The Pastures of Heaven (3 page)

The short-story cycle is an older form than the novel, having its origins in such works as Boccaccio's
The Decameron
and Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales,
works published centuries before the inception of the novel in English literature in the eighteenth century. In American literature, the story cycle came into prominence in the late nineteenth century, when the demand for short works of fiction was at its highest point. In the late decades of the century, such works as Mary Wilkins Freeman's Six
Trees,
Stephen Crane's
Stories of Whilomville,
and Charles Chesnutt's
The Conjure Tales
gave expression to the form. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the genre emerged as one of the most important forms in literature, and a brief list of important works would include such masterpieces as William Faulkner's
Go Down, Moses,
Eudora Welty's
The Golden Apples,
Jean Toomer's
Cane,
and scores of others.

The artistic challenge of the short-story cycle is always unity, some means of relating one story to another, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. In
The Pastures of Heaven,
Steinbeck followed a tradition established much earlier by Garland, Crane, and Anderson of developing essentially Naturalistic themes within the form of interrelated stories. Garland had succeeded in
Main-Travelled Roads
by having each story advance the central ideas of democratic Populism, placing in a sympathetic and humane light worthy characters pitted against external forces that overwhelm them. Crane used continuing characters in his tales of Sullivan County and Whilomville, and the growth and development of these characters from story to story enrich the characterizations. Anderson blended several unifying devices in
Winesburg:
a stable location, rich with local personalities and historical conflicts; a continuing protagonist, George Willard, who confronts adult realities and matures through the sequence of stories; and unifying themes that bind one story to the other. Steinbeck was to follow in this tradition in his work on
The Pastures of Heaven.

One of the unifying elements he gave his book was the handling of time, with all the principal stories occurring in the general period of 1928—29. Within that temporal scheme, each succeeding story concludes somewhat later than the preceding one, so that there is a sense of historical progression to the flow of stories, despite the flashbacks that sometimes open the narratives. The volume derives coherence as well from its structural organization, with the framing device of a prologue and an epilogue that provide a thematic “envelope” for ten internal stories, each devoted to a family within a fictional valley. As Steinbeck explained in a letter to his agent,

 

 

Although he was to change the name of the unifying family from Moran to Munroe, he conformed to this general plan throughout the writing of the manuscript.

The opening prologue establishes the central unifying location for all of the stories, Las Pasturas del Cielo (The Pastures of Heaven), at the same time suggesting many of the central ideas that are developed later in the stories. The central device of an omniscient narrator who not only relates events and dialogue but comments on the action, often ironically, continues throughout the collection, creating unity of tone and perspective. The motif of religion, beginning with the building of the Carmelo Mission in 1776, serves as a frequent point of reference, always with the suggestion that spirituality in none of its forms provides much solace for the people of the valley. As Joseph Fontenrose points out in his
Steinbeck's Unhappy Valley: A Study of
The Pastures of Heaven, no religion is efficacious:

 

 

On the secular level, the Spanish corporal who discovers the valley has a dream of someday having a comfortable house beside a stream, an idea that develops into the repeated concern for the family home, the central issue in the concluding story of John Whiteside and his dreams of a dynasty in the valley. At the core of the Spanish enslavement of the indigenous population to work on the mission is the idea of “civilization” in conflict with a more basic human nature, a motif that recurs in nearly every story. Finally, the prologue concludes with the tragic death of the Spanish corporal, suggesting not only the vanity of human wishes but also that there is a curse associated with the valley, one that is given more direct development in the first full story.

The curse in the opening story functions both historically and dramatically, and the resonance of it lingers throughout the volume. All of the events involve what is known as the Battle farm, founded by George Battle in 1863. He marries an epileptic woman who bears him a son before going insane; the son, John, inherits both proclivities and dies in a religious struggle with a snake. The father having also expired, the farm lies fallow until the Mustrovics move in, an odd family that mysteriously disappears with breakfast left on the table. These bizarre events pave the way for the introduction of the central family in
Pastures,
the Munroes.

In some ways the Munroe patriarch, Bert, is the most important character in
The Pastures of Heaven
in that he appears in a variety of stories, always influencing the action by his presence. By settling on the Battle farm and taming its reversion to wilderness, Bert makes a success of his labors and enjoys the respect of the community. On the surface, there are few problems with the family. His wife is dutiful and fecund, producing three children in short order. The oldest child, Mae, is the satisfied recapitulation of her mother; the son, Jimmie, enjoys extraordinary success in romantic conquest; the youngest child, Manfred, is retarded but obedient, with a submerged tendency for hysteria. But of itself, the opening story is one of financial and social success for the Munroe family, compromised only by reiterations of the curse on the farm. As is soon evident, with the Munroes comes disaster, tragedy not always “caused” by them but somehow precipitated by their presence. Every story that follows contains a Munroe, and the foreboding of the curse provides a motif that pervades all the subsequent action.

The story of Shark Wicks exemplifies the richness with which Steinbeck developed the independent stories while simultaneously linking them to the others in the volume. In the broadest terms, this story chronicles the lives of the Wicks family, newcomers in the valley, but more specifically it is about Edward Wicks, whose nickname, “Shark,” results from the pretense that he is a wealthy and sagacious financial investor, despite the homely realities of his daily existence. The irony is that his imaginary world of wealth obscures from him where his real treasures reside: in a loving and understanding wife and a beautiful if simple daughter, Alice. Shark's second obsession is with the virginity of this child, which inspires him to limit her social contacts and restrict her normal development. While he is away on a trip to a family funeral, his wife takes her to a community dance where she meets the wily rake Jimmie Munroe, who later kisses her. When Shark learns of the incident, he seeks revenge with a rifle, is arrested, and, when required to post bond, is forced to confess that he is a poor man, his wealth a ruse to enhance his stature. In a sense, the Munroe curse is his undoing, in that the intervention of Jimmie precipitates his fall. On a deeper level, however, the vulnerability is within Shark from the beginning, in his need to establish his stature on a pretense, in his abnormal insecurity about his daughter's chastity. From this perspective, the collapse of Shark Wicks emerges as the result of obsession and illusion, and the Munroe curse is only the occasion for the fall, not the causal agent. This point was emphasized when Steinbeck revised his manuscript to diminish the role of Jimmie as a predatory seducer and thus transfer the responsibility for the protagonist's humiliation to Shark himself. The fertile promise of the Pastures of Heaven, it would seem, is too precarious to admit of illusion, and all who build on pretense are forced to a painful recognition of reality.

The story of Tularecito, the foundling who is deformed, retarded, and yet gifted with extraordinary physical strength and artistic sensitivity, is perhaps the most remarkable in the collection. This “little frog” senses some affinity for the gnomes, a mythical race of small beings that dwell within the earth, and his desire to return to his own people, and his violence in avenging the destruction of his artistic creations, lead to his incarceration as criminally insane. What links this story to the entire volume is not Tularecito's abnormalities, however, but the application of many of the same themes that inform the surrounding stories. It is again the interaction of the central character with the Munroe family that precipitates the tragic conclusion, when Tularecito attacks Bert Munroe and is arrested. This story introduces another important theme: the conflict between the natural instincts and desires of the individual and the demands for conformity to the norms of “civilization,” an idea best understood by the boy's adoptive father, Franklin Gomez, who argues that his son should not go to school but should be allowed to roam free. “He is not crazy,” Gomez protests, “but is one of those whom God has not quite finished.” The societal restriction on individual prerogatives invests several of the stories that follow, and the fact that Tularecito's teacher is Molly Morgan links this story directly to the later one concerning her life in the valley. In the end, Tularecito has lost his freedom, Gomez has lost a son, and the world has lost the creative potential of one of its extraordinary beings.

The motif of mental instability and violence links the story of Tularecito to that of Helen Van Deventer, a comparatively wealthy woman with a penchant for tragedy in all of its forms. After the death of her husband, Helen gives birth to Hilda, whose pathologies include a violent temper and the creation of imaginative beings of destructive potential. As soon as the widow and her daughter move to the Pastures, Bert Munroe comes to pay an innocent courtesy call, which precipitates a series of events that results in Helen's execution of her daughter, a death interpreted as a suicide by the authorities. Although a Munroe is again involved tangentially in the tragedy, this story differs from the others in the collection in that the dramatic situation is imported into the valley: Hilda is not driven mad by anything inherent in the valley itself, and Helen's proclivity for tragic situations antedates her move. As the family physician says to her, “You love the hair shirt.... Your pain is a pleasure. You won't give up any little shred of tragedy.”

The events in the life of Junius Maltby also relate to the story of Tularecito in the themes of the child undone by compulsory attendance at school and the destruction of the individual by demands for social conformity. Certainly Junius has his share of tragedy: his father dies in bankruptcy; Junius has a lung condition that forces him out of San Francisco and into the valley of the Pastures of Heaven; his two adopted sons die of influenza; and his wife dies in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son, Robbie—named for Robert Louis Stevenson, who came to Monterey in 1879. If these early tragedies can be attributed to the vagaries of Fate, the final one cannot. Junius, an undisciplined but thoroughly absorbed scholar of a disorganized host of subjects, neglects his farm and domestic responsibilities to give free rein to intellectual interests. Robbie grows to embrace the same free spirit as his father, and they are content and unfettered until the boy is forced to attend school, where he is happy and popular until the inevitable intrusion of yet another Munroe. Mrs. Munroe, appalled at the tattered clothing young Robbie wears to school, presents him with new clothes, highlighting his destitution, and Junius and Robbie leave the valley for San Francisco and a more conventional life. The unwitting gesture of the insensitive Munroes in giving the boy the new clothes, emblems of civilization and conformity, ruins the happiness of the Maltbys. Steinbeck seems to have been particularly intrigued with this story, for he published it independently as
Nothing So Monstrous
in 1936, four years after it was included in
The Pastures of Heaven.

The most charming and humorous story in the collection features the Lopez sisters, rotund, devout Roman Catholics left to their own devices after the death of their father. Part of the charm results from their attempts at self-deception, at convincing themselves that they run a restaurant and merely “encourage” their customers, the ones who buy three or more enchiladas, with sexual favors. As John H. Timmerman has observed, “Never would the sisters admit that their sex was for sale, a solely commercial venture relegated in their peculiar theology to fallen women.” Once they begin this practice, their business booms, and they make a comfortable place for themselves within the valley. It is again the intrusion of the Munroes into the situation that precipitates their demise and compels their admission that they are in fact prostitutes, and they leave the valley, as did the Maltbys, for San Francisco. They find the strength for this recognition in their simple faith and in their love for each other. This story, originally written as part of a manuscript called “The Green Lady” and then incorporated into
Pastures,
provides not only comic relief but another demonstration of the demands of “respectable” society for conformity. Essentially whores with hearts of gold, out of a tradition begun in the stories of Bret Harte, the Lopez sisters are only the first examples of Steinbeck's use of prostitutes in his fiction, which he was to continue most graphically in his next book,
Tortilla Flat,
and later in
East of Eden.