Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Discontent

Introduction

The problem of how three editors might write an introduction to Steinbeck and the Environment together seemed insurmountable until we decided to adopt the useful evolutionary principle of niche partitioning. Here each of us has contributed his or her own introductory perspective, approaching this volume’s title subject from the respective points of view of biologist, Steinbeck specialist, and generalist in American literature. We are hopeful that the reader will find the interdisciplinary approach helpful from the start, using our points of convergence to locate the universals in the scientific and humanistic experience of Steinbeck’s writing and our points of departure to gauge what our different disciplines can contribute to one another.

A SCIENTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr.

This volume presents papers by researchers of two basic types. The first group consists of people whose primary interest is in American literature and literary criticism. The second group comprises practicing scientists. This characterization of contributors does not mean that the literary cadre is not interested in science or that the scientists are not interested in literature—quite the opposite, as all the authors represented here have enthusiastically contributed to this interdisciplinary anthology.

My background is essentially scientific, so I will seek to introduce this volume from a generally scientific standpoint. First I will attempt to provide some definitions and common ground for terms and concepts often used in the following essays. Then I will attempt to explain why I feel many of Steinbeck’s works appeal strongly to scientists.

Ecology, Environment, Environmentalists, and Environmental Science

Ecology in the sense of man’s awareness of interrelationships among organisms themselves and between organisms and their environment is not new. One does not need formal training to recognize that without herbivores there would be no lions and that palm trees cannot grow at the North Pole. Ecology did not emerge as an intellectual concept and academic discipline, however, until the nineteenth century.

Darwin’s 1859 presentation of the evolutionary idea, with his and others’ subsequent elaboration of it, is fundamental to the development of ecological thinking. Although there were glimmerings before 1859, it would be very difficult to form concepts of interrelationships among organisms and with the environment without the concept of change and adaptation that is the driving force in developing these relationships. The leading German proponent of Charles Darwin’s organic evolution concept, Ernst Haeckel, proposed the term Oekologie in 1866 and defined it as the comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment. Even before this codification, people such as the German Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), and British investigators William MacGillivray (1796–1852) and John G. Baker (1834–1920), had accomplished serious research into plant distribution relative to physical environmental factors (Sheail 1987, 3).

By 1900, a number of people were practicing the new science of ecology, although the results were often criticized for sloppiness and lack of standards. In England, Arthur G. Tansley (1871–1955) set out to improve this situation; he was abetted by Frederic E. Clements (1874–1945) in the United States. Tansley established a journal, the New Phytologist (literally plant student), in 1901 and then assisted in forming the British Ecological Society in 1913. Its carefully refereed journals continue to present the finest of ecological research today. Beginning in 1897, Clements published significant works on American plant ecology, establishing high standards for such work in the United States. The American Ecological Society formed in 1915 and began publishing its journal in 1920 (Sheail 1987, 16–42). By the late 1930s, the emphasis of ecological thought and research was on the relationship between organisms and the physical environment, following the early motto of the American Ecological Society: All forms of life in relation to environment.

By the time Ed Ricketts studied with Warder C. Allee (1885–1955) at the University of Chicago and Steinbeck attended Stanford classes and worked at the Hopkins Marine Laboratory, ecology was a well-established and well-respected discipline. Allee was a pioneer of modern population biology, an approach more concerned with interactions among organisms than simply with their environmental relations. From about 1920 until the 1950s, Allee published a series of papers on animal sociobiology and a book, Animal Aggregations: A Study in General Sociology (1931), that Ricketts and Steinbeck took with them on their trip to the Gulf of California (Astro 1973, 15). Allee noted that aggregations of animals could often withstand stresses, either from environmental factors or from other organisms, that individuals could not survive. For example, if organisms ranging in complexity from bacteria and protozoa to goldfish are not present in sufficient numbers, they cannot aggregate for mutual support and cannot survive in many marginal habitats (Scott 1958). Allee’s concept of cooperation among organisms made him the harbinger of a new wave in ecology, and he exposed Ricketts to this very advanced thinking.

Astro (1973, 44–45) points out that Steinbeck came under the influence of teachers espousing the superorganism idea when he studied at the Hopkins Marine Station in 1923. This school believed that survival of cells, organs, individuals, or higher organizations depended on the orderly cooperation of all the component parts. Thus conditioned by education and predilection, Steinbeck and Ricketts embarked on some mutual advanced thinking of their own.

Neither Ricketts nor Steinbeck would recognize the terms environment, environmentalist, or environmental scientist as they are used today—although if given definitions and examples they would understand quickly. The terms have either changed their meanings or did not exist in the days when Ricketts and Steinbeck were active.

To the two friends in Monterey, the environment meant the physical surroundings of living plants and animals—air, water, weather, salinity, and temperature. Today, environment has come to mean man’s surroundings—flora, fauna, and physical habitat—with particular emphasis on how man has damaged that environment and how he must now set about putting it right. I suggest that Ricketts and Steinbeck were progenitors of the present definition of environment, but I feel it would be a mistake to believe they held that concept in its current form.

Environmentalists, as presently defined, were rare in Ricketts’s and Steinbeck’s day. Now an environmentalist is that admirable person who belongs to Greenpeace and seeks to destroy whaling vessels, or who at least belongs to the Sierra Club, is probably a liberal, and commendably votes for the interests of redwoods and spotted owls—as I do. An environmentalist is a politically active organism. Steinbeck was certainly politically active when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath; he recognized the Dust Bowl as a politically created environmental disaster, and I am confident that both he and Ricketts would have considered themselves friends of the natural world. Nevertheless, I still think we should not evaluate the two men by current environmentalist standards.

Environmental science was not a recognized specialty in the 1930s. Today’s environmental scientists are people doing the useful work of monitoring air and water quality, seeking out point or nonpoint discharge sources of pollution, and keeping track of fluctuating plant and animal populations. Others are administrators working in government agencies to devise, test, and enforce environmental regulations. Some are highly educated theoretical scientists. Neither Ricketts nor Steinbeck would be regarded as an environmental scientist today, because neither was doing these things. Rather both men were advanced early ecologists, not only evaluating organisms in relation to the physical environment, but also considering living populations, including man, in relation to each other.

When we discuss Ricketts or Steinbeck as ecologists, or speak of them as early environmentalists, it will be important to keep the above history and distinctions in mind. Although the precepts of good ecology have not changed, the terminology surrounding our concept of environment and the word’s connotations certainly have. And if some of their ideas and philosophy seem a little naive and self-evident, or their marine collecting practices seem environmentally incorrect to us today, remember that fifty-five years have passed since Sea of Cortez saw print, and our ideas and approaches have changed. Ricketts and Steinbeck were pioneer ecological thinkers and we should not chastise them for lacking the benefit of our modern and enlightened ideas.

Why Steinbeck Speaks to Scientists

I am pleased to be the token biologist associated with this project because several of John Steinbeck’s works speak strongly to biologists and particularly to that strange subset of characters I belong to, the field biologist. Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charley, and particularly The Log from the Sea of Cortez are my personal favorites, and many colleagues share my tastes. To me, Steinbeck’s Log provides a fine description of ecological field biology.

Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck set out on a serious scientific expedition to the Gulf of California, although the description of the trip was anything but serious at times. Their objective "was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced (LSC 2). They prepared with great care, stocking the Western Flyer with preserving chemicals of all descriptions and seemingly endless quantities of specimen containers, but still ran short during the six-week voyage.

Steinbeck, Ricketts, and the Western Flyer’s crew worked hard during the trip and returned with an impressive catch. Some of the collections Ricketts sold on the commercial market (he made his living this way), but the bulk of the material was distributed to scientific specialists for identification. In 1940 the Gulf of California was virtually unknown territory for marine biologists, and half of the collections Ricketts and Steinbeck made there represented entirely new species or significant range extensions for known species. Today, some fifty lots of preserved echinoderms and starfish relatives (plus the human embryo so admired by Ed Ricketts’s father) are preserved at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. These came to the Academy from W. K. Fisher, echinoderm specialist, director of the Hopkins Marine Laboratory, and an associate of Ricketts.

Although the pranks, parties, drinking, and sex stick in the memory, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday also reflect a scientist doing serious work. Benson comments that the Doc of these novels is characterized as a man who spends much of his time going for beer, counseling misfits and prostitutes, chasing girls, and partying. He notes that Ed Ricketts did all of these things but concludes that, in actuality, Ed was a serious, energetic man who spent most of his time working (Benson 1984, 194).

Then there is Ed Ricketts’s and Jack Calvin’s serious and delightful Between Pacific Tides (1939). It continues to be an innovative sourcebook, not simply a list of organisms and collecting sites, but organized by habitat (protected coast, open coast, bays and estuaries) and emphasizing the natural history and aesthetics of the animals it covers. As such, Between Pacific Tides was a great departure from the dry ball lists published before its first appearance and, periodically updated, remains current, if not still ahead of its time, today.

Both Ricketts and Steinbeck liked to have fun, but both took their work seriously. Practicing scientists do science because they think it is important, and they are serious about doing their work well. An earnest approach to work bonds the two men to other scientists and to practitioners of other disciplines as well. Scientists appreciate Steinbeck, the famous literary figure and Nobel Prize winner, for understanding their work and taking it seriously.

But this is definitely not to say that scientists in general and field ecologists in particular don’t manage to have various sorts of fun (very few field biologists are dry balls). Again, the accounts of high jinks in Steinbeck’s books ring true to many scientist readers: We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world-temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. They tend to proliferate in all directions (LSC 33). Later in the gulf, the expedition crosses the trail of an earlier field biologist, John Xántus, who truly proliferated in all directions—leaving in his wake a whole tribe of Xantuses (LSC 72). I won’t shock present readers or embarrass my colleagues by citing similar examples from personal or vicarious experiences.

Then there is Murphy’s Law. Few field biologists are religious in a conventional sense, but most, like Ed Ricketts, are notably superstitious. Also, most possess a sense of humor. Offhand I cannot think of a field biologist who does not believe in Murphy’s Law (Sod’s Law in Britain). According to this law, Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and one of its many corollaries is that machines work perfectly until you really need them. Practicing scientists, in field or laboratory, frequently experience the immutable truth of this most basic principle. The Hansen Sea Cow, the outboard motor portrayed in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, is a classic example:

It completely refused to run: (a) when the waves were high, (b) when the wind blew, (c) at night, early morning, and evening, (d) in rain, dew, or fog, (e) when the distance to be covered was more than two hundred yards. But on warm, sunny days when the weather was calm and the white beach close by—in a word, on days when it would have been a pleasure to row—the Sea-Cow started at a touch and would not stop. (LSC 25)

Very few scientists and certainly no field biologist can read this passage without remembering the essential piece of gear, functioning perfectly ashore or in the laboratory, that just plain died afloat or in the field.

Finally, scientists empathize with Steinbeck because they share his need to know how it all works. The very basis of scientific curiosity is to seek to understand, in as unbiased a way as possible, how the natural world—from the tide pool to the stars—really works. Ricketts and Steinbeck strive to achieve is thinking and quest for a unified field theory of ecology. They may not have succeeded, but striving toward these or similar goals is the essence of science.

Steinbeck and Ricketts’s outstanding idea is that microcosm and macrocosm are interacting entities and part of a grand, interlaced continuum embracing human society. Within this continuum, no part can do without the whole. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, literature and literary critics are not isolated from the ideas and products of science, and scientists do not live apart from the concepts and reality of literature. Here, both are parts of the intellectual whole.

Note

I am indebted to Alan Baldridge, librarian of the Hopkins Marine Station, and Dustin Chivers, senior curator, Department of Invertebrate Zoology, California Academy of Science, for information on the importance and fate of the Ricketts/Steinbeck collections.

A STEINBECK SCHOLAR’S PERSPECTIVE

Susan Shillinglaw

Most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most 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 known and unknowable.

—Log from the Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck and marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts met in 1930, when Steinbeck moved to his parents’ summer home in Pacific Grove, California. There he matured as a writer. There he and Ricketts stimulated, challenged, and refined one another’s thinking. To appreciate their shared ecological perspective, which received its fullest statement in Sea of Cortez (1941), it may be well first to recognize their common romanticism: Steinbeck grew up reenacting the stories of King Arthur, and Ricketts had a lifelong fondness for the poetry of Whitman. Neither was narrow-minded, linear, or materialistic. Meaning resided, for both, in the juncture of the physical and the intangible. Their ecological holism had not only biological but also metaphysical dimensions.

Long before Steinbeck met Ricketts he was struggling to articulate holistic concepts, to conceive of a human’s place in a living whole. His earliest published fiction focuses on a character drawn to nature. In Fingers of Cloud, which ran in a 1924 Stanford Spectator, the restless heroine Gertie flees her home and finds temporary solace and consoling visions on a mountaintop. This romantic escape is her single moment of bliss, for she descends the mountain into a bad marriage. But this story highlights Steinbeck’s inclination to identify or measure a character against nature, both as physical place and as metaphysical symbol. He would repeatedly acknowledge humanity’s intimate and essential ties with its environment. As he was writing To a God Unknown in 1930, he kept a journal intended for his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, and in that journal he records an idea that adumbrates Gertie’s quest and his own ecological bent: Each figure is a population and the stones—the trees, the muscled mountains are the world—but not the world apart from man—the world and man—the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know. Man is said to come out of his environment. He doesn’t know when (Stanford University Library).

Steinbeck’s 1930 statement goes a long way toward explaining his ecological holism. In the novel he wrote for Sheffield (he often imagined an audience for his works in progress), To a God Unknown, the hero’s tragic flaw is that he wrestles to forge a unit—Joseph Wayne and his burgeoning ranch, Joseph Wayne and the mysterious rocks—rather than accepting the natural rhythm of nature that the Indians around him so instinctively acknowledge—years of drought followed by years of rain. Joseph, in contrast, stands defiant. Most of Steinbeck’s memorable characters must learn not to do so. His most sympathetic figures are sculpted in their environments, often first glimpsed as intimately linked to a place both sustaining and threatening, as is the whole of nature. Fog hangs over Elisa Allen’s valley, suggesting her isolation. Lennie and George seek refuge (from economic and social predators) by a stream that evokes fragile safety; the Joads are Oklahomans, their identity forged in contact with the land they must abandon; and the hard drinking paisanos (defiantly antiestablishment) reside on a hill both physically and spiritually above mercantile Monterey. In its dominant metaphor, Cannery Row (1945) sees the enclave of bums and whores, of Doc and Lee Chong, as a human tide pool. In each work Steinbeck rejects the notion of a man-centered universe and describes commensal relationships in an interconnected whole. In short, to see any situation fully, whether it be a migrant exodus or a strike in the central valley or Monterey’s Cannery Row, is to acknowledge the interaction between humans and their environment.

Typically in his novels, one character does recognize connections. These wise counselors are men who stand apart or occasionally the women who articulate an alternative vision that implicitly denies male linearity. Jackson Benson has called these farsighted characters Merlin figures, more or less magical characters who recognize the living whole, both physical and metaphysical. They interpret: Slim, Casy, Pilon, and Doc in Cannery Row and the Chinese Lee in East of Eden. Juanito in To a God Unknown is a wise counselor, as is the problematic Margie Young-Hunt in The Winter of Our Discontent. As visionary, the Merlin figure is the artist, the creator, and he has a little of both Steinbeck and Ricketts in him. In life these two friends, like the farsighted characters, sought connections.

The essays in this collection examine this interconnectedness that Steinbeck and Ricketts long sought to articulate and define in conversation, in letters, in essays, and, for Steinbeck of course, in fiction. Their magnum opus was Sea of Cortez, published in 1941, the collaborative work that is the focus of several of these analyses. At the time of publication, Lewis Gannet commented that this book held more of the whole man, John Steinbeck, than any of his novels. And more of Ed Ricketts. The work represents a decade of thought, and it may be well to step back from Steinbeck’s novels to see the context that shaped the thinking of both men. Long a subject of critical debate, their symbiotic relationship is difficult to unravel. Richard Astro, for one, in his pioneering study John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist, champions the marine biologist as the well-spring of Steinbeck’s biological naturalism. By self-admission a shameless magpie, Steinbeck, others concur, absorbed Ricketts’s philosophical ideas: nonteleological, or is, thinking; the group man concept; and biological holism.

A better model to characterize the relationship between Steinbeck and Ricketts, however, may be borrowed from their own investigations, the ecological one of interconnection. Key psychological and philosophical issues worked out between the two men were debated, refined, and recorded separately, as each strove to articulate a model of the universe that integrated physical and spiritual realms, reality and symbolic context. They sought to articulate larger relationships, in Ricketts’s words, between human society and the given individual, between man and the land, and between man and his feeling of supra-personal participation from within (Stanford University Library, Thesis and Materials for a Script on Mexico 1). Steinbeck’s holistic solution, if you will, focused on connections between nature, man, and group; Ricketts’s, perhaps the more abstract of the two, concentrated on man’s potential for breaking through to some reality beyond the physical. Ricketts’s cosmology embraced the scientist’s grasp of matter and the metaphysician’s awareness of the inward things.

The year 1932 was, I believe, the generative time, perhaps the annus mirabilis for Ricketts’s lab circle. That year Joseph Campbell lived briefly in Pacific Grove. That year Steinbeck was working on To a God Unknown, arguably his most mystical work. Steinbeck used to talk about putting unconscious symbols in his work, reported Richard Albee about Steinbeck’s writing during that time; he explicitly talked about working with symbols. Joseph Campbell sheds further insight into Steinbeck’s state of mind when he first knew the writer: Nature power was the generator of myth as far as Steinbeck was concerned, he told Steinbeck’s biographer, admitting that he learned more from Steinbeck about myth than vice versa (Benson 1984, 223). During that remarkable year, Campbell, Ricketts, and Steinbeck—all reading the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, the writings of Carl Jung, and the works of Spengler—were similarly struggling to find a universal commonalty, a source, a way of tying together human experience, nature, myth, symbol, and mysticism—each in his own way. Each recognized, in Ricketts’s words, the trait that has enabled the works of Plato, Lao Tzu, Christ, Jung, etc. to live. . . . I think it’s one of the deepest and most significant quests in human life. Ricketts later wrote to Henry Miller: The people are few who speak from ‘the other side’ (2 July 1941).¹ In 1932, Steinbeck, Ricketts, and Campbell—following the Jeffers lead, said Campbell (14 September 1939)—sought words for the connections they felt.

The correspondence between Ricketts and Steinbeck was burned—by the writer himself—when the marine biologist died in 1948. Campbell and Steinbeck had a falling out. And the reclusive Jeffers certainly never made it over the hill from Carmel to join the group that gathered at Ricketts’s lab. But one can tentatively—and here rather briefly—reconstruct what was under discussion at the lab during what Campbell called our year of crazy beginnings (14 September 1939) through the correspondence between Ricketts and Campbell. Not having seen the marine biologist for seven years, Joseph Campbell wrote to him in 1939, mentioning that the project he was working on last time he saw Ed was a synthesis of Spengler and Jung. I have been diligently at work on the project these seven silent years, Joyce’s new work, ‘Finnegans Wake,’ is the closest thing I have found to a complete resolution of the problem (22 August 1939).

Ricketts responded immediately: In continuation of the things we discussed I have worked up three essays that pretty well sum up the world outlook, or rather the inlook, that I have found developing in myself more and more during the years (25 August 1939). For Ricketts, the problem of unity was resolved by the extra humanists, the breaking thru gang: Whitman, Nietzsche, Jeffers, Jung, Krishnamurti. Stevenson in Will-o the will, a lodging for night. Emerson’s oversoul. James Stevens knew it. Conrad Youth and Heart of Darkness. Steinbeck To a God Unknown and In Dubious Battle (Ricketts’s notes). All were willing, in Ricketts’s mind, to grasp a sense of the whole, to break through tangible reality to a spiritual awareness. In 1939, he sent Campbell the essays that outline the core of his thought: Non-Teleological Thinking (the Easter Sunday sermon in Log), Philosophy of Breaking Through, and A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry, each of which Campbell critiques and endorses. Both men resolved the problem by unifying fields of thought: in poetry, in biology, and in myth each found both vivid reality and a reaching beyond.

During those same seven years, of course, Steinbeck published his best fiction. I have been especially interested in John Steinbeck’s notions because they develop widely the holistic concepts being felt specifically in modern biology, Ricketts wrote late in the 1930s. For Steinbeck, the problem of unity found focus in stories about group man and the potential of the whole, in the higher calling of Tom and Ma Joad, and of course in the biological holism articulated in Sea of Cortez. Composing the Log section using Ed’s daily journals of the trip and undoubtedly recalling years of conversation, Steinbeck carefully builds a text—to paraphrase Ricketts (31 December 1941)—that conveys immediacy, connection, and a sharp awareness of a cosmic whole. Joseph Campbell acknowledges as much in a letter to Ricketts after he read the book:

And I think that the book form discovered by you and John is perhaps as close to the life form itself as [a] book could possibly be to life. The on-and-on carelessness of the first two hundred pages, with the cans of beer and the vague chewing the fat; and then, emerging out of all this, the great solid realization of ‘non-teleological thinking’: and then again, that moment just before the entering of Gueyamas, when a realization of two realistic worlds, in the most moving way presenting itself; gradually, meanwhile, the dominant theme of the work is emerging, and from this remark and from that, we understand that society itself is an organism that these little intertidal societies and the great human societies are manifestations of common principles; more than that: we understand that the little and the great societies are themselves units in a sublime, all inclusive organism, which breathes and goes on, in dream-like half consciousness of its own life-processes, oxidizing its own substance yet sustaining its wonderful form. Suddenly, then the life goes out of the trip and we are on our way back to the laboratory to follow this great thing through in a more exact set of terms. (26 December 1941)

Ricketts responds that no critic to date has gotten his sense of the whole.

Certainly the essays here fill gaps in our appreciation of Steinbeck’s approach to the problem, a holistic appreciation of life. For too long, the voice of Edmund Wilson has echoed through Steinbeck studies: the author’s biological holism is simply his tendency to see a character in its lowest common denominator as a kind of instinctive animal. These essays offer a healthy corrective to that view, engaging the reader in the full context of Steinbeck’s holistic