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STEINBECK, John.
The Wayward Bus.
First edition, first printing. With the author's remarkable presentation inscription to the front free endpaper, "For Marge and Nat - If as utilitarians say glass eggs will make reluctant chickens lay, May I suggest with sylvan hesitation an artificial stool for constipation John Steinbeck (cynic)" A final line is pretty much indecipherable except for the intriguing last word "Goat"! Steinbeck's relationship with the younger Benchleys began early in 1946, when a contractor introduced them: Steinbeck needed tenants for the twin Manhattan brownstone that adjoined his living quarters, and the Benchleys needed a place to live. Marjorie Benchley later recalled, "It was a perfect match…John had been a good friend of my father-in-law, Robert Benchley. But he didn't know my husband, Bench. I was pregnant at the time, and Gwyn [Steinbeck] was pregnant, so it was really a good situation. We were all in the same boat." A friendship developed quickly. "We lived in each other's houses…The boys - we each had two boys - roamed freely…. We ate meals together. John and Bench would go off together after dinner to the local bar … They talked about everything, cooking up all kinds of projects…. Gwyn was very social, so they had frequent parties, and you would meet all sorts of people there - movie people, Broadway actors and directors, writers and journalists. Harold Ross the editor of the New Yorker was a regular guest. And John's publisher, Harold Guinzburg, and his editor, Pat Covici, were always there…. [Steinbeck had] been looking for somewhere to settle down for many years, and I think he felt that he'd at last found the right place." Steinbeck nurtured Benchley, then a journalist at Newsweek, to pursue his fiction writing, and the protagonist of Benchley's first novel, Side Street, is readily identifiable as Steinbeck, his friend and landlord. According to Marjorie: "Side Street tells exactly what our lives were like then…. The characters, the houses, the kids: it's all true, taken from life." Towards the end of that year the Steinbecks became unable to hide the marital discord that had begun upon the birth of their second son. "John drank an awful lot," Benchley recalled. "We all did in those days…. But I think this was exaggerated when John and Gwyn were having problems…." Biographer Jay Parini writes, "The drinking problem, the crisis in his marriage, and his deep uncertainties about the value of The Wayward Bus may all have contributed to what he called his depression." (This and Benchley quotations from Parini: John Steinbeck: A Biography, NY: Holt, 1995, pp. 297-302.)
Octavo. Original orange cloth, titles to spine and upper board gilt, pictorial decoration to upper board blind stamped, green top-stain. With the dust jacket. An excellent copy in the dust jacket.
