East of Eden

Key Takeaways

Highlights imported 2026-09-13 from the Kindle notebook export (470 highlights, 10 notes). Key takeaways and synthesis to come.

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Highlights

• “I’ve been practicing for a book for 35 years,” he wrote in 1949, “and this is it. I don’t see how it can be popular because I am inventing method and form and tone and context.” All else had been apprenticeship: “It is the first book.” “There is only one book to a man,” he wrote in the journal that tracked the novel’s progress.
• Steinbeck replied that “Katie is a total representative of Satan. If you can believe in saints, you can believe that somebody can be all good, you’ve got to believe that somebody can be all bad.”
• East of Eden was a book he wrote “to my sons,” and “I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers.”
• Many critics deploy an Antaeus myth with Steinbeck and argue that the perceived falling-off in his work after The Grapes of Wrath is a direct result of having left the landscapes and associations that nourished him. Louis Owens has advanced the most sustained argument against this view. He reads the career as an act of informed eastering: “The American consciousness must turn about and commit itself to what it has traversed, to everything eastward of the Pacific shore.”
• East of Eden explores the value and “love of places,” and some of the strongest writing in the book is reserved for them. But it is also written against places, or at least out of a growing conviction, expressed first while married to Gwyn but bolstered by the ease of his final transplantation to New York, that “living is people, not places.”
• Just before moving to New York, Steinbeck wrote Elaine that “I think I have no ‘place’ home. Home is people and where you work well.”
• Ricketts had supplied Steinbeck with many of the controlling notions of the 1930s and ’40s, especially the interest in cellular and group behavior and “non-teleological thinking.” But by the time Steinbeck began the novel his need for mentoring had waned, as had his interest in the collective. “I think I believe in one thing powerfully,” he wrote John O’Hara in 1949, “that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group.”

  Kyle: Pluribus

• If the book was an emotional event, it was also a professional endeavor. The Journal interests itself as much in the process as the origin and end of writing. “I hold a pencil for about six hours every day,” Steinbeck calculates, and he rejoices when his new Blackwings “really glide over the paper.” Steinbeck liked work, especially with his hands, and so conveys in the Journal a distinct sense of physical labor. But his deepest concerns are with how imagination shapes the story. The letters recur to three formal concerns: pace, tone, and structure.
• “Books establish their own pace,” he had written. Filled with monologues, the novel often suspends plot in favor of commentary.
• Nothing has irritated critics more than the novel’s investment in expository talk. The novel has the tone of wisdom literature. From the start Steinbeck claimed that “It has to have a universal quality or there is no point in writing it.”
• The first half of the novel belongs to Adam; the second, to Cal. Both are sons caught in a drama of rejection, but the second is not a repetition but a revision of the first. Abra is another kind of alternation, “the strong female principle of good as opposed to Cathy.” Such patterns make a point about the power of story to determine and the power of persons to revise.
• I think it can be properly called not a novel but an history. And while its form is very tight, it is my intention to make it seem to have the formlessness of history. History actually is not formless, but a long view and a philosophic turn of mind are necessary to see its pattern.
• The rhetoric throughout the Journal personifies the story’s characters as actual people and the book itself as a physical space. The author speaks about living “in” it. Cathy feels “real.” All of the Hamilton stories are true,” he asserts. He is trying to get on paper “true things.” His role is to record the truth: “In this book I am a bystander and I know it.” His engagement in a project he believed answerable to truth rather than form or convention made him defensive from the start.
• Steinbeck proposed four titles for East of Eden before he finally got it right: The Salinas Valley My Valley Valley to the Sea Cain Sign East of Eden
• In Eden, the stories of the Bible become not only a model for plot but an object of commentary. In bringing his precedents so openly into view, Steinbeck makes a kind of argument that the origin and responsibilities of story are in and to other stories.

  Kyle: Everything is a remix and you shouldn’t be ashamed of your source material; you should bare it proudly

• Of the pioneers in the Salinas Valley he can write: I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units—because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.
• At the other extreme lay the dangers of “mass method”: “In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger.” Between fascism and communism lay the “exploring mind of the individual human.”

  Kyle: Pluribus

• You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
• Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.
• And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
• When the Spaniards came they had to give everything they saw a name. This is the first duty of any explorer—a duty and a privilege. You must name a thing before you can note it on your hand-drawn map. Of course they were religious people, and the men who could read and write, who kept the records and drew the maps, were the tough untiring priests who traveled with the soldiers. Thus the first names of places were saints’ names or religious holidays celebrated at stopping places.
• Then the Americans came—more greedy because there were more of them. They took the lands, remade the laws to make their titles good.
• The Americans had a greater tendency to name places for people than had the Spanish. After the valleys were settled the names of places refer more to things which happened there, and these to me are the most fascinating of all names because each name suggests a story that has been forgotten.
• You can name anything San Lorenzo, but Shirt Tail Canyon or the Lame Moor is something quite different.
• He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money. Other men who had the talent took Samuel’s tricks and sold them and grew rich, but Samuel barely made wages all his life.
• he brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
• Even in reasonably good years there was so little feed that the cattle kept thin running about looking for enough to eat.
• Men from all over the district brought him tools to mend and to improve. Besides, they loved to hear Samuel talk of the world and its thinking, of the poetry and philosophy that were going on outside the Salinas Valley. He had a rich deep voice, good both in song and in speech, and while he had no brogue there was a rise and a lilt and a cadence to his talk that made it sound sweet in the ears of the taciturn farmers from the valley bottom.
• It was a bad day when three or four men were not standing around the forge, listening to Samuel’s hammer and his talk. They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.
• Samuel’s hands were so good and gentle that neighbors from twenty miles away would call on him to help with a birth. And he was equally good with mare, cow, or woman.
• The Hamiltons must have been either lucky or moral for the sections on gonorrhea and syphilis were never opened.
• Samuel had no equal for soothing hysteria and bringing quiet to a frightened child. It was the sweetness of his tongue and the tenderness of his soul. And just as there was a cleanness about his body, so there was a cleanness in his thinking. Men coming to his blacksmith shop to talk and listen dropped their cursing for a while, not from any kind of restraint but automatically, as though this were not the place for it.
• Liza Hamilton was a very different kettle of Irish. Her head was small and round and it held small round convictions. She had a button nose and a hard little set-back chin, a gripping jaw set on its course even though the angels of God argued against it.
• Bearing her children did not hold her back very much—two weeks at the most she had to be careful. She must have had a pelvic arch of whalebone, for she had big children one after the other.
• Liza had a finely developed sense of sin. Idleness was a sin, and card playing, which was a kind of idleness to her. She was suspicious of fun whether it involved dancing or singing or even laughter. She felt that people having a good time were wide open to the devil. And this was a shame, for Samuel was a laughing man, but I guess Samuel was wide open to the devil. His wife protected him whenever she could.
• When people first came to the West, particularly from the owned and fought-over farmlets of Europe, and saw so much land to be had for the signing of a paper and the building of a foundation, an itching land-greed seemed to come over them. They wanted more and more land—good land if possible, but land anyway. Perhaps they had filaments of memory of feudal Europe where great families became and remained great because they owned things. The early settlers took up land they didn’t need and couldn’t use; they took up worthless land just to own it.
• But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units—because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.
• She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and of herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness.
• Whether she liked children or not no one ever knew. She was not asked, and she never said anything unless she was asked. From Cyrus’s point of view this was possibly the greatest of her virtues. She never offered any opinion or statement, and when a man was talking she gave a vague impression of listening while she went about doing the housework.
• Timidly he began to tell Alice about his campaigns, but as his technique grew so did his battles. At the very first he knew he was lying, but it was not long before he was equally sure that every one of his stories was true. Before he had entered the service he had not been much interested in warfare; now he bought every book about war, read every report, subscribed to the New York papers, studied maps. His knowledge of geography had been shaky and his information about the fighting nonexistent; now he became an authority. He knew not only the battles, movements, campaigns, but also the units involved, down to the regiments, their colonels, and where they originated. And from telling he became convinced that he had been there.
• There was one thing Cyrus did not do, and perhaps it was clever of him. He never once promoted himself to noncommissioned rank. Private Trask he began, and Private Trask he remained. In the total telling, it made him at once the most mobile and ubiquitous private in the history of warfare. It made it necessary for him to be in as many as four places at once. But perhaps instinctively he did not tell those stories close to each other.
• And while he never actually said it, you got the indestructible impression that Private Cyrus Trask was one of Lincoln’s closest, warmest, and most trusted friends.
• No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.
• Perhaps she didn’t dare to mention it to her husband. He had devised a method for dealing with sickness which resembled punishment. A stomach ache was treated with a purge so violent that it was a wonder anyone survived it. If she had mentioned her condition, Cyrus might have started a treatment which would have killed her off before her consumption could have done it.
• Alice retired to the background until she was barely visible at all.
• When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
• And then—it was very fast, almost a click in the brain—Adam knew that, for him at least, his father’s methods had no reference to anything in the world but his father. The techniques and training were not designed for the boys at all but only to make Cyrus a great man. And the same click in the brain told Adam that his father was not a great man, that he was, indeed, a very strong-willed and concentrated little man wearing a huge busby. Who knows what causes this—a look in the eye, a lie found out, a moment of hesitation?—then god comes crashing down in a child’s brain.
• Charles felt for his brother the affection one has for helpless things, for blind puppies and new babies.
• Adam looked out of his covered brain—out the long tunnels of his eyes—at the people of his world.
• His father, a one-legged natural force at first, installed justly to make little boys feel littler and stupid boys aware of their stupidity;
• And it would no more have occurred to Adam to confide in his brother—to tell him the hunger, the gray dreams, the plans and silent pleasures that lay at the back of the tunneled eyes—than to share his thoughts with a lovely tree or a pheasant in flight.
• Adam thought sometimes that if he could only find out what sin it was she had committed, why, he would sin it too—and not be here.
• Charles had one great quality. He was never sorry—ever. He never mentioned the beating, apparently never thought of it again. But Adam made very sure that he didn’t win again—at anything. He had always felt the danger in his brother, but now he understood that he must never win unless he was prepared to kill Charles. Charles was not sorry. He had very simply fulfilled himself.
• They’ll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can’t finally give in, they’ll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside—neither part of themselves nor yet free. It’s better to fall in with them. They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it. Within itself, if you do not hold it up to other things for comparison and derision, you’ll find slowly, surely, a reason and a logic and a kind of dreadful beauty. A man who can accept it is not a worse man always, and sometimes is a much better man.
• If you can go down so low, you will be able to rise higher than you can conceive, and you will know a holy joy, a companionship almost like that of a heavenly company of angels. Then you will know the quality of men even if they are inarticulate. But until you have gone way down you can never know this.”
• Adam was staring at his father in wonder. “You never came here looking for me,” he said. “No,” Cyrus replied. “I wouldn’t do that. You can drive a human too far. I wouldn’t do that. Always you must leave a man one escape before death. Remember that! I knew, I guess, how hard I was pressing you. I didn’t want to push you over the edge.”
• But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, described and recognizable, by bullet or saber, arrow or lance, then you need never be afraid again, at least not in the same way you were before. Then you will be a man set apart from other men, safe where other men may cry in terror. This is the great reward. Maybe this is the only reward.
• To put him in an army would be to let loose things which in Charles must be chained down, not let loose. I would not dare to let him go.”
• I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but it’s true. I love you better. Else why would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you?
• “He won’t like it. It’s not right for him.” “It doesn’t matter,” Cyrus said, and he repeated loudly, “It doesn’t matter,” and his tone said, “Shut your mouth. This is not your affair.” They were silent a moment, and then he said almost in a tone of apology, “It isn’t as though he were your child.”
• The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.
• It has always seemed strange to me that it is usually men like Adam who have to do the soldiering. He did not like fighting to start with, and far from learning to love it, as some men do, he felt an increasing revulsion for violence.
• To Adam who was an instrument, who saw not the future farms but only the torn bellies of fine humans, it was revolting and useless. When he fired his carbine to miss he was committing treason against his unit, and he didn’t care. The emotion of nonviolence was building in him until it became a prejudice like any other thought-stultifying prejudice. To inflict any hurt on anything for any purpose became inimical to him.
• He was regarded by his comrades with contemptuous affection and the unspoken fear men have of impulses they do not understand.

  Kyle: When you see someone who is so good, you hate yourself more.

• As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
• He was a conservative, not only in politics but in everything. Ideas he found revolutionary, and he avoided them with suspicion and distaste. Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.
• Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing. If Samuel had been a rich man like the Thornes or the Delmars, with their big houses and wide flat lands, he would have had a great library.
• The Delmars had a library—nothing but books in it and paneled in oak. Samuel, by borrowing, had read many more of the Delmars’ books than the Delmars had.
• But a poor man—what need had he for poetry or for painting or for music not fit for singing or dancing? Such things did not help him bring in a crop or keep a scrap of cloth on his children’s backs. And if in spite of this he persisted, maybe he had reasons which would not stand the light of scrutiny.
• Little boys don’t want their fathers to be different from other men. Will might have picked up his conservatism right then.
• Samuel belonged to the valley, and it was proud of him in the way a man who owns a peacock is proud. They weren’t afraid of him any more, for he did not seduce their wives or lure them out of sweet mediocrity.
• The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long finger down their throats. They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them defensive always.
• Some men think big and some think little. Samuel and his sons Tom and Joe thought big and George and Will thought little.
• His mother and father thought him a poet because he wasn’t any good at anything else.
• Then there was Dessie, whose laughter was so constant that everyone near her was glad to be there because it was more fun to be with Dessie than with anyone else.
• Her total intellectual association was the Bible, except the talk of Samuel and her children, and to them she did not listen. In that one book she had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she just read it. The many places where it seems to refute itself did not confuse her in the least. And finally she came to a point where she knew it so well that she went right on reading it without listening.
• Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink.
• When Liza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and her doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and she was a much more relaxed and happy woman.
• There was no question of inheritance. Although the hill ranch was large it was abysmally poor. Samuel sunk well after well and could not find water on his own land. That would have made the difference. Water would have made them comparatively rich. The one poor pipe of water pumped up from deep near the house was the only source; sometimes it got dangerously low, and twice it went dry. The cattle had to come from the far fringe of the ranch to drink and then go out again to feed.
• There is great safety for a shy man with a whore. Having been paid for, and in advance, she has become a commodity, and a shy man can be gay with her and even brutal to her. Also, there is none of the horror of the possible turndown which shrivels the guts of timid men.
• Charles developed a restlessness that got him out at dawn. He worked the farm mightily because he was lonely. Coming in from his work, he gorged himself on fried food and went to bed and to sleep in the resulting torpor. His dark face took on the serious expressionlessness of a man who is nearly always alone.
• He conceived a shame for his scar; he hated his scar. He became restless when anyone looked at it, and fury rose in him if any question was asked about it.
• He didn’t want to go home and he put it off as long as possible. Home was not a pleasant place in his mind. The kind of feelings he had had there were dead in him, and he had a reluctance to bring them to life.
• “Thanks. Where you staying?” “Mrs. May’s boarding house.” “I know her. What they tell is she fills you up with soup so you can’t eat much meat.” “I guess there are tricks to every trade,” said Adam. “I guess that’s right. There’s sure plenty in mine.” “I bet that’s true,” said Adam. “But the one trick I need I haven’t got. I wisht I knew that one.” “What is it?” “How the hell to get you to go home and let me close up.”
• The porch steps complained again, and Adam knew the woman would be standing in her doorway ready to spray inhospitality on the new arrival.
• To an enlisted man the high far gods in Washington were crazy, and if a soldier wanted to keep his sanity he thought about generals as little as possible.
• This man was a stranger to him. A faint distaste arose in Adam. Something was not true.
• With the leg off, his father became himself again, the self Adam remembered. He had experienced the beginning of contempt, but now the childhood fear and respect and animosity came back to him, so that he seemed a little boy testing his father’s immediate mood to escape trouble.
• “Are you defying me?” Cyrus asked quietly. Adam took a long time to answer, and his mind sought escape before he said, “Yes, sir.”
• Adam knew more than that. He knew that Cyrus was defending himself with threats. “Yes, sir. I’ve heard.”
• Adam remembered his father’s tone and how he looked. And he had plenty of time to remember, because he did rot in barracks. He remembered that Cyrus was lonely and alone—and knew it.
• Charles waited for Adam, and Adam did not come. Perhaps Adam was ashamed to write. It was Cyrus who told Charles in an angry letter about Adam’s re-enlistment against his wishes. And Cyrus indicated that, in some future, Charles could visit him in Washington, but he never asked him again.
• Time had got in its work. After that Charles wrote right after New Year’s and received a letter from Adam written right after New Year’s. They had grown so apart that there was little mutual reference and no questions.
• A farmer cannot think too much evil of a good farmer.
• Adam spent his next five years doing the things an army uses to keep its men from going insane—endless polishing of metal and leather, parade and drill and escort, ceremony of bugle and flag, a ballet of business for men who aren’t doing anything.
• Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
• he learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it. He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself.
• And now he learned how men can consider other men as beasts and that the easiest way to get along with such men was to be a beast. A clean face, an open face, an eye raised to meet an eye—these drew attention and attention drawn brought punishment.
• Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt.
• When two events have something in common, in their natures or in time or place, we leap happily to the conclusion that they are similar and from this tendency we create magics and store them for retelling.
• Charles inspected him from head to foot. “You don’t look prosperous.”
• Adam said, “Just thinking.” And he was thinking with amazement, Why, I’m not afraid of my brother! I used to be scared to death of him, and I’m not any more. Wonder why not? Could it be the army? Or the chain gang? Could it be Father’s death? Maybe—but I don’t understand it. With the lack of fear, he knew he could say anything he wanted to, whereas before he had picked over his words to avoid trouble. It was a good feeling he had, almost as though he himself had been dead and resurrected.
• Adam said, “Let me tell you. The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.”
• “I won’t look at the papers. Papers are no match at all for my faith in my father.”
• And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
• To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
• Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.
• Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar—if he is financially fortunate.
• Cathy learned when she was very young that sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have. And in that day it was even more disturbing than it is now, because the subject was unmentionable and unmentioned. Everyone concealed that little hell in himself, while publicly pretending it did not exist—and when he was caught up in it he was completely helpless.
• What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
• “Now look here, Mike,” he said, “you shouldn’t do a thing like that. If that poor fellow had been just a little smarter you might have got him hanged.” “He said he did it.” The constable’s feelings were hurt because he was a conscientious man. “He would have admitted climbing the golden stairs and cutting St. Peter’s throat with a bowling ball,” the judge said. “Be more careful, Mike. The law was designed to save, not to destroy.”
• This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old.
• When two men live together they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other. Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting, and they know it.
• “Well, if we run true to form we’ll fight for three or four weeks, getting you ready to go away. If you’re getting restless, couldn’t you just go away and save all the trouble?”
• “Charles, we could go to Egypt and walk around the Sphinx.” “We could stay right here and make some good use of our money. And we could get the hell out to work and make some use of the day.
• “You know what I think? I don’t think I’m half as mean as you are under that nice skin. I think you’re a devil.”
• She was afraid. She needed protection and money. Adam could give her both. And she could control him—she knew that. She did not want to be married, but for the time being it was a refuge. Only one thing bothered her. Adam had a warmth toward her which she did not understand since she had none toward him, nor had ever experienced it toward anyone.
• You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be—more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world—the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. Old men who didn’t know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost—good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word.
• A man’s mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
• History was secreted in the glands of a million historians. We must get out of this banged-up century, some said, out of this cheating, murderous century of riot and secret death, of scrabbling for public lands and damn well getting them by any means at all.
• Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
• When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
• At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
• Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
• And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
• It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
• He raged at his farm, forced it, added to it, drilled and trimmed, and his boundaries extended. He took no rest, no recreation, and he became rich without pleasure and respected without friends.
• “It’s real godforsaken country,” said Louis. “Makes me feel mean,” said Adam. “How’s that?” “Well, I’m fixed so I don’t have to live on a place like this.” “Me too, and I don’t feel mean. I’m just goddam glad.”
• There’s people that when they see Samuel Hamilton the first time might get the idea he’s full of bull. He don’t talk like other people. He’s an Irishman. And he’s all full of plans—a hundred plans a day. And he’s all full of hope. My Christ, he’d have to be to live on this land! But you remember this—he’s a fine worker, a good blacksmith, and some of his plans work out. And I’ve heard him talk about things that were going to happen and they did.”
• “My Tom is a hell-bent boy. Always takes more on his plate than he can eat. Always plants more than he can harvest. Pleasures too much, sorrows too much. Some people are like that. Liza thinks I’m like that. I don’t know what will come to Tom. Maybe greatness, maybe the noose—well, Hamiltons have been hanged before.
• They say it’s a dangerous thing to question an Irishman because he’ll tell you. I hope you know what you’re doing when you issue me a license to talk. I’ve heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second—Liza says to a fault.
• But some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”
• “If I get started I have no self-control. My son Will says I talk to trees when I can’t find a human vegetable.”
• “Well, a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does.”
• Louis said half derisively and half with admiration, “He’s always thinking about how to change things. He’s never satisfied with the way they are.”
• “I can see myself sitting on my dust heap making a world in my mind as surely as God created this one. But God saw his world. I’ll never see mine except—this way. This will be a valley of great richness one day. It could feed the world, and maybe it will. And happy people will live here, thousands and thousands—” A cloud seemed to come over his eyes and his face set in sadness and he was silent.
• There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty. And there were plenty of examples to prove that learning made a boy leave the farm to live in the city—to consider himself better than his father. Enough arithmetic to measure land and lumber and to keep accounts, enough writing to order goods and write to relatives, enough reading for newspapers, almanacs, and farm journals, enough music for religious and patriotic display—that was enough to help a boy and not to lead him astray. Learning was for doctors, lawyers, and teachers, a class set off and not considered related to other people.
• Debt was an ugly word and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the fifteenth of the month was a debt. The word had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor. Olive, who truly believed that her family was the best in the world, quite snobbishly would not permit it to be touched by debt. She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbors had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.
• If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.
• Afterward he said over and over, “She’s the goddamest woman I ever saw. I tore up the rule book and she wanted more. Good Christ, what a pilot she would have made!”
• In his mind a darkness was settling over his memory of Connecticut. Perhaps the hard flat light of the West was blotting out his birthplace. When he thought back to his father’s house, to the farm, the town, to his brother’s face, there was a blackness over all of it. And he shook off the memories.
• He was not alone in his preoccupation with the future. The whole valley, the whole West was that way. It was a time when the past had lost its sweetness and its sap. You’d go a good long road before you’d find a man, and he very old, who wished to bring back a golden past. Men were notched and comfortable in the present, hard and unfruitful as it was, but only as a doorstep into a fantastic future. Rarely did two men meet, or three stand in a bar, or a dozen gnaw tough venison in camp, that the valley’s future, paralyzing in its grandeur, did not come up, not as conjecture but as a certainty. “It’ll be—who knows? maybe in our lifetime,” they said.
• And Samuel could remember hearing of a cousin of his mother’s in Ireland, a knight and rich and handsome, and anyway shot himself on a silken couch, sitting beside the most beautiful woman in the world who loved him. “There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”
• “Tom,” he said, “do you think you could keep the estate going while I run down and talk water with a dry man?” “Why don’t I go with you? You might need some help.” “At talking?—that I don’t. It won’t come to digging for some time if I’m any judge. With wells there’s got to be a great deal of talk—five or six hundred words for every shovel of dirt.”
• “I guess that’s right,” said Samuel. “In my own way I tell jokes because people come all the way to my place to laugh. I try to be funny for them even when the sadness is on me.” “But the Irish are said to be a happy people, full of jokes.” “There’s your pidgin and your queue. They’re not. They’re a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It’s said that without whisky to soak and soften the world, they’d kill themselves. But they tell jokes because it’s expected of them.”
• There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
• Maybe I will tell you some time when I can tell and you want to hear.” “I’ll want to hear,” Samuel said. “I eat stories like grapes.”
• Some accident of eye shape and eye color, it is. But no, that’s not it. It’s a look and has no reference to shape or color. Well, why is a look evil then? Maybe such a look may have been sometime on a holy face. Now, stop this romancing and never let it trouble again—ever. He shivered. I’ll have to set up a goose fence around my grave, he thought.
• “Well, I think he’s a fine man—has a good tongue and a fair mind. He’s given to dreaming—” “Hear now the pot blackguarding the kettle,” Liza interrupted. “I know, Mother, I know. But have you ever thought that my dreaming takes the place of something I haven’t? Mr. Trask has practical dreams and the sweet dollars to make them solid. He wants to make a garden of his land, and he will do it too.”
• “I don’t know that it’s a good idea for you to go over there. Riches and idleness, devil’s tools, and you’ve not a very sturdy resistance.”
• It’s my experience, Samuel, and should be yours, that if they don’t pay presently they never pay at all. We could buy a valley farm with your promises.”
• “Joe can’t go,” she said. “You know he’s delicate.” “I thought I might scrape off some of his delicacy. He can starve on delicacy.”
• “I’m sure you would if you could come. But I’m against it. And when you talk to your mother about it, I’ll thank you to let it slip that I’m against it. You might even throw in that I refused you.” Joe grinned, and Tom laughed aloud. “Will you let her persuade you?” Tom asked. Samuel scowled at his sons. “I’m a hard-opinioned man,” he said. “Once I’ve set my mind, oxen can’t stir me. I’ve looked at it from all angles and my word is—Joe can’t go. You wouldn’t want to make a liar of my word, would you?” “I’ll go in and talk to her now,” said Joe. “Now, son, take it easy,” Samuel called after him. “Use your head. Let her do most of it. Meanwhile I’ll set my stubborn up.” Two days later the big wagon pulled away, loaded with timbers and tackle. Tom drove four horses, and beside him Samuel and Joe sat swinging their feet.
• It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.
• “Why, Mrs. Trask is about to have her baby. I told Adam I’d stand by.” “You?” Joe asked. Samuel leveled his eyes on his youngest son. “I brought both of you into the world,” he said. “And you’ve given no evidence you think I did a bad service to the world.
• Samuel said, “Anger’s a slow thing in me and disgust is slower, but I can taste the beginnings of both of them. You’ll get out of the room and give me no trouble or I’ll go away and you’ll have a basket of trouble.”
• He stared at her. “I did not come by choice except as a friend,” he said. “It’s not a pleasure to me, young woman. I don’t know your trouble and minute by minute I don’t care. Maybe I can save you some pain—who knows? I’m going to ask you one more question. If you don’t answer, if you put that snarling look on me, I’m going out and leave you to welter.”
• Samuel was caught by her tone. There was no sickness, no weariness, no softness. His words came out without his will. “I don’t like you,” he said and wished he could gather the words back into his throat and into his mind. But his words had no effect on Cathy.
• The life went out of Samuel. “Do what you want, Lee. A frightened sorrow has closed down over my heart. I wish I were a child so I could cry. I’m too old to be afraid like this. And I’ve not felt such despair since a bird died in my hand by a flowing water long ago.”
• “I think I’ll go away,” he said. “I never went willingly to a slaughter house.” Samuel stiffened. “What do you mean?” “I don’t know. The words came out.” Samuel shivered. “Lee, men are fools. I guess I hadn’t thought about it, but Chinese men are fools too.” “What made you doubt it?” “Oh, maybe because we think of strangers as stronger and better than we are.”
• Samuel said, “Maybe the foolishness is necessary, the dragon fighting, the boasting, the pitiful courage to be constantly knocking a chip off God’s shoulder, and the childish cowardice that makes a ghost of a dead tree beside a darkening road. Maybe that’s good and necessary, but—”
• “I want my wife,” Samuel cried. “No dreams, no ghosts, no foolishness. I want her here. They say miners take canaries into the pits to test the air. Liza has no truck with foolishness. And, Lee, if Liza sees a ghost, it’s a ghost and not a fragment of a dream. If Liza feels trouble we’ll bar the doors.”
• I’ll get out to sleep. Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.” “That it does, Rabbit. Good night then.”
• And it was a criminal thing to leave your last-born, and he little more than a baby himself, sitting there by a hole in the ground with no one to care for him. It was a matter which might even engage the attention of the Lord God himself.
• He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.
• Quiet, lackadaisical, like most rich Eastern women (Liza had never known a rich Eastern woman),
• “Samuel, you know that Chinese with his slanty eyes and his outlandish talk and that braid?” “Lee? Sure I know him.” “Well, wouldn’t you say offhand he was a heathen?” “I don’t know.” “Come now, Samuel, anybody would. But he’s not.” She straightened up. “What is he?” She tapped his arm with an iron finger. “A Presbyterian, and well up—well up, I say, when you dig it out of that crazy talk. Now what do you think of that?” Samuel’s voice was unsteady with trying to clamp his laughter in. “No!” he said. “And I say yes. Well now, who do you think is looking after the twins? I wouldn’t trust a heathen from here to omega—but a Presbyterian—he learned everything I told him.”
• Three things are never any good—farming, fishing, and hunting—compared to other years, that is.
• “I don’t think anybody’s ever been afraid of me before—mad at me, yes—but not afraid. It’s a mean thing, makes me feel mean.”
• Samuel leaned over the basket and put his finger against the small palm of one of the twins and the fingers closed and held on. “I guess the last bad habit a man will give up is advising.” “I don’t want advice.” “Nobody does. It’s a giver’s present. Go through the motions, Adam.” “What motions?” “Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.” “Why should I?” Adam asked. Samuel was looking at the twins. “You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.” Adam did not answer, and Samuel stood up. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll be back again and again. Go through the motions, Adam.”
• A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naïve and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development—to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.
• The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built churches which couldn’t be paid for in a hundred years. The sects fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed all the others were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry, and our relationships are built. It took a smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but anyone could see what they had in common. And they brought music—maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it. And they brought conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself.
• The church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the little theater.
• In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.
• Alex in the kitchen, who, if he had believed what was usually said of him would have considered himself a murderer, found that he had a magic hand with biscuits.
• “All right, Mother,” he said, but it saddened him because Samuel could not mind his own business when there was pain in any man. It was no easy thing for him to abandon Adam to his desolation.
• Samuel wrote to Joe, saying, “I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you’d take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills un-curable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven’t even got a shovel yet.”
• One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.
• Liza spoke sharply, “What my mother would mind is what I mind, and I’ll tell you what I mind. You’re never satisfied to let the Testament alone. You’re forever picking at it and questioning it. You turn it over the way a ’coon turns over a wet rock, and it angers me.” “I’m just trying to understand it, Mother.” “What is there to understand? Just read it. There it is in black and white. Who wants you to understand it? If the Lord God wanted you to understand it He’d have given you to understand or He’d have set it down different.”
• Samuel’s anger grew and put out leaves. “A man, his whole life, matches himself against pay. And how, if it’s my whole life’s work to find my worth, can you, sad man, write me down instant in a ledger?”
• “You bought your eyes and nose,” Samuel jeered. “You bought your uprightness. You bought your thumb on sideways. Listen to me, because I’m like to kill you after. You bought! You bought out of some sweet inheritance. Think now—do you deserve your children, man?”
• “Tear away with your jelly fingers. You have not bought these boys, nor stolen them, nor passed any bit for them. You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation.” Suddenly he plucked his hard thumbs out of his neighbor’s throat. Adam stood panting. He felt his throat where the blacksmith hands had been. “What is it you want of me?” “You have no love.” “I had—enough to kill me.” “No one ever had enough. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much.”
• Samuel struck him with a work-heavy fist, and Adam sprawled out in the dust. Samuel asked him to rise, and when Adam accepted struck him again, and this time Adam did not get up. He looked stonily at the menacing old man. The fire went out of Samuel’s eyes and he said quietly, “Your sons have no names.” Adam replied, “Their mother left them motherless.” “And you have left them fatherless. Can’t you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don’t you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?” “I didn’t do it,” Adam said. “Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.” He stooped down and put his arms around Adam’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. “We’ll give them names,” he said. “We’ll think long and find good names to clothe them.” He whipped the dust from Adam’s shirt with his hands.
• Samuel smiled, crinkle-eyed. “Did it seem natural? Did I do it right?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Well, in a way I promised my wife I’d do it. She didn’t believe I would. I’m not a fighting man, you see. The last time I clobbered a human soul it was over a red-nosed girl and a schoolbook in County Derry.”
• “You know, if chickens had government and church and history, they would take a distant and distasteful view of human joy. Let any gay and hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.”
• Samuel thought, Sometimes your opponent can help you more than your friend.
• “Did she mean to kill you?” “I’ve thought of that more than anything else. No, I don’t think she meant to kill me. She didn’t allow me that dignity. There was no hatred in her, no passion at all. I learned about that in the army. If you want to kill a man, you shoot at head or heart or stomach. No, she hit me where she intended. I can see the gun barrel moving over. I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had wanted my death. That would have been a kind of love. But I was an annoyance, not an enemy.”
• Was she very beautiful, Samuel?” “To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation.” Adam mused aloud, “I wonder who she was—what she was. I was content not to know.”
• But I would like to know what kind of blood is in my boys. When they grow up—won’t I be looking for something in them?” “Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them.” “But their blood—” “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
• “That’s exactly right. She most of all would disagree, and so I would not say it to her and let loose the thunder of her disagreement. She wins all arguments by the use of vehemence and the conviction that a difference of opinion is a personal affront.
• I’ve never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of this—whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong.
• This one will be shrewd, I think, and shrewdness is a limitation on the mind. Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd.
• Maybe it would be good to give them a high mark to shoot at—a name to live up to. The man I’m named for had his name called clear by the Lord God, and I’ve been listening all my life. And once or twice I’ve thought I heard my name called—but not clear, not clear.”
• An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion. I haven’t the courage for that.”
• Adam said, “I’ve wondered why a man of your knowledge would work a desert hill place.” “It’s because I haven’t courage,” said Samuel. “I could never quite take the responsibility. When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called His name—but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It’s not an uncommon disease. But it’s nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.”

  Kyle: What is an extraordinary man?

• “I’d think there are degrees of greatness,” Adam said. “I don’t think so,” said Samuel. “That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other—cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He’s suffering over the choosing right now. It’s a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn’t that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.”
• “Wait until I get my ng-ka-py,” said Lee. While he was gone Adam said, “It’s strange to me—he used to speak differently.” “He trusts you now,” Samuel said. “He has a gift of resigned loyalty without hope of reward. He’s maybe a much better man than either of us could dream of being.”
• “You’re getting well,” Samuel said. “Some people think it’s an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.”
• “Two stories have haunted us and followed us from our beginning,” Samuel said. “We carry them along with us like invisible tails—the story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel. And I don’t understand either of them. I don’t understand them at all but I feel them.
• Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.
• “No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have!” Samuel said to Adam, “And you have tried to take it all.” Lee said, “So do I, so does everyone. We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.” Adam broke in, “It makes me feel better, not worse.” “How do you mean?” Samuel asked. “Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.” “Yes, I see. But how does this story make it better?” “Because,” Adam said excitedly, “we are descended from this. This is our father. Some of our guilt is absorbed in our ancestry. What chance did we have? We are the children of our father. It means we aren’t the first. It’s an excuse, and there aren’t enough excuses in the world.”
• Lee asked, “How does Mrs. Hamilton feel about the paradoxes of the Bible?” “Why, she does not feel anything because she does not admit they are there.” “But—” “Hush, man. Ask her. And you’ll come out of it older but not less confused.”
• And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule—a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”
• “I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now—don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there—the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul—the secret, rejected, guilty soul.
• You’ve disturbed my pretty universe. You’ve taken a contentious game and made an answer of it. Let me alone—let me think!
• Suddenly Samuel laughed. “In two minutes,” he said, “and after a waterfall of words. Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.”
• Of all his daughters Una was Samuel’s greatest joy. Even as a little girl she hungered for learning as a child does for cookies in the late afternoon. Una and her father had a conspiracy about learning—secret books were borrowed and read and their secrets communicated privately.
• He was one of those men who live in poverty so that their lines of questioning may continue.
• Like most technicians, he had a terror and a contempt for speculation. The inductive leap was not for him. He dug a step and pulled himself up one single step, the way a man climbs the last shoulder of a mountain.
• He had great contempt, born of fear, for the Hamiltons, for they all half believed they had wings—and they got some bad falls that way.
• Una’s death struck Samuel like a silent earthquake. He said no brave and reassuring words, he simply sat alone and rocked himself. He felt that it was his neglect had done it.
• Liza with her acceptance could take care of tragedy; she had no real hope this side of Heaven. But Samuel had put up a laughing wall against natural laws, and Una’s death breached his battlements. He became an old man.
• Joe had gone east and was helping to invent a new profession called advertising. Joe’s very faults were virtues in this field. He found that he could communicate his material daydreaming—and, properly applied, that is all advertising is. Joe was a big man in a new field.
• Samuel told Adam Trask that Tom was arguing with greatness. And the father watched his son and could feel the drive and the fear, the advance and the retreat, because he could feel it in himself.
• Will and George were gamblers and often tried to entice their brother into the joys and sorrows of venture. Tom said, “I’ve tried and it just seems tiresome. I’ve thought why this must be. I get no great triumph when I win and no tragedy when I lose. Without these it is meaningless. It is not a way to make money, that we know, and unless it can simulate birth and death, joy and sorrow, it seems, at least to me—it feels—it doesn’t feel at all. I would do it if I felt anything—good or bad.”
• What I set down about him will be the result of memory plus what I know to be true plus conjecture built on the combination. Who knows whether it will be correct?
• He wanted to say something beautiful, I think. He wished for words like his father’s words, sweet winged words, cooing and lovely.
• I don’t remember that Tom talked. Now that I think of it, I can’t remember the sound of his voice or the kind of words he used. I can remember both about my grandfather, but when I think of Tom it is a memory of a kind of warm silence. Maybe he didn’t talk at all.
• Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.
• Samuel said that Tom was quavering over greatness, trying to decide whether he could take the cold responsibility. Samuel knew his son’s quality and felt the potential of violence, and it frightened him, for Samuel had no violence—even when he hit Adam Trask with his fist he had no violence. And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly—well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
• It is probable that his father stood between Tom and the sun, and Samuel’s shadow fell on him.
• Tom wrote secret poetry, and in those days it was only sensible to keep it secret. The poets were pale emasculates, and Western men held them in contempt. Poetry was a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. To read it was to court catcalls. To write it was to be suspected and ostracized. Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so. No one knows whether Tom’s poetry was any good or not, for he showed it to only one person, and before he died he burned every word. From the ashes in the stove there must have been a great deal of it.
• I guess my mother knew, but it was one of those things put away in the family closet and never brought out.
• Weariness came down on him, and he went to his bed where Liza had been for two hours. He was puzzled at himself, not that he had to go to bed but that he wanted to.
• They all wanted to say the same thing—all ten of them. Samuel was an old man. It was as startling a discovery as the sudden seeing of a ghost. Somehow they had not believed it could happen. They drank their whisky and talked softly of the new thought.
• They said these things in outrage. This can’t happen, they were saying. Father can’t be an old man. Samuel is young as the dawn—the perpetual dawn.
• How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it?
• He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him. He told me again and again how I must believe that time would take care of it. He said it so often that I knew he was losing.”
• We know him from the insides of ourselves.”
• Then they were silent again, for the idea of not having the ranch, the dry, stony desert of heartbreaking hillside and unprofitable hollow, was shocking to them.
• He says himself that thing about time doing the job dynamite can’t touch.”
• And Will said out of his experience, “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
• “Tom, wouldn’t you be willing to take over the ranch?” George asked. “Oh, that’s nothing,” said Tom. “It’s no trouble to run the ranch because the ranch doesn’t run—never has.”
• “Such a little bit of a wife,” he said. “Three of her is hardly a bite.”
• “Samuel, now you stop this. I don’t mind a joke in the evening sometimes, but it’s not eleven o’clock. Now you go along.”
• “In fifty years, did you ever have a vacation, you little, silly, half-pint, smidgin of a wife?”
• “Two tickets to Salinas on the train. Ollie says she doesn’t want to give us a single escape.” “You can just turn them in and send her back the money.” “No, I can’t. Why, Liza—Mother—now don’t. Here—here’s a handkerchief.” “That’s a dish towel,” said Liza. “Sit here, Mother. There! I guess the shock of taking a rest kind of threw you. Here! I know it’s a dish towel.
• Samuel’s jeweled, sardonic eyes dwelt on Tom’s face until Tom said, “What’s the matter, Father?” “It’s the little tone, son—so little that I could barely hear it. But it was there. Tom, my son, if you have a secret with your brothers and sisters, I don’t mind. I think that’s good.” “I don’t know what you mean,” said Tom. “You may thank God you didn’t want to be an actor, Tom, because you would have been a very bad one.
• “Thank you for wanting to honor me with the truth, my son. It’s not clever but it’s more permanent.”
• Samuel stood in the doorway of the forge and looked at the land. “They say a mother loves best an ugly child,” he said, and he shook his head sharply. “Tom, I’ll trade you honor for honor. You will please hold this in your dark secret place, nor tell any of your brothers and sisters—I know why I’m going—and, Tom, I know where I’m going, and I am content.”
• I have wondered why it is that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death than others. Una’s death cut the earth from under Samuel’s feet and opened his defended keep and let in old age. On the other hand Liza, who surely loved her family as deeply as did her husband, was not destroyed or warped. Her life continued evenly. She felt sorrow but she survived it.
• Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, but he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
• She had no love of places. A place was only a resting stage on the way to Heaven. She did not like work for itself, but she did it because it was there to be done.
• Privately there were some things in Heaven of which she did not quite approve. There was too much singing, and she didn’t see how even the Elect could survive for very long the celestial laziness which was promised. She would find something to do in Heaven. There must be something to take up one’s time—some clouds to darn, some weary wings to rub with liniment. Maybe the collars of the robes needed turning now and then, and when you come right down to it, she couldn’t believe that even in Heaven there would not be cobwebs in some corner to be knocked down with a cloth-covered broom.
• She was gay and frightened about the visit to Salinas. She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it.
• Places were very important to Samuel. The ranch was a relative, and when he left it he plunged a knife into a darling. But having made up his mind, Samuel set about doing it well. He made formal calls on all of his neighbors, the old-timers who remembered how it used to be and how it was. And when he drove away from his old friends they knew they would not see him again, although he did not say it. He took to gazing at the mountains and the trees, even at faces, as though to memorize them for eternity.
• “You know how it is,” Samuel said. “When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he’s gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.”
• “I heard about your daughter. I’m sorry.” “I got your letter, Lee. I have it. You said good things.” “Chinese things,” said Lee. “I seem to get more Chinese as I get older.”
• Cal is sharp and dark and watchful, and his brother—well, he’s a boy you like before he speaks and like more afterwards.” “And you don’t like Cal?” “I find myself defending him—to myself. He’s fighting for his life and his brother doesn’t have to fight.”
• “Will you stay to dinner?” Adam asked. “I will not be responsible for the murder of more chickens,” said Samuel. “Lee’s got a pot roast.” “Well, in that case—”
• “Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?”
• And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining—small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
• “I know the ‘shoulds,’ although I never do them, Adam. I always know the ‘shoulds.’ You should try to find a new Cathy. You should let the new Cathy kill the dream Cathy—let the two of them fight it out. And you, sitting by, should marry your mind to the winner. That’s the second-best should. The best would be to search out and find some fresh new loveliness to cancel out the old.”
• You’ve worked hard enough on that dust heap of yours.” “I love that dust heap,” Samuel said. “I love it the way a bitch loves her runty pup. I love every flint, the plow-breaking outcroppings, the thin and barren topsoil, the waterless heart of her. Somewhere in my dust heap there’s a richness.”
• When you say I deserve a rest, you are saying that my life is over.”
• “I’m a nosy old man, Adam. And the sad thing to me is that I’m losing my nosiness. That’s maybe how I know it’s time to visit my children. I’m having to pretend to be nosy a good deal of the time.”
• “I’d rather you worked your guts out on your dust heap.” Samuel smiled at him. “What a nice thing to hear! And I thank you.
• “What a stubborn man you are!” “Contentious,” said Samuel. “Liza says I am contentious, but now I’m caught in a web of my children—and I think I like it.”
• But we named you well. You’re Caleb, aren’t you?” “I’m Cal.” “Well, Cal then.” And he turned to the other. “Have you found a way to rip the backbone out of your name?” “Sir?” “Are you called Aaron?” “Yes, sir.” Lee chuckled. “He spells it with one a. The two a’s seem a little fancy to his friends.”
• Lee said, “I think I see why that is. There is no woman in the house to put a value on babies. I don’t think men care much for babies, and so it was never an advantage to these boys to be babies. There was nothing to gain by it. I don’t know whether that is good or bad.”
• “Adam, I wonder whether you know what you have in Lee. A philosopher who can cook, or a cook who can think? He has taught me a great deal.
• I told you, Mr. Hamilton, that I was growing more Chinese. Do you ever grow more Irish?” “It comes and goes,” said Samuel.
• “You say ‘the man.’ Do you then not think this is a divine book written by the inky finger of God?” “I think the mind that could think this story was a curiously divine mind.
• “I went along with them, marveling at the beauty of their proud clean brains.
• My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too—‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’
• “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”
• Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.
• It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there.
• “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”
• And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because ‘Thou mayest.’ ”
• I have never in thirty-three years found one good thing about him. He even has an ugly disposition. He is selfish and quarrelsome and mean and disobedient. To this day I don’t dare walk behind him because he will surely take a kick at me. When I feed him mash he tries to bite my hand. And I love him.” Lee said, “And you named him ‘Doxology.’ ” “Surely,” said Samuel, “so ill endowed a creature deserved, I thought, one grand possession.
• “He must have aches and pains.” “Well, he doesn’t think so. Doxology still thinks he’s one hell of a horse.
• “You would really shoot my horse because death might be more comfortable?” “Well, I meant—” Samuel said quickly, “Do you like your life, Adam?” “Of course not.” “If I had a medicine that might cure you and also might kill you, should I give it to you? Inspect yourself, man.” “What medicine?” “No,” said Samuel. “If I tell you, believe me when I say it may kill you.”
• Cathy, and she is now called Kate, takes the fresh and young and beautiful and so maims them that they can never be whole again.
• “Long ago I learned this: When a dog has eaten strychnine and is going to die, you must get an ax and carry him to a chopping block. Then you must wait for his next convulsion, and in that moment—chop off his tail. Then, if the poison has not gone too far, your dog may recover. The shock of pain can counteract the poison. Without the shock he will surely die.”
• “Show me the man who isn’t interested in discussing himself,” said Samuel.
• “Careful, Lee, you’ll get me talking. I told you my Irish came and went. It’s coming now.”
• I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only—and that note unchanging sorrow. I’m not alone in my attitude, Lee. It seems to me that too many of us conceive of a life as ending in defeat.”
• Lee said, “Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”
• ‘Thou mayest rule over sin,’ Lee. That’s it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles—only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. ‘Thou mayest, Thou mayest!’ What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before.
• For one thing, he could not believe that Samuel was dead. He could hear the rich, lyric voice in his ears, the tones rising and falling in their foreignness, and the curious music of oddly chosen words tripping out so that you were never sure what the next word would be. In the speech of most men you are absolutely sure what the next word will be.
• “My people bury them with drums and scatter papers to confuse the devils and put roast pigs instead of flowers on the grave. We’re a practical people and always a little hungry. But our devils aren’t very bright. We can outthink them. That’s some progress.”
• “The trouble with you Occidentals is that you don’t have devils to explain things with.
• “I don’t think I’ve ever known what you people call happiness. We think of contentment as the desirable thing, and maybe that’s negative.”
• Lee said, “I don’t think any man is contented when there are things undone he wishes to do.”
• I want to open a bookstore in Chinatown in San Francisco. I would live in the back, and my days would be full of discussions and arguments.
• He was puzzled—but he was often puzzled. He knew his brother was getting at something, but he didn’t know what. Cal was an enigma to him. He could not follow the reasoning of his brother, and he was always surprised at the tangents it took.
• Aron said, “What would she want to run away for?” “How do I know? Maybe she didn’t like us.” Aron inspected this heresy. “No,” he said. “The men were liars. Father said she’s in Heaven. And you know how he don’t like to talk about her.”
• Through his gathering tears Aron could see his brother’s eyes, hard and reasonable. There were no tears in Cal’s eyes.
• “My daughter’s name is Abra, boys. Isn’t that a funny name?” He used the tone adults employ with children.
• He said, “I guess I’m a lazy man. And my father didn’t help me when he left me enough to get along on without working.” He dropped his eyes but he could feel the relief on the part of the Bacons. It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn’t know anything was spoiled or independent.
• For just a second Adam thought of saying, “Why don’t you mind your own goddam business?” but instead he asked, “You think that would be a good idea?”
• The Bacons didn’t want to comment on the incident. They wanted to be alone to discuss it.
• Aron said, “That lady told us the rain was stopped.” Abra answered him wisely, “She didn’t look. When she’s talking she never looks.”
• The boys exchanged uneasy glances. It was their first experience with the inexorable logic of women, which is overwhelming even, or perhaps especially, when it is wrong. This was new to them, exciting and frightening.
• “I live in Salinas,” Abra said in such a tone that they knew they were dealing with a superior being who hadn’t time for bumpkin pleasures.
• Maybe the difference between the two boys can best be described in this way. If Aron should come upon an anthill in a little clearing in the brush, he would lie on his stomach and watch the complications of ant life—he would see some of them bringing food in the ant roads and others carrying the white eggs. He would see how two members of the hill on meeting put their antennas together and talked. For hours he would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground. If, on the other hand, Cal came upon the same anthill, he would kick it to pieces and watch while the frantic ants took care of their disaster. Aron was content to be a part of his world, but Cal must change it.
• Some children want to be babies and some want to be adults. Few are content with their age. Abra wanted to be an adult. She used adult words and simulated, insofar as she was able, adult attitudes and emotions. She had left babyhood far behind, and she was not capable yet of being one of the grownups she admired. Cal sensed this, and it gave him the instrument to knock down her anthill.
• This night, the first after Adam’s return from Salinas, Cal and Aron were first astonished and then a little embarrassed to find that Adam listened to them and asked questions, looked at them and saw them. The change made them timid. Adam said, “I hear you were hunting today.” The boys became cautious as humans always are, faced with a new situation. After a pause Aron admitted, “Yes, sir.”
• “I wish there were some way you could tell the boys the truth.” “That would rob them of the good thoughts about their mother, Lee.” “Have you thought of the other danger?” “What do you mean?” “Well, suppose they find out the truth. Plenty of people know.” “Well, maybe when they’re older it will be easier for them.” “I don’t believe that,” said Lee. “But that’s not the worst danger.” “I guess I don’t follow you, Lee.” “It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything. If they ever found out you’d lied to them about this, the true things would suffer. They wouldn’t believe anything then.”
• “Yes, there’s the trouble. It’s bound to be all truth or part lie.
• “You must know that a Chinese must pay all of his debts on or before our New Year’s day. He starts every year clean. If he does not, he loses face; but not only that—his family loses face. There are no excuses.”
• “How could your mother do a man’s work?” Lee smiled. “My father said she was a strong woman, and I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is almost indestructible.”
• These human cattle were imported for one thing only—to work. When the work was done, those who were not dead were to be shipped back. Only males were brought—no females. The country did not want them breeding. A man and a woman and a baby have a way of digging in, of pulling the earth where they are about them and scratching out a home. And then it takes all hell to root them out. But a crowd of men, nervous, lusting, restless, half sick with loneliness for women—why, they’ll go anywhere, and particularly will they go home.
• “Did you ever tell this to Sam Hamilton?” “No. I didn’t. I wish I had. He loved a celebration of the human soul. Such things were like a personal triumph to him.”
• ‘There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.’ ”
• It is hard now to imagine the difficulty of learning to start, drive, and maintain an automobile. Not only was the whole process complicated, but one had to start from scratch. Today’s children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncracies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell.
• He was nineteen and chewed tobacco, and from his three months in automobile school he had gained a great though weary contempt for human beings.
• Now, if you got all that we’ll go on to Operation of the Automobile.” He said this in boldface type, capital letters. He was obviously glad to be done with the first part of his lecture, but he was no gladder than his listeners. The strain of concentration was beginning to tell on them, and it was not made any better by the fact that they had not understood one single word.
• “I predict there’ll come a time when you can’t find a horse, Mr. Trask.” “Maybe so.” “They’ll change the face of the countryside. They get their clatter into everything,” the postmaster went on. “We even feel it here. Man used to come for his mail once a week. Now he comes every day, sometimes twice a day. He just can’t wait for his damn catalogue. Running around. Always running around.”
• And he said a little sadly, “I wish’t I knew I had him before he was dead.” He felt that he was growing rich in dead relatives. “Was he nice?” Aron asked.
• We judge from your letter that you are still in the land of the living and we wish to offer our congratulations.
• Cal saw the confusion and helplessness on Aron’s face and felt his power, and it made him glad. He could outthink and outplan his brother. He was beginning to think he could do the same thing to his father. With Lee, Cal’s tricks did not work, for Lee’s bland mind moved effortlessly ahead of him and was always there waiting, understanding, and at the last moment cautioning quietly, “Don’t do it.” Cal had respect for Lee and a little fear of him. But Aron here, looking helplessly at him, was a lump of soft mud in his hands. Cal suddenly felt a deep love for his brother and an impulse to protect him in his weakness. He put his arm around Aron.
• “Seems to me you put too much stock in the affairs of children. It probably didn’t mean anything.” “Yes, it meant something.” Then he said, “Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?” “Maybe you’re right,” said Adam. “It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.” “And memory.” “Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.
• I’m crochety. I feel sand under my skin. I’m looking forward to the ugly smell of old books and the sweet smell of good thinking.
• Cal crept quietly down the dark hall and edged into the room where he and his brother slept. He saw the outline of his brother’s head against the pillow in the double bed, but he could not see whether Aron slept. Very gently he eased himself in on his side and turned slowly and laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the myriads of tiny colored dots that make up darkness. The window shade bellied slowly in and then the night wind fell and the worn shade flapped quietly against the window. A gray, quilted melancholy descended on him. He wished with all his heart that Aron had not walked away from him out of the wagon shed. He wished with all his heart that he had not crouched listening at the hall door. He moved his lips in the darkness and made the words silently in his head and yet he could hear them. “Dear Lord,” he said, “let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I’ll give you anything in the world, and if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for to get it. I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be lonely. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.” Slow warm tears were running down his cheeks. His muscles were tight and he fought against making any crying sound or sniffle.
• And in his mind he cried, “Don’t let me be mean.”
• Adam stopped and slowly turned and his eyes were thoughtful. “I hadn’t considered before,” he said, and he moved toward her until he towered over her and she had to tilt back her head to look into his face. “I said I didn’t understand about you,” he said slowly. “Just now it came to me what you don’t understand.” “What don’t I understand, Mr. Mouse?” “You know about the ugliness in people. You showed me the pictures. You use all the sad, weak parts of a man, and God knows he has them.” “Everybody—” Adam went on, astonished at his own thoughts, “But you—yes, that’s right—you don’t know about the rest. You don’t believe I brought you the letter because I don’t want your money. You don’t believe I loved you. And the men who come to you here with their ugliness, the men in the pictures—you don’t believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. You see only one side, and you think—more than that, you’re sure—that’s all there is.”
• I think you are only a part of a human. I can’t do anything about that. But I wonder whether you ever feel that something invisible is all around you. It would be horrible if you knew it was there and couldn’t see it or feel it. That would be horrible.”
• “Children raised in the country do better.” It was the law, and she could prove it by her own boys. Then she centered closely on him.
• “Something’s the matter with Tom. He’s moping around like a monument.” “I guess he depended on Samuel.” “Too much,” said Will. “Far too much. He can’t seem to come out of it. In some ways Tom is a great big baby.”
• Dessie was not beautiful. Perhaps she wasn’t even pretty, but she had the glow that makes men follow a woman in the hope of reflecting a little of it.
• Dessie’s business began to fall off. And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness.
• Then Samuel died and the world shattered like a dish. His sons and daughters and friends groped about among the pieces, trying to put some kind of world together again.
• “That was different. But now he’s broody. He doesn’t talk. He goes walking alone in the hills at night. I went out to see him and—he’s been writing poetry—pages of it all over the table.” “Didn’t you ever write poetry, Will?” “I did not.” “I have,” said Dessie. “Pages and pages of it all over the table.”
• “I guess that’s it. Tom, there’s so much grass.” “I’m getting twenty head of stock to eat it.” “You must be rich.” “No, and the good year will break the price of beef. I wonder what Will would do. He’s a scarcity man. He told me. He said, ‘Always deal in scarcities.’ Will’s smart.”
• Dessie remembered how her father had said, sitting at the head of the table, “I told Rabbit I was going to raise some pigeons and—do you know?—he said, ‘No white pigeons.’ ‘Why not white?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the rare worst of bad luck. You take a flight of white pigeons and they’ll bring sadness and death. Get gray ones.’ ‘I like white ones.’ ‘Get gray ones,’ he told me. And as the sky covers me, I’ll get white ones.” And Liza said patiently, “Why do you be forever testing, Samuel? Gray ones taste just as good and they’re bigger.” “I’ll let no flimsy fairy tale push me,” Samuel said. And Liza said with her dreadful simplicity, “You’re already pushed by your own contentiousness. You’re a mule of contention, a very mule!” “Someone’s got to do these things,” he said sullenly. “Else Fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”
• “This is a morning light as down and no time to be slugging.” “You sound like your father,” Dessie said, and she laughed with him. His joy hardened to fierceness. “Yes,” he said loudly. “And we’ll have that time again, right here. I’ve been dragging myself in misery like a spine-broken snake. No wonder Will thought I was cracked. But now you’re back, and I’ll show you. I’ll breathe life into life again. Do you hear? This house is going to be alive.” “I’m glad I came,” she said, and she thought in desolation how brittle he was now and how easy to shatter, and how she would have to protect him.
• That was not all—he labored with humor and good spirits. Dessie had to rise very early to get in her hand at the housework before Tom had it all done. She watched his great red happiness, and it was not light as Samuel’s happiness was light. It did not rise out of his roots and come floating up. He was manufacturing happiness as cleverly as he knew how, molding it and shaping it.
• “The children will bring them in,” said Dessie. “Just let me take care of it. I hope you have plenty of storage space.” “It would be exploiting the young, wouldn’t it?” “Certainly it would,” Dessie agreed. “When I had my shop I exploited the girls who wanted to learn to sew—and they exploited me. I think I will call this The Great Monterey County Acorn Contest. And I won’t let everyone in. Maybe bicycles for prizes—wouldn’t you pick up acorns in hope of a bicycle, Tom?” “Sure I would,” he said. “But couldn’t we pay them too?” “Not with money,” Dessie said. “That would reduce it to labor, and they will not labor if they can help it. Nor will I.” Tom leaned back from his board and laughed. “Nor will I,”
• Poor Tom did not know and could not learn that dissembling successfully is one of the creative joys of a businessman. To indicate enthusiasm was to be idiotic. And Will really did mean to think it over. Parts of the plan fascinated him. Tom had stumbled on a very interesting thing. If you could buy shoats on credit, fatten them on food that cost next to nothing, sell them, pay off your loan, and take your profit, you would really have done something. Will would not rob his brother. He would cut him in on the profits, but Tom was a dreamer and could not be trusted with a good sound plan. Tom, for instance, didn’t even know the price of pork and its probable trend. If it worked out, Will could be depended on to give Tom a very substantial present—maybe even a Ford. And how about a Ford as first and only prize for acorns? Everybody in the whole valley would pick acorns.
• He thought dawdling, protective thoughts, sitting under the lamp, but he knew that pretty soon his name would be called and he would have to go up before the bench with himself as judge and his own crimes as jurors. And his name was called, shrilly in his ears. His mind walked in to face the accusers: Vanity, which charged him with being ill dressed and dirty and vulgar; and Lust, slipping him the money for his whoring; Dishonesty, to make him pretend to talent and thought he did not have; Laziness and Gluttony arm in arm. Tom felt comforted by these because they screened the great Gray One in the back seat, waiting—the gray and dreadful crime. He dredged up lesser things, used small sins almost like virtues to save himself. There were Covetousness of Will’s money, Treason toward his mother’s God, Theft of time and hope, sick Rejection of love. Samuel spoke softly but his voice filled the room. “Be good, be pure, be great, be Tom Hamilton.” Tom ignored his father. He said, “I’m busy greeting my friends,” and he nodded to Discourtesy and Ugliness and Unfilial Conduct and Unkempt Fingernails. Then he started with Vanity again. The Gray One shouldered up in front. It was too late to stall with baby sins. This Gray One was Murder.
• slapped him aware again. Now Red Tom, Gum Tom, was too tired to kill himself. That takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell. He remembered that his mother had a strong distaste for suicide, feeling that it combined three things of which she strongly disapproved—bad manners, cowardice, and sin. It was almost as bad as adultery or stealing—maybe just as bad. There must be a way to avoid Liza’s disapproval. She could make one suffer if she disapproved.
• He said, “My father, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. You overestimated me. You were wrong. I wish I could justify the love and the pride you squandered on me. Maybe you could figure a way out, but I can’t. I cannot live. I’ve killed Dessie and I want to sleep.” And his mind spoke for his father absent, saying, “Why, I can understand how that would be. There are so many patterns to choose from in the arc from birth back to birth again. But let’s think how we can make it all right with Mother. Why are you so impatient, dear?” “I can’t wait, that’s why,” Tom said. “I can’t wait any more.”
• I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
• Herodotus, in the Persian War, tells a story of how Croesus, the richest and most-favored king of his time, asked Solon the Athenian a leading question. He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer. “Who,” he asked, “is the luckiest person in the world?” He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance. Solon told him of three lucky people in old times. And Croesus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself. And when Solon did not mention him, Croesus was forced to say, “Do you not consider me lucky?” Solon did not hesitate in his answer. “How can I tell?” he said. “You aren’t dead yet.” And this answer must have haunted Croesus dismally as his luck disappeared, and his wealth and his kingdom. And as he was being burned on a tall fire, he may have thought of it and perhaps wished he had not asked or not been answered.
• And in our time, when a man dies—if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?—which is another way of putting Croesus’s question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
• I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board,… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
• Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
• There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?”
• In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
• It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
• We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
• They say a clean cut heals soonest. There’s nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can’t see or hear or touch a man, it’s best to let him go.”
• The sharpest question she had asked, “How does it feel not to have a mother?” slipped into his mind. And how did it feel? It didn’t feel like anything. Ah, but in the schoolroom, at Christmas and graduation, when the mothers of other children came to the parties—then was the silent cry and the wordless longing. That’s what it was like.
• Lee’s voice said, “I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.” And Lee had worked patiently and slowly and he had succeeded in building Adam as the center, the foundation, the essence of truth.
• If Adam had conceived thousands of ideas, the way Sam Hamilton had, they might all have drifted away, but he had only the one. The frozen mastodon stayed in his mind. His little cups of fruit, of pudding, of bits of meat, both cooked and raw, continued in the icebox. He bought every available book on bacteria and began sending for magazines that printed articles of a mildly scientific nature. And as is usually true of a man of one idea, he became obsessed.
• Adam said, “I was thinking about your father and I thought I’d like to talk to a Hamilton.” Will relaxed a little in his chair. “He was a great old talker.” “Somehow he made a man better than he was,” said Adam. Lee looked up from his darning egg. “Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.”
• I’m not like a man looking for a job. I’m looking for work. I don’t need a job.”
• “I got an idea and I can’t get rid of it. I go to sleep and it comes right back at me. Never had anything give me so much trouble. It’s a kind of a big idea. Maybe it’s full of holes.”
• “I come from a whole goddam family of inventors,” said Will. “We had ideas for breakfast. We had ideas instead of breakfast. We had so many ideas we forgot to make the money for groceries. When we got a little ahead my father, or Tom, patented something. I’m the only one in the family, except my mother, who didn’t have ideas, and I’m the only one who ever made a dime. Tom had ideas about helping people, and some of it was pretty darn near socialism. And if you tell me you don’t care about making a profit, I’m going to throw that coffeepot right at your head.”
• “It’s like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know—because I’ve got her in me.” His head was down and his voice was heartbroken. Lee jumped up. “You stop that!” he said sharply. “You hear me? Don’t let me catch you doing that. Of course you may have that in you. Everybody has. But you’ve got the other too. Here—look up! Look at me!” Cal raised his head and said wearily, “What do you want?” “You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now—look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it—not your mother.”
• Cal didn’t hate the lie but the necessity for telling it. Cal lied for reasons of profit of one kind or another. To be driven to a lie seemed shameful to him.
• It was natural that the convert Aron should work on Cal. First Aron prayed silently for Cal, but finally he approached him. He denounced Cal’s godlessness, demanded his reformation. Cal might have tried to go along if his brother had been more clever. But Aron had reached a point of passionate purity that made everyone else foul. After a few lectures Cal found him unbearably smug and told him so. It was a relief to both of them when Aron abandoned his brother to eternal damnation.
• It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.
• Adam slowly raised his head. It is true that Cal had never looked into his father’s eyes before, and it is true that many people never look into their father’s eyes. Adam’s irises were light blue with dark radial lines leading into the vortices of his pupils. And deep down in each pupil Cal saw his own face reflected, as though two Cals looked out at him. Adam said slowly, “I’ve failed you, haven’t I?” It was worse than an attack. Cal faltered, “What do you mean?”
• Cal said, “We don’t think you’re a bad father.” “Poor things,” said Adam. “How would you know? You’ve never had any other kind.”
• You see, there’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.
• A miracle once it is familiar is no longer a miracle;
• “Sometimes I work my brother over,” he said. “I make him squirm, I’ve made him cry. He doesn’t know how I do it. I’m smarter than he is. I don’t want to do it. It makes me sick.” Kate picked it up as though it were her own conversation. “They thought they were so smart,” she said. “They looked at me and thought they knew about me. And I fooled them. I fooled every one of them. And when they thought they could tell me what to do—oh! that’s when I fooled them best. Charles, I really fooled them then.” “My name is Caleb,” Cal said. “Caleb got to the Promised Land. That’s what Lee says, and it’s in the Bible.” “That’s the Chinaman,” Kate said, and she went on eagerly, “Adam thought he had me. When I was hurt, all broken up, he took me in and he waited on me, cooked for me. He tried to tie me down that way. Most people get tied down that way. They’re grateful, they’re in debt, and that’s the worst kind of handcuffs. But nobody can hold me. I waited and waited until I was strong, and then I broke out. Nobody can trap me,” she said. “I knew what he was doing. I waited.”
• What Lee said was true.” “What did Lee say?” Cal said, “I was afraid I had you in me.” “You have,” said Kate. “No, I haven’t. I’m my own. I don’t have to be you.” “How do you know that?” she demanded. “I just know. It just came to me whole. If I’m mean, it’s my own mean.”
• People didn’t really believe in war even while they planned it. The Salinas Valley lived about as it always had.
• Will looked at the dark-faced boy and he liked him. He thought, This boy is sharp. He’s nobody’s fool. “I guess you’ll be going into business pretty soon,” he said. “Yes, sir. I thought I might run the ranch when I get out of high school.” “There’s no money in that,” said Will. “Farmers don’t make any money. It’s the man who buys from him and sells. You’ll never make any money farming.” Will knew that Cal was feeling him, testing him, observing him, and he approved of that.
• Cal ignored the question. “Would you give me some advice?” Will felt a glow of pleasure. “If I can, I’ll be glad to. What is it you want to know?” And then Cal did something Will Hamilton approved even more. He used candor as a weapon. He said, “I want to make a lot of money. I want you to tell me how.” Will overcame his impulse to laugh. Naïve as the statement was, he didn’t think Cal was naïve.
• Will’s fleshy face contorted and a memory swept over him like a chilling wind. He did not move slowly over the past, it was all there in one flash, all of the years, a picture, a feeling and a despair, all stopped the way a fast camera stops the world. There was the flashing Samuel, beautiful as dawn with a fancy like a swallow’s flight, and the brilliant, brooding Tom who was dark fire, Una who rode the storms, and lovely Mollie, Dessie of laughter, George handsome and with a sweetness that filled a room like the perfume of flowers, and there was Joe, the youngest, the beloved. Each one without effort brought some gift into the family. Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering. He thought of himself as slow, doltish, conservative, uninspired. No great dream lifted him high and no despair forced self-destruction. He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had—care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn’t even know they needed him. He had the ability to get money and to keep it. He thought the Hamiltons despised him for his one ability. He had loved them doggedly, had always been at hand with his money to pull them out of their errors. He thought they were ashamed of him, and he fought bitterly for their recognition. All of this was in the frozen wind that blew through him.
• Will had sensed his family but he had not understood them. And they had accepted him without knowing there was anything to understand. And now this boy came along. Will understood him, felt him, sensed him, recognized him. This was the son he should have had, or the brother, or the father. And the cold wind of memory changed to a warmth toward Cal which gripped him in the stomach and pushed up against his lungs.
• Listen—you have a brother. Does your father like him better than you?” “Everybody does,” said Cal calmly. “Everybody loves Aron.” “Do you?” “Yes, sir. At least—yes, I do.” “What’s the ‘at least’?” “Sometimes I think he’s stupid but I like him.” “Now, how about your father?” “I love him,” said Cal. “And he loves your brother better.” “I don’t know.” “Now, you say you want to give back the money your father lost. Why?” Ordinarily Cal’s eyes were squinted and cautious, but now they were so wide that they seemed to look around and through Will. Cal was as close to his own soul as it is possible to get. “My father is good,” he said. “I want to make it up to him because I am not good.” “If you do that, wouldn’t you be good?” “No,” said Cal. “I think bad.” Will had never met anyone who spoke so nakedly. He was near to embarrassment because of the nakedness, and he knew how safe Cal was in his stripped honesty. “Only one more,” he said, “and I won’t mind if you don’t answer it. I don’t think I would answer it. Here it is. Suppose you should get this money and give it to your father—would it cross your mind that you were trying to buy his love?” “Yes, sir. It would. And it would be true.”
• Will shook his head and laughed. He was filled with pleasure. “Maybe I’m being a fool, but I believe you—and I’m not a fool.” He gunned his motor and then let it idle again. “I want you to listen. Do you read the papers?” “Yes, sir.” “We’re going to be in this war any minute now.” “That’s what it looks like.” “Well, a lot of people think so. Now, do you know the present price of beans? I mean, what can you sell a hundred sacks for in Salinas?” “I’m not sure. I think about three to three and a half cents a pound.” “What do you mean you’re not sure? How do you know that?” “Well, I was thinking about asking my father to let me run the ranch.” “I see. But you don’t want to farm. You’re too smart. Your father’s tenant is named Rantani. He’s a Swiss Italian, a good farmer. He’s put nearly five hundred acres under cultivation. If we can guarantee him five cents a pound and give him a seed loan, he’ll plant beans. So will every other farmer around here. We could contract five thousand acres of beans.” Cal said, “What are we going to do with five-cent beans in a three-cent market? Oh, yes! But how can we be sure?” Will said, “Are we partners?” “Yes, sir.” “Yes, Will!” “Yes, Will.” “How soon can you get five thousand dollars?” “By next Wednesday.” “Shake!” Solemnly the stout man and the lean dark boy shook hands.
• A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight. Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.
• And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn’t true either. The dreadful telegrams began to sneak sorrowfully in, and it was everybody’s brother. Here we were, over six thousand miles from the anger and the noise, and that didn’t save us.
• The draftees wouldn’t look at their mothers. They didn’t dare. We’d never thought the war could happen to us.
• I guess we were like a tough but inexperienced little boy who gets punched in the nose in the first flurry and it hurts and we wished it was over.
• Once Adam had remarked on the quiet splendor of Lee’s clothes, and Lee had grinned at him. “I have to do it,” he said. “One must be very rich to dress as badly as you do. The poor are forced to dress well.”
• “Remarkable,” said Lee. “Why is he doing it?” “Why, to save a year!” “What does he want to save it for?” “Goddam it, Lee, he’s ambitious. Can’t you understand that?” “No,” said Lee. “I never could.”
• “Cal’s trying to find himself,” said Lee. “I guess this personal hide-and-seek is not unusual. And some people are ‘it’ all their lives—hopelessly ‘it.’ ”
• Aron said, “I wish we had in our church, well—well, I might as well say it. I wish we had something like the Augustines or the Franciscans. Someplace to withdraw. Sometimes I feel dirty. I want to get away from the dirt and be clean.” “I know how you feel,” Mr. Rolf said earnestly. “But there I cannot go along with you. I can’t think that our Lord Jesus would want his priesthood withdrawn from service to the world. Think how he insisted that we preach the Gospel, help the sick and poor, even lower ourselves into filth to raise sinners from the slime. We must keep the exactness of His example always before us.”
• Lee read European history, trying to discern from the filaments of the past some pattern of the future.
• “You’ve got a bug up your ass.” “I don’t like that kind of language.” “Why do you think I used it? I am not profane by accident. Aron, your father has been living for this.”
• Go to bed now, and in the morning get up early and tell your father about the tests. Make it exciting. He’s lonelier than you are because he has no lovely future to dream about. Go through the motions. Sam Hamilton said that. Pretend it’s true and maybe it will be. Go through the motions. Do that.
• She didn’t know whether he liked her or not, and so she didn’t like him.
• Aron was lonely at Stanford. His letters were drenched with lonesome longing for his girl. Together they were matter of fact, but from the university, ninety miles away, he made passionate love to her, shut himself off from the life around him. He studied, ate, slept, and wrote to Abra, and this was his whole life.
• There was no subject she could not discuss with Lee. And the few things she could talk about to her father and mother were thin and pale and tired and mostly not even true. There Lee was different also. Abra wanted to tell Lee only true things even when she wasn’t quite sure what was true. Lee would sit smiling a little, and his quick fragile hands flew about their work as though they had independent lives. Abra wasn’t aware that she spoke exclusively of herself. And sometimes while she talked Lee’s mind wandered out and came back and went out again like a ranging dog, and Lee would nod at intervals and make a quiet humming sound.
• I thought he always felt—well, kind of crippled—maybe unfinished, because he didn’t have a mother.” Lee’s eyes opened wide and then drooped again. He nodded. “I see. Do you figure Cal is that way too?” “No.” “Then why Aron?” “Well, I haven’t got that yet. Maybe some people need things more than others, or hate things more. My father hates turnips. He always did. Never came from anything. Turnips make him mad, real mad. Well, one time my mother was—well, huffy, and she made a casserole of mashed turnips with lots of pepper and cheese on top and got it all brown on top. My father ate half a dish of it before he asked what it was. My mother said turnips, and he threw the dish on the floor and got up and went out. I don’t think he ever forgave her.” Lee chuckled. “He can forgive her because she said turnips. But, Abra, suppose he’d asked and she had said something else and he liked it and had another dish. And then afterward he found out. Why, he might have murdered her.”
• “Lee, I’m not good enough for him.” “Now, what do you mean by that?” “I’m not being funny. He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up, and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that—not like the made-up one.” “What’s she like?” “Pure!” said Abra. “Just absolutely pure. Nothing but pure—never a bad thing. I’m not like that.” “Nobody is,” said Lee. “He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t even want to know me. He wants that—white—ghost.”
• “Do you think it’s funny to be so serious when I’m not even out of high school?” she asked. “I don’t see how it could be any other way,” said Lee. “Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn’t in time.”
• Lee broke in, “Once I worked for a woman of thirty-five who had successfully resisted experience, learning, and beauty. If she had been six she would have been the despair of her parents. And at thirty-five she was permitted to control money and the lives of people around her. No, Abra, age has nothing to do with it. If I had anything at all to say—I would say it to you.”
• The girl smiled at him. “I’m clever,” she said. “Shall I be clever?” “God help me—no,” Lee protested.
• “I don’t care what you do as long as I don’t have anything to do with it. I guess no matter how weak and negative a good man is, he has as many sins on him as he can bear. I have enough sins to trouble me. Maybe they aren’t very fine sins compared to some, but, the way I feel, they’re all I can take care of. Please forgive me.”
• “What’s the matter with Aron?” “What do you mean?” “He just seems to think only about himself.” “I don’t think that’s very new. Have you had a fight with him?” “No. When he had all that about going into the church and not getting married, I tried to fight with him, but he wouldn’t.” “Not get married to you? I can’t imagine that.” “Cal, he writes me love letters now—only they aren’t to me.” “Then who are they to?” “It’s like they were to—himself.”
• Joe Valery got along by watching and listening and, as he said himself, not sticking his neck out. He had built his hatreds little by little—beginning with a mother who neglected him, a father who alternately whipped and slobbered over him. It had been easy to transfer his developing hatred to the teacher who disciplined him and the policeman who chased him and the priest who lectured him. Even before the first magistrate looked down on him, Joe had developed a fine stable of hates toward the whole world he knew. Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant. Joe early developed a gentle protective love for Joe. He comforted and flattered and cherished Joe. He set up walls to save Joe from a hostile world. And gradually Joe became proof against wrong. If Joe got into trouble, it was because the world was in angry conspiracy against him. And if Joe attacked the world, it was revenge and they damn well deserved it—the sons of bitches.
• Out of his memory of bad luck a warm sadness grew, and he pushed it with more memories until the tears came to his eyes and his lips quivered with pity for the lonely lost boy he had been.
• What would—Aron, that was the name—what would he do if he knew? His brother knew. That smart little son of a bitch—wrong word—must not call him that. Might be too true. Some people believed it. And not smart bastard either—born in holy wedlock. Kate laughed aloud. She felt good. She was having a good time.
• Henry said, “I’d hate to—” “Hate to what?” “I was just wondering how I’d feel if I had to pass on my own sons.” “I’d resign,” said Adam. “Yes. I can see that. A man would be tempted to reject them—I mean, his own.” “No,” said Adam. “I’d resign because I couldn’t reject them. A man couldn’t let his own go free.”

  Kyle: Papa having to pull his own son, Roy’s, draft number.

• “Well, suppose there’s a slight doubt that the boy should be in the army and we send him and he gets killed.” “I see. Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you?” “I don’t want blame.” “Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn’t carry any pleasant egotism.”
• The word was timshel.” “Timshel—and you said—” “I said that word carried a man’s greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it.” “I remember Sam Hamilton felt good about it.” “It set him free,” said Lee. “It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man.” “That’s lonely.” “All great and precious things are lonely.” “What is the word again?” “Timshel—thou mayest.”
• Even though Aron had been away such a short time Adam had forgotten him and changed him the way any man changes someone he loves.

  Kyle: We change everyone in our minds; for better and for worse.

• Aron, who had not known he had a home, was nauseatingly homesick.
• In the new and neutral hiding place he cut the university out, went to his classes and left as soon as he could, to live in his new-found memories.
• of Abra he made his immaculate dream and, having created her, fell in love with her.
• crazy Alf Nichelson, who was a survival from an era that was past. Alf was a jack-of-all-trades, carpenter, tinsmith, blacksmith, electrician, plasterer, scissors grinder, and cobbler. Alf could do anything, and as a result he was a financial failure although he worked all the time. He knew everything about everybody back to the beginning of time.
• He looked at Joe and tried to place him. “I know you,” he said. “Don’t tell me.” Joe edged away. He was wary of people who knew him.
• You could say good morning to Alf and he’d work it around to a password. He was convinced that everyone lived secretly and that only he could see through them.
• Joe was restless. He wanted to get away—and Alf knew he did. Alf was an expert in people who wanted to get away from him. Come to think of it, maybe that is why he carried his bag of stories. No one really went away when he could hear some juicy stuff about someone. Everybody is a gossip at heart.
• Train schedules are a matter of pride and of apprehension to nearly everyone. When, far up the track, the block signal snapped from red to green and the long, stabbing probe of the headlight sheered the bend and blared on the station, men looked at their watches and said, “On time.” There was pride in it, and relief too. The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.
• And having gone this far, he proceeded with his self-punishment. “Why am I giving the money to my father? Is it for his good? No. It’s for my good. Will Hamilton said it—I’m trying to buy him. There’s not one decent thing about it. There’s not one decent thing about me. I sit here wallowing in jealousy of my brother. Why not call things by their names?” He whispered hoarsely to himself. “Why not be honest? I know why my father loves Aron. It’s because he looks like her. My father never got over her. He may not know it, but it’s true. I wonder if he does know it. That makes me jealous of her too. Why don’t I take my money and go away? They wouldn’t miss me. In a little while they’d forget I ever existed—all except Lee. And I wonder whether Lee likes me. Maybe not.”
• Adam was saying, “The times are changed. A boy must be a specialist or he will get nowhere. I guess that’s why I’m so glad you’re going to college.” Aron said, “I’ve been thinking about that, and I wonder.” “Well, don’t think any more. Your first choice is right. Look at me. I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one of them to make a living in these times.”
• “It’s natural for a man to want his son to succeed,” Adam went on. “And maybe I can see better than you can.”
• “Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn’t be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well.” “Yes,” Lee said from the doorway, “and he deplored it. He hated it.” “Did he now?” Adam asked.
• “Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small,” said Lee. “Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses—the whole world over his fence.” “We’re only talking about making a living.” “A living—or money,” Lee said excitedly. “Money’s easy to make if it’s money you want. But with a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.”
• Cal swallowed. “It’s—I made it—to give to you—to make up for losing the lettuce.” Adam raised his head slowly. “You made it? How?” “Mr. Hamilton—we made it—on beans.” He hurried on, “We bought futures at five cents and when the price jumped—It’s for you, fifteen thousand dollars. It’s for you.” Adam touched the new bills so that their edges came together, folded the tissue over them and turned the ends up. He looked helplessly at Lee. Cal caught a feeling—a feeling of calamity, of destruction in the air, and a weight of sickness overwhelmed him. He heard his father say, “You’ll have to give it back.” Almost as remotely his own voice said, “Give it back? Give it back to who?” “To the people you got it from.” “The British Purchasing Agency? They can’t take it back. They’re paying twelve and a half cents for beans all over the country.” “Then give it to the farmers you robbed.” “Robbed?” Cal cried. “Why, we paid them two cents a pound over the market. We didn’t rob them.” Cal felt suspended in space, and time seemed very slow. His father took a long time to answer. There seemed to be long spaces between his words. “I send boys out,” he said. “I sign my name and they go out. And some will die and some will lie helpless without arms and legs. Not one will come back untorn. Son, do you think I could take a profit on that?” “I did it for you,” Cal said. “I wanted you to have the money to make up your loss.” “I don’t want the money, Cal. And the lettuce—I don’t think I did that for a profit. It was a kind of game to see if I could get the lettuce there, and I lost. I don’t want the money.” Cal looked straight ahead. He could feel the eyes of Lee and Aron and Abra crawling on his cheeks. He kept his eyes on his father’s lips. “I like the idea of a present,” Adam went on. “I thank you for the thought—” “I’ll put it away. I’ll keep it for you,” Cal broke in. “No. I won’t want it ever. I would have been so happy if you could have given me—well, what your brother has—pride in the thing he’s doing, gladness in his progress. Money, even clean money, doesn’t stack up with that.” His eyes widened a little and he said, “Have I made you angry, son? Don’t be angry. If you want to give me a present—give me a good life. That would be something I could value.”
• Lee said, “Stop it! Stop it, I tell you!” “Stop what? What do you want me to stop?” Lee said uneasily, “I told you once when you asked me that it was all in yourself. I told you you could control it—if you wanted.” “Control what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lee said, “Can’t you hear me? Can’t I get through to you? Cal, don’t you know what I’m saying?” “I hear you, Lee. What are you saying?” “He couldn’t help it, Cal. That’s his nature. It was the only way he knew. He didn’t have any choice. But you have. Don’t you hear me? You have a choice.”
• Quinn looked around the comfortable sitting room. He felt that he didn’t want his office much longer. He remembered hearing a doctor say, “I love to deliver a baby, because if I do my work well, there’s joy at the end of it.” The sheriff had thought often of that remark. It seemed to him that if he did his work well there was sorrow at the end of it for somebody. The fact that it was necessary was losing its weight with him.
• Every man has a retirement picture in which he does those things he never had time to do—makes the journeys, reads the neglected books he always pretended to have read.
• “I don’t either,” said Lee. “I’ve got a bad stomach for liquor. Besides it makes me playful, intellectual but playful.” “How do you mean, Lee?” “I can only give you an example. In my younger days I played tennis. I liked it, and it was also a good thing for a servant to do. He could pick up his master’s flubs at doubles and get no thanks but a few dollars for it. Once, I think it was sherry that time, I developed the theory that the fastest and most elusive animals in the world are bats. I was apprehended in the middle of the night in the bell tower of the Methodist Church in San Leandro. I had a racquet, and I seem to have explained to the arresting officer that I was improving my backhand on bats.”
• “Don’t make it complicated,” Lee said. “You know why you did it. You were mad at him, and you were mad at him because your father hurt your feelings. That’s not difficult. You were just mean.” “I guess that’s what I wonder—why I’m mean. Lee, I don’t want to be mean. Help me, Lee!”
• He said, “Did burning the money give you much pleasure?” “I—I guess so.” “And are you taking pleasure from this whipping you’re giving yourself? Are you enjoying your despair?” “Lee!” “You’re pretty full of yourself. You’re marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask—Caleb the magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself as a snot-nose kid—mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits, and curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside of that you’re very like all the other snot-nose kids. Are you trying to attract dignity and tragedy to yourself because your mother was a whore? And if anything should have happened to your brother, will you be able to sneak for yourself the eminence of being a murderer, snot-nose?”
• We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed—selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful—we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture? That’s what we are, Cal—all of us. You aren’t very different.”
• That winter of 1917-1918 was a dark and frightened time. The Germans smashed everything in front of them.
• We learned then that war was not a quick heroic charge but a slow, incredibly complicated matter. Our spirits sank in those winter months. We lost the flare of excitement and we had not yet put on the doggedness of a long war.
• “No,” Lee said softly. “A few are women from the moment they’re born. Abra has the loveliness of woman, and the courage—and the strength—and the wisdom. She knows things and she accepts things. I would have bet she couldn’t be small or mean or even vain except when it’s pretty to be vain.”
• When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn’t enough. I had to have something else, because the story wasn’t true any more.”
• “When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too. I’m glad you told me about Aron.” “Why?” “Because now I know I didn’t make it all up. He couldn’t stand to know about his mother because that’s not how he wanted the story to go—and he wouldn’t have any other story. So he tore up the world. It’s the same way he tore me up—Abra—when he wanted to be a priest.”
• Abra had long ago given up having any private thing in her room, even any personal thing. This was of such long standing that Abra did not think of her room as a private place. Her privacies were of the mind. The few letters she kept were in the sitting room itself, filed among the pages of the two-volume Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which to the best of her knowledge had never been opened by anyone but herself since it came off the press.
• There was a quiet rising joy in Lee. It was the joy of change. Time’s drawing down for Adam, he thought. Time must be drawing down for me, but I don’t feel it. I feel immortal. Once when I was very young I felt mortal—but not any more. Death has receded. He wondered if this were a normal way to feel.
• Suppose it were true—Adam, the most rigidly honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. Lee laughed to himself—now this second will, and Aron, whose purity was a little on the self-indulgent side, living all his life on the profits from a whorehouse. Was this some kind of joke or did things balance so that if one went too far in one direction an automatic slide moved on the scale and the balance was re-established?
• “I burned all of Aron’s letters.” “Did he do bad things to you?” “No. I guess not. Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good.” “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?” “I guess so. Maybe that’s it.”

  Kyle: Camdens parenting line

• “Hello, Tom. The damn thing’s too tight.” “I don’t see you around the town at night lately.” “No.” “Don’t tell me you reformed.” “Maybe.” Tom prided himself on his ability to kid people and make it sound serious. He said, “Sounds like you got a girl.” Cal didn’t answer. “I hear your brother faked his age and joined the army. Are you picking off his girl?” “Oh, sure—sure,” said Cal. Tom’s interest sharpened. “I nearly forgot,” he said. “I hear Will Hamilton is telling around you made fifteen thousand dollars in beans. That true?” “Oh, sure,” said Cal. “You’re just a kid. What are you going to do with all that money?” Cal grinned at him. “I burned it up.” “How do you mean?” “Just set a match to it and burned it.” Tom looked into his face. “Oh, yeah! Sure. Good thing to do. Got to go in here. Good night.” Tom Meek didn’t like people to kid him. “The young punk son of a bitch,” he said to himself. “He’s getting too smart for himself.”
• He told Dr. Edwards, “That Chink knows more about the pathology of cerebral hemorrhage than I do, and I bet as much as you do.” He spoke with a kind of affectionate anger that this should be so. The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.
• “I’m sorry, Cal. Bear up! You’ll have to bear up.” And he said, “It always surprises me how people bear up.
• “I thought that once an angry and disgusted God poured molten fire from a crucible to destroy or to purify his little handiwork of mud. “I thought I had inherited both the scars of the fire and the impurities which made the fire necessary—all inherited, I thought. All inherited. Do you feel that way?” “I think so,” said Cal.
• “Maybe you’ll come to know that every man in every generation is refired. Does a craftsman, even in his old age, lose his hunger to make a perfect cup—thin, strong, translucent?” He held his cup to the light. “All impurities burned out and ready for a glorious flux, and for that—more fire. And then either the slag heap or, perhaps what no one in the world ever quite gives up, perfection.” He drained his cup and he said loudly, “Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us—would stop trying?”
• Lee said, “Help him, Adam—help him. Give him his chance. Let him be free. That’s all a man has over the beasts. Free him! Bless him!”
• Adam looked up with sick weariness. His lips parted and failed and tried again. Then his lungs filled. He expelled the air and his lips combed the rushing sigh. His whispered word seemed to hang in the air: “Timshel!” — His eyes closed and he slept.
• Covici supplied Steinbeck with a large, ruled notebook for composition of what Steinbeck called “The Book,” his “life’s work.” Each working day from January through November 1951, he wrote letters to his close friend and editor before he began writing the text of his novel on facing pages. Later, he presented the manuscript to Covici in a large wooden box carved with the word “timshel” on the top.
• Maybe I can finally write this book. All the experiment is over now. I either write the book or I do not. There can be no excuses.
• In a sense it will be two books—the story of my county and the story of me. And I shall keep these two separate. It may be that they should not be printed together. But that we will have to see after the book is all over and finished and with it a great part of me.
• I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little.
• One can go off into fanciness if one writes to a huge nebulous group but I think it will be necessary to speak very straight and clearly and simply if I address my book to two little boys who will be men before they read my book.
• They have no background in the world of literature, they don’t know the great stories of the world as we do. And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable—how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born.
• I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature.
• There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through—not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible.
• I think perhaps it is the only book I have ever written. I think there is only one book to a man. It is true that a man may change or be so warped that he becomes another man and has another book but I do not think that is so with me.
• The advantage of this will be that the story itself can be increasingly quick and terse and short. Such readers as only like plot and dialogue can then skip every other chapter and meanwhile I can take time for thought, comment, observation, criticism, and if it should seem a good thing to throw it out, I can do that too.
• I don’t want to dawdle too much today and on the other hand I do not want to start the book today.
• But try to relate the reader to the book so that, while I am talking to the boys actually, I am relating every reader to the story as though he were reading about his own background. If I can do that, it will be very helpful. Everyone wants to have a family. Maybe I can create a universal family living next to a universal neighbor. This should not be impossible.
• Next, I want to be so relaxed that the book will soothe and excite at the same time. Also it must not be a dour book but one that has gaiety as well as movement. It has to have a universal quality or there is no point in writing it.
• I have written each book as an exercise, as practice for the one to come. And this is the one to come. There is nothing beyond this book—nothing follows it. It must contain all in the world I know and it must have everything in it of which I am capable—all styles, all techniques, all poetry—and
• and it must have in it a great deal of laughter. I can see no reason why I should not tell the family stories. They are just as good as they ever were and maybe as I go I will remember more and more of them.
• I think I will put a good deal of my mother and my father also. It is time I wrote these things, else they will be gone because no one else will ever do them except me.
• You know I am really stupid. For years I have looked for the perfect pencil. I have found very good ones but never the perfect one. And all the time it was not the pencils but me. A pencil that is all right some days is no good another day.
• I have fine prejudices, lazy ones and enjoyable ones. It occurs to me that everyone likes or wants to be an eccentric and this is my eccentricity, my pencil trifling.
• Cathy Ames is a monster—don’t think they do not exist. If one can be born with a twisted and deformed face or body, one can surely also come into the world with a malformed soul.
• My god this can be a good book if I can only write it as I can hear it in my mind.
• I want to ask and even beg one thing of you—that we do not discuss the book any more when you come over. No matter how delicately we go about it, it confuses me and throws me off the story. So from now on let’s do the weather or fleas or something else but let’s leave the book alone.
• There are no good collaborations and all this discussion amounts to collaboration.
• My father was not an inventive man and he always said the Hamiltons were crazy. It was because he did not understand them. One is always crazy. Also the inventions of the Hamiltons did not make money. Money always removes the charge of craziness….
• And I think I have a title at last, a beautiful title, EAST OF EDEN. And read the 16th verse to find it. And the Salinas Valley is surely East of Eden.
• I think we are winning the battle of Tom but it will be very gradual. I am really quite worried about him. He needs help and right now. Sometime I will tell you about the talk I had with him yesterday. I talked to him as though he were an adult or at least my equal and I think a lot more got through than you can imagine.
• And I am a little drained. But that’s all right. One is never drained by work but only by idleness. Lack of work is the most enervating thing in the world.
• It is the fashion now in writing to have every man defeated and destroyed. And I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name a dozen who were not and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is of battles—the defeated are forgotten, only the winners come themselves into the race.
• It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth.
• The first page of the novel faced the first page of this letter, which ended here in the manuscript. It was headed: The Salinas Valley, and began: “Dear Tom and John.” The opening paragraphs, and other letters addressed to the boys, persisted through the first draft but were later omitted. The plan to make the chapters alternate rigidly between the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and to address all the Hamilton chapters to the boys, was abandoned earlier.
• Language explains part of the power of East of Eden—the lilting speech of Sam Hamilton, the cruel voice of Cathy/Kate, the biblical cadences of the Cain and Abel story. And the reflective language of the narrator—Steinbeck himself—as he composed both a fictive account of the Salinas Valley and a personal record of composition, a companion text, Journal of a Novel, “perhaps as complete a record of a book as has ever been done,” Steinbeck later mused.
• For years he resisted putting pencil to paper, other than making scattered notes, knowing that he was, admittedly, too vindictive and harsh on his Salinas hometown, on a region where wealthy growers/shippers ascended to the top of the social hierarchy and the toiling field-workers, exiles from Eden, were planted at the bottom.
• The Ransom Library at the University of Texas holds the holograph with author revisions, including journal entries and messages to Steinbeck’s longtime editor Pascal Covici written on the verso (left-hand) pages.
• Steinbeck’s Imaginarium: Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022. A deep dive into Steinbeck’s various journals.
• Steinbeck, John. “Always Something to Do in Salinas.” Holiday, June 1955. (Reprinted in America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, Viking, 2002.) A compelling essay on Steinbeck’s hometown.
• “Conversation at Sag Harbor,” Holiday, March 1961. (Reprinted in America and Americans.) Steinbeck speaks with his sons.
• In 1950, Steinbeck declared that André Gide’s The Counterfeiters is “one of the greatest books I have ever read. Simply because Gide knew how to write, because his mind knew how to explore…because he thought what he wanted to and gave form to his curiosities.” That describes Steinbeck writing East of Eden as well.

  Kyle: #books-to-read

• Family Sagas Tamar, Robinson Jeffers (1924); The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner (1943); A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989); The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001); Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng (2014); Pachinko, Min Jin Lee (2017); The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett (2020).

  Kyle: #books-to-read