The Long Valley (2 page)

Although his interest in short-story writing was stimulated at Stanford University, little else was. He overachieved in indolence. Disputatious and self-styled, he scorned the orthodox manners of early 1920s university life. He occasionally visited classes, when he wasn’t too busy with his own interests. He participated in a writers’ group and the school’s literary magazine, although his fictional efforts might be politely described as crude. That he actually maintained some student status there for several years is more a testament to the liberal relationship between Stanford and California’s students than Steinbeck’s academic endeavors. He pursued writing, and that was about it, unless one includes the eccentrically bohemian lifestyle he set for himself. He wanted to be a writer, but he had only a very dim notion of what this meant.

He was, at best, a some-time student, who still worked frequently at the Spreckels Ranch and other places, until he left for New York in November of 1925. From California, he saw New York as a mecca for a young writer; from New York, he saw it as the loneliest place in the world. After several months of laboring as a construction worker, then as a journalist, with little time for his own writing, he scurried home to California. This was his home, his region, the landscape for his stories. And it was where he was to work diligently over the next few years to put down his roots as a writer.

 

If one beginning for John Steinbeck lies in those cursory biographical details, another lies in the year 1933.

In the summer of 1933 this thick-shouldered writer hunched over the table at the family home on Central Avenue in Salinas, California. He was thirty-one years old, married to Carol Henning, and the author of two published books—
Cup of Gold
(1929) and
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932)—and a soon-to-be-published third,
To a God Unknown
(1933), none of which had or ever would sell particularly well. In an interview with Robert van Gelder reprinted in
Conversations with John Steinbeck,
Steinbeck pointed out that “the first three novels I published didn’t bring me in a thousand dollars altogether. The first didn’t earn the $250 advance I’d been paid; the second earned about $400; and the third didn’t earn its $250 advance.” It seemed to him in 1933 that his writing career was about to evaporate.

The reason for his sitting in the family home further suggests the desperate nature of his writing career. His mother had suffered a debilitating stroke the past March, and since he seemed to have no self-supporting employment and was readily available, John Steinbeck was called upon to nurse her as she lay in a nearby room. From June 1933, when his mother was discharged from the hospital and sent home, Steinbeck lived and wrote in most chaotic and demanding circumstances. Strangely, the very encumbrances seemed to liberate his storytelling imagination. In that dining room of the large, sprawling home on Central Avenue, he worked at the short stories that he hoped would set his career on course.

During this time Steinbeck wrote in a series of three ledger notebooks, at least one of which he’d lifted from his father’s office, cut out eight pages at the beginning, and erased several pages of penciled notations pertaining to court cases. The reason was simple: Steinbeck’s budget was painfully tight, a combination of income from Carol’s work and a small stipend from his father. For much the same reason, perhaps, Steinbeck covered nearly every inch of the pages in his tight, tiny, but quite legible handwriting. Throughout his later career Steinbeck gauged the lengths of his novels on the basis of an estimated thousand words per handwritten page. Some of the ledger notebooks of this early period far exceed that average. He experimented with inks and pens, usually buying ink in quantity on sale at Holman’s store and often winding up with colors he detested—green, for example. He especially liked a deep, rich purple or black ink. While he often wrote in pencil later in his career, generally lining up a few dozen sharpened pencils before settling in at his desk, during the 1930s he favored pens and was finicky about the feel and flow of the pen. He was delighted, for example, that while writing
The Grapes of Wrath
he had located what he called the “best pen” he’d ever had.

For several reasons, it seemed to Steinbeck that, rather than tackle another novel in a fickle market, the surer course for his artistic searching lay in short stories. Steinbeck felt compelled to tell those stories that grew out of his own experience. It may have been a process of discovering his personal voice as a storyteller, but he was also wrestling with self-confidence as a writer and thus turned to those stories he knew best. After
Cup of Gold,
a wildly imaginative novel full of swashbuckling action on the high seas, Steinbeck began to turn—in
The Pastures of Heaven
—to stories of his own region and experience. His confidence as a writer, as he tried to prove himself, grew from what he called “sureness of touch,” a term that included, among other things, writing about events with which he had first-hand experience or a clear sense of geographical and thematic identity.

While Steinbeck may well have turned to the short-story form to develop his writing skills in tales of the region and people he knew best, this was also in fact a golden age for the American short story. Many of the writers of the early twentieth century first broke into print or established their reputations by publishing short fiction in commercial periodicals. These periodicals were also plentiful, providing a ready market for new talent. The newsstands purveyed dozens of magazines carrying fiction, and—particularly important during the early years of the Depression era—they appeared at quite affordable prices. Such periodicals as
North American Review, Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly,
and
Harper’s Magazine,
among many others, packed a lot of fictional punch for a dime or quarter. It was an eager market; both editors and readers were bullish on the short story.

Yet another reason explains Steinbeck’s attention to the short-story form during the early 1930s: The publication process gave a very quick response. Within a few months an author who had a work accepted would see it in print, placed before thousands of readers. For the reader-starved author, the expectation was a literary bonanza. The market promised recognition and an audience. If one got published.

The early summer of 1933, however, seemed to provide an exceptionally grim atmosphere for this effort to prove himself in short fiction. As Steinbeck took over nursing chores, he would write for a while, then have to interrupt the writing to answer a call from his mother in the next room. In a letter to another young writer, George Albee, collected in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
he related the effort: “The pony story, you can understand has been put off for a while. But now I spend about seven hours a day in the hospital and I am trying to go on with it, but with not a great deal of success, because partly I have to fight an atmosphere of blue fog so thick and endless that I can see no opening in it. However, if I can do it, it will be good. Anyone can write when the situation is propitious” (SLL:73). A few days later he again wrote Albee, this time to say how he was trying to type the second draft of “The Gift,” the first of the Red Pony stories, while being constantly interrupted to tend his mother: “One paragraph—help lift patient on bed pan. Back, a little ill, three paragraphs, help turn patient so sheets can be changed” (SLL: 83). Steinbeck made a poor nurse. Openly confessing to a “fear and hatred of illness and incapacity which amounts to a mania” (SLL: 83), he often returned to the typewriter feeling nauseated and emotionally drained.

It was a nerve-racking and stressful time. Steinbeck, virtually trapped in his boyhood home, turned to stories of his youth and so stumbled upon the sequence of the Red Pony stories:

 

The Red Pony stories, which would later form part of
The Long Valley,
set the artistic and thematic tone for the volume. Years later, in his essay “My Short Novels,” Steinbeck reflected upon the writing:

 

The pattern of “loss and acceptance and growth” was both his personal experience during those trying days and also the emerging theme in his short stories.

Steinbeck finished the first of the Red Pony stories, “The Gift,” in June 1933 and the second, “The Great Mountains,” later that summer. By the end of that summer his agents, McIntosh and Otis, had placed both stories for publication in
North American Review;
they appeared in the November and December 1933 issues. While the
Review
did not pay generously—Steinbeck received between forty-five and fifty dollars for each story—the magazine held a position of national prestige, and it published three more of Steinbeck’s short stories over the next two years. Perhaps more important than the money for Steinbeck, however, was the affirmation of his efforts. It was as if the unusually demanding conditions were themselves unleashing an increasing sureness of touch in the writing. Encouraged by sales of the Red Pony stories, Steinbeck tackled the infinitely more complex plotting and tone of the macabre story “The Murder” late that summer.

Steinbeck had long held an interest in the popular murder mysteries that were emerging at this time in American literature. In fact, three years earlier he had written a mystery novel titled “Murder at High Moon” by Peter Pym, an effort to enter the popular genre and acquire some quick sales. It didn’t sell—even to his agents—and remains unpublished. “The Murder,” however, was probably conceived of as early as 1931, while he was writing stories for
The Pastures of Heaven,
since it shares both its setting and also thematic and character patterns with those stories. “The Murder” was completed in the late summer or early fall of 1933 and published in the April 1934 issue of
North American Review.

In the late summer and early fall of 1933, Steinbeck sought a bit of diversion from the short stories and almost casually, in a matter of weeks, drafted a short, whimsical novel that would be published in 1935 as
Tortilla Flat.
It would be his breakthrough book—the one that secured a larger reading public and affirmed his personal confidence in his writing skills, although at this point in 1933, the work seemed to Steinbeck little more than a bit of self-indulgent whimsy. When it met with success two years later, no one was more surprised than Steinbeck himself.

While the publications brought little financial reward, they certainly fueled Steinbeck’s literary energy. He began to sense success like a still elusive but now just visible reality. He committed himself anew to writing short stories during the last months of 1933 and the first half of 1934. In one of those explosive outpourings that marked his creative effort for much of his career, he labored over the stories that would form the bulk of
The Long Valley.

The effort was not without incident or setback.

The most serious threat to his writing continued to evolve in the family home. In the late summer of 1933 Steinbeck’s father collapsed and was incapacitated for much of the following year. Still more of the care and anxiety for his mother, whose health declined steadily, thereby fell upon young Steinbeck. The family tried grimly to celebrate a last Christmas together. Mrs. Steinbeck died shortly thereafter. Steinbeck’s writing understandably stumbled.

In late summer or early fall 1933, Steinbeck recollected a story told him by Edith Wagner, the mother of his boyhood friend Max Wagner. The story, “How Edith McGillcuddy Met R.L. Stevenson,” apparently came quite easily, taking up only six pages of tight, sure handwriting, with very few revisions, in the ledger notebook. Because Mrs. Wagner had herself written a version of the story and was trying to publish it, Steinbeck withheld his own version from submission. He finally published it, with Mrs. Wagner’s permission, in 1941 in
Harper’s Magazine,
too late to be included with the stories that made up
The Long Valley
collection.

One work in particular seemed to compel him during this period. In late fall 1933, Steinbeck made his first tentative start on “The Chrysanthemums,” a story that seemed to acquire special importance for him but one that also presented artistic difficulties. There exist in manuscript form several beginnings of the story, in which Steinbeck tried to work out the independent characters of Elisa and Henry Allen and then their relationship with one another. The starts would break down in some self-directed commentary in which Steinbeck alternately encouraged himself on the worth of the story or flogged himself for not having the “sureness of touch” to execute it properly.

Such notes to himself pepper the ledger notebooks in which Steinbeck drafted these stories. Of “The Chrysanthemums,” Steinbeck noted: “Two days of work passed before I realized that I was doing it all wrong. And now it must be done again.” He worried about words “which had an untrue ring.” He commanded himself to keep out words that had no absolute bearing on the story. At the same time, worries about finances and the strained family situation arise over and over in the notebooks. Finally, as if in response to the faltering writing and the personal difficulties, Steinbeck commanded himself to “work like a dog.” That appeared to be the only solution.