John Steinbeck (post 2): “I confuse pretty easily,” he explains in a personal letter, so he had to “split” himself into two or three “entities” or “units”

In the previous post, I quoted Steinbeck from an interview, after he won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, in which he insisted that he was a “writer,” not an “author.” Subsequently, in a personal letter to his book editor, he elaborated on his sense of identity:

“I confuse pretty easily I guess, although the Stockholm experience is capable of confusing anyone…When it comes right down to it, nothing has changed. The English sentence is just as difficult to write as it ever was. I guess a whole lifetime of direction can’t be changed by one experience.

“But I have had to make a couple of drastic changes in the time past. Once I thought I could successfully divorce everything about myself from my work, I mean as far as the reader was concerned. I discovered that this, while it could be done if one had only written under a pseudonym, was impossible. So I had to split in two and establish two entities—one a public property and a trade mark. Behind that I could go on living a private life just so long as I didn’t allow the two to mix. Now perhaps there must be three—the Nobel person, the trade mark and the private person. I don’t know how many of these splits are possible. As far as I am concerned the only important unit is the private one because out of that work comes and work is to me still not only the most important thing but the only important thing” (1, p. 922).

Why didn’t he just say that he liked his privacy? Because that wouldn’t convey what he meant, which was that he had more than one personality, and he didn’t want the public (which was to be dealt with by his host personalities) to interfere with his writer personality, which he preferred to keep private.

Why did he talk in terms of “entities” and “units” rather than personalities? Either he didn’t think of it as multiple personality, per se, or he thought it prudent to use euphemisms when discussing this matter with his editor.

1. Jackson J. Benson. John Steinbeck, Writer [1984]. New York, Penguin Books, 1990.