The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Red Pony

  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 filmmaker 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 1978, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  John Seelye is Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida, where he teaches American Studies. His books include Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (1977), Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the American Republic (1991) and Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (1998). He has also written fiction, including The Kid (1972, 1982), a Western.

  JOHN STEINBECK

  The Red Pony

  With an Introduction by John Seelye

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 5 Watkins Street, Denver Ext 4, Johannesburg 2094, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the USA by Covici, Friede, Inc. 1937

  Published with 'The Leader of the People' by The Viking Press 1945

  First published in Great Britain with Of Mice and Men by William Heinemann Ltd 1940

  Published with The Pearl in a Viking Compass edition 1965

  Published in Penguin Books 1976

  The Red Pony 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 1933, 1937, 1938 by John Steinbeck

  Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1961, 1965

  Introduction copyright (c) John Seelye, 1994

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author of the introduction 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

  Contents

  Introduction by John Seelye

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  The Red Pony

  Introduction

  When I was a student in high school, Steinbeck was one of my favorite authors. He is a writer whose simple, straightforward language and realistic even violent plots are attractive to young readers making a first encounter with serious modern literature. I read Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath, even The Moon Is Down--the Second World War was just over and the issues were still fresh--but I did not read The Red Pony, which had recently been published as a single and amplified text, with color illustrations. I think the pictures may have put me off. They suggest that the series of short stories is a children's book, which it is not--and more pertinent to my own youthful bigotries, they certified that it was a book about horses, a genre that for whatever reasons I associated with young females in jodhpurs and boots. The Red Pony is most assuredly not that, either.

  So I was wrong on all scores, not the first time during my adolescent years--or afterward--and here at long last I have an opportunity to make up for that ignorant omission.

  I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Jack Benson and Linda Wagner-Martin for their helpful and encouraging remarks concerning this introduction.

  But let me begin by declaring that I have had considerable company in mistaking this book for something it is not, for in reading it the first time through I also consulted the critical literature on this text, which for the most part misconstrues what I take to be its meaning and intent, thanks to assumptions not too far different from my adolescent prejudices. I will come to that mistaken reading in due course (and proportion). What follows is not chiefly an argument with other critics. It is, however, an attempt to demonstrate that Steinbeck's cycle of stories about a boy who has a series of painful even traumatic experiences on the threshold to adolescence may be a slender book, but in this it can be compared to the pin that holds two hinges together. Not only is it a text central to Steinbeck's development as a writer but it is a transitional work in the development of literature intended for just the sort of reader I was when first encountering Steinbeck's novels and stories.

  The importance, in these dual regards of The Red Pony was hardly a matter of authorial intention. At the time he wrote the stories about young Jody Tiflin, Steinbeck was concentrating chiefly on getting through a very difficult period in his life. True, many of Steinbeck's works were written during times of crisis, some of his own making, as if the author thrived on emotional turmoil, escaping into the much more tidy world of his own creation yet bringing along the heightened sensibilities that conflict engenders. But the author's troubles during the time he was writing the Red Pony stories were thrust upon him and were primal in nature. His mother lay dying from the lingering effects of a stroke and his father, bewildered by the loss of his wife's presence and support, was himself in a handicapped state, from which he would not recover.

  Although already a published writer, Steinbeck was well short of the fame that would convey (against his will) the status of "author" upon him, and his financial affairs were still uncertain. He returned home to Salin
as, the place of his birth some thirty years earlier, in 1902, bringing with him his young wife, Carol. Steinbeck took on his share of the duties in caring for his mother, which included changing bedpans and soiled linen, disgusting chores that nauseated him. He also helped out in his father's accounting office, working up long columns of figures in ledgers, stultifying labor that dulled his creative sensibility. Between times, Steinbeck worked on the Red Pony stories, writing in a room next to the one in which his mother lay dying. Given the personal context--the threatened loss of parents who had supported him both psychologically and financially during his long apprenticeship as a writer--it is not surprising that the stories were autobiographical, drawing on Steinbeck's memories of his childhood. What is surprising, however, is the artistry of the stories, evincing a formal mastery that would seem to bely the circumstances of their composition. It is this combination of subjective materials and objective craftsmanship that helps to explain the power of these parabolic tales.

  The resemblances between Jody's parents and Steinbeck's own are not exact, and the ranch setting resembles the farm owned by his maternal uncle, not his home in the small town of Salinas, but there are sufficient points of tangency to certify an overall autobiographical presence. More important, perhaps, is the significance of the sheer presence of parents in the boy Jody's world, not only as adult figures of support and understanding but as authorities to be dealt with often subversively, to be evaded by strategies of rebellion and escape. In a certain sense, the Red Pony stories are liminal, in that they deal with aspects of a boy's maturation, but they stop well short of carrying Jody across the threshold into maturity, much as the long-desired pony of the title is taken from him before he has a chance to ride it. Given the conditions under which they were composed, we are not surprised to find the themes of loss and death dominating these stories. But the theme of withheld fulfillment is something else again, and has less to do with the immediate situation than with Steinbeck's long-sustained world view, which may have had psychological origins but which by 1933, the year he returned to Salinas, was integral to his emerging theory of fiction and inseparable from his scientifically derived theory of human existence.

  The device of incompletion is typical of much that Steinbeck would write, and is part-and-parcel of his biologically determined notions about animate life, but it should not be confused with what critics call indeterminacy or ambiguity. Life, observed Melville, one of our most ambiguous authors, does not organize itself into tidy periodicities; that is the role of literature. For Steinbeck, life and literature were reciprocal functions, and he regarded the duty of the author as one of devising fictions that captured the kinds of discontinuity that define life, both animal and human, which is made up of no final terminations, no neat packages of events, just a sequence of happenings productive of other happenings. Much as Jody continually contrives to escape the authority of his parents, so these stories subversively evade the traditional role of literature, which is to shape the raw, discontinuous stuff of life into orderly units chiefly defined by strategies of closure. In sum, art tames disorderly elements and puts them in harness, the fate the red pony escapes through death.

  This reading, let me now state, is contradictory to the standard interpretation of these stories, which sees them as leading to Jody's maturation, as stages in a developmental progress. I will return to that interpretation--and its impossibility--but want first to address Steinbeck's life and work in general, so as to approach The Red Pony from that perspective. We may start with the irony that these stories, which so handily illustrate Steinbeck's theories of life and literature, occurred within a turning point in the author's life that resembles the most convenient kind of literature. The illness and death of his mother, followed shortly by the death of his father, were followed in turn by the sudden and almost unexpected upswing of the writer's reputation and income, which were not perhaps as welcome as one might expect.

  Throughout much of his young adulthood, in college and afterward, the son had struggled to escape his parents' control, living away from home as much as possible, working at jobs unacceptable to middle-class notions of suitable employment, and only returning to Salinas when financial necessity made homecoming inescapable. This kind of distancing is traditionally associated with the independence essential to creativity--most writers of Steinbeck's generation insisted on it as a kind of authorial ritual--but in his case the need for independence from his parents had a number of paradoxical dimensions. First of all, he was forced to accept their financial assistance, as well as the house in which he and Carol lived after they were married, in Pacific Grove, within the orbit of both sets of parents. This in turn got the couple close to Monterey, which would provide Steinbeck with the material for his first commercial success, Tortilla Flat (1935), as well as the tutelage of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who would be so influential on Steinbeck's emerging philosophies of life and art. Finally, the deaths of both parents, which gave him absolute freedom from their personal control, came just as he entered that phase in his career when he no longer needed the isolation from their influence. This is precisely the kind of tidy reticulation of circumstances that Steinbeck worked very hard to avoid in his fiction.

  But then there are a number of discontinuities between the facts of Steinbeck's life--or our perceptions of those facts--and the kinds of fiction he wrote. There is, for example, a kind of chronological neatness in the conjunction between the writing and publication of Steinbeck's most successful, even greatest, works and the first two presidential terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The proximity makes it easy to associate Steinbeck's fiction with the social reformations undertaken during the successive Roosevelt administrations, an association that colors most of the appraisals of his work, yet any such linkage is fallacious howevermuch fortuitous. This is especially true of Grapes of Wrath (1939), which bears a close resemblance to the propaganda engendered by the Works Progress Administration, ennobling the suffering poor in order to loosen congressional pursestrings. At times the text seems to cry out for illustration by the photographs of Walker Evans, but the coincidence is misleading: Grapes of Wrath was not written to promote Roosevelt's social reforms, nor was it (as it was regarded at the time) in harness with even more radical movements of the day.

  Of course, like many Americans, Steinbeck felt great pity for the displaced Okies and Arkies who had followed a national myth (and misleading pamphlets distributed by agribusiness agents) to California seeking work, only to find enforced idleness, persecution, and peonage. Indeed, his feelings resulted in the need to revise entirely the manuscript that became Grapes of Wrath. The emphasis of the first version of the book was a satiric attack on the greed and vigilantism of the California farmers; the second stresses the noble sufferings of the workers, epitomized by the Joad family. But despite Steinbeck's presenting a positive case for government-sponsored work camps, and despite the celebration of humble humanity found in the book, Grapes of Wrath is not, finally, an epic of the migrant farmhand but a tragedy centered on the breakup of a family because of bewildering changes in agricultural practices brought on by the economic forces of the Great Depression, accelerated by the manmade "natural" disaster that was the Dust Bowl. It is, moreover, a demonstration of inevitability that makes any kind of government palliative futile. And finally, by concentrating on the decline of the Joad family, Steinbeck placed himself in the company of contemporary writers who have never been associated with the social reforms of FDR.

  Writers of the 1930s with such disparate backgrounds and styles as Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, and Margaret Mitchell were also concerned with family breakup, and even Erskine Caldwell (a writer who in many respects can be compared--as he is occasionally confused--with Steinbeck) used the disintegrating family as the central fact of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. All of these writers, notably, were from the South, and their books can be regarded as reflecting the "matter" of the South, conceived as a process of decline and degeneration,
dating from the disastrous effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. But Steinbeck, a Californian, came from a region inevitably associated (as by the Joads) with the party of Hope and Progress--that is, with the promise held out to the rest of America by the West. It was that hopeful grail that lured Steinbeck's grandfather to California after the Civil War, and which his father continued to pursue during young John's boyhood. Steinbeck regarded that quest as Quixotic and thought of his parents as victims of the false promise of the West, as having spent their lives in futile pursuit of a prosperity that was forever withheld. This is yet another facet of that complex paradox that characterized the writing of the Red Pony stories, for Steinbeck's success which followed (not as a direct result of their publication, I should add) disrupted his certainty that his own creative life would be one of constant disappointment.

  Steinbeck was not the first writer in California to regard the promise of the West as something of a delusion. Most of the Easterners-come-west who produced the first "California" literature--most notably Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce--recorded less than hopeful parables, derived from the boom-and-bust cycles of gold-mining life. Closer to Steinbeck in time and subject matter was Chicago-born but California-raised Frank Norris, who in The Octopus (1901) framed an epic-sized tragedy in which the dreams of wealth from raising wheat nurtured by false expectations on the part of San Joaquin farmers are blown away by the harsh realities of price manipulation by the railroad. If California was "the future," then to reverse the famous aphorism, it didn't seem to work--except for corporate capitalism.

  Again, little in Steinbeck's personal experience would have suggested otherwise: Though born in relatively comfortable middle-class circumstances, the boy's life was overshadowed by the restless dissatisfaction of a father who never, in his own estimation, seems to have succeeded. Though enjoying the steady income derived from his position as treasurer of Monterey County, the senior John Steinbeck had earlier lost his bid for much greater prosperity when the feed and grain business he started was doomed from the start by the advent of the automobile. The marginal jobs young Steinbeck held as he slowly even haltingly worked his way through Stanford University could have done nothing to affirm any belief in the American dream, and though the field and factory work brought him into contact with the workers who would populate the stories that first made him a popular writer, nothing he ever wrote suggested that some political or economic solution to the inherent instability of agricultural capitalism was just around the corner.