John Steinbeck - To a God Unknown

To a God Unknown is John Steinbeck's second novel, published four years after the unsuccessful but promising, Cup of Gold. Steinbeck spent a great deal of time writing a much larger story than To a God Unknown would eventually become, biting off a great deal more than he could, at the time, chew. Pared down to roughly two hundred and thirty pages, To a God Unknown is a story of the farmer Joseph Wayne as he struggles to gain a foothold for his family in the new, unclaimed land of California. Joseph's father, who always wished to see the new land, dies before the family leaves but after Joseph has gone and Joseph, exultant at California's fertility, begins to believe that his father's spirit inhabits a tree near his new home.

Joseph is a man unknown as much as Joseph's tree becomes his unknown God. His brothers and their wives and children, who follow him to California after he tells them the land is good, respect and admire him, and follow him, but they do not know him. Rama, Joseph's brother Thomas' wife, is a “strong, full-breasted woman with black brows that nearly met over her nose.” She is one of the first to recognise Joseph's pagan understanding with the tree, perhaps because she shares a deep knowledge of unspoken things herself. Joseph is attuned to the earth, considering that his fortunes will rise and fall with it, and that the duty of caring for the land is his and his alone. Rama's knowledge is hearth-based, revolving around children and birthing and marriages and relationships, but she connects with Joseph in a way that his brothers cannot.

Steinbeck builds the mystery surrounding Joseph and his inner knowledge well. Though we are almost always 'carried along' with Joseph as he tends the land and finds a wife and has a child, we are rarely made aware of his actual thoughts. We, as much as his family, can only observe, though we do perhaps understand his bond with the tree better because we see the effect it has on him. As the novel progresses and Joseph ties himself to the land with the tight ropes of childbirth and death, Steinbeck pulls back even further from Joseph, to the extent where before it was as though we were walking alongside him, but now we are viewing him from a distance. The greater the distance between Joseph and the reader the larger he becomes, threatening to swamp the narrative with the force of his personality.

For all that the novel sounds like a mystical, pagan dance, it is actually quite earthy and lively. Much time is devoted to explaining and exploring the land, the animals and the plants and the tending of cows and crops, and much time is given to the goings on of Joseph's extended family. There are extended passages on farming, such as, “Joseph worked tremendously in the prodigal spring. He cut the bull calves, moved rocks out of the flowers' way, and went out with his new branding-iron to burn his 'JW' into the skins of the stocks...” Farming, and the farm life, and how the rains affect the fortunes, moods and possibilities of the family, are paramount to the novel. Joseph is, however, the centre, of the novel and the family and the land, which makes his presence felt everywhere. As Rama says to Joseph's brand new wife Elizabeth, “I do not know whether there are men born outside humanity, or whether some men are so human as to make others seem unreal. Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then...”

Joseph's connection to the earth is a primal one, something he feels within every particle of himself. But his connection to the tree is greater and when, roughly halfway into the novel, the tree dies, the novel shifts tone and becomes something darker, less about the potential of newness and prosperity and more about the dissolution of lives and the absence of hope. Steinbeck brings Joseph's paganism to the fore as he rejects ordinary civilisation and comes to resemble a man he and his brother once met earlier, a man who would sacrifice a small animal to the sun each day as it died in the West.

The central theme of the novel is belief. Each characters hold a strong belief inside themselves, some ordinary, others not. Rama, as mentioned above, has the belief and the knowledge of homely matters; Elizabeth, Joseph's wife, becomes something of a primal mother when she has her first child; Burton, Joseph's brother, is devoutly, obsessively Christian – and the list goes on. Joseph's belief is greater than the others, to the point where they begin to feel swamped by his power and must leave. But is his belief true? What he believes seems to occur, but that doesn't mean much – religion, no matter how primitive or advanced, has a certain knack for explaining events in a way that makes it seems foretold. Steinbeck extends the novel or, rather, Joseph's belief, as far as it can possibly go, taking events to their natural, satisfactory end. To a God Unknown is a strange novel, powerful and cohesive but odd, as though Joseph's importance was never fully pushed on to the reader. There are times when we believe Joseph's belief, and times when we do not, just as there are times when he really does seem more knowing of the land and the trees and stars than anyone else, and times when we can, just like Burton and Rama and the others, both fear and ridicule the strength of his convictions, convictions based on little more than the fluttering of leaves on a tree, and the chill breath of wind before it rains.

Steinbeck was not wholly successful with To a God Unknown, but he didn't fail, either. The ordinary, life on the farm aspects of the novel are confident and assured, showing hints of his later and greater achievements in that area. Joseph's mysticism, however, fails at times, particularly near the end when Steinbeck attempts to link Joseph, at least in his mind, to the power and importance of Christ. A noble attempt, and worth the read.

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