The Red Pony (3 page)

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 Rawlings 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.

The first story, likewise, “The Gift,” has an element of self-deconstructiveness, starting with its ironic title. The red pony colt is the kind of “gift” called “Greek,” in that it comes hearing special conditions. Jody must earn his “gift” by attending to its training. Like many middle-class parents (as in
Flicka
), Carl Tiflin hopes to use the experience as a step in an enforced process of teaching “responsibility.” But it is Billy Buck who serves as the tutor when it comes to actually caring for the pony, and his tragic failure in that regard results in the emotional explosion with which the story ends—not only Jody’s grief but Billy Buck’s turning on the unseeing father, a multiple instance of unresolved anger. The title of the third story (the last in the original cycle), “The Promise,” is again ironic. The terms of the second “gift” are such that Jody can take no pleasure in it, having required the death of Nellie, the gentle old mare: “He tried to be glad because of the colt, but the bloody face, and the haunted, tired eyes of Billy Buck hung in the air ahead of him.” Here again it is Billy Buck who is the parental figure, carrying the guilt over his omissions that caused the death of the red pony into the bloody horror of delivering the second colt. Though the death of the mare is inevitable, the position of the colt in her womb being beyond human intervention, Billy turns it into an act of retaliation against Jody: “There’s your colt, the way I promised,” he says implying that the death of the mare was
somehow the boy’s fault, much as the name of the colt (given before it is born), Black Demon, carries with it a kind of foreboding or tragic necessity, linking it to the dark range of mountains much as the red pony was named for the Gabilans.

Symbols of death and loss loom over these stories, but they do not point toward any cumulative pattern of resolution. The most explicit of the parables in this regard is the second, which, like the fourth and last, exists outside the “pony” sequence. The sight of the old Mexican riding an ancient horse off into “The Great Mountains” never to return is a powerful, even archetypal image, which fills Jody with “a nameless sorrow” but no real understanding of what he has witnessed. Death may be the dominant theme of these stories, but although we can read the signs and signals, Jody cannot, and he serves chiefly as a kind of symbol himself, of boyish innocence against which the cycles of birth and death are played. Again, the cumulative result is not progressive but promotes a kind of stasis, a symbolic map of contraries and correspondences: the two ranges of mountains, the two colts, the two old men, the two “fathers,” an arrangement centered by the “round tub at the brush line” and the sad boy lying next to it “with his crossed arms and… nameless sorrow.”