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lettuce strike—“there are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born,” he told George Albee (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 132). The strike was smashed with terrorism, and recollections of the workers’ defeat festered in Steinbeck for more than a year. Then, in early February 1938, galvanized by reports of the worsening conditions in Visalia and Nipomo, Steinbeck felt the urgent need to do something direct in retaliation. “It seems to be necessary to write things down,” he said in Entry #1. “Can’t stop it.” John Steinbeck never became what dyed-in-the-wool activists would consider fully radicalized, but by putting his pen to the service of a political cause, he was stepping as close to being a firebrand as he ever would. He launched into “L’Affaire,” a vituperative satire aimed at attacking the leading citizens of Salinas, “the committee of seven,” who organize and direct the ignorant army of vigilantes. The cabal of organizers remain aloof, but “work out the methods by which vigilantes are formed and kept steamed up.” The vigilantes were assembled from the common populace of Salinas—clerks, service station operators, shopkeepers—all of them “dopes” and “suckers” for creating mayhem. 12
    By all accounts, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” was the angriest, most thesis-ridden book Steinbeck ever attempted. It presented difficulties from the outset. Carol, his closest critic, did not like its subject (despite her leftist beliefs), its title was concocted and unwieldy, and its approach was a detour from his main concern for the migrant workers, already adumbrated in “The Harvest Gypsies.” In fact, “L”Affaire“ wasn’t really a ”literary“ work, but a ”vulgar“ tract. In May 1938 Steinbeck confessed to Annie Laurie Williams: ”I’ll have the first draft of this book done in about two weeks. It is only a little over seventy thousand words. And it is a vicious book, a mean book. I don’t know whether it will be any good at all. It might well be very lousy but it has a lot of poison in it that I have to get out of my system and this is a good way to do it. Then if it is no good we can destroy it. I’ll send it on for the opinion of you all though before I destroy it. I feel so ferocious about the thing that I won’t have much critical insight. Probably be almost ready to send out by the first of June. But it is going so rapidly there will be a good deal of cleaning up about it.“ 13
    Within days Steinbeck’s critical insight returned. The careful artist triumphed over the ferocious propagandist, and he destroyed “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” Immediately, Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis, his main literary agent, and to Pascal Covici, who had already announced the publication of “L’Affaire,” to inform them that he would not be delivering the manuscript they expected. The following excerpted letter to Otis, written around mid-May 1938, offers a statement of Steinbeck’s artistic integrity, because it serves as a covenant with the abiding principles of his art and with the noble qualities of his migrant subject matter, which his blind anger had blurred in the headlong rush for revenge. This letter also sets up a resonant echo with many of the concerns voiced in the main journal section of Working Days:
     
    This is going to be a hard letter to write ... this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! these incidents all happened but—I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire.... I know, you could sell possibly 30,000 copies. I know that a great many people would think they liked the book. I myself have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the argument but I don’t like the book.