Beschreibung:

STEINBECK, JOHN. Autograph letter signed ("John") to Dennis Murphy, Discove Cottage, Bruton, Somerset, England, 29 March 1959. 4 pages, 4to, in blue ink on four sheets of thin paper, Steinbeck's address embossed at head of first page, with a few slight, mostly marginal stains; with original addressed envelope and with typed transcript . "I AM AT PEACE HERE AMONG THE GREAT ONES" In early March 1959 Steinbeck and his wife Elaine moved into Discove Cottage in Bruton, Somerset, where he would spend most of the year working on his Morte d'Arthur . Here he writes in a particularly philosophical mood: "...I've come back to a place which is curiously home, to do my work. This is haunted country, old country and in a blood sense as well as a spiritual -- my country. Here the anglo saxon met the Celt and those are my blood lines...And Arthur was born in Somerset and if tradition holds, and it does, was buried twelve miles from there in Glastonbury...The local speech is anglo saxon in form, tempo and pronunciation and more nearly like the speech of western America than like modern British speech. I am content here. More content than I have been for many years. I've been ripped apart too much in recent years. Here I am whole, and rested and what is coming out is clear, clean unaccented English prose as sharp and timeless as diamonds...I am working away at my Arthur and I feel both humble and fiercely triumphant...I did not know that I could ever again have such joy -- all bedraggled and beshitted as I have been...I would willingly finish here. In the clattery world of literary fashion...I am charged with being finished, through, washed up -- as though it were a crime. What's wrong with finishing?...Art is indeed long -- longer than life so that no man has ever come to an ending of it and all artistic lines end with an open quote. Yes, I am at Peace here among the Great Ones. I know my place too and that's good to know. It isn't much but it isn't nothing either. I've turned some pebbles, and if I live will turn a few more but it will be only pebbles -- and that's all right for a Salinas kid who started with no better education than Homer had and grew out of a social background not one speck better than Shakespeare's..." "In this stone cottage where I am living over sixty generations have been born and lived and died. And every one had my hands and feet, eyes, breath and capacity for pleasure and suffering. I feel lifted up by a great company of friends who have been through it -- And at the end they simply died and added another generation to the pile. Actually I am like the tiny bit of living coral on the top of a structure of dead coral rising from the bottom of the sea -- And more than that I am alone but not lonely. I have found an area of rest and acceptance. This does not have nor require the coquetry of religion nor the lust for continuance which is called immortality. I never needed those but I am grateful that before the little whirl-wind of my life like those skittering curls of straw and dust and dried dung in a barn yard, is over, that I have been given this moment of rest and understanding of my place and position in the glittering pile. I am not afraid any more and I am not hungry any more and given these things I have no need to be cruel any more...I'll let you go now, but I did want to tell you that I am well and almost magically fulfilled. That can have very little interest nor importance to you but it is essential to me that I tell you. For whether or not you know it or wish it or resist it, you will be the little fringe of coral that flourishes on top of me when I have joined the supporting stalk. You haven't any choice about that..."