Adventure classics -- Mountains beyond mountains

The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

***

The family of John Steinbeck was obsessed with the legend of his maternal grandfather, Irish immigrant Samuel Hamilton. Steinbeck would transfer Hamilton almost completely (including the name) into his late novel, East of Eden, and fill the earlier stories of The Red Pony with nostalgic memories of visits to the Hamilton family farm in Salinas Valley.

But before Hamilton was the shadowy paternal grandfather, John Adolph Grossteinbeck, who shortened the family name after immigrating to the United States. John Adolph was the fierce-looking, ill-fated wanderer who was the source, Steinbeck believed, of his own sense of adventure.

As a young man, John Adolph had journeyed from his native Germany to Jerusalem with the avowed intention of converting the Jews. Whether this bizarre mission was serious or only an excuse for adventure, it ended tragically, with John Adolph’s brother killed by bandits. Fortunately for literary history, John Adolph lived, married, and immigrated to the United States. Dogged by a strain of bad luck worthy of a Steinbeck story, the family arrived just before the Civil War in Florida, where John Adolph was drafted into the Confederate army. Surviving the war, the family wandered to New England, then across the continent to California.

Steinbeck would draw on both these grandfathers for two of the stories in The Red Pony collection. The first of these “grandfather” stories is “The Great Mountains,” placed in the collection between the two “horse” stories of “The Gift” and “The Promise” discussed last week.

In “The Great Mountains,” the grandfather figure is an old paisano, Gitano, whose family once owned the land where young Jody Tiflin’s family lives. When asked his business, the man only says, “I am Gitano, and I have come back.” What he has come back to do is die on the land of his birth.

He is also the only person who can tell Jody about the mountains that rim the far side of the family ranch, the “great mountains where they went piling back, growing darker and more savage until they finished with one jagged ridge, high up against the west. Curious secret mountains; (Jody) thought of the little he knew about them. “What’s on the other side?” he asked his father once. “More mountains, I guess,” was the only reply. Those are the mountains Gitano both fears and longs for.

Jody’s father refuses the old man more than a single night’s lodging on the ranch, and compares him clumsily to the ranch’s old, past-work horse, Easter. “Old things ought to be put out of their misery¼ one shot, a big noise, one big pain in the head maybe, and that’s all.”

But Jody wants to know more. He visits Gitano in the bunkhouse, to find the old man polishing a weapon, “a lean and lovely rapier with a golden basket hilt. The blade was a thin ray of dark light.” The next morning, Gitano is gone, and so is the old horse, only seen by a passerby, “an old man on an old horse¼ (with) something shining in his hand.”

“(Jody) looked searching at the towering mountains -- ridge after ridge after ridge until at last there was the ocean. For a moment he thought he could see a black speck crawling up the farthest ridge. Jody thought of the rapier and of Gitano. And he thought of the great mountains¼ ”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes a February of animal adventures with a last look at The Red Pony.)

Adventure classics -- Life, death & the cost of a promise

The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

***

Looking back two decades after The Red Pony, John Steinbeck said, “(It) was written a long time ago, when there was desolation in my family. The first death had occurred. And the family, which every child believes to be immortal, was shattered. . ."

Shattered, but put back together. Put back together, but never the same. (“You will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would write later about the experience of grief.)

So Steinbeck drew on his own experiences of visiting his grandparents’ farm, of seeing the day to day work of living and dying on the farm, to transmute the experience of death, and the experience of human frailty and fallibility, on young Jody Tiflin, protagonist of the stories that make up The Red Pony cycle.

In the first of the four stories published together in book form, “The Gift,” Jody receives a red pony colt his father bought at auction from a bankrupt circus. Although Jody promises to take care of the pony, he depends on the aid and advice of his father’s horse-wise hired hand, Billy Buck. But after Billy Buck fails to bring the young colt in from a winter rain while Jody is at school, the colt becomes ill and dies.

Although Jody’s emotionally-distant father, Carl, seems to be little affected by the pony’s death, in a later story of the cycle, “The Promise,” he tells Jody that he may have the colt of the family’s plow mare if he takes care of the colt, and of the mare during her pregnancy.

But of even more importance to Jody than his father’ promise of a colt is the promise he tries to extract from Billy Buck. Having failed in his responsibility to Jody when the red pony died, Billy at first tries to evade telling Jody that everything will be well with the second horse. At last, as the mare goes into labor, he soothes Jody’s worries by assuring him that he’ll get a good colt.

And then things go terribly wrong. Realizing that the colt’s position inside the mother won’t allow it to be born, Billy kills the mare and cuts the colt from her body.

“‘There’s your colt. I promised. And there it is. I had to do it -- had to.’” And as Jody leaves the stable to get water to clean and care for the new life, “he tried to be glad because of the colt, but the bloody face, and the haunted, tired eyes of Billy Buck hung in the air ahead of him.”

And whose was the mysterious death that started Steinbeck’s meditation? My choice would be his maternal grandfather. Although dying in 1904, when Steinbeck was only two-years-old, “it is remarkable how much I remember about him,” Steinbeck later wrote, perhaps referring more to family legend than to the living man whose name and personality he would embody in fiction.

(Next Friday, the lessons taught by two old men in The Red Pony.)

 

Adventure classics -- No easy lessons for the innocents

The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

***

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.)