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

The Red Pony

by John Steinbeck

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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

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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 -- A woman’s best friend is her horse

Black Beauty

by Anna Sewell

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If Anna Sewell’s mother, herself an author of children’s books famous in their time, told her disabled daughter to write about what she knew, did she think that would be about horses? And that Anna’s single book, published only months before her death, would become one of the bestselling books of all time? (At an estimated fifty million copies, it’s up there with such classics as Dr. Spock’s baby book, Lolita and The Name of the Rose.)

And all because Anna, at the age of twelve, slipped while walking home from school, broke her ankles, and would never again be able to stand without a crutch or walk with any ease. Anna learned to drive carriage horses to compensate for her loss of mobility, regularly taking her father to and from his commuter train, experiences she would incorporate into her 1877 classic, Black Beauty.

Like millions of other horse-crazy kids, I read Sewell’s book in childhood. And I was pleasantly startled a few years ago when a young client at the stable where I do volunteer work quoted it to me. Really? Kids in the twenty-first century take time out from texting to fall in love with Black Beauty and his friends?

Not that Anna Sewell ever intended her book to appeal to children. Instead, she wrote it for people who worked with horses, hoping it would “induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.”

Interspersed through its purported autobiography of a working horse is practical advice on training horses (including acclimating them to such strange sights as railway locomotives), stable hygiene, nutrition, grooming, exercise, even end of life issues. And critically important from Sewell’s perspective, how to drive horses.

When I read Black Beauty in the mid-twentieth century, I’d only seen horses being driven in Westerns, and then with far less emphasis than on riding them. But driving horses was both Sewell’s daily activity and her passion. Re-reading her manual recently, I learned again through Black Beauty’s experience that even in the dark, a driver with a practiced hand can feel through the rein whether something is wrong in a horse’s gait. And that “a slovenly way of driving gets a horse into bad and often lazy habits,” besides the tart observation that a horse “likes to know that one’s driver is not gone to sleep.”

Sewell’s Black Beauty was a cross between prince and plebeian, thoroughbred and work horse, able to comment on the social classes of the human beings he encounters, from working Farmer Grey to Squire Gordon of Birtwick Park and the aristocratic Countess of W --, through his drop down the social scale to livery horse, cab horse, and finally finding himself in a sale of “old broken-down horses. . . some that I am sure it would have been merciful to shoot.”

Along the way, Sewell gives her own analysis of England’s working poor, some of whose woes, such as the exorbitant licensing fees for cab drivers, were alleviated, perhaps due to her writing, soon after her book was published.

At the end, Black Beauty finds himself with the now grownup children of Vicar Blomefield, to whom Squire Gordon once entrusted another old and beloved horse. And I detect in one of those Sewell herself, “with dark eyes and a merry face,” who Beauty approves as a “good driver.”

“My troubles are all over, and I am at home,” Black Beauty says at the end. “And often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees.”

(Because Black Beauty has been so continuously in print, I had trouble finding copyright-free images for this post. The accompanying illustration, of Black Beauty as a colt, is part of William M Hutchinson’s artwork for the 1955 edition from the now defunct Whitman Publishing Company.)

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics opens a March of thrillers and suspense with Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.)