A tinker’s wagon pulls into a farmyard in the opening story of The Long Valley by John Steinbeck and the woman working in the flower bed refuses to give him anything to mend. Then he asks what the plants are, and she talks for a page about what it feels like in the hands when you know what you are doing, and her voice goes husky, and she reaches toward his leg and stops herself.
He takes the chrysanthemum shoots she gives him and dumps them on the road a few miles on, keeping the pot. She sees them from her husband’s car that evening and looks away.
That is fifteen pages, and a group could spend an entire evening on it. Which is the first thing to say about The Long Valley by John Steinbeck: do not assign the whole book.
What Is Actually In The Long Valley
Thirteen pieces, published by Viking in September 1938, six months before the novel that made him internationally famous. The title suggests a designed cycle in the manner of the earlier linked-story book about a Californian valley. It is not one. The pieces were written separately and gathered at his editor’s suggestion out of what was in the drawer.
Four of the thirteen make up the Red Pony cycle, published on its own for decades and reviewed here separately. One, a medieval joke about a saintly pig, was written years earlier than the rest. The remaining eight came out of a single stretch between the summer of 1933 and the summer of 1934, written at the dining table of his parents’ house in Salinas while he nursed his mother, who had suffered a severe stroke that March. He was broke. His three published novels had together earned under a thousand dollars.
Most of these stories were rejected by magazines when he sent them out.
The Four Stories in The Long Valley Worth Assigning
“The Chrysanthemums.” Start here. It is the best thing in The Long Valley by John Steinbeck and everybody in the room will have something to say about it. A capable, strong, thirty-five-year-old farm wife with an extraordinary gift for growing things, a kind husband who cannot hear her, and twenty minutes with a stranger who pretends to understand and then throws her gift in a ditch. Nothing happens and everything does.
“The Harness.” A farmer so respected that his neighbours plant whatever he plants has worn a shoulder brace and an elastic belt under his clothes for twenty years because his tiny invalid wife wanted him to stand straight. She dies on page four. He strips the harness off in front of a horrified neighbour, announces that his stomach is going to stick out from now on, and says his life has been dribbled out to him. Then he plants forty-five acres of sweet peas. What happens after that is the discussion.
“Flight.” A boy of nineteen stabs a man in a drunken quarrel and rides into the mountains. The story then takes everything off him in order: horse, knife, coat, hat, rifle, the use of one hand. By the last page he is scraping an infected wound with a shard of rock. It is the most physical writing in the book and there is not a spare clause in it.
“Johnny Bear.” The best machine in the collection. A man with the mind of a child and the memory of a recording device can reproduce any conversation he overhears, in the exact voices, and he will do it in the bar for a glass of whiskey. What he reproduces is what two respectable spinster sisters say to each other with the windows shut. The town needs those women to be what it thinks they are. The story is about what a community does when its proof of goodness fails.
The One You Must Warn People About
“The Murder” won a prize in 1934 and a group needs to know what is in it before they open it.
A rancher married to a Croatian woman he cannot talk to finds her in bed with her cousin and shoots the man through the head while he sleeps. The coroner tells him the charge will be dismissed, as such charges always are in that part of the country. He then fetches a nine-foot bull whip, goes up to the hayloft and beats his wife. She comes down, washes her bitten mouth, fries him eggs, and asks whether he will whip her again. He says not for this. She smiles.
The Long Valley by John Steinbeck presents that as a marriage locating its proper arrangement, and nothing in the narration disagrees. A table can have a serious discussion about it, including about the ugly business of the wife being written as barely human and the beating being framed as her father’s cultural advice coming true. But nobody should meet it cold.
Where It Will Lose People
Be straight about the rest of The Long Valley by John Steinbeck:
- “Saint Katy the Virgin” is a feeble gag about a cannibal pig that gets canonised, and it does not belong in the book.
- “The Vigilante” puts a lynching on the page in close detail, with the narrator using the period’s language throughout and no authorial comment at all.
- “The White Quail” and “The Raid” are interesting and thin; one is a symbol worked through to its conclusion, the other a sketch toward a later novel.
- Paying for the Red Pony stories a second time will annoy anyone who already owns them.
The Three-Page Story in The Long Valley
Before a group disperses, somebody should read “Breakfast” aloud. It takes four minutes.
A man on a road before dawn smells bacon and bread, stops at a tent, and is fed by a family of cotton pickers who have had twelve days of work and new dungarees they are quietly proud of. Nothing happens. The opening line has the narrator confessing he cannot account for the memory at all. Five years later that same act of noticing, given six hundred pages and a political argument, made its author one of the most famous writers alive.
Reading It With the Rest of John Steinbeck
The useful comparison for a group that has finished The Long Valley by John Steinbeck is our analysis of Of Mice and Men, written immediately after these stories, where the compression he learned in the short form is doing all the work. The book that followed six months later is covered in our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath, and the connection is direct. For the same country given twenty years and six hundred pages, there is our analysis of East of Eden. “The Murder”, for what it is worth, took an O. Henry Award the year it appeared, which is worth knowing when you argue about it.
Questions for the Table
These assume the four stories above. A table that has read all of The Long Valley by John Steinbeck will want to add one about why the weak pieces were included at all.
- Does Elisa’s husband do anything wrong? Could he have?
- The tinker keeps the pot and dumps the plants. Is he cruel or just poor?
- In “The Harness”, does the farmer get free?
- “Johnny Bear” is paid in whiskey to destroy two people. Who is responsible?
- What is a group supposed to do with a well-made story whose moral position it finds repellent?
- These were mostly written in one year by a man nursing his dying mother. Does that change how you read them?
Before You Assign It
A lynching rendered in detail with the era’s slurs intact, a wife beaten with the story’s approval, a death by the character’s own hand, a pregnancy treated as disgrace, a cat and a rat killed in a laboratory on the page, and a long death from blood poisoning.
After the Last Page
What survives is the attention.
The Long Valley by John Steinbeck was put together by a publisher out of whatever had accumulated, and it turns out to hold the most exact writing of his career: a woman proud that her flowers smell bitter, a farmer scratching his stomach the moment his corset comes off, two labourers inhaling when hot bread leaves a rusty oven. Four of these stories are better than most novels. Two of them should not be read without warning. The honest recommendation for a group is to pick, and to argue about the picking.
Nobody should have to defend the whole book. The best of it defends itself in fifteen pages.