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.”
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.
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.
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.”
Even though Steinbeck wrote a three-thousand-word preface, and Ricketts over five thousand words of text, the Bay area handbook was never completed. It did, however, provide impetus for a larger, more expansive project, the 1940 collecting expedition to the Gulf of California which resulted in the subsequent collaboration on Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. In addition to those members of the crew who are mentioned in the volume, Steinbeck’s wife Carol made the trip, which the couple hoped would serve to help salvage a failing marriage. It didn’t. The Western Flyer left Monterey Bay on March 11, and returned six weeks later on April 20. The four-thousand-mile trip covered some twenty-five to thirty collecting stations where Ricketts, Steinbeck, and the crew collected what Ricketts guessed was “the greatest lot of specimens ever to have been collected in the Gulf by any single expedition.”
After the trip, Steinbeck and Carol returned to their home in Los Gatos, where their marriage promptly collapsed, and where Steinbeck was dragged into controversy over The Grapes of Wrath, which, during his absence, had been brutally attacked for its alleged communist sympathies. Typical was the charge by Phillip Bancroft of the Associated Farmers of California (and a former candidate for the United States Senate) that the novel “is straight revolutionary propaganda.... In page after page it tries to build class hatred, contempt for officers of the law, and contempt for religion.” Steinbeck felt some vindication, however, when he learned in early May that Grapes had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, though he was typically reticent about receiving the award, and turned over his one thousand dollars in prize money to a struggling Monterey writer named Richie Lovejoy, whose father had loaned Steinbeck money to begin his career a decade earlier.
Ricketts spent the better part of a year identifying and cataloging specimens, and many more months passed as the Viking Press assembled the volume, reproduced photographs of the most important animals collected, and dealt with the many criticisms and revisions of the authors as the book went to press. When Steinbeck returned to Cannery Row in January 1941, his marriage to Carol was over, and he was in the midst of a flourishing affair with singer Gwen Conger. He worked on the book’s narrative, and with Ricketts on matters relating to its publication, throughout the spring and summer of 1941. Pascal Covici, Steinbeck’s editor at Viking, probably spent more time on the publication of Sea of Cortez than on any three of Steinbeck’s other books combined. It was finally published during the first week of December 1941. But the reviews in the papers of Sunday, December 7, were hardly noticed as readers were distracted by events of much more immediate importance.
Those reviews that did appear were mixed, but largely favorable. The venerable Clifton Fadiman was miffed. He was at a loss to understand how the author of The Grapes of Wrath got mixed up with such a project in the first place, and he and others pointed to parts of the narrative that seemed obscure, almost unreadable. Joseph Henry Jackson, then the arbiter of literary taste in San Francisco, thought it “suspicious mysticism.” In terms of its scient
ific value, the critical response was more favorable. Among the more disparaging was that of John Lyman, who noted that the authors said a great deal about the “Panamic” character of the Gulf’s fauna, but gave “only the bare lists of forms taken at each collecting station.” More approvingly, Rolf Bolin, the Hopkins ichthyologist and longtime friend of Steinbeck and Ricketts, wrote that it was a good book and would be a great aid to people going to the area to collect. But whatever its scientific merits, the fact is that the book is recognized by nearly all of Steinbeck’s critics as a statement of his beliefs about man and the world; that, as Peter Lisca noted as early as 1958, it “stands to his work very much as Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa stand to that of Hemingway.” Accordingly, it is essential to dispel myths about the book’s authorship and to understand just how it was written.
Sea of Cortez is a big book, nearly six hundred pages long. For many years, it was assumed that Steinbeck wrote the first part, the narrative of the trip—published separately by Viking in 1951 as The Log from the Sea of Cortez—and that Ricketts authored the second part, a phyletic catalog describing the animals collected, prefaced by a series of notes on preparing specimens. At the same time, it was believed that the material for the narrative came from two journals, one kept by Steinbeck, the other by Ricketts. Both assumptions are inaccurate. There were two journals, but neither was kept by Steinbeck. Rather, they were kept by Ricketts and by Tony Berry, the owner and captain of the purse seiner which Steinbeck and Ricketts chartered for the trip. And while Steinbeck referred to Berry’s log for matters of fact (chiefly dates and times), he composed the narrative chiefly from Ricketts’s journal. Indeed, in a joint memorandum which the authors wrote to Covici in August 1941, they set the record straight:
Originally a journal of the trip was to have been kept by both of us, but the record was found to be a natural expression of only one of us. This journal was subsequently used by the other chiefly as a reminder of what had actually taken place, but in several cases parts of the original field notes were incorporated into the final narrative, and in one case a large section was lifted verbatim from other unpublished work. This was then passed back to the other for comment, completion of certain chiefly technical details, and corrections. And then the correction was passed back again.
In this memorandum to Covici, the authors dismiss the notion that Sea of Cortez is two books. Instead, they insist, “the structure is a collaboration, but mostly shaped by John. The book is the result.”
The phyletic catalog is a comprehensive and remarkably readable account of marine life in the gulf, though it is not as complete as Between Pacific Tides, because it is based on a single collecting trip rather than on a decade of study and research. What is unusual about it as a work of science, however, is that it focuses on common rather than on rare forms of marine life—since, note Ricketts and Steinbeck, they, “more than the total of all rare forms, [are] important in the biological economy.” The Log portion of the book is a fascinating series of accounts of the lifestyle of the Indians of the gulf, and discussions of birth and death, navigation and history, and even the scientific method itself. Among the best sections are those in which the writers ridicule science that is cut off from the real concerns of human life. They label such scientists as “dryballs” who create out of their own crusted minds “a world wrinkled with formaldehyde.” Above all, though, the Log is a celebration of the holistic vision the authors shared, and in accordance with their “reverence” for the ideas of Allee and Ritter, this is depicted in terms more mystical and intuitive than scientific. “It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious,” they note in one of the most compelling passages in the book, “most of the mystical outcrying, which is one of the prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.” The narrative as a whole is the record of scientific discovery intermingled with explorations into philosophy, “bright with sun and wet with sea water,” and “the whole crusted over with exploring thought.”
In “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck recalls that “very many conclusions Ed and I worked out together through endless discussion and reading and observation and experiment.” They had a game, he notes, “which we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality.” Indeed, notes Steinbeck, “we worked together, and so closely that I do not now know in some cases who started which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds. I do not know whose thought it was.”
The Log from the Sea of Cortez is an exercise in speculative metaphysics, grounded in the factual record of the trip itself, though even here simple facts like dates get mixed up. Consider, for example, that chapter 24 records events that occurred on April 3. Chapter 25 continues the narrative but is dated April 22, and chapter 26 is dated April 5. And remember that the Western Flyer returned to port on April 20.
There are entire sections where the thinking of both men coincide, and it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish the authorship of ideas. Typical of these sections are those about the scientific method, about seeing life whole, and about how the mind of the observer inevitably colors what is observed. Both Ricketts and Steinbeck were avid enthusiasts of the work of John Elof Boodin, who wrote in Cosmic Evolution (1925) that “the laws of thought are the laws of things” (the phrase is used verbatim in the Log), and that this law underpins the very notion of human creativity, since man and man alone can be a knower and can use his knowledge to understand the universe.
There are other sections of the Log, however, where research into the composition of the narrative reveals single authorship. The complex and controversial chapter on what the authors call “non-teleological” thinking was written almost entirely by Ricketts a decade before Sea of Cortez was published. Steinbeck enlisted Paul de Kruif to help market it and two of Ricketts’s other essays (“The Philosophy of Breaking Through” and “A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry”) to the editors of Harpers, but Ricketts’s convoluted prose and his complicated thinking made this an exercise in futility. So, to provide a forum for Ricketts’s ideas, and because he thought he could find a way to incorporate them into the Log that would be unobtrusive and consistent with the tone of the manuscript as a whole, Steinbeck included the twenty-page essay as “an Easter Sunday sermon.” And there are other sections of the narrative, specifically those dealing with the patterns of tides and with something the authors call “sea-memory,” that date back to a collecting trip Ricketts made with Jack Calvin and with the now-legendary comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in the early 1930s.
Most important, however, are those passages of the Log in which Steinbeck and Ricketts work out their differences in their views of the world and man’s role in it, for it is in these sections that we find clues to what is really going on in such important novels as In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. There are those who believe that Steinbeck drew most if not all of his ideas from Ricketts. Indeed, Jack Calvin speaks for more than a few of Ricketts’s friends when he suggests that “Ed was a reservoir for John to draw on ... in Ed he found an endless source of material—or call it inspiration if you like—and used it hungrily.” The fact is, however, that the intellectual relationship between Steinbeck and Ricketts was a very complicated affair. They disagreed on matters of intellectual substance almost as often as they agreed. Those agreements and disagreements can be found in the Log, and are worked out in fictional form in Steinbeck’s most important novels.
Though Ricketts read widely and was extraordinarily knowledgeable, his worldview was narrow in that it was essentially Eastern and mystical. Indeed, what he called nonteleological or “is” thinking
is essentially noncausal thinking. His major thirst in life was to see and to understand, which he defined as “breaking through” (a phrase he found in Robinson Jeffers’s “Roan Stallion” and quoted in his “Spiritual Morphology of Poetry”) to an understanding of what he called “the deep thing,” where we can see and know, quoting from William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” that “all that lives is holy.” For Ricketts, the objective was what he called “a creative synthesis,” an “emergent viewpoint,” where by living into the whole one can know “it’s right, it’s alright, the good, the bad, whatever is.”
Ricketts’s doctrine of “breaking through” is the cornerstone of his worldview. And certainly Steinbeck shared his friend’s passion for living deeply, seeing clearly, and viewing life whole. Steinbeck’s work at Hopkins predisposed him to holistic thinking, which he embraced fully, and Blake’s statement that “all that lives is holy” is quoted verbatim by Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath and is the basis for collective action by the Joad family as they move from the “I” to the “we” and become leaders of a movement to empower the lonely and displaced tenant farmers. But for Steinbeck, simply understanding the deep thing, the fundamental unity of life, is essentially a monistic approach that ignores common human needs and so is socially flawed. From Ricketts, Steinbeck learned to see life in scientific terms. His own reading of Ritter, and years of conversations with Ricketts, helped him see life in largely biological terms. Perhaps that is why so many of his most memorable characters are animal-like in thought and action. Tularecito in The Pastures of Heaven, Noah Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, assorted denizens of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, and, most significantly, Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, have more in common with what Ricketts called “the good, kind sane little animals” of the intertidal than with physicians or philosophers. But while Steinbeck understood and was sensitive to human weakness, and while he sometimes envied the simple Indians of the Gulf of California—who, as he notes in the Log, may one day have a legend about their northern neighbors, that “great and godlike race that flew away in four-motored bombers to the accompaniment of exploding bombs, the voice of God calling them home”—he was not content to view the world with what he identified as simple “understanding-acceptance.” Rather, for Steinbeck, man is a creature of earth, not a heaven-bound pilgrim, and the writer’s most memorable characters are those who see life whole, and then act on the basis of that understanding, to “break through” to useful and purposeful social action.
The Log from the Sea of Cortez Page 2
