The Red Pony (2 page)

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, Stein-beck 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.

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.