The Long Valley

The Long Valley, an anthology of twelve short stories by American author John Steinbeck, was released in 1939, the same year as the novel that is often considered his magnum opus, The Grapes of Wrath. The anthology provides a wide survey of the themes and styles Steinbeck evolved through, and returned to, throughout the early and middle stages of his writing career. Each story is characterized by a deep interest in the universal experiences of the ordinary man, with particular attention to the ways in which people feel marginalized or foreign, even in the places where they ostensibly belong. The stories were heavily influenced by the Great Depression, which pervades the emotional lives of the characters. Even so, they strive to grasp some semblance of primal freedom in a capitalist world that tends to suppress it.

In the anthology’s first story, “The Chrysanthemums,” Eliza Allen experiences friction between her innate softness and romanticism and her husband’s abrasiveness. The story utilizes the setting of the garden, which Eliza frequently tends to, and which corresponds to her attempt to fashion a sanctuary in a harsh and uncaring external world. At the story’s beginning, a contrast is established between Eliza’s diligent care for the plants and her statue-like husband who anticipates the coming winter. She particularly loves the chrysanthemums, which come to stand in for her inner life and gentle sexuality. It quickly becomes clear that her husband does not value her perspective on life.

One day, a professional tinker drives up to the ranch, offering his services to Eliza. She replies that she has no work to be done, but gives him a pot of chrysanthemums after he compliments them profusely. She rejoices in the notion that a man might have seen into her inner life, if only briefly. That evening, however, she finds the chrysanthemums discarded on the walkway, the pot smashed. She cries alone, lamenting her isolation in an uncaring world that devalues natural flourishing and seemingly has no place for people like her.



In another story, “The White Quail,” the trope of the garden returns, symbolizing a mental and physical environment for beauty and existential evolution. In this narrative, Mary Tiller seems to misuse these affordances of the garden, vigorously pruning it into a narcissistic psychic image of her idealized self. She is elated one night to spot a white quail that has taken up residence in the garden. Meanwhile, she grows more distant from her husband, Harry, who fails to satisfy her in the way that her personal project does, alienating him as he holds tightly to an idealized image of her. The garden, to her, comes to signify order and sterility. This all changes when a cat enters the garden. Mary panics and orders Harry to kill it with his gun. Disobeying her for a reason that is never explicit, he kills the quail instead. As a result, he puts an end to Mary’s psychic garden, ejecting her from it like a dream.

Perhaps the most well-known story in The Long Valley is “Flight.” It takes place on a farm beside the mountains owned by the Torres family, following their oldest son, Pepe. Pepe’s father passed away years ago, and he rationalizes his absence by passively waiting for the day that he becomes a man and reaches a kind of equivalent subjectivity. When his mother sends him to Monterey to complete a task, a man insults him. Pepe retaliates by murdering him with a knife. Upon his return to the farm, he says farewell to his mother. He takes his father’s horse and gun, leaving for the mountains. Along the way, he loses both of them, while trying to escape from a number of humanoid “dark watchers” who take on the uncanny appearance of both humans and wild phenomena. At the story’s end, a dark watcher slays him, suggesting that they were human after all and had been sent to collect Pepe for his crime.

The Long Valley is rich and winding in content, exploring a diversity of human struggles. Nevertheless, its seemingly unrelated worlds and characters are connected by their shared stake in humanity. As he gives brief but incisive insights into their lives, Steinbeck suggests that there is neither an optimal nor easy way to live a human life.