steinbeck is responding to an insensitive society as he sees it, a "mechanistic civilization." He is observing his world "with such sullenness and real despair." But he writes, "the only light we have is the light we create for ourselves by our courage, compassion, and love" (249-250) . With this light he begins to build the person he becomes in the Journal of a Novel.

The attachment Steinbeck kept for the Salinas Valley as the setting for so many of his novels and short stories early in his writing career, was this picturesque, lush green, fertile valley. As Steinbeck remains in his dark moods in the

1940s until 1951, his perception of Salinas Valley changes. 136

Instead of the bright valley of light, his view in a short story, "Always Something to do in Salinas," points out the darkness of Salinas, like the darkness in Steinbeck's life in mid-life. This short story is a "warm piece of nostalgia" that Timmerman examines for the gray, brooding, decaying references to blackness in Steinbeck's later years.

Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley, cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains...were beautiful, but Salinas was not.... I wonder whether all towns have the blackness— the feeling of violence just below the surface.... It was a blackness that seemed to rise out of the swamps, a kind of whispered brooding that never came into the open— a subsurface violence that bubbled silently like the decaying vegetation under the black water of the Rule Swamps (266-267). In 1951, "East of Eden." according to DeMott, "announced a marked change in Steinbeck's fictional vision, technique and temperament" (A Great Black Book 43) . In it he found an open, expressive release in his writing, after his marriage to

Elaine Scott. He found the power to free himself of past personal conditioning and experiences. Benson records that he learned to like himself enough "to project a possible version of himself based on what he actually was as well as what he would wish to be or become" (830). Also, he had an insatiable need to write to redeem himself in the literary world because he still had expectations for himself (665) . Finally, writing

East of Eden was like "he engaged his soul in a resolution of his life" (701). "The light shines on me..." Steinbeck writes

(Novel 70). In East of Eden, states French, Steinbeck abandoned his earlier naturalistic writing and his "phalanx theory" of individuals influenced by groups in society, and strove to create dramas of consciousness (Steinbeck. Preface). He began to write in a particular fashion "clothed in parables," allegory, fantasy and history, returning to his earliest themes in Cup of Gold. As Timmerman observes, "The [Salinas]

Valley [in East of Edenl contains [an] interplay of light and shadow, a geographically symbolized good and evil" in East of

Eden that intrigued Steinbeck for years (48). He abandoned his "phalanx theory" of the effects of mob psychology on individuals, he abandoned the common working class causes, and he abandoned his "aloofness" as an author in his books, but he sought to capture "the dogmatic or didactic intrusions" allowed to an author. Steinbeck was not interested or concerned "with creating underdogs," French claims (Steinbeck

44) , and he was no longer content to be the chronicler of

Depression-era subjects," says DeMott (Working 19). He was interested, however, states French, in "an afterlife or mortality in society and a heightened consciousness and responsibility for one's own actions" (Steinbeck 142).

Steinbeck was "seeing himself" in East of Eden, but he became moralistic and sentimental and in so doing, he was writing his own "literary obituary."

The Journal of a Novel. Owens believes, is Steinbeck's experiment with creating a "narrator-controlled world" (73). 138

"His focus turned toward the social role and ethical dilemmas

of a single person" (Steinbeck and Wallsten 636-637). In it,

as a lonely individual, he strives to find himself and to

survive. Therefore, East of Eden is as much a study of the

mind of the author as a biography. It could not have been

written earlier than 1951 because Steinbeck had not gone

through the chaos of the years between 1938 and 1951. This

novel came out of a need for Steinbeck to write another long

novel, and the need to explain his life.

Steinbeck, a man implying a developmental timetable of

thought to his writing, was passing through the natural age-

graded period of life. The turbulence of the mid-life years

had made him more perceptive. According to Benson, Steinbeck

now sensed implications of relationships and conditions of

people. He felt "bursts of feeling and insight" (181). In

addition, East of Eden was more a "collection of scenes and

sketches" rather than "cause-effect patterns of events, climax

and resolution" (181). Steinbeck made his own interpretations

now of "what is..., commenting on meaning and emotion of what

he saw" (505); his central characters are seen "through the

eyes of those around them" (202). Steinbeck depends on the

reader to "subliminally" experience emotion, not be critical

in an intellectual analysis of the story.

The inward pondering recorded in the Journal of a Novel

provides evidence that forces outside the mind of the writer were engaged in the process of writing. 139

Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel. Lisca believes, is the painful record of a man seeing the sources of his artistic life drying up, hanging on in desperation to any straw that can provide the illusion of continued vitality, immersing himself in the very physical process of writing as if that might rekindle the vital flame, knowing that without that flame the rest was not worthwhile, thinking much of death... (Steinbeck and Nature 173).

But at the same time, in the Journal of a Novel, almost in a resolution of a mature life, Steinbeck writes, "I can think of no pleasanter way to spend the rest of my life than in this house, with these people, and at this drafting board" (14).

Steinbeck announced in the Journal of a Novel. "I want to write this book as though it were my last book" (8). Compare this with The Journals of Grapes: "It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted" (25). The "best book" and the "last book" are announcements of how Steinbeck views his writing career differently from 1938 to 1951. In these thirteen years between The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, he has written The Moon is Down (1942) , Cannery Row (1945),

The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), and Burning Bright

(1950), but none of these were the "great book" Steinbeck conceived of writing. At the age of forty-nine in 1951, he steadily, forcefully, slowly approaches writing that book,

East of Eden, that may reaffirm him as the writer he wants to be.

As a writer and a man, Steinbeck comments in both journals about aging. As a writer while writing The Grapes of

Wrath, Steinbeck is a young, optimistic writer of thirty-six 140

years of age. "I feel very strong to do it" (Journals of

Grapes). But I'm afraid of this book, really afraid" (59).

"... there is this frightful fear that I won11 be able to do

it..." (61-62). "A slightly less frantic outlook would make

some difference" (53). The "terrible immediacy, an obsessive urgency" in this intense "nervous," "battered," "wild,"

"crazy," "jumpy," "sick," "tired," "frightened," "anxious," panicky time within a book is a writer's desperation early in

life to write a masterpiece. Steinbeck wants success in the

literary world. As early as July 11, 1938, he writes that

"once the first draft is done, I will be all right because

someone could read it even if I passed out of the picture"

(41). "...if I ever finish, it will be some kind of triumph"

(43). "If I get this book done it will be remarkable" (51).

And then he says, "This success will ruin me as sure as hell"

(56) , as if he is anticipating success. "This is probably the high point of my life if I only knew it" (60).

As a man when younger, Steinbeck says, "Maybe I couldn't have stood myself as I am when I was younger and so I had to make all the plans about changing..." (Benson 607). "This is

one of the comforting things about the middle ages I am in....

I could promise to reform and now I know I'm just never going to do it..." (607). Steinbeck acknowledges that when he was younger, he was intolerable and needed to change, but now he has failed to change to be some other way or to try something new. "Perhaps what I am fighting is simple age and a low- 141 burning fire.... I can enforce a demand if I have one strong enough" (Journal of King Arthur 326). But he could not find

a vision strong enough. Ferrell says that "the older John grew...the more deeply he was drawn to the past" (John

Steinbeck 20). Fensch claims that as Steinbeck "grew older, his perspectives changed" (xiii). According to Steinbeck,

"There was a time when I didn't think I had any limitations either qualitative or quantitative. I don't know what 1 think now..." (Novel 98) . He feels limitations with himself and his creative ability.

In Steinbeck's quest for immortality, his characters in

East of Eden "do not emerge through story or dialogue" as the custom had been, but by Steinbeck's "modern fashionable method": "Using my method which is neither new nor old-

fashioned, I can tell everything and even say what I think about the character" (Novel 43) . With this inventive approach for Steinbeck in the 1950s, his characters become

"identifications" of himself, especially Samuel Hamilton, Adam

Trask, and Lee. Steinbeck remarks, "I am glad that I can use the oldest story in the world (Genesis, the story of Cain and

Abel in the Bible) to be the design of the newest story. The lack of change in the world is the thing which astonishes me.

So I am going to let these three men go over the old story and illuminate it, each one out of his own experience" (104).

First, recorded in the Journal of a Novel. "I want Samuel to become a kind of huge figure of folklore" (111) . I want 142 him "to go out with wonder and interest,.. .not destroyed"

(115), and "Samuel I am going to try to make into one of those pillars of fire whom little and frightened men are guided through the darkness" (115) . "I want Sam Hamilton to be remembered with pleasure, not thought of sadly" (148). I must

"show...Samuel in a kind of golden light, the way such a man should be remembered" (109). Steinbeck admired all the qualities his grandfather possessed, and so he made all of them admirable for a man. All these perfect images are an

identification of Steinbeck and how he wants to be remembered.

In addition, Steinbeck's grandfather, Samuel Hamilton , is the image of the "macho" man, the ideal man of the

frontier. Steinbeck, like Samuel, was a "hearty," well-built man with a macho, sexy physique. Samuel had "good looks and charm and gaiety. It is hard to imagine that any country

Irish girl refused him" (Steinbeck, East 9). Steinbeck, too, always wanted to be attractive to women and "boasted about his conquests" in whorehouses (Benson 89) . At Stanford University

in his college years, he "...concentrated on 'girls' whose needs were more physical than social" (51) . Later in life,

"his sexual adventures soothed an ego bruised by earlier rejections" (52).

When Samuel came to the Salinas Valley, he was "full-blown and hearty, full of inventions and' energy.. .a big man but delicate in a way" (Steinbeck, East 9) . "His hands were clever. He was a good blacksmith and carpenter and 143

woodcarver.. .an [improviser]... [but with no] talent for making

money.... Samuel barely made wages all his life" (10).

Steinbeck, too, was a clever carpenter and woodcarver like his

grandfather and barely made wages for half of his life.

Samuel was a man of love, true to one woman. Likewise,

Steinbeck was a man who married one woman at a time. Samuel had no equal in soothing hysteria with "the sweetness of his tongue and the tenderness of his soul" (12) . His deep rich voice was a song, "in the cadence of his speech" (12).

Hearing recordings of Steinbeck reading his own short stories at the Salinas Library, Salinas, California, the voice of

Steinbeck sounds like the possible voice of Samuel.

Steinbeck, like Samuel, had love and tenderness in his sensibilities.

The portrayal of Lee is the second identification

Steinbeck makes with his characters in East of Eden. Lee is necessary, Steinbeck writes in the Journal of a Novel, because the story needs "his eyes and his criticism which [are] more detached than mine" (73) . Lee is Steinbeck speaking, however, the philosopher, a gentle and thoughtful man who expounds the theory of "Thou mayest," the moral freedom of individual choice. Lee says, "Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing" (Steinbeck, East

308). "The human is the only guilty animal" (311). "Else we would long ago have wiped out guilt, and the world would not be filled with sad, punished people" (308). "Couldn't a world 144

be build around accepted truth? Couldn't some pains and

insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?" (311). "I

think this is the best-known story in the world because it is

everybody's story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul" (310). Steinbeck is speaking through Lee.

The third character Steinbeck finds identity with is Adam

Trask.

Young Adam was always an obedient child. Something in him shrank from violence, from contention, from the silent shrieking tensions that can rip at a house. He contributed to the quiet he wished for by offering no violence, no contention, and to do this he had to retire into secretness, since there is some violence in everyone. He covered his life with a veil of vagueness, while behind his quiet eyes a rich full life went on. This did not protect him from assault but it allowed him an immunity (22).

Adam was "not competitive"; his "silent pleasures" were talking to "a tree or a pheasant in flight" (23). Later in

East of Eden. Adam is the father of two sons like Tom and John

in Steinbeck's family, and he is married to a vengeful wife,

in the image of Gwyn.

In East of Eden. Steinbeck was able to release his anger

for Gwyn in the character of Cathy (Kate) Ames, Adam's wife.

She had the "hatred look out of her eyes," the "stony, expressionless" look on her face, and the "cold interest" she had in her newly born twins as she said to Adam, "Throw them in one of your wells" (232) , whereupon she got up out of bed, shot Adam, and shut the door behind her as she walked out of the house. Cathy (Gwyn) was the "wicked mother image" throughout the book. Described in the Journal of a Novel. 145

Cathy is a monster, a hustler, a whore. "If one can be born with a twisted and deformed face or body, one can surely also come into the world with a malformed soul" (Novel 41). "She

is a fascinating and horrible person to me" (44). "Cathy has great power over people because she has simplified their weaknesses and has no feeling about their strengths and goodnesses" (44). "You will wonder why Cathy married Adam"

(59), just as Steinbeck looks back and wonders about his own marriage to Gwyn. "Kate (Cathy) is so frightening. She has no conscience" (96). She is without emotion and lacks "human reactions" (60). Steinbeck confesses that one purpose in East of Eden is to build Cathy up but show her weaknesses.

Steinbeck seems to receive therapy in releasing his deep anger and frustration toward Gwyn in this book. Gwyn had "stripped him of his will, his confidence, his pride and his sense of...manhood; he had felt mean, and low, and was filled with self-disgust and hopelessness," Benson says (690).

Interestingly, the character of Abra in East of Eden is an identification with Elaine. Abra is transformed into this redeeming, positive, optimistic instrument in the story.

Steinbeck represents her as a strong female with the

"principles of good." She is an effective human being with wisdom and sweetness in her expression, and loveliness, courage and strength in her wisdom. This parallels

Steinbeck's "unbelievable, incredible" love for Elaine (Novel

13). "...luck is getting better. And sure enough I have 146

Elaine and what better luck could there be” (16).

Three women in Steinbeck's mid-life years between the

ages of thirty-six in 1938 and forty-nine in 1951 culminated

in "the capacity of having adult peer relationships with women" (Levinson 109). The components of such a relationship,

according to Levinson, are affection, sexuality, emotional

intimacy, dependency, nurturing, romantic love, friendship,

collaboration, respect, admiration and enduring commitment.

In each "special woman" love relationship, Steinbeck developed

different components. For example, in his first relationship with Carol, friendship and collaborative respect and

admiration were some of the main components. Carol was the "special woman" who was a true mentor:

Her special equality [lay] in her connection to the young man's Dream. She [facilitated] his entry into the adult world and his pursuit of the Dream [in Steinbeck's case, writing, especially writing The Grapes of Wrath1. She does this partly through her own actual efforts as teacher, guide,...critic, sponsor. At a deeper psychological level she...generates and supports his heroic strivings. The special woman helps him to shape and live out the Dream (109).

Like a "collaborative writer" or critic, Carol helped

Steinbeck in his early career at writing, "to outgrow the

little boy in himself and to become a more autonomous adult"

(109). It was a marriage more of respect and less romantic

love. She fostered "his adult aspirations while accepting his

dependency, his incompleteness..." (109). But a lasting

relationship that furthers his development did not further

hers. Steinbeck failed to see Carol's wishful projections and 147

her desires and efforts, and finally, in her support of his dream, she loses her own dream as well as his sexuality, dependency, and nurturing friendship.

In mid-life Steinbeck rejects Carol's support with a

sense of guilt and regret, and turns to Gwyn, the "special woman" who fills his need for a "romantic love" and physical beauty. Gwyn was "a young, red-haired, milk-skinned" feminine beauty that inflamed Steinbeck's sexuality and affectionate devotion. Steinbeck idealized Gwyn. He made "a holy distortion and prayerful magic" out of his relationship with her (DeMott, Working 104). His "fatal attraction to Gwyn" helped him satisfy his life as a family man. Gwyn dealt with

Steinbeck's depressions, and she kept a neat, clean house for a "terrible slob"; she bore his sons for him. But for

Steinbeck, "having a baby was satisfying, but...better as a dream— already a pregnant wife was more of an anchor than he had desired" (Benson 545). He felt tied down and restless for travel, and never felt like a father. Again, as Carol found,

Gwyn discovered that Steinbeck had ruined her singing career and he had misunderstood her as a "wife of domesticity" (582) .

"He was building a dream of life around Gwyn that had little to do with what Gwyn was or what she wanted" (494) . Steinbeck was inattentive to Gwyn's needs. He gave her full responsibility for his sons; he wanted "a very conventional home from which he could roam from and retreat to, like an island... (494) . "He delighted in a wife who was dependent on 148 him, one he could take care of..(495) . Steinbeck would not allow Gwyn to perform in New York on several occasions. "He insisted that she give up her career entirely and stay at home, perhaps clues to the breakup of his previous marriage

[to Carol] as well as his intent to establish a different pattern for his relationship with Gwyn" (494) . At the age of forty, Steinbeck thought Gwyn was all he had missed, but she was the "special woman" who most deeply hurt him in their stormy and tragic marriage of five years. Steinbeck had created a Gwyn he wanted from the medieval dreams of King

Arthur.

In his marriage to Elaine, Steinbeck found the "special woman" with whom he did not have to compete. She provided domesticity, affection, emotional intimacy, nurturing, and a respecting admiration. With Elaine he made an enduring commitment. She "[took] care of outside details" (Novel 6).

She gave him an "unbelievable, incredible new life" (13) . The sexual drive was alive and strong in Steinbeck, "all in one direction." Elaine "taught me...[to be] kinder and better mannered I think" (Benson 738). She facilitated "his entry into the adult world" and she perpetuated his dream with him.

Elaine gave her blessing to his life and "[joined] him on the journey and [created] a 'boundary of’ space1 within which his aspirations can be imagined and his hopes nourished" (Levinson

109) . She loves him and their relationship was loving and supporting and connected to his dream. She wanted to build 149 both their lives. She was a professional stage manager, a woman with "a liberated version of a woman's life" (110), but she was also traditional in being content in the role of wife and mother at a more mature age. "His dream...[served] as a vehicle for defining and pursuing her interests" (110). In this developmental stage of Steinbeck's love relationships, he became a more complete person with the contributions of "a special woman" like Elaine. Thus, three developmental stages of love transpired between 1938 and 1951 in Steinbeck's life.

To conclude this decade of mid-life development between

1938 at the age of thirty-six and 1951 at the age of forty- nine, the influences of change move against Steinbeck's style of writing and his personal fulfillment. He could not change existing structures in his past personal life and his creative

i work, even though he attempted other genre of writing. He sought to maintain the same order of his past; he tried to prevent change. But his decision to keep his own individual way was a detriment to a revised vision and perception. By courage and by overcoming great obstacles, he endured. He had been "constrained by expectations of others" and himself, but his method of surviving through this decade of the 1940s was to remain in the past, even in a mid-life crisis in which he endured an "intense period of suffering, confusion, rage against others [and self], grief over lost opportunities, and lost parts of self" (225) . He conquered life with maturity in his human adult development, but not in making a great personal or creative change. Understanding this as a mid-life

developmental process for Steinbeck would mean that life

circumstances in the culture, in his family, and in his

individual dynamics during these years between 1938 and 1951,

contributed to his "efforts to redefine who he is" (Farrell and Rosenberg, Men 30). CHAPTER VII

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

The texts of The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath and the

Journal of a Novel provide the researcher with a historic view of literature's non-literary contexts affecting a writer.

This view of John Steinbeck in the process of writing a book is a study of his literary and non-literary responses to his writing, to himself, and to his relationship as an individual in a community. It provides a cultural perspective of the writer transcending contexts and personal conflicts provoked by individual and social change. By studying cultural, economic, ideological, political and social issues influencing

Steinbeck's perspective, the researcher has interpreted and reconstructed the texts as a dominant source of evidence that a writer's words at any given moment in their historic existence represent the co-existence of social-ideological phenomena of the past and present. In addition, the writer's use of language in two texts written at two particular historic times in two separate environments indicates patterned developmental processes operating in the writer including socio-historical, internal psychological, physiological, literary, and mid-life transitional processes.

By examining prior written biographical and autobiographical

151 152

materials available from the past, the researcher has been

able to study Steinbeck with a retrospective ethnographic view

in a attempt to discover meaning.

In summary, the significance of this research is that it

contributes to an ongoing study of the human development of

creative persons. Writers are not isolated from their art but

are bound in it by psychological and physiological human

development and by the culture in which the author has been

nurtured with imagination and insight. Human development and

cognitive development are universals behind writing; cognition

doesn't stand alone without change. The individual personality of creative people produces different writing behavior. Two creative people are not the same in uniqueness.

Research needs a "theory of the individual" (Gruber) for each

creative person. Generalizations of Steinbeck cannot determine a theory for any other writer. Creative people are

not in XYZ descriptive categories.

Furthermore, the writing process is affirmed according to the present composition research. An analysis of Steinbeck's writing process from his journals leads to the conclusion that he used the cognitive strategies of an experienced writer:

setting goals, planning, getting started, translating, pausing

in concentration, bounding episodes, solving problems, overcoming writer's block and reviewing. Invention in the journals, notebooks, and letters for Steinbeck was an

inseparable part of writing a long novel. A mature writer 153

like Steinbeck in 1951 incorporated expanded global content,

increased reflection and evaluation of social, political and economic issues, and an intensified effort to integrat his

internal personal world with the external global world

(Cooper).

A major finding from this study is that behind Steinbeck’s journals are his expression of, and resistance to,

forces of his social, political, economic and historical environment. Invention in the journals was "an exchange between the individual and the socio-culture" (LeFevre 24) .

This is different, LeFevre continues, from invention with a

Platonic view "that does not allow for the individual's interaction with a response to a world of people and things and symbolic forms; nor does it [recognize] how social and cultural features are embedded in each individual; not does it show how individuals and culture are interdependent" (25) .

Thus, a Platonic view would contend that Steinbeck's novels were a creation and property of his own, rather than a socially created entity (29). Also, it would claim that

Steinbeck was abstracted from society and creatively operated

"solely on the basis of an internal locus" that was self- reliant from culture (29). That assumption does not describe the collaborative involvement in the society that Steinbeck had while creating The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck relied on his cultural roots in California for his creative power. The pages of both of his journals, The Journals of Grapes and 154

Journal of a Novel, are "a visual image of his creative process" in the society and culture of California (Howarth

87) .

The Platonic view that imagination abides in an ethereal realm outside of social and cultural forces is not true for

Steinbeck. His journals are full of entries dealing with social and cultural "real world" concerns. In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a journal kept on a scientific research sea voyage, Steinbeck claims that there is "a creative association between observer and objects" in the environment of the author, and that all observers look through their "own looking glass." Therefore, Steinbeck says, "all observers viewing the external reality through eyes set in a conditioned thinking pattern will of necessity bring some residue of that pattern to the reality" (Benson 429). Steinbeck saw his society and culture through his own looking glass and wrote about it in his own fictional form and with his own philosophy. His vision of the Pacific Ocean, the sands of Monterey Bay, the cliffs of Point Lobos, Lisca says, "provided Steinbeck with a symbolism and a unique frame of reference for his understanding of the human condition" (Steinbeck and Nature

2). Steinbeck's intimacy with his surroundings were his imaginative strength in his novels. Social and cultural forces were working behind his writing process.

Steinbeck was involved in the disasters and problems of

California in the 1930s. He exposed this historical period by, as Sarte says, "[raising] disturbing questions and

anxieties that harass[ed] society" and by "inducing feelings"

(What is Literature x) , and "by denouncing abuses" that required social responsibility (24). He wanted to communicate, disclose, and change the suffering, starving and dying he saw in the winter of 1938 in Visalia and Nipomo.

DeMott believes Steinbeck felt the necessity to write a novel of "spiritual urgency...rooted in the deepest wellsprings of democratic fellow-feeling" within a society (Working xliii).

Steinbeck believed and recorded in his A Russian Journal that

"a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to [expose] its faults" (Astro and Hyashi 1970). Lisca contends that

"more than any other American novel-, fThe Grapes of Wrath 1 successfully embodies a contemporary social problem of national scope in an artistically viable expression" (Nature

88) . He adds that Steinbeck "stirred the American public for a social cause as to have had measurable political impact"

(88). Steinbeck could not have written such a poignant book engaging the audience in society and the culture at that time if personal forces and cultural forces behind him had not compelled him to write his expression of it or his resistance to it.

In contrast to writing The Grapes of Wrath. East of Eden was not addressed to any burning social, political or economic

issue. Steinbeck was simply commenting on the present world by pointing out moral issues in it. Even though the California

Salinas Valley was the same setting for both The Grapes of

Wrath and East of Eden f East of Eden had no imminence of

justice to plead for any cause or class of people, and

Steinbeck was not advocating reform for society as a whole, but to individuals in the society. Principally, Steinbeck wrote to explain himself from his cultural roots. From a moral sense, Steinbeck wrote about individual freedom,

individual responsibility in society, and free will within a

"neglected American life" (Wedlock and Wicker 100); he wanted

"to deal effectively with the burdensome problems of human existence" (Astro, Steinbeck and Ricketts 44). The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath and the Journal of a Novel reveal different motives for writing about the society. In The Grapes of Wrath it was artistic vengeance against injustice; in East of Eden, it was artistic discovery of oneself. The

Grapes of Wrath was a forceful outward reach to society; East of Eden was an inward reach to oneself in society. But both novels were written about the same social and cultural setting in California.

The subject of The Grapes of Wrath emerged from forces in society. The story was not planned years ahead, but presented itself at a moment of urgency, needing to be told. East of

Eden, on the other hand, had been pondered and planned years ahead but for no urgent social or cultural reason that compelled it to be written like The Grapes of Wrath had been. 157

Therefore, the forces behind writing The Grapes of Wrath were more threatening to a society and culture than were the forces behind writing East of Eden, as Flower suggests when she states that a writer's assumptions and prior knowledge are expressions of "forces" in the culture that "force" the writer to write. The urgency for writing is noted in The Journals of

The Grapes of Wrath by the short, hurried, staccato entries, whereas the Journal of a Novel entries are longer treatises of deliberation through the process of writing. This may indicate, as Cooper suggests, that' an integration of the external and internal world of a writer demands more deliberation, not being forced with urgency.

John R. Wilson in Writing the Academic Essav cautions that a "cultural fallacy" and an "author fallacy" are possible in research of writers. A cultural fallacy "assumes that a work of art is the sum total of the time's social, political and economic climate" (126). Instead, Wilson continues, independent thinkers use imagination as a creative force behind any climate. Equally important is the author fallacy which assumes that a work reflects an author's reading, knowledge, psychology, upbringing, and so forth (126). While these do contribute, insight and imagination, from the research of Bargar and Duncan, are important forces to be considered. Research such as this study of Steinbeck, Wilson claims, cannot assume to know enough about the private life or the mind of an author in a specific context to be an authority 158

on that information (126). Either fallacy ignores the

importance of insight and imagination.

Evidence from the journals indicates human and creative development when comparing the two journals in 1938 and in

1951. In The Grapes of Wrathr Steinbeck has a philosophical vision of human beings living together as groups to transcend human misery through humanity's compassionate responsibility

for it. In The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck presents an awareness and discovery of persons in harmony with "a universal world spirit, a big soul of mankind [humankind]"

(Covici, Commitment 64). Also, Steinbeck was masterfully and indirectly saying what was right and wrong. Dissimilarly, the

Journal of a Novel for East of Eden indicates a commitment to individual men [women], not a generalized "manself

[humanself ].11 It revolves around moral freedom through

"individual choice" and working out individual resolutions as a responsibility in society. Steinbeck presents an awareness and discovery of individuals choosing deliberate actions which are right or wrong, by means of free choice. Each individual has the power to free oneself of conditioning and experiences and make a moral statement of choice. This indicates an insight that came to Steinbeck in the process of writing East of Eden in 1951 that evolved since 1938.

Steinbeck's journals have many contrasts. First, the personal intensity, dedication, investment and drama of The

Journals of The Grapes of Wrath contrasts with the sprawling, digressive, philosophical personal entries of the Journal of a Novel. Secondly, in The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath,

"the self" is more removed, whereas in the Journal of a Novel

Steinbeck "asserts his presence." Another contrast is that

The Grapes of Wrath is limited in intention and scope with a singleness of purpose for a specific event in time, at a certain place; but East of Eden's intention and scope speaks to all times and places and events. A fourth contrast is that

The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath was written with a claustrophobic tone and attitude while the Journal of a Novel was written in "a tone of familiarity and comraderie." Fifth, the entries in the The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath are brief, direct, staccato and sharp , unlike the voluminous "warm-ups" of the Journal of a Novel. Finally, the material for The Grapes of Wrath was collected over a few years while the material for East of Eden was collected over four decades.

The differences in these two journals, one written in 1938 at the age of thirty-six and the other in 1951 at the age of

forty-nine, demonstrate that developmental transactions and transformations were occurring in Steinbeck's life over time.

A self-reflective, philosophical person is a natural development for a mature adult.

The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath and the Journal of a

Novel represent two social periods of history over thirteen years. The subject of The Grapes of Wrath came out of a national economic disaster that became a social tragedy which contributed to a political populist movement. Steinbeck felt the pain for the people he was writing about in the society.

The subject of East of Eden, however, came to Steinbeck when he returned from the tragedies of World War II and found his own mortality. He began to ask what life and death's meaning were and what was important in life. During the War, Davis records, Steinbeck had written "to omit uncomfortable truths

[of the period] in order to foster popular American illusions" (Steinbeck 3). He became abstract, remote, and moralistic at an older age in the era he was living through. He was thinking more deeply and more philosophically about his own mortality. Whereas war and people starving, suffering, and dying were similar conditions in each period in which

Steinbeck was writing in 1938 and 1951, and the same truth had a powerful effect upon Steinbeck, he did not speak about it in East of Eden. Perhaps the suffering was an issue he could not write about again. Most likely, the time and place were too separated from each other and Steinbeck perceived the issue differently.

At the age of forty-nine, Steinbeck perceives the moral state of the society differently than at the age of thirty- six. He wrote, "immorality is destroying us. The failure of man toward men, [and] the selfishness that puts making a buck more important than the common wealth" (Steinbeck and Wallsten

649), is turning kindness, generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling a commitment to society into 161 sharpness, greed, acquisition, meanness, egotism and self- interest. His response to this perception of the times in

1951 is to write about individual responsibility. The problem for Steinbeck, however, was that he could not make a new response to his world, connecting an old response to the new, with a novel solution. In spite of time passing, Steinbeck still kept his old ways of looking at himself and his past.

When Steinbeck could not "transcend past patterns" of writing and make changes, "the inherited order [did] not perfectly adjust to the present" (DeMott, Steinbeck and Creativity 174) .

Thereupon, the old patterns "fixated" Steinbeck in the past without a novel solution in the present.

Steinbeck explained in an interview in 1952 that while he was writing The Grapes of Wrath, "[he] was filled...with certain angers...at people who were doing injustices to other people" (DeMott, Working xxxviii). His thinking, his pondering, his anger, his frustration, and his sense of powerlessness among common people, was the force that provoked him to use his writing as a tool to invoke the question to the society about justice. This was not only a personal issue, but a social issue that Steinbeck exploded in the culture.

In contrast to this commitment to a theme for the working class when he himself was a struggling, economically, impoverished writer in the 1930s, Steinbeck, during the 1940s and the rest of his life, was middle or upper-middle class social status. His perspective of the poor working class in New York never again stirred his imagination. In New York he was not involved with the working class as he had been in

California, and even if he pleaded their cause in The Grapes of Wrath, he felt no compulsion to write about their plight in

New York. His life had changed in New York, and therefore, his perspective. In his new life, working for the government, the war effort, and traveling, his perspective was not for the derelicts, the misfits, the drunks, and the working class people on the streets of New York; this theme did not affect him in his new life, so there was no cause to stir him to write about them. Furthermore, none of his friends and acquaintances in New York were involved in the struggles of the working class. The migrant worker's struggle in

California in the 1930s, however, involved Steinbeck's friends, neighbors, countrymen, and statehood citizens, culturally bound to Steinbeck's conscience, imagination and setting, whereas in New York and abroad in Europe, people were not culturally bound as a community to him, so he began to write on other themes, but with less vision and purpose.

Steinbeck could never find a community in New York that he felt responsible to with a commitment to be heard through his writing. Thus, his creative impulse in 1951 was not stirred by the socio-cultural, historical and economic forces in New

York so he returns to those that were behind the process of writing in California.

Since Steinbeck never found the cultural community in New 163

York to respond to with sympathy and sensitivity, he was a stranger (or foreigner) in New York. In an interview, however, with Elaine Steinbeck, March 1991, she disagreed.

She said New York was beneficial to Steinbeck because "his mind was joggled in New York," and, she continued, even if he had wanted to write about Salinas Valley, it was not the same place and he was not the same man.

The historic evidence from the journals indicates that

Steinbeck could not separate himself from his socio-cultural influences for writing his greatest pieces of literature.

Twelve out of his seventeen major works and countless short stories are located in the Salinas Valley. The setting in

Cannery Row (1945), for example, was a street in Salinas.

From his New York environment during the years between 1939 and 1954, Steinbeck wrote The Wayward Bus (1947), Burning

Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), and Sweet Thursday (1954), all set in California but written in New York, but none were considered outstanding in American literature compared to The

Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck continued to go back to his cultural roots for his inspiration and imagination. Thus, the forces behind Steinbeck's writing, this research concludes, came from his social and cultural background in California.

Steinbeck says, however, in a letter to Elizabeth Otis on

September 17, 1954, that his technique was dictating his stories and how they were being written, not the separation from California. Nevertheless, when he turned away from 164 earlier experiences in his California, culture, previous places in his culture, and his habits of composition, he could not reach the literary heights to which he aspired.

The great social causes for the working class of people never gripped Steinbeck's imagination for the remainder of his career. His commitment to such causes diminished, it seems, in proportion to the pleasures he enjoyed in his own life with material possessions and with travel, even though he criticized greed and the drive for material possessions as a moral decay in the society. He wrote about nature and the land, and admired simple people in the early part of his career, but his admiration for the common working class in the midst of wealth was replaced by associations with upper-middle class persons such as President Johnson, the writer Nathaniel

Benchley, playwright Arthur Miller, and lyricists and composers Rogers and Hammerstein, and Frank Loesser. After The

Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck wrote, "I suppose self-interest is the end of all" (Novel 163).

Steinbeck conformed to New York and abandoned his perspective of the simple life he had known so well. This led

DeMott to comment that when Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, it

"lacked the aggressive bite of his earlier work in California"

(Working xlvi). Howarth observed that whereas The Grapes of

Wrath "denounced capitalism, rThe Grapes of Wrath1 ran up towering sales; [Steinbeck's] fame brought him wealth and power yet it ruined him for greater works" (54). Steinbeck believed that "a novelist...is limited by his experience, his knowledge, his observation, and his feelings"

(Unedited letter to Otis and Horton, April 26, 1947, Journal of King Arthur 303). To Steinbeck, writers as well as other people are "the products of their environment" (Benson 248).

But for writers, Steinbeck wrote, "they must overcome prejudices and predilection, as well as cultural projections onto reality to see things as they are" (249-250) . In an unedited letter written July 14, 1957, to Otis and Horton,

Steinbeck writes, "Considering [a writer]...there are three directions one may take to build up some kind of reality about him— His work (the most important), His times (important because he grew out of them) and finally His associates or people with whom he may have associated" (Journal of King

Arthur 308). Thus, Steinbeck's words collaborate with the findings of this research by saying that the times out of which a writer grows, and the people he associates with build a background for a writer's work, upon which the writer can be considered.

In a letter to Covici, April 22, 1954, Steinbeck wrote,

"...wish I could...rest the process [of writing] so that something fresh might come when I start again. For I feel I am becoming hackneyed. I am dissatisfied with my efforts. I am desperately afraid that risks are creeping in and that I am utilizing technique rather then creation..." (Benson 749).

While writing in New York, the creative power Steinbeck found 166 in the California landscape is not the same aggressive drive, vision, or theme that once engaged him. As a result,

Steinbeck turns from others to himself in the Journal of a

Novel and though he found a possible version of himself he wished to be— wise and accepted— his artistic struggle in the

1950s did not project this wise persona needing acceptance.

In fact, as both journals attest, his acceptance of himself had never given him confidence. Instead of building an ego in

The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, his conscious self was full of doubt, insecurity, worry, restlessness and loneliness as it was in the Journal of a Novel. Writing The Grapes of

Wrath had plunged him into a state of depression about himself, his life and his work, so the Journal of a Novel became therapy to lead him out of this developmental malaise by means of writing a new novel.

Self-doubt, insecurity, inadequacy, lack of confidence, and worry and fear of failure recorded in both The Journals of

The Grapes of Wrath and Journal of a Novel portray Steinbeck as a writer without confidence, always doubting his ability to write. But, according to Elaine Steinbeck, this perception is incorrect (Interview). Instead, the entries in the journals that doubt his confidence are Steinbeck's confessions of his modesty and his humbleness within the task of writing creatively. According to Elaine Steinbeck, he never boasted about his talents; instead, he was humble about his gift in the presence of others, assuring critics in particular that he works with doubts; he is admitting that he is not the greatest writer perhaps, but he is a writer working diligently and quietly to be among the great. Success, he claimed, "will ruin me as sure as hell" (Journal of Grapes 62) . According to

Benson, 11 [Steinbeck's} worry about publicity was partly a moralistic worry about damage that could be caused by pride"

(355). Steinbeck tried to maintain a modesty in the journals.

Success scared him and spoiled him because he became too self- conscious. He never could rejoice in public success and a self-conscious ego. In a 1936 entry in a ledger, Steinbeck says, "I am not made for success. I find myself now with a growing reputation. In many ways it is a terrible thing....

Among other things I feel that I have put something over.

That this success of mine is cheating..." (DeMott, Part I,

Prelude, Working 1) . The absence of ego consciousness,

Steinbeck believed, makes a good writer. If he were a public, ego-seeking person, he would be concentrating on self instead of his creation. Steinbeck knew himself well enough to know that his conscious self was a mixture of kindness and meanness toward persons near him, and it was full of doubt, worry, restlessness and loneliness. Only the unconscious self inside a novel could be the highest point of his creative power. For too long the conscious state could not be transcended, especially after The Grapes of Wrath. The inward sickness inside and outside of his being had to be healed in the conscious state before the unconscious state could be 168 accessed.

Harry B. Lee, a Freudian psychoanalyst, in "Unconscious

Processes in the Artist" speaks on the matter of the unconscious.

If the artist should attempt to work during his more severe depressions,...he finds that he is unable to concentrate his interest upon the project or to gain satisfaction from his efforts. At such times he becomes obsessed with grave doubts about his artistic ability, and fears that he has finally lost it; panicky with the belief that he has permanently lost his creative power, he struggles to recapture it, and to escape his suffering as well, through instituting changes in his physical environment or physical changes in himself.... He may attempt to re-create the environmental setting of past inspired moments... (Rolansky 130-1).

As Gruber suggests in his study of Charles Darwin, negative emotions— fear, rage, anxiety, and guilt— must be balanced with positive emotions such as the passion for truth, enthusiasm in the pursuit, and tranquility and enjoyment in the creation itself (xxi). The cognitive and emotional inner forces of a creative person direct the creative will (Rolansky

Creativity). During the thirteen years between writing The

Grapes of Wrath in 1938 and writing East of Eden in 1951, the inner positive forces of Steinbeck's psyche were not controlling his will as strongly as negative forces of worry, depression, disappointment, nervousness, personal irritations, loneliness and guilt. Both journals record the same negative forces prevailing. Therefore, the evidence points to the conclusion that Steinbeck's creative power was diminished while negative forces were controlling his will.

The data from The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath and 169

Journal of a Novel support Cooper's composition research on narrative writing. The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath for

Steinbeck's narration The Grapes of Wrath, was written in 1938 when Steinbeck was younger at thirty-six than when he wrote the Journal of a Novel for East of Eden at forty-nine in 1951.

The Journal of a Novel has "expanded global content, and an increased amount of reflection and evaluation of social, political, ethical and moral issues" (Cooper) than his The

Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, written at an earlier age.

Within each journal an interior monologue is embedded, as

Cooper found in his research. East of Eden, written thirteen years after The Grapes of Wrath, "was given to integrating the internal personal world with the external global world" as

Cooper suggests. Thus, in the case of Steinbeck, Cooper's composition research on narratives corresponds with the evidence of this study that a developmental process was occurring between 1938 and 1951 related to a maturing adult.

Clearly, the data indicates that for Steinbeck, writing journals or personal letters is a strategy inseparable from writing novels. The journals and letters clarify thoughts before writing; it gets the movement and rhythm of writing started to remove fear of "getting started"; it resolves personal matters by writing them down and getting rid of them; it is a discussion with a "supposed someone" who is listening; it relieves moods that could affect the writing; it maps progress in writing a novel. Therefore, writing a journal or 170 letter, as the journals attest, is an important strategy in the process of writing a long novel.

The journals and letters Steinbeck wrote indicate that

Steinbeck did not believe in collaborative writing. He makes it clear to Covici in the Journal of a Novel that discussing the novel together did not amount to a collaboration. "It is no more a collaboration than any of the others have been. The morals, ideas, philosophies are my own and are not offered for correction or revision" (Novel 160). "[Writing] is primarily a lonely craft and must be accepted as such. If you eliminate that loneliness of approach, you automatically eliminate some of the power of the effect" (Steinbeck and Wallsten 85) .

"Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and

I have no sense of its being mine" (Benson 637) . In an interview with Herbert Kretzmer from the London Daily Express on January 15, 1965, Steinbeck concludes that "unless a writer is capable of solitude, he should leave books alone and go into the theater" (DeMott, Working xxx) . In a letter to Peter

Benchley, Steinbeck declares that the purpose of writing is that "a writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate...like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing.... A story [begs] the listener...to feel" (Steinbeck and Wallsten 522) . 171

The affinity of the mind moving ideas and words through the pen onto paper was such physical comfort to Steinbeck during the years between 1938 and 1951. When Steinbeck did not write at all or wrote minor works or period pieces, he was physically separated from a psychic need in his life. Without the pen and pencil, the mind was in pain.

The internal stress Steinbeck expressed in both his journals had long-term effects upon his physical health. For the rest of his life he had worry, nervousness, restlessness and depression which placed a strain on his physical and mental health. (He died at 66 of heart failure.) The combined stress was so interrelated that it was hard to determine which was the cause and which was the effect. The more the two factors interacted on each other, the more

Steinbeck was deprived of the drive and energy he could have devoted to writing. He reached high moments of joy in creating, but he also reached low moments of depression when he was not writing. This research recognizes that probably the basic individual nature of Steinbeck could not have been changed. But the nature of a writer is expressed well by

Andre Gide in his journal: "The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. [It is] essential to remain between the two, close to madness when you dream and close to reason when you write" (38).

The most important new discovery that the evidence for this research points to is that during the years between 1938 172 and 1951, Steinbeck was passing through a mid-life crisis, a

"normative, age-graded, organismic and internal" personality development. Erickson defines it as "epigenetic"; the development "has a structure that unfolds at an assigned time and is viewed as a series of stages" (Rodgers 487). Social and cultural historic factors define these stages. Therefore, a theory of human development is not "culture free." From the context of the journals and other biographical materials, the researcher in this study speculates that the cultural move from one environment in California to another in New York between 1938 to 1951, for Steinbeck, contributed to a deep developmental change in the cultural structure of Steinbeck's vision. His dislocation forced him to adopt a new perspective that never quite contributed to his creativity in his writing like his California environment had done earlier in his life.

His mid-life crisis about himself and his writing was never spiritually resolved.

Also, internal, external and interactive forces underlying his psyche during the thirteen years between writing The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, heightened

Steinbeck's self-consciousness, recorded in the Journal of a

Novel and in the novel, East of Eden. Through the 1940s

Steinbeck came to self-insight. In this mid-life transition,

Steinbeck considers how he wants to alter his behavior. He tries to project past psychological interpretations onto new situations to meet the challenge of his adult inner needs at 173 a new period of his life-span development (Rodgers 470) ; however, he was not able to discard past cultural and psychological interpretations entirely, although he attempted to. The cultural environment in which he grew up would not release him from its psychic grip in his creative writing.

One insight that is a reinterpretation, made an important change in Steinbeck's past reading and understanding of the

Cain and Abel biblical story. His creative reading explaining sin and the freedom of choice released him from past interpretations. This truth came in a moment of insight.

Three translations of the Bible gave him the truth: The King

James version, as a prophecy, says, "Thou shalt rule over it"

(sin); the American Standard version is translated, "Do thou rule over it," an order; finally, the modern version states,

"Thou mayest rule over it," the offering of free choice. This insight was an invention of Steinbeck's conscience in this mid-life period of explaining himself. With this insight he was more honest and more able to acknowledge feelings in his personal beliefs, ideas, and philosophy in the Journal of a

Novel in 1951 when it was a struggle to achieve wholeness within himself and outwardly to the external world.

In mid-life, Steinbeck was confronted by changes and constraints and expectations of others— wives, children, literary critics, publishers. But his greatest concern was his own established identity as he attempted to redefine who he is. During the years between 1938 and 1951, he had altered 174 his family role, his values about material possessions, and his relationship with people within the New York environment.

In addition, Steinbeck had lived with cultural expectations from California where the "ideal man" was strong, tough and macho. These cultural expectations, Farrell and Rosenberg state, make non-achievement a defect in development instead of being a developmental process of understanding one's own motivations (217) . Farrell and Rosenberg believe that men, in particular, "devote much of their lives acting out stereotypes of what they 'should' be— caught up on subcultural ideals of strength, power, control and competitive success. It apparently requires a rare individual to transcend these issues in order to experience intimacy and selfhood" (119).

Though Steinbeck says he never wanted power or that he was not competitive, he did wish to have control over writing, and his success was a competitive measure against other writers.

In the 1940s, Steinbeck's experiences led to a developmental crisis. In this crisis he had an "overwhelming feeling that he cannot accomplish the task of Becoming One's

Own" (Levinson 191). He can't seem to advance in his creative writing during the 1940s; he couldn't seem to gain affirmation again as a truly great American writer; he didn't seem to be able to define his life in the life structure he found himself. When he could not modify negative elements in his life during this mid-life transition, he became "cynical, estranged, and unable to believe anything" (193) until he re­ 175 engaged his soul in writing East of Eden. In the Journal of a Novel Steinbeck accepts the developmental task of taking a further step toward greater self-knowledge and self­ responsibility (224).

This retrospective ethnographic study of John

Steinbeck's creative process of writing recorded in the journals concludes that the total context of a writer is rooted in a long growth process both literary and personal.

An individual1s development has meaning within a context of human development. When the ensemble of social, cultural, political, economic, and historic contexts interacts in a relationship with the psychological, physiological, emotional and cognitive contexts in the development of a writer, the creative intellect works with the human developmental processes to define a creative person.

Further Research Suggestions

In an extensive analysis of data, the researcher further studied Steinbeck's journals delineating the process of writing as the principal focus. These findings validate previous composition research about the writing process and contribute to the understanding of a noted, adult, creative writer's process of writing. But such a study did not enlighten composition research with a new discovery. It confirms what composition research already knows about the process of writing, except to advocate the inseparable 176 function of a journal with writing a long novel. The data indicates that mature writers set goals, plan, translate and review. Writing is a recursive process, according to

Steinbeck's journals. He writes with episodic boundaries, notably in The Grapes of Wrath where the alternating interchapters represent meaningful units of concentration, moments of changing pace or focus, and mental representations of meaning. They are pauses for explanation, discussion or analysis which is a unique technique Steinbeck uses also in

East of Eden. Also, the data reveals the idiosyncratic nature of writing from day to day. In addition, Steinbeck creates meaning as a private act with rhetorical purpose: to persuade an audience to act (especially in The Grapes of Wrath) . Above all, Steinbeck's journals tell the reader that emotions affect the writer day by day, and that journals have an inseparable function along with writing a long novel. Finally, the journals reveal that Steinbeck did not believe in collaborative writing.

Further studies of the journals could reveal the nature of the chapter begun in the journal, and its tone and content with the corresponding chapter in the novel. The opposite periods of depression and happiness recorded in the journals could indicate that the psychological and physiological highs and lows of a writer are cyclical and patterned in relation to the content.

A valuable and interesting study of human development 177 should be given to the entire life of Steinbeck. His human development from the beginning to the end of his life would be more representative of a holistic look at his human and creative development.

This research is continuing in a study of Steinbeck's attitudes toward women in his own life and in his stories, novels and dramas. The Salinas Library with its Steinbeck

Collection has already sent a list of resources on this subject. Little attention has been given to this topic until the 1990s. Since Steinbeck writes about his first wife Carol in The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath and his third wife

Elaine in the Journal of a Novel, a further study could be made of Steinbeck's love relationships with women as a psychic aspect of his personal development. Between 1938 and 1951

Steinbeck had been through three marriages and two affairs.

He was a man seemingly sensitive to Carol, yet insensitive to her destiny while they were married. He never liked competition in a wife, and so his first two marriages to talented, young women were a disaster to everyone involved.

Steinbeck was conservative in his views of women, and he stereotyped them as teachers, mothers, wives or whores in his works; women usually lived with defects or limitations.

Steinbeck was a man whose psychic needs in love relationships with women centered on sexual and nurturing roles more than equal and liberated partnerships. His women characters are disturbing because he has a "virgin/whore" complex, out of which he never changes. "It was the time in which he was writing," Elaine Steinbeck said in a interview when asked about his views of women. His whole attitude toward women should be a separate study. APPENDIX A

A Conceptual Model for Discourse Construction

179 180

Discourse Conventions Social Language Context Activated Purpose & Knowledge Goals

Awareneee

WRITER’S MENTAL REPRESENTATION

READER'S MENTAL REPRESENTATION

Awareness

Purpose & Activated Goals Knowledge Social Language Context Discourse Conventions

Figure t A Conceptual Model for Discourse Construction APPENDIX B

Adaptations of Definitions of Coding Categories

181 182

APPENDIX B

Adaptations of Definitions of Coding Categories Bargar-Duncan Case Studies Data Base

Manor Terms

1. Culture: refers to political, sociological, culture, economic and intellectual influences that can be ascribed to the broader culture. This might include (a) specific events, such as the Great Depression, The Vietnam War, etc., (b) historical trends, such as industrialization, political trends, etc., or (c) the qualities of region, community, or larger setting, such as Salinas Valley and the United States.

2. Milieu: refers to the immediate setting surrounding an environment, or milieu in which an event or series of events occur. (a) Working milieu— the immediate working environment: a room, the studio, the ocean front for Steinbeck. (b) Personal milieu— the personal and interpersonal qualities of the setting within which the individual works: Family, Recreational, Locational (Nantucket, New York City, Salinas Valley, the United States).

3. Development: refers to developmental processes and phenomena that are perceived to be generic to or to influence an individual's creative work. Four types or areas of development have been coded: (a) Cultural Development, coded Cul Dev...the development of the culture within which the individual works as that culture is perceived to influence specific creative work. (b) Milieu Development, coded Mil Dev...the development of the milieu within which the individual works as that milieu affects specific creative work. (c) Individual Development, coded Ind Dev.. .the development of the individual as that development affects the person's creative work. This could include a wide range of developmental events or patterns. (d) Medium Development, coded Med Dev...the development of the medium within the individual's works as they affect the individual's creativity. 183

(e) Linguistic Development, coded Ling Dev.. .development or innovations in the language and literary genre.

4. Individual: refers to certain elements in the creative thought processes of the individual. The following elements have been coded: (a) Principle— a construct or theme that emerges as central to the creative work of the individual. (b) Metaphor— an image or configuration, whether sensory or verbal, that serves as a highly significant organizer, pattern or analogy for creative work. (c) Style— an element or elements of consistency in an individual's work, more commonly used traditionally as a quality in the arts, but with cognitive connotations in the arts. (d) Transform— shortened form of the word, transformation, which refers to a major reconfiguration of concepts, images, etc., that is at the heart of a major breakthrough in creative thought. (e) Insight— an experience of illumination that helps shape the course of creative work, often coming to the individual in unsought moments. (f) Genre— class or category of creative endeavor having a particular form, content, or technique. Journals, letters, notes, telegrams, speeches, lectures.

5. Medium: refers to the medium in which the individual works, in this case, the art of writing. Three general references to the medium have been coded: (a) Internal Medium. Coded Int Med— references to the processing of the medium in thought; e.g., Steinbeck's working out of a design "in his head" before committing the design on paper. (b) External Med, coded Ext Med— references to working with the medium physically, rather than only in thought; e.g. the pen, paper, eraser, desk top, reading aloud (c) Internal and External Medium, coded Int & Ext Med— reference to a simultaneous working on the medium both in thought and physically.

6. Transactions: certain transactions among key categories have been recognized as representing important relationships in creative thought. These include: (a) Culture and Milieu, coded Cul X Mil— influences of culture on the milieu in which the individual works. (b) Culture and Individual, coded Cul X Ind— influences of culture on the individual. (c) Culture X Medium. coded Cul X Med— influences of culture on the development or use of the medium. 7. Other categories: (a) Family Background, coded Family Bkdg— references to 184

family background as an influence on creative work. (b) Mentor— references to a mentor or mentor relationships; e.g., Steinbeck's editor and publisher, Pascal Covici, and his lifelong relationship with Elizabeth Otis, managing editor. (c) Nature of Individual. coded Nature of Ind— general references to personal, psychological, or physiological characteristics of the individual as related to creative work. For Steinbeck this includes "forces of his nature," e.g., health, drive, restlessness, audience, criticism, economic status, time, self- confidence, anxiety. (d) Education. coded Educ— refers to educational experiences of the individual. (e) Parents. Father. Mother. Grandfather. Grandmother, etc.— references to family members. (f) Values. Beliefs. Attitudes— refers to values, beliefs, and attitudes held by the individual and perceived to be influential on creative work, whether political, social, economic, religious, or ideological. (g) Talent. Aptitude. Interests. etc.— refers to specific capacities related to creative work. (h) Heritage— reference to the family or ethnic heritage of the individual. (i) Mind and Creativity— references to the mind and its creativity. (j) Sources— refers to the background source of a literary work. APPENDIX C ‘

Revised Case Study Model

185 REVISED CASE STUDY MODEL

Development H u m an Instruments P hysical M ethod Pencil, Paper M en tal Room, Chair A b ility T a le n t

Forces C u ltu re H e alth ) Rest Tim e Im pulse Drive, Energy / Beliefs Audience A ttitu d es - C ritic is m / Values Hobbies Composing Insights Econom ic Ideology P o litic a l \ Social Self-Confidence W orry Genre Journals Philosophy Letters Speeches Notes f Metaphors Novel M ilie u k. M ind F a m ily Physical aspect H eritag e E m o tio n al F a m ily Psychological Apartment in Friends Creative aspect Recreational N.Y. W orking N a n tu c k e t APPENDIX D

Steinbeck Database

187 188

APPENDIX D

Steinbeck database, Creative Person Heritage

Record Number 1

Author: Steinbeck, John Title: Journal of a Novel Publisher N.Y.: Viking Press, 1969 Date: February 12, 1951

Category: Family Bkdg, Heritage,

Quotation: "...Chapter I must have its design made in advance...my sons...tell them what their blood is. Next...describe the Salinas Valley in detail...sights and sounds, smells and colors...the physical background of the book. Next our grandfather and his sons and his daughters and his wife and the land they took up near King City.. .And finally...mention the neighbors...the physical valley— then center down to the little area...while I am talking to the boys." p. 8 "I think I will put a good deal of my mother and my father also. It is time I wrote these things, else they will be gone because no one else will every do them except me." p . 9

Comments: East of Eden is a biography of Steinbeck's family, the Hamiltons, in the Salinas Valley, Steinbeck's home territory. He knew the valley and it influenced his writing before he went to New York, and particularly in this novel. The family background and heritage are the basis of the entire book...it couldn't have been written by anyone else who was not acquainted with this landscape. The Salinas Valley pulled Steinbeck back to California from New York during this time of his life. Perhaps he longed for the influence it once had in his early years of writing about this territory. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Henry. "Thomas Hart Benton's Illustrations for The Graoes of Wrath." San Jose Studies XVI. 1 (Winter 1990): 6-18.

Anderson, Harold H., ed. Creativity and Its Cultivation. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1959.

Angus, Paul. "Literature's Romantic Era: Historicists Re­ interpret It and Generate Controversy Among Their Colleagues." The Chronicle xxxiv (13 April 1988): 31.

Apthorp, Elaine S. "Steinbeck, Guthrie, and Popular Culture." San Jose Studies XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 19-39.

Aristotle. "Creation as Making." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Ashe, M. R. B. "A Study of Change Measured Personality Adjustments and Release of Creativity Through Freedom of Expression in Writing." Dissertation Abstract 26 (1963): 860.

Astro, Richard and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Proceedings of the 1970 Steinbeck Conference Sponsored by Oregon State and Ball State Universities. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1970.

Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Babcock, C. Merton, ed. Focus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963.

Bargar, Robert B. and James K. Duncan. "Cultivating Creative Endeavor in Doctoral Research." Journal of Higher Education 53.1 (1982).

"A Study of the Transformational and Transactional Processes at the Core of Creative Activity." Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, The Ohio State

189 190

University, March, 1988.

Barrett, Loren S. and Barry M. Kroll. "Some Implications of Cognitive-Developmental Psychology." Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Eds. Charles Cooper and Lee Odell. NCTE, Urbana, 111., 1978.

Beach, Joseph Warren. American Fiction: 1920-1940. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948. 309-347.

Beach, Richard and Lillian S. Bridwell, Eds. New Directions in Composition Research. New York: The Builford Press, 1984.

Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. Writer. New York: Viking Press, 1984.

Bertagnolli, Olivia and Jeff Rackham, eds. Creativity and the Writing Process. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1982.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Cultural Criticism: A Social Approach to Studying Writing." Research Network Workshop, CCCC 1988. In English 895 Readings. The Ohio State University, Spring Quarter, 1988.

Blanchard, Brand. "The Teleology of the Creative Act." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North- Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Bluestone, George. The Grapes of Wrath. Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982.

Bolen, L. M. and E. P. Torrance. "The Influence on Creative Thinking of Locus of Control, Cooperation and Sex." Journal of Clinical Psychology 34 October 1978: 903-7. Booth, Wayne. "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism." Critical Inguirv 9 September 1982.

Brandt, Deborah. "Toward an Understanding of Context in Composition." Written Communication 3,2 (April 1986): 139-157.

Brinkley, Alan. "Why Steinbeck's Okies Speak to Us Today." The New York Times 18 March 1990, sec. 2: 1.

Britton, James. "The Composing Process and the Functions of Writing." Research on Composing; Points of Departure. Eds. Charles Cooper and Lee Odell. NCTE, Urbana, 111., 191 1978.

Bruce, David. "No Wrath with Working Days." Athens News 10 April 1989: 16.

Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds. Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1983.

Burgum, Edwin Berry. "The Sensibility of John Steinbeck." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

The Novel and the World's Dilemma. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1947. 272-291.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1950.

Burns, Stuart L. "The Turtle or the Gopher: Another Look at the Ending of The Grapes of Wrath." Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982.

Caldwell, Mary Ellen. "A New Consideration of the Intercalary Chapters in The Grapes of Wrath." Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982.

Campbell, Joseph, Ed. The Portable Jung. New York: The Viking Press, 1971. Chpts. 1, 2, 4, 5.

Canfield, Dorothy. "How Flint and Fire Started and Grew." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Cannon, Walter Bradford. "The Role of Hunches in Scientific Thought." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Carey, L. J. and Linda Flower. "Foundations for Creativity in the Writing Process: Rhetorical Representations of Ill- Defined Problems." Berkeley: University of California, Center for the Study of Writing, June 1989.

Chickering, A. W. and Havighurst, R. J. "The Life Cycle." In The Modern American College. Ed. A. W. Chickering. San 192

Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981.

Christiansen, Rupert. "Fame's Cost." New Statesman 20 April 1984: 107:2770: 27-8.

Clemons, Walter. "Cursed by Success." Newsweek CIII (6 February 1984): 80.

Cohen, Ralph. "The Autobiography of a Critical Problem." Midwest MLA Convention. Bloomington, Indiana, November 1984.

Comprone, Joseph. "Kenneth Burke and the Teaching of Writing." Composition and Its Teaching. Ed. Richard C. Gebhardt. Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, 1979. 62-66.

Connors, Robert J. "Rhetorical History as a Component of Composition Studies." Research Network Workshop, CCCC 1988. In English 895 Readings, The Ohio State University, Spring Quarter, 1988.

Cooper, Charles R. "Procedures for Describing Written Texts." Research in Writing. Eds. Peter Mosenthal, Lynne Tamor, and Sean A. Walmsley. New York: Longman, 1983.

"The Development of Autobiographic Writing." Address. The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1988.

Cooper, Charles R. and Lee Odell. Research on Composing: Points of Departure. NCTE, Urbana, Illinois, 1978.

Covici, Pascal, Jr. "From Commitment to Choice: Double Vision and the Problem of Vitality for John Steinbeck." The Fifties: Fiction. Poetry. Drama. Ed. Warren French. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1970. 63-71.

Covici, Pascal, Jr., ed. The Portable Steinbeck. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.

Cowley, Malcolm. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. New York: The Viking Press, 1958.

Crouch, Steve. Steinbeck Country. New York: Bonanz Books, 1985.

Crowley, S. "Components of the Composing Process." Paper, Annual Meeting of CCCC, 1976. ED 126 514.

Davis, Robert Con, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Englewood Cliffs, N.Y.: Prentice-Hall, 193 Inc., 1982.

Davis, Robert Murray, ed. Steinbeck. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972.

DeMott, Robert. ,!,A Great Black Book': East of Eden and Gunn's New Family Physician." American Studies 21,2 (1981): 41-57.

"Steinbeck and the Creative Process: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown Against Sweet Thursday." Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Eds. Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi. Proceedings of the 1970 Steinbeck Conference sponsored by Oregon State and Ball State Universities. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1970. ed. Working Davs: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1989.

Detro, Gene. "Carol— The Woman Behind the Man." The Herald Weekend Magazine 10 June 1984: 3-6.

. "Steinbeck Biography— Most Comprehensive Yet, but Marred by Bias." Christian Science Monitor 6 March 1984: 22,24.

Dickerson, Mary Jane. "'Shades of Deeper Meaning': On Writing Autobiography." Journal of Advanced Composition 9 (1989): 135-150.

Ditsky, John. "Steinbeck's 'Slav Girl' and the Role of the Narrator in 'The Murder.'" Steinbeck Quarterly xxii, 3-4 (Sum-Fall 1989): 68-76.

"The Grapes of Wrath at 50: The Critical Perspective." San Jose Studies XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 46-53.

Dostevsky, Fedor M. The Diary of a Writer. New York: George Braziller, 1954.

Edwards, A. D. Language in Culture and Class. New York: Crane, Russak and Co., Inc., 1976.

Einstein, Albert. "Letter to Jacques Hadamard." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Technigues for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. 1-58, 177-313.

Emig, Janet. "Hand, Eye, Brain: Some 'Basics' in the Writing 194

Process.11 Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Eds. Charles Cooper and Lee Odell. NCTE, Urbana, 111., 1978.

. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. NCTE Research Report No. 13. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1971.

. "The Composing Process: Review of Literature." Contemporary Rhetoric: A Conceptual Background with Readings. Ed. W. Ross Winterowd. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc., 1975. 49-70.

Ericsson, K. A. and H. A. Simon. Sources of Evidence on Cognition: An Historical Overview. C. I. P. Working Paper No. 406, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburg, 1979.

Ernst, Max. "Inspiration to Order." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Farrell, Michael P. and Stanley D. Rosenberg. Men At Midlife. Dover, Massachusetts: Auburn House Publishing Co., 1981.

Fensch, Thomas, ed. Conversations with John Steinbeck. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

Steinbeck and Covici: The Story of a Friendship. Middlebury, Vermont: Paul S. Eriksson, 1979. 123-231.

Ferrell, Keith. John Steinbeck: The Voice of the Land. New York: M. Evans and Co., 1986.

Fiedler, Leslie A. "Looking Back After 50 Years." San Jose Studies. XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 54-64.

Fine, Jonathan and Roy 0. Freedle, eds. Developmental Issues in Discourse. Norwood, N.J.: ABLEX Publishing Corporation, 1983.

Flower, Linda and John R. Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." College Composition and Communication December 1981: 365-87.

"Plans That Guide the Composing Process." Writing: The Nature. Development. and Teaching of Written Communication. Eds. Carl H. Frederiksen and Joseph F. Dominic. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1981. 39-58.

"Process-Based Education of Writing: Changing the Performance, not the Product." Pittsburg: Carnegie- 195

Mellon University, Center for the Study of Writing, April 1981.

"The Pregnant Pause: An Inquiry into the Nature of Planning." Pittsburg: Carnegie-Mellon University, Center for the Study of Writing, April 1981.

Flower, Linda, Karen A. Schriver, Linda Carey, Christina Haas and John R. Hayes. "Planning in Writing: the Cognition of a Constructive Process." Berkeley: University of California, Center for the Study of Writing, July 1989.

Flower, Linda. "Cognition, Context and Theory Building." Pittsburg: Center for the Study of Writing, Carnegie- Mellon University, May 1989.

"Interpretive Acts: Cognition and the Construction of Discourse." Pittsburg: Carnegie-Mellon University, Center for the Study of Writing, September 1987.

. "Rhetorical Problem Solving: Cognition and Professional Writing." Pittsburg: Carnegie-Mellon University, Center for the Study of Writing, November 1985.

"The Role of Task Representation in Reading-to-Write." Pittsburg: Carnegie-Mellon University, Center for the Study of Writing, November 1985.

Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1989.

Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981.

Fontana, Cyndee. "John Steinbeck: Friends Recall Famed Author." Salinas Californian 14 June 1980.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Sussex, Great Britain: The Harvester Press, 1980.

Frank, Rich. "Hoping Again for Generosity of Spirit in a Brutal Land." The New York Times 23 March 1990: Bl.

Frederiksen, Carl H. and Joseph F. Dominic, eds. "Introduction: Perspectives on the Activity of Writing." Writing; The Nature. Development, and Teaching of Written Communication. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1981. 1-20.

French, Warren, ed. A Companion to The Grapes of Wrath. Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1972. 196

. "40 Years in the Angry Vineyard." San Jose Studies XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 65-75.

John Steinbeck. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

The Social Novel at the End of an Era. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967.

Freud, Sigmund. "Creative Writers and Daydreaming.11 Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North- Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Frul, Eugene L. "A Comparative Study Between Certain Concepts and Principles of Modern Psychology and the Main Writings of John Steinbeck." New York University, 1946.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. "John Steinbeck: Footnote for a Memoir." Atlantic Monthly 224 .(Nov. 1969): 65-67.

Galton, Francis. "Genius as Inherited." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Gannett, Lewis. "John Steinbeck's Way of Writing." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

Geismar, Maxwell David. Writers in Crisis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942. 237-270.

Gerard, R. w. "The Biological Basis of Imagination." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Ghiselin, Brewster, ed. The Creative Process. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952. Gide, Andre. The Journals of Andre Gide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.

Gordon, W. J. J. Svnectics. New York: Harper and Row, 1961.

Gowan, J. D. "The Production of Creativity Through Right Hemisphere Imagery." The Journal of Creative Behavior 13 First Quarter 1979: 39-51.

Graves, R. L. "Levels of Skills in Composition Processing." College Composition and Communication 1978: 227-32.

Green, Judith L. and Cynthia Wallat, eds. Ethnography and Language in Eductional Settings. Norwood, New Jersey: 197

ABLEX Publishing Corporation, 1983. Gregg, L. W. and E. Steinberg, eds.• Cognitive Processes of Writing. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980.

Griffith, Robert J. and William A. Freedman. "Machines and Animals: Pervasive Motifs in The Grapes of Wrath." Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1982.

Gromm, Erich. "Symbolic Language of Dreams." Focus. Ed. C. Merton Babcock. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963. 261-272.

Gruber, Howard E. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Guilford, J. P. "Creativity: A Quarter Century of Progress." Perspectives in Creativity. Eds. Irving A. Taylor and J. W. Getzels. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1975.

Gumperz, John J. Language and Social Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Gundlach, R. A. "The Composing Process and the Teaching of Writing: A Study of an Idea and Its Use." Dissertation Abstracts International 1978: 6497.

Hammersley, Martyn and Paul Atkinson. Ethnography: Principles in Practice. New York: Tavistock Publications, 1983.

Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck on Writing. Steinbeck Essay Series, No. 2. Muncie, Indiana: Ball State University, 1988.

ed. Steinbeck's Literary Dimension: A Guide to Comparative Studies. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1973.

Hayes. J. R. and L. S. Flower. "Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes." Cognitive Processes of Writing. Eds. C. W. Gregg and E. R. Steinberg. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980.

Heath, Shirley Brice. Letter. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 23 January 1989.

Hedrick, Joan. "Mother Earth and Earth Mother: The Recasting 198

of Myth in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath." Twentieth Century Interpretations; The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hill, Inc., 1982.

Heisenberg, W. Phvsics and Bevond: Encounters and Conversations. Trans. A. J. Pomerans. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Helson, Ravenna. "Women and Creativity." The Creative Question. Eds. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976.

Hillocks, George, Jr. Research on Written Composition. National Conference on Research in English. Urbana, Illinois: ERIC Clearing House on Reading and Communication Skills, 1986.

Hirsch, E. D. The Philosophy of Composition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

House, Humphry, ed. The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manlev Hopkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1937.

Howarth, William. "The Mother of Literature: Journalism and The Grapes of Wrath." Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Norman Sims. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 53-81.

"The Writer of Our Discontent." Manchester Guardian Weekly (22 January 1984): 18.

Hughes, H. Stuart. "Contemporary Historiography: Progress, Paradigms, and the Regression Toward Positivism." Progress and Its Discontents. Eds. Goureel A. Almond, et al. Berkeley, California, 1982.

Hughes, R. S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Hunter, J. Paul. "Steinbeck's Wine of Affirmation in The Grapes of Wrath." Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982.

Impressions of John Steinbeck. Film. Dir. Donald Wrye. Public Affairs USATV. U. S. Information Agency, Washington, D.C., 1969.

"John Steinbeck's Widow Revisits the Land her Husband Called 'The Pasture of Heaven.'" People 17 (May 1976): 41-43. 199

Jones, J. Journal of a Novel Review. Saturday Review 20 December 1969: 25-26.

Jung, Carl Gustav. "On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetic Art." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970. . "Psychology and Literature." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Memories. Dreams. Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.

Kakutani, Mishiko. "A New Work on Faulkner Links His Life and Art." The Living Arts, The New York Times. 26 May 1989.

Kant, Immanuel. "Genius Gives the Rules." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Kazan, Eliza. A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Kennedy, John S. "John Steinbeck: Life Affirmed and Dissolved." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

Kennedy, William. "My Work is No Good." New York Times Book Review 9 April 1989, sec. 7: 39.

Kinneavy, James L. A Theory of Discourse. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971.

Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964.

Kris, Ernst. "On Preconscious Mental Processes." The Creative Question. Eds. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976.

Kubie, Lawrence S. "Creation and Neurosis." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

La Capra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Langer, s. K. Mind: An Essav on Human Feeling. Vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. 200

Lannon, John M. The Writing Process; A Concise Rhetoric. Boston: Scott, Foresman and Co.', 1989. 9-17.

Larson, R. The Writer's Mind. Keynote address at Skidmore Writing Conference, Saratogo Springs, New York, 4 October 1980.

Lasswell, Harold D. "The Social Setting of Creativity." Creativity and Its Cultivation. Ed. Harold H. Anderson. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1959.

Lauer, Janice M. and J. William Asher. Composition Research: Empirical Designs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. "Making Pictures." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Lee, Harry B. "Unconscious Processes in the Artist." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North- Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a-Social Act. Carbondale, Illinois: Southen University Press, 1987.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Steinbeck's Grapes, With His Diary of Writing It." New York Times 30 March 1989: 15.

. "Steinbeck's Journal Reveals Doubts." Columbus Dispatch 9 April 1989: 8F.

Levinson, D. J. "Toward a Conception of the Adult Life Course." In Themes of Work and Love in Adulthood. Eds. N. J. Smelser and E. H. Erikson. Cambridge MA: Harvard Un ivers ity Press, 1980.

Levinson, Daniel J. "Growing up With the Dream." Psychology Today. January 1978.

. The Seasons of a Man's Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

Lisca, Peter. "John Steinbeck: A Literary Biography." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

"The Grapes of Wrath: An Achievement of Genius." Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1982. 201

"The Wayward Bus— A Modern Pilgrimage." Steinbeck and His Critics; A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

John Steinbeck: Nature and Mvth. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1978.

. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958.

Lowell, Amy. "The Process of Making Poetry." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Lunsford, Andrea A. "Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer." College English 1979: 38-46.

. English 895 Readings. The Ohio State University, Spring Quarter, 1988.

"Cognitive Studies and Teaching Writing." Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in Composition. Eds. Ben W. McClelland and Timothy R. Donovan. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1985. 150-157.

Lutwack, Leonard. "The Grapes of Wrath as Heroic Fiction." Twentieth Century Interpretations: The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1982.

MacKinnon, Donald W. "Architects, Personality Types and Creativity." The Creative Question. Eds. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976.

"Creativity: A Multi-faceted Phenomenon." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

"IPAR's Contribution to the Study of Creativity.11 Perspectives in Creativity. Eds. Irving A. Taylor and J. W. Getzels. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1975.

Magny, Claude-Edmonde. "Steinbeck, or the Limits of the Impersonal Novel." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

Marvin, U. B. Continental Drift: The Evolution of a Concept. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1973. 202

Maslow, Abraham. "Creativity in Self-Actualizing People." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North- Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Matsuhashi, A. "Pauses and Planning: The Tempo of Written Discourse Production." Research in the Teaching of English 1981: 113-34.

May, Rolla. "The Nature of Creativity." Focus. Ed. C. Merton Babcock. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963. 251-260.

The Courage to Create. New York: Norton, 1975.

McClelland, Ben W. Writing Practice: A Rhetoric of the Writing Process. New York: Longman, 1984.

McKay, Nellie Y. "Happy [?]-Wife-and-Motherdom: The Portrayal of Ma Joad in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. New Essay on The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. David Wyatt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 47-69.

McWilliams, Carey. "The End of a Cycle." A Companion to The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Warren French. Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelly, Publishers, 1972.

Mednick, Sarnoff A. "The Associative Basis of the Creative Process." The Creative Question. Eds. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976.

Miles, Matthew B. and A. Michael Huberman. Qualitative Data Analysis. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1984.

Miller, Henry. "Reflections on Writing." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Miller, James E. Word. Self. Reality: The Rhetoric of Imagination. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972.

Mitgana, Herbert. "Pages From the Life of Tennessee Williams." Arts/Entertainment, The New York Times 29 April 1989.

Moore, Henry. "Notes on Sculpture." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Morsberger, Robert E. Review of The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. Writer. Western American Literature (November 1984): 231-33. 203

Mozart, Wolfgagng Amadeus. "A Letter.” The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Murray, Donald M. "WRite Before WRiting." The WRiting Teacher's Sourcebook. Eds. Gary Tate and Edward P. J. Corbett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. 170- 179.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, N. J.: Boynton/Cook Publisher, Inc., 1987.

Northrop, F. S. C. "Philosophy's statement of the Problem of Creativity." The Nature of Creative Thinking. Sponsored by Industrial Research Institute, Inc. Symposium presented at the May 5-7, 1952 meeting of the Industrial Research Institute, Skytop Club, Skytop, Pennsylvania. 16.

Ornstein, R. The Psychology of Consciousness. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972.

Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985.

The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Perkins, D. N. The Mind's Best Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Perl, S. "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers." Research in the Teaching of English 1979: 317- 36.

Perron, J. D. "Composition and Cognition." English Education 1979: 144-54.

Piazza, Carolyn. "Identifying Context Variables in Research on Writing." Written Communication 9,2 (April 1987): 107-137.

Poincare, Henry. "Mathematical Creation." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin.- Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Porter, Katherine Anne Porter. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: A Seymour Lawrence Book, Delacorte Press, 1970. 433-482.

. "Notes on Writing." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster 204

Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Powys, Llewelyn. "Letter to Warner Taylor." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Pratt, John Clark. John Steinbeck: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans/Publishers, 1970.

Preston, John Hyde. "A Conversation with Gertrude Stein." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Prince, George M. "Creativity, Self, and Power." Perspectives in Creativity. Eds. Irving A. Taylor and J. W. Getzels. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1975.

Prince, George M. The Practice of Creativity. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Railsback, Brian. "Selectivity, Sympathy, and Charles Darwin." San Jose Studies XVI. 1 (Winter 1990): 98-106.

Rand, H. J. "Creativity— Its Social, Economic and Political Significance." The Nature of Creative Thinking. Sponsored by Industrial Research Institute, Inc. Symposium presented at the May 5-7, 1952 meeting of the Industrial Research Institute, Skytop Club, Skytop, Pennsylvania 12.

Rank, Otto. "Life and Creation." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Rascoe, Burton. "John Steinbeck: Artist and Thinker." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

Reti, Ingrid. Review. Working Days: The Journal of The Grapes of Wrath. The Steinbeck Newsletter. San Jose State University (Summer, 1989): 10.

Rodgers, R. F. "Theories of Adult Development: Research Status and Counseling Implications." In Handbook of Counseling Psychology. Eds. S. Brown and R. Lent. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984. Chapter 12.

Roe, Anne. "Psychological Approaches to Creativity in Science." The Creative Question. Eds. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman. Durham, N.C.: Duke 205

University Press, 1976.

Rogers, Carl R. "Toward a Theory of Creativity." The Creative Question. Eds. Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976.

Roslansky, John D., ed. Creativity. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Rosner, S. and L. E. Abt. The Creative Experience. New York: Grossman, 1970.

Ross, Woodburn 0. "John Steinbeck: Naturalism's Priest." Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. Anthology. Intro. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

Rothenberg, Albert and Carl R. Hausman, eds. The Creative Question. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1976.

Sachs, Hans. The Creative Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass.: SCI-ART Publishers, 1942.

Sadler, D. R. "Intuitive Data Processing as a Potential Source of Bias in Naturalistic Evaluations." Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 3(4) (1981): 25-31.

Salter, Christopher L. "John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as a Primer for Cultural Geography." Critical Essays on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. John Ditsky. Boston: C. K. Hall and Co., 1989.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Literary and Philosophical Essays. Trans. Annette Michelson. New York: Rider and Company, 1955.

What is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1965.

Schachtel, Ernest G. "Perceptual Modes and Creation." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North- Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Schneer, Deborah. "A Psychoanalytic Reading." San Jose Studies XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 107-116.

Scinto, Leonard F. M. Written Language and Psychological Development. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1986.

Shasky, Florian and Susan F. Riggs, eds. Letters to Elizabeth. San Franciso: The Book Club of California, 1978. 206

Simmonds, Roy S. "The Original Manuscript." San Jose Studies XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 117-132.

Snell, George. The Shapers of American Fiction. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1961. 187-197.

Spradley, James P. Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.

Stallard, C. K. "Composing: A Cognitive Process Theory." College Composition and Communication 1976: 181-4.

Starr, Kevin. "A Life of Dubious Battle." The New York Times Book Review 22 January 1984: 1.

Stegner, Wallace. "The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer." Los Angeles Times Book Review 1 January 1984: 1 .

Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twentv-Five Years. An Anthology with Introduction and Notes by E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.

"Steinbeck, Author, is Divorced." Salinas Californian 13 March 1942.

Steinbeck, Elaine. Interview. New York City. 14 March 1991.

Steinbeck, John. "The Making of a New Yorker." The Empire City. Ed. Alexander Klein. New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1955.

Steinbeck, John. "Their Blood is Strong." A Companion to The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Warren French. Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1972. 53-92.

Steinbeck, John. A Cup of Gold. New York: P. F. Collier and Son Corporation, 1929. Steinbeck, John. A Russian Journal. New York: The Viking Press, 1948.

Steinbeck, John. America and Americans. New York: The Viking Press, 1966.

Steinbeck, John. Burning Bright. New York: The Viking Press, 1950.

Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. In The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. New York: The Viking Press, 1953. 207

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Steinbeck, John. In Dubious Battle. New York: The Viking Press, 1936.

Steinbeck, John. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. New York: The Viking Press, 1969.

Steinbeck, John. Letters to Elaine Steinbeck (1949). The John Steinbeck Collection, Stanford University, 1991.

Steinbeck, John. Letters to Elizabeth Otis (1931-1952). The John Steinbeck Collection, Stanford University, 1991.

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Intro. Joseph Henry Jackson. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1953.

Steinbeck, John. The Acts of Kina Arthur and His Noble Kniahts. From the Winchester Manuscripts of Thomas Malory and Other Sources. Winchester, Md.: Random House, 1980.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.

Steinbeck, John. The Harvest Gypsies. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1936.

Steinbeck, John. The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. Working Davs: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Robert DeMott. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1989. 19-128.

Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: The Viking Press, 1951.

Steinbeck, John. The Long Valiev. New York: The Viking Press, 1938.

Steinbeck, John. The Moon is Down. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Intro. Joseph Henry Jackson. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1953.

Steinbeck, John. The Pearl. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Intro. Joseph Henry Jackson. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1953.

Steinbeck, John. The Red Pony. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Intro. Joseph Henry- Jackson. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1953. 208

Steinbeck, John. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. New York: The Viking Press, 1953.

Steinbeck, John. The Short Reign of Pippin IV. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.

Steinbeck, John. The Wavward Bus. New York: The Viking Press, 1947.

Steinbeck, John. The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: The Viking Press, 1961.

Steinbeck, John. To a God Unknown. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1935.

Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Into. Joseph Henry Jackson. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1953.

Steinbeck, John. Travels With Charley. New York: The Viking Press, 1962.

Steinbeck, John. Unpublished letter to Elizabeth Otis. Stanford University Library, 28 July 1938.

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: The Viking Press, 1975.

Steinmann, M. "Perlocutionary Acts and the Interpretation of Literature." Centrum 1975: 234-242.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Essavs in the Art of Writing. London: Chatto and Windus, 1905.

Taylor, Irving A. and J. W. Getzels, eds. Perspectives in Creativity. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1975.

The Nature of Creative Thinking. Sponsored by Industrial Research Institute, Inc. Symposium presented at the May 5-7, 1952 meeting of the Industrial Research Institute, Skytop Club, Skytop, Pennsylvania.

Thurstone, L. L. "A Psychologist Discusses the Mechanism of Thinking." The Nature of Creative Thinking. Sponsored by Industrial Research Institute, Inc. Symposium presented at the May 5-7, 1952 meeting of the Industrial Research Institute, Skytop Club, Skytop, Pennsylvania. 35.

Timmerman, John H. "Comic Vision in The Grapes of Wrath." San Jose Studies XVI, 1 (Winter 1990): 133-141. 209

The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Torrance, E. P. "Influence of Dyadic Interaction on Creative Functioning." Psychological Reports (April 1970): 391- 94.

Vaillant, George E. Adaptation to Life. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1977.

Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Eds. M. Cole, et. al. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Thought and Language. Ed. and trans. E Hanfman and G. Vakar. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962.

Waldmeir, Joseph. "John Steinbeck: No Grapes of Wrath." A Question of Quality: Popularity and Value in Modern Creative Writing. Ed. Louis Filler. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976. 219- 228.

. Review of The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. Writer. The Centennial Review (Summer 1984): 252-53.

Wallas, Graham. "Stages of the Creative Process." Creativity. Ed. John D. Roslansky. London: North- Holland Publishing Company, 1970.

Wallas, Graham. The Art of Thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1926.

Weeks, Edward. "Peripatetic Review." Library Journal (March 1970): 899-900.

Weisberg, Robert. Creativity; Genius and Other Myths. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1986.

Wilson, John R. Writing the Academic Essay. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill Publishing Co., 1988.

Winterowd, W. Ross. Composition/Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

Wollenberg, Charles. Introduction to The Harvest Gypsies. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988. v-xvii.

Woolf, Leonard, ed. A Writers Dairy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954.

Wyatt, David, ed. New Essays on The Grapes of Wrath. New 210

York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

. The Fall of Eden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 127-157.

Yeats, William Butler. "Three Pieces on the Creative Process." The Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Young, Richard. "Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention." Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Eds. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1978.