The Pearl Read Online Free Page A

than the anger at his own loss of his male heir.
    Steinbeck has also made it clear that losing the pearl is inevitable: Power accrues to those who already have it. Neither Kino nor his family nor his community have any chance of hanging on to the prize fortune has accidentally given them. Understanding that they are fortunate to have their lives, given the rapacity of most human beings (even, or particularly, the doctor), Kino and Juana are reconciled to live their poor lives with gratefulness. It is less a happy ending than it is a stoically resolved one.
    The narrative that Steinbeck thought he would write was subtly changed in his telling. His recent biographer Jackson Benson sees
The Pearl
as a reflection of the synthesis taking place within Steinbeck. His ongoing scientific studies provided the ideas that “would form a bridge from his early work, poetic and visionary, to the so-called sociological works of the middle period, from
In Dubious Battle
to
The Pearl
.” Benson calls attention to the discrepancy in nomenclature: These works are literature, not sociology. But in them Steinbeck’s concern for the real lives of characters that might exist dominates his portraiture. His personal sympathy for the down-and-out of society—whether in the States or in Mexico—led him to draw their circumstances vividly. Steinbeck’s fiction provides convincing details, so that the reader believes in the characters’ dilemmas.
    In the weeks he spent in 1944 getting ready to write
The
Pearl
, Steinbeck found “the little book” more difficult to complete than he had expected. To a friend, he wrote that he had visited the “beautiful” ruins of Mitla and Monte Alban near Oaxaca, as well as San Miguel Allende, commenting on the strangeness of his impressions and his sense that he was experiencing a personal rebirth. After he had finished
Cannery Row
, and Gwyn had given birth to their son, Thom, he was able to begin work on
The Pearl
in earnest. Once the family was settled down and living together, Steinbeck felt that his life was once more whole, and Gwyn then helped write the theme music from what he described as “ancient Indian music long preceding the Conquest.”
    Working on
The Pearl
was an unusual process, one that absorbed much of Steinbeck’s energies. He commented about its being so experimental that he feared it would fail; in a letter to friends, he called the story “folklore” and noted that he had tried “to give it that set-aside, raised-up feeling that all folk stories have.” Once
The Pearl
was finished, in late January of 1945, he wrote with his usual modesty, “It’s a brutal story but with flashes of beauty I think.”
    The process of filming the work dragged on through the summer of 1945, but in 1947 and 1948, it became the first Mexican-made film to be commercially distributed in the States.
The Pearl
was published in 1947 to coincide with the film’s release, though it had earlier appeared as
The Pearl of the World
in the December 1945 issue of
The Woman’s Home Companion
. The reaction to Steinbeck’s nativity story—with Kino, Juana, and Coyotito as his Holy Family—was unimpressive. Although some critics today consider it one of his best postwar accomplishments, it wasoften dismissed when it was reviewed at all as too slight an effort to warrant serious criticism. Louis Owens speaks to that body of what he calls “contradictory criticism” of
The Pearl
, ranging from calling the novella “defective” to a “triumph.” In contrast, readers of the 1990s came to appreciate the work’s broadly based sympathies, its rare understanding of otherness, its insistence on a man’s achieving his own psychological health, and its eloquent lyricism that remains in the reader’s eye and ear as if it were almost a visualization of Kino and Juana’s travail.

Suggestions for Further Reading
    Benson, Jackson J., ed.
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,