Adventure classics -- No easy lessons for the innocents

The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

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Sometimes it seems that there’s nothing like the presence of an animal character to get a story labeled as children’s literature. Throw a child character as well as an animal into a book and you’ll be all but guaranteed to find it shelved in the children’s section of your local bookstore or library. But surely it would be more appropriate to label such stories, “not for children only,” because the lessons taught by those we dismiss as innocents are needed, if anything, still more desperately by adults. To place an Enzo of The Art of Racing in the Rain, or a Scout of To Kill A Mockingbird into a story is to view life through a lens of unwavering truth.

And so John Steinbeck must have thought when “The Gift,” the first of his stories about young Jody Tiflin, appeared in the November 1933 issue of The North American Review. Notice, that’s not a children’s magazine.

“The Gift,” about the red circus pony colt Jody receives from his father, is sometimes now anthologized as a stand-alone story. However, over the course of the 1930’s, Steinbeck would return to the theme of young Jody’s passage from childhood into adolescence repeatedly with “The Great Mountains” and “The Promise.” “The Leader of the People,” a fourth story more loosely linked to the rest, was included with the first three when Penguin publishing brought them together as The Red Pony. (The illustration for this post is one of artist Wesley Dennis’s paintings for the 1945 book.)

The joint publication seems to imply, rather misleadingly, that the stories constitute a novel, or at least a novella (the combined stories run to less than 120 pages in the hardback Penguin edition illustrated by Dennis). Some critics even try to guess at an integrated chronology, additionally misled by the 1949 movie, whose screenplay was also written by Steinbeck, but relies mainly on only two of the stories.

Instead, consider them, as Steinbeck may have, as separate meditations on the themes of life, death and the loss of innocence, in the person of 10-year-old Jody Tiflin.

Taking Jody and hired cowboy Billy Buck to the barn of his Salinas Valley ranch, “Jody’s father moved over toward te one box stall. ‘Come here!’ he ordered. (Jody) looked into the box stall and then stepped back quickly A red pony colt was looking at him out of the stall¼ he asked very shyly, ‘Mine?’”

It’s the beginning of the idyllic friendship between the boy and the mishandled colt who learns to trust him, the colt he names Gabilan, for the nearby, beautiful Gabilan Mountains. As the weeks, then months go by, the colt grows. “He nickered when Jody came across the stubble-field, and in the pasture he came running when his master whistled for him. There was always a carrot for him every time.”

And seeing how fast the pony is growing up, Jody's father at last says, “I guess you can ride him by Thanksgiving. Think you can stick on?”

It's still three weeks until Thanksgiving, but winter comes faster. Winter and rain, cold rain on a young colt. “A little rain don’t hurt a horse,” the ranch’s hired hand, Billy Buck, tells Jody reassuringly. But will it?

(Next Friday, Adventure classics looks at Jody's first lesson of The Red Pony.)

Adventure classics -- Bambi: a war in the woods

Bambi

by Felix Salten

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The first thing you should know about Felix Salten’s dark vision of Bambi (originally subtitled A Life in the Woods) is that it isn’t a children’s book. Salten’s European woods of the 1920’s are the descendents of the forbidding forest where Dante lost his way, the wolf-haunted forests of the Brothers Grimm. And over their sweet thickets hedged by “hazel bushes, dogwoods, black-thorn and young elders” where fawns come into the world hangs the shadow of one world war, and the clamor of another drowns the forest’s myriad voices.

John Galsworthy’s enthusiastic foreword to the 1929 English translation recommends the book, ironically, I must suppose, “to sportsmen.” The Nazis who would later overrun Salten’s native Austria, although seldom masters of subtlety, understood better. They banned the book.

Some writers, after the gentler Disney movie version came out in 1942, considered Bambi an anti-fascist allegory, it’s more realistic to think of it as an anti-war allegory, but from a civilian standpoint. Salten, after all, was nearly fifty when the First World War ended. And except for a single mass hunt in which Bambi’s mother perishes, there’s relatively little direct carnage. Instead, Salten gives us background fear, food shortages, and betrayals by other “civilians” in the forest.

But don’t let the darkness keep you from enjoying the book. Between episodes of darkness, lovers frolic, children are born, and life goes on, often with great beauty and delight. Although I often dislike, as Galsworthy wrote, “the method which places human words in the mouths of dumb creatures, it is the triumph of this book that, behind the conversation, one feels the real sensations of the creatures who speak.”

To achieve this illusion of getting behind the conversation, Salten relies less on putting human words in the mouths of animals than of allowing humans to feel the emotions of the animals.

“All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain,” writes twenty-first century animal behavioral scientist Temple Grandin in her 2009 Animals Make Us Human. Grandin actually is only considering the emotions of mammals, but Salten extends our sympathies to owls, magpies, jays and ducks, even to a crowd of midges, marveling at the ancient beetles “who live forever almost. They see the sun thirty or forty times, we don’t know exactly how many. Our lives are long enough, but we see the daylight only once or twice.“

Hungarian-born Salten’s family moved to Vienna when he was a child, seeking the citizenship the city granted to Jews in the late nineteenth century. He dropped out of school at sixteen to help support his family, eventually becoming known as a prolific writer of plays, fiction, and journalism. and was soon was a poet, playwright, and journalist. And he must also have loved the woods, however dark they were, and the creatures who inhabited them.

From the opening sentence, “He came into the world in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades which seem to be entirely open, but are really screened in on all sides,” to the tenderness of an adult Bambi’s interaction with a pair of fawns, fawns who readers realize, although Bambi did not, are his own children, Bambi is, in Galsworthy’s words, “a delicious book.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a February of animal adventures with Albert Payson Terhune’s short story, “One Minute Longer.”)