#1574 John Steinbeck and the Western Flyer
2023-11-21 00:56:49
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Hello everyone, this is Clay Jenkinson with this podcast introduction to this edition of Listening to America. A conversation with one of my closest friends in the world, Russ Eagle, of Salisbury, North Carolina. We've known each other for a long time. We met under the auspices of Lewis and Clark. He came on one of my Lewis and Clark adventures and has since become a a regular. First as a as a client, and now as a as a member of our of our management Um field director of of many of these tours.
And he and I have then discovered that we both had a great interest in Steinbeck, and, at his suggestion, I've done a couple of Steinbeck retreats out in California. We'll be doing more. And Russ is deeper into Steinbeck than I am, although I'm pretty deep myself in it. I'm writing a book now about Steinbeck and the Arthurian saga, The Mort d'Arthur. Which was a project that never was completed. But is fascinating and and reveals a great deal about all sorts of important things relating to John Steinbeck. And so I'm working on that at the moment, I'm working on a chapter on JFK and Camelot, you know, Mrs.
Kennedy said that, uh, he used to love to listen to that, that LP of the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Camelot. And really, she created the Camelot myth not alone, but she created the Camelot myth a week after the death of her husband in Dallas. So I'm writing about that because Steinbeck was asked by her to write a biography of her husband. JFK Um, he considered it, you know, he pondered it in his usual way, eventually decided he couldn't do it, which is very fortunate. Uh, because it turns out that she was almost impossible to deal with. Such was her grief.
Perhaps, um. When William Manchester was not commissioned but but recruited to write the definitive account of the actual assassination, it produced a classic death of a president. She, Jacqueline Kennedy and her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy, um, attacked. Manchester. Filed lawsuits against him, tried to prevent publication, tried to prevent him from in any way profiting from the work that they had encouraged him to do. They were absolutely 100 unreasonable, uh, they broke, uh, commitments that they had made, they they, they committed. Very deep, ethical.
Breaches, uh, per this. Eventually, the book was published. Uh, and it's a classic. it's a great book. I just reread it. And so Steinbeck dodged a bullet on that one, uh. But he was thinking, if you can imagine it, of casting a biography of J.F.K. Sort of in the tone and manner of Arthur and the round table, which would have been, I think, a terrible, both historical and creative mistake.
Anyway, so I'm working on that. And another chapter on the discovery of the Winchester Manuscript of the Morte d'Arthur, which is a 1485 book. One of the first books published in English by Caxton at his press in London. Um, and this was discovered. The Winchester manuscript was discovered in 1934. It was one of the great literary discoveries of the 20th century. But there were two others that I'm writing more briefly about. The discovery of James Boswell's journals. UM, principally in, uh, near Dublin, in Ireland, uh, and also the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. Uh, so I'm, you know, neck deep in Steinbeck.
At the moment, I'm not as I'm not as enamored of the Western Flyer and the Sea of Cortez as Russ is. Thank goodness, he is, um, and I so envy him going out there now to actually see the launch of it in UM Monterey on the 4th of November. By the time you hear this, he will have done this and we will then do a second program. Uh, of his UM reporting, what, what he saw, whom he met, uh, what that experience was like, and what it says about, uh, the great Steinbeck. So, you know, Russ and I have been friends forever.
Now, um, and it's a joy, it's a pure joy to have a friendship like this. Uh, because he reads books all the time. If I mentioned a book, he almost always orders it and, often enough, is able to read it. Given all the other reading he's doing, as you probably know, he's also writing a book on Steinbeck, on Steinbeck's novella Cannery, so we're all looking forward to that.
Um, he's an encyclopedia of Steinbeck information, he knows, um, as much as I think anybody on earth, about, um, John Steinbeck's life. The details of of of his work, um, his whereabouts, his relationships, his friendships, his um, his letters to, uh, Elizabeth Otis and Pat Covici, among others. Um, and we were just together, uh, Russ and I, in Monterey not long ago. Uh, because he had come out to, uh, join me and and and a couple of others, uh. As we went to the Steinbeck Center, I gave the 25th anniversary keynote speech at the banquet there. Russ unfortunately couldn't stay for that. But we had the day before spent time in the archives there, and we had a just a marvelous time. Um, sharing in the way that the best friendships allow, uh, these experiences. So, um, Russ is a is a quiet man and a humble man, um, and uh, and he thinks before he speaks.
Um, so, uh, be aware of that as we go in. This is a really interesting discussion, I think, with Russ Eagle of North Carolina, about one of his favorite subjects, if not his favorite subject. John Steinbeck. And the discovery, the refurbishing, and now the relaunching of the Persane Boat, The Western Flyer. So let's go to the show.
Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkins and Today. Steinbeck John Steinbeck and his trip to the Sea of Cortez in 1940. The boat that he took, the boat that he secured for this expedition, was called the Western Flyer, and it has been found and refurbished.
And I believe now is at sea. To talk about this. I want to turn to my Steinbeck expert and my very dear friend Russ Eagle of Salisbury, North Carolina. Welcome Russ.
Thank you, it's great to be back.
Is the Western flyer at sea?
It is moored at Moss Landing now, which is at the center of Monterey Bay. Monterey is down at the south end of the bay. The gentleman who owns the Western Flyer and who made all of this restoration happen. He has a business, marine geologist, and he has a business up at Moss Landing. And I think they had hoped to sort of hide it there until it goes to Monterey next week. But needless to say, in fact, I was there about a month ago looking for it, but I missed it by about a week.
But it has been found out.
So this is a very big event in Steinbeck, in the Steinbeck world. Let's back up so. John Steinbeck is an American novelist, best known for of Mice and Men and the Grapes of Wrath, and perhaps East of Eden. He also wrote a very large range of other work. He's pretty hard to pigeonhole, because if you're just talking about an American novelist, you wouldn't necessarily see him going on a five-week journey into the Sea of Cortez, the Baja, California.
No, and in fact, his own son Tom, a few years ago, before his death. Talked about what a crazy idea this was. And he said, You know, my dad just had the ability to come up with these bizarre ideas that nobody else could make happen, but he would make them happen.
By now, Steinbeck had some money. In 1934, Tortilla Flat was published, it won awards, and it really, in a sense, brought him onto the national scene. Then, of course, in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. So he has plenty of money to fund an excursion like this.
What's going on in his life at the time when he undertakes this adventure?
Well, I think there were two things going on, they're sort of related and I think that's what drove him to take this trip. I mean, you did mention he had, you know, more money than he could ever have imagined. And so, you know, what a lot of people don't realize is that the grapes of wrath. The process of researching and writing it, and then dealing with the fallout, just destroyed Steinbeck.
For one thing, he was not the least bit comfortable with fame and fortune. He really wanted to be a writer who sold, you know, enough books to make a living at it. And he was not comfortable in the public spotlight. Plus, you know, the Grapes of Wrath was very unpopular with his people, the people that he came from, and Salinas, you know, the middle class. So he had sort of become a pariah in his hometown.
At the same point, those same factors just sort of ate away at his marriage, which had been, you know, I think, one of the two. His first wife, Carol, was one of the two big relationships in his life. She just meant so much to his work and played such a major role. That was eating at him and he just needed to get away. At the same time, he had said in a letter to a friend, You know, I've got to find new directions. He said he had pushed the novel as far as he could.
He said It's a clumsy vehicle at best. He had decided that science was the direction he was going to go in.
His life was destroyed. That's a really big statement, but let's parse it just a little bit, he told his publisher, Pat Covici. Yeah, print a few thousand copies of Grapes of Wrath. That's probably what it'll do. He couldn't have anticipated that it would become a giant in the history of American literature, and he wasn't comfortable with it.
So he has fame, he's being hounded now by people who want things from him, both good and bad. He is very shy. And he also had a philosophy, and I want you to sort of clarify that his philosophy was that celebrity and success are the death of real art.
Right, I mean, he said, You know, if I go out of the house and I'm noticed, you know, that takes away my ability to observe, to absorb, to create. I mean, that was a huge fear of his long before he was popular, before he had ever published a book, when he was just had just stacks of rejection slips, even when he would finally get someone to agree to publish a book. When they asked for biographical information, he would just shut down. I can't do that, that's going to destroy everything I'm setting out to do.
I mean, I don't think it was posing, I think it was. I think it was very difficult for him being recognized. I think it kept him from doing what he felt like he needed to be do to be a writer.
I agree that, I mean, this is a genuine feeling. This is not some sort of posturing as we sometimes see in writers and artists. But again, going back to your word destroyed, not to get too far ahead of ourselves. Russ But do you think it did? I mean, in other words, he never was able to rise to the level of the Grapes of Wrath again. The critics soon began to notice this and say that he was a one trick pony. Or that he had peaked too early, or that he had limited talent and had gotten lucky with the Grapes of Wrath. Do you think that that celebrity really did damage his capacity to be a creative artist?
I think it probably did. I think it's going to be hard for us to measure the extent of that because so much other stuff was going on in his life. And also, you know, as you know, he, he did not like the idea of doing the same thing twice. So he always was looking for a new direction with the next book. And, um, you know, I think it would be unreasonable to expect anybody to continue the level of success he had there in the latter half of the thirties and early forties.
I mean, he was on a roll. And, you know, his second marriage and his war experience caused significant damage to his psyche, I think, and to his physical wellbeing. So I just think there are a lot of factors, but yes, I think, uh. The Grapes of Wrath took him years to write and several false starts. Um, when he finished, you know, he nearly collapsed, he was bedridden for weeks. So, yeah, I think it, uh, it did play a role in, um, his subsequent output.
To get ready for this program, which is about the five week journey to the Sea of Cortez. I read all the biographies that I have of Steinbeck for that section, and a couple of things that really struck me. Russ number one. He had already decided, as you've already mentioned, that that the novel was a very imperfect form. That he had taken it about. As far as he was going to be able to take it. That it really wasn't the ideal medium for what he was trying to say to the world, what an amazing thing for a great novelist to say.
Right, and, you know, probably the most. At the time, he said, that probably the most popular novelist in the world, I mean, his books were selling just astounding numbers.
So he didn't want to repeat himself, and so he, he, that's one reason he's moving in this direction. Just one more thing about the the relationship with Carol, So he was married three times to Carol, then to Gwendolyn, and finally to Elaine. By all accounts, the marriage with Elaine was the most harmonious of the three, although it wasn't entirely so.
The marriage with Gwendolyn he regarded as a disaster, although it brought him his two children, which he also sometimes regarded as a disaster. Carol was really the most creative of of the three wives. She typed his Grapes of Wrath manuscript, she made some editorial changes quietly in the manuscript, she also named it.
She gave it the name The Grapes of Wrath. I mean, Carol is a giant figure. And and and you and you just have to wonder what would have happened had they worked it out. How much would she have have influenced his creative life afterwards? What we do know is that she insisted on going on this journey on the Western Flyer. He was not in favor of that.
And they were really in the last days of their relationship. At this time, talk about that a little bit. So Carol is is is a strange figure on that boat.
She was, and their relationship at the time was very combative. Her insistence on coming along was just sort of to torture Steinbeck. I mean, they could be incredibly cruel to each other when things were not going well. And supposedly she had signed up to be the cook. Sparky Anaya is one of the crew members, and in the early nineties, he's passed away since, but he published a memoir.
He claims Carol made one lemon meringue pie and that was the sum total of her cooking on the trip. It's a pretty, you know? He tells a pretty dark story of what went on. According to him, there were infidelities on the boat, with both on the part of both John and Carol. On the trip, they did not, even though the captain had given up his quarters for them. They did not spend a single night together in the same cabin. There was a lot of dysfunction on that trip.
That's not represented in the book.
So they do leave on March 11th, 1940 in this 76 foot boat, they return on April 20th. They went down to Cabo San Lucas before it was born as a place, and then went up into the Gulf and did collecting. And the crew consisted of John Steinbeck, Captain Barry, who owned the boat, Tony Barry, Carol, the Unwanted spouse, Tex Travis, who was their engineer? Sparky Enea, an Italian man, and then a person named Tiny Coletto, who was an ex-boxer. So quite a motley crew. And then, of course, Ed Ricketts.
So when we come back in a moment, I want you to talk about Ed Ricketts and the place of Ed Ricketts in this story. But in the minute we have left Russ, it seems to me so odd that Carol would be there. They didn't sleep together on the trip, she may have slept with others, They were really at each other's throats.
That's going to be tension, that's going to build in tension and dysfunction. That just seems like that's not going to be a fun trip for anyone.
And again, if you read Sparky Enea's account, there were times where it wasn't. But I think at night, you know, the alcohol flowed, and you know, sometimes that flow went in positive directions, sometimes it didn't. Steinbeck actually got into a physical fist fight with Tony Berry at one point. People say this about travels with Charlie, you know that Steinbeck only told part of the story? Well, I mean, that was part of his thing. Was perspective, you know, I think you're getting when you read Sea of Cortez, you're getting a true account of the voids, but you're not getting the only true account, the only perspective. And I think it got pretty dark at times.
Now let's take a break. I'm talking with my friend Russ Eagle of North Carolina about Steinbeck, the Great John Steinbeck and his 1940 journey to the Sea of Cortez. With a crew, including someone who was a really important figure in his life, Ed Ricketts We'll begin with Ed Ricketts. When we return, we'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson, and across from me, virtually at least, is my friend Bruss Eagle, with whom I've been on many, many adventures, including into Steinbeck Country. We've done a couple of Steinbeck retreats together in the Monterey Bay area. He's a stalwart on the Lewis and Clark journeys that I make every year. We've been to France together and so on, and, of course, your spouse, Liz. So Russ. The Ed Ricketts relationship is sort of central to any biography of John Steinbeck, and I don't think we've really settled on what exactly it was.
Obviously they were friends. Steinbeck invested in Doc's laboratory in Monterey, helped him out financially, Steinbeck paid for this trip. Steinbeck proposed to co-write a book about the trip with Ed. Ed is an extraordinary man who becomes sort of a hero in Cannery Row and so on.
What's the situation? What's this friendship really?
About a large sector of, I guess, the Steinbeck world. It's hard to even get them to talk about Steinbeck without the Ricketts angle, which I think they go a little overboard. He was a fascinating guy, as you say, he's very unorthodox, very charismatic. He was a scientist, although he did not have an undergraduate degree, much less an advanced degree. Which, in a sense, makes the fact that he eventually convinced Stanford University to publish his books more impressive.
He was a writer, he was a poor writer, and I really think that was part of the motivation for this trip. Steinbeck was trying to help this dear friend of his get his ideas heard because he had tried many times. But if you read the chapter of C. F.
Cortez called Easter Sunday sermon. I think it's called on non-telelogical thinking. That is Ed Ricketts writing, you can tell when you read it, the Steinbeck, this is no longer Steinbeck's prose, I think. William Souter, who wrote the last Steinbeck biography. He said that much of the chapter sounds like a load of proto-existential gibberish. Ricketts just tried too hard when he was writing.
Steinbeck's love for him was so great. I think part of this trip was to get Ed Ricketts ideas heard. I mean, Tony Berry, the captain of the boat. After he read C. F. Cortez, he sort of cornered Steinbeck and asked him, Why didn't you tell the whole story?
Steinbeck said That was for Ed, it was all for Ed.
You hear Ricketts described as Steinbeck's best friend for 20 years. Once Tortilla Flat sold and the movie rights sold for $4,000. Steinbeck was off to Europe, off to Mexico, off to New York, moved to Los Gatos. The time when they were really together on a regular basis, day-to-day, for an extended period of time, was in the early to mid-30s. It's probably, along with Carol, the most intense relationship of Steinbeck's life. Ricketts did have a huge impact on him.
So did a lot of other people. It's easy to see why so many people have grabbed onto Ricketts. Because, as you say, he's the model for Doc in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. He's the only person Steinbeck who said There's no such thing as a good collaboration, He's the only person he collaborated with. A lot of people have this image of Ricketts as this Sage holding court in his lab and Steinbeck sitting at his feet.
A lot of people who didn't like Steinbeck and who were close to Ricketts said some pretty nasty things after Ricketts died about how Steinbeck's wealth dried up. At that point, that was the end of his career.
Yeah, that's unfair. So Ed Ricketts is charismatic, sort of fatally attractive to women, fond of Eastern philosophy and literature, fond of jazz and music, constantly playing LPS records in his laboratory. A serious marine biologist who developed theories of marine biology and wrote a textbook, which is of extraordinary importance. Even now he and Steinbeck met, we think in a dentist's office. The story's very slightly about that.
But they saw something in each other, they were hard drinking, both admirers of women, although in different ways, both given to bouts of philosophical reverie. And the thing that's always, no matter what account we get of Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck, we hear about the Phalanx theory and non-phileological thinking. So, in the quickest possible way, tell us what?
Non-phileological thinking is it's acceptance of what is, I mean, they always capitalize the word is seeing the world as it is, realizing that it's not. Things are not driven by external imperatives, things simply exist, they said. Non-phileological thinking concerns itself not with what could be or what might be, just actually what is.
Attempts to answer questions like what and how? but never why.
Right, and really resisting the idea that there's some sort of a beginning, middle and end to a story, or that there's a moral of the story. Or that things tend in a direction towards some end or other. And you can see that if Steinbeck imbibed that, that's one reason why he thought the novel was a spent force. Because the expectation in a novel is that the Joads will go on their journey from Oklahoma to California and go through many troubles. And eventually, there'll be a resolution they will prosper, or they will find a way or turn back.
But that novel ends without a clear ending, much to the frustration of many readers. So you can see why Steinbeck and Ed sort of were thinking along the same lines. In this. Whatever is is, let's just look at it as a phenomenon, rather than something that has causality or an end product.
Okay, so we get that. What's Phalanx? Phalanx, which I think, correct me if I'm wrong, it's a Roman term, I think.
Sometimes you see it credited as coming from the Greeks, but I think it's the Romans. It was a military term, I think it was, I think literally. It was a battle formation where they covered themselves with their shields. The whole army, you know, and made this great, turtle-like, you know, shelled single, you know, and they became one. Steinbeck came up with this, this idea. Ricketts then fed him all sorts of supporting scientific data.
It was really Steinbeck that came up with this, It sort of snowballed when he and Ricketts started talking about it. Steinbeck came up with this idea. When his mother was dying, he's talking about her, you know, her individual cells are dying.
In the grapes of wrath, we see this rust. So the one person's not going to change the world, but two people squatting together by the side of the road. There starts to be some cross-fertilization of ideas and some strength. Then you get four or five or a bunch, and suddenly you're building a movement, you're building a community. And that if that phalanx attacks the growers of the central Valley of California, it has a chance. But individuals are going to be swallowed up by the larger dynamics of the economy and so on. And so he's, he's constantly pushing.
For the Phalanx, not necessarily in positive ways, either. You know, mob behavior, right? Exactly. The Vigilante was one of his early short stories, which was, and The Indubious Battle, his strike novel that came out before, of Mice and Men and the Grapes of Wrath. Those were all.
Attempts to write a Phalanx novel. So I think that the Ricketts influence on Steinbeck is exaggerated in a way that's unfair to the independence of Steinbeck's thinking and Steinbeck's creative powers. I think you agree with that, I do, and, you know, in a sense.
I think it's unfair to Ed Ricketts as well, the way he is characterized when I think of Ed Ricketts. I think of something that I've heard you say in the past about Jefferson, and that there was no downtime in his life. He died when he was 51, and if you look at the things that he accomplished, he ran this business, he designed these immaculate, intricate catalogs. We still have so many of his records.
He carried on this detailed correspondence with scientists all over the world. He wrote one book which he worked on for years, he did a lot of other writing that was, he couldn't get published. He just did so many things. Like I said, the time that Steinbeck was, he and Steinbeck were actually together was not that many years.
At the same point, I don't think you can question how important he was to Steinbeck, you know? Steinbeck went through two failed marriages, both of which were very difficult on him. And both times he went back to Monterey and went back to Ed Ricketts. It was a great relationship that doesn't need to be exaggerated.
Exactly so. Ricketts dies at 51. He dies of an accident in which his jalopy is smashed in the town of Monterey by a rail car, a rail engine. Steinbeck was unable to get back before he was living in New York, now unable to get back before Ricketts died.
Let's go to this trip. They have to get a boat number one, you have to have the boat. They had trouble getting a boat.
They had trouble getting a boat because of Steinbeck's identification with the labor movement, and the boat owners were facing efforts by the fishermen to unionize. So Steinbeck, one of them actually agreed, and then the Boaters Association, or whatever, sort of pressured him to back out of that deal. They got the boat at the last minute from Tony Berry, who was new to Monterey, had a new boat and didn't. Really, you know, sort of an independent thinker. He just said, Sure, you know, you pay the price of the charter, I'll do it. And he had been to the Sea of Cortez once before, so he knew where he was going.
It's a 76 foot boat, what would you call it? They were looking for a seine boat.
A purse? Seine? Yes, that was the boat that was in vogue at the time in the Monterey sardine industry, which was about to peak. You know, they had used, I think they were called Lamparan Nets before. But this was a new boat, and the Western Flyer was one of three that was built up at Western Boat Building in Tacoma, specifically for the Monterey sardine industry.
It had an engine of 165 horsepower, an Atlas diesel engine, it had bunks for 12. Steinbeck commissioned. he was always something of a gadgeteer and inventor. He commissioned a library slash desk slash toolbox that was made out of plywood. You can still see it in Doc's lab.
You and I have been there together in Monterey. It had a welded framework and plywood, and then it could fold down as a desk and hold specimens and so on, and so forth. It turns out it was too big for the boat, so they had to lash it to the deck. But nevertheless, it went on the journey. And again, the crew John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, Captain, Barry, Tony Barry, Tex, Travis, Sparky Anea, Tony Colletto and Carol. They're on a collecting mission.
So they get around the tip of Baja and they go up into the Gulf, and they're stopping every day, almost to collect specimens in.
These tide pools Why? Well, that was Ed Ricketts business, for one thing collecting in the tide pools and selling animals to schools, universities across the country. He was also interested. The best way I can describe it if you go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium today, Ed Ricketts inspired the way that aquarium is laid out. You know, you have different ecosystems as you move around, and he was interested in studying different ecosystems, what animals were present, what their numbers were, what their relationship were.
And he had written a book about that along the Central California coast, called Between Pacific Tides. I was on a Zoom meeting last night where they pointed out, as they always do that. Even after 83 years, that book is still in print and used by a number of high schools and colleges. It has been updated many times, so the amount of Ed Ricketts left in it is dwindling. So that was an interest of his. It also gave design to the trip.
You know, a lot of it was just to get away. Well, that's a question I have, so I've been.
Reading these biographies, three or four of them, they all seem to agree that it was Steinbeck who drove this trip, and it was Steinbeck who wanted to collect specimens. And that Ed was sort of mostly there for a lark. He was willing to work, but he was not as committed to the collection.
Side of this, as Steinbeck, is that fair? Yes, I've read that too, but as I said, I read Sparky Anaya's memoir. I reread that a couple days ago and he's even more emphatic about that point. You know that Ed spent a lot of time sitting on deck in a bathtub, drinking, and that he said, You know, if it hadn't been for Steinbeck, there wouldn't have been any collecting. At the same time, Steinbeck kept no notes or no journal.
Ricketts is the one that did that. You know, we have his journal. It's funny the first day on the trip, he says. Out into fair weather, but sufficiently pitchy and rolly so that Carol was sick until well into the night and Tony was tired. John was okay, and I miraculously stayed with it.
First night, a few porpoises, many schools of fish off San Luis Obispo, a few sardines, but mostly bait fish, as proven by Spotlight. That's all the Journal says. And then you look at what Steinbeck wrote about the first night, you know, the next year, sitting down there at Isilomar. It shows, you know, Steinbeck's, I don't know whether you would say his memory or his creative talents, but Ricketts has these little blurbs and that's what Steinbeck turned into the book.
So the part you read was Ricketts, that's Ricketts Journal.
That's Ricketts Journal that he kept on the trip, and Tony Berry kept a captain's log. We have that, too, they've been published. Steinbeck had those two in front of him, those two documents, when he sat down and wrote the book.
Was there a photographer? There was not a photographer. They took some high dollar motion picture equipment, which none of them knew how to use, and they got nothing.
So it wasn't well documented in that way. I've read the account and some of it is a little bit too biological for my tastes. There are a lot of splendid passages in the book. In spite of the tensions on board, it appears that they all, in many respects, had a great time at times.
I hope that Bill Steigerwald is not listening to this.
He's our antagonist, he's the one who likes to puncture the balloon of Steinbeck's fictional accounts of reportage.
In the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck got a lot of the dates, right, the Easter Sunday sermon. But one other passage that came out of Ricketts writing from years before, Steinbeck shaped this to tell the story that he wanted to tell. As he did with all his other work, which you and I, and most people don't have a problem with. But yeah, there were a lot of great times. I can tell you again that Sparky and Tiny had a great time. They were sort of legends in the Monterey area.
They were mentioned in Cannery Row, by the way. They also take some shots at what they called the dry ball biologists and scientists, those I think were shots at specific people. Over next door to Ed's lab at Hopkins Marine Station, people looked down on him because he lacked academic credentials, They thought a real scientist had to.
Have most lovers of Steinbeck will never have read this book. Most people listening will not have read Steinbeck's account of this journey. Make the case for reading it.
I think it's a must-read, there are so many passages that you can trace to other Steinbeck works I know. One marine biologist at Hopkins referred to Sea of Cortez as the skeleton key for understanding grapes of wrath. I have a copy. Like you said, I've sort of highlighted in one color all the collecting of specimens because it's not very interesting.
Maybe once you've read it once, okay, if you skip those sections, it's a much breezier read. The most quoted passages you see about Steinbeck come from this book. There's one that is my favorite, I think it's in Chapter 21..
It's a long passage, but I'm just pulling out central, what I think the important to me sentence. It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical, outcrying. That 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 reality, known and unknowable. I think that's what Ricketts and Steinbeck were about, and especially Ricketts's, they were searching for sort of this pre-Darwinian spirituality in a post-Darwinian world. I think that describes Tom Joad when he has his moment in Grapes of Wrath.
Probably Rose of Sharon, too, at the end of the book, when she has that mysterious smile. If you've read Cannery Row, I think that describes Doc out on the reef, when he discovers the body of the dead girl. These moments, these flashes of connectivity, they're very important in Steinbeck's work. I think Ricketts had an obsession with searching.
For those kind of moments, these are the things that just are. they're not necessarily pleasant, they're not necessarily unpleasant, they just are.
But in those tide pools, everything's eating, everything else. You don't want to moralize too much about it. It's just the way a tide pool works. It's just the way that biology works. And humans are part of it, although they have successfully attempted to detach themselves from it. Dating back at least to the Book of Genesis, the passage you recited, and by the way everyone Russ was reciting that passage, is a justly famous passage.
The trip and the book are regarded as pioneering works in ecology that the science of ecology was just being born, the idea of the amazing interconnectedness of all things. Here comes one of America's three or four major novelists taking this strange and interesting journey into Baja and producing a book that is not widely read. But is more important than that because of its influence on this emerging field of ecology. So we need to take another break here. Russ, When we come back, I want to ask you a little bit about the Western Flyer and how we can place this book. Actually, there were two, and I want to get to that, too, in the larger achievement of John Steinbeck.
So you're listening to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson? Stay tuned, we'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm having the great pleasure of sitting across virtually from my friend Russ Eagle of North Carolina. Russ, I'm glad to see you're wearing one of your green shirts. So the Western Flyer. Ever since I've known you, you've been talking about this. I knew there was a boat, but I didn't know that it had any lingering existence.
I just assumed it went the way of all boats, but it was found and it has now been completely restored. Tell that story.
Quickly, how was it found? All right, well, the gentleman at the Port Townsend Shipwrights that headed up this restoration project. His name is Chris Chase. I visited him several times up there before Covid really enclosed the place.
But I asked him if it was true that the boat had been found through its radio signal. Which apparently never changes when a boat is christened. And he said, Well, people say that, he said. But the fact is, in the fishing industry, everybody always knew where this boat was. This boat was never lost. You mentioned it was built as a purse Seiner, but it was built in 1937 by the mid Forties.
The sardine industry was practically dead in Monterey. Tony Berry sold the boat. It was converted to a trawler at one time, a crabber. I think. It was used to fish for salmon in Puget Sound at one time, so it had this long history, but it was an active fishing boat for 60 years.
And then, and it changed owners a couple of times. One of the owners was a NASA enthusiast and renamed it the Gemini. To the extent that people lost track of it. That was another reason, and in 1971, it washed up on a reef in Alaska and was nearly destroyed. Finally, it was retired and a guy bought it.
He bought it knowing he was buying Steinbeck's boat, and he announced a number of different plans over the years. He was going to build a canal in downtown Salinas and float it there as a restaurant. And then he was going to cut it in half and put it on the wall in a restaurant. Anyway. While this was going, it was just sitting there, rotting.
And in 2012, this was up in northern Washington State. It was parked under a bridge, it was moored under a bridge and it sank. It sank in the puget sound. It sank, sat on the bottom for it was not in deep water, but it sat on the bottom for two weeks.
It turned out it cost a lot of money to do everything. That had to be done from an ecological standpoint, draining the oil and so forth before it could be brought back to the surface. And then that was in late 2012 and 2013, it sank again and they left it on the bottom for six months. Pretty much everybody thought it was gone by that point. And finally, they raised it one more time, towed it to Port Townsend and put it in dry dock.
That's where John Gregg came along that we mentioned earlier. He heard the boat was there, he inquired about buying it. As you know, he came and talked to one of our groups a few years back and he said, You know, I paid a million dollars for a boat that was worthless in the Steinbeck community.
Since he bought this boat, I think it was in 2015, you know, this has been the big story. He spent a lot of his own money, they've raised a lot of money. They commissioned the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-op to refurbish this boat, using the same tools, the same materials, the same methods as when it was originally built.
Until Covid, you know, it was a very public thing, you could go by and see the ship. In fact, we were there one day when there was no work going on. And Chris showed us around for a couple of hours and said, You know, the boat's yours. For the rest of the day if you want to hang out. So it was a lot of fun, got a lot of great pictures.
I got a lot of great before pictures, plenty of after pictures are available on the internet now. It's just stunning what they did. But recently, the mechanical work was finished up in Seattle and they're putting a laboratory and classroom in the old Fish hold. And that is not complete yet. I think that'll be done in about six months. But the boat is now seaworthy and, like I said, it's hiding out in Moss, landing on Saturday, November 4th.
It's going to be a parade of boats leading it into.
Monterey Harbor, is my understanding. You actually have pieces of the old boat. I mean, you've contributed to the refurbishing and been part of the whole world of that, and one of your benefits was to.
Get a small piece of the old boat. Yeah, I have two pieces of the original deck and then some of the original nails that they pulled out and they fastened to that. So, yeah, I mean, they did a great job of involving the Steinbeck community, the boating community. I mean, there's a wooden boat world out there that I was totally unaware of. And this project has been very popular, won a lot, lots of awards.
Some of the shipwrights recently went to Great Britain to receive some awards for this job. So, I mean, it's been a big deal in a lot of different areas.
Obviously, well, more than a million dollars have been spent on this several times. That probably, and now you're going to see it in a sense relaunched. How many people will be there? What are your expectations? What's going to happen that day?
Will you get on the boat?
They are going to allow tours of the boat. I haven't been on the boat now and since, I guess, late 2019. Because the lab and classroom down below is not complete. I don't think they're going to open that up, but I'm expecting certainly hundreds of people. So we have two of the great.
Relics. We have Rosanate, which is the the pickup and the camper that he commissioned to go on the back of it, which are at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. You and I were just there and then now, the Western Flyer will be in Monterey. If they could find the pie wagon that he used for research on Grapes of Wrath, we would have a perfect Trinity here. Amazing.
So you'll be there, you've contributed to it, I guess you'll get on that boat. What are they going to do with it once?
They have relaunched it, it is going to be used for education, they're putting a science lab in the fish hole for students. It is going to, I think, go, it's going to be, I guess. Home Port would be the term in Monterey, but it's going to go up and down the coast.
The mission of the Western Flyer Foundation is to stir curiosity by connecting art and science in the spirit of John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts and their journey on the Western Flyer. They bought a period bus, the same period as the Western Flyer, and have restored it. They're going to use that to take kids from schools down to the Western Flyer and that sort of thing. I'm sure they've gotten a lot of grant money.
It's snowballed into an even bigger thing than it started out to be, absolutely, and I think.
I've heard you say that. One of their plans is to, at some point, recreate the journey with a.
Chase cruise ship behind it. That was certainly planned. In fact, they even had the the company they had made a deal with, the company in Seattle. I think to make that trip. And of course, Covid got in the way of everything. But I'm certainly hoping that still happens and hopefully we can secure a.
Birth on that cruise ship. We'll expect a report when you get back from your journey to see the the unveiling of the Western Flyer in Monterey. So why are there two books that came out of this?
Journey, you know, we talked about when this happened. In Steinbeck's career, the Grapes of Wrath had just a year earlier been what somebody called the publishing event of the century. Selling books by the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. That was Steinbeck's first book with the Viking Press. And needless to say, you know, he had a lot of pull. After he wrote that book, he wanted to write this book with his friend Ed Ricketts.
Viking had no interest in this book. We haven't even mentioned the fact that it included a over 300 page Violetic catalog. It was huge, it had color photos, it was expensive to produce.
It was, you know, as Tom Steinbeck said, the last thing you would expect. A writer following up The Grapes of Wrath, and then, when it was published, Pearl Harbor happened the very next day. So after these hundreds of thousands and millions of books that Steinbeck had sold, Grapes of Wrath, the C...F. Cortez sold about 3,000 copies. It was the first edition.
It was, you know, a non-event because of the war, and that's one thing that happened. And then, you know, as you mentioned in I Think 1948, Ed Ricketts died in an accident. And Viking had also pressured Steinbeck to leave Ricketts. Name off as co-author and just list him as responsible for the Violetic catalog. And Steinbeck, you know, was very blunt.
You know, I forbid that we're either going to include his name or we're not going to publish it. A couple years after Ricketts death, I believe it was 1951. Pat Kovici and Viking Pat Kovici was Steinbeck's editor. They convinced Steinbeck to release just the log portion, the prose portion, to leave off the Violetic catalog. You know, much easier to produce, much cheaper to produce, to leave Ricketts name off of it as co-author.
But they sort of, I guess, they convinced him to do so by including an essay, a pretty long essay he wrote, called. And in most people's opinion, it's not Steinbeck's shining moment that he agreed to to leave his friend's name off of this book. They did have to convince Ed Ricketts Jr. to sign off on. This. Second. Publication that You Talk of Is was published as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, with a new essay about Ed Ricketts. And it's just by John Steinbeck a really important.
Biographical essay about Ricketts I mean, much of what we know about the friendship and about the nature of the friendship comes from this essay, right? And I think it's probably from.
This essay that people outside of Steinbeck's personal world and people outside of Monterey had no idea. You know, that Doc was Ed Ricketts, or that he was anybody. I mean, we sort of take it for granted now. But at the time when that was published, I'm sure, you know, it was a sort of an aha moment for readers around the world. That's who Ed Ricketts is. Ed Ricketts was Doc.
So after?
These two books are out, they're what based 10 years apart. Steinbeck is going to move on now to something else. What does he move on to after this episode is out of his system? Farky Anaya says that.
When they got back to San Diego, and Steinbeck started getting radio reports on I think the invasion of Norway that he started working on. The moon is down right then. We know from the book that the seed was planted for the pearl on this journey. But Tiny says that the moon is down and Cannery Row were also ideas that Steinbeck got on this trip. They get back and he publishes.
The Sea of Cortez, The war begins, as you say. He learns at San Diego that things have changed dramatically during their journey, where they were really out of the loop. Something that maybe not everybody knows. Steinbeck is a very serious patriot and he wanted to commit himself to the cause.
He wanted to be in the army, he couldn't. It was too old, so he wrote some propaganda. I suppose we'd call it for the United States government.
Bombs away, for example, which is about? He went on every plane that we had in the U.
S Air Force. And wrote an interesting account of that, he wrote, The Moon is Down, which is about what life under occupation is like. And although it's not his greatest work, it might be, in some ways, his most appreciated work. The people of occupied Europe were absolutely thrilled and given some sense of hope from what he had done. And when he traveled to Europe thereafter, he was lionized for that book, which was passed around in typescripts in many of the occupied countries. And he also had a couple meetings with FDR in which he suggested ways in which we could win the war. Then he got himself to the war, first in England and then in Africa, and finally in Italy.
He had a serious world War, too, he did, and he was there as.
Press. But when things started happening, he took off his press badge and put on a gun. It's really interesting that the commander of the unit he was with was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He wrote a biography called A Hell of a War, where he talked about Steinbeck's bravery and determination to be part of everything. Of course, you talked about him riding in every type of plane. Then he went over to Vietnam and shot every kind of rifle they had in the army.
But you said he was a serious patriot and he did some things in life. I don't think he wanted to do because he was asked by president to do it. Steinbeck was one of those people that you never say no to your president.
At least three presidents called upon him to do things for them. FDR But then John Kennedy did. He sent him and Elaine, his third wife, over to Beyond the Iron Curtain on a Goodwill tour. And kind of a fact-finding tour in 1963. In fact, they were there in Warsaw when JFK was assassinated, and then LBJ wanted him to go to Vietnam officially.
He refused to do that, but he went unofficially and then reported back to LBJ and told Jack Valenti, LBJ's chief of staff. Effectively, communications director, told him when he got back in 1968 that the war couldn't be won, he did, and.
That was never really publicized, as you say. He went over there on his own dime and I got shot at, and he did. His sons were there and he did, you know, he didn't do it publicly, but he did make his.
Opinions known to the President, just to back up. So, three marriages, the first one is dying during the Western flyer adventure in the Sea of Cortez. But she's along, and I mean, the reports vary. But she was sometimes a good sport. And chipped in on some of the work that was being done and probably enlivened that boat in some important ways. He's already begun a relationship with Gwendolyn, who will become his second wife. He's doing that in secret, so there's a lot of guilt and tension around all of that.
That second marriage dies pretty quickly, and then he meets Elaine Scott, his third and final wife, and so his personal life is roiled, is filled with chaos. And he actually says in a number of letters to Elizabeth Otis, his agent, and to Pat Acovici, his publisher, that he actually writes best. In periods of great tension and unhappiness, that's.
True, and in fact, the things that really finally turned it around for him, like the Red Pony and Tortilla Flat. You know, he was writing a lot of that outside his mother's door. While his mother was dying. He did always seem to do better, writing in some sort of state of chaos, his mother dying.
And his father, sort of having a breakdown of will, just helpless in the face of all of this. Steinbeck there, he's a very unusual man, John Steinbeck. Give us a couple more passages, if you have them, from either of the two books, The Log of the Sea of Cortez or The Sea of Cortez. Just so our listeners can get a better feel of his style. Okay, since we're talking about the boat.
I'll start with one thing he says early in the book, when he's talking about the Western Flyer specifically. But he's talking about boats in general is, to nearly all men, a boat, more than any other tool he uses, is a little representation of an archetype. There is an idea, boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong that it's probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty. As a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave, and hence is not worth building.
But the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently, the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition, and feeling kills are sound planking. Truly chosen and set, a man builds the best of himself into a boat, feels many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors.
How deep this thing must be. The giver and the receiver again. The boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat, which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf. Fallen by accident in a stream. And man receiving back from a boat. A warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest. A boat, above all other inanimate things, is personified in man's mind.
This is not mysticism, but identification. Man building his greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat shaped mind and the boat a man-shaped soul. Wow, that's fantastic.
It's so Steinbeck. I can't imagine Hemingway, who was on many boats and owned some, writing that passage. I can't imagine Faulkner writing that passage. I can't imagine Mark Twain writing that chapter of Joan Didion or Edith Wharton. That's just quintessential Steinbeck. And, frankly, I don't hear a whiff of Ed Ricketts in that passage.
No, that's all. Steinbeck really beautiful. No, let me say this without, I hope, offending you in any way. It borders on being ponderous, but it's not right, it's right.
There, on the edge of it, but it's not. But Steinbeck, I think, always had fun when he was writing. And you can just imagine him sitting there writing this. And, you know, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I think, but uh, but yeah, it's. It's fun to read. Give us one more, if it's brief, all right, you know, Steinbeck, this is also from the beginning of the book.
You know, Steinbeck was all about things being connective and the sort of interaction of microcosm and macrocosm. So the beginning of the book, he writes. We said, let's go wide open, let's see what we see, you record what we find and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures. We cannot observe a completely objective Sea of Cortez anyway. For in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf, our boat and ourselves would change at the moment we entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf.
Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality if it exists at all. It is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes. Let's go, we said, into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it. That our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool. Make us truly and permanently a part, a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something, too. And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless, it is of relative importance.
We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world, and that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. 50 miles away, the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging, with overlapping scoops bringing up tons of shrimps. Rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region, that isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away, the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is, none of it is important, or all of it is.
That's fantastic an.
Implacable universe watching bombs flying in Europe and and shrugging that this is what is, It is what it is. Humans wage wars against each other. Uh, amazing, so thank you, Russell.
Just quickly, if you had the choice between holding the desk of the Declaration of Independence in your hands. Or holding Lewis's air gun, Meriwether Lewis's air gun, or being on the Western Flyer, which would?
You choose. Well, I've been on the Western Flyer, I've seen Jefferson's desk, there's no answer to.
That question, that question is, how high do you rank this? I mean, are you like a child? Just thrilled that in a week's time you're going to be on that refurbished boat. Or is this an important thing, but.
Not like that important. Well, I can see from where I'm sitting, a photo of me taking my first step onto the Western Flyer about five years ago. So, you know, you know, it's a big deal for a Steinbeck.
Nerd at least, yeah, you're way beyond a nerd. Thank you very much. We'll meet again after you've had this thing. I hope you take careful notes and bring back your own Phalanx theory of everybody crowding to get on the Western flyer on November 4th, 2023.
Russ Eagle, my dear friend and co-adventurer, including Mount Whitney. But we won't go into that. We'll see you soon and thanks for appearing today. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
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