The Red Pony Read Free Page B

of “home” to arouse pity in the reader, an emphasis shared by his subsequent and much moreambitious 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 ofdogs 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.
    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 socialprotest, 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