It was a nerve-racking and stressful time. Steinbeck, virtually trapped in his boyhood home, turned to stories of his youth and so stumbled upon the sequence of the Red Pony stories:
It is a very simple story about a boy who gets a colt pony and the pony gets distemper. There is a good deal in it, first about the training of horses and second about the treatment of distemper. This may not seem like a good basis for a story but that entirely depends upon the treatment. The whole thing is as simply told as though it came out of the boy's mind although there is no going into the boy's mind. It is an attempt to make the reader create the boy's mind for himself. An interesting experiment you see if nothing else. (SLL: 70)
The Red Pony stories, which would later form part of The Long Valley, set the artistic and thematic tone for the volume. Years later, in his essay "My Short Novels," Steinbeck reflected upon the writing:
The Red Pony was written a long time ago, when there was desolation in my family. The first death occurred. And the family, which every child believes to be immortal, was shattered. Perhaps this is the first adulthood of any man or woman. The first tortured question "Why?" and then acceptance, and then the child becomes a man. The Red Pony was an attempt, an experiment if you wish, to set down this loss and acceptance and growth.
The pattern of "loss and acceptance and growth" was both his personal experience during those trying days and also the emerging theme in his short stories.
Steinbeck finished the first of the Red Pony stories, "The Gift," in June 1933 and the second, "The Great Mountains," later that summer. By the end of that summer his agents, McIntosh and Otis, had placed both stories for publication in North American Review; they appeared in the November and December 1933 issues. While the Review did not pay generously--Steinbeck received between forty-five and fifty dollars for each story--the magazine held a position of national prestige, and it published three more of Steinbeck's short stories over the next two years. Perhaps more important than the money for Steinbeck, however, was the affirmation of his efforts. It was as if the unusually demanding conditions were themselves unleashing an increasing sureness of touch in the writing. Encouraged by sales of the Red Pony stories, Steinbeck tackled the infinitely more complex plotting and tone of the macabre story "The Murder" late that summer.
Steinbeck had long held an interest in the popular murder mysteries that were emerging at this time in American literature. In fact, three years earlier he had written a mystery novel titled "Murder at High Moon" by Peter Pym, an effort to enter the popular genre and acquire some quick sales. It didn't sell--even to his agents--and remains unpublished. "The Murder," however, was probably conceived of as early as 1931, while he was writing stories for The Pastures of Heaven, since it shares both its setting and also thematic and character patterns with those stories. "The Murder" was completed in the late summer or early fall of 1933 and published in the April 1934 issue of North American Review.
In the late summer and early fall of 1933, Steinbeck sought a bit of diversion from the short stories and almost casually, in a matter of weeks, drafted a short, whimsical novel that would be published in 1935 as Tortilla Flat. It would be his breakthrough book--the one that secured a larger reading public and affirmed his personal confidence in his writing skills, although at this point in 1933, the work seemed to Steinbeck little more than a bit of self-indulgent whimsy. When it met with success two years later, no one was more surprised than Steinbeck himself.
While the publications brought little financial reward, they certainly fueled Steinbeck's literary energy. He began to sense success like a still elusive but now just visible reality. He committed himself anew to writing short stories during the last months of 1933 and the first half of 1934. In one of those explosive outpourings that marked his creative effort for much of his career, he labored over the stories that would form the bulk of The Long Valley.
The effort was not without incident or setback.
The most serious threat to his writing continued to evolve in the family home. In the late summer of 1933 Steinbeck's father collapsed and was incapacitated for much of the following year. Still more of the care and anxiety for his mother, whose health declined steadily, thereby fell upon young Steinbeck. The family tried grimly to celebrate a last Christmas together. Mrs. Steinbeck died shortly thereafter. Steinbeck's writing understandably stumbled.
In late summer or early fall 1933, Steinbeck recollected a story told him by Edith Wagner, the mother of his boyhood friend Max Wagner. The story, "How Edith McGillcuddy Met R.L. Stevenson," apparently came quite easily, taking up only six pages of tight, sure handwriting, with very few revisions, in the ledger notebook. Because Mrs. Wagner had herself written a version of the story and was trying to publish it, Steinbeck withheld his own version from submission. He finally published it, with Mrs. Wagner's permission, in 1941 in Harper's Magazine, too late to be included with the stories that made up The Long Valley collection.
One work in particular seemed to compel him during this period. In late fall 1933, Steinbeck made his first tentative start on "The Chrysanthemums," a story that seemed to acquire special importance for him but one that also presented artistic difficulties. There exist in manuscript form several beginnings of the story, in which Steinbeck tried to work out the independent characters of Elisa and Henry Allen and then their relationship with one another. The starts would break down in some self-directed commentary in which Steinbeck alternately encouraged himself on the worth of the story or flogged himself for not having the "sureness of touch" to execute it properly.
Such notes to himself pepper the ledger notebooks in which Steinbeck drafted these stories. Of "The Chrysanthemums," Steinbeck noted: "Two days of work passed before I realized that I was doing it all wrong. And now it must be done again." He worried about words "which had an untrue ring." He commanded himself to keep out words that had no absolute bearing on the story. At the same time, worries about finances and the strained family situation arise over and over in the notebooks. Finally, as if in response to the faltering writing and the personal difficulties, Steinbeck commanded himself to "work like a dog." That appeared to be the only solution.
During the winter of 1934 the hard work began to pay off. The writing accelerated, acquiring momentum in method and definition. By late February Steinbeck had completed "The Chrysanthemums," his most challenging short story both personally and artistically. At about the same time he completed two more Red Pony stories, "The Promise" and "The Leader of the People," in that order. He made a brief start on a fifth Red Pony story that he never completed. That work was over for him.
In late spring and summer of that year, Steinbeck's restless imagination turned in other directions. In late May or early June he wrote "The Raid," a story suggesting the labor battles of his later In Dubious Battle; it was published in North American Review in October 1934. During roughly the same period he drafted "The Harness," "Flight," and "The White Quail." "Johnny Bear" followed in late June of 1934; "The Vigilante," "The Snake," and "Breakfast" were drafted by the end of August. With the exception of "The White Quail," which was published in North American Review in March 1935, few of the later stories were readily accepted for independent publication. (Specific details on the publishing history appear in the Explanatory Notes to each story that follow the present text.)
By the summer of 1938, Pascal Covici had in his hands the typed manuscripts of all these stories. With the exception of one anomaly, all had been written in the course of approximately one year, from the summer of 1933 to that of 1934. The one anomaly was "Saint Katy the Virgin," which had been drafted long before, possibly as early as a poetic form dating back to Steinbeck's intermittent career at Stanford University. The satiric nature of the work also places it outside the shared tone and common themes of The Long Valley stories. The story had long been an odd favorite of Steinbeck, however, and he sent it along with the others for Covici to manage. The collection was one item that Covici took with him to the Viking
Press during the summer of 1938, and he wasted no time getting the volume into print. Advance sales were surprising: 8,000 copies by July 22, 1938.
Although Steinbeck's ledger notes of 1933-1934 reveal that he was thinking of possibly collecting the stories into a volume, it is clear that they were written independently for quick sales to periodicals. With the startling success of Tortilla Flat, released just five days after his father's death in May 1935, Steinbeck experienced a surge of confidence in his novelistic skills and turned his attention to the great novels that would absorb all his energy for the rest of the decade. In comparison with those novels, the short stories may seem fairly negligible, a kind of apprenticeship Steinbeck had to serve before hitting his artistic stride. Seen in such a way, Pascal Covici's collection of the stories into The Long Valley volume may seem simply a shrewd, hard-eyed financial investment, a recycling of old works on the energy produced by the major novels.
Such a view, however, neglects both the importance of these stories to Steinbeck and also their intrinsic aesthetic merit. To be sure, the stories served as a kind of literary apprenticeship. Steinbeck never avoided that fact. He wrestled head-on with the artistic challenges of finding and developing character. He explored subtle variations of narrative point of view, risking some dangerous methods as his skills hardened. He developed a terse, precise way of creating setting, but also of letting setting explode suggestively in complicated patterns of imagery. The apprenticeship was not without trial and certainly not without error, but it did develop what Steinbeck called "a sureness of touch"--a superb confidence in artistic crafting that was to serve him during the rest of his career.
Moreover, in his wrestling with these stories, Steinbeck was developing a profoundly personal voice--a way of articulating his major themes and concerns through character, setting, and symbolism. Those themes developed in the stories, hinted at in The Pastures of Heaven but now emerging in many ways for the first time in dramatic clarity, were also to form the backbone of many of his novels in future years. It would be an error to argue that the stories exist only in order to articulate personal themes. But it would be equally erroneous to ignore Steinbeck's deep investment of personal philosophy and thematic patterns in these stories. They emerge not in didactic statement, surely, but in subtle patterns that weave a common thread through these highly independent works. While any mere listing of such limits the scope of Steinbeck's rich artistry, several major artistic themes are clearly evident.
THE MAJOR THEMES AND PATTERNS
Steinbeck himself announced the thematic pattern for his earliest sequence of these short stories, those four tales that form The Red Pony. With the aim of attempting "to make the reader create the boy's mind for himself" (SLL: 70), Steinbeck intended to explore "the desolation of loss" (SLL: 63). The pattern is clear and unequivocal in the stories--from Jody's colt to old Gitano's passage to Grandfather's fading dream. But the pattern suffuses the other stories as well. By confronting the desolation of loss, one also focuses the challenges that lead to growth.
Often what the character loses is the sense of an individual dream for him-or herself. In contemporary terms, that dream may be described as self-fulfillment; in Steinbeck's time it may have had a simpler but no less profound twist. Each individual bears a dream of some sort--whether it is Pepe's dream of manhood in "Flight," Elisa Allen's dream of personal freedom in "The Chrysanthemums," Mary Teller's dream of sexual and personal identity in "The White Quail," or Peter Randall's dream of personal freedom in "The Harness." Indeed, the pattern was a major one for Steinbeck throughout this decade, parlayed powerfully into the novels Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. The biographical critic might add that it was no less Steinbeck's own major theme, as he dreamed of artistic freedom to tell the sort of stories he wanted during the 1930s.
All too often, however, those dreams are shipwrecked upon some jagged rocks that society places in the way. Thereby also emerges Steinbeck's third major pattern: the isolated individual in conflict with some larger social structure. In his Cannery Row novels, beginning with Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck identified this repressive social force as "civilization," by which term he meant the rule of social propriety erected by the prevailing power bloc of society. That power bloc has little patience with restless dreamers. Steinbeck's characters are often the detritus, the fallout, of the conflict.
Such characters--and they are common in the short stories of this period--often struggle powerfully to pursue their individual dreams, only to find them blocked or stamped out by the social power structures. These characters are improper; they are the outcasts, the isolated individuals of society. They are the voiceless people, the ones whose stories turn inward for lack of speaking and lack of listeners. Steinbeck is repeatedly compelled to tell the story of these lonely, outcast individuals trying to make their way, enact their little dreams, on the far fringes of social propriety. Whether they appear in a laboratory as in "The Snake," or in the aftermath of mob violence as in "The Vigilante," or toiling in a garden as in "The Chrysanthemums" or "The White Quail," such characters find themselves outside the established norms. They are fascinating and illuminating for precisely that reason. They call into question values we hold too readily and often too thoughtlessly. Steinbeck's social conscience emerges powerfully in these stories.
ARTISTIC TECHNIQUES
Just as the stories of 1933-1934 became a proving ground for several of Steinbeck's major thematic patterns, ones that would also shape the novels of the 1930s, so too were the stories a proving ground for his artistry. The fact is that, although possessing a powerful instinct for storytelling and a seemingly inexhaustible trove of stories from his own region and past, Steinbeck's storytelling abilities were to this point often raw and undisciplined. In the early novels--Cup of Gold and To a God Unknown--he often seems self-indulgent, at the mercy of the language rather than in control of it, at the mercy of the story rather than directing it. In the stories of the 1920s also, several of which remain unpublished, the prose is full of raw energy, but it often explodes in white-hot outbursts rather than a carefully developed scheme.
In this regard of maturing artistic craft, the stories of The Pastures of Heaven, most of which were written in 1931 and published together in 1932, represent a tremendous improvement in stylistic craft. Steinbeck learned to temper the grandiose, to use imagery as a pattern revealing character rather than for its own sake, to control point of view in the arrangement of character and plot. In effect, he was learning to rely upon the story itself, and to let that have center stage, while he subdued his considerable stylistic talents to a supporting role in the story's revelation.
Steinbeck was, nonetheless, a daring experimenter until he found the right combinations that unlocked a story's power. If the characters didn't have the ring of authenticity at first, as was the case with "The Chrysanthemums," he pushed the originals aside and started over until he got it right. If he found himself wandering into self-indulgent writing, his passages having little to do with the clear telling of the story, as was the case with "Flight," he cut whole pages of the telling out. Some works--including "Flight," with its late-written "Addendum" that Steinbeck incorporated into the story--had extensive revisions. Some came whole and smooth, with hardly a word changed. (Steinbeck's habitual misspellings were cleared up by his wife, Carol, in the typing or by later editors.) Several stories of the period were simply abandoned altogether, with just a paragraph or several pages of aborted effort remaining in the ledger. Following the drafts chronologically, however, one observes an incremental development of artistic skill and confidence.
Several artistic skills were perfected during this period, ones that would remain with him throughout his career. Perhaps foremost among them is Steinbeck's use of patterned imagery to reveal character. He always had a potent gift for imagery, but in prior works it often appears in a random, eclectic fashion, often for its own sake rather than as a part of character revelation. "Flight" demonstrates his increasing c
ontrol over imagery. Pepe undergoes a sort of devolution in personhood, one supported by increasingly intense animal and reptile imagery for his actions as he crawls among the rocks. In "The Snake," the weird relationship between the woman and the laboratory reptiles is eerily paced by suggestive imagery.
Furthermore, Steinbeck perfected the use of setting as revelation of character, theme, and plot. Setting becomes an essential part of the story's telling, rather than a simple backdrop for events. This pattern is clear, for example, in the subtle mood piece "Breakfast," but it is particularly important in a story like "The Raid," where the mingled shadows and flickering lights suggest the very state of mind of the character Root. So too, Mary Teller's garden in "The White Quail" operates metaphorically as a revelation of her essential character. And the fogs and swamps of "Johnny Bear" adumbrate the social mindset in his culture.
In particular, however, Steinbeck perfected and controlled his early propensity for symbolism. Steinbeck often spoke of his works as having several layers of meaning, and he carefully suggested those layers through patterns of implication. He had used symbolism before, to be sure: To a God Unknown fetches up nearly every archetype known to the Western world. It is an artistic overload, a veritable morass of allusions. Here in the short stories Steinbeck learns to be both more selective of his symbols and also more in control of those he selects. Just what do the chrysanthemums represent for Elisa Allen? Of such a question the essential mystery of the story is made. Is the harness that Peter Randall wears merely a support or an enslavement? And if the latter, what does enslave him? Here too in "The Harness," symbolism abets the fundamental narrative and exploration of the story itself.