30 - Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)

Summary

William Hogan.

“World of Books.”

San Francisco Chronicle,

16 December 1969, p. 41.

We enter a low-keyed neurotic wonderland in John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. This is a literary document, reminiscent of… Thomas Wolfe's self-revealing background notes on the writing of Look Homeward, Angel (1935). But the Steinbeck material is a far more personal and revealing emotional catharsis. It is a series of letters to his editor at Viking Press, the late Pascal Covici (who died some four years before Steinbeck did), and who was Steinbeck's mentor, psychiatrist and father- confessor.

The letters were written between January and November, 1951, when Steinbeck was writing East of Eden, the long, realistically detailed saga of a Salinas valley family played as a reconstruction of the Cain and Abel story. As it turned out, East of Eden was a rather pretentious novel which stirred a mixed critical reception, but it added to the bulk of Steinbeck's work for which, in 1962, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Daily, during the composition of this book, Steinbeck “unblocked” himself by writing a letter to Covici. Most of the letters appeared on left hand pages of a large notebook; the text of his story was on the right hand pages, all written in longhand. They tell much about the writer's creative process, and about this particular author-editor relationship.

It is intimate stuff, never designed for publication. It is chatter about his characters, about his drinking habits, about news events of the day, his wife, sons and his title. Should it be “Salinas Valley,” or “My Valley”? “I have never been a titleman,” he confided.