{"id":49921,"date":"2026-09-22T15:26:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T15:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/steinbeck-and-the-difficult-art-of-the-friend-breakup\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T15:26:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T15:26:19","slug":"steinbeck-and-the-difficult-art-of-the-friend-breakup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/steinbeck-and-the-difficult-art-of-the-friend-breakup\/","title":{"rendered":"Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI can\u2019t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing.\u201d<\/h3>\n
\n

<\/a>\u201cA friend,\u201d<\/em> wrote the poet and philosopher John O\u2019Donohue in his beautiful meditation on the Ancient Celtic notion of anam cara<\/em><\/a>, \u201cawakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.\u201d<\/em> But what happens when a friendship ceases to magnify your spirit<\/a> and instead demands that you be a smaller version of yourself? While David Whyte is absolutely right in that \u201call friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness,\u201d<\/a> there comes a point past which granting forgiveness yet again for the same hurtful behavior becomes not an act of moral strength but one of moral weakness \u2014 an exercise in self-mutilation in the unwillingness to relinquish what has metastasized into a draining or even abusive relationship. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s what John Steinbeck<\/strong> (February 27, 1902\u2013December 20, 1968) confronted in his mid-thirties as his friendship with George Albee, another young writer, grew increasingly strained by Albee\u2019s professional jealousy. Things came to a head in early 1938 when a young woman Steinbeck had known since childhood accused him of getting her pregnant; although the accusation appears false by biographical accounts, Steinbeck found himself in the midst of a maelstrom he described as one of the most trying times of his life. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

When he was most in need of support from his loved ones, he learned that Albee had been speaking ill of him instead of sticking up for him. The disloyalty wounded Steinbeck deeply and he distanced himself from his former friend. Albee eventually sensed the cooling of the relationship and pressed for an answer. <\/p>\n

In a masterwork of the friend breakup, found in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 which also gave us the Nobel laureate\u2019s terrific advice on falling in love<\/a> in a missive to his teenage son \u2014 Steinbeck finally confronts Albee:<\/p>\n

\n

Dear George: <\/p>\n

The reason for your suspicion is well founded. This has been a difficult and unpleasant time. There has been nothing good about it. In this time my friends have rallied around, all except you. Every time there has been a possibility of putting a bad construction on anything I have done, you have put such a construction. <\/p>\n

Some kind friend has told me about it every time you have stabbed me in the back and that whether I wanted to know it or not. I didn\u2019t want to know it really. If such things had been reported as coming from more than one person it would be easy to discount the whole thing but there has been only one source. Now I know that such things grow out of an unhappiness in you and for a long time I was able to reason so and to keep on terms of some kind of amicability. But gradually I found I didn\u2019t trust you at all, and when I knew that then I couldn\u2019t be around you any more. It became obvious that anything I said or did in your presence or wrote to you would be warped viciously and repeated and then the repetition was repeated to me and the thing was just too damned painful. I tried to sidestep, just to fade out of your picture. But that doesn\u2019t work either. <\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to be friends with you, George, but I can\u2019t if I have to wear a mail shirt the whole time. I wish to God your unhappiness could find some other outlet. But I can\u2019t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing. This has been the most difficult time in my life. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve needed help and trust and the benefit of the doubt, because I\u2019ve tried to beat the system which destroys every writer, and from you have come only wounds and kicks in the face. And that is the reason and I think you always knew it was the reason. <\/p>\n

john<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Apparently unsatisfied with having made the point too implicitly, Steinbeck sums it up in an explicit postscript: <\/p>\n

\n

And now if you want to quarrel, it will at least be an honest quarrel and not boudoir pin pricking.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Let\u2019s Be Enemies<\/em><\/a> by Janice May Udry<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some days later, still stewing over the situation, Steinbeck writes to his literary agent and lifelong friend<\/a> Elizabeth Otis:<\/p>\n

\n

Unpleasant thing. I finally broke open the thing with George. At least now if he wants to quarrel it won\u2019t be lady quarreling. I feel better about that, but I don\u2019t like such things at all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A few weeks later, Steinbeck writes in his diary in lamenting the dark side of his success<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

People I liked have changed\u2026 I\u2019m tired of the struggle against all the forces that this miserable success has brought against me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When asked about the fallout, Richard Albee, George\u2019s brother, reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

You may be sure that the basic cause was artistic jealousy, and of course it was on the part of George, not John.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, few things erode the mutual dignity of a friendship more effectively than the petty jealousies of competitiveness. But just a few weeks later, in a testament to Kierkegaard\u2019s observation that creative work is the only antidote to the embitterment of such petty jealousies<\/a>, Steinbeck embarked upon the greatest creative labor of his life<\/a>, the fruits of which earned him his first Pulitzer Prize the following year and became the cornerstone of his Nobel Prize two decades later.<\/p>\n

Complement Steinbeck: A Life in Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 which is thoroughly satisfying in its totality, full of the beloved writer\u2019s wisdom on literature and life \u2014 with Steinbeck on creative integrity<\/a>, discipline and self-doubt<\/a>, the joy of writing by hand<\/a>, and his prophetic dream<\/a> about how the commercial media machine is killing creative culture, then revisit Andrew Sullivan on why true friendship can be a greater gift than romantic love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

newsletter<\/h3>\n

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\u201cI can\u2019t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing.\u201d \u201cA friend,\u201d wrote the poet and philosopher John O\u2019Donohue in his beautiful meditation on the Ancient Celtic notion of anam cara, \u201cawakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.\u201d But what happens when a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 12:12:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}