Adventure classics -- Who needs a happy ending?

The Red Pony/My Friend Flicka

by John Steinbeck/Mary O’Hara

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Did John Steinbeck compromise his art by grafting a happy ending onto the screenplay based on his story collection, The Red Pony? It’s a common complaint among avid readers that the movies made from book are never as satisfying as the books themselves, that the authors of books must be gnashing their teeth over the changes screenwriters make to their stories.

In The Red Pony, though, the changes were the author’s own, with Steinbeck using only material from three of the stories and adding a controversially happy ending. “If a producer who had acquired the rights to an original work made such extensive changes in it, admirers of the original could justifiably raise cries of protest against the treatment of the source¼ ( but) Steinbeck was obviously not interested in simply transferring his story cycle to the screen; he wished to tell the story of Jody Tiflin’s initiation into manhood in a way that he deemed suited to the new medium, critic Warren French wrote in “The Red Pony as Story Cycle and Film.”

And why not? It’s an author’s prerogative, after all, to change his mind. But I can’t help suspecting a little influence from another story about a boy and the young horse he nurses through a serious illness, My Friend Flicka.

Written by Mary O’Hara (herself a Hollywood veteran), 1941’s Flicka went on to become successful enough as a 1943 movie to get a spin-off TV series and 21^st century remakes.

Both Flicka and The Red Pony feature young boys on their way to learning hard lessons; both revel in the natural worlds their authors loved -- California’s Salinas Valley where Steinbeck spent much of his boyhood at his grandparents’ ranch, the Wyoming of the Remount Ranch where O’Hara moved with her equestrian husband. And both stories, of course, have a horse at their center. Significantly, though, the equine heroine of Flicka lives. Jody Tiflin’s pony, at least the one in the first story of The Red Pony cycle, the story on which most of the movie is based, dies.

Did Steinbeck take that into account in collaborating on the screenplay of the 1949 Red Pony movie? His original stories, although with a child protagonist, were written for adults. The movie was expected to appeal mainly to children. Was the death of a beloved animal deemed just too difficult for kids to handle?

“Children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes,” Rosemary Sutcliff, another author of what would now be considered YA stories, once said.

Sutcliff herself knew tragedy through a painful and disabling illness that kept her secluded most of her childhood. She never quibbled about describing the deaths of characters, even major characters in her historical fictions, only differentiating between her fiction for adults and younger readers with sensitively-handled sex scenes. But how much acquaintance with tragedy can children handle, and how much becomes too much?

(For more about Rosemary Sutcliff’s work at this site see, “An Arthur for our time,” May 20, 2011; and “This game’s a fight to the finish,” May 30, 2012. For more about My Friend Flicka and Mary O’Hara at this site, see “A little horse to love,” February 17, 2012.)
(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a month of thrillers and suspense with Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel.)

Adventure classics -- This game's a fight to the finish

The Mark of the Horse Lord

by Rosemary Sutcliff

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Why can’t I find Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels on school reading lists? Is it because the history, set in ancient Britain in many cases, seems too remote for Americans? Or is it the violence? As Scott O’Dell, a man whose own books make a lot of reading lists, writes in the afterword to the 1989 edition of The Mark of the Horse Lord, “A river of blood and violence runs through this book. . . Yet it never runs just for effect. Ms. Sutcliff is never melodramatic, never drawn beyond the facts.”

The level of violence in this story of the ex-gladiator Phaedrus forced into the kingship of a Celtic tribe on the outskirts of Roman Britain makes The Hunger Games look mild. In fact, the similarity of the opening premise of both books -- young people forced to fight to the death for a crowd’s amusement (and still more darkly, the subjection of their own people), is striking. Perhaps it’s a story that needs repeating with every generation, and every war.

Sutcliff, who died in 1992, gained the label -- slighting for the time -- of a children’s author in the days before MG (middle grade) and YA (young adult) books were some of the best sellers on any publisher’s list. But as with the best of young readers’ fiction even today, her best books appeal as well to adults as for children and teens.

The opinion of Sutcliff herself was that “children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes.” And as blogger Annis notes at www.historicalnovels.info/Rosemary-Sutcliff.html/, the only significant differences between her novels for young people and those for adults, such as the Arthurian retelling Sword at Sunset (discussed on this blog May 20 of last year), are “some sensitively drawn sex scenes unlikely to faze the modern teenager.”

Her protagonists were more often young men than women, whose social rules were more limited in the historical periods she chose. But she could still portray the likes of the young warrior queen Murna in The Mark of the Horse Lord. And the book’s antagonist, Murna’s soul-devouring mother. (Sutcliff’s own beloved but manic-depressive mother may be the model for her troubling portraits of older women.)

And she has no competitor in her depiction of the loneliness of outsiders in society, and of the disabled, subjects she knew in her own life. She suffered from a form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that left her with painfully distorted joints and prevented her from marrying, although not from falling in love.

As she observes tartly but not bitterly in her autobiography, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection, “It has begun to dawn on the able-bodied world that . . . we may have the same emotional needs as anybody else, and the ability to satisfy those needs in each other, or even in the able-bodied.”

Although many of Sutcliff’s books are out of print, they’re gaining new life as e-books, available on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook readers, ready to enchant a new generation.

(Next month -- Adventure classics begins a month of stories from Texan Robert E. Howard. Hope you enjoy his very different take on the same setting as Sutcliff’s, in Worms of the Earth next Wednesday.)

Adventure classics -- An Arthur for our time

Sword at Sunset
by Rosemary Sutcliff
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Rosemary Sutcliff's reimagining of the history behind  Britain's King Arthur opens with a scene in a sickbed, an awakening in pain like those she knew from her own experience of hospitals and operations.  And like the legends that transformed a Dark Ages war chief into a figure of towering chivalry, she transforms pain and fear and loneliness into story.

"Now that the moon is near to full," her Arthur says, speaking directlyto the reader, "the branch of an apple tree casts its nighttime shadow in through the high window, across the wall beside my bed. . . I reach out in the grayness and touch the familiar grip that has grown warm to my touch in so many fights; and the feeling of life is in it, and the feeling of death. . . "

Stricken with Still's disease, a form of juvenile rhematoid arthritis, as a girl, Sutcliff lived a restricted life -- enduring frequent operations, her schooling fragmentary, her freedom of movement often restricted to a wheelchair.  But although she didn't learn to read until age nine, her imagination roamed far and wide, fed by her mother's tireless storytelling.

At age fourteen, she entered the Bideford Art School, graduating to work as a painter of miniatures before she began to write stories.  As a comment on the site http://rosemarysutcliff.com/ notes, "her sense of place was uncanny, in that she could get no nearer to a site than the seat of a car on an adjacent road.  Friends often served as her eyes, and also as her researchers, but it was the conclusions she drew from the evidence, and her re-creations of them, that made her contributions to the literature of the ancient world so distinctive."

Her most famous children'sbook, "The Eagle of the Ninth" (which would be classified as YA in today's market)  recently appeared in a movie adaptation, but it was "Sword at Sunset" that sealed her reputation as a writer for adults.  From the wealth of material about the legendary King Arthur, Sutcliff kept what she thought was the earliest.  She assigned, for instance, the character of one of Arthur's earliest recorded companions, Bedwyr, the part of the guilty lover instead of Lancelot, whom she considered a late medieval French addition.

"Most of the actual research I did for the book," Sutcliff said in an interview a few years before her death in 1992, "apart from knowing the Arthurian story from the romance versions, was into Dark Age life and history as far as they were known.  Then I worked into this setting the  Arthur who seemed to me to carry weight, to be the most likely kind of person.  It was very strange because I have never written a book which was so possessive. . . it absolutely rode me throughout the entire time."

(Next Friday:  From another hospital bed, Josephine Tey's fictional detective Alan Grant unravels the mystery of Richard III and his nephews in the Tower of London in "The Daughter of Time.")