The Long Valley

by John Steinbeck

  Grandfather looked sidewise. "I'm trying to get right side up," he said gently. "I'm not being mad. I don't mind what you said, but it might be true, and I would mind that."

  "It isn't true," said Carl. "I'm not feeling well this morning. I'm sorry I said it."

  "Don't be sorry, Carl. An old man doesn't see things sometimes. Maybe you're right. The crossing is finished. Maybe it should be forgotten, now it's done."

  Carl got up from the table. "I've had enough to eat. I'm going to work. Take your time, Billy!" He walked quickly out of the dining-room. Billy gulped the rest of his food and followed soon after. But Jody could not leave his chair.

  "Won't you tell any more stories?" Jody asked.

  "Why, sure I'll tell them, but only when--I'm sure people want to hear them."

  "I like to hear them, sir."

  "Oh! Of course you do, but you're a little boy. It was a job for men, but only little boys like to hear about it."

  Jody got up from his place. "I'll wait outside for you, sir. I've got a good stick for those mice."

  He waited by the gate until the old man came out on the porch. "Let's go down and kill the mice now," Jody called.

  "I think I'll just sit in the sun, Jody. You go kill the mice."

  "You can use my stick if you like."

  "No, I'll just sit here a while."

  Jody turned disconsolately away, and walked down toward the old haystack. He tried to whip up his enthusiasm with thoughts of the fat juicy mice. He beat the ground with his flail. The dogs coaxed and whined about him, but he could not go. Back at the house he could see Grandfather sitting on the porch, looking small and thin and black.

  Jody gave up and went to sit on the steps at the old man's feet.

  "Back already? Did you kill the mice?"

  "No, sir. I'll kill them some other day."

  The morning flies buzzed close to the ground and the ants dashed about in front of the steps. The heavy smell of sage slipped down the hill. The porch boards grew warm in the sunshine.

  Jody hardly knew when Grandfather started to talk. "I shouldn't stay here, feeling the way I do." He examined his strong old hands. "I feel as though the crossing wasn't worth doing." His eyes moved up the side-hill and stopped on a motionless hawk perched on a dead limb. "I tell those old stories, but they're not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them.

  "It wasn't Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn't been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head.

  "Under the little bushes the shadows were black at white noonday. When we saw the mountains at last, we cried--all of us. But it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering.

  "We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed.

  "Then we came down to the sea, and it was done." He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. "That's what I should be telling instead of stories."

  When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him. "Maybe I could lead the people some day," Jody said.

  The old man smiled. "There's no place to go. There's the ocean to stop you. There's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them."

  "In boats I might, sir."

  "No place to go, Jody. Every place is taken. But that's not the worst--no, not the worst. Westering has died out of the people. Westering isn't a hunger any more. It's all done. Your father is right. It is finished." He laced his fingers on his knee and looked at them.

  Jody felt very sad. "If you'd like a glass of lemonade I could make it for you."

  Grandfather was about to refuse, and then he saw Jody's face. "That would be nice," he said. "Yes, it would be nice to drink a lemonade."

  Jody ran into the kitchen where his mother was wiping the last of the breakfast dishes. "Can I have a lemon to make a lemonade for Grandfather?"

  His mother mimicked--"And another lemon to make a lemonade for you."

  "No, ma'am. I don't want one."

  "Jody! You're sick!" Then she stopped suddenly. "Take a lemon out of the cooler," she said softly. "Here, I'll reach the squeezer down to you."

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  "The Chrysanthemums": First published in Harper's Magazine 175 (October 1937): 513-19

  1:1 grey-flannel fog. Steinbeck typically spelled gray with an e. Although Harper's Americanized the spelling, Viking Penguin follows Steinbeck's spelling here and in all the other short stories with the except ion of "The White Quail."

  8:22-23 Every pointed star ... lovely. Steinbeck's holograph version reads: "Every pointed star gets driven up into you, into your body. It's like that. Hot and sharp and all lovely." The passage was censored in the Harper's publication, with these sentences deleted entirely.

  9:31 scary. The word is misspelled as scarey in the earlier Viking Penguin text. It is spelled as scary in the manuscript and Harper's texts.

  "The White Quail": First published in the North American Review 239 (March 1935): 204-11

  22:9 Florida Water. A trademark name for an aromatic toilet water or perfume with an orange-flower scent.

  "Flight": First published in The Long Valley (1938)

  "Flight" appears in the ledger notebook under the title "Man Hunt." A later entry, titled "Addenda to Flight," was incorporated into the final version of the story.

  "Flight" was one of Steinbeck's most extensively revised stories. Sections of the rejected portions of the first draft appear in John H. Timmerman, The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories (190-92).

  31:3 dulces. Spanish for "sweets," or candy.

  34:21 'Qui 'st'l caballo. Spanish for "Here's the horse."

  "The Snake": First published in the Monterey Beacon (June 22, 1935): 10-11, 14-15; published as "A Snake of One's Own" in Esquire (February 1938): 31, 178-80

  In his 1951 essay "About Ed Ricketts"--the prototype for Dr. Phillips--in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Viking Press, 1951), Steinbeck recollects the actual event from which the short story "The Snake" developed:

  A thing happened one night which I later used as a short story. I wrote it just as it happened. I don't know what it means and do not even answer the letters asking what its philosophic intent is. It just happened. Very briefly, this is the incident. A woman came in one night wanting to buy a rattlesnake. It happened that we had one and knew it was a male because it had recently copulated with another snake in the cage. The woman paid for the snake and then insisted that it be fed. She paid for a white rat to be given it. Ed put the rat in the cage. The snake struck and killed it and then unhinged its jaws preparatory to swallowing it. The frightening thing was that the woman, who had watched the process closely, moved her jaws and stretched her mouth just as the snake was doing. (pp. xxii-xxiii)

  Webster Street, in "Remembering John Steinbeck," San Jose Studies 1 (November 1975), offers a slightly different view of the incident from his eyewitness point of view:

  This girl happened to be there and took a fancy to Ed, and Ed invited her to the lab. And she was a kind of sexy-looking dame and so while she was there, he said that he had to feed the snake. He had a big cage, quite a big cage full of white rats--and he went in there and selected one and put it in with the rattlesnake. The mouse [sic] ran all around, and this girl was just fascinated by the damned thing. And then, pretty soon, the little mouse stopped and the rattlesnake struck. (p. 121)

  Echoes of "The Snake" also appear in chapters 16 and 17 of Sweet Thursday (Viking Press, 1954).

  "Breakfast": First published in the Pacific Weekly 5 (November 9, 1936): 300
<
br />   The first-person narrative of this sketch, likely written in the summer of 1934, is often compared to the third-person accounting in chapter 22 of The Grapes of Wrath.

  "The Raid": First published in North American Review 238 (October 1934): 299-305

  75:10--12 Can't you see? ... what you're doing. Compare Root's words with Jim Casy's in chapter 26 of The Grapes of Wrath: "You fellas don't know what you're doing!" The response to Root is "Kill the red rats!" To Casy, it is "Shut up, you red son-of-a-bitch."

  76:23-24 Forgive them ... what they're doing. Cf. Luke 23:34: "Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

  76:26 Religion is the opium of the people. From Karl Marx (1818-1883), in his introduction to Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (1844).

  "The Harness": First published in Atlantic Monthly 161 (June 1938): 741-49

  "The Harness" was written in the ledger notebook under the working title "The Fool." The geographical setting for the story--"across the Salinas River, next to the foothills"--is similar to that of "The Chrysanthemums," wherein Henry Allen intends to plant sweet peas.

  81:8 sodium amytal. Amytal is a pharmaceutical name for amobarbital, a sedative.

  "The Vigilante": First published as "The Lonesome Vigilante" in Esquire 6 (October 1936): 35, 186A-186B.

  "The Vigilante" is based upon a historic event, the lynchings in San Jose, California, on November 16,1933, of John Maurice Holmes and Thomas Harold Thurmond. The historical circumstances of the case are related in The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories,

  The story first appears in the ledger notebook under the title "Case History." Steinbeck wrote a synopsis of the plot for the story:

  John Ramsey--hated the war and misses it. Came home to the quiet, the lack of design, for the war was a huge design. Wanders lost on his farm looking for a phalanx to join and finds none. Is nervous and very lost. Finally finds the movement in a lynching. War shock not so much war as the ceasing of the drive of war. Hunger for the group. Change of drive. What does it matter. The mob is not a wasteful thing but an efficient thing.

  The "phalanx" is Steinbeck's term for a certain mob psychology, a theory he had been speculating about for several years. "Case History," although lengthy (4,500 words), never really got going as a story, falling prey instead to Steinbeck's social theory.

  Apparently Steinbeck was well aware of this, for he set "Case History" aside, wrote "The White Quail," "Johnny Bear," and two other short pieces, before writing "The Vigilante."

  "Johnny Bear": First published as "The Ears of Johnny Bear" in Esquire 8 (September 1937): 35, 195--200

  Steinbeck alternately titled the story "Johnny Bear" and "The Sisters." The subplot of dredging a swamp, the occupation of the first-person narrator, is rooted in Steinbeck's own brief experience of working as a dredger near Castroville, his model for Loma in the story.

  Steinbeck's native Salinas, however, shares some similarities with Loma, if not in size then in a certain ambience. In his essay "Always Something to Do in Salinas"--published in Holiday 17 (June 1955): 58--59, 152, 153, 156--Steinbeck observes that Salinas grew up on tule swamps. He writes: "Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful but Salinas was not and we knew it" (p. 58). The swamps, Steinbeck reflects, gave the town an atmosphere of darkness: "I wonder whether all towns have the blackness--the feeling of violence just below the surface.... It was a blackness that seemed to rise out of the swamps, a kind of whispered brooding that never came into the open--a subsurface violence that bubbled silently like the decaying vegetation under the black water of the Tule Swamps" (p. 59).

  102:19 fumadiddles. A variation of flumadiddles, meaning trash, worthless things, nonsense--or in this case, strangers.

  117:9-11 I smiled... to fit his thoughts. Cf. Steinbeck's comment in a letter to Peter Benchley in 1956:

  A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing.... Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends, and this is arbitrary because there are no beginnings nor any ends. (SLL, p. 523)

  "The Murder": First published in North American Review 237 (April 1934): 305-12; published in L.ovat Dickson's Magazine 3 (October 1934): 442-46

  In "Steinbeck's 'The Murder': A Critical and Bibliographical Study" [Steinbeck Quarterly 9 (Spring 1976): 45-53], Roy S. Simmonds traces the textual variants among the two magazine publications and the 1938 Viking Press text. As Mr. Simmonds established, an unusual number of variants appear, with a number of errors in the 1938 Viking text that have persisted into later editions. That the manuscript for "The Murder" was edited at the Viking offices, perhaps even by Pascal Covici, is clear, but the Viking text precisely follows neither the holograph manuscript, nor either of the two published manuscripts. Rather, it appears to conflate patterns from the latter two, mixing both American and British usage patterns. The present text standardizes the spelling according to American conventions. Substantive variants from the prior Viking text are indicated in the notes that follow.

  In the holograph manuscript Steinbeck considered three different titles for the story, entering them as a series on one line as follows: Sepie The Murder Jelka Sepic.

  121:2 Canon del Castillo. The holograph draft places the story in the Corral de Tierra--the "Pastures of Heaven" locale. This is struck through in the holograph draft and replaced by Valle del Castillo, then Canon del Castillo. Geographically, the story still takes place in the Corral de Tierra. "The Castle" is in fact an actual rock formation there; the ruined buildings in the story still stand at its base.

  121:21 Jim Moore. Moore's name first appears in the holograph manuscript as Tomas Ernest Manuelo More, then Tomas More, then Jim Moore.

  122:8 bought a fine Guernsey bull. The previous Viking Penguin text erroneously reads brought a fine Guernsey bull.

  122:11 Jelka Sepie. Both the holograph manuscript and the North American Review accent Sepie, Jelka's name changes in the heavily revised holograph manuscript from Stefanie to Steffanie to Jelka, which name, as John Ditsky has pointed out in "Steinbeck's 'Slav Girl' and the Role of the Narrator in 'The Murder,' " means "Helen" in English. Ditsky also traces the ethnic origins and implications of Jelka's full name.

  128:32-34 He listened long for the sound. The previous Viking Penguin text erroneously omits long, present in all other proof manuscripts.

  131:12-13 But behind, the hollow-point bullet... the pillow. Apparently a difficult passage for Steinbeck in the manuscript. His original version reads: The back of the skull was broken out by the hollow pointed bullet and the pillow and wall were splashed. The revision is successful largely because of the switch from passive voice to active for the dramatic event.

  "Saint Katy the Virgin": First published in a limited edition (199 copies) as Saint Katy the Virgin (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936)

  137:24 They went tithing together. That is, Brothers Paul and Colin went out collecting the tithes (ten percent of income) that people owed to the church.

  139:28 APAGE SATANAS. Greek for "Depart, Satan." Cf. Mark 8: 33, where Jesus rebukes Peter by saying, "Get thee behind me [Depart from me], Satan."

  140:6 Daniel in the lion's den. See Daniel chapter 6.

  141:22 Sermon on the Mount. See Matthew chapters 5-7.

  142:20 There is more rejoicing in heaven. See Luke 15:7, from the Parable of the Lost Sheep.

  143:13 scrofula or trichina. Scrofula is a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes, especially in the neck. Trichina, technically the name of the parasitic worm harbored in animal intestines, may be confused by Steinbeck with trichinosis, the disease caused by undercooked meat, particul
arly pork, that harbors the trichinae.

  "The Red Pony" A special, limited edition of 699 copies--which included "The Gift," "The Great Mountains," and "The Promise"--was published in 1937 by Covici-Friede Publishers in New York. A 1945 edition by the Viking Press first included "The Leader of the People" with the other stories.

  "The Gift": First published in North American Review 236 (November 1933): 421-38

  166:13 Strangles. An infectious disease in horses caused by a bacterium (Streptococcus equi), characterized by inflamed mucous membranes and abscesses of the jaw and throat.

  "The Great Mountains": First published in North American Review 236 (December 1933): 492-500

  177:33-34 Now he turned ... jolly mountains. Cf. East of Eden (Viking Press, 1952): "I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains" (p. 4).

  179:18--19 old paisano man. "They were called paisanos because not only were they made up of Spanish and Indian blood, but many of them were also part Italian or part Portuguese." Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 277.

  "The Promise": First published in Harper's Magazine 175 (May 1937): 243-52

  "The Leader of the People": First published in Argosy 20 (August 1936): 99--106

  Argosy is a British publication, and its text is considerably different from that of The Long Valley in minor variants of spelling and punctuation conventions.

  215:11 congress gaiters. Ankle-high shoes with elastic side pieces, usually of black leather (kid) with white elastic.

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  "Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience."--Don DeLillo