For sale: Steinbeck’s fatherly notes on love

The legendary author of The Grapes of Wrath took the time to offer guidance to his 14-year-old son on the vicissitudes of love.

Author John Steinbeck.

In the autumn of 1958 a 14-year-old boy wrote to his father explaining that he had fallen in love and it was serious. His father was John Steinbeck and the reply he sent would eventually be held up as one of the great expositions of love, endlessly republished and read out at weddings.

Now a handwritten draft of the famous letter, in Steinbeck’s neat, flowing hand, with occasional crossings out, is to be offered for sale by an auction house in Boston.

“Dear Thom,” it begins, addressing the elder of his two sons, born in New York in 1944 during his second marriage, to Gwyndolyn Conger.

They divorced in 1948, and in 1950 Steinbeck married Elaine Scott, an actor and stage manager.

Thom would later tell an interviewer that his mother “was difficult, to put it lightly” and drank heavily, and “the only way my father could save me from her was to put me into boarding schools on the East Coast from the time I was in third grade” – about the age of eight.

He and brother John would spend their holidays with their father, taking long trips where they had a tradition of reading to each other. “I’ll read you a chapter, you’ll read me a chapter,” Thom told Publishers Weekly in 2011.

His letter to his father from school arrived on November 10, 1958, describing a girl he had met named Susan. “I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers,” his father wrote in response.

“First, if you are in love, that’s a good thing – that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

“Second, there are several kinds of love.

“One is a selfish, mean, grasping egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom that you didn’t know you had.”

His son, he wrote, had told him that “this is not puppy love”. He began to write about puppy love but then crossed it out, saying: “If you feel so deeply, of course it isn’t … You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it – and that I can tell you.”

He advised his son to “glory in it and be grateful for it”.

There would be no harm in saying it, except that “some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration”. He added: “Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.”

His marriage to Elaine Scott would last the remainder of his life. “She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can,” he wrote.

“And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens. The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

Bobby Livingstone, executive vice-president of RR Auction, said the letter was being offered for sale by a collector. It is expected to sell for $US15,000 ($23,500).

A 1938 Steinbeck letter to a friend that is also up for sale shows how the author was working to finish a book that he had great hopes for.

“Do you like the title we have chosen: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’?” he asked.

The Times