Dead Letters: The Critic

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

In the spring of 1936, I drove down to Pacific Grove, California, to interview a writer named John Steinbeck, who had published a novel called Tortilla Flat the year before and was beginning to be discussed in the kind of rooms where writers are discussed before they are read. I had written ahead. He had agreed, with the reluctance of a man who would rather be doing almost anything else, to give me an afternoon.

I arrived to find him sitting on the steps of his cottage, holding what was left of a manuscript.

I use the word "left" deliberately. The pages in his hands were intact. The pages on the ground around him were not. They had been reduced to something between confetti and pulp, scattered across the yard in a radius that suggested enthusiasm. In the middle of this radius, lying in the sun with the serene conscience of the truly innocent, was a setter pup.

"That's Toby," Steinbeck said, by way of greeting. "He's eaten my book."

I asked which book.

"The only one that mattered this month," he said. "About half of it. There's no other draft. Two months of work, and he made it into a salad."

I had, by this point in my career, conducted interviews under a number of difficult circumstances. I had been ignored, deceived, and shut out. I had never arrived to find my subject in the immediate aftermath of a literary catastrophe inflicted by a dog. I did not know the protocol. I asked if he wanted me to come back another day.

"No," he said. "Sit down. You've come all this way. And anyway I can't work — there's nothing to work on. He ate it."

I sat down on the step. Toby thumped his tail against the ground without otherwise moving.

I expected anger. I expected, at minimum, the particular despair of a man who has lost two months of irreplaceable work to an animal incapable of understanding what it destroyed. What I got instead was something I have never forgotten, because it was the opposite of what every other writer I'd met would have felt.

"I was pretty mad at first," Steinbeck said, watching the dog. "But you know, the poor little fellow may have been acting critically." He said this without smiling. "I'm not sure the manuscript was any good. I've been telling myself it was for two months, and maybe Toby's the first honest reader it had. I didn't want to ruin a good dog over a book I'm not sure of."

I asked what he intended to do.

"Write it again," he said. "From the start. Better this time, probably. He only got the first draft. The first draft is always a lie you tell yourself so you'll keep going. Toby just ate the lie." He reached over and scratched the dog behind the ears. "I've decided to promote him. Lieutenant-colonel. In charge of literature."

I asked if I could quote that.

"You can quote the dog," he said. "He's the one who did the editing."

I stayed for another hour. Steinbeck talked about the migrant camps he'd seen, the men who moved from ranch to ranch with everything they owned in a bindle, the particular loneliness of work that ends the day it's finished. He did not talk much about the book. He had, it was clear, already let it go — not the story, which was still in his head, but the pages, which were in his dog. The pages he did not seem to mourn. He had decided they were a draft, and a draft, to Steinbeck, was not the thing itself. It was the scaffolding you built so you could find out where the thing was, and then tore down.

He finished rewriting the book that August. It was published the following year, under the title Of Mice and Men, and it made him famous in the way that changes a life. The story it tells is about two men, George and Lennie, and it ends with George doing the only kind thing left to do for a friend who cannot be saved. I have read it many times. I cannot read the early pages — the ones with the dead mouse that Lennie won't put down — without thinking that they once existed in another form, in another draft, in the stomach of a setter pup in Pacific Grove.

Toby lived a long and well-fed life. He is the only literary critic I have ever met whose verdict the author accepted without argument.

I got the quote. It belonged to the dog.  

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.