Free America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw Page A

ridiculous as the first. I had had a kind of a success with a novel after many tries. The royalties that poured in seemed to me princely. There must be some background to this. Three of my preceding novels did not make their advance and the advance was four hundred dollars. The largest amount I had ever got for a short story was ninety dollars. That was for The Red Pony and the payment was large only because the story was very long. When royalties for Tortilla Flat went over a thousand dollars, and when Paramount bought the book for $3,000—$2,700 net—I should have been filled with joy but instead I was frightened. During the preceding years I had learned to live comfortably, and contentedly, on an absolute minimum of money—thirty-five to fifty dollars a month. When gigantic sums like $2,700 came over the horizon I was afraid I could not go back to the old simplicity.
    Whereas on my first try New York was a dark hulking frustration, the second time it became the Temptation and I a whistle-stop St. Anthony. I had become a fifth-rate celebrity. People in a narrow field went out of their way to be nice to me, invited me places, and poured soft and ancient beverages for me. And I, afraid I would lose my taste for twenty-nine-cent wine and red beans and hamburger, resisted like a mule.
    As with most St. Anthonys, if I had not been drawn toward luxury and sin, and to me they were the same thing, there would have been no temptation. I reacted without originality: today I see people coming to success doing the same things I did, so I guess I didn’t invent it. I pretended, and believed my pretense, that I hated the city and all its miles and traps. I longed for the quiet and contemplation of the West Coast. I preferred twenty-nine-cent wine and red beans. And again I didn’t even see New York. It had scared me again but this time in another way. So I shut my eyes and drew virtue over my head. I insulted everyone who tried to be kind to me and I fled the Whore of Babylon with relief and virtuous satisfaction, for I had convinced myself that the city was a great snare set in the path of my artistic simplicity and integrity.
    Back to the West I plunged, built a new house, bought a Chevrolet and imperceptibly moved from twenty-nine-cent wine to fifty-nine-cent wine. Royalties continued to come in. Now I made a number of business trips to New York and I was so completely in my role of country boy that I didn’t look at it because I must have been enjoying my triumph over the snares and pitfalls. I had a successful play but never saw it. I believed I wasn’t interested but it is probable that I was afraid to see it. I even built up a pleasant fiction that I hated the theater. And the various trips to New York were very like the visits of the Salvation Army to a brothel—necessary and fascinating but distasteful.
    The very first time I came to the city and settled was engineered by a girl. Looking back from the cool position of middle age I can see that most of my heroic decisions somehow stemmed from a girl. Some basic healthiness in me had never permitted me to add girls to my catalogue of sins. And I who distrusted luxuries was a pushover for those most expensive luxuries of all—women.
    I got an apartment on East Fifty-first Street between First and Second Avenues but even then I kept contact with my prejudices. My new home consisted of the first and second floors of a three-story house and the living room looked out on a small soot field called a garden.
    Two triumphant Brooklyn trees called ailanthus not only survived but thumbed their noses at the soft coal dust and nitric acid which passed for air in New York.
    It is so strange to look back. I was going to live in New York but I was going to avoid it. I planted a lawn in the garden, bought huge pots and planted tomatoes, pollinating the blossoms with a water-color brush. But I can see now that a conspiracy was going on, of which I was not even