Here is the diary of a book and it will be interesting to see how it works out. I have tried to keep diaries before but they don’t work out because of the necessity to be honest. ~ Steinbeck
I had floated the idea of doing this Substack with a couple of friends, one of whom referred to the diary Steinbeck kept while writing The Grapes Of Wrath. I’ve never warmed up to Steinbeck as much as some of his contemporaries, and I prefer Of Mice And Men or Tortilla Flats to The Grapes Of Wrath, but of course I recognize its greatness, and (as the son of a labor organizer) I appreciate Steinbeck’s support for migrant labor issues (the more things change …) — we must admire his heart and humanity. Though I don’t think of Steinbeck as a strong influence on my own sensibility, we have very different artistic concerns, yet the diary really hit me where I live.
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.1
Bang. I’m the nail for that hammer.
Steinbeck was already a successful author when he started on The Grapes Of Wrath, yet he is haunted by his feelings of inadequacy, overwhelmed by his ambition for the novel.
… I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain — never temper a word to a reader’s prejudice, but bend it like putty for his understanding. If I can do that it will be all my lack of 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.
At times his anguish pushes him to the brink of mental breakdown.
The despair came on me for a while but although still nervous from it I think I am recovering. … 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?
There are a number of passages like that one.
As for me, lately there are days when I am so panicky I cannot work at all. Many another morning I go to the desk full of anxiety, fearful even to look at what I wrote the day before. And few are the days I don't despair of ever being able to finish the “the damn book”, let alone publish it — and then, my god, what if people laugh? — I don’t want to be one of God’s fools!
Why make art when the making of it can be such torment? Why invent such problems for ourselves, isn’t life hard enough all on its own? We are so fortunate just to have the luxury of indulging such problems, aren’t there healthier ways to employ our privilege?
The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living. ~ UG Krishnamurti
Are we compelled to be miserable?
And still a stranger question is this: why, to begin with, do our projects of imagination, which we conjure from the air, cause us so much angst? The absurdity of it, being terrified of something you only made up! The worst ogres are the imaginary ones.
There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius … In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes; a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity. ~ Nietzsche
Aye, there’s the rub. Would we be even worse without our struggle, in denial of our genius? Must every genie be a demon?
I think of the great adventurers, the sailors, climbers, explorers: voluntarily they spend their lives in physical peril, in insufferable conditions and difficulties: they need these challenges more than they need comfort and security: they need to push themselves beyond their own limits: that is, to go beyond themselves.
Ernest Becker wrote that we all invent an “immortality project”, something into which we try to install our identity, as a way to outlive the fragile flesh: we need some defense against the terror of mortality. Merely living well is not enough. Viktor Frankl believed that our central motivation is meaning. I think there’s much in common between Frankl and Becker.
The world of imagination is the world of eternity. ~ Blake
In Tarkovsky’s Stalker the Writer says to the Professor:
[A] man writes because he’s tormented, unsure of himself. He has to keep proving his worth to himself and to others. But if I’m convinced I’m a genius then why do I need to write? … At any rate, all your technology — all those blast furnaces, wheels and suchlike hustle and bustle so that people can work less and consume more — they’re all crutches, artificial limbs. Mankind exists in order to create works of art. At least that’s unselfish compared with all other human activities. Great illusions. Images of absolute truth.
I often think to myself that the best art is that which is made by the artist as a gift of love to the world. And that’s the attitude I should like to take toward my writing of the Swan.
Eternity exists, and all things in eternity, independent of creation, which was an act of mercy. ~ Blake
1 Steinbeck excerpts from DeMott. Working Days. New York: Penguin, 1989.