The Log from the Sea of Cortez (2 page)
Read The Log from the Sea of Cortez Online
Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro
Cannery Row,
which Steinbeck claims he wrote for a group of soldiers who told him to write something funny, something that wasn’t about the war, is more nostalgia than anything else, and the leading character, Doc, is a Ricketts who sometimes resembles the original and is at other times purely a creation of Steinbeck’s imagination. He is not the Ricketts who co-authored
Sea of Cortez,
which was published days before Pearl Harbor was bombed and America entered the war that separated two men whose ideas were so closely interrelated that it is sometimes difficult to know who learned what from whom. That relationship and the thinking of the two men who wrote it are what
Sea of Cortez
is really all about. It is a useful work of travel literature, and it is a pioneering work of intertidal ecology, though it was written a full three decades before Earth Day turned environmental thinking into one of our national pastimes.
which Steinbeck claims he wrote for a group of soldiers who told him to write something funny, something that wasn’t about the war, is more nostalgia than anything else, and the leading character, Doc, is a Ricketts who sometimes resembles the original and is at other times purely a creation of Steinbeck’s imagination. He is not the Ricketts who co-authored
Sea of Cortez,
which was published days before Pearl Harbor was bombed and America entered the war that separated two men whose ideas were so closely interrelated that it is sometimes difficult to know who learned what from whom. That relationship and the thinking of the two men who wrote it are what
Sea of Cortez
is really all about. It is a useful work of travel literature, and it is a pioneering work of intertidal ecology, though it was written a full three decades before Earth Day turned environmental thinking into one of our national pastimes.
When Steinbeck died in December 1968, his critical reputation as a writer was severely tarnished. He had written little of significance in nearly two decades, and his support of the American war effort in Vietnam had put him in critical disrepute among even those critics who earlier had commended him as the champion of the victims of the Oklahoma dustbowl and the avarice of California agribusiness in
The Grapes of Wrath,
and for his compelling portraits of the simple but decent denizens of the Central California valleys in
Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Pastures of Heaven.
When he died, there were few serious scholars who did not share Harry T. Moore’s feeling that his ultimate status as a writer would be that of a Louis Bromfield or a Bess Streeter Aldrich, and that even his best books were watered down by what Arthur Mizener called his “tenth-rate philosophizing.”
The Grapes of Wrath,
and for his compelling portraits of the simple but decent denizens of the Central California valleys in
Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Pastures of Heaven.
When he died, there were few serious scholars who did not share Harry T. Moore’s feeling that his ultimate status as a writer would be that of a Louis Bromfield or a Bess Streeter Aldrich, and that even his best books were watered down by what Arthur Mizener called his “tenth-rate philosophizing.”
History has proved otherwise. During the past quarter century, a veritable Steinbeck industry has emerged. All of his books have been reprinted. Important full-length critical studies have been published by major academic presses, and articles on virtually every aspect of his work have appeared in the best scholarly journals. The publication of his letters by his widow, Elaine, in collaboration with Robert Walsten, and a comprehensive and carefully researched biography by Jackson J. Benson, have shed new light on the man and his creative process. Steinbeck research centers now exist at several universities, most notably in the unlikely location of Muncie, Indiana, where, at Ball State University, Tetsumaro Hayashi began in 1969 publishing the
Steinbeck Quarterly,
which helped young Steinbeck scholars to share their views long before the more prestigious journals were prepared to question the judgments of Harry Moore and Arthur Mizener.
Steinbeck Quarterly,
which helped young Steinbeck scholars to share their views long before the more prestigious journals were prepared to question the judgments of Harry Moore and Arthur Mizener.
Today, Steinbeck’s reputation seems secure. While few would disagree that his canon as a whole reflects an uneven talent, it is clear that his best books champion ordinary men and women, simple souls who do battle against the forces that dehumanize the species, and who struggle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to forge lives of genuine meaning and worth. At the center of Steinbeck’s thematic vision is a continuing dialectic between contrasting ways of life: between innocence and experience, between primitivism and progress, between narrow self-interest and an enduring commitment to the human community. His most interesting characters—George Milton and Lennie Small in Of
Mice and Men,
Doc Burton of
In Dubious Battle,
Tom Joad and Jim Casy in The
Grapes of Wrath,
and Mack and the boys in
Cannery Row
—search for meaning in a world of human error and imperfection.
Mice and Men,
Doc Burton of
In Dubious Battle,
Tom Joad and Jim Casy in The
Grapes of Wrath,
and Mack and the boys in
Cannery Row
—search for meaning in a world of human error and imperfection.
At the heart of this dialectic are the contrasting views of human society held by the novelist and Ed Ricketts. This contrast in views can be seen in
Sea of Cortez,
and in large measure accounts for the book’s importance. For while in much of his work, and most notably in
The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck celebrates what he calls “man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit,” the fact that man “grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments,” he also concedes (in the narrative portion of
Sea of Cortez)
that man “might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.”
Sea of Cortez,
and in large measure accounts for the book’s importance. For while in much of his work, and most notably in
The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck celebrates what he calls “man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit,” the fact that man “grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments,” he also concedes (in the narrative portion of
Sea of Cortez)
that man “might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.”
I have long believed and I have written elsewhere that “the tragic miracle of consciousness” is, for Steinbeck, man’s greatest burden and his greatest glory. And it is the manner in which Steinbeck portrays this burden and this glory in his novels and his short stories that accounts for his success as a writer. This is the basis of the feeling in his fiction, the compassion, and at its extreme, his sentimentality. It was his central concern as a writer, from Henry Morgan’s drive for power in
Cup of Gold
and Joseph Wayne’s search for meaning in To a
God Unknown,
to the last sentence of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he paraphrased John the Apostle, stating, “In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man, and the Word is with Man.” It is to
Sea of Cortez
that we must look if we are fully to understand all this, if we are to grasp the thematic vision of this writer whose books continue to be read and reread by millions of all ages, in his native California, across the United States, and throughout the world—where. in such diverse countries as Portugal and Poland, Mexico and Moldova, Steinbeck remains among the most loved and appreciated of all American novelists.
Cup of Gold
and Joseph Wayne’s search for meaning in To a
God Unknown,
to the last sentence of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he paraphrased John the Apostle, stating, “In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man, and the Word is with Man.” It is to
Sea of Cortez
that we must look if we are fully to understand all this, if we are to grasp the thematic vision of this writer whose books continue to be read and reread by millions of all ages, in his native California, across the United States, and throughout the world—where. in such diverse countries as Portugal and Poland, Mexico and Moldova, Steinbeck remains among the most loved and appreciated of all American novelists.
Though Steinbeck was born and grew up in the city of Salinas, a major processing center for the foodstuffs raised in one the most fertile agricultural lands in America, he spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the towns along nearby Monterey Bay. In 1930, he settled in the bayside community of Pacific Grove with his bride, Carol Henning, whom he met and married in nearby San Jose. The center of California’s sardine fishing industry, Pacific Grove and its neighboring communities of Monterey and Carmel were for many years California’s “seacoast of bohemia.” Robinson Jeffers built Tor House along Big Sur. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce were frequent short-term visitors, and Charles Warren Stoddard, George Sterling, and Mary Austin were permanent residents. Monterey Bay itself, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in “The Old Pacific Capital,” resembles a giant fishhook—with Monterey cozily ensconced beside the barb. Just outside the barb, in a cove embraced by rugged Point Lobos, lies Carmel. And just short of Point Lobos, the Carmel River reaches the sea, flowing down from what Stevenson called “a true California valley, bare, dotted with chaparral, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills.”
The Steinbecks were in poor financial shape as the decade began. His first novel,
Cup of Gold,
failed to sell, and Carol had given up a teaching job in San Jose to move with him to the Steinbeck cottage in Pacific Grove. When Steinbeck and Ricketts met in 1930 (not at a dentist’s office as Steinbeck states in his retrospective “About Ed Ricketts,” but rather at the home of Ricketts’s friend and other collaborator, Jack Calvin), the most immediate result of their budding friendship was that Ricketts hired Carol as his secretary at his Pacific Biological Laboratory, where Ricketts made ends meet during the Great Depression by selling prepared slides to local high schools. At the same time, Steinbeck and Ricketts gradually developed a deep and lasting friendship, based largely on the novelist’s interest in Ricketts’s work in the intertidal.
Cup of Gold,
failed to sell, and Carol had given up a teaching job in San Jose to move with him to the Steinbeck cottage in Pacific Grove. When Steinbeck and Ricketts met in 1930 (not at a dentist’s office as Steinbeck states in his retrospective “About Ed Ricketts,” but rather at the home of Ricketts’s friend and other collaborator, Jack Calvin), the most immediate result of their budding friendship was that Ricketts hired Carol as his secretary at his Pacific Biological Laboratory, where Ricketts made ends meet during the Great Depression by selling prepared slides to local high schools. At the same time, Steinbeck and Ricketts gradually developed a deep and lasting friendship, based largely on the novelist’s interest in Ricketts’s work in the intertidal.
It is generally assumed that Steinbeck’s interest in marine science began when he met Ricketts. But Steinbeck had been interested in the subject for several years, at least since 1923, when he took a summer course in general zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station taught by C. V. Taylor. Taylor was a student of Charles Kofoid at Berkeley, and both were devotees of William Emerson Ritter, whose doctrine of the organismal conception of life formed the zeitgeist of the Berkeley biological sciences faculty at the time. In fact, Ritter’s ideas were transmitted via Kofoid and Taylor to the young and impressionable Steinbeck, who years later told Hopkins professor Rolf Bolin that what he remembered most about his summer at Hopkins was Ritter’s concept of the “superorganism.”
Ritter believed that “in all parts of nature and in nature itself as one gigantic whole, wholes are so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the whole depend upon the orderly cooperation and interdependence of the parts, but the whole exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts.” This notion of “wholeness” is inherent in every unit of existence, claimed Ritter, since each living unit is a unique whole, the parts of which “contribute their proper share to the structure and the functioning of the whole.” Ritter believed that since “one’s ability to construct his own nature from portions of nature in general is a basic fact of his reality,” man is capable of understanding the organismal unity of life and, as a result, can know himself more fully. This, says Ritter, is “man’s supreme glory”—not only “that he can know the world, but he can know himself as a knower of the world.”
Ed Ricketts was not familiar with Ritter’s work when he came to California in 1923, after an uneven career as a biology undergraduate at the University of Chicago (he grew up on the northwest side of the city). But Ritter’s ideas had much in common with those of Ricketts’s favorite teacher at the university, animal ecologist W. C. Allee, whose ideas about the universality of social behavior among animals, and whose theory that animals behave differently in groups than as individuals (described in detail in his classic 1931 treatise on the subject,
Animal Aggregations),
profoundly affected Ricketts’s way of viewing life. Years later, Jack Calvin told this writer that “we knew W. C. Allee from Ed’s conversations, discovering that all of his former students got a holy look in their eyes at the mention of his name, as Ed always did.” Allee did much of his work at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he eventually concluded that “the social medium is the condition necessary to the conservation and renewal of life,” but that this is an automatic and not a conscious process. And when Allee turned his attention from the lower animals to man, he concluded that so-called altruistic drives in man “apparently are the development of these innate tendencies toward cooperation, which find their early physiological expression in many simpler animals.”
Animal Aggregations),
profoundly affected Ricketts’s way of viewing life. Years later, Jack Calvin told this writer that “we knew W. C. Allee from Ed’s conversations, discovering that all of his former students got a holy look in their eyes at the mention of his name, as Ed always did.” Allee did much of his work at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he eventually concluded that “the social medium is the condition necessary to the conservation and renewal of life,” but that this is an automatic and not a conscious process. And when Allee turned his attention from the lower animals to man, he concluded that so-called altruistic drives in man “apparently are the development of these innate tendencies toward cooperation, which find their early physiological expression in many simpler animals.”
Ritter’s organismal conception, his idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and that these parts arise from a differentiation of the whole, is different from but complementary to Allee’s thesis that organisms cooperate with one another to ensure their own survival. The ideas of these two pioneering ecologists provided an expansive intellectual ground upon which Steinbeck and Ricketts could develop their friendship. From almost the first day of their meeting, they became members of a larger group of latter-day Cannery Row bohemians, bound together by their poverty, which they combatted, as Jack Calvin noted, “by raiding local gardens and stealing vegetables for communal stews.” Over time, Steinbeck drew very close to Ricketts. They spent endless hours in Ed’s lab discussing the work of Allee and Ritter as Steinbeck worked on his novels and short stories and Ricketts studied what he called “the good, kind, sane little animals,” the marine invertebrates of the Central California coast.
In time, they both succeeded. Steinbeck achieved modest successes with his early short stories, greater glory with
Tortilla Flat,
which won him critical recognition, and then—when he sold the movie rights to the novel for the then-magnificent sum of four thousand dollars—financial independence. In the late 1930s, his popularity skyrocketed as Of
Mice and Men
succeeded both as fiction and as theater, and as
In Dubious Battle
and
The Grapes of Wrath
established him as a champion of the proletariat. Grapes was and remains Steinbeck’s masterpiece. This epic account of the plight of a family of disinherited Oklahoma tenant farmers made Steinbeck a novelist of international stature. It is the book upon which his enduring reputation as a major American writer continues to rest.
Tortilla Flat,
which won him critical recognition, and then—when he sold the movie rights to the novel for the then-magnificent sum of four thousand dollars—financial independence. In the late 1930s, his popularity skyrocketed as Of
Mice and Men
succeeded both as fiction and as theater, and as
In Dubious Battle
and
The Grapes of Wrath
established him as a champion of the proletariat. Grapes was and remains Steinbeck’s masterpiece. This epic account of the plight of a family of disinherited Oklahoma tenant farmers made Steinbeck a novelist of international stature. It is the book upon which his enduring reputation as a major American writer continues to rest.
Ricketts, on the other hand, worked away on his studies of life in the tidepools, taking the necessary time to maintain his prepared-slide business, which was his only source of income until 1939. That year, Stanford University Press published the results of his work in
Between Pacific
Tides, which Ricketts co-authored with Jack Calvin. Calvin did little more than polish Ricketts’s stilted prose into a thoroughly readable and very professional account of the habits and habitats of the animals living on the rocky shores and in the tide pools of the Pacific Coast. Some years later, Steinbeck wrote a foreword to the third edition of
Tides,
noting that the book “is designed more to stir curiosity than to answer questions.... There are good things to see in the tidepools and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peephole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.” Ricketts’s years of hard work paid off.
Between Pacific Tides
became the definitive source-book for studying marine life along the Pacific Coast, and even today it is read by students at every major oceanographic station from Southern California to British Columbia.
Between Pacific
Tides, which Ricketts co-authored with Jack Calvin. Calvin did little more than polish Ricketts’s stilted prose into a thoroughly readable and very professional account of the habits and habitats of the animals living on the rocky shores and in the tide pools of the Pacific Coast. Some years later, Steinbeck wrote a foreword to the third edition of
Tides,
noting that the book “is designed more to stir curiosity than to answer questions.... There are good things to see in the tidepools and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peephole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.” Ricketts’s years of hard work paid off.
Between Pacific Tides
became the definitive source-book for studying marine life along the Pacific Coast, and even today it is read by students at every major oceanographic station from Southern California to British Columbia.
The Grapes of Wrath and Between Pacific Tides
were both published in 1939. Both authors were left fatigued. Steinbeck had moved to the Los Gatos hills some two or three years earlier, but the two remained close friends and saw one another often. For some time they had planned to write a book together—originally, a modest handbook for general readers about the marine life of San Francisco Bay. Ricketts drafted an outline for the book, and Steinbeck (whose participation in the project has been largely unnoticed) suggested “shopping” the book to his publisher (Viking) and to Ricketts’s (Stanford University), and giving it to the highest bidder. The book was to be written chiefly by Steinbeck, said Ricketts, and would be designed “so that it can be used by the sea coast wanderer who finds interest in the little bugs and would like to know what they are and how they live. Its treatment will revolt against the theory that only the dull is accurate and only the tiresome, valuable.”
were both published in 1939. Both authors were left fatigued. Steinbeck had moved to the Los Gatos hills some two or three years earlier, but the two remained close friends and saw one another often. For some time they had planned to write a book together—originally, a modest handbook for general readers about the marine life of San Francisco Bay. Ricketts drafted an outline for the book, and Steinbeck (whose participation in the project has been largely unnoticed) suggested “shopping” the book to his publisher (Viking) and to Ricketts’s (Stanford University), and giving it to the highest bidder. The book was to be written chiefly by Steinbeck, said Ricketts, and would be designed “so that it can be used by the sea coast wanderer who finds interest in the little bugs and would like to know what they are and how they live. Its treatment will revolt against the theory that only the dull is accurate and only the tiresome, valuable.”
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