The Red Pony Read Free Page A

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. Andyet 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 hismost 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