As a story with a young boy as the protagonist and a reference to a horse in the title, it is with predictably dull-witted sensibility that John Steinbeck’s short novel has been woefully mischaracterized as fiction for young adults. One can only imagine the further generic terrorism which might have taken place if the story had featured a heroine instead of a hero. The curious case of The Red Pony is offered as exhibit “A” in the defense of John Steinbeck as one of America’s most underrated and overlooked innovators in the art of long-form fiction which characterized the revolution in its national literature in the early decades of the 20th century.
Steinbeck is by no means to be accorded the same distinction as his fellow experimentalist William Faulkner in terms of mastery of the sentence nor is he as flashy in his broader canvases as John Dos Passos, though he much closer to the latter than the former. As a writer raising the bar during the Modernist era, Steinbeck is victimized by his own talent. Such is the fluidity with which he penetrates into the milieu of the average Joe that he can seem at times to be merely at the top of the ladder of the American realists. No small feat, to be sure, but a closer examination of his work in general and The Red Pony specifically illustrates that while Steinbeck appears to be merely going about his business of portraying the harsh realities of life during economic wartime, he was actually changing the very face of long-form fictional prose in a way that makes Ernest Hemingway look like a drunk taking far too long to write out a shopping list. When it comes to the means by which Steinbeck is a great experimentalist, it’s time to paraphrase Oskar Schindler, “It’s not the words, not the words; the presentation.”
The language of The Red Pony is typical Steinbeck: a simplicity of word choice that belies its fundamentally poetic and almost mystical nature, a ferocious lack of duplicity in presenting the essential truth of the nature of his characters, an easily followed line of narrative and a wealth of emotional honesty that never even seems on the verge of cowering to the temptations of indulging in sentimentality. All of these qualities are overlaid, of course, with the patina of Steinbeck’s fervent commitment to pursuing his non-teleological argument for pursuing truth in fiction. No good guys, no bad guys; just folks doing what they see fit to do under their own personal circumstances. Ripped apart from each other in some kind of literary laboratory to be studied as chemical analysis and it would appear as The Red Pony could only—and should only—have been written as a dedicated novel with the author setting out from the beginning equipped with a clear intent. In fact, however, that chemical analysis reveals an opposite truth that is startling: each of the individual component elements were composed separately over an extended period of five years and with no stimulation—in the early years at least—on the part of the Steinbeck that they would have to be fitted together in perfect sync to be transformed into the long-form work collectively known as The Red Pony.
Steinbeck was not the first writer to construct a “novel” out of a collection of short stories, but few American writers before the arrival of The Red Pony had ever attempted it and far fewer had ever produced a work that is equally strong as a cohesive collection as it is a volume of completely independent tales. (The absolutely stunningly talented Charles Chesnutt comes most immediately to mind as one who did it best before Steinbeck.) One can read each of the four stories which comprise the novel on its own and be satisfied on every aspect one demands from a short story. Likewise, one can read them in chronological order and in no way recognize that they were not planned and completed as a matter of course for inclusion together as a longer work.
The genius of Steinbeck is what separates him from the hardly untalented Dos Passos whose magnum opus U.S.A. is actually similar in that it is a trilogy of novels which are unified into one massive overview of a certain period in the history of America. To achieve that impressive design, however, Dos Passos is forced to utilize what are clearly “experimental” modes of expression as linking devices. While it is true that Steinbeck is working on a smaller scale of combining short stories rather than entire novels, is still quite a remarkable achievement to cull together four stories written over a period of half a decade and do almost nothing more than simply place them in the right chronology and still be able to keep all the characters true to themselves in each section while also avoiding repetition and continuity errors.
The Red Pony may seem on the surface like it belongs on the shelf beside Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka, but the reality is that it is has turned out to be one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, influencing on some level such later similar works as The Things They Carried, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Martian Chronicles.
