Books: Steinbeck Inflation

THE RED PONY—John Steinbeck— Covici-Friede ($10).

For a parallel to the inflation that has skyrocketed the value of John Steinbeck first editions, bibliophiles must turn to the classic rise in the price of calves’ liver, once given away in most butcher shops, currently selling at 85¢ a Ib. Distributed free to Publisher Covici-Friede’s friends last Christmas, Author Steinbeck’s St. Katy the Virgin, a short story, is now quoted at $10. Published last fortnight in an edition limited to 699 autographed, de luxe copies, Novelist Steinbeck’s latest work, The Red Pony, was quoted at $10 a copy, and no man knew where it would go from there.

Some readers, baffled by the famine-price set on this slim, 81-page volume (all the more remarkable in view of Steinbeck’s proletarian themes), may jump to the wrong conclusion that The Red Pony contains erotic or esoteric matter too caviarish for the general. On the contrary, The Red Pony is neither scandalous nor abstruse but of an innocence that almost qualifies it for juvenile readers. It consists of three episodes based on Author Steinbeck’s youth. Central character is a healthy, shy, towheaded, 10-year-old farm boy named Jody Tiflin. Given a red pony colt by his father, coached in its training by the hired hand, Jody is in perpetual seventh heaven except when he is in school. A few days before the pony is ready to ride, it catches pneumonia, sneaks away to die in the woods, where Jody is found beside the corpse, hammering insanely on the long-since smashed head of a buzzard that was too slow to escape his wild grief.

Most tenuous, but also the most interesting in showing how the early Steinbeck twig of romanticism was bent, is the second episode: Jody, who feels deeply the mystery of the distant California Sierras, thinks he has the answer when he watches an old Mexican going off into the mountains to die.

Last episode relates how Jody got his second pony. In return for Jody’s putting in a summer’s hard work, Farmer Tiflin lays out $5 to breed their own mare Nellie. Jody dedicates himself completely to Nellie’s prenatal care, to giving his father more than his five-dollar’s worth. When complications develop at the delivery, the hired hand kills Nellie with a hammer, and in a gory Cesarean delivers Jody his promised colt.

The Author. California-born (1900), big, blond, blue-eyed, slow-spoken John Ernest Steinbeck has been a farm hand, hod carrier, caretaker, chemist and painter’s apprentice, itinerant newspaperman. At Stanford University off & on for six years, he treated it as a sort of public library where he read only what took his fancy: physics, biology, philosophy, history. Indifferent to most fiction, he thinks Thackeray passable, cannot stomach Proust because he “wrote his sickness, and I don’t like sick writing.” He is dead set against publicity, photographs, speeches, believes “they do you damage.” Now living in Los Gatos, Calif, since publication of his best-selling Of Mice and Men* (167,000 copies) Mr. Steinbeck can well afford to abandon an erstwhile $25-a-month budget which he and his tall, brunette wife Carol supplemented by fishing, not for fun, from their own launch in Monterey Bay.

*A dramatized version is scheduled for Broadway next month.