The Pearl
Authors: John Steinbeck
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Pearl
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast – and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions,
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), and worked on short stories later collected in
The Long Valley
(1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed course regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937) and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a film maker with
The Forgotten Village
(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez
(1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing
Bombs Away
(1942) and the controversial play–novelette
The Moon is Down
(1942).
Cannery Row
(1945),
The Wayward Bus
(1947),
The Pearl
(1947),
A Russian Journal
(1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright
(1950), and
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
(1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden
(1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday
(1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication
(1957),
Once There Was a War
(1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962),
America and Americans
(1966) and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The ‘East of Eden’ Letters
(1969),
Viva Zapata!
(1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976) and
Working Days: The Journals of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’
(1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
Linda Wagner–Martin is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches modern and contemporary American literature, women’s studies, and courses in biography and autobiography. Among her recent books are
Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography
(1994),
The Modern American Novel
(1989) and
Sylvia Plath: A Biography
(1987). She is co-editor of
The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States
and its companion anthology of women’s writing.
JOHN STEINBECK
With an Introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin
Drawings by José Clemente Orozco
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the USA by The Viking Press, 1947
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1948
Published with
The Red Pony
in a Viking Compass edition 1965
Published in Penguin Books 1976
The Pearl
published in Penguin Books 1993
This edition published in the USA in Penguin Books 1994
Published in Great Britain in Penguin Classics 2000
1
Copyright 1945 by John Steinbeck
Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Thom Steinbeck, 1973
Introduction copyright © Linda Wagner-Martin, 1994
All rights reserved
Introduction originally published in
Woman’s Home Companion
as ‘The Pearl of the World’
Drawings by José Clemente Orozco
The moral right of the author of the introduction and of the illustrator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
In 1939, John Steinbeck—who was considered a radical California writer, best known at the time for
In Dubious Battle
, his 1936 novel about unions and strike activity— found himself on the cover of
Time Magazine
. His new novel,
The Grapes of Wrath
, was a runaway success, making him the target for hate mail and FBI scrutiny, as well as commercial fame. In this long narrative about the dispossessed Okies (farmers from Oklahoma, devastated by years of drought on land that was a part of the so-called Dust Bowl) who traveled to California in search of any kind of work on profitable farms, Steinbeck seemed again to sympathize with collective strategies, to hint that communist cooperation was the way to settle economic inequities in the United States. Besides being a best-seller,
The Grapes of Wrath
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940. And it was quickly made into a film starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, a film that many viewers found objectionable (it was the first American-made movie to show a pregnant woman on camera, for example; and it was assuredly and consistently about poor people, those whose lifestyles were so primitive that Americans with enough money for movie tickets did not like to be reminded that fellow citizens lived this way).
Steinbeck would have enjoyed the fame and money that his fiction brought him, but the persecution that resulted from his writing about the poor, people marginalized by the changing industrial patterns of the times, frightened him. The modest and soft-spoken Steinbeck, who had spent years and considerable personal energy studying ocean ecology, had trouble defining himself as a subversive, an unpatriotic man who was a threat to the national interest. Seemingly at the top of his profession with the appearance of
The Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck instead found himself going through torturous self-assessment.
By 1944–1945, when he wrote his novella
The Pearl
, he had pretty much decided that his view of himself was more credible than the versions the media, or the FBI, had created. But these years of personal questioning, and personal quest, had caused Steinbeck to come to terms with what wealth meant, with what an obsession with wealth (and in his case, perhaps, fame) could do to a community, as well as to the identity of the person experiencing that wealth and fame. As he had done before, he drew his personal convictions into the frame of the story he was writing, and when he chose the title for
The Pearl
, he intended readers to recall the biblical “pearl of great price.” In that parable, the jewel for which the merchant trades everything he owns becomes the metaphor for Heaven. Everything in a person’s earthly existence is worthless when compared with the joys of living with the Eternal Father in His Kingdom, or so the gospel of Matthew states.
In Steinbeck’s parable, however, when “the great pearl, perfect as the moon… as large as a sea-gull’s egg,” is found by the illiterate and innocent Mexican man Kino, his discovery became a way for Steinbeck to assess the
American dream and to find it wanting. To become successful, to gain possessions and prominence, to become a force within a community—these were aspects of the dream that everyone recognized and few questioned. But for Steinbeck, the great notoriety of
The Grapes of Wrath
had been traumatic. After its publication, he turned inward and interrogated the values he had assumed he shared with most Americans. As a result of his experience, he saw that the established people in communities cared little about anyone else’s misfortunes but would do whatever they could to keep prestige and position for themselves. The lives of the simple Kino and his wife, Juana, illustrate the fall from innocence of people who had assumed that finding wealth would erase their problems. Steinbeck had earlier written about such characters in his short story “Flight” and in
Tortilla Flat
(the
paisanos
—now Chicanos—of Monterey), as he would later write about a more racially mixed group in
Cannery Row
(Mack and his friends). He wrote, ironically, that these characters’ good points—“kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling”—were the traits most likely to lead to failure in the dog-eat-dog capitalistic system.
Steinbeck’s life had been one of lower middle-class values as he learned the craft of writing. Born in 1902 in Monterey County, California, he grew up with Mexican American friends, and became fascinated by their lack of concern for more prestigious WASP values. He felt pulled between the two cultures. As a college student, he studied at Stanford University, majoring in marine biology, a science that attracted him by its beauty and systemic order. In 1925 he dropped out of school to work his way to New York City through the Panama Canal. There he worked as a journalist
and practiced the art of writing, publishing a fictionalized life of Sir Henry Morgan (
Cup of Gold
) in 1929.
Returning to California, for two winters Steinbeck lived alone in the High Sierra mountains, writing and developing a philosophy that showed his respect for the symmetry and sensibility of the natural world. His personal pantheism replaced any other organized religion (in
Cannery Row
, his version of the Lord’s Prayer begins “Our Father who art in nature”). He then worked in a trout hatchery and on fruit ranches (laboring with Mexican Americans in the orchards), and as a surveyor, an apprentice painter, and a chemist. In 1932 he published
Pastures of Heaven
, a collection of short stories about the working-class people who lived in the secluded valley of that name. In 1935, after he had sold the screen rights to
Tortilla Flat
, his fiction about the
paisanos
of Monterey, he took a trip to Mexico for several months.
As a native Californian, Steinbeck was aware of how much Mexico meant to the American culture that surrounded him, and he was curious about—and interested in—the country. It was becoming clear to him that any system of morality—one of the things for which he had searched during his years working outside the privileged occupations in the States—could sometimes be more easily found among the poor than among the financially successful. If Steinbeck was cynical, his cynicism at least had its roots in his real-life experiences. One result of that Mexican experience was
Of Mice and Men
, his 1937 novella that became a successful play, where he again probed the tragedy inherent in lives crippled by the brutality of poverty and ignorance. In Lennie’s case, his retarded mind combined with his powerful physique led inexorably to predictable tragedies.
Between the often frightening reactions to
The Grapes of Wrath
and his earlier fiction, and Steinbeck’s work on
The Pearl
in 1944, came other experiences that helped to confirm his feelings about the values of the poor who knew little except how to be genuine, truthful, and usually moral. He served as a journalist during World War II, living in danger on the Italian front. In contrast to that bleak, chaotic time, he had one of his most idyllic periods when, in the spring of 1940, he sailed with Ed Ricketts, his friend and partner in a small biological laboratory, from Monterey up the west shore of the Gulf of California to Angeles Bay and then across to Puerto San Carlos east and south to Agiabampo Estuary. During the six weeks of their travels in Baja, collecting marine and terrestrial organisms and animals, they lived among the Mexican people, whom they liked because of their tough yet humane values. So important was this journey to Steinbeck at this time in his life, rocked by the unexpected criticism of his work and slanderous innuendos, that, with Ricketts, he wrote
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research
.
What he had thought to be the peace of California life, with its live-and-let-live attitude toward people of color, came to an abrupt halt in 1942 and 1943, when Los Angeles was racked by race riots. In the east-side barrios, Mexican and Mexican American adolescents and young men had formed
pachucos
, or gangs, and as uniforms wore wide-brimmed hats and long-tailed coats, complete with ankle-length watch chains. Dressed in these zoot suits, the Mexican men were targets for racial discrimination. The trial of twenty-four
pachucos
in the summer of 1942 for the murder of Jose Diaz near “The Sleepy Lagoon” swimming hole led to many convictions, and the men had served
two years of their sentences before the second-degree murder convictions were overturned for lack of evidence. Even more visible were the ten days of the so-called Zoot Suit Race Riots in June of 1943, when U.S. servicemen from the Navy training facility in the barrio attacked the zoot-suited Mexicans. Abetted by police, the servicemen went free while the Mexicans were arrested. Like the unreasonable persecution of the Okies, this turn against people of Mexican background puzzled and angered Steinbeck.
During the early 1940s Steinbeck also wrote screenplays for four films, among them the documentary
The Forgotten Village
, about the conflicts between modern medicine and superstitious folk cures in a Mexican town. During the filming of that project, he returned to Mexico twice, and when he took his wife, Gwyn, for a third visit, friends there suggested that he write a screenplay for a film to be produced and filmed in Mexico, a film that might create a true picture of Mexican life because it could bypass the Hollywood studios. Emilio Fernandez, Mexico’s best-known
auteur
, and Gebrial Figuora, his cinematographer, wanted to make the film with Steinbeck.
The Pearl
, then, grew out of this invitation to write a text suitable for filming, and Steinbeck’s strategies in it are often filmic: his use of only a few characters, action pared to key scenes that involve intensely emotional interchanges, and ways for readers/viewers to visualize that emotion. He also used a cinematic point of view, with some sections presented in close-up and others at medium or distant range. Like an objectively presented documentary text,
The Pearl
focused on showing the reader/viewer what life for Kino and Juana was like. Some of the elements of the story are drawn from
The Forgotten Village
(i.e., the rapacious
physician), but the source of the narrative is much more clearly the tale of the young Mexican boy who finds a pearl of great value, a legend that Steinbeck narrated in
Sea of Cortez
. For the next several years, through his World War II experiences and his own unhappy personal life, Steinbeck searched for a story suitable for a Mexican-made and directed film. Dissatisfied as he had become with American materialism and the pressure to be loyal to a system that oppressed the poor, Steinbeck focused on the chance to write something truthful. He also hoped his screenplay would promote understanding among races.
As he thought about the pearl story, however, the legend seemed much too simple. In the
Sea of Cortez
narrative, the boy finding the pearl was intent on using it for money to buy drink, sex, and clothes. The tragedy in this version of the tale was that the pearl dealers in La Paz (the ironically named Village of Peace) would not give him a reasonable price for the pearl, and after realizing that he was the victim of their collusion, he buried the jewel. Owning such valuable property, he became the target for attack, and that night he was beaten. The next night, when he stayed with a friend, both boys were beaten; later, when he traveled away from the village, he was again tracked and beaten. So he returned to La Paz, dug up the pearl, cursed it, and threw it into the sea. In Steinbeck’s words, “He was a free man again with his soul in danger and his food and shelter insecure. And he laughed a great deal about it.” While a reader might question what was comic about an endangered soul and insecure living, one of Steinbeck’s points was that, as a single man, his protagonist could take chances with life. His existence was not threatened by his giving up the fortune.
What was important about the legend as Steinbeck recalled it is that the boy had the sense to get rid of the object that was going to cost him his life. The original pearl story, then, is a parable of materialism, an example of the dangers of prosperity in a culture that thinks nothing of killing for money. But the pearl story as Steinbeck wrote it several years later is different, and it shows how complex his own state of mind was at this time of conjunction of war experience, Hollywood film experience, material success from
The Grapes of Wrath
and other ventures, with all the good things tempered radically by the deaths he had observed in the theater of war, as well as by the death of his marriage. The year 1944 was a time of personal change for John Steinbeck, and he was apprehensive about that change.
His personal situation influenced his creation of
The Pearl
. When Steinbeck wrote his version of the story, he made the young man into the older Kino, a responsible married man with a wife and child to provide for. Kino is probably named for Eusebius Kino, the Jesuit missionary and explorer in the Gulf region (it was he who proved that lower California was a peninsula—a
baja
—rather than an island). In
Sea of Cortez
, Steinbeck had shown his knowledge of many of the explorers and missionaries, both Mexican and American, involved with the settlement of the Baja. That journal too has a spiritual overlay, as Steinbeck used it to explore several sets of principles for leading a good life.
Juana, the name he chose for Kino’s wife, means “woman,” and as such she becomes the answerer, the solace for her husband’s disappointed idealism. As in his earlier fiction, particularly in the characters of Ma and Pa Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck drew male and female as complementary characters, with the woman having wisdom, common sense, and authority to balance the man’s more wistful and sometimes unrealistic hopes. With tempered sympathy, Steinbeck acknowledges that Kino is obsessed with hanging on to the pearl, and that in equating it with his pride, he fails to see that his more useful role toward his family would be protecting them. When he confesses that the pearl has become his soul. Kino admits that he will endanger his family rather than relinquish his prize, and his abuse of Juana when she tries to get rid of the pearl illustrates his growing fanaticism. In that unexpected violence, Steinbeck shows how far from any Jungian individuation Kino’s wealth has taken him—he is a monster of a male ego, not a caring and supportive husband. But behind Kino’s obviously rash behavior stands the tranquil wife, who watches over him while he sleeps and starts the fire each morning. Though all-knowing and all-caring, Juana in her role as submissive wife does not have enough power to make Kino listen to her warnings.
