Study Guide to The Red Pony and The Pearl by John Steinbeck

INTRODUCTION TO JOHN STEINBECK

EARLY DAYS

John Steinbeck’s father, who came to California shortly after the Civil War, for many years occupied a position as treasurer of Monterey County; the novelist’s mother was a teacher in the public schools of the Salinas Valley. In contrast with the farther-ranging locales found in the fictions of Hemingway and Henry James, the frequent appearance in Steinbeck’s novels and stories of the California valleys and their inhabitants underlines the novelist’s link with his parents’ involvements. John Ernst Steinbeck, born in Salinas on February 27, 1902, repeatedly demonstrates in his work his sensitivity to nature and to natural processes, so much of which he studied and learned about in the context of the California where he was born and which he loved. His fiction abounds with the paisanos, the migrant laborers, the exploited men and women, the union organizers, and the marine scientists whose affections, concerns and fears the writer had such abundant opportunity to observe. What is more, Steinbeck has made statements about his early years testifying to his experience of literature at home—he mentions Paradise Lost, Crime and Punishment, The Return of the Native, and Madame Bovary among others as works with which he had a very early acquaintance. Here, no doubt, his mother’s profession contributed directly to the burgeoning writer’s direction. Nor was his father uninvolved in the boy’s artistic adventures; Steinbeck’s early fiction was written in cast-off accountant’s ledgers!

FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO THE FIRST NOVEL

Steinbeck kept very busy in high school. He wrote for the school paper; he belonged to the basketball and track teams; he was elected president of his senior class. When school was out, he spent vacations working as a hired hand on local ranches. After he graduated, and before his entrance to Stanford University, he worked as an assistant chemist in a local sugar-beet factory. His attendance at Stanford was not continuous. He was an English major, attended intermittently over a period of five years, but did not get a degree; he wrote some vagabond stories and poems, commonly satirical, for the college newspaper and magazine. Perhaps as important to his future career as his academic involvement were his periods of employment while he was not attending classes. He worked on ranches and on a road gang, where he learned about verbal and behavioral traits which he later incorporated into his work. In later years he would write to his agents letters justifying unusual aspects of conversational passages in his books by drawing on his memory of such observations. In 1925, having amassed less than half the number of credits required for graduation, Steinbeck left Stanford permanently; he went to New York City to become a writer. His brief stay, unsuccessful and anonymous, interestingly recalls William Faulkner’s journey to New York five years before. Of all major 20th century American novelists probably these two made the most consistent and profound use of their provincial environment; both disliked large urban centers. Faulkner too had come to the big city right after brief stays at the local university—the University of Mississippi. Where Steinbeck worked for a brief and unsatisfactory while as a reporter on the New York American, Faulkner spent a similarly short and equally unpleasant time in the book department of Lord and Taylor’s department store. And like Steinbeck, Faulkner left New York quickly and went back to his home area; Steinbeck failed in his attempt to publish some short stories in New York and returned home as a deck hand on a ship that crossed the Panama Canal. When he returned to New York City fifteen years later as a famous writer, he still viewed the city unfavorably. In California again, Steinbeck got a job as caretaker of a Lake Tahoe estate; he was fired from that position when a tree fell through the roof. He then worked in a fish hatchery nearby. During this period, amounting to approximately two years, the writer finished his first novel to be published, Cup of God, A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History. It was his fourth attempt at a novel, got few reviews and little recognition.

THE SALINAS VALLEY

This valley, Steinbeck country, runs roughly north and south, paralleling the California coast about thirty miles from the shoreline. The southern end of the valley, divided into large fields, grows lettuce, broccoli and other vegetables; cattle feed on nearby hill slopes. The town of Salinas itself, Steinbeck’s home town, ten miles from Monterey Bay, is the county seat—somewhat urbanized, but essentially involved with the growers, cattlemen and workers of the area. The lettuce-growing complex has been the scene of severe labor-management disputes; before the second World War a strike by the local workers was ruthlessly put down. During this period normal judicial processes were suspended, violence characterized some aspects of the struggle, and after a month the union lost. The region in general features interestingly divergent social groups. The picturesque harbor includes fishermen and cannery workers from various backgrounds, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian, involved largely with the sardine trade. In addition, survivals from old Spanish mission days draw interested tourists. Carmel is not far; artists and writers have found it a congenial home and find its lack of rigid social rules inviting.

A TERRAIN OF EXTREMES

Carey McWilliams has underlined idiosyncratic aspects of the vineyards, orchards and ranches in the area. While the old tradition of individual’ initiative and adventure still remains, as embodied in the lifestyles of fishermen, aspects of bohemian socialization and some traits of ranch hand behavior, vegetable growing and cattle raising are highly collectivized. These industries are big business and feature a distinct separation between ownership and management. Freeman Champney points out that the region has been typically a terrain of extremes—poverty and riches, economic upper class and mobile, untutored working people. The area lacked a stable middle class, and all the continuous, responsible communal concern that such a class often has. The reader will note the relevance of these sociological observations when he examines Of Mice and Men. Another environmental feature of the greatest importance to the development of Steinbeck’s thinking is the proliferation of marine life in the Bay. With Edward Ricketts, a marine biologist and close friend, Steinbeck in 1941 published Sea of Cortez, a journal of travel and research in marine biology. This study summed up some aspects of the novelist’s long-standing interest in animal behavior and scientific objectivity. Its particular relevance will be discussed in the Critical Commentary.

THE SECOND NOVEL

In 1930, at the age of twenty-eight, Steinbeck married. He went to live in Pacific Grove; his father gave him $25.00 a month and a small house. He wrote 30,000 words of a novel, and a thriller, Murder at Full Moon. The latter, a piece of hack work done in the hope of earning some quick cash, he was unhappy with. He withdrew both from his agents. His next important work, published in 1933, was To a God Unknown, a novel in which Steinbeck suggests the deep-lying need of man for ritualistic and magical behavior. Neither of the first two published novels made money but Steinbeck kept on; he was also writing short stories, planning some articles based on a tentative 400-mile horseback trip in Mexico, and working intermittently on odd jobs. The first of his stories to be printed were the first two parts of The Red Pony, in the North American Review of November and December 1933. The trip to Mexico was cancelled because of the pressure of writing, and Steinbeck worked at odd jobs until 1936-1937.

PAISANOS AND PROPERTY; THE THIRD NOVEL

Steinbeck’s third novel found an appreciative audience and made money. Tortilla Flat was published in 1935, received an award, was produced as a play and was sold to the movies. Consistent to his pattern, Steinbeck in this book drew upon incidents he had observed—in this case episodes stemming from the lives of workers in the sugar-beet factory where he had worked years before. In the life of his paisanos, described in a mock-epic style, the novelist emphasizes values subtly critical of middle-class morality. The characters lie, forgivably, steal, forgivably, and continually rationalize, forgivably; these traits, commonly defined as unworthy in a middle-class context, are not presented as heinous in the culture depicted. Steinbeck does not so much support his characters’ attitudes, poor diets and uncleanliness as he deplores the larger society’s consuming and corrupting concern with property and the inimical values derived from owning property. Steinbeck suggests that the