A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Ed Ricketts inside his lab, 1945.

  For eighteen years, Ricketts and Steinbeck were intellectual sparring partners, soul mates, and collaborators. They discussed any and all subjects—the mathematics of music, observations of animal behavior, interpretations of modern art, the philosophy of Carl Jung. If Pacific Grove was Steinbeck’s home and writerly retreat, the lab in New Monterey was where ideas were forged. In the little laboratory by the sea, John Steinbeck’s mind moved outward. There one of the peninsula’s most beloved residents, Edward Ricketts, and one of its most famous, John Steinbeck, forged perhaps the most unusual and significant collaborative relationship of the twentieth century. To set down Ricketts’s influence on Steinbeck is to trace interweaving threads that bind together science, metaphysics, and holistic thought.

  Edward F. Ricketts: A Scientist First

  Ricketts made his life’s work the sea. Born in 1897 in Chicago, he came west in 1923 with fellow marine biologist and business partner Albert E. Galigher. At the University of Chicago, both men had been students of Warder Clyde Allee, whose theory of “mutual interdependence or automatic cooperation among organisms” helped Ed formulate his own beliefs about cooperation, both in animals and in humans. Their life in the West began as a joint effort: Ed’s wife, Anna, recalled that the men “decided that it would be best if the two families lived together on a share basis, sharing car, house and food. We could all benefit that way and put most of the monies into the firm”—a biological supplies lab in Pacific Grove. For a year, that mutual effort (all four collecting marine specimens) helped establish one of the first biological supply houses on the West Coast; the 1925 catalogue offered for sale marine creatures from microscopic organisms to rays, octopuses, hagfish, starfish, and jellyfish, as well as rats, frogs, and cats. But establishing a business was tough going, and in 1925 Galigher departed for Berkeley. For most of Ricketts’s twenty-five-year career on the peninsula, his business bumped along, rarely prosperous though never insolvent, thanks in part to Steinbeck’s significant investments and in part to Ed’s own quirky business practices—leaving bills unopened, according to friends. But he cast a wide net of economic goodwill by paying local kids to collect eels (two cents), frogs (five cents), cats (twenty-five cents), and rattlesnakes (price varied). Ricketts was most certainly scientist first, businessman last.

  If business practices were never Ed’s forte, innovative thought about ecology was. Ecology is the science of connections between organisms and their environment, and his keen mind saw connectivity as a bedrock of scientific inquiry—a holistic viewpoint hardly appreciated by marine scientists in the 1930s. This philosophical foundation led Ricketts to be a great generalist—he never specialized in any particular group of animals or specific subject like anatomy or physiology or embryology. Indeed, it’s impossible to peruse Ricketts’s papers (held at Stanford University, his letters collected in Renaissance Man of Cannery Row) and not be dazzled by the range of his scientific interests, the extensive scientific bibliographies he prepared, and the volume of his epistolary exchanges with other scientists. Ricketts read widely in scientific literature and observed the natural world with full “participation,” a favorite word of both Ricketts and Steinbeck—meaning, for both, full engagement of the mind and senses.

  Edward Flanders Ricketts “had more fun than anyone I’ve ever known,” wrote Steinbeck in 1951.

  Ricketts’s lab.

  Ricketts’s range was broad. He studied vitamin A in shark liver oil, sending small vials of oil to friends afflicted with arthritis or asthma or having ovaries removed. He wrote an essay on wave shock, noting how marine animals were affected in different intertidal zones. He planned a handbook on the intertidal life of San Francisco Bay (with Steinbeck), compiled the phyletic catalogue for Sea of Cortez (1941), and was planning a similar work for the “Outer Shores” off British Columbia the year he died (1948).

  This breadth of marine interests was the scientific side of the holistic view of life that Ricketts cherished, one that guided his attempts to synthesize complex interconnected biological phenomena. He spent hours compiling data on fluctuating plankton levels measured in sea water—his own measurements as well as those from marine stations in La Jolla and the Aleutian Islands. He concluded in a 1947 letter to Joseph Campbell that there was “a primitive biological rhythm operative over the whole of the north Pacific.” (He shared that insight with scientists at nearby Hopkins Marine Station, who, ten years earlier, had published findings on “a predictable rhythm in the changes in temperature of water in the bay.”) Ricketts combined these observations with data on declining sardine populations of the 1940s in a series of newspaper articles that viewed the problem holistically as one involving changing ocean temperatures, plankton supplies, and overfishing. His prescient view continues to be one that marine scientists of today struggle to develop.

  Much of Ricketts’s scientific passion, some assert, is muted in Steinbeck’s accounts of the affable but detached Doc in Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and “The Snake,” a story set in the lab. The fictional Doc embalms cats, prepares invertebrate specimens, mounts developing starfish eggs on microscope slides at precise times, collects at low tide, and struggles with writing a scientific paper. Ricketts did all these things. Although Ricketts didn’t write with Steinbeck’s fluidity, he tirelessly revised a series of essays on science and human psychology, working hard to articulate complex ideas—as does Doc in Sweet Thursday.

  Between Pacific Tides

  Ricketts produced his own seminal work, Between Pacific Tides, the same year that Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, 1939. Published by Stanford University Press and now in its fifth edition, Between Pacific Tides is historically important and remains a valuable text. It was the first work to classify the sea life of the Pacific coast by specific zones of the intertidal environment, stressing interconnections among the different species that inhabited the “protected outer coast,” the “open coast,” and the “bay and estuary.” To Ricketts, the important unifying theme was the community of organisms—how the different species interacted with each other, and how the specific habitat type determined the structure of its own community. This was a radical departure from the traditional approach of classifying organisms by taxonomic groupings, or phyla. Ricketts’s handbook is practical, and easily readable by the nonscientist; the current edition is available in the Monterey Bay Aquarium bookstore.

  Frontispiece from Between Pacific Tides, second edition (1948).

  Ricketts and Steinbeck: Water-Gazers

  “I am a water fiend. I think that is why I need these fish bowls. Water is everything to me.”

  During the years that Steinbeck lived in his family’s 11th Street house in Pacific Grove, (1930-36), he would usually work until late afternoon and then often walk two blocks down the hill toward the bay, turn right along Ocean View Avenue, and end up at Ed Ricketts’s marine supply lab, snug against the sea on what was then simply “cannery row” in New Monterey. Walking this path allows one to feel the allure of water, to sense that humans are, as Herman Melville reminds us at the beginning of Moby Dick, essentially “water-gazers.” For water-gazers, the sea suggests all that is elusive in human experience, what Melville calls “mystical vibrations.” Steinbeck felt these vibrations. He had “a spiritual streak,” said Elaine, his third wife. He was a water-gazer.

  John Steinbeck, circa 1938.

  Certainly he loved living near the ocean. “I don’t like Yosemite at all,” he wrote his godmother in 1935. “Came out of there with a rush. I don’t know what it was but I was miserable there. Much happier sailing on the bay.” Friends say that young John, something of a loner, took long walks on the beach when his family came to Pacific Grove each summer. On a trip to New York City in 1937, reported his agent Elizabeth Otis, John and Carol “went up and down the escalator at a major department store, and every time he got to the sporting goods section he’d go over and touch a boat.” When he moved permanently to New York in
1949, it took him only a few years to buy a house near the sea, in Sag Harbor. Even before he and Elaine moved in, he built himself a small boat, later bought bigger boats, and regularly sailed and fished in the estuary around his point of land. The sport of fishing, he wrote to Harry Guggenheim in 1966, “I consider the last of the truly civilized pursuits. Surely I find it a most restful thing. And if you don’t bait the hook, even fish will not disturb you.”

  Undoubtedly much of his fishing time was spent water-gazing. “Modern sanity and religion are a curious delusion,” he wrote in 1930. “Yesterday I went out in a fishing boat—out in the ocean. By looking over the side into the blue water, I could quite easily see the shell of the turtle who supports the world.” The man who could draw on an American Indian creation myth in a letter moved easily from facts to symbols all his life. “Always prone to the metaphysical,” Steinbeck wrote several months into his relationship with Ricketts, “I have headed more and more in that direction.”

  Salinas mural of Indian creation myth.

  Ricketts was also a water-gazer, long intrigued by metaphysics, prone to the abstract. Walt Whitman had been his favorite poet since childhood—and there was much of Whitman’s yeasty grounding and spiritual ache in him. Like Whitman, Ed was a spiritual nomad and sparked in all who came to the lab a yearning to “break through,” one of his favorite notions, to mental fields beyond the physical. Ricketts was drawn to the “true things,” in his words, an “alignment of ‘acceptance’ (= being) with ‘breaking thru’ (= becoming).” He found wholeness in music and in the poetry of William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Robinson Jeffers, all of whom embraced “not only the ‘beauty’ of ugliness, but the ‘beauty, of beauty; even more important, the ‘beauty’ of the deadly desultory … the beauty of all things as vehicles for breaking through.” To get a sense of what Ricketts was talking about, think of the mystical moments in Cannery Row: the old Chinaman’s eyes, the vision of the drowned girl in the La Jolla tide pool.

  For both men, philosophic inquiry was as fundamental to the human condition as was investigative journalism or collecting marine animals. “Man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as well as unknowable,” Steinbeck writes in Sea of Cortez. To live fully, that book conveys, humans must look from “the tide pool to the stars and back again.” It was not simply a theoretical position but a frame of mind that they shared throughout the 1930s—Steinbeck as both gritty realist and symbolist, Ricketts as marine biologist searching for physical and cosmic connections.

  At the Lab

  In 1928, Ricketts moved his business and then gradually his home life to Cannery Row. If in the daytime scientific work got done at Ricketts’s lab, at 800 Cannery Row, at night the space was given over to conversation and drinking. Ricketts’s lab was New Monterey’s salon, a tiny bohemian enclave of artists, writers, and musicians who were invited for parties and dinners or simply dropped by in the evenings to see what was happening. “There were great parties at the laboratory,” Steinbeck recalled, “some of which went on for days.” The group was committed to rollicking good times, companionship, intellectual sparring, and The New Yorker, a magazine that brought New York sophistication to the shores of the Pacific in the 1930s. What happened at the lab was the kind of relaxation and friendship that Steinbeck assigns to the paisanos in Tortilla Flat or Mack and the boys in Cannery Row. In Ed’s presence people became the best of themselves, if tales told are true. And leavening it all was always the commitment to a good time: “People who are concerned with ‘the eternal verities,’” Ed wrote, “would do well to remember that fun is one of them.”

  The real Ed and the fictional Doc are conflated in nearly everyone’s mind, and what emerges is a nearly legendary figure who embraced in life and embodied in fiction acceptance, relaxation, camaraderie, and conversation. “Everyone near him was influenced by him,” Steinbeck writes in “About Ed Ricketts,” “deeply and permanently. Some he taught how to think, others how to see or hear.” Rolf Bolin, head of the Hopkins Marine Station in the 1940s, said, “I went over there for the purpose of feeling better.” Ed would listen with great sensitivity and compassion. He would play liturgical music. Before the lab burned in 1936 (rebuilt on the same spot), his walls were covered in charts that traced the history of world music, art, and history.

  Ed Ricketts inside the lab, 1948.

  On April 24, 1948, Steinbeck wrote in his journal that he felt close to “some kind of release of the spirit. I don’t know how this is going to happen. I just know it is so. Maybe through the book maybe through sorrow or pain or something. Anyway it is near and I must be ready for it.” On May 5, he wrote, “No word from Ed. I have a feeling that something is wrong with him.” Three days later, Ed Ricketts was struck by a train as he drove across the tracks at Drake Avenue and Cannery Row (now marked by a bust of Ricketts). Having eerily anticipated the loss, Steinbeck was numb. After Ricketts’s funeral, he wrote to Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if Ed was us and that now there wasn’t any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him. I’ve wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which.”

  Indeed, John Steinbeck spent the better part of the next seven years laying to rest the ghost of Ricketts and the siren call of his own past—in East of Eden (there is much of Ricketts in Lee); in the marvelous essay “About Ed Ricketts,” the preface to the Log from the Sea of Cortez, published in 1951; and in the wacky novel Sweet Thursday.

  Ricketts’s spirit endured in Monterey as well. In 1956, another group took over the space that had sheltered Ed. For more than fifty years, the “lab group” held weekly stag parties at Ed’s lab. These businessmen, lawyers, and artists helped found the Monterey Jazz Festival. In 1993, the group ensured the small building’s future when they deeded it to the City of Monterey for a California pittance, $170,000. Although the building has hardly changed since 1936, the city has long struggled with the problem of how to preserve this fragile wood structure. It is now open to the public on May 14 (Ed’s birthday), during the annual Steinbeck Festival, and occasionally for other local celebrations.

  Joseph Campbell at the Lab

  One year, 1932, clarifies the vital importance of metaphysical speculation at the lab. Early that year a footloose young Joseph Campbell—later in life a famed mythologist—came to the peninsula at the suggestion of Carol Steinbeck’s sister, Idell, and spent several months in the company of Ricketts and Steinbeck. It would be a seminal year, “our year of crazy beginnings,” recalled Campbell in a 1939 letter to Ricketts. Campbell reflected on the significance of their interaction: “Since my last letter I have been pushing slowly forward, as through a swamp, toward that great synthesizing middle-point which we all glimpsed those days of the great intuitions.” Those days included nights, when the group would gather at the lab, Ricketts wrestling with the notion of breaking through physical sensations to some greater truth; Steinbeck revising To a God Unknown, his pantheistic novel; and Campbell seeking a “synthesis of Spengler and Jung…. Joyce’s new work Finnegans Wake is the closest thing I have found to a complete resolution of the problem.” The problem, for Campbell, was to trace underlying cultural patterns, the “hero with a thousand faces.”

  The prevailing ideals were to defy conventional thinking, to find meaning in music and nature and spirituality and philosophy, to sift for unity, to see the “whole picture,” as Ed termed it. For Ricketts, the “problem” of unity was resolved by a group of writers and philosophers he called “Extra-humanists, the breaking-thru gang: Whitman, Nietzsche, Jeffers, Jung, Krishnamurti, Stevenson … Emerson’s oversoul. James Stephens knew it. Conrad Youth and Heart of Darkness. Steinbeck To a God Unknown, and In Dubious Battle.” All were willing to grasp a sense of the whole. “You and your life-way,” Campbell wrote Ricketts, “stand close to the source of [my] enlightenment.” “Enlightenment” is not a bad word to describe what happened to all three of them in
1932, water-gazers all.

  Yet, what might have been a historical triad was disrupted by affairs of the heart. Campbell fancied Steinbeck’s feisty wife Carol. Carol fancied Campbell. John, tormented, went off into the Sierra Nevadas—departing to excite “profound pity,” thought a disgusted Campbell (whose “job” it was to “disappear,” as he and Carol had agreed, although the two continued to write one another). Campbell joined Ricketts on a collecting trip in British Columbia.

  Years later, Steinbeck exacted his gentle revenge, apparently casting Campbell as the effete and pretentious Joe Elegant in Sweet Thursday, a writer who explains to brothel owner Fauna “the myth and the symbol” of his book and the “reality below reality.” She isn’t impressed: “Listen, Joe, whyn’t you write a story about something real?”

  Joseph Campbell (second from right) joined Ed Ricketts (center) on a collecting trip to British Columbia in 1932.

  The Sardine Industry

  For more than forty years, the eight- to ten-inch Monterey Bay sardine, packed six to eight to an oval can in oil or tomato sauce, gave life to Monterey’s cannery row. Each night during the season, from mid-August to mid-February, fishermen went out in boats—first lamparas, and by 1926, purse seiners—to scoop up tons of sardines and dump their catches in hoppers a hundred yards out in the bay. From the hoppers, the sardines were sucked into the canneries through underwater pipes.