Steinbeck by John Steinbeck

while observing the course of his mother’s illness that notes which Steinbeck had been making at random for many years suddenly came into focus —with the collaboration of Ed Ricketts—and a turning point in his creative life was reached. Even at the time it seemed so important to him that, contrary to his custom, he dated in full the letter in which he first wrote about it.

To Carlton A. Sheffield
    Pacific Grove
June 21, 1933
    Â 
    This is not a letter to read unless you have so much time that you just don’t care. I just want to talk and there is no one to talk to. Out of the all encircling good came a theme finally. I knew it would. Until you can put your theme in one sentence, you haven’t it in hand well enough to write a novel. The process is this (I am writing this at the risk of being boring. One can refuse to read a letter and the writer of it will never know.) The process is this—one puts down endless observations, questions and remarks. The number grows and grows. Eventually they all seem headed in one direction and then they whirl like sparks out of a bonfire. And then one day they seem to mean something.
    When they do, it is the most exciting time in the world. I have three years of them and only just now have they taken a direction. Suddenly they are all of one piece. Then the problem begins of trying to find a fictional symbolism which will act as a vehicle.
    Let me quote a few of the notes. The coral insect working with hundreds of billions of others, eventually creates a strange and beautiful plant-like formation. In the course of time numberless plants create the atoll. Architecturally the atoll is very beautiful and good. Certain groups in Europe at one time created the Gothic spire. They seem to have worked under a stimulus as mysterious, as powerful and as general as that which caused the coral insects to build.
    Note—in nineteen seventeen this unit was in a physical and psychic condition which made it susceptible to the inroads of the influenza germ. This germ at other times was not deadly, and, when encountered now, causes discomfort but not ordinarily death. It has been shown that at the time mentioned the germ had not changed but the receptivity of the race had.
    Note—in Mendocino county a whole community turned against one man and destroyed him although they had taken no harm from him. This will sound meaningless to you unless you could see the hundreds of notes that make them meaningful to me. It is quite easy for the group, acting under stimuli to viciousness, to eliminate the kindly natures of its units. When acting as a group, men do not partake of their ordinary natures at all. The group can change its nature. It can alter the birth rate, diminish the number of its units, control states of mind, alter appearance, physically and spiritually. All of the notations I have made begin to point to an end—That the group is an individual as boundaried, as diagnosable, as dependent on its units and as independent of its units’ individual natures, as the human unit, or man, is dependent on his cells and yet is independent of them.
    Does this begin to make sense to you? The greatest group unit, that is the whole race, has qualities which the individual lacks entirely. It remembers a time when the moon was close, when the tides were terrific. It remembers a time when the weight of the individual doubled itself every twenty-eight days, and strangely enough, it remembers every step of its climb from the single cell to the human. The human unit has none of these memories.
    The nature of the groups, I said, were changeable. Usually they are formed by topographical peculiarities. Sometimes a terrible natural stimulus will create a group over night. They are of all sizes, from the camp meeting where the units pool their souls to make one yearning cry, to the whole world which fought the war. Russia is giving us a nice example of human units who are trying with a