John Steinbeck by Milton Meltzer

Author:Milton Meltzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

WHEN THE GRAPES OF WRATH dropped off the best-seller lists, Steinbeck was relieved. He had had enough of the unforeseen byproducts of success and celebrity. He’d rather be collecting specimens of wildlife from the sea than creating fictional characters.

Spending his weekends at Pacific Grove, on weekdays he worked with Ed Ricketts at the lab. His investment had made him a half-owner of the lab. “The world is sick now,” he wrote his friend Sheffield. “There are things in the tide pools easier to understand than Stalinist, Hitlerite, Democrats, capitalist confusion and voodoo. So I’m going to those things which are relatively more lasting to find a basic new picture.”

He began intensive study of marine biology, helped Ed with the lab work, and made several field trips with him in the Bay area. Soon he was emerging from the mood of despair, writing Elizabeth Otis, “I can’t tell you what all this means to me, in happiness and energy. I was washed up and now I’m alive again, with work to be done and worth doing.”

Notes he made in this period suggest the point of view he was developing. He believed there was a “creative association between observer and object.” The observer has a point of view. It conditions how he sees what he is examining. It is a sort of creative interchange. The observer’s expectations—shaped by his life, his experience—affect how he sees the object. What peephole is the observer looking through, Steinbeck wanted to know.

He believed that “the life of any individual is closely bound up in the material and social life of his city, with its climate, its water supply, its swamp or altitude, its politics, factories, its food supply and transportation; so is the life of each individual in the tidepool inextricably relative and related to every surrounding environmental factor.”

Later, after one of their field trips, he said, “We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities.”

These ideas would help shape the fiction to come, as well as the journal of the exploratory marine expedition he planned with Ed Ricketts. Late in March 1940, John and Ed were ready for their month in the Gulf of California. John, paying for the voyage, handled all the preparations, buying equipment and supplies and obtaining necessary permits from the State Department and Mexico.

Going aboard with John and Ed were the ship’s captain, a crew of three, and Carol serving as cook. As they left Monterey on their seventy-six-foot boat, Western Flyer, they saw the threatening signs of war: navy planes and ships, gathering for action someday.

Steinbeck spoke of the trip as a research project for Ricketts. But it was more for himself. He was looking for fresh material to write about, not the tragedies of human existence, but the microscopic life of marine animals.

The object of the voyage was to collect and preserve marine invertebrates along the seashore.

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