The Long Valley (3 page)

During the winter of 1934 the hard work began to pay off. The writing accelerated, acquiring momentum in method and definition. By late February Steinbeck had completed “The Chrysanthemums,” his most challenging short story both personally and artistically. At about the same time he completed two more Red Pony stories, “The Promise” and “The Leader of the People,” in that order. He made a brief start on a fifth Red Pony story that he never completed. That work was over for him.

In late spring and summer of that year, Steinbeck’s restless imagination turned in other directions. In late May or early June he wrote “The Raid,” a story suggesting the labor battles of his later
In Dubious Battle;
it was published in
North American Review
in October 1934. During roughly the same period he drafted “The Harness,” “Flight,” and “The White Quail.” “Johnny Bear” followed in late June of 1934; “The Vigilante,” “The Snake,” and “Breakfast” were drafted by the end of August. With the exception of “The White Quail,” which was published in
North American Review
in March 1935, few of the later stories were readily accepted for independent publication. (Specific details on the publishing history appear in the Explanatory Notes to each story that follow the present text.)

By the summer of 1938, Pascal Covici had in his hands the typed manuscripts of all these stories. With the exception of one anomaly, all had been written in the course of approximately one year, from the summer of 1933 to that of 1934. The one anomaly was “Saint Katy the Virgin,” which had been drafted long before, possibly as early as a poetic form dating back to Steinbeck’s intermittent career at Stanford University. The satiric nature of the work also places it outside the shared tone and common themes of
The Long Valley
stories. The story had long been an odd favorite of Steinbeck, however, and he sent it along with the others for Covici to manage. The collection was one item that Covici took with him to the Viking Press during the summer of 1938, and he wasted no time getting the volume into print. Advance sales were surprising: 8,000 copies by July 22, 1938.

Although Steinbeck’s ledger notes of 1933-1934 reveal that he was thinking of possibly collecting the stories into a volume, it is clear that they were written independently for quick sales to periodicals. With the startling success of
Tortilla Flat,
released just five days after his father’s death in May 1935, Steinbeck experienced a surge of confidence in his novelistic skills and turned his attention to the great novels that would absorb all his energy for the rest of the decade. In comparison with those novels, the short stories may seem fairly negligible, a kind of apprenticeship Steinbeck had to serve before hitting his artistic stride. Seen in such a way, Pascal Covici’s collection of the stories into
The Long Valley
volume may seem simply a shrewd, hard-eyed financial investment, a recycling of old works on the energy produced by the major novels.

Such a view, however, neglects both the importance of these stories to Steinbeck and also their intrinsic aesthetic merit. To be sure, the stories served as a kind of literary apprenticeship. Steinbeck never avoided that fact. He wrestled head-on with the artistic challenges of finding and developing character. He explored subtle variations of narrative point of view, risking some dangerous methods as his skills hardened. He developed a terse, precise way of creating setting, but also of letting setting explode suggestively in complicated patterns of imagery. The apprenticeship was not without trial and certainly not without error, but it did develop what Steinbeck called “a sureness of touch”—a superb confidence in artistic crafting that was to serve him during the rest of his career.

Moreover, in his wrestling with these stories, Steinbeck was developing a profoundly personal voice—a way of articulating his major themes and concerns through character, setting, and symbolism. Those themes developed in the stories, hinted at in
The Pastures of Heaven
but now emerging in many ways for the first time in dramatic clarity, were also to form the backbone of many of his novels in future years. It would be an error to argue that the stories exist only in order to articulate personal themes. But it would be equally erroneous to ignore Steinbeck’s deep investment of personal philosophy and thematic patterns in these stories. They emerge not in didactic statement, surely, but in subtle patterns that weave a common thread through these highly independent works. While any mere listing of such limits the scope of Steinbeck’s rich artistry, several major artistic themes are clearly evident.

Steinbeck himself announced the thematic pattern for his earliest sequence of these short stories, those four tales that form
The Red Pony.
With the aim of attempting “to make the reader create the boy’s mind for himself” (SLL: 70), Steinbeck intended to explore “the desolation of loss” (SLL: 63). The pattern is clear and unequivocal in the stories—from Jody’s colt to old Gitano’s passage to Grandfather’s fading dream. But the pattern suffuses the other stories as well. By confronting the desolation of loss, one also focuses the challenges that lead to growth.

Often what the character loses is the sense of an individual dream for him- or herself. In contemporary terms, that dream may be described as self-fulfillment; in Steinbeck’s time it may have had a simpler but no less profound twist. Each individual bears a dream of some sort—whether it is Pepe’s dream of manhood in “Flight,” Elisa Allen’s dream of personal freedom in “The Chrysanthemums,” Mary Teller’s dream of sexual and personal identity in “The White Quail,” or Peter Randall’s dream of personal freedom in “The Harness.” Indeed, the pattern was a major one for Steinbeck throughout this decade, parlayed powerfully into the novels
Of Mice and Men
and
The Grapes of Wrath.
The biographical critic might add that it was no less Steinbeck’s own major theme, as he dreamed of artistic freedom to tell the sort of stories he wanted during the 1930s.

All too often, however, those dreams are shipwrecked upon some jagged rocks that society places in the way. Thereby also emerges Steinbeck’s third major pattern: the isolated individual in conflict with some larger social structure. In his Cannery Row novels, beginning with
Tortilla Flat,
Steinbeck identified this repressive social force as “civilization,” by which term he meant the rule of social propriety erected by the prevailing power bloc of society. That power bloc has little patience with restless dreamers. Steinbeck’s characters are often the detritus, the fallout, of the conflict.

Such characters—and they are common in the short stories of this period—often struggle powerfully to pursue their individual dreams, only to find them blocked or stamped out by the social power structures. These characters are improper; they are the outcasts, the isolated individuals of society. They are the voiceless people, the ones whose stories turn inward for lack of speaking and lack of listeners. Steinbeck is repeatedly compelled to tell the story of these lonely, outcast individuals trying to make their way, enact their little dreams, on the far fringes of social propriety. Whether they appear in a laboratory as in “The Snake,” or in the aftermath of mob violence as in “The Vigilante,” or toiling in a garden as in “The Chrysanthemums” or “The White Quail,” such characters find themselves outside the established norms. They are fascinating and illuminating for precisely that reason. They call into question values we hold too readily and often too thoughtlessly. Steinbeck’s social conscience emerges powerfully in these stories.

Just as the stories of 1933-1934 became a proving ground for several of Steinbeck’s major thematic patterns, ones that would also shape the novels of the 1930s, so too were the stories a proving ground for his artistry. The fact is that, although possessing a powerful instinct for storytelling and a seemingly inexhaustible trove of stories from his own region and past, Steinbeck’s storytelling abilities were to this point often raw and undisciplined. In the early novels—
Cup of Gold
and
To a God Unknown
—he often seems self-indulgent, at the mercy of the language rather than in control of it, at the mercy of the story rather than directing it. In the stories of the 1920s also, several of which remain unpublished, the prose is full of raw energy, but it often explodes in white-hot outbursts rather than a carefully developed scheme.

In this regard of maturing artistic craft, the stories of
The Pastures of Heaven,
most of which were written in 1931 and published together in 1932, represent a tremendous improvement in stylistic craft. Steinbeck learned to temper the grandiose, to use imagery as a pattern revealing character rather than for its own sake, to control point of view in the arrangement of character and plot. In effect, he was learning to rely upon the story itself, and to let that have center stage, while he subdued his considerable stylistic talents to a supporting role in the story’s revelation.

Steinbeck was, nonetheless, a daring experimenter until he found the right combinations that unlocked a story’s power. If the characters didn’t have the ring of authenticity at first, as was the case with “The Chrysanthemums,” he pushed the originals aside and started over until he got it right. If he found himself wandering into self-indulgent writing, his passages having little to do with the clear telling of the story, as was the case with “Flight,” he cut whole pages of the telling out. Some works—including “Flight,” with its late-written “Addendum” that Steinbeck incorporated into the story—had extensive revisions. Some came whole and smooth, with hardly a word changed. (Steinbeck’s habitual misspellings were cleared up by his wife, Carol, in the typing or by later editors.) Several stories of the period were simply abandoned altogether, with just a paragraph or several pages of aborted effort remaining in the ledger. Following the drafts chronologically, however, one observes an incremental development of artistic skill and confidence.

Several artistic skills were perfected during this period, ones that would remain with him throughout his career. Perhaps foremost among them is Steinbeck’s use of patterned imagery to reveal character. He always had a potent gift for imagery, but in prior works it often appears in a random, eclectic fashion, often for its own sake rather than as a part of character revelation. “Flight” demonstrates his increasing control over imagery. Pepé undergoes a sort of devolution in personhood, one supported by increasingly intense animal and reptile imagery for his actions as he crawls among the rocks. In “The Snake,” the weird relationship between the woman and the laboratory reptiles is eerily paced by suggestive imagery.

Furthermore, Steinbeck perfected the use of setting as revelation of character, theme, and plot. Setting becomes an essential part of the story’s telling, rather than a simple backdrop for events. This pattern is clear, for example, in the subtle mood piece “Breakfast,” but it is particularly important in a story like “The Raid,” where the mingled shadows and flickering lights suggest the very state of mind of the character Root. So too, Mary Teller’s garden in “The White Quail” operates metaphorically as a revelation of her essential character. And the fogs and swamps of “Johnny Bear” adumbrate the social mindset in his culture.

In particular, however, Steinbeck perfected and controlled his early propensity for symbolism. Steinbeck often spoke of his works as having several layers of meaning, and he carefully suggested those layers through patterns of implication. He had used symbolism before, to be sure:
To a God Unknown
fetches up nearly every archetype known to the Western world. It is an artistic overload, a veritable morass of allusions. Here in the short stories Steinbeck learns to be both more selective of his symbols and also more in control of those he selects. Just what do the chrysanthemums represent for Elisa Allen? Of such a question the essential mystery of the story is made. Is the harness that Peter Randall wears merely a support or an enslavement? And if the latter, what does enslave him? Here too in “The Harness,” symbolism abets the fundamental narrative and exploration of the story itself.

And finally, Steinbeck experimented with and acquired control over narrative point of view in these stories. In earlier works Steinbeck simply failed, quite often, to trust the story and the reader. He tended to comment overtly on the story’s telling as it unfolded, sending directions like little announcements to the reader. In these short stories, for all practical purposes, that authorial intrusion disappears. Although “Saint Katy the Virgin,” as a carryover from a much earlier work and as a work of satire, clearly has the storyteller present in the story and commenting upon it, that story stands as good evidence of his subsequent growth as a writer. Most of the stories in
The Long Valley
are rendered in third-person, objective, or dramatic point of view. Character and story do the telling. A variation occurs in the third-person, omniscient point of view in “The Snake,” as the reader undergoes with Dr. Phillips a deep revulsion at what he witnesses. Here Steinbeck does seem to comment on the event, but it is through his character, not through his own voice. Other experiments with point of view in the collection occur in “Breakfast” and “Johnny Bear,” where the first-person narrator captures the feelings of the community and records them with great immediacy.

With such developments in artistic technique, it is indeed accurate to call the stories of
The Long Valley
“breakthrough” works for Steinbeck. He tested his artistic skills to the limit, exploring and perfecting new ways of telling the story and techniques to use in the telling. These works form the artistic soil out of which the novels of the 1930s grew. They are, therefore, so important to Steinbeck’s canon that it is surprising that for so long the critical understanding of them was so mixed.

The critical response to
The Long Valley
offers a curious miscellany of praise and condemnation. The initial response among reviews of the book during the year following its publication quickly reveals the mixed opinion.