The Pastures of Heaven Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

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  THE PASTURES OF HEAVEN

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast--and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Buming Bright (1950), and The Log from The Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  James Nagel is the first J. O. Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia. He founded the scholarly journal Studies in American Fiction and edited it for twenty years; he is the general editor of the Critical Essays on American Literature series, published by Macmillan in New York; and he serves as the executive coordinator of the American Literature Association. Among his dozen books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, and Hemingway in Love and War, which was selected by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year in 1989. He has published over fifty articles in scholarly journals, and he has lectured on American literature in twelve countries. His current projects include a study of the contemporary short-story cycle and a book about Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

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  First published in the United States of America by

  Robert O. Ballou, Inc. 1932

  New edition, completely reset, published by The Viking Press 1963

  Published in a Viking Compass edition 1963

  Published in Penguin Books 1982

  This edition with an introduction by James Nagel published

  in Penguin Books 1995

  20

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1932

  Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1960

  Introduction and notes copyright (c) James Nagel, 1995

  All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.

  The pastures of heaven/John Steinbeck;

  with an introduction and notes by James Nagel.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-44067417-4

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  INTRODUCTION

  I

  When The Pastures of Heaven was first published in the autumn of 1932, almost no one knew his name. John Steinbeck was not then the established writer he was to become later in the decade with the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath, and he was a long way from the celebrity status he was to enjoy with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. In the early 1930s he was a struggling writer committed to a literary life but still searching for a subject and a style. He found the first in the area he knew best, the farm country near his home in Salinas, California, and the simple people who settled there. This was the subject that was to inform the best of his work and to underlie his reputation as a writer of intellectual substance and social significance. In the writing of a series of stories about this area, he refined his fictional prose and a new method of organization, and he was well on the way to developing the consummate craft of his greatest work.

  John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. His father's family, the Grossteinbecks, had come from Germany in the nineteenth century, settling briefly in Jerusalem before moving to Florida and then California, simplifying their name on the journey. The father, whose name was the same as his son's, worked at several occupations, milling flour and serving as treasurer of Monterey County. Steinbeck's mother, Olive Hamilton, came from an Irish family that had settled on a ranch near Monterey before the Civil War, and she had been a schoolteacher prior to her marriage. John and Olive established a home in the Salinas Valley, between the Gabilan Mountains to the east and the Santa Lucia range to the west. This was the area of John Steinbeck's youth and the terrain he was to capture in the best of his early work, especially in Of Mice and Men, "The Red Pony," and his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.

  But there was little in his early life to suggest the status he was later to attain. He was not an outstanding student in Salinas High School, from
which he graduated in 1919, but he did have strong personal interests in science and classical literature. His experiences in an Episcopal Sunday school gave him a good background in Scripture, one he was to use in his fiction the rest of his life. At Stanford University his record was less than exemplary; he attended sporadically from 1920 to 1925, taking courses in zoology and the classics and devoting himself to his training in creative writing, the only area in which he excelled. As Jackson Benson has pointed out, Steinbeck is unique in his generation for having studied the craft of writing fiction at a university. But some semesters he dropped out of school and worked as a common laboror, learning the ways of ranch hands and migrant workers, and later returned to Stanford for a semester or two; he left the university without graduating.

  He made an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as a writer in New York City, but he ended up pushing wheel-barrows filled with concrete for the foundation of Madison Square Garden. He returned to California broke but determined to pursue a literary career. His first book, Cup of Gold, was an adventure tale about a pirate, inspired in part by the success of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, published in 1922 and made into a popular movie in 1925. Steinbeck had attempted to combine the tradition of the buccaneering romance with the Grail legend, but this first novel attracted scant attention. He worked at his next major project for five years, a novel later titled To a God Unknown, but this endeavor to meld Arthurian legend into a tale about a California farmer's struggle against the elements was temporarily abandoned.

  It was set aside early in 1931 so that he could begin work on a volume of short stories prompted by Elizabeth Ingels's comment that she was going to write a volume of interconnected tales similar to what Sherwood Anderson had done in Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. She had grown up in a valley to the west of Salinas called Corral de Tierra, "the fence of earth," and had the idea of doing a series of stories about the development of a young girl interacting with the strange families of this confined environment. Steinbeck was inspired, for here was a subject closer to home than anything he had thus far attempted, and he quickly adapted Beth Ingels's idea into the project that was to become The Pastures of Heaven.

  His idea for the new book was to remain largely constant throughout its development, although he changed several details and ultimately deleted a few of the original stories. In the spring of 1931 he wrote to his friend Ted Miller to say that he was at work on The Pastures of Heaven: "Now this is a series of related stories each one dealing with a family in the Pasturas." As the manuscripts indicate, his initial idea was to begin with the description of the valley, then move on to stories depicting roughly ten families, then to introduce the Munroes, the key family that would influence the lives of the others in the concluding group of stories. As his work progressed on the first draft, however, he seems to have felt that the separate stories lacked unity, and he decided to introduce the Munroe family at the beginning, immediately after his description of the valley, thus unifying all of the following stories by the interventions of the Munroes. By May 8 he was far enough along to write to his new literary agent, Mavis McIntosh, explaining the basic plan for the volume:

  The present work interests me and perhaps falls in the "aspects" theme you mention. There is, about twelve miles from Monterey, a valley in the hills called Corral de Tierra. Because I am using its people I have named it Las Pasturas del Cielo. The valley was for years known as the happy valley because of the unique harmony which existed among its twenty families. About ten years ago a new family moved in on one of the ranches. They were ordinary people, ill-educated but honest and as kindly as any. In fact, in their whole history I cannot find that they have committed a really malicious act nor an act which was not dictated by honorable expediency or out-and-out altruism. But about the Morans there was a flavor of evil. Everyone they came in contact with was injured. Every place they went dissension sprang up. There have been two murders, a suicide, many quarrels and a great deal of unhappiness in the Pastures of Heaven, and all of these things can be traced directly to the influence of the Morans. So much is true.

  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 Pastures of Heaven I sent off last Saturday. It should be there by the time you receive this. If the reader will take them for what they are, and will not be governed by what a short story should be (for they are not short stories at all, but tiny novels) then they should be charming, but if they are judged by the formal short story, they are lost before they ever start. I am extremely anxious to hear the judgment because of anything I have ever tried, I am fondest of these and more closely tied to them. There is no grand writing nor any grand theme, but I love the stories very much.

  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.

  II

  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, thoug
h, 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."