Archive Including Autograph Letters Signed; East of Eden; The Red Pony; Travels with Charley; et al.

STEINBECK, JOHN

Verlag: Viking, New York, 1959

A collection of unpublished letters with outstanding content and inscribed books establishing the close friendship John Steinbeck and his wife Elaine shared with theater director John Fearnley. The correspondence is lengthy, writerly, and warm, and the inscriptions humorous and joyful. The letters, largely undated, map primarily to their time in England from March through September 1959. The inscriptions were likely made in the mid-to-late 1950s - most of them post-dating their publications by years or even decades. The Books: In the first edition of East of Eden (1952) Steinbeck writes as if he simply pulled it off Fearnley's shelf: What joy to write in the copy of my book which belongs to my friend John Fearnley: I think this might be the reason I wanted to write it. John Steinbeck. In the third printing of The Red Pony (1937) Steinbeck leaves a cute poem in an inscription employing nicknames they gave each other on a trip in the 1950s: Dear Fearnley (Small Change) When you are old And cannot see, Put on your 'specs, And think of me. Your [ ] friend John (Inside Straight) Steinbeck And in the first edition of Travels with Charley (1962) - the only inscription that could be contemporaneous with publication - he wrote as if from himself and his dog Charley: "For Fido Fearnley / Bow Wow and F-F-F-T! From John and Charley Steinbeck." (Also from Fearnley's library, but unadorned by Steinbeck, are a jacketed pre-publication second printing of Cannery Row (1945), and a jacketless copy of Tortilla Flat (1935).) The Letters: Steinbeck met Elaine Anderson - then wife of actor Zachary Scott - in May 1949. They married in December 1950, after Elaine's divorce. It was Steinbeck's third and final marriage. Anderson knew Fearnley, casting director for Rodgers and Hammerstein from 1945-1955, from their shared theater production days. (Anderson's most high-profile credit we can trace is as assistant stage manager of "Oklahoma!" in the mid 1940s.) In one letter, Steinbeck writes to Fearnley, "Elaine protects you like a mother hen. .You are pretty much her property, you know." The three worked together on "Burning Bright" in October 1950, with Steinbeck as writer, Elaine as his assistant, and Fearnley as casting director, and again in 1955 when Fearnley cast Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway production of "Pipe Dream," a musical based on Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday which ran for 256 performances at the Schubert Theater. In some of these letters and inscriptions Steinbeck incorporates nicknames they devised on a New Year's trip to Trinidad and a holiday sail around the Windward and Leeward Islands during that "Pipe Dream" run: They "took Calypso names: Inside Straight (Steinbeck), Queen Radio (Elaine Steinbeck), and Small Change (Fearnley)" (Letters 519). In two of these letters Steinbeck writes at length on the many issues he had with that Rodgers and Hammerstein production, from script to direction, in the process revealing his thoughts and feelings about Sweet Thursday, of which he hopes that Fearnley might helm a new stage adaptation. Steinbeck adorns those letters, as well as the cover of the dust-jacket of The Red Pony, with his signature flying pig stamp and his handwritten phrase, "as astra per alia porci" - "to the stars on the wings of a pig," referencing the common lore that one of his early teachers had told him he'd only become a writer "when pigs fly." Elaine explained elsewhere in 1983, The Pigasus symbol came from my husband's fertile, joyful, and often wild imagination. After his signature on letters or inside his books, he would draw a fat little pig with wings, and lettered his name, "Pigasus." John would never have been so vain or presumptuous as to use the winged horse as his symbol; the little pig said that man must try to attain the heavens even though his equipment be meager. Man must aspire though he be earth-bound. At some point, he began to write "Pigasus" in Greek letters, and he added the motto, "Ad Astra Per Alia P. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 2769

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Archive Including Autograph Letters Signed; ...
Verlag: Viking, New York
Erscheinungsdatum: 1959
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: Good
Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Schutzumschlag
Signiert: Signatur des Verfassers
Auflage: First edition.