The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [12]
In 1939, at Steinbeck’s suggestion, Collins worked as a well-paid technical adviser to John Ford’s 20th Century Fox production of The Grapes of Wrath. (“Tom will howl his head off if they get out of hand,” Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis.) And later—probably spurred by the success of both novel and film—Collins himself (under the pseudonym of Windsor Drake) wrote an autobiographical-fictional memoir, to which Steinbeck, who appears as a character, added a foreword: “Windsor and I traveled together, sat in the ditches with migrant workers, lived and ate with them. We heard a thousand miseries and a thousand jokes. We ate fried dough and sow belly, worked with the sick and the hungry, listened to complaints and little triumphs.” The book was accepted but never reached print because the publisher reneged on the deal. After that, Collins resigned from the FSA, and he and Steinbeck passed out of each other’s lives.
Clearly, Steinbeck had a knack for associating himself with gifted, generous people. George West, chief editorial writer for the progressive San Francisco News, was the man who instigated Steinbeck’s initial investigations of the migrant labor situation for his paper (to be discussed below) . Frederick R. Soule, the enlightened regional information adviser at the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration, and his assistant, Helen Horn, provided statistics and documents for his News reports and otherwise opened official doors for Steinbeck that might have stayed closed. Soule’s colleague Eric Thomsen, regional director in charge of management at the FSA office in San Francisco, personally escorted Steinbeck to the Central Valley and introduced him to Tom Collins at the Arvin camp for the first time. (Biographer Jackson J. Benson was the first to recognize that, in a convoluted and unintentional way, the federal government underwrote Steinbeck’s research.) A continent away, in Manhattan, Steinbeck’s publisher, the intrepid and irrepressible Pascal Covici (1888-1964), kept up a running dialogue with the novelist. In his literary agents he was triply blessed. Mavis McIntosh, Elizabeth Otis, and Annie Laurie Williams not only kept his professional interests uppermost at all times, but did so with the kind of selflessness that made them more like family members than business managers. Of the three women, Elizabeth Otis (1901-1981) became his most trusted confidante.
III
Steinbeck lived to write. He believed it was redemptive work, a transformative act. Each morning, after warming up with letters to Otis or Covici and an entry in Working Days, he often listened to Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, Stravinsky’s “very fine” Symphony of Psalms, and Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas, which put him in a conducive mood to create a disciplined working rhythm and maintain what he called a “unity feeling”—a sense of continuity and habitation with his material. “Let the damn book go three hundred thousand words if it wants to. This is my life. Why should I want to finish my own life? The confidence is on me again. I can feel it. It’s stopping work that does the damage,” he admitted in Working Days on July 7, 1938. Ideally, for a few hours each day, the world Steinbeck created took precedence over the one in which he lived. Because both worlds can be considered “real,” at times Steinbeck didn’t know where one began and the other left off; walking back into the domestic world from the world of imagination was not always a smooth shift for him (or for Carol). His work demanded his attention so fully that he finally refused to dissipate his energy in extra-literary pursuits: “I won’t do any of these public things. Can’t. It isn’t my nature and I won’t be stampeded. And so the stand must be made and I must keep out of politics,” he promised himself.
Steinbeck’s doubts about his ability to carry out the plan of his novel surface repeatedly