The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

  Quite the contrary: Even as he sustained the "social realism" of his fiction by means of mythic material abstracted from his beloved tales of King Arthur, there is an abiding sense that Arthur will not return, that the past enriches the present but only in terms of literary contexts. Jackson Benson, from whose biography of Steinbeck much of the foregoing material has been taken, tells us that the boy's mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was largely responsible for nurturing his creative drives. A schoolteacher, she filled the home with literary material, books and magazines, and read bedtime stories to her children, including tales of magic and enchantment, laying the basis for John's enthrallment by the Arthurian legends. And yet Steinbeck's are the kind of fairy stories in which no benevolent godmother shows up, no powerful prince on horseback saves the day. And if the Red Pony stories seem to resemble the kinds of fiction written for children, if only because the protagonist is himself a child, they are not the kinds of fiction traditionally framed for young readers, which more often than not end with a hopeful, upbeat finale.

  It is important to understand what many students of Steinbeck's life and works now know: that the signal influences on his early work were Donn-Byrne and James Branch Cabell, fantasists and mannerists whose writings Steinbeck himself acknowledged provided the worst possible models. But his recantation does not alter the fact, nor the likelihood that, as in all such matters, influence is a guide to predisposition. Both older writers, despite the vast differences in their personal backgrounds and materials, were products of the art-for-art's sake movement of the 1890s, which stressed style as substance, and both sustained a disillusioned view of the present by retreating into an invented past, where they could indulge their romanticism unchecked by considerations of verisimilitude.

  Their influence is most clear in Cup of Gold (1929), Steinbeck's first (and atypical) novel, a loosely "historical" romance about the pirate Henry Morgan that is imperfectly sustained by the Grail myth. But despite Steinbeck's abandoning the purplish prose associated with his youthful models, something of their underlying cynicism remains in much of his subsequent fiction. Moreover, the theories that would sustain his most famous works, the nonteleological philosophy in part abstracted from the wisdom of his friend Ed Ricketts, and the "phalanx" idea that underlies his most serious works of social criticism, only reinforced the nihilism essential to his early reading even as they necessitated a more "realistic" kind of fiction. Neither idea holds out much hope for individual or even communal enterprise: those of his characters who entertain some motivating errand or purpose end as versions of Don Quixote, deluded victims of their own dreams--they are versions, in short, of the senior John Steinbeck.

  Because The Grapes of Wrath looms so large in his corpus, Steinbeck is thought of as a sentimentalist, another erroneous perception. Sentimentalism had been utilized in America in reform fiction ever since Harriet Beecher Stowe used it to arouse reader sympathy for Negro slaves, hitting upon a device that Steinbeck also used effectively: stressing the loving, virtuous "family" values maintained by Uncle Tom and his wife in their humble cabin. Stowe brought her readers to tears by dramatizing the anguish of family breakup and the selling of black children out of the arms of their mothers, in every instance appealing to her white, middle-class readers for whom the integrity of the family was sacred. But she was in her other works seldom a sentimentalist, establishing rather the objective tone that would be characteristic of an emerging literary realism-- explicitly antisentimental in its aims. Steinbeck, at the other end of that process, would likewise use sentimentality chiefly in works that, like Stowe's great protest romance, were constructed so as to inspire sympathy for the downtrodden. Thus in Of Mice and Men (1937), which in its account of disadvantaged and displaced farm workers is preludic to Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck like Stowe uses the middle-class ideal of "home" to arouse pity in the reader, an emphasis shared by his subsequent and much more ambitious novel. But in neither work does Steinbeck propose solutions to the sufferings he has so sympathetically portrayed (the allusion in the title of the novella to Burns's "To a Field Mouse" perfectly cues the balance between sympathy and inevitability), whereas Stowe pointedly wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in the service of abolition and the aims of the American Colonization Society. Divorced from the specific reforms of protest literature, Steinbeck's use of sentimentality is akin to the pathos of Greek tragedy, inspiring identification with the protagonists but allowing for no remedies or relief save release through death.

  In The Red Pony, where middle-class people are the chief characters and home is an often conflicted reality, not a lost or impossible hope, Steinbeck more clearly delineates his emerging thematic and stylistic norms. Much as the writer refuses to give any of the stories a positive, teleological ending, so he avoids the sentimentality that a number of the situations allow, especially regarding the suffering and deaths of animals. We need only compare these stories with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling (1938), a novel with virtually plagiaristic similarities to The Red Pony, to understand Steinbeck's "differences" in dealing with the death of a beloved pet. Mary O'Hara's subsequent "colt-to-horse" cycle, My Friend Flicka (1941), pulls out all the emotional stops in a story that also resembles Steinbeck's, with the signal difference of the colt's survival. Starting with Black Beauty (1877), by Anna Sewell (a novel written to further the work of the S.P.C.A.), the tradition in "animal stories" has been for the most part sentimental. Even such a ferocious realist as Jack London, whose stories of dogs and wolves generally steer clear of appeals to emotions other than anger--aimed at the brutal exploiters of dogs trained to obey the whims of their owners--ended the story of White Fang with his wolf-dog in the midst of a happy family of pups.

  There is no anger, reformational or otherwise, in The Red Pony, except that expressed by its characters. Jody's fury over the needless death of his pony is viewed with detachment and is related not to social issues capable of reform but simple human (and therefore unremedial) failings, establishing an authorial distance classical in its austerity. Here again, Steinbeck is bucking tradition: From Hamlin Garland's Main-Traveled Roads (1891) to his own Grapes of Wrath, the "farm novel" in the United States usually floated a social agenda, displaying the sufferings of farmers in the grip of exploiting railroads or large land owners. In The Red Pony, Steinbeck perhaps most closely resembles Willa Cather, whose stories of Nebraska farmers avoid specific political and economic issues while emphasizing the hardships of the farmer's life, portrayed as a grim and unrelenting struggle with natural forces, a constant test of the strengths--and weaknesses--of rural people. Yet there is an underlying optimism in Cather's stories, while Steinbeck, once again, seems of the party of despair. "A Leader of the People," the final story in The Red Pony, sums up that prevailing sense of loss by placing an old man's boastfully sad recollections of a "heroic" West against the cruel indifference of his son-in-law, Jody's hard-working but insensitive father, Carl Tiflin.

  Though younger than Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, Steinbeck shared with them an abiding sense of decline and fall, and like the writers of the Lost Generation, he used myths to emphasize his themes of loss. First received as a photographic realist in the tradition of social protest, Steinbeck has been shown in the studies of Peter Lisca and Joseph Fontenrose to be a sophisticated manipulator of themes and situations that establish a parable-like depth to his fictions. Like Mark Twain, whose vernacular tradition he continued, Steinbeck is more "literary" than he appears at first reading. As Jackson Benson affirms and reaffirms, from the start Steinbeck's fiction tended toward symbolic and even allegorical configurations of meaning, of which the Arthurian materials are only one aspect. It was a self-conscious quality that, during his last, post-World War II phase, became only more obvious, not more the rule. The contemporary events of the 1930s, along with Steinbeck's experiences as a laborer in the fields of California agribusinesses, provided sufficient "realistic" flesh to cover the bare bones of symbolic meaning, but with his removal to New York
and the East Coast, along with the feared encumbrances of wealth and prestige, Steinbeck lost both the ability and the materials to give his allegories sufficient heft of experience.

  Here again, the Red Pony stories evince the marvelous balance of Steinbeck's best work. Critical comment frequently refers to the symbolic implication of the otherwise realistically described landscape, the balance between the range of "jolly" mountains to the East--the Gabilans, for which Jody names his pony--and the dark, foreboding "Great Ones" in the West, into which the aging Mexican farmhand Gitano disappears. The grim mountains are matched by the black cypress associated by Jody with hog-butchering and death, while another positive feature of the landscape is the "old green tub" filled with spring water, a sacramental vessel to which the boy retreats when he needs to be alone. But these symbolic features do not resolve themselves into any kind of articulated allegory, and they provide instead a "natural" set of contraries, suggesting the eternal balance of light and dark, hope and despair, centered around the tub of pure water, polarities that enhance Jody's several encounters with birth and death but "resolve" nothing. Again, it is this restraint on Steinbeck's part that especially recommends The Red Pony, inspiring critical accord concerning its literary excellence--in Warren French's words, its perfect integration of form and content. Distilled from events of the author's boyhood--including the gift of a "chestnut" pony--and recollected during a time of great personal stress, the stories derive considerable power from the fact of engagement yet avoid throughout a descent into bathos.

  It is helpful to recall that the Red Pony stories were written over a three-year period, 1933-1936, and that they make up one of several story cycles composed by Steinbeck at about the same time. These include The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and Tortilla Flat (1935), the last being the book that brought him sudden fame and that encouraged the publication of Steinbeck's short stories in The Long Valley (1938), including "A Leader of the People," which was not included in the first book publication of The Red Pony in 1937. It was not until 1945 that the four stories were collected together under that title. As Jackson Benson tells us, at one point Steinbeck had yet another story about the Tiflin family in mind, and he'd even projected a number of other stories, concentrating on Billy Buck, as well as each of Jody's parents, in turn. I want to consider the implication of what is essentially a fragmentary text to our understanding of the Red Pony stories as a unit, but first we need to put those stories in the context of Steinbeck's other work of the period.

  As in Steinbeck's projected plan for the Tiflins, the stories in Pasture of Heaven take their unity from a family, but in this case a "bad luck" family whose often well-meant actions serve to destroy the lives of those around them. Tortilla Flat, by contrast, features a picaresque community--an ad-hoc "family"--of low-life characters whose humorous misadventures successfully obscure their mythic underpinnings and helped earn the book its popularity. A third and related work is the novel To a God Unknown, published in 1935 but written much earlier, a heavily symbolic even fantastic parable in which a California farmer engages in pagan fertility rites, rituals that eventually consume him as a self-sacrificial victim. Besides sharing the common California setting, and deriving much of their detail from Steinbeck's own experience, all of these books (and we may here include The Long Valley ) are versions of antipastoral, and in this they are reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), as well as resembling Erskine Caldwell's contemporaneous Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933).

  If we consider the first three of the stories in The Red Pony as a unit, then the book as it was first published is of a piece with Steinbeck's other story cycles of the period, which present farm life as a sequence of grim, even fatal events, for the story ends with the tragic birth of the black colt, which has brought no joy to young Jody. "A Leader of the People," in the context of the other stories in The Long Valley, is one more account of hardship and disillusionment with a California setting, but when added to the first three of the Red Pony stories, it provides what is essentially a false note of hope--a mistake, however, not attributable to authorial intention but critical interpretation. I am speaking here of the glass of lemonade that Jody, at the end of the story, is about to bring to his grandfather, a charitable gesture that would seem to put an affirmative seal to the end of the story cycle. Jody, it would seem, can now see past his own immediate concerns and recognize the needs of others.

  There is a Bildungsroman tradition in American literature that dates from Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841), in which a young man or boy is brought to maturity by means of initiatory incidents. Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are perhaps the best-known examples of these literary initiates, who have their female counterparts in Alcott's Jo March and Wiggins's Rebecca Randall. But these liminal fictions by and large are concerned with young people in their teens, the postpubescent age when entrance to adulthood is anticipated. Notably, Tom and Huck, Jo and Rebecca, all evince some romantic interest in members of the opposite sex. Huck excluded, they are obviously being prepared for marriage and the responsibilities of maturity, and such stories, with their linear, "progressive" plots, by means of which the educational aspects of experience bring the young protagonists to a more realistic, "mature" point of view--shedding youthful illusions and bigotries--are precisely the kinds of teleological allegories from which Steinbeck rather noisily distanced himself.

  Approaching the four Red Pony stories from the established canon of initiatory fiction, critics have made assumptions that the text does not bear out. As I have already mentioned, much is made of Jody's fetching a glass of lemonade for his grandfather in the last story of the cycle, a charitable gesture that displaces his earlier juvenile plans for exterminating a colony of fat mice exposed by removing their sheltering haystack. But the gesture, inspired by sympathy for his grandfather because of his father's callous treatment of the old man, is as much an act of defiance against the father himself as a response to the grandfather's humiliation. At ten years of age, Jody differs from Huck and Tom in being poised on the threshold to adolescence-- with its alternating cycles of rebellion and yearning for acceptance by society--not on the threshold of maturity, with its patterns of accepting responsibility and achieving compromise between expressing one's individuality and acceding to the needs of others. Jody's is a situational world, in which impulsive actions are the rule and parental, adult authority a wall to be circumvented. Significantly, Jody is called "a little boy" throughout the four stories, placing him well beyond expectations of maturation.

  Here again, it is useful to refer to The Yearling and My Friend Flicka, episodic novels clearly in debt to Steinbeck's Red Pony but that operate well within the initiatory tradition of American literature. In the first, a sensitive poor white youth is brought to the threshold of maturity through the death of his favorite pet, a "yearling" deer who is sacrificed to the rural necessity of producing sufficient provender to survive on the barest of subsistence crops for another year. In the second, a pioneering instance of "young adult" fiction in which the boy hero gains maturity through raising--and nearly losing--a colt, we have what amounts to a strategic revision of Steinbeck's parable. The definitive tension between father and son remains, but it is brought to a resolution by the younger McLaughlin's success in putting aside his childish ways and shouldering the responsibilities of raising and training a young horse. This is also Carl Tiflin's intention regarding his son, but it comes, literally, to grief. Nothing that Steinbeck wrote, before or afterward, suggests that he was interested in promoting convenient resolutions of social or family problems. Again, if we return to the original Red Pony volume, sans "A Leader of the People," we are given no note of hope, false or otherwise, at the end of the grim round of events.

  Such a return helps to remove the literary and critical veils of contextuality and conventional expectation that have been placed between us and Steinbeck's Red Pony stories--accretions, ironically enough, that include the novels of Raw
lings and O'Hara. Indeed, even the title of the book is a red herring of sorts that lines a trail toward The Yearling and My Friend Flicka. The title, which is taken from the first story in the cycle, falsely implies that the rest of the stories have a common connection with Jody's "gift" of a colt, when, as we have already seen, Steinbeck seems to have thought of them as a cycle centering on the Tiflin family--including the farmhand, Billy Buck. Moreover, the horses that do figure in the stories are innocent, even passive participants in a kind of ongoing family politics, especially the power play between the father and son. Family politics most certainly figure in the novels by Rawlings and O'Hara, but these result, finally, in resolutions intimate with the presence and function of pets. By contrast, in Steinbeck's parables, the several horses do not resolve but point up familial discontents, and their use, finally, is discontinuous. What, we might ask, happens to the colt born in the third story, the one whose birth is so terribly costly and who is intended to replace Gabilan, the titular red pony? No mention is made of that presumably important animal in the final story, and if "A Leader of the People" is summary, as it has been read, then the colt named Black Satan should somehow be part of the tale, much as Gabilan's death overshadows the story of the second colt's birth. Instead, the last story acts to turn events back on themselves, not move them forward to some kind of cumulative conclusion. We might even assume that the events occurred before the first colt arrived on the farm.