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Published in the Cork Independent online on 11th August 2012.
As I stood staring out at a grey, fog-laden Pacific, the words swam in my ears. I was married only a few days so I was used to the dreamy stupor. “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”
John Steinbeck wrote these words in his most famous work of non-fiction, The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The sentence encapsulates the writer’s philosophy on the interconnectedness of humans and the cosmos – that we are of the world, rather than in it. Steinbeck was fascinated by marine biology. The Log from the Sea of Cortez documents a six week trip he took with his best friend, the biologist, Ed Ricketts. Ed Ricketts appears largely in Steinbeck’s novels, most notably as the preacher Casey in The Grapes of Wrath and the much-persecuted Doc in Cannery Row. Apart from being a collector of marine animals, Ricketts was a philosopher, and both he and Steinbeck spent a great deal of time in the back of Ricketts’ laboratory on Cannery Row discussing the intricacies of the world. In the Log from the Sea of Cortez, the two (and a number of other unnamed characters, including Steinbeck’s then wife Carol) sailed on a hired fishing boat around the Gulf of California, collecting and identifying intertidal fauna. No doubt the voyage’s raison d’être was fundamentally zoological, but the book is perhaps best known for its investigations into metaphysics and philosophy. On one occasion Steinbeck muses:
“…that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things – plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.”
I remember distinctly the moment John Steinbeck first crossed my path. I was twenty, and I had taken down a friend’s copy of The Grapes of Wrath from his bookcase. I read the opening paragraph, and it was a moment of devastating clarity. I did not know it then, but those eight lines forged in me an implacable desire to write that lasts to this day. The words were pure and truthful. No tricks, no forced floweriness so beloved of amateurs who are too sure of themselves. And in the end it is merely a description of the beginnings of a drought in the farmlands of Oklahoma. Of course the event frames the entire novel – the drought precipitated the largest internal human migration in American history. Steinbeck’s direct and visceral style, alas, is much abandoned today. It is considered too old fashioned. For some reason, starts, middles and ends, in that order, are disdained by modern critics. The more confusing and peppered with obscure metaphors a book is today the more editors think it will sell. That or the dirtier it is.
Steinbeck is most famous as a writer of the working classes, of the simple folk who worked the land in the SalinasValley of his youth. In novels like Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and Tortilla Flat, his narrative of the land and of those who worked it is unequalled in modern literature. I did not learn of Steinbeck’s love for the marine until I read Cannery Row. By that time, and by coincidence, I myself had drifted into working in marine ecology. With the identity crises that seemed to pebble dashed my twenties, it was refreshing to learn that one could be a writer and also, as it were, be a man of the world. The twenty year-old brain, still in its intellectual infancy, too often thinks in all-or-nothing mode. Though Steinbeck’s work ethic is legendary (he was, after all, married three times), his novels were only a reflection of his real world curiosities. Many writers today are career writers – they know of little else. Steinbeck believed that writing can only spring from living.
Cannery Row is a simple novel about a bunch of down-and-outs living in and around the tuna canneries of Monterey on the central Californian coast. It is virtually devoid of plot, and in a sense it is not a novel at all. Everything described in the book probably happened, and in some cases the names are only slightly altered from the people who once lived there. It also perhaps the best biography of the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts (Doc), that exists. Last year, I fulfilled a personal ambition, when my very understanding wife and I visited Monterey on our honeymoon. The canneries are long gone – they are now factory outlets or ice cream parlours (although the largest of the canneries is now the Monterey Bay Aquarium). I also made a pilgrimage to the Great Tide Pool in Pacific Grove, the very one which inspired Steinbeck’s universal metaphor. I dismounted my bicycle and walked barefoot to the tide pool. Great waves washed in from the Pacific, hissed and ebbed away again. In the momentary stillness hermit crabs scuttled in the sand beneath fronds of seaweed that waved back and forth like hair in a liquid wind. Leathery starfish clung to the underside of black, barnacled rocks. I thought of the great writer and tried to imagine what he imagined when he came here with his friend to collect little animals. “The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air.”
When I returned to our little rented seaside cottage, my wife was cooking burgers and onions. In the corner of the dainty kitchen, atop a freshly set table, a single candle burned beside an uncorked bottle of red. It was from the Napa Valley, and in the candlelight it glowed ruby and crimson and redwood bark from the great forests to the north.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
