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Long ago I’d expressed an interest in reading the works of John Steinbeck in chronological order, starting with Cup Of Gold, his account of Sir Henry Morgan’s piratic life, and then immediately lost track of that aim. I’ve returned to it now, albeit with a slight ‘administrative’ error, in that I’ve come next to To A God Unknown (1933), rather than The Pastures Of Heaven, published the prior year.

Year of publication aside, To A God Unknown took Steinbeck the greatest number of years of any of his works to write, so if the year of publication doesn’t precede The Pastures Of Heaven, the idea certainly does. In fact, as Robert DeMott makes clear in his lengthy introduction, the novel has its origins in an unfinished play by one of his classmates, and over the years saw many drafts and titles as Steinbeck toiled to get it under wraps. It may not be the best of the books he wrote, but it was the one that, through the toil of writing it, made him as a writer.

The novel begins on the Wayne Farm in Vermont, where Joseph Wayne expresses to his father an interest in following the westering crowds and claiming himself some land. (”If I wait, the good land might all be taken.”) where it’s preferred that he stay home a while and find a wife.

“If you could wait a year,” the old man said at last, “a year or two is nothing when you’re thirty-five. If you could wait a year, not more than two surely, then I wouldn’t mind. You’re not the oldest, Joseph, but I’ve always thought of you as the one to have the blessing. Thomas and Burton are good men, good sons, but I’ve always intended the blessing for you, so you could take my place. I don’t know why. There’s something more strong in you than in your brothers, Joseph; more sure and inward.”

In a Joseph, with brothers, singled out by his father there’s an nod to the Joseph of Genesis (no coat of many colours, though), enhanced by the skill of interpreting symbols and later incidents pertaining to the land he settles. On reaching this new pasture, verdant and teeming with life, Steinbeck foreshadows Joseph’s path and gives a first real taste of his intuitive ability:

The past, his home and all the events of his childhood were being lost, and he knew he owed them the duty of memory. This land might possess all of him if he were not careful. To combat the land a little, he thought of his father, of the calm and peace, the strength and eternal rightness of his father, and then in his thought the difference ended and he knew there was no quarrel, for his father and this new land were one. Joseph was frightened then. “He’s dead,” he whispered to himself. “My father must be dead.”

With his father indeed dead, the remainder of his brothers uproot their families to join him and together they farm this new promised land, raising cattle, breeding pigs. Joseph takes a young wife, an educated schoolteacher, and it’s all happy families for a time. Tensions rise, however, as one of the brothers, Burton, confronts Joseph on his pagan beliefs, namely his attitude toward a large tree that looms over the farmhouse:

“My father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to believe it.”

Through Joseph Wayne, almost shamanlike in his understanding of the land, we follow an exploration of man’s relationship to nature, for better and for worse. In he good days the livestock breeds, the crops grow, and the rains come; in the bad days, the opposite, and the land dries. When, knowing the harshness of the land, sticks are upped and people move to pastures new, all that remains is Wayne, stubborn to the last, which leads to a wonderfully ambiguous conclusion that leaves open a number of possible readings.

At times the abundance of description can, though evocative, be laid on thick, and the dialogue comes across as wooden, but there are still moments when Wayne reflects on the world around him that raise the book above mere catalogue of events and add a further depth to what could otherwise be a flat character:

High up on tremendous peak, towering over the ranges and the valleys, the brain of the world was set, and the eyes that looked down on the earth’s body. The brain could not understand the life on its body. It lay inert, knowing vaguely that it could shake off the life, the towns, the little houses of the fields with earthquake fury. But the brain was drowsed and the mountains lay still, and the fields were peaceful on their rounded cliff that went down to the abyss. And thus it stood a million years, unchanging and quiet, and the world-brain in its peak lay close to sleep. The world-brain sorrowed a little, for it knew that some time it would have to move, and then the life would be shaken and destroyed and the long work of tillage would be gone, and the houses in the valley would crumble. The brain was sorry, but it could change nothing.

While To A God Unknown is a minor Steinbeck, it’s important in light of the works that would come later. In its California setting, the hardship of a devastated land, and Biblical allusions we are given a dress rehearsal of major Steinbeck novels. Apparently less than six hundred copies of the novel sold on its initial release. Dress rehearsals were never meant for the public anyway.

With Christmas in mind I fancied reading something festive to try and get me out of the humbug spirit and, while the obvious choice would have been Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I thought it more interesting to try Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal (1845). It’s a novella, with the subtitle A Christmas Tale and, given how blank and frosty the cover is, I went in with little idea as to how the story would go, knowing only that it concerned village life and two children lost in an icy landscape. And, having read Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace earlier this year, the prospect of lost children and icy landscapes is always a welcome one.

Rock Crystal takes some time before its main narrative gains control to look at the tradition of Christmas (”…when nights are long and days are short, when the sun slants toward earth obliquely and snow mantles the fields…”) in rural Bohemia which Stifter presents with warmth, bringing the touch of a fairy tale to the snowy mountains and valleys:

In most places, midnight as the very hour of Christ’s birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendour, to which bells wring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with frost, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring - the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.

The story tightens its scope from exploring village life at this time of the year to the marriage of the beautiful daughter of the dyer of Millsdorf to the shoemaker of Gschaid (and she hasn’t done too bad for herself since shoemakers are “indispensible the world over where human beings are no longer in the primitive stage”) and this one just happens to be the only one in the whole valley. But despite their marriage, the dyer’s daughter is still considered a stranger to the people of Gschaid, where, like all villages, customs hold dear to a place. Even the children soon borne of the marriage are considered strangers.

It’s not long before the children are older and the eldest, Conrad, is allowed to escort his younger sister, Sanna, across the mountains to Millsdorf in order visit their grandmother. This Christmas, returning with presents and pockets stuffed with bread, they find themselves lost on the mountains when the weather takes a turn for the worse and they find the blizzard of snow is filling in their recent footprints so that they are “going on with the dogged endurance that children and animals have, not knowing what is ahead or when their reserves may give out”:

…on every side was nothing but a blinding whiteness, white everywhere that none the less drew its ever narrowing circle about them, paling beyond into fog that came down in waves, devouring and shrouding everything till there was nothing but the voracious snow.

Stifter does well to present the icy landscape in Rock Crystal, dominated as it is by the snowy mountain with its “dazzling horn-shaped peaks” and rock-faces “coated with a white velvet map of hoar-froast and glaze with ice-tissue” making it “the inspiration of many a tale”. The alpine meadows sparkle white, too; and the trees that speckle the mountainside are “drooping with the weight of snow”. Reading around the novella, it seems that Stifter is renowned for his depictions of landscapes and the knack he obviously had for them is demonstrated here with depth, variety, and genuine appreciation.

While the children’s adventure in the story brings them close to death, their will to survive drives them on further into the night, into the ice. And meanwhile, the people of Gschaid come together to bring the children to safety, their selfless hunting a significant act that shows that these people considered strangers are not so after all and that the mother can enjoy “the same familiarity and warm intimacy that existed between the people that belonged to the valley.”

The finest moment of Rock Crystal is certainly the descriptive passages, especially over the typical 19th Century exposition where you get the whole family history before the story is allowed to happen, as they bring an immediacy to the prose, a sense of actually being present in the valley (and on the mountain) as snow falls. My inner sadist was hoping for a different conclusion, but the charm of Stifter’s novella is that it ties faith in with the spirit of Christmas. Not so much faith in the religious sense, but the unquestionable duty to other people for which we should hope to depend on when needs must. And for a Christmas tale, it was good to put my faith in Stifter.