The Valley of Eden

Perhaps influenced by Dante, we are accustomed to imagining Eden up there, high above. Leopardi, too, linked happiness with asceticism: ‘Perhaps if I had wings to fly above the clouds […] I would be happier’. Yet in the fourth chapter of Genesis, after Cain has committed fratricide and God has marked him, forcing him to continue living—but outside Eden—there is no mention of height or depth: it merely states that Cain goes ‘east of Eden, to the land of Nod’. It is the place where we, the descendants of Cain, still dwell: and in 1952, John Steinbeck wrote a book about it ("East of Eden", erroneously translated as "The Valley of Eden").

“The land east of Eden is not Eden, certainly not, but nor can one say that it lies at an insurmountable distance,” the Californian author noted in 1951. One might wonder what he meant, and whether he’d been drinking (which was not unusual for him), given that he’d seen quite a lot: the Great War (from afar), the Second World War (up close), the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl (from the inside). Later, Vietnam. And more: two messy divorces, two difficult children, his best friend killed by a train. And no faith to cling to, save in humanity (he was a Freemason).

And yet, this non-believer knew the Bible better than many believers (like the character Lee in the novel), and not just because he was born in the USA… In The Valley of Eden – where everything is biblical, starting with the title – alongside the Chinese character Lee, the character who is most surprising, and the only one capable of giving the protagonist Adam (a middle-aged man in crisis, in whom it is not difficult to recognise the Steinbeck of the 1940s) a good slap, is Samuel Hamilton. A man who ‘doesn’t talk like the rest of us. He’s Irish. He’s got loads of plans, a hundred plans a day. And he’s full of hope’. This man is none other than Steinbeck’s own maternal grandfather: a poor wretch (and a Christian) who ended up with the only plot of land in the Salinas Valley where not a single fig tree grows. And yet, he is capable of saying: “I like that pile of dust. I love it as a bitch loves her scrawniest pup. I love every flint, every outcrop that breaks the plough, I love the thin, dry layer of humus, I love its parched heart. Somewhere in my pile of dust there’s a treasure.” And he looks not only at his own land in this way, but also at Adam.

Perhaps Eden really is not an insurmountable distance away, nor is it above us, but within us. We need to dig through the dust of the heart. To do so, however, we need a friend: someone who looks upon us with hope. This is where the possibility lies to always start afresh, and not to be enslaved by (one’s own) evil, which in the novel is encapsulated by the key word ‘timshel’ – the ‘you can (overcome your sin)’ that God says to Cain before his exile. But it is not a ‘you can’ in the style of Pico della Mirandola, nor an echo of Pelagius: for ‘beneath the superficial layers of their fragility, people long to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, almost all their vices are attempts to find a shortcut to goodness’. It is all too clear, in fact, that we cannot save ourselves on our own.

We have not yet invented the wings of happiness. The twentieth century tried to forge many such wings, but every mad flight ended miserably, like Icarus, in a sea of blood. And yet, in the midst of that century, whilst here in Europe the party of nihilism was gaining the upper hand, this masterpiece was published in the United States, and it remains to this day a challenge to our despondency. Kudos to Bompiani for reminding us of it, by reprinting it in a series entitled ‘Contemporary Classics’: that is where it belongs. (And may God grant us the best of luck with the upcoming Netflix series).