MK

“When reading this unusual novel, then, with its oddly unsettling and sometimes strained combination of Christian and pagan, sacred and profane attributes—its earthiness and surreality, violence and pastoralism, pantheism and anthropomorphism, naturalism and lyricism—it is helpful to remember that Steinbeck invested his essential self in it, which is to say, he wrote it more like an extensive poem, or extended dream sequence, than like a traditionally mimetic or realistic novel. “I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener,” he informed Grove Day in late 1929. Thus, while To a God Unknown has an urgent, breathless fairy-tale quality, and is, as critic Howard Levant asserts, more “a series of detached... scenes” than “a unified... organic whole,” it is not an incoherent concoction—“a rambling and improbable history,” as Warren French calls It—that flies in the face of all sensible literary convention. During its long gestation through different versions and multiple drafts, Steinbeck worked hard to create a palpable factual dimension that gives this otherwise arcane book a recognizable texture in regard to its geographical setting and landmarks (the moss-covered rock actually existed in the northern California town of Laytonville), its unusual characters (some of whom, such as the seer, Steinbeck claimed were based on living persons), and in its feel for telling details of nature and social life in Monterey County in the early part of this century.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. There has been handed down a poetical account of this great battle — a story that O’Curry says can hardly be less than fourteen hundred years old — which is very interesting, and wherein we get some quaint glimpses of ancient Irish ethics of war (for even in the most highly imaginative tale, the poets and seanachies of all times, unconsciously reflect the manners of their own age, or of ages just passed).”
― Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland

“In mid-May 1933, while proofreading galley sheets Ballou had sent, he wrote in another notebook: “I read a few pages and found them fairly effective. The detached quality is there undoubtedly. Here and there I could see a word I would like to change were I better known and the fear of proof correction costs less fearful to me. But I was not cast down by the prose. It is ambitious. Perhaps in its thousands of lines there are one or two of pure poetry. The critics will scream at me but I do not care about that.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“Writing to Ballou on the day he had shipped the final manuscript, Steinbeck said: “It will probably be a hard book to sell. Its characters are not ‘home folks.’ They make no more attempt at being sincerely human than the people in the Iliad. Boileau [Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, in The Art of the Poetic (1674)] ... insisted that only gods, kings and heroes were worth writing about. I firmly believe that. The detailed accounts of the lives of clerks don’t interest me much, unless, of course, the clerk breaks into heroism.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown