The Long Valley Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  The Chrysanthemums

  The White Quail

  Flight

  The Snake

  Breakfast

  The Raid

  The Harness

  The Vigilante

  Johnny Bear

  The Murder

  Saint Katy the Virgin

  The Red Pony

  The Leader of the People

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  READ MORE JOHN STEINBECK IN PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE LONG VALLEY

  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 and then as caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, 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 (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning 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.

  John H. Timmerman, Professor of English at Calvin College and former editor of the scholarly journal Christianity and Literature, has published extensively, in both books and articles, on twentieth-century literature.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Pengum Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Pengum Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Pengum Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published m the United States of America by The Viking Press 1938

  Published in a Viking Compass edition 1956

  Published in Penguin Books 1986

  This edition with an introduction and notes by John H. Timmerman

  published in Penguin Books 1995

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1938

  Copyright renewed John Stembeck, 1966

  Introduction and notes copyright (c) John H. Timmerman, 1995

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stembeck, John, 1902-1968.

  The long valley / John Steinbeck ;

  with an introduction by John H. Timmerman.

  p. cm.--(Penguin twentieth-century classics) eISBN : 978-1-44067406-8

  1. Salinas River Valley (Calif)--Social life and customs--

  Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3537.T3234L6 1995

  813'.52--dc20 95-6766

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any

  other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage

  electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  https://us.penguingroup.com

  INTRODUCTION

  Nearly lost among the reviews and critical studies that erupted following publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is an early master's thesis written by Merle Danford, a graduate student at Ohio University in 1938. The thesis is notable now, perhaps, only because it was the first written on Steinbeck's work and because it elicited direct commentary from Steinbeck himself in response to a list of questions Danford sent him. Edited by Robert DeMott and published as "Voltaire Didn't Like Anything: A 1939 Interview with John Steinbeck," the questions, along with Steinbeck's terse answers, provide an interesting psychological map to the author's literary attitude at the time.

  Danford's request arrived when Steinbeck was deep into the long, hard pull of writing The Grapes of Wrath. It is surprising that Steinbeck took the time to respond to it at all during those days when he regretted every interruption. "It scares me to be late," he confessed in his writing journal, since published as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. Exasperated by the interruptions to his writing--negotiations for the purchase of a new house, the sudden illness of his wife, Carol, an unrelenting stream of visitors and letters--Steinbeck announced in one diary entry: "So many things are going on I'm nearly crazy." Given the incredible writing pace he set for himself, the endless demands upon his time and attention, and, perhaps especially, his general low regard for critical inquiries about his work, one begins to understand the acerbic tone that punctuates his responses to Danford's questionnaire.

  From the perspective of the graduate student, Steinbeck's major works at the time were Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and the just recently released The Long Valley. Almost dutifully at first, Steinbeck responded to the questions, then his patience wore thin until, by the time questions arose about the critical reception to The Long Valley, there was virtually no patience left, and Steinbeck concluded with a note of apology:

  Dear Miss Danford:

  I haven't wanted to be flippant. The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

  And as to the question as to what I mean by--or what my philosophy is--I haven't the least idea. And if I told you one, it wouldn't be t
rue. I don't like people to be hurt or hungry or unnecessarily sad. It's just about as simple as that. Sorry I can't go into an erudite discussion. I could if I hadn't promised to be straight with you. I hope this wasn't just a mess to you.

  Sincerely,

  John Steinbeck

  When one confronts such a comment, the act of assessing the literary history and critical reception of an author's work seems slightly irreverent.

  Yet this important and essential point, at least, surfaced in the cryptic responses Steinbeck gave as he dutifully fulfilled his obligation to Ms. Danford: He told the stories that he wanted to, the stories that he had heard or lived, stories of genuinely human characters in all their raw need or desperate yearning. And he told them without concern for critical approval or censure. At one point in Danford's questionnaire Steinbeck protested: "Look! This is too complicated. I just write stories." This attitude toward writing indeed flavors the stories of The Long Valley, but to capture that telling wholly, one must also capture the story behind the stories, for they arise out of particular contexts that shape the force and voice of each narrative.

  WRITING THE LONG VALLEY

  One of the early misperceptions of The Long Valley was that the volume of stories represents a unified whole in the way that, for example, Steinbeck's earlier The Pastures of Heaven (1932) presents individual short episodes that link together into a narrative and thematic whole. In fact, the stories of The Long Valley were crafted at different periods, most of them were published independently, and their collection in a volume was at the encouragement of Steinbeck's friend and editor Pascal Covici. Covici had earlier published three special limited-edition printings of individual stories: a 370-copy edition of Nothing so Monstrous in mid-1936; a 199-copy Christmas edition of Saint Katy the Virgin in late 1936; and a 699-copy edition of The Red Pony in 1937. With his firm, Covici-Friede Publishers, deep in debt in 1938 and Steinbeck's works beginning to attract a wider audience, Covici wanted to bring out a new collection of stories. About this time Covici moved to Viking Press, taking the collection with him. The Long Valley was published in September 1938 by Viking and reached the bestseller lists, justifying Covici's judgment.

  The real story behind the stories, however, takes place some years earlier. It begins in one sense with the birth of John Ernst Steinbeck on February 27, 1902, in the small California town of Salinas. His parents were respectable members of the community. Indeed, their sprawling house on Central Avenue and their evident prosperity bespoke the genteel advances of this town as it moved into the twentieth century. Underneath the patina of gentility, however, remained the more notorious elements of what was essentially a rough-and-tumble California frontier town, fortunately tucked amid some of the world's most fertile land. John Steinbeck grew up well aware of that side of Salinas and that shadowed side of human nature. He worked with migrants on the huge Spreckels Ranch; he investigated the surrounding region; he traipsed across the rolling, sunny hills and into the dark forests; he grew restless. All the while, his imagination recorded stories. By the time he enrolled in Stanford University in 1919, his head was stuffed full of them. All he really wanted to study was writing.

  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.