LETTER: Autograph letter signed to John Steinbeck, and related Nobel Prize correspondence to JS.
The Nobel Laureate Club:
Buck (winner 1938) Advises Steinbeck (winner 1962)
Buck, Pearl. Autograph letter signed, “Pearl S. Buck,” to “John Steinbeck,” Perkasie, Pennsylvania, November 16, 1962; two leaves of letterhead (“R.D.1 – Box 164 / Perkasie, Pennsylvania”), three pages, half-inch round spot on first page.
Together with:
Faber, Aksel. Typed letter signed, “Aksel Faber,” to “Mr. [John] Steinbeck,” Vienna, June 12, 1962; one leaf of Faber Foundation letterhead, recto only, two small closed tears.
Together with:
Steinbeck, John. Typed letter signed, “John Steinbeck,” to “Mr. Faber” [Aksel Faber], Stockholm, December 12, 1962; one leaf of hole-punched paper, recto only, light edgewear.
Together with:
Ståhle, Nils. Typed letter signed, “Nils K. Ståhle,” to “Mr. [John] Steinbeck,” Stockholm, December 12, 1962; one leaf of Nobel Foundation letterhead, recto only.
Pearl Buck, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Earth and Nobel laureate in Literature (1938) responds to a letter from John Steinbeck (not present) in which he had apparently requested advice on the logistics of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was soon to accept, as well as insights into the impact of the award on one’s career.
On the issue of writing a Banquet Speech, Buck explains her own difficulties:
I felt the same way, and the more because I had lived so long in China that I knew too little about my own country. I therefore made my speech on the Chinese novel, which was appropriate only as a discussion of what place and influence the novel had in the culture of China – it was, as a matter of fact, a real force, always, through history – for reform and liberalism, since novelists were not considered to be within the literary, conservative pale.
Buck then advises Steinbeck that:
If I have anything thing to say that could be helpful it is only that here is an opportunity to say something you’ve only felt and thought about and never said—the simpler and straight it is, the more effective it will be.
Steinbeck ended his Banquet Speech in Stockholm by perhaps following Buck’s advice to be simple and straight (although perhaps not in the final line):
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.
Buck also explains fondly what it is like to be a laureate at the ceremony. She dishes on the levels of sobriety of Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner when they attended their own ceremonies, cautioning Steinbeck against drinking too much (clearly she did not agree that Hemingway’s quote that “All good writers are drunks” applied at the Nobel Prize Ceremony):
The occasion itself is something not to be forgotten. The Swedish people make it easy and delightful. Someone tells you exactly what is to be done, everything and everyone is warm and friendly, and you will just accept in the same spirit and enjoy it. Poor Sinclair Lewis got excited and drank too much and I am sure was not clear in his own mind. Faulkner had to be sobered up, I am told, I doubt either of them did his best. It will be different with you.
Finally, Buck ends with parting words about what to do in the wake of winning the award:
[T]he effects of having received the prize never end. One is persistently elevated – or downgraded – by the fact. The best thing to do, once the even is over, is to get back to work.
Buck’s advice that the effects of the award would not end after the ceremony are apparent in Aksel Faber’s letter to Steinbeck, in which he offers the soon-to-be laureate access to “a number of ‘refugiums’ for the ‘elite of humanity’ in different parts of the world” and proposes that anything Steinbeck desires, the Faber F
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