Note: this essay obviously not about Iceland, but it does speak to the deep connection between a people and their land, a bond that is possibly even stronger for immigrants and newcomers who chose a place as their new home, as my Icelandic parents did California. Also, there are a few typos in the text, so please excuse:)
The days when our father took my sister and I out to the beaches of our hometown, Pacific Grove, were special days. Not because they were few and far between but because every moment we got to spend on the windswept beaches of Asilomar chasing waves and climbing the tidepool-rich rocks was delicious. Pabbi would stroll the sands while we splashed in the near-Arctic waters of the Northern California coast.
He would call out to us to remember the undertow, the sucking force of which would easily sweep a grownup off their feet and into the deeps of the Pacific, to be eaten by the horrible monster that my sister and I were sure lurked below the waves. He explained the drop-off to us in simple language, describing the spot where the surf broke as the edge of an underwater ledge which terraced down into the Monterey trench, one of the...
...deepest undersea canyons on the planet. To this day, he would say, men catch deep-sea fish never before seen by humans, grotesque prehistoric creatures swept accidentally to the surface of the Monterey Bay. Our father knew everything.On the rocky outcrops scattered along the beach he showed us the life of the tidepools, taught us how to tell the difference between a stinging anemone and an innocent urchin and how an anemone would quickly fold its short tentacles into its center if tickled with a stalk of seagrass. My sister and I would try to drop bits of shell into them, scoring points if the shell floated into center of the little purple puffs and fooled them into closing as if on a bit of lunch. We would also hunt hermit crabs, taking one or two home with us in plastic containers of seawater - the ones with the best adopted shells - and letting the rest run amok on our palms until they dropped off and fell back into their pools.
We enjoyed a freedom
not always typical in the US, the freedom to roam and discover and take risks
that our Icelandic parents had had in their youth. We were also often the
only people out on the beach on cold and windy days, Icelandic summer weather
days that seemed to rejuvenate our father and broaden his smile. When it
was time to leave he would call to us and we would run with our day’s cache
against the wind and to the car where he would brisk the sand off of our legs,
leaving us chafed and red and sore. These are memories which will never
leave me and which come alive again each time I scent an ocean breeze.
The landscape of a person’s youth never leaves them. Though most specific memories fade and many more are jumbled into concepts or mixed together to form a kind of interpretative recollection independent of time or actual fact, the overwhelming impact of life as a child stays with us forever. Whether the type of person who savours their personal history, sucking on memories like hard candy, or one who keeps eyes forward, relishing the idea of new and different tastes to explore, the backdrop of childhood remains like a template to which we refer for definition of self.
Consciously or unconsciously, the places, people and
events of our early years supply the basics, the simple truths, to which all our histories and moments
are added. Mountain, for example, may be represented by many
different images and locations to a travelled adult but its core value, its
simple truth, is the one given to it by the child within the adult: the highest
point in town, raced down on a bicycle, perhaps. Tree to a grownup
is a fir, a maple, an oak, a forest, an environmental concern, and always in
the back of the mind the one in the front yard of one’s childhood home, climbed
or swung from. In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
writes,
After we are in the new house, when
memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the
land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are…We
comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed
must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as
images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality
as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of
dreams.
Bachelard is specifically
identifying home as the house in which one finds one’s first memories, but home
can also be a reference to the landscape of childhood; we say I grew up in
such and such town (or city or neighborhood), identifying ourselves with a
population or we say I was raised by this or that lake (or seashore or
mountain), identifying ourselves with physical features of the world
immediately surrounding us. There is, as Bachelard notes, a comfort in
being able to place-set ourselves, to find the template of our history close at
hand and apply it to all the unknown situations into which we wander. We
recognize tree by its basic qualities, learned in childhood, giving us a
sense of safety in the known; from there we can wander into the more unknown
territory of defining the more specific qualities of the tree in question.
The template of youth exists in all of us. “An intelligent being cannot treat every object it sees as a unique entity unlike anything else in the universe. It has to put objects in categories so that it may apply its hard-won knowledge about similar objects, encountered in the past, to the object at hand,” writes Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works. The “hard-won knowledge” is of course that which we struggle for in childhood, the identification and naming of the basic template objects in our environment. The existence of the template does not, however, mean that it is consciously recognized.
In fact, it is most often deeply buried in layers of fresher memories, which become the new reference-points for learning. This makes sense at some level, since we are continually adapting to an ever-changing world; yet, in another sense, we are distancing ourselves from the core truths which all humans experience. In other words, the process of re-referencing denies us access to the sensations, magic, wonder, and mythos of childhood, the time of life when we discover the core aspects of being human, as individuals and more importantly as members of a vast system of life.
Carl Jung called these core themes “archetypes
of the collective unconscious,” universal memories which exist within each and
every human on the planet, but are so often repressed or forgotten.
Joseph Campbell, the world-renowned mythologist, expands on Jung’s premise by
suggesting mythology as the living repository of these common archetypes, and
by describing the role of the artist as that of awakener or revealer, kin to
the religious leader yet not bound by the rites and dogma of a set faith: “In the way of the method of
art, the features of an environment become transparent to transcendence, which
is the way of the vision of myth.”
A living mythology within a society or a community is not simply a cannon of stories to entertain or moralize, is not some holdover from a naïve past, but is a path in and of itself. “A mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime – birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death.” To Campbell, mythologies and their attending gods, parables, and metaphors are not only societal-based, but are inherent values to be realized in every individual. The function of the artist is to remind us of these values and of our connection to a greater whole.
Joseph Campbell spent time in Pacific Grove, California, moving there in the winter of 1932. There he met and became friends with two men who were to influence and be influenced by him, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. Steinbeck was a native of the region, having been born in nearby Salinas thirty years earlier. Ricketts was a marine biologist who worked out of a lab in Monterey, on the street that is now known as Cannery Row.
These three men and Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, spent many hours together discussing Carl Jung, Taoism, Spengler, and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers (who lived reclusively in nearby Carmel), each adding to the others’ knowledge of symbols and the intrinsic connectivity of all life. Campbell himself acknowledged that the year he spent in Pacific Grove was a valuable one, admitting that he had learned as much or more about myth from Steinbeck as Steinbeck had from him. Pooling their extensive individual knowledge, the group came to see the interconnectedness of existence as the truth that humans grow to forget. They struggled to “find a universal commonality, a source, a way of tying together human experience, nature, myth, symbol, and mysticism…and words for the connections they felt.”
During this year Steinbeck was working on his novel To a God Unknown, reading it aloud to Carol, Campbell and Ricketts and unabashedly filling the story with the kind of essential symbolism which would bring the reader to recognize, remember, his or her relation to the very physical world in which we live. The following year Campbell left Pacific Grove after falling in love with Carol, and Steinbeck published his novel. Their “year of crazy beginnings,” as Campbell termed it, was over. For Steinbeck, though, the sense of wonderment and interconnectivity with nature that had taken root in him as a child was renewed and confirmed during that year, giving his writing a spirit it had previously lacked.
My
personal recollection of that historic spot is vastly different than
the world these literary and philosophical giants roamed:
We used to go down to Cannery Row with our
Icelandic visitors, letting them wander about the souvenir shops and soak in
the history of the once flourishing sardine cannery business which ground to a
sudden halt the year the sardines stopped coming into Monterey Bay thirty years
earlier. In the mid-Seventies, when we lived there, the abandoned
canneries still stood like derelicts, leaning their wooden frames and rotting
piers into the bay. Though the oldest standing was no more than fifty years
old, they seemed in their disuse like relics of some glory we were supposed to
remember. My father would tell our guests about John Steinbeck, about how
this was the Cannery Row, the one the book was written about. And
though my father had probably never read the story himself, let alone our
visitors, there was a kind of pride of knowledge in his voice. The
grownups would kind of nod in recognition of the name and look around a little
more intently, because there was a history to the street.
It wasn’t much to look at in those days, with graffiti covering the fronts of the canneries and windblown trash collecting in corners. My father would point to a general location across the street and tell them that that’s where Doc Ricketts’ lab had been before it burned down. The guest would stare and nod some more. I had to walk that falling down, famous street so often, hearing the same story, that, at age eight, I discovered that I hated tourists. By that time I had read my first Steinbeck book, The Red Pony, a gift-with-deposit given out by the bank my mother worked at. It was a horrible story for a young girl (the pony dies and has its eyes plucked out by vultures) but it stuck with me, and I felt contempt for the foreigners wandering around my home town who hadn’t felt the love and pain that I’d felt reading that book. John Steinbeck was my author, from my town. By the time I read Cannery Row, all full of my tidepools and my beloved bay, the deal was done. No one knew what I knew about Pacific Grove, about what secrets Steinbeck had invited me to share, about the once-happy street we took all our tourists to. I owned the whole area and, in a sense, still feel I do.
John Steinbeck was the grandson of westerers, meaning those from the east who traveled west to search for a new life and take advantage of the prosperity virtually guaranteed in the rumored land of plenty that was on the far side of the Rocky Mountains. His paternal grandparents, John Adolph Grosssteinbeck from Dusseldorf, Germany and Almira Dickson of Leominster, Massachusetts, met in Jerusalem in the 1850’s where each had gone with missionary families.
John Adolph and his brother courted Almira and her sister, and in a double wedding, both couples were married on the Mount of Olives. After a series of fantastically dramatic adventures, including shipwreck, Bedouin attack, murder, rape and mauling, John Adolph and Almira (virtually the only two of their respective families to escape the Middle East unscathed) returned to the States. Now called more simply Steinbeck, they moved from New England to Florida where John Ernst, the author’s father, was born. Eventually, John Adolph westered his family to California where he bought ten acres of land near Salinas and, after trying out both the fruit and dairy business, established a flour mill.
On the maternal side, Steinbeck’s inheritance was Irish. Samuel Hamilton, his grandfather left Bally Kelly, Ireland when he was seventeen and emigrated to New York City, where he met the Irish Elizabeth Fagen. They married in 1850, and a year later Samuel traveled around the Horn of South America to California, where Elizabeth joined him via the Isthmus of Panama. They settled first in San Jose, a busy agricultural crossroads sixty miles south of San Francisco, and eventually homesteaded a ranch in the Salinas Valley, near King City. Olive Hamilton, the author’s mother, left the ranch when she was fifteen to prepare for a teaching credential. Three years later she began teaching in King City where she met and was married to John Ernst, who had developed a second family flour mill there. Shortly after marrying, the young Steinbeck couple moved to Salinas where John Ernst Steinbeck, writer, was born in 1902.
Much has been made of Steinbeck’s special relationship to the landscape of his youth: Salinas and the long, fertile valley it lay in; the river of the same name which young John suggested was hardly a river at all as it disappeared each summer until the rains fell again in winter; the low rolling Gabilan Mountains to the north and the seductive, living Santa Lucias to the south; the summer house in Pacific Grove, just blocks from the beaches on which John and his two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary played. It was more than simply his surroundings, however, that influenced the development of Steinbeck’s lifelong respect for nature. Jackson Benson, Steinbeck’s official biographer and a highly respected authority on the more esoteric details of the author’s life, writes:
Steinbeck’s father felt the constant need to be plugged into the soil, to feel its vibrations. Even the smallest things in nature were important. Man must conserve, for man was part of the pattern, the chain of life. On the other side, Steinbeck’s mother had the sense that all things about us are enchanted, if we had by the eyes to see…To these influences must be added the majesty and power of the landscapes of the central California coast – its redwoods and rugged mountains, its river valleys and rolling hills, and its remarkable shoreline of rocky cliffs and windblown cypresses and pines, bays, estuaries and beaches.
From his father, then, he received a
Teutonic sensibility, an often cold but very respectful and logical sense of
man’s place in and need for nature. From his mother he inherited the
Gaelic charmed vision, full of leprechauns and fairies and spirits. Add
to this mix his awkwardness and often boorish obnoxiousness as a child that
left him virtually friendless, and what resulted was a loner who found solace
in the natural world surrounding him. “It was in response to this pattern
of social failure and separation that he developed a rich inner life…Fabricated
from materials supplied by the attitudes and values of his parents, the
foundation of this inner life was a special relationship he developed with
nature and with language,” writes Benson.
He often rode his pony into the
surrounding countryside to be amongst those things he felt he could find
communion with: wild animals, a clear running brook or a grove of trees.
As an adult he recalled his childhood as charmed, magical. He found secret
places tucked into the dramatic flanks of the Santa Lucia Mountains, and just
as many in the pages of the books he read. Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, a
gift from his aunt, had a fantastic appeal to young John, proving for him that
magic was real and that heroes’ hardships were necessary to gain the ultimate
prize of self-understanding and greatness. Remembering his school years,
he commented that certain books “were realer than experience – Crime and
Punishment was like that and Madame Bovary and parts of Paradise
Lost and things of George Eliot and Return of the Native.
I read all of these when I was very young and I remember them not at all as
books but as things that happened to me.”
From childhood, then, John Steinbeck was developing the sense of myth and the belief in some greater truth that was to be his personal contribution to the dedicated discussions in that “crazy year” of 1932 with Campbell and Ricketts. He was a Californian in every sense of the word: barely two generations removed from Europe, of hardy, willful stock, educated, adventuresome, restless, and dependent on the land for survival. For Steinbeck, though, what the land provided him was not simply physical sustenance, but food for the soul. His survival depended on his being able to merge with the hills and with the tidepools and with the magic things that lay inside the supposedly inanimate objects of nature.
In his essay “The Uniqueness of California,” James J. Parsons states, “When contrasted with the humid East, the extraordinary character of the California environment can scarcely be denied; nor can the extraordinary character of its culture. Inevitably the temptation had been strong to link the two in the direct cause and effect of environmental determinism, arguing that the California land and climate breeds special forms of religious, political and social organizations.”
He goes
on to suggest, though, that the “continued flow of restless immigrants” has had
just as strong an effect on the unique cultural qualities of the state.
The Hamiltons and the Steinbecks journeyed to this new, open land to make,
through their own hard work, a better life for their progeny; the fertile soil
and temperate climate was not their birthright but a thing to be respected and
earned. In this sense Steinbeck was not an inheritor of land but of an attitude
towards the land, a concept still fresh for those Californians who understand
the true bounty of the state.
From his teenage years Steinbeck dedicated himself to becoming a writer. Though he found various ways of paying the rent over the years, he never stopped writing. “He loved the words, the shape, the sound, the history of meaning; he delighted in the magical properties of language; he even got satisfaction from the touch of pencil and paper.” He attended Stanford University but never graduated; he was an erratic student who missed classes, failed to study for exams and learned to drink booze and smoke grass in the best university tradition.
He went as often as he could to San Francisco to “indulge in as much sweet-scented sin” as he was able on his meager budget. Though a lousy student and a reckless, moody friend, Steinbeck’s dedication to writing never failed him. Benson notes that his ever-realistic parents knew of his passion to become an author by the time he was in university but were understandably skeptical about his realizing that goal. “They weren’t opposed to his plan, but they were realistic about it. They knew that even if their son applied himself diligently – a characteristic that he was not known for – his chances of becoming an important, well-known writer were very slim.”
Stanford University was not pleased with John’s spotty attendance and poor grades. He in turn knew he was slipping behind and rather than admit failure “chose” to join the working world, eventually landing a job at the Spreckels Sugar Factory where his father worked. He continued to enroll himself at Stanford, but rotated his scholastic education with that of the laborer; he would often spend a semester at Stanford then a semester at Spreckels, where he was a carpenter’s apprentice, sugar beet harvester and bench chemist. During this period of both hard labor and monotonous detail work, Steinbeck gained a broader, clearer view of life and most probably an education more relevant to his writing than that on offer in the classroom. He discovered the world of the migrant laborer, mostly Mexicans, Filipinos and Japanese, as well as the rhythms of the laboratory.
A few years later, after a miserable
stint in New York City, he took on a caretaker position at a lodge by Lake
Tahoe in the Sierrra Nevada Range, and there he learned, during harsh alpine
winters, the exact nature of total solitude and the true effort involved in
writing a novel (he was working on his first published story, A Cup of Gold.)
By 1929, he had met Carol Henning, whom he was to marry, and had moved into his
family’s Pacific Grove cottage. His father gave him a meager allowance
that nonetheless allowed John to focus on his craft full time.
Steinbeck, then, had the imagination and
dedication to become an author, but can he be said to have been a specifically California
writer? According to Stoddard Martin in his book California Writers,
he was. Following in the footsteps of nineteenth century writers Mark
Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce, none of whom were native Californians yet
who were able to recreate in novellas and short stories the adventures of the
post-gold rush era, were Jack London and John Steinbeck. Their works took
on the greater social significance lacking in the earlier writers, but they
inherited the essential theme of landscape as character.
Though the Wild West was no longer as wild after the turn of the century as it had once been, the relationship of men and women to the dramatic California landscape was virtually unavoidable to its native writers. Martin notes, “A culture grows out of a sustained relationship of a people with an environment, not of a flash-in-the-pan succession of mining camps and boom-towns. Only when women began to appear as other than whores-with-hearts-of-gold, and families began to form and communities take root, did California, as a culture begin to exist.” The “Western” literary style evolved as the culture did, and what had initially been for most an adventure at the edge of the world became a challenge to survive and thrive in “a position remotely analogous to that which the Celtic fringes of Europe held through the Dark Ages.”
Martin also claims that “temporally, California stands in a ‘symbolic relation’ to the twentieth century” as the hearty and foolhardy alike, left with no more West to Go, were forced to forge a community identity. Edmund Wilson commented that “California, since we took it away from the Mexicans, has always presented itself to Americans as one of the strangest and most exotic of our adventures; and it is the duty of the literary artist, precisely, to struggle with new phases of experience, and to give them beauty and sense.”
This is a very important point in understanding Steinbeck’s classification as a specifically California writer. Given that the Californian has been in a constantly evolving relationship with the environment, as opposed to a constant struggle with the more firmly established cultures of the eastern seaboard and of Europe, the western writer’s protagonists are more likely to face their conflicts with nature than with society. “Steinbeck’s hunger, his compulsion to tell the significant stories of people situated in and on, but not apart from, this land became one of his recognizable signatures as a novelist.” Stoddard Martin describes the categorizations of American literature thus:
It is reasonable to argue that a culture as eclectic as California’s, made up almost entirely of newcomers and with virtually no tradition in English before 1840, has had little chance to produce a distinctive literature. From the outset it should be understood that these California writers exist within the larger body of American literature, and in a more intimate relation than, say, English or Russian novelists of the late nineteenth century existed within the larger body of European literature. At the same time, American literature is not a monolith: the writers of the South are customarily regarded as reflecting the history and climate peculiar to that region, and there are still some who regard the literature of New England as the only true American ‘literature.’ Leslie Fielder has characterized the disparate strains in American letters by reference to the compass. The Eastern, by writers such as Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald, who aspire to the European and mannered; the Northern, by those, such as Robert Frost, who celebrate a modest ascetic rural order; the Southern, by the Poes and Faulkners and Tennesee Williamses, who see imaginative fertility amid material decay; the Western by Hemingway in some phases and even such an eccentric as Ezra Pound, who pit themselves against Fate and the elements in pursuit of increasingly elusive frontiers.
The Californians of the early part of the last century were all of these things, (Stoddard Martin calls California “the melting-pot of the melting-pot” which is the United States) but were also people who had arrived, made it to the edge, and were determined to cultivate a society out of the raw materials of the land. John Steinbeck was not himself a homesteader or a prospector or a cowboy or a farmer, but his people had been. His task as a Californian, as a writer, and as a believer in the overwhelming magic and mysticism of nature, was to bring to life the spirit of both the people and the land to which he belonged.
To a God Unknown was published in 1933 after a five-year creation process in which it evolved from a play written by Steinbeck’s Stanford friend, Toby Street, into the homage to myth and symbolism it became. Street had had the idea of a man obsessed with the forest surrounding his Mendocino home. His passion for his land becomes nearly sexual and when his possessiveness of his college-age daughter emerges, the two obsessions twine and hint at an incestuous perversion.
Street was unhappy
with the play and in 1927 allowed Steinbeck to attempt a novelization of the
story. Though initially supposed to be a collaboration, Street was busy
studying for the bar and Steinbeck ended up working the story for the most part
by himself. He called his version “The Green Lady,” an allusion to the
feminine aspect the forest took on for the protagonist, Andy Wane. After
two years of sporadic work on the story, he made the key decision to relocate
it to a landscape he knew much better than the wild Northern California woods
of Mendocino, namely the Salinas Valley.
He created a multi-generational
saga by adding the figure of Andy’s father, the patriarchal Joseph, and changed
the spelling of the last name to Wayne. In this new draft Andy’s
obsessions take on a nearly pathological bent as he attempts to merge his very
being with the surrounding forest. The tale had two halves, the first
detailing Joseph Wayne and the second Andy. Steinbeck wrote to a
potential publisher that the story “is a fairly close study of a paranoiac mind
and of primitive instincts of a modern man.” Despite this faith in his
“study” the novel was rejected for publishing time and again.
Now named “To the Unknown God” in reference to a Vedic Hymn (“Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?” is the hymn’s repeated invocation,) the unaccepted manuscript began to sit ill with Steinbeck, causing serious moments of self-doubt which he had never known before. It was not until the “crazy year” with Ricketts and Campbell that he began to understand what was lacking in his novel. He discarded the second half of the story, with Andy Wayne’s dark compulsions toward his trees and rejected the original “natural disaster” of fire for one that had more relevance to Central California, namely drought.
He shifted the energy of the story from perversion to faith, though the central pantheistic theme remained. Joseph Wayne, a naturally patriarchal and nearly god-like figure became the sole protagonist. He allowed for Joseph Wayne’s “rite of passage to the sacred center of the world,” and, according to Robert Demott, put more emphasis on the “archetype of the eternal woman” in direct response to Campbell’s falling in love with Steinbeck’s wife Carol. Demott surmises that the scene in which Joseph’s brother Benjy is killed by a jealous husband is a direct stab at the (platonic) affair between his friend and his wife. Whatever the motivation, the story had gained a force it had lacked before, and by February 1933, was accepted for publishing under the title To a God Unknown.
The book tells the story of Joseph Wayne’s
migration to California from Vermont in 1903. He is a thirty-five year
old bachelor with three brothers, Thomas Burton and Benjy, and a strong but
aged father who remains nameless: he is simply father. Graced with a long
white beard and wise eyes, he is the patriarch of his clan an seems initially
to be the physical representation of the Christian god, bestowing upon Joseph a
blessing when he states his intention to go west: “May the blessing of God and
my blessing rest on this child. May he live in the light of the
Face. May he love his life.” The old man claims to have received
the same blessing from his father, stating “a custom so old cannot be
wrong.” These words set the tone of the novel, revealing a religious
aspect as well as a sense of heritage.
But the blessing has a unique
wording that sets it apart from traditional Christian benedictions and that
gives it a more mystical quality: “live in the light of the Face.” We can
assume that the old man is referring to the face of God, but the capitalization
of the word face hints at some unknown presence, something that may be
greater, older and brighter than the Judaeo-Christian god. There is also
in the phrase “a custom so old it cannot be wrong” a hint of not only history
but of the mythic as well, strengthening the feeling that the Face in question
is somehow older than time and timeless. Furthermore, the fact that
Joseph’s father says “and my blessing” as if he is an equal of the deity gives
the benediction an almost sacrilegious feeling, allowing as it were for more
than one god. Joseph states later in the story, “My father thinks he is
almost a god. And he is.” So within the first three pages the
pantheistic and mythic are suggested to the reader, though in a subtle manner.
The blessing has great importance to the story, not only because it shows Joseph Wayne’s connection to his father, a man he resembles in every way (hinting that he too is “almost a god”), but also because it introduces the old man as a powerful being, powerful enough to find Joseph across an entire continent when he passes away and enter the great oak tree under which Joseph builds his house. In the letter that Joseph receives telling of his father’s death, his ultra-pious brother Burton writes “He said he could live as long as he wanted, but he wished to see your new land…he talked a great deal about floating over the country…He talked about the mating of animals. He said the whole earth was a – no, I can’t see any reason for saying it.”
The old man felt
he had the ability to stave off the one inevitable factor of life: death.
And yet he did continue living beyond the flesh, trading his mortal body for
the strength and power of a California Oak tree. Poet and classicist
Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, writes, ”The oak [is] the
tree of Zeus, Juppiter, Hercules, The Dagda (the chief elder of the Irish
gods), Thor, and all the other thunder gods, Jehovah in so far as he was ‘El’,
and Allah. The royalty of the oak tree needs no enlarging upon.”
As far as mythology is concerned, Steinbeck had no other option than to
allow his father-god to reside in an oak, for no other tree would have been
powerful enough to house the soul of a god.
The valley in which Joseph settles
is called Nuestra Senora, “the long valley of Our Lady in central
California.” Steinbeck’s choice of name is relevant on two levels, the
first of which is the reference to the Hispanic heritage of the area. A
Californian is in constant contact with the Spanish language, specifically
because of the overwhelming preponderance of towns, cities and land features
with Spanish names, and more subtly because of the great number of
Mexican-Americans in the state, many of whom live their entire lives in
California without ever speaking English.
Legally a bilingual state, all
official documents and most public instructional material must be printed in
Spanish as well as English. One hears Spanish and sees it nearly every
day. In To a God Unknown, the Mexican Indian heritage of the area
supports Joseph’s paganism by allowing for the existence of unseen forces in
the landscape. Joseph befriends Juanito who tells him that his mother, an
Indian, “said how the earth is our mother, and how everything that lives has
life from the mother and goes back into the mother.”
He later tells Joseph that the spring that trickles from the massive “altar” stone in the center of the sacred fir grove is rumored by the local Indians to come from the center of the world. The grove itself and the open glade in which the massive and mysterious rock stands is a place where “the old ones” still come, according to Juanito. These references ring familiar to Joseph, just as the rock “seemed to be shaped cunningly and wisely, and yet there was no shape in the memory to match it.” He senses the rightness of the Indian natural philosophy, something he recognizes which springs from Jung’s archetypal unconscious.
In The Return of the Vanishing
American, Leslie Fiedler identifies the Native American as a crucial aspect
of literature of the West. He writes, “the heart of the Western [i.e.
literature of the West] is not the confrontation with the alien landscape (by
itself this produces on the Northern [literature]), but the encounter with the
Indian, that utter stranger for whom our New World is an Old Home.”
He
continues, “The Western story in archetypal form is, then, a fiction dealing
with the confrontation in the wilderness of a transplanted WASP and a radically
alien other, an Indian – leading either to a metamorphosis of the WASP into
something neither White nor Red…or else to the annihilation of the
Indian.” He suggests that in this mythological confrontation, one of the
characters must be eliminated, and that if it is the White who is ritually or
symbolically removed, a New Man, new kind of American hero may emerge.
The relationship between Juanito and Joseph fulfills this theory. Joseph’s cultural heritage merges with that of Juanito, releasing in the white man some deep understanding of the mythology of the world. Joseph, has no sense of having turned his back on the Christian god, but rather incorporates him into a larger pantheon of deities. Steinbeck does not turn his back either on the Judeo-Christian god, allowing the character of Father Angelo, the local Catholic priest, to chastise Joseph for his dabbling with pagan elements. In the following passage he catches Joseph making an offering of wine to the oak tree:
Father Angelo smiled wisely and a little sadly at him. “Be careful of the groves, my son. Jesus is a better saviour than a hamadryad [a wood-fairy].” And his smile became tender, for Father Angelo was a wise as well as learned man.
Joseph started to turn rudely away but then, uncertainly, he swung back. “Do you understand everything, Father?"
“No, my son,” the priest said. “I understand very little, but the Church understands everything. Perplexing things become simple in the Church, and I understand this thing you do,” Father Angelo continued gently. “It is this way: The Devil has owned this country for many thousands of years, Christ for a very few. And as in a newly conquered nation, the old customs are practiced a long time, sometimed secretly and sometimes changing slightly to comply with the tenor of the new rule, so here, my son, some of the old habits persist, even under the dominion of Christ.”
Father Angelo is like a link between Joseph
and Juanito, between the ancient ways of original Californians and those of the
newcomer. Though the Indian in many ways encourages Joseph’s pantheism,
he eventually suggests that his friend seek the council of the wise old priest,
who’s “prayer is through the Virgin. He can get what he prays for.”
This is a telling quote, which leads into the second, and more important
relevance of the name Nuestra Senora, namely the overwhelming presence of the
Great Mother in To a God Unknown. For Juanito, the old priest’s
Catholicism works precisely because of the importance given to the Mother of
God, who is the source of all life and to whom we return at death.
Steinbeck was very blatant about the presence of the Goddess in the landscape of Joseph Wayne’s valley. Aside from the name, he also describes his protagonist’s entry into the valley in voluptuous, erotic terms: “Joseph became timid and yet eager, as a young man is who slips out to a rendezvous with a wise and beautiful woman. He was half-drugged and overwhelmed by the forest of Our Lady. There was a curious femaleness about the interlacing boughs and twigs.” Joseph passes “trembling leaves,” senses “the land’s throbbing,” travels a “smooth, rounded track,” feels “his body flushing with a hot fluid of love” for his land. In a dramatically erotic passage, Joseph makes love to his land:
His possessiveness became a passion “Its mine,” he chanted. “Down deep its mine, right to the center of the world.” He stamped his feet into the soft earth. Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river. He flung himself face downward on the grass and pressed his cheek against the wet stems. His fingers gripped the wet grass and tore it out, and gripped again. His thighs beat heavily on the earth…For a moment the land had been his wife.
Joseph has a many-leveled
relationship to his land. At times he sees it as a reflection of himself,
of his father, as a wife and as a child. But the primary metaphor is that
of the Great Goddess. In an article entitled “The ‘Great Mother’ in The
Grapes of Wrath, Lorelei Cederstrom writes, “The Great Mother is a force
for change in the individual and in society; this change may involve growth or
destruction, rebirth or death, for both are within her domain.”
Though
the article focuses primarily on The Grapes of Wrath, Cederstrom
identifies the Great Mother in To a God Unknown as “a personification of
the Earth itself.” Joseph, she notes, “can be seen as a priest assisiting
in her mysteries, as he works to ensure the fertility of the earth. He
views these preiestly duties as ‘the heritage of a race which for a million
years had sucked at the breasts of the soil and co-habited with the
earth.”
Joseph may also be the sacred consort king of the Great Mother;
he is married to the goddess, reigns for a period of time until he is
sacrificed to her in a ritualistic fashion. Joseph ultimately sacrifices
himself at the altar of the great rock, letting his blood flow to feed the
spirits of the stone and the Lady in whose valley he dwelt and reigned. This
purely pagan sacrifice joined with the Father’s Christian prayer to the Virgin
have the effect Joseph so desperately desired as he watched the country dry up
and seemingly die: the rains come.
“He lay on his side with his [slit]
wrist outstretched and looked down the long blsck mountain range of his
body. Then his body grew huge and light. It arose into the sky, and
out of it came the streaking rain. ‘I should have known,’ he whispered,
‘I am the rain.’”
He merges finally in sacrificial death with the center of the world and returns to the arms of the Great Mother.
But it is exactly this that the dour and pious Burton doesn’t understand. He accuses Joseph of idolatry, and kills the oak tree which his brother seems to worship; in that act he destroys not a tree but a living essence of the gods. Burton sees only “the pagan growth” in Joseph as the ultimate sin against his God. “You have left God, and his wrath will strike you down,” shouts Burton. This curse from the follower of the jealous Judaoe-Christian god is the antithesis of Joseph’s blessing, and Burton makes sure that it comes true when he kills the oak by circling a deep gash around the girth of the tree. When the tree dies the spirit of the blessing suffers as well, leaving Joseph’s tribe and the valley itself unprotected and endangered.
Note: this is an incomplete version of a longer literary review of John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown
which was written for a Masters level course in Comparative Literature
at the University of Iceland in 2003. The final draft is lost,
unfortunately. Though the bibliography could be reconstructed, the books
and authors referenced should be fairly clear without going into that
process. There are a few surviving footnotes, however, which are
presented here:
Benson writes, “Steinbeck was not a particularly attractive youngster. In his reclusiveness and shyness, he developed a protective arrogance that alienated many of those around him. He tried to gain affection and acceptance, but often failed. Only a few outside his family showed much warmth toward him…His rebellion took on a somewhat different form from that of most young people: despite conflicts with his parents, he maintained his affection for them and instead developed a resentment for the community as a whole.”
“Getting to California [in the mid-nineteenth century] was an undertaking of major proportion which must have exerted a significant selective influence on its early settlement. It was the more footloose and restless of the adventurers who came, whether from East of the Rockies, from Europe, from Chile, or from China.” Durrenberger.
California is still for many the ultimate land of opportunity. According to an article published in 1966, 1,460 new residents crossed the border into California each day. Though seriously outdated, the figure still holds a certain shock value. An article written for the Population Reference Bureau notes that “in a sense…California…affords a cross-section of the nation. It is composed of a larger foreign-born element than any other state of the union except New York.” Also, referring to the fantastic hopes and often miserable reality which newcomers experience, the article claims, “California has always been part fantasy and proud of it. Where else is the range so broad between fairyland and nightmare.” Those newcomers who stay usually discover that though the streets of the west are not paved with gold, the climate alone is something to be thankful for.
Benson says his job as bench chemist was “essentially a matter of running perfunctory tests on the beet distillate.” This was not his first brush with the physical sciences; he and his sister Mary had enrolled as teenagers in summer courses on zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, but he must have discovered the routine monotony that is lab work, as well as the importance that is placed on exactitude in the sciences.
© Maria Alva Roff, 2003
Image by Adam Gerritsma
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