The Pastures of Heaven (4 page)

The story of Molly Morgan is the most artistically complex of all the stories, particularly with regard to the handling of time and motivation. In most of the stories the use of the omniscient narrator simply provides a means of commentary and the establishment of character by exposition rather than dramatic revelation. In this story, however, Steinbeck's skillful juxtaposition of memory with current action allows for the theme of the past living in the present. The great mystery in the background is the whereabouts of Molly's father, an irresponsible parent and absent husband who nevertheless looms as a romantic hero in his daughter's mind. When Molly arrives in the valley to interview for a teaching position with John Whiteside, who heads the school board, their conversation is interspersed with sections recounting Molly's painful memories of her youth. This device also allows for the dramatic irony of the contrast between the tragic memories and the benign personal history she relates to Whiteside. She acquires the position and succeeds until the intrusion of Bert Munroe, who describes the profligacy of his new hired hand, and Molly is forced to confront the conflict between the image of her father as a romantic hero and the awful reality that he may well be the drunken sot sleeping in Bert Munroe's car. It is her fear that her father may have returned, and her desire to sustain the respectability of society, that destroys her happiness.

Respectability is not the issue for Raymond Banks but the confrontation of attitudes. One of the most successful farmers in the valley, Raymond conducts the affairs of his chicken farm in images of purity, with white buildings and chickens and ducks. What does not quite fit the picture is his interest in the hangings at San Quentin, where an old friend serves as warden and allows Raymond to observe the executions, an event he approaches with great detachment, scornful of those who have an emotional reaction. It is the
intrusion of Bert Munroe, particularly his graphic depiction of a mutilated and dying chicken, that forces Banks to regard the hangings from a new perspective, and he cancels his trip. This is another of the stories in which the resolution consists of a change of perspective, not the outcome of a physical conflict, and it is a rich psychological study most closely linked to the story of Shark Wicks.

The concluding stories of Pat Humbert and John Whiteside both focus on the family house in the valley and the broken dreams associated with it. For Humbert that house is as stifling as the antiquated attitudes of his parents. When they die he lives for a time with the ghosts of the past, but an accident allows him to see that new possibilities lie open to him. Inadvertently overhearing a conversation between the comely Mae Munroe and her mother, in which Mae expresses an interest in the Humbert house, Pat is inspired to remodel the home as a prelude to beginning their courtship. He finishes the project only to discover that she has just become engaged to young Bill Whiteside. He retreats back to a “dark and unutterably dreary” house, accepting the sterile solitude that had characterized the lives of his parents, his dreams vanquished.

The Munroes are also involved in the destruction of the Whiteside family dreams, although more dramatically so. Mae Munroe is certainly not the cause of Pat Humbert's distress, in the sense that she is not aware that he has overheard her comments about the house, and she has no idea that he is interested in her romantically. Bert Munroe is more directly involved in the Whiteside debacle. The richest story in the collection, the saga of the Whiteside family covers three generations, beginning with Richard's desire to found a dynasty in the Pastures with the family house as its center. His only child, John, carries on the dream, only to have it shattered when his son, Bill, marries Mae Munroe, adopts her values, and moves out of the valley. The burning of the family home is thus emblematic of the destruction of the family dream of dynasty.

The involvement of the Munroe family is complex in this story. In an earlier tale, Bill Whiteside has an opportunity for a romance with Molly Morgan, who might have remained in the valley and helped fulfill the ancient dream of the family. But Bill's insensitive comments to her preclude any development of the relationship. Later, Bert Munroe's hired hand frightens her out of the valley altogether. Mae Munroe might have married Pat Humbert, had the timing of the courtship been more favorable, but she weds Bill and insists on moving to Monterey, violating the objectives of the founding father of the Whitesides. But Bill's parents might have remained in the house had Bert Munroe not assisted in a disastrous attempt to burn the brush in the area, which leads to the immolation of the Whiteside house and the family dream. This event, the simultaneous destruction of the family house and stature, links Steinbeck's story to a rich legacy in American fiction, one that includes Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher,” George Washington Cable's “Belle Damoiselles Plantation,” and William Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!,
to name only a few. The collapse of the grand ambitions of the original settlers of the Pastures of Heaven provides a fitting end to the central stories of the volume, one brought to ironic conclusion by the epilogue.

The epilogue provides the enclosing envelope for the ten stories, much as the prologue initiates the central themes of the volume. That it takes place at a temporal and psychological distance from the central action also mirrors the opening sequence, and the irony of the conclusion completes the stories of broken dreams, disillusionment, and painful realizations that awaited the people who moved into the valley. As the opening dramatized the historic beginnings of the settling of the valley, the closing shows a modem bus bringing tourists to the area along the same route the Spanish corporal had taken. But now the valley has been domesticated with homes and farms, and cows wearing bells have replaced the grazing deer of the prologue. The tourists too have their dreams for the valley, but they reflect the mercantile ambitions of the new age: “Some day there'll be big houses in the valley, stone houses and gardens, golf links and big gates and iron work.” The grand illusions and dreams of dynasty of the original settlers have been replaced by the commercial interests of the modem age, and the Edenic promise of a verdant nature has drifted back into the past, lost forever in the broken dreams and thwarted ambitions
that once belonged to the Pastures of Heaven.

John Steinbeck's reputation as a writer does not rest primarily on
Pastures,
but it is a major work of American fiction, and it was pivotal in his career. In it he discovered the central subject of his greatest work, the simple people of the Salinas Valley, struggling against the odds, against economic deprivation and the legacy of a past that threatens to overwhelm them, ideas that inform
The Grapes of Wrath
and
East of Eden.
His Naturalistic use of characters who are psychologically deformed, or obsessed, or driven by a curse, he was to use again and again, most brilliantly in
Of Mice and Men
and
In Dubious Battle.
Steinbeck went on to write other collections of interrelated stories, containing some of his very best fiction:
Tortilla Flat
and especially
The Long Valley,
which features perhaps his best known story, “The Red Pony.” Many of the themes of
Pastures
—the destructive potential of conformity, the dangers of self-delusion and false social values—he continued to explore throughout his career, even through
The Winter of Our Discontent
in 1961. Perhaps it is not too much to claim that the central components of the greatness of Steinbeck's work, his basic style and subject and fundamental themes, have their origin not in his most celebrated novels but in an often ignored collection of stories that appeared, unceremoniously, in 1932,
The Pastures of Heaven.

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John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Benson, Jackson J.
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck,
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Ferrell, Keith.
John Steinbeck: The Voice of the Land.
New York: M. Evans, 1986.

Fontenrose, Joseph.
John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963.

—.
Steinbeck's Unhappy Valley: A Study of
The Pastures of Heaven. Berkeley: Joseph Fontenrose, 1981.

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New York: Twayne, 1961.

Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. “Female Characters in Steinbeck: Minor Characters of Major Importance?”
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Hearle, Kevin. “The Pastures of Contested Pastoral Discourse.”
Steinbeck Quarterly,
26, No. 1-2 (1993): 38-45.

Hughes, R. S.
Beyond The Red Pony: A Reader's Companion to Steinbeck's Complete Short Stories.
Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1987.

—.
John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction.
Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Ingram, Forrest L.
Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre.
The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Levant, Howard.
The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974.

Lisca, Peter.
The Wide World of John Steinbeck.
New York: Gordian Press, 1981.

Mann, Susan Garland.
The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide.
Westport: Greenwood, 1989.

Mawer, Randall R. “Takashi Kato, ‘Good American': The Central Episode in Steinbeck's
The Pastures of Heaven.” Steinbeck Quarterly
13 (Winter-Spring 1980): 23-31.

Mortlock, Melanie. “The Eden Myth as Paradox: An Allegorical Reading of
The Pastures of Heaven.” Steinbeck Quarterly
11 (Winter 1978): 6-15.

Owens, Louis.
John Steinbeck's Re- Vision of America.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Peterson, Richard. “The Turning Point:
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932).”
A Study Guide to Steinbeck: A Handbook to His Major Works,
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Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.
New York: Viking, 1975.

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Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

—.
John Steinbeck's Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

The text of this volume reproduces that issued by the Viking Press in 1963, which was based on the original Brewer, Warren, and Putnam edition of 1932. The first edition was reprinted under the Covici-Friede imprint in 1935.

When the Carmelo Mission of Alta California was being built, some time around 1776, a group of twenty converted Indians abandoned religion during a night, and in the morning they were gone from their huts. Besides being a bad precedent, this minor schism crippled the work in the clay pits where adobe bricks were being molded.

After a short council of the religious and civil authorities, a Spanish corporal with a squad of horsemen set out to restore these erring children to the bosom of Mother Church. The troop made a difficult journey up the Carmel Valley and into the mountains beyond, a trip not the less bewildering because the fleeing dissenters had proved themselves masters of a diabolic guile in concealing traces of their journey. It was a week before the soldiery found them, but they were discovered at last practicing abominations in the bottom of a ferny canyon in which a stream flowed; that is, the twenty heretics were fast asleep in attitudes of abandon.

The outraged military seized them and in spite of their howlings attached them to a long slender chain. Then the column turned about and headed for Carmel again to give the poor neophytes a chance at repentance in the clay pits.

In the late afternoon of the second day a small deer started up before the troop and popped out of sight over a ridge. The corporal disengaged himself from his column and rode in its pursuit. His heavy horse scrambled and floundered up the steep slope; the manzanita reached sharp claws for the corporal's face, but he plunged on after his dinner. In a few minutes he arrived at the top of the ridge, and there he stopped, stricken with wonder at what he saw—a long valley floored with green pasturage on which a herd of deer browsed. Perfect live oaks grew in the meadow of the lovely place, and the hills hugged it jealously against the fog and the wind.

The disciplinarian corporal felt weak in the face of so serene a beauty. He who had whipped brown backs to tatters, he whose rapacious manhood was building a new race for California, this bearded, savage bearer of civilization slipped from his saddle and took off his steel hat.

“Holy Mother!” he whispered. “Here are the green pastures of Heaven to which our Lord leadeth us.”

 

 

His descendants are almost white now. We can only reconstruct his holy emotion of discovery, but the name he gave to the sweet valley in the hills remains there. It is known to this day as
Las Pasturas del Cielo.

By some regal accident the section came under no great land grant. No Spanish nobleman became its possessor through the loan of his money or his wife. For a long time it lay forgotten in its embracing hills. The Spanish corporal, the discoverer, always intended to go back. Like most violent men he looked forward with sentimental wistfulness to
a little time of peace before he died, to an adobe house beside a stream, and cattle nuzzling the walls at night.