Introduction of To a God Unknown
The second novel that are going to read this year is Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown. Like The Pastures of Heaven, To a God has garnered mixed reactions by readers and critics, in part due to thematic differences. Nature, not humanity, is the central character in this work and many argue that that this could be his most mystical novel. We’ll discuss more about themes and structure in future posts. For now, I am going to share a few reviews from the time period to give you a sense of the response then.
V. S. Pritchett. "Fiction." Spectator [England], 154 (5 April 1935), 580
Mr. Steinbeck ... is a good descriptive writer. He can describe the California land, its richness and fertility, its torrential rains, its scaly droughts with a warm, vivid and simple poetic gravity. He can suggest the pagan past immanent in the hidden forests. His Vermont farmers who go west to open up this splendid land are plain men and women well drawn, and he has the right touch of realistic humour in dealing with the Mexican hangers-on. He is so clearly a far better novelist than most, and for this reason, will stand much more serious criticism, while one picks out a few conventional words of praise for his more saleable made-to-measure contemporaries. This is one of the injustices of reviewing, and if I were a reader I should always put down on my library list the book on which the reviewer has spent time, space and spleen in pulling to pieces. Now for Mr. Steinbeck's crime. Fundamentally, it arises from a failure to understand that there is a difference between truth expressible in poetry and truth expressible in the novel. His chief character, Joseph, loves the land. He feels a deep, mystical kinship with it. He worships its increase, he feels it as part of himself and as part of his patriarchal father whose momentous nature he inherits; he loves with the land and suffers with it. Thus, he performs all kinds of primitive acts. He talks to the tree, calling it "sir," and because he sees in it his Abraham-like father; he does odd things with bits of calfskin; he visits a forgotten pagan altar-stone on which—at the end of the book—he makes a literal blood-sacrifice of himself in order to break the drought which has skinned the land clean.
The story of Joseph is one of a man with a mysterious intuition, who is gradually absorbed into a cult which Christianity had silenced. It is not an impossible theme for a novel, but the trouble is that we are painfully aware of Mr. Steinbeck, text-book in hand, telling Joseph what to do next. The cult is not truly ancient: it is a revival. And when Joseph marries a schoolmistress and drives home with her across the mountains, there ensues a dialogue which is D. H. Lawrence at his symbolic worst: '". .. and there are times when the people and the hills and the earth, all, everything except the stars, are ones, and the love of them all is strong like a sadness.' "'. . . Not the stars, then?' "'. . . No, never the stars. The stars are always strangers—sometimes evil, but always strangers. Smell the sage, Elizabeth. It's good to be getting home.'" Joseph has walked out of the Old Testament via Vermont to become a gigantic piece of half-baked mysticism. The hiatus between idea and living man becomes more and more distressing. The result is poetry gone flat. It is a pity because Mr. Steinbeck's grasp of the scene is masterly.
"Fiction." Times Literary Supplement [London], 11 April 1935, p. 236
"To a God Unknown will remind the reader inevitably of D. H. Lawrence"— so runs the wrapper. The novel is unlikely to do anything of the kind, though it may well depress and perhaps annoy the person whose respect for Lawrence's work is a matter of genuine literary taste. Here the tale is of a farmer in California at the beginning of the century who had thoughts about the mating of man and the earth. Joseph Wayne would observe his animals from time to time, whisper to trees, bend down and kiss the ground, and so on. Sometimes he would express poetic ideas about lust and fertility and God and creation. When after a time he began to think about marriage a young schoolmistress named Elizabeth, who had some knowledge of algebra, chose to tremble in his presence. Eventually he married her, after which she inconsiderably slipped on a rock in a forest glade and broke her neck, whereupon Joseph severed the veins in his wrists, hoping that his death would somehow put an end to the drought.
The author could make better use of his abilities. There is no harm in borrowing a habit of mind from somebody else, but the unfortunate thing here is that what is borrowed is not merely unbecoming to the author but presents an appearance of marked artistic falsity. The "literary" conversation of these farming people about imponderable things is, in fact, like the invocation of mystery in the description of bulls and trees and hills and rocks, of the kind best described as shymaking. However, there are occasional passages of straightforward narrative that may be read with interest.
Margaret Cheney Dawson. "Some Autumn Fiction." New York Herald Tribune, 24 September 1933, "Books" section, pp. 17, 19.
This strange and mightily obsessed book is for those who are capable of yielding themselves completely to the huge embrace of earth-mysticism. Of all the brands of mysticism, religious or poetic, there is none so vast and awesome as that which arises from the earth and is a passion simply for the miracle of a body that yields, puts forth, grows and dies; which is unconcerned with good or evil, solace or punishment, error or reason. And of all the books written out of such passion, this is the purest expression of it that I have ever encountered.
The chief characters are a man, a tree and an enormous stone. The man is Joseph Wayne, who set out from his Vermont home to take up land in California with his father's blessing ("Maybe I can find you later," the old man had said, meaning that he would soon be dead and hence free to travel also). The tree is the oak on Joseph's new homestead in the Valley of Nuestra Senora which became to him the reincarnation of his father's spirit. And the stone? Symbol of ancient pagan religion, repository of earth lore and haunt of both good and evil forces, stern avenger of insult, last green fortress of the earth against drought, altar for the sacrifice of human blood—these are some of the roles it plays.
What it actually stood for in Joseph's life and worship is not easily hobbled by words. One can only say that he came closer and closer to it in feeling until, when his crops and animals were dead from the dryness of two years and all his family gone in search of a less treacherous land, he chose to remain behind, living in the shadow of the rock, husbanding the little water that ran from its side to pour over its still-green moss, finally dying with cut wrists on its back, offering his blood to bring back the rain.
All that happened to Joseph between the time of his coming to the lush California valley and his final martyrdom for the land was influenced by the tree-spirit of his father and the stone-spirit of the earth. After he had established himself there, built a house and started to work, he sent for his three brothers.
Thomas was the one who could handle the animals, treating them without sentiment, but with "a consistency that beasts could understand." Burton was meager, pious and afraid. Benjy was sweet and wayward, lying and getting drunk and winning from bewildered women the gifts of their pity and virtue. With these men came their wives and children, and later Joseph was to have a wife and child also. Over them presided the oak tree, and Joseph (to Burton's horror) hung offerings in its branches and poured wine at its root. The tribe flourished, and Joseph was wild with joy at its increase and at the growing size of the herd. Then Burton decided to leave, go to some small town and set up a little shop. It would suit him better, and he was ill with fear over Joseph's practices. Before he left he girdled the tree, so that it shortly died.
After that, the tide of disaster rose around them, until the Wayne ranch became only a cluster of deserted houses and a huge empty barn. All but Joseph had left, and he lay in communion with his stone. It would be futile to urge this book upon any one who draws back from strong expression of a strong emotion. Its lust and furious power will repel some readers, and others who were charmed by the lucidity of The Pastures of Heaven, may be dismayed to find Mr. Steinbeck on so different a tack.
Virginia Barney. "Symbols of Earth." New York Times Book Review, 83 (1 October 1933), 18.
The unknown god of the hero of Mr. Steinbeck's second novel is an earth god whose sole commandment is "increase and multiply." It is a heathen god, manifest wherever life is reproductive, disdainful of sterility. Joseph Wayne meets and is moved by false gods but he never yields to them. His brother Benjy seeks the god of the pleasures of the senses. Brother Burton worships the god of his Calvinist ancestors. Brother Thomas identifies himself with the pure animalism of creature feeling. Rama, wife to Thomas, symbolizes the mother of all living. The Catholic priest worships a god he can respect but cannot follow. Joseph is even drawn to the strange mortal who, living on a California cliff, has figured it out that he is the last man of the Western world to see the evening sun go down and who, therefore, at each sunset, sacrifices some live thing to the sun god.
In his wife, Elizabeth, Joseph discovers a woman who is both of earth and of aspiration. Rama is earth itself; but Elizabeth is the spirit of earth. And so when Elizabeth dies in the solitary place by the big rock; when the tree which, to Joseph, embodies the spirit of his father is killed by Burton who disapproves of it as a pagan symbol; when the lean years come and the land and the beasts that feed upon it become unproductive; when aridity, sterility and death, disease and famine come, Joseph is defeated. Taking a leaf from the eccentric cliff dweller, Joseph sacrifices a calf to the rain god. Then the truth comes to him and in the solitary place by the big rock he sacrifices himself. And even before consciousness departs the rain comes and fertility is assured.
The bare narrative, reduced from its wrappings, is very brief. Joseph Wayne leaves his revered father in Vermont to seek land of his own in California. The father dies shortly afterward, but Joseph communes with him through a tree. His brothers come to California and take up homesteads adjacent to him. Joseph woos and wins the school teacher Elizabeth, who bears him a child. Life moves on rhythmically at the ranch. A great fiesta is given. All is well. Then Benjy is killed in the arms of a jealous Mexican's wife and a whole chain of disaster follows.
This is a symbolical novel conceived in mysticism and dedicated to the soil. To this reviewer it is little more than a curious hodgepodge of vague moods and irrelevant meanings. It cannot be said to be successful even of its kind. It treads dangerous ground without a touch of that sureness and strength which characterize the very few good works of its order in modern times. The elements of realism and symbolism fail to cohere and it oversteps all the bounds of convincingness even on the mystic plane. To a God Unknown is a novel which attempts too much; and by any standard it achieves too little.