The Pastures of Heaven (2 page)

 

 

 

As he developed the group of stories, he took the central idea beyond what Beth Ingels had originally suggested, making the material his own. In creating the schoolteacher named Molly Morgan, he drew on the experiences of his mother in the early years of her career. For the senior Whiteside, he utilized his father's interests in classical literature. He took a story about a pair of sisters who become reluctant prostitutes from another book he was planning and merged it into the structure of his new volume.

By the autumn of 1931 he had finished the composition of the stories, and his wife, Carol, finished typing them sometime in early December. He immediately sent the manuscript to his agent. As he wrote to Ted Miller:

 

 

The initial reaction from Mavis McIntosh was negative, but she agreed to forward the collection to a publisher for a reading.

That response was immediate and positive. The manuscript had been sent to Robert O. Ballou, an editor at Cape and Smith, and he accepted it for publication within three days. Steinbeck received the news on his thirtieth birthday, February 27, 1932, and it was the most encouraging development of his young career, but the euphoria was not to last. In March he learned that Jonathan Cape had gone bankrupt, and his book was not to be published after all. Then, in a fortuitous development, Robert Ballou, set adrift by the failure of the firm, landed a position at Brewer, Warren, and Putnam, and he brought
The Pastures of Heaven
with him. By May production on the bedeviled volume had resumed under the new imprint, and it appeared in October to very little fanfare, partly because the firm lacked the funds to market it aggressively. Indeed, shortly after publication of Steinbeck's book, this publisher also declared bankruptcy, and Steinbeck made very little money on the project. The Depression, later to figure so importantly in his fiction, had hit him personally.

In the final twist on the matter, two years later, Pascal Covici, head of the publishing firm of Covici-Friede in Chicago, read the stories enthusiastically and decided to buy up the contract and the existing backlog of books and issue the title again under his own imprint, which he did in the fall of 1935.
The Pastures of Heaven
was thus given a second life. However, the curious and convoluted history of the volume's publication is not as important as the role that the book played in Steinbeck's growth as a writer, for it was during the composition of these stories that he found the subject and the mode of artistic expression that were to generate the most important work of his life.

If the publication of the volume was encouraging for Steinbeck, the reviews were less so, for many critics did not understand the genre and faulted a collection of interrelated stories for not being a novel. The reactions to
The Pastures of Heaven
varied, but in general they tended to praise Steinbeck's style, to puzzle about his genre, and to marvel at the variety of his characters and scope of his portrait of his fictional valley. Margaret Cheney Dawson, writing at length in the
New York Herald-Tribune Books
(October 23, 1932), remarked on the “author's charming serenity of style” and concluded that “there is a clarity, good humor and delicacy in Mr. Steinbeck's writing that makes the book fine reading.” Describing the form of the volume, she observed that “each of the chapters presents an individual or group enacting some small drama against the backdrop of Heaven's Pastures. Short stories they are really.” The review in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
(November 19, 1932) concluded that “the novel is well plotted, though, perhaps, the conclusion is of a somewhat obvious type. The characters are as vitally real as your next door neighbor, and the style and presentation of the novel are restrained, compassionate, as well as compelling.”

Anita Moffett wrote more extensively in the
New York Times Book Review
for November 20, 1932, praising the prose of the volume: Steinbeck “writes with deep feeling for the tragedy implicit in each situation, yet undeceived by the self-delusion or self-dramatization of the persons involved. Racy, realistically direct and caustically humorous, his writing is noteworthy for originality of phrase and image and a strongly poetic feeling.” The commentator for the
Saturday Review of Literature
(November 26, 1932) observed that the “book is ... a collection of short stories unrelated except by the unity of place and the occasional appearance of one or another character in an episode in which he is not primarily featured,” a comment that missed entirely the substantial thematic unity that Steinbeck had given his volume.

A brief comment in
The Nation
on December 7, 1932, called the book a “series of connected sketches” that are obsessed with abnormal character types. Praising Steinbeck's style, the reviewer predicted that “his future work should lead to his recognition as an excellent psychological analyst.” Revealing the preoccupation of the age, he added that if Steinbeck “could add social insight to his present equipment he would be a first-rate novelist.” Cyrilly Abels, in The
Book-man
for December of 1932, compared
Pastures
to Hilton's
Ill Wind
as another series of linked stories and suggested that in these tales “civilization shows a pathetic gray against the delightful green of Nature, [and] ... even the Garden of the Hesperides brings disillusion.” A brief notice in
The Booklist
(December 1932) observed that “sensitivity, a very human pity, and humor preserve the book from an unwholesome impression that the themes of horror and abnormality might have conveyed in less skillful writing.” Helen McAfee praised Steinbeck's characterizations and his description of the valley and remarked that “the author has a sense of motivation, with psychological insight and understanding. The odd and queer people are naturally so. The normal people are normally so. The whole story is plausible, and seemingly historical in its descriptions of places and events.”

But to come to terms with the adequacy of these early reviews, and to attempt to understand the literary contributions and context of
The Pastures of Heaven,
it is important to place the book in the context of two important literary traditions that converge in these stories: American Literary Naturalism and the genre of the short-story cycle, both of which had been gaining in importance in American fiction since the 1890s.

Growing out of the hard edge of Realism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Naturalism had become the dominant literary movement in American fiction by the turn of the century, manifesting its influence in the Bowery tales of Stephen Crane, the fight for survival in the work of Jack London, the grim struggle of simple characters against a world they cannot control in Frank Norris's fiction, and the complex inner drives that impel disaster in the novels of Theodore Dreiser. At the ideological heart of this literary tendency is pessimistic Determinism, the notion that the causative factors in human tragedy lie beyond the powers of the individual. The influence of Darwin led to biological determinism and to atavistic scenes in which characters revert to primitive states of animalistic behavior; the influence of Karl Marx, coupled with problems emanating from the urbanization of America and the economic problems at the end of the nineteenth century, engendered the portrayal of socio-economic forces that overwhelm individual lives. These themes came to replace for a time the ethical dilemmas so prevalent in Realism, in which characters struggle, as does Huck Finn, to make morally difficult decisions. Internal struggle is not significant in the context of external determinism, which overwhelms individual prerogatives. Beginning with
The Pastures of Heaven,
these concepts came to play an important role in the fiction of John Steinbeck.

These themes led the Naturalist to focus on the lives of lower-class characters struggling for survival in an alien and often hostile society, one insensitive to their personal needs for fulfillment or self-expression. Often these characters are in some way grotesque, retarded, or misshapen victims of genetic accident, or people obsessed by greed, sexual craving, or a compulsive plan for success that ultimately destroys them. Since the characters themselves are incapable of explaining the complex causal history of the events that sweep them along, the personalized narrative methods of Realism, in which simple characters tell their own stories, is replaced with a dominant, omniscient narrator who can relate deterministic factors far beyond the knowledge of the characters affected by them. Since the underlying assumption of Naturalism is that reality is not only comprehensible but stable and available for detailed, scientific analysis, the tendency is for symbolization, for dominant images that embody determining forces—for example, the variety of gold symbols that pervade Norris's
McTeague.
The plots of Naturalism tend to depict the downward spiral of impending tragedy, and there is normally very little suspense about the final outcome of events. No one emerges triumphant in a Naturalistic novel, since simple survival constitutes a moral victory. The style of Naturalism lacks the grace of Realism, and artistic subtlety and the skillful turn of phrase give way to narrative exposition and the rational explanation of the implications of depicted events.

John Steinbeck was not a dedicated student of American Naturalism, and his fiction does not exhibit an uncompromised utilization of these tendencies, yet in theme and method his work has greater affinity to Naturalism than to any other tradition in American literature. As his letters indicate, he was familiar with the work of Sherwood Anderson, whose
Winesburg, Ohio
is perhaps the greatest influence on
The Pastures of Heaven.
As a college student and aspiring writer in the 1920s, Steinbeck was aware of the growing popularity of such Naturalistic writers as Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, and Edith Summers Kelly, as well as the older generation of Naturalists, Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and London.

 

The Pastures of Heaven
is certainly a compendium of Naturalistic tendencies, dominated by an omniscient narrator who establishes characters through expository comment rather than dramatic revelation. There are no deep mysteries within Steinbeck's characters that are beyond the reach of the narrative intelligence, no background influences that the narrator cannot explain, no events to come that are impossible to predict. Omniscience is a powerful tool in the telling of the story, but it obscures the subtleties of the human personality, subordinates organic development, and tends toward the depiction of static characters who emerge, predictably, as the victims of circumstances beyond their control.

In the stories in
Pastures,
Steinbeck reveals as well the Naturalistic tendency for grotesque characters: Alice Wicks and Manfred Munroe suffer from retardation, Myrtle and John Battle from epilepsy and a form of insanity, Helen Van Deventer from neurosis, and Hilda Van Deventer from schizophrenia. Tularecito, perhaps the most interesting of these personalities, is depicted as a retarded savant, severely restricted in the standard forms of learning but gifted in the artistic re-creation of the nature around him. Other characters suffer from obsessions that impel disaster or humiliation : Shark Wicks, for example, has a compulsive need to appear to be a wealthy and shrewd investor of his mythical fortune; and John Whiteside is driven to create an estate and a dynasty to inhabit it throughout the coming generations, even though every ensuing development thwarts his deepest desires. As Richard Astro has pointed out, the underlying tragedy is that although this rich valley presents the promise of a fulfilling life, the characters within it are either so restricted or so driven by self-deception and obsession that they do not make the most of their abundant opportunities. In narrative method, style, characterization, and theme,
The Pastures of Heaven
owes much to the traditional norms of American Naturalism.

In form, however, its organizational principles derive from another source altogether, from a popular but not widely understood genre customarily called the short-story cycle, a collection of interrelated stories. Distinct in many ways from the more celebrated “novel,” a cycle consists of stories that are independent fictional units, with a conflict, a resolution, and a sense of closure in each narrative. These stories are often published individually in magazines prior to being collected as a group, but placed in context with the other stories, each tale is enriched by the presence of the others. Often the stories are linked by a continuing central character, as they are in Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio
and Ernest Hemingway's
In Our Time;
sometimes the unifying feature is the setting for the stories, as it is in Hamlin Garland's
Main-Travelled Roads
or Sarah Orne Jewett's
The Country of the Pointed Firs;
sometimes the unifying element is the narrative voice of the stories, as in Charles Chesnutt's
The Conjure Tales
or Joel Chandler Harris's
Stories of Uncle Remus;
and sometimes the stories are tied together thematically, with ideas reinforced or presented in counterpoint to the central motifs of the other works.