Free Working Days by John Steinbeck Page A

sheets.) Ironically, though Steinbeck severely doubted his own artistic ability, in writing The Grapes of Wrath he was creating with the full potency of his imaginative powers. His ability to execute a work of its magnitude so flawlessly places him among the premier creative talents of his age. From the vantage point of history, the venture stands as one of those happy occasions when a writer simply wrote better than he thought he could.
    Undeterred by the failure of his vigilante novel, Steinbeck set out immediately to establish a unified work rhythm, a “single track mind” that would allow him to complete the enormous task in one hundred days, or approximately five months. Though he had written steadily throughout the 1930s (he published eleven books and/or limited editions in the first eight years of the decade), the work never seemed to get easier. Averaging 2,000 words a day (some days as few as 800, some days, when the juices were flowing, as many as 2,200), Steinbeck began the novel unhurriedly to keep its “tempo” under control, hoping at the same time to keep alive the large rhythmic structure of the novel. This he accomplished by listening to Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, and Igor Stravinsky’s “very fine” Symphony of Psalms. Music inspired him by setting a mood conducive to writing and by establishing a rhythm for the day’s work. Even more important, classical music provided Steinbeck with formal, harmonic, and lyric analogies for his fiction. In writing The Grapes, he said, “I have worked in a musical technique . . . and have tried to use the forms and the mathematics of music rather than those of prose.... In composition, in movement, in tone and in scope it is symphonic” (John Steinbeck/Merle Armitage, letter, February 17, 1939; courtesy of University of Virginia Library). The contrapuntal form of the novel, with its alternating chapters, its consonant combination of major chords, is deeply rooted in the attentiveness, the tonal acuity, of Steinbeck’s ear. (But not to put too fine a construction on this, when Steinbeck didn’t have his music, he listened to the washing machine—its metronomic beat was soothing, at least for a while).
    As Steinbeck’s anxiety escalated during the late summer, his pace became increasingly frenetic, his attention splintered, and his work became a chore. “Was ever a book written under greater difficulty?” he asked himself on September 1. That he completed the novel within the time he had allotted testifies to his discipline, resilience, willpower, and singleness of purpose. This story of the composition of his novel is a dramatic testimony to triumph over intrusions, obstacles, and self-inflicted doubts. Nearly each day brought unsolicited requests for his name and new demands on his time, including unscheduled visitors, unanticipated disruptions and reversals. Domestic relations with Carol were frequently strained, even hostile (Steinbeck apparently subscribed to the theory that sexual intercourse dissipated the creative drive). Throughout the summer a procession of house guests trooped to Los Gatos, including family members and longtime friends Carlton Sheffield, Ed Ricketts, and the Lovejoys, plus new acquaintances, such as Wallace and Martha Ford, Broderick Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, and Pare Lorentz.
    As if that weren’t enough to erode the novelist’s intitial composure and solitude, the Steinbecks’ tiny house on Greenwood Lane was besieged with the noise of neighborhood building, which nearly drove them to distraction. “This place is getting built up and we have to move. Houses all around us now and so we will get back farther in the country.... I can hear the neighbors’ stomachs rumbling,” he complained to Elizabeth Otis on July 22 (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 169). By midsummer, hoping for permanent sanctuary, they began looking at secluded real estate, finally settling on the Biddle ranch, a