John Steinbeck writing routine

Oh, yes, John said, his father was a disciplined worker. “He would get up at five in the morning, generally, and fiddle around with breakfast. Then he would sharpen pencils for a long time. he had a box of not such dull pencils here … ” John reached with his right hand into an imaginary box … “and an empty box here.” He reached with his left hand into a second, imaginary box. Laughed. “I’m talking about 400 pencils. He had one of the first electric pencil sharpeners ever made He’d take a pencil,” John mimed, “put it in the sharpener, and by the time he had them all sharpened, when this box was full, he had gotten over what all writers have: that morning inhibition: ‘Am I really going to put my mind on a piece of blank paper?’ By the time the 400 pencils were sharpened, he’d negotiated all that. And then he would write, from six or seven in the morning until noon. Then quit and go fishing or whittling or invent. I thought that was really enviable, that he only worked until noon. But he did it with a great deal of discipline. He didn’t give himself vacations. He didn’t gnash his teeth about stuff. He worked out a lot of his mechanical problems by writing letters to his close friends and editor.”

I was looking up “John Steinbeck San Diego” to see if he ever wrote anything about the place and found this 1989 interview with his son, who was living in La Jolla, in The San Diego Reader.

“He worked very hard at what he did. He was poor for a long time. His success of any remark was in in his late 30s. He worked hard and he worked a lot of things, did a lot of manual labor, was a night watchman, helped build Madison Square Garden, poured cement ffr it.”

What things remind him of his father? “Some odors — a certain Florida toilet water. I noticed very pleasantly the other day, I walked into my office and it smelled like my father’s office.

Some gags:

“He brought a lot o this into his real life. In one of the Sports Illustrated articles, he had written that one of the sports he liked — he was making them up — was fishing contests without baiting the hook. Actually, he did fish that way a lot, not baiting the hook. Actually, he did fish that way a lot, not baiting the hook, because, he said, ‘It won’t disturb them.’ Also, he fished that way sometimes in order to work out problems in his work.”

In another of his Sports Illustrated articles, Steinbeck had discussed racing oak trees. John was visiting him and saw, next to his father’s writing desk, a baking dish filled with peat moss and on the peat moss were rows of acorns, turned upside down. “I didn’t let him know I’d read the Sports Illustrated article,” John said, “and I asked him, “What are you doing here?’ and he said, ‘I’m racing oak trees.'” John’s laughter interrupted his story, then he continues, repeating to us his father’s answer, “‘Well, it hasn’t caught on yet, but if it does, I have one of the first stables.’

“It was so strange. He had a very funny private little thing going on. You’d go into the attic where people had mousetraps. He’d have a plate of poisoned grain, and he’d have signs all over, ‘Mouse Beware. This is Poison. Do not Eat.’ He was a funny guy.”

How about this:

“The most gratifying thing he gave me, both before and after he died, was to know that the most refined highest wisdoms and human knowledge we find in the everyday, ordinary world, not in a library of Sanskrit, not at Oxford, but from the guy down the street. That guy knows as much. The common wisdom is the most profound. Ordinary mind is enlightened mind. Fortunately, my other training also reinforced that truth.

“Not that my father didn’t believe scholarship was useful, but that it had its place. If he needed to learn something about the language of the Middle Ages, he would go to the books or scholars who could teach him, but he did that only so he could learn what ordinary people said in the Middle Ages.”

Previous Steinbeck coverage.