To a God Unknown is itself a mostly unknown Steinbeck. It was his second novel, and he hadn’t developed his mature style, with all the skills he would apply to later works. To a God Unknown was a long, hard struggle for Steinbeck to compose. Through this striving, he shaped considerably both his own ability as a writer, and himself.
I enjoyed this book very much — partly because of the contending forces animating To a God Unknown with an electric energy, and also for the surreal Blakean vision it paints, of a gorgeous but dangerous Californian Wilderness, one hundred years ago.
I will show you this eccentric world that charmed me. In case it doesn’t tempt you to dive into To a God Unknown, I’ll finish up recommending five more mainstream and popular Steinbeck novels you might prefer.
‘To the Unknown God’
(A Hindu Vedic Hymn, that Steinbeck includes as a prologue to his novel)
He is the giver of breath, and strength is his gift.
The high Gods revere his commandments.
His shadow is life, his shadow is death;
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
Through His might He became lord of the living and glittering world
And he rules the world and the men and the beasts
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
From His strength the mountains take being, and the sea, they say,
And the distant river;
And these are his body and his two arms.
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
He made the sky and the earth, and His will fixed their places,
Yet they look to Him and tremble.
The risen sun shines forth over Him.
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
He looked over the waters which stored His power and gendered the sacrifice.
He is God over Gods.
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
May He not hurt us, He who made earth,
Who made the sky and the shining sea?
Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?
We’re starting from an alien root. This God isn’t Christian, it has no human face. The mountains, the sea and the distant river are “his body and his two arms.” Every verse leads to sacrifice. “His shadow is death . . . they look to Him and tremble.”
To a God Unknown is built upon this chthonic bedrock. It is weird and intense, as Steinbeck means it to be. On top of this are other layers, still primal but Western: Biblical motifs; pagan fertility rites; Fisher King symbols out of The Golden Bough; Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbellian heroic journeys. The topsoil above these is more congenial and familiar, a cleanly plotted family drama set in a northern California valley in the early 1900s.
I found the dark mythic undercurrents compelling; but some just find them jarring. The New York Herald Tribune Books review called it a “strange and mightily obsessed book” that would only appeal to readers “who are capable of yielding themselves completely to the huge embrace of earth-mysticism.”
To a God Unknown’s topsoil, though, will appeal to most readers. Marion “Duke” Morrison assumed the name John Wayne, acted in many B-movies, then became an A-list star in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Coincidentally, the granite-jawed patriarch in To a God Unknown (1933) is also John Wayne.
The book opens on John’s farm in Vermont, shared with his four sons: Thomas, Burton, Joseph and Benjamin. Joseph has the strongest character, the most complexity, and his father’s blessing. His acts and decisions, his changing awareness, are main engines of the plot. Here are the other Waynes:
Thomas was the oldest, forty-two, a thick strong man with golden hair and a long yellow mustache. His cheeks were round and red and his eyes a cold wintry blue between slitted lids . . . Thomas understood animals, but humans he neither understood nor trusted very much . . . Joseph was the only person with whom Thomas felt any relationship; he could talk to Joseph without fear.
Thomas’ wife was Rama, a strong, full-breasted woman with black brows that nearly met over her nose. She was nearly always contemptuous of everything men thought or did. She was a good and efficient midwife and an utter terror to evildoing children . . . She understood Thomas, treated him as though he were an animal, kept him clean and fed and warm, and didn’t often frighten him . . .
Burton was one whom nature had constituted for a religious life. He kept himself from evil and found evil in nearly all close human contacts . . . Burton was never well. His cheeks were drawn and lean, and his eyes hungry for a pleasure he did not expect this side of heaven. In a way it gratified him that his health was bad, for it proved that God thought of him enough to make him suffer . . . He knew when [his wife] exceeded the laws, and when, as happened now and then, some weak thing in Harriet cracked and left her sick and delirious, Burton prayed beside her bed until her mouth grew firm again and stopped its babbling.
Benjamin, the youngest of the four, was a charge upon his brothers. He was dissolute and undependable; given a chance, he drank himself into a romantic haze and walked about the country, singing gloriously. He looked so young, so helpless and so lost that many women pitied him, and for this reason Benjamin was nearly always in trouble with some woman or other. For when he was drunk and singing and the lost look was in his eyes, women wanted to hold him against their breasts and protect him from his blunders.
As each brother marries, and has children, the Waynes’ Vermont farm can no longer support all the mouths to feed. California promises a bountiful dawn to this new century. The brothers can each homestead 160 acres, if they will cultivate it. Joseph leads, his brothers follow, and they build a great house for all of them, under the shadow of a magnificent spreading oak, centering their 640 acre farm and ranch, in the northern California Salinas Valley.
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Steinbeck’s Glorious Californian Wilderness
Steinbeck is a careful observer who condenses characters and incidents into striking, sometimes poetic prose. His views of nature are vivid and shimmering. I’m rhapsodizing, I know. Firstly, I was surprised at just how well Steinbeck brought his scenery to life. Secondly, he takes us deep into the California countryside of a century ago. Whereas I’m writing to you from the asphalt heart of 21st Century LA. To a God Unknown reveals the golden dream I moved West searching for — which is a world apart from this bustling, polluted megacity I now call home. But let’s escape together, and dive right into Steinbeck’s Eden:
Now the trail skirted a long side hill densely protected by underbrush—blackberry, manzanita and scrub oak so thickly tangled that even the rabbits had to make little tunnels through it. The trail forced its way up the long narrow ridge and came to a belt of trees, tan oak and live oak and white oak. Among the branches of the trees a tiny white fragment of mist appeared and delicately floated along just over the treetops. In a moment another translucent shred joined it, and another and another. They sailed along like a half-materialized ghost, growing larger and larger until suddenly they struck a column of warm air and rose into the sky to become little clouds. All over the valley the flimsy little clouds were forming and ascending like the spirits of the dead rising out of a sleeping city. They seemed to disappear against the sky, but the sun was losing its warmth because of them. Joseph’s horse raised its head and sniffed the air. On top of the ridge stood a clump of giant madrone trees, and Joseph saw with wonder how nearly they resembled meat and muscles. They thrust up muscular limbs as red as flayed flesh and twisted like bodies on the rack. Joseph laid his hand on one of the branches as he rode by, and it was cold and sleek and hard. But the leaves at the end of the horrible limbs were bright green and shiny. Pitiless and terrible trees, the madrones. They cried with pain when burned.
Joseph gained the ridge-top and looked down on the grasslands of his new homestead where the wild oats moved in silver waves under a little wind, where the patches of blue lupins 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 his 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 the 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 look down upon it. “It’s mine,” he said again, “and I must take care of it.”
The little clouds were massing in the sky; a legion of them scurried to the east to join the army already forming on the hill line. From over the western mountains the lean grey ocean clouds came racing in. The wind started up with a gasp and sighed through the branches of the trees. The horse stepped lightly down the path toward the river again, and often it raised its head and sniffed at the fresh sweet odor of the coming rain. The cavalry of clouds had passed and a huge black phalanx marched slowly in from the sea with a tramp of thunder. Joseph trembled with pleasure in the promised violence. The river seemed to hurry along down its course, to chatter excitedly over the stones as it went. And then the rain started, fat lazy drops splashing on the leaves. Thunder rolled like caissons over the sky. The drops grew smaller and thicker, raked through the air and hissed in the trees. Joseph’s clothing was soaked in a minute and his horse shone with water. In the river the trout were striking at tumbled insects and all the tree trunks glistened darkly.
The trail left the river again, and as Joseph neared his tent the clouds rolled backward from the west to the east like a curtain of grey wool and the late sun sparkled on the washed land, glittered on the grass blades and shot sparks into the drops that lay in the hearts of wildflowers. Before his tent Joseph dismounted and unsaddled the horse and rubbed its wet back and shoulders with a cloth before he turned the tired beast loose to graze. He stood in the damp grass in front of his tent. The setting sun played on his brown temples and the evening wind ruffled his beard. The hunger in his eyes became rapaciousness as he looked down the long green valley. His possessiveness became a passion. “It’s mine,” he chanted, “down deep it’s 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.
The fury left him and he was cold and bewildered and frightened at himself. He sat up and wiped the mud from his lips and beard. “What was it?” he asked himself. “What came over me then? Can I have a need that great?” He tried to remember exactly what had happened. For a moment the land had been his wife. “I’ll need a wife,” he said. “It will be too lonely here without a wife.” He was tired. His body ached as though he had lifted a great rock, and the moment of passion had frightened him.
Over a little fire before his tent he cooked his meager supper, and when the night came he sat on the ground and looked at the cold white stars, and he felt a throbbing in his land. The fire died down to coals and Joseph heard the coyotes crying in the hills, and he heard the little owls go shrieking by, and all about him he heard the field mice scattering in the grass. After a while the honey-colored moon arose behind the eastern ridge. Before it was clear of the hills, the golden face looked through bars of pine-trunks. Then for a moment a black sharp pine tree pierced the moon and was withdrawn as the moon arose.
Here we see the best and the worst in To a God Unknown. The passage is eloquent, it brings the Salinas valley to life before us; also, it gets a bit ridiculous at points. “The hunger in his eyes became rapaciousness as he looked down the long green valley. . . . Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river. . . . His thighs beat heavily on the earth. . . . For a moment the land had been his wife.”
To a God Unknown paints an intense, eccentric vision of life, especially in the hero Joseph, who anchors the book. It has psychological extremes, like Dostoevsky does, pantheism and eroticism like D.H. Lawrence. It’s easy to find these elements ridiculous — but how much of that comes from the surreal world of the book, and how much do we put there, looking at it from our detached modern viewpoint? This book asks for more than suspension of our disbelief, it asks us to accept alien powers. More even than that, I think. To fully comprehend the story, we need to see both the truth and the madness in Joseph’s vision, for this book is romance, tragedy and farce all at once. I like the striving here, the contending forces. To a God Unknown gets odder as it goes, but it was a brave and personal quest for Steinbeck to write it, to persist until he found the balance and energy that (for me) makes it work.
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Steinbeck Crafts a New Style and a New Self
Steinbeck told a friend, a fellow novelist, that To a God Unknown “leaves realism farther and farther behind. I never had much ability for nor faith nor belief in realism.” But this only expresses one moment in the writer’s evolving process. In the end, To a God Unknown has plenty of realism, blended with wilder, more personal modes of vision.
Steinbeck worked five years on To a God Unknown, longer than he spent on either of his blockbusters, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or East of Eden (1952). To a God Unknown was his second novel. Steinbeck was wrestling to shape a tricky story, and also to bind conflicting energies in his imagination and personality. He was carving out the book’s plot, and his own style. He would accomplish other, greater things later, with The Grapes of Wrath — but he had to pass through the crucible of To a God Unknown to get there.
Steinbeck’s Stanford classmate wrote a play called The Green Lady, but never finished it. In 1928 Webster Street became a lawyer, and handed his script over to Steinbeck to rework. For the next five years, Steinbeck chopped and changed everything: characters, location, timeline, moods and themes. Halfway along, he threw out the second half and reframed the rest. During all this, Steinbeck incorporated many other sources, and the major themes haunting his own unconscious. He poured his essence into Street’s vessel, then crafted several bigger vessels until he had his ark.
In 1932 Steinbeck wrote to another Stanford friend that, “The story is a parable, Duke, the story of a race, growth and death. Each figure is a population, and the stones, the trees, the muscled mountains are the world—but not the world apart from man—the world and man—the one indescribable unit man plus his environment.”
Northern California, where he grew up, was a river of inspiration nourishing this book. Steinbeck wrote, “My country is different from the rest of the world. It seems to be one of those pregnant places from which come wonders. Lhasa is such a place. I am trying to translate my people and my country in this . . . I was born to it and my father was. Our bodies came from this soil—our bones came . . . from the limestone of our own mountains and our blood is distilled from the juices of this earth. I tell you now that my country—a hundred miles long and about fifty wide—is unique in the world.” But Steinbeck himself was unique in the world, too, and the world of To a God Unknown also shines forth from his inner light. In 1932 he wrote to his novelist friend, George Albee, “You haven’t any place you know until you make one. And if you make one, it will be a new one. Forget about genius and write books. Whatever you write will be you.”
[This section was distilled from Robert DeMott’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition]
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Five More Popular Steinbeck Novels
To a God Unknown is weird but compelling, and spoke strongly to me. I’m glad I read it, both for itself and for the insight it gave me into Steinbeck as a person and a writer. But Steinbeck is a colossus among American Writers and, if To a God Unknown had mass appeal, you’d have heard of it before today. Steinbeck wrote 27 books, including 16 novels. If you have hardly read Steinbeck, any of these more mainstream works might offer a more accessible entry point.
This was the book Steinbeck wrote after To a God Unknown; it was his first notable success. He humorously portrays a gang of mixed-heritage paisanos, jobless but drunk on life (and wine), as if they were King Arthur and his knights. Steinbeck’s been criticized for heroizing bums, and for stereotyping Latinos in this book. He never meant to do either. In a 1937 foreword, he protested, "it did not occur to me that paisanos were curious or quaint, dispossessed or underdoggish. They are people whom I know and like, people who merge successfully with their habitat . . .good people of laughter and kindness, of honest lusts and direct eyes. If I have done them harm by telling a few of their stories I am sorry. It will never happen again."
This is like Tortilla Flat, in being more a parade of characters and incidents than a plotted novel. It’s a bit shorter, it’s less of a humorous vision, but it’s based on people Steinbeck knew better than the paisanos, so it has more sides of life and realism in it. "Cannery Row" was actually Ocean View Avenue in Monterey — which later got renamed Cannery Row, in honor of Steinbeck’s book.
This novella is easily the shortest book here, and the most concentrated. That’s why it’s so often assigned in high school or freshman college English classes. But if you weren’t force-fed this in your youth, it’s a powerful story and a good place to start with Steinbeck.
This is Steinbeck’s longest novel, and he considered it his greatest. He said, "It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years . . . I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this." Critics found East of Eden’s violence and sadism off-putting, and its Biblical allusions heavy-handed. However, those elements contributed to the book’s popular success, and are judged less harshly in our savage, godless era. You might know the story from the movie, one of James Dean’s three starring roles before his car-crash tragedy, aged 24.
If you read only one Steinbeck, it should be this. The Grapes of Wrath sold fifteen million, won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and was instrumental in earning Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize. It is frequently cited as The Great American Novel. This is Steinbeck’s most significant novel, in how it chronicles US history, our Great Depression, the plight of migrant farm workers in California, and the bleeding liberal heart of the USA. Steinbeck rolled up his sleeves and dove deep into realism here. He visited migrant camps, studied their lives, and compiled his tapestry. Steinbeck wanted to “put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards” who caused the Depression, and to wake up America’s conscience: "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags." Steinbeck wrote a chapter of America.
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