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.

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 Salinas, 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 Stein-beck 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.