To a God Unknown (John Steinbeck)

240 pages
Published in 1933

Although it runs only 240 pages (compare that to East of Eden at 601 pages), To a God Unknown was the project which took Steinbeck the longest to complete. It was only his second full-length novel, and he worked on it over a period of five years, nearly scrapping it on more than one occasion. And despite all of his revisions and efforts he just did not succeed in making it a great piece of literature.

Now don't get me wrong -- it is still in an entirely different league than the pulpy kind of garbage that sells by the cartload at the grocery checkout line, and it should have been more obvious to the critics of the day that this young author had great potential. But ultimately To a God Unknown is an example of a writer overreaching, straining to attain lofty heights and instead painfully falling short.

It was actually reassuring to me -- as one of the 295 million aspiring authors in the United States -- to see that someone with as much talent as Steinbeck could also struggle to find himself. In fact, this novel taught me a few good lessons:

1) Not all projects or ideas are created equal. To a God Unknown sprang out of a play that one of Steinbeck's friends had written in college. Being a young and inexperienced author, Steinbeck may have thought it would be easier to build on an existing storyline and set of characters, despite the fact that the source itself did not receive many accolades. But the kernel of the story was just lacking something. I have no doubt that Steinbeck greatly improved it in his version, but a plot focusing on a farmer who reverts to pantheism and ultimately sacrifices his own blood to feed the drought-ridden land simply does not resonate with the average person,* no matter how talented Steinbeck himself was. It's the literary equivalent to Christopher Nolan's film, Insomnia, which also showed that all the talent in the world can't make up for a weak story line, even if it is well executed. Before pouring five years of his life into a story that was fundamentally flawed, Steinbeck would have been well-advised to spend more time elaborating a better premise.

2) Establishing your voice is crucial. Even the most casual fan knows that Steinbeck's books generally take place in the Salinas region of California, and that his works are populated by the most common of people. In To a god Unknown he is still honing this voice, and makes the ill-fated decision to focus on a character who is larger than life. Joseph (modeled after the biblical figure) is a man who nobody -- not his wife, brothers, or ultimately the readers -- can relate to, because he is intentionally designed to be more. He has feelings and desires that the average person cannot relate to, and his behavior and beliefs are, at times, simply inexplicable. It wasn't until Steinbeck discovered his ability to relate to the common man with his next novel, Tortilla Flat, a story about wine-drinking, fun-loving paisanos in Monterey, California, that he achieved critical success.

3) To succeed at being an author, you have to WORK. Those were an incredibly trying five years for Steinbeck, during which time he weathered many setbacks and rejections. We have the benefit of hindsight to know that it all turned out well in the end, but for the young author he had no way of knowing that he would ever succeed. His first novel, Cup of Gold, had hardly sold at all, and for five long years he divided his time between trying to sharpen a story which would ultimately defeat him, and trying to sell a story he was faltering with to publishers who had no faith in him. If he had not slogged through this book and seen its publication (and subsequent lack of success) and still been willing to push onward, the world would never have known Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, or The Winter of our Discontent.

Ultimately I would love to be responsible for a failure as great as To a God Unknown. It is easy to follow the link from this novel, with its tragedy and gritty earthiness, to Steinbeck's masterpieces. But, somewhat ironically, this novel does a better job at illuminating the enormous character of Steinbeck than it does at interesting the reader in the artificial and ambiguous Joseph Wayne.





[*Now that I've written it up in this single sentence I'm feeling a little more intrigued by it -- maybe I can kind of understand the allure it held for Steinbeck, even if in the end it was inperfectable.]