The Pastures of Heaven Page 2

  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.

  III

  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.

  IV

  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.

  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 st
ory 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.

  V

  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,

  I am using the following method. The manuscript is made up of stories, each one complete in itself, having its rise, climax and ending. Each story deals with a family or an individual. They are tied together only by the common locality and by the contact with the Morans.

  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:

  The Whitesides failed to establish a family dynasty in the new land. The religions of Maltby and Banks, the foundations of their lives, were shattered by Bert Munroe's suggestions of evil: Junius believed something monstrous about himself and had to leave Eden. There were no gnomes and elves for Tularecito to find. Alice Wicks was not a special gift from heaven. Though Helen Van Deventer, Molly Morgan, and Pat Humbert clung to or lapsed back into the old religion, it gave them no satisfaction.

  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 n
ot 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."