The Red Pony Read Free

“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, conceivedas 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