Last February, I posted a piece about George R. Stewart’s landmark ecological novel, Storm, which cataloged the impact of a monster Pacific storm on California. Stewart christened the disturbance “Maria.”
In that post, I referenced the heavy rains and Sierra snowfall which at that time seemed to promise some respite from California’s severe years-long drought. In an interview with NPR, Andrew Schwartz of the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab reported that at the end of 2021, a record December snowfall of 193.7 inches accumulated at the laboratory site near Donner Summit. Alas, practically no rain came to the Golden State for the remainder of the winter.
In spring of 2023, California is in a different place. Heavy rains—driven by a series of atmospheric rivers—once again had built a near record snowpack by early January. But after the experience of last winter, for a while at least, optimism for a break in the drought felt foolish. “It’s just far too early to tell whether or not these storms will have an impact on the drought.” In an early January interview, Schwartz recalled previous experience: “We were in this exact same spot last year. We were way above average, and then the faucet shut off in January through March.”
Well, not this year.
Since the beginning of 2023, California has been flooded by a series of atmospheric rivers that have significantly raised reservoir levels throughout the state and, as of May, built a record snowpack. It’s still too early to make long-term predictions of whether or not the west is headed out of the recent drought cycle, but the short-term relief is nevertheless real—even as it’s important to remember Maria-style storms have here and there had devastating effects on lives and property, especially in low-lying areas such as Tulare County, where Tulare Lake, which disappeared with development, is re-emerging.
So maybe it’s time to take a look at another California novel centered on the relationship of human beings and the environment that nurtures and threatens them, John Steinbeck’s weirdly imagined 1933 novel To a God Unknown. Instead of a sprawling saga of human beings attempting to stand against an indifferent and overpowering nature, as in Storm, Steinbeck gives us a much more localized story of a single man whose egocentricity (which may take the form of divine self-regard) drives him to cancel the history of California’s cycles of drought.
I know. We’re a long way from Cannery Row.
The setting of To a God Unknown, Nuestra Señora, is based on the San Antonio Valley in the Santa Lucia mountain range. The northern edge of the little valley is site to the Mission San Antonio de Padua; its southern entrance is marked by the one-time stage stop of Jolon, where, writes Susan Shillinglaw in A Journey into Steinbeck’s California, “fifteen-year-old Steinbeck spent several weeks at a friend’s ranch” (44-45). She adds, “In Steinbeck’s hands, this is contested land emblematic of California’s early history. A mission, an Indian village, and a white homestead each has a claim on the heart of the valley, and the book’s central thrust is concerned with land use—be it for profit, consecration, mystery, or enjoyment” (46).
As the novel opens, it’s 1903, and Joseph Wayne, third son of a patriarchal Vermont farmer, comes west to homestead land and to find the elbow room needed to establish his own family. He settles near Nuestra Señora and, after the death of his father back in Vermont, welcomes his three brothers and their families, each brother expanding the Wayne holdings by adding an adjacent homestead.
In the meantime, Joseph has felt the spirit of the land, a mysterious force with which he feels a peculiar accord. Eventually, he thinks of this force as a manifestation of the spirit of his father, embodied for Joseph, in the life force of a great oak tree that shades his ranch home. Joseph and his family prosper. He marries, has a son, and worships the oak and exults more and more in the processes of procreation that fuel his ranch, the seasonal growth of the grass and the mating of stock, all of which Joseph links in his mind to the benign spirit of the oak. Angered by his “paganism,” one of his brothers—acting out of Christian belief but blinded by his own self-righteousness—kills the oak.
Soon after, Joseph loses his wife in an accidental fall while she was climbing a rock in a mysterious glade. Drought descends on the region, and eventually—in the midst of dryness and sterility as acute as anything imagined by T. S. Eliot—Joseph assumes the mantle of the Fisher King and sacrifices himself, opening the veins of a wrist while lying atop the same mossy rock from which his wife tumbled to her death: “and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while” (184). The episode ends with the “rush of waters” (184), a torrent of rain breaking the drought. Readers are left to wonder: are we supposed to imagine that Joseph’s seeming self-sacrifice bring forth the rain, or is the storm’s arrival wholly unconnected to Joseph’s final act and is, therefore, a performance of human narcissism? Or both?
To a God Unknown is less appreciated than Steinbeck’s later, more celebrated works, partly because it is an apprentice novel and maybe because it retains too much of its original source, the unfinished manuscript of a play, “The Green Lady,” written by Steinbeck’s Stanford friend, Webster Street. Thus Steinbeck was not working originally from his own imaginative frame. But Steinbeck eventually made over the material, adding some of his own unique touches, including, says Robert DeMott in his introduction to the novel, not only moving the setting from Mendocino County to Jolon, but also adding a focus on the cyclical return of drought years which would become a central image in the book (xix-xx).
Upon its publication, many reviewers were perplexed by the novel, some straining to classify it by referencing the work of Steinbeck’s contemporaries—and by so doing implicitly maligning a number of prominent authors. A Nation reviewer caustically wrote, “This book reads like a novelized version of a Robinson Jeffers poem,” complaining that a novel “demands treatment in the round” and that Steinbeck’s novel was “pitifully thin and shadowy” (McElrath 25). V. S. Pritchett, writing for Spectator, found the dialogue “. . . D. H. Lawrence at his symbolic worst” (McElrath 27). These opinions, which, it must be said, make for entertaining reading, may seem spot on for readers familiar with Steinbeck’s later works, especially the magisterial 1940 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. To many, To a God Unknown may seem an apprentice work not worth pondering.
But more recent scholarship offers some more nuanced views.
Steinbeck scholar and fellow novelist Louis Owens finds much to admire in To a God Unknown, claiming for it “a remarkable unity” derived in part from what he calls a “brilliantly sustained ambiguity” that runs through the novel (27). John H. Timmerman adds that “despite the labored mysticism of the novel . . . one detects a seminal attitude of Steinbeck that grew, deepened, and matured in later years,” pointing out that Joseph Wayne’s “thinking has changed, as he sees human life as a part of a whole natural pattern” (316). Gavin Jones frames the novel in terms of magical realism: “Steinbeck’s novel shares some important traits with magical realism, particularly its cyclical rather than linear sense of time, which sees the white colonizing presence inevitably pass from the land” (19), an insight that not only expands our understanding of the structural patterns of natural cycles within To a God Unknown, but also leads to a richer understanding of how the novel implicates race.
Still, despite these more positive framings for the book (and their detailed academic analysis), it’s worth remembering that the venerable Lawrence Clark Powell included a chapter on Steinbeck’s novel in his collection of essays on California writing, California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State, a title I doubt anyone would have the temerity to propose in the wake of English department canon wars. Still, decades ago Powell placed the book in rare company, including Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain. “Steinbeck’s remains a living book,” wrote Powell, “lit with passion for his native earth” (226).
I agree. Despite its flaws, reading the book provides a remarkably powerful experience, mostly because of descriptions of natural spaces, rendered in precise and often richly moving language. Moreover, the novel evokes a sense of mystery, partly through embedding contrasts of light in descriptions of landscape. This technique appears in other, better known, Steinbeck works set in the region, perhaps most memorably in a passage from a novel written at the other end of Steinbeck’s remarkable career, 1952’s East of Eden:
I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stoop up against the sky to the west and keep the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains. (1)
The contrast of dark and light landscapes, one rising above, the other enfolding the agrarian world that Steinbeck often explores, creates tension between what is unknowable, ancient, mysterious, even threatening and what is wholly familiar, modern, wholesome. The same tension holds for many of the landscape descriptions in To a God Unknown. Visit the place that inspired the novel’s setting, and even today you can feel the contrast between the open, inviting, even colorful landscape of the San Antonio Valley floor and the darker terrain of the stream beds and the forested terrain that lean upwards toward the west.
The attention to natural spaces, and the play of light and dark, is evident early in the novel. Joseph has recorded his homestead and is entering the valley, a lush and inviting landscape full of promise to Joseph’s eyes. It’s late afternoon in spring:
Joseph gained the ridge-top and looked down on the grass lands of his new homestead where the wild oats moved in silver waves under a little wind where the patches of blue lupines lay like shadows in a clear lucent night, and the poppies on the side hills were broad rays of sun. He drew up to look at the long grassy meadows in which clumps of live oaks stood like perpetual senates ruling over the land. The river with its mask of trees cut a twisting path down through the valley. Two miles away he could see, beside a gigantic lonely oak, the white speck of his tent pitched and left while he went to record his homestead. A long time he sat there. As he looked into the valley, Joseph felt his body flushing with a hot fluid of love. “This is mine,” he said simply, and he eyes sparkled with tears and his brain was filled with wonder that this should be his. There was pity in him for the grass and flowers; he felt that the trees were his children and the land his child. For a moment he seemed to float high in the air and to look down on it. “It’s mine,” he said again, “and I must take care of it.” (7)
This passage is remarkable, not only for its rich description of the valley, but also for the tension that’s subtly embedded within it. On one hand, live oaks are “perpetual senates ruling over the land”; on the other hand, Joseph asserts his own authority, “This is mine” and “I must take care of it,” statements which challenge the rule of the oaks. They portend his descent into self-deception, though it’s worth noting that others mark his mysterious authority with approval. His sister-in-law, Rama (no slouch as an earth mother), tells Elizabeth, Joseph’s new wife, her own views on Joseph: “Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know” (68). Is Joseph a part of the natural world—where shadow is manifest in the valley lupines and sunlight manifest in the hillside poppies—or is the natural world a part of Joseph, whose personality embraces both dark and light?
These days the area around Jolon is much changed from the valley that inspired Steinbeck. The San Antonio Valley aligns south to north, much of it bisected by Mission Road, which runs north from its intersection with Jolon Road (route G18) near the southern end of the valley to the Mission San Antonio at the other end. Other routes access portions of the valley floor, but the most notable change since the setting of the novel is the establishment of Fort Hunter Liggett in 1940, whose buildings now dominate the eastern edge of the valley. The base currently comprises 165,000 acres and provides, according to the base website, “opportunities for ‘real world’ training and defense technology testing.” The Spanish mission, though changed, preserves much of its cultural heritage, and after extensive renovations in recent years, now offers visitors a taste of California’s mission past, including access to aqueducts and wells, artifacts of European colonialism, now part of an important archeological site. Today, the front of the mission—including its long, arched gallery and clay tile roof—would have still looked pretty familiar to its founders.
As does much of the valley floor.
I visited here on a sunny April day, just after the last of our recent rains. Even if not somewhere on the slopes of the Gabilans, the sensations evoked here tracked with Steinbeck’s description of them, “full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation,” feelings I think Joseph Wayne, despite his admittedly authoritarian and sometimes dour spirit, would have found familiar in his homestead.
When I arrived, the last of the atmospheric rivers had been gone a week or so. The valley was green with annual grasses, embedded with lupins and California poppies. These blooms sprouted throughout the valley floor, but perhaps most spectacularly on the eastern slopes of the valley, where interior live oaks clustered and among and above them on the gentle slopes, bright orange smudges of poppy orange glowed in the sunlight, overwhelming, at least here on this day, the less organized blue of the sky lupines. In addition to the blue and orange hues belonging to the wildflowers that Steinbeck gives us, were the astonishing yellow of myriad patches of low-growing California goldfields, their bright petals competing pretty successfully with the showy orange of the poppies. And among many of these plants grew white popcorn flowers, delicate blossoms that looked good enough to eat. I found that Steinbeck’s description of the valley still felt true, but, not surprisingly, there was a lot more of the natural world to take in here.
So, it’s sort of nice to realize how much of the valley still conforms to Steinbeck’s description early in the novel, but even nicer to set my own April experience of the place against another description which Steinbeck offers, this one pinned to the second year of Joseph’s tenure in Nuestra Senora. It’s also in April:
When April came, and warm grass-scented days, the flowers burdened the hills with color, the poppies gold and the lupins blue, in spreads and comforters. Each variety kept to itself and splashed the land with its color. And still the rain fell often, until the earth was spongy with moisture. (98)
And rising high above the wildflower carpet of the valley floor, valley oaks dominate, tall, stately, their trunks clad in deeply furrowed bark, the trees individually shaped, to my eye, so that the stout limbs structure canopies, that even at a distance, appear as unique as a human fingerprint. Any number of these trees could model for the “gigantic lonely oak” that Joseph chooses to shade his house, even though he’s warned of the danger by Romas, the driver who delivers lumber for the dwelling: “Going to build under a tree? That’s not good. One of those limbs might crack off and take your roof with it, land smash you, too, some night while you sleep” (10). But Joseph will not be dissuaded, and his decision seems especially portentous when a letter tells him of his father’s death and Joseph regards the oak with awakened understanding:
. . . the wind whispered a moment in the grass and then grew strong and steady, bringing the sharp odors of the grass and of the damp earth, and the great tree stirred to life under the wind. Joseph raised his head and looked at its old, wrinkled limbs. His eyes lighted with recognition and welcome, for his father’s strong and simple being, which had dwelt in his youth like a cloud of peace, had entered the tree. (18)
Joseph knows that his devout brother Burton would disapprove of the “feeling of joy and welcome” that washes over him. Sometime later, at a New Year’s fiesta that Joseph gives, the mission’s Father Angelo comes to sense something disturbing about Joseph’s attitude, remarking, “‘Be careful of the groves, my son. Jesus is a better savior than a hamadryad.’ And his smile became tender, for Father Angelo was a wise as well as a learned man” (89). Alas Brother Burton, who does not give “sanction to the Pope on this land” (86) proves not nearly so wise. Burton is especially offended when Joseph, in an act of supplication, places his infant son in the crotch of the tree, seeing “how the gnarled limbs curved up protectingly about it” (117). Burton secretly kills the tree, and when the act is discovered, Brother Thomas observes, “’The veins are cut. There’s nothing to do,’ he paused,—’except beat Hell out of Burton’” (123).
Soon after the death of the tree comes the death of the land. The valley turns sterile with the coming of drought, a cyclic event that easterner Joseph, unlike Californian’s of his era and our own, can’t fathom. Soon after his arrival in the midst of life and light, Joseph had been warned of drought’s likely return, but he dismisses the idea, despite learning that “the Indians said it had been before, twice in the memory of old men.” Joseph says, “I don’t like to think about it. It won’t come again surely. Feel how tall the grass is already” (14).
With the coming of the drought, Thomas moves the family’s stock to the Central Valley, hoping that conditions there won’t be so severe for the animals. Joseph is left as solitary guardian of the homesteads, but his mind centers on another place, a solitary pine glade, watered by a robust stream and surrounding a massive rock, a place Joseph and brother Thomas, led by a part-Indian ranch hand named Juanito, came to when chasing wayward cattle. If the sunlit valley floor fostered life—infant son, growing herds, the endless bounty of wildflowers and trees—the pine glade, despite its dark beauty, seemed to promise something far different:
They had come to an open glade, nearly circular, and as flat as a pool. The dark trees grew about it, straight as pillars and jealously close together. In the center of the clearing stood a rock as big as a house, mysterious and huge. It seemed to be shaped, cunningly and wisely, and yet there was no shape in the memory to match it. A short, heavy green moss covered the rock with soft pile. The edifice was something like an altar that had melted down over itself. In one side of the rock there was a small black cave fringed with five-fingered ferns, and from the cave a little stream flowed silently and the glade and disappeared into the tangled brush that edged the clearing. (31)
Thomas immediately declares of the glade, “I don’t think I like it, I can’t tell.” (31). Juanito is familiar with the glade, “Sometimes I think the old ones come here still” (32). Joseph’s responds with reverence, “There’s something strong and sweet and good in there” (32). But the mossy rock—mysterious, indescribably shaped, guarded by “dark trees”—is also the site of tragedy. Joseph’s wife Elizabeth loses her life here when in Joseph’s company she attempts to climb the rock but falls when the moss “stripped off a little,” and she breaks her neck (132). The rock is also the place where Joseph returns during the worst of the drought. There, he takes his life, declaring “I am the land. . . and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while” (184). Soon, the rain comes and the streams fill. After a few days of rain, Father Angelo thinks of Joseph Wayne, “and he saw the pale eyes suffering because of the land’s want. ‘That man must be very happy now. . . .’” (186).
Steinbeck’s sly description of the rock, “no shape in the memory to match it,” relieves the novel of the burden of correspondence to the actual. Which is fortunate, in a way, since instead of searching for a particular natural phenomenon, we can search instead for a congress of feeling shrouded in shadow. I think the results are not as satisfying as the pleasure of seeing how strongly Steinbeck’s descriptions of Nuestra Señora feel alive while exploring contemporary San Antonio Valley. Still, there’s satisfaction in thinking of the glade when climbing westbound out of the valley along Nacimiento-Fergusson Road as it leads away from the valley via a green-painted truss bridge spanning the Nacimiento River.
As the road winds its way to the crest–this route was once commonly used to cross the Santa Lucias when traveling to the Salinas Valley from the coast–sycamores, live oaks, and pines can close out the sun, evoking a feeling of remoteness, perhaps a feeling of disconnectedness from the more open world, a place where bad things can happen, a feeling not unlike what I imagine caused Thomas’ unease as he encountered the glade. But Joseph’s sense of something powerful and good also obtains, a reminder of our individual insignificance even within the fairly circumscribed scope of a limited—but darkly variegated and beautiful—vista. No mossy rock as far as I could tell, but the emotional correspondence was available if I wanted to so indulge.Ultimately, To a God Unknown serves not only as a reminder about the natural cycles that govern the global natural world and our own place within it, but also it explores the narrower perspective defined by the emotional impact of light upon an active human imagination. The novel thus serves as a reminder of the unfathomable and wonderful oscillation between the mysterious and the quotidian, a phenomenon fully observable within and around the San Antonio Valley that inspired Steinbeck’s setting. If George R. Stewart’s Storm tends to a global perspective, Steinbeck’s novel contends for a more personal perspective, even if it’s ultimately a tragic one.
Sources:
Beers, Terry. “George R. Stewart’s Storm.” Rewriting California. https://rewritingcalifornia.com/george-r-stewarts-storm. Accessed 9 January 2023.
Bowman, Parker. “600,000 Years of History, and Tulare Lake Isn’t Done Yet.” The Sentinel. 27 May 2023. https://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/600-000-years-of-history-and-tulare-lake-isnt-done-yet/article_680ec871-732d-5e85-84a7-5945da302275.html. Accessed 1 June 2023.
“History of Fort Hunter Liggett.” U. S. Army Garrison Fort Hunter Liggett. https://home.army.mil/liggett/index.php/about/history. Accessed 11 January 2023.
Jones, Gavin. “To a God Unknown: Drought, Climate, and Race in the West.” Steinbeck Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2017. pp. 1-22. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/662438. Accessed 7 December 2022.
McElrath, Joseph R., Jesse S. Crisler, Susan Shillinglaw, eds. John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge U P, 1996.
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Nickerson, Scooty. “California’s Snowpack Near Decade High.” The Mercury News. 3 January 2023. https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/01/as-another-another-storm-settles-over-california-snowpack-reaches-3rd-highest-point-in-time-accumulation-in-2-decades/. Accessed 9 January 2023.
Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. U of Georgia P, 1985.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State. Ward Ritchie P, 197.
Schwartz, Andrew. Interview with Adrian Florido. All Things Considered. National Public Radio. January 2, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/02/1069784229/california-record-snowfall. Accessed 19 January 2022.
Shillinglaw, Susan. A Journey into Steinbeck’s California. Photographs by Nancy Burnett. Roaring Forties Press, 2006.
Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. 1952. Intro. David Wyatt. Penguin, 2002.
—. To a God Unknown. 1933. Intro. Robert DeMott. Penguin, 1995.
Timmerman, John H. “Steinbeck’s Environmental Ethic: Humanity in Harmony with the Land.” Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Susan F. Beegel, et al., U of Alabama P, 1997, pp. 310-322.
