America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (27 page)

Not until after college, however, did Steinbeck meet the man who became the closest, most influential friend of his life, Edward Flanders Ricketts. It was Ricketts who inspired the writer's many accounts of friendship, for that was the relationship that Steinbeck explored most consistently in his fiction: Lenny and George, Mack and Jim, Tom and Casy, Mack and the boys, Adam Trask and Lee. In all of these stories of male bonding, there was, either as one of the friends or as a sage looking on, a figure of serene demeanor and broad understanding. That character was always modeled on Edward Flanders Ricketts. He was a natural object for Steinbeck's interest. He was self-contained without being arrogant; extremely competent at his work as a marine biologist; knew things that Steinbeck didn't know well enough, like music and science and poetry and philosophy; was quiet and yet loved parties and conversation and ideas; and was a nonconformist with broad enthusiasms. “His mind had no horizons,” Steinbeck writes in “About Ed Ricketts,” one of the most heartfelt essays that he ever composed, written a few years after Ed's untimely death in 1948.

Other friends, others he admired, inspired shorter pieces. Tom Collins was the migrant camp manager he met while doing research for his newspaper series on the Dust Bowl migrants, “The Harvest Gypsies” (1936). Collins, like Ricketts, was a thoughtful nonconformist, the kind of creative, unusual person who always attracted Steinbeck. Both Ricketts and Collins were frustrated writers, and Steinbeck attempted to get various works of his two friends published; for Collins he wrote the piece reprinted here, a foreword to the autobiographical novel Bringing in the Sheaves (by Windsor Drake, the pen name that Collins adopted). His words about Woody Guthrie and Henry Fonda also grew out of his work on The Grapes of Wrath. Singer of Dust Bowl ballads, Woody sang “The Ballad of Tom Joad” at a New York benefit. And Fonda's early and defining film role as Tom Joad began a long friendship between the actor and the writer.

When he moved to New York City, first with his second wife, Gwyn, in 1941, later with Elaine in 1950, he became closer to his agents at McIntosh and Otis and to his lifelong editor, Pascal Covici. But he never wrote much about the loyal women who were his agents, Elizabeth Otis, with him from the beginning; Mavis McIntosh, who handled all film adaptations; or Shirley Fisher, whose husband flew the bomber Mary Ruth out of England in World War II and who herself became a Sag Harbor fishing buddy. But once, giving Elizabeth part of the proceeds from the musical Pipe Dream, he wrote her a letter that suggests much about the quality of his deep friendship and loyalty, to her, to others:

 

From that “little house” he made gestures to his closest friends. To Pascal Covici he gave the manuscript of East of Eden, in a wooden box he had carved himself. “The dedication is to you with all the admiration and affection that have been distilled from our singularly blessed association of many years” (SLL 437), he wrote to Covici. And on his death, he wrote him a short tribute: “Pat Covici was much more than my friend. Only a writer can understand how a great editor is father, mother, teacher, personal devil and personal god” (“In Memoriam” 19).

For the most part, Steinbeck kept to his “little house” and wrote publicly about only a few of his closest friends. But the accounts share a certain depth of feeling that is characteristically Steinbeck, a writer often accused of being sentimental who could with words express what he often could not in person. When photographer and collaborator Robert Capa died in 1954, Steinbeck was in Paris, and, shocked and numb, he walked the city for hours, an account recorded in a piece for Le Figaro. He later wrote a short piece on Capa for Photography magazine (1954), included here. Another friendship first forged during the war was with the indefatigable journalist Ernie Pyle, a bond built on admiration for the quality of his commitment to reporting: “Ernie Pyle was a poet.” When they first met at a hotel in Algiers in 1943, they “acted like a couple of lovebirds courting each other,” reported journalist Quentin Reynolds, a correspondent for Collier's. Pyle was about to be sent home for a rest, “not out of the kindness of editors,” Steinbeck writes, “but because they were afraid he would melt and run down over himself from pure weariness” (“Letters to Alicia,” 21 May 1966).

One man Steinbeck cared about a great deal was Adlai Stevenson, two-time Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1952 and 1956. Stevenson had the enormous handicap of running against a hero that everyone loved, Dwight D. Eisenhower, while he, Stevenson, was the relatively unknown governor of Illinois. Steinbeck started out in the first campaign as an Eisenhower supporter—he had known about him, as did all Americans, during the war and had admired him. Yet, as he says in his foreword, reprinted here, to a collection of Stevenson speeches, he changed his mind “entirely because of the speeches,” entirely because of Stevenson's ideas and his clear, unambiguous expression of those ideas. In 1956, Steinbeck was enlisted by Alan Jay Lerner, the musical comedy composer, to contribute ideas and drafts for speeches to the Stevenson campaign. At the Democratic convention that year he was able to meet and talk at some length to Stevenson, and they became friends.

From
About Ed Ricketts

JUST ABOUT DUSK one day in April 1948, Ed Ricketts stopped work in the laboratory in Cannery Row. He covered his instruments and put away his papers and filing cards. He rolled down the sleeves of his wool shirt and put on the brown coat which was slightly small for him and frayed at the elbows.

He wanted a steak for dinner and he knew just the market in New Monterey where he could get a fine one, well hung and tender.

He went out into the street that is officially named Ocean View Avenue and is known as Cannery Row. His old car stood at the gutter, a beat-up sedan. The car was tricky and hard to start. He needed a new one but could not afford it at the expense of other things.

Ed tinkered away at the primer until the ancient rusty motor coughed and broke into a bronchial chatter which indicated that it was running. Ed meshed the jagged gears and moved away up the street.

He turned up the hill where the road crosses the Southern Pacific Railways track. It was almost dark, or rather that kind of mixed light and dark which makes it very difficult to see. Just before the crossing the road takes a sharp climb. Ed shifted to second gear, the noisiest gear, to get up the hill. The sound of his motor and gears blotted out every other sound. A corrugated iron warehouse was on his left, obscuring any sight of the right of way.

The Del Monte Express, the evening train from San Francisco, slipped around from behind the warehouse and crashed into the old car. The cowcatcher buckled in the side of the automobile and pushed and ground and mangled it a hundred yards up the track before the train stopped.

Ed was conscious when they got him out of the car and laid him on the grass. A crowd had collected of course—people from the train and more from the little houses that hug the track.

In almost no time a doctor was there. Ed's skull had a crooked look and his eyes were crossed. There was blood around his mouth, and his body was twisted, distorted—wrong, as though seen under an untrue lens.

The doctor got down on one knee and leaned over. The ring of people was silent.

Ed asked, “How bad is it?”

“I don't know,” the doctor said. “How do you feel?”

“I don't feel much of anything,” Ed said.

Because the doctor knew him and knew what kind of a man he was, he said, “That's shock, of course.”

“Of course!” Ed said, and his eyes began to glaze.

They edged him onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital. Section hands pried his old car off the cowcatcher and pushed it aside, and the Del Monte Express moved slowly into the station at Pacific Grove, which is the end of the line.

Several doctors had come in and more were phoning, wanting to help because they all loved him. The doctors knew it was very serious, so they gave him ether and opened him up to see how bad it was. When they finished they knew it was hopeless. Ed was all messed up—spleen broken, ribs shattered, lungs punctured, concussion of the skull. It might have been better to let him go out under the ether, but the doctors could not give up, any more than could the people gathered in the waiting room of the hospital. Men who knew better began talking about miracles and how anything could happen. They reminded each other of cases of people who had got well when there was no reason to suppose they could. The surgeons cleaned Ed's insides as well as possible and closed him up. Every now and then one of the doctors would go out to the waiting room, and it was like facing a jury. There were lots of people out there, sitting waiting, and their eyes all held a stone question.

The doctors said things like “Doing as well as can be expected” and “We won't be able to tell for some time but he seems to be making progress.” They talked more than was necessary, and the people sitting there didn't talk at all. They just stared, trying to get adjusted.

The switchboard was loaded with calls from people who wanted to give blood.

The next morning Ed was conscious but very tired and groggy from ether and morphine. His eyes were washed out and he spoke with great difficulty. But he did repeat his first question.

“How bad is it?”

The doctor who was in the room caught himself just as he was going to say some soothing nonsense, remembering that Ed was his friend and that Ed loved true things and knew a lot of true things too, so the doctor said, “Very bad.”

Ed didn't ask again. He hung on for a couple of days because his vitality was very great. In fact he hung on so long that some of the doctors began to believe the things they had said about miracles when they knew such a chance to be nonsense. They noted a stronger heartbeat. They saw improved color in his cheeks below the bandages. Ed hung on so long that some people from the waiting room dared to go home to get some sleep.

And then, as happens so often with men of large vitality, the energy and the color and the pulse and the breathing went away silently and quickly, and he died.

By that time the shock in Monterey had turned to dullness. He was dead and had to be got rid of. People wanted to get rid of him quickly and with dignity so they could think about him and restore him again.

On a small rise not far from the Great Tide Pool near Lighthouse Point there is a small chapel and crematory. Ed's closed coffin was put in that chapel for part of an afternoon.

Naturally no one wanted flowers, but the greatest fear was that someone might say a speech or make a remark about him—good or bad. Luckily it was all over so quickly that the people who ordinarily make speeches were caught unprepared.

A large number of people drifted into the chapel, looked for a few moments at the coffin, and then walked away. No one wanted company. Everyone wanted to be alone. Some went to the beach by the Great Tide Pool and sat in the coarse sand and blindly watched the incoming tide creeping around the rocks and tumbling in over the seaweed.

A kind of anesthesia settled on the people who knew Ed Ricketts.

There was not sorrow really but rather puzzled questions—what are we going to do? how can we rearrange our lives now? Everyone who knew him turned inward. It was a strange thing—quiet and strange. We were lost and could not find ourselves.

It is going to be difficult to write down the things about Ed Ricketts that must be written, hard to separate entities. And anyone who knew him would find it difficult. Maybe some of the events are imagined. And perhaps some very small happenings may have grown out of all proportion in the mind. And then there is the personal impact. I am sure that many people, seeing this account, will be sure to say, “Why, that's not true. That's not the way he was at all. He was this way and this.” And the speaker may go on to describe a person this writer did not know at all. But no one who knew him will deny the force and influence of Ed Ricketts. Everyone near him was influenced by him, deeply and permanently. Some he taught how to think, others how to see or hear. Children on the beach he taught how to look for and find beautiful animals in worlds they had not suspected were there at all. He taught everyone without seeming to.

Nearly everyone who knew him has tried to define him. Such things were said of him as “He was half-Christ and half-goat.” He was a great teacher and a great lecher—an immortal who loved women. Surely he was an original and his character was unique, but in such a way that everyone was related to him, one in this way and another in some different way. He was gentle but capable of ferocity, small and slight but strong as an ox, loyal and yet untrustworthy, generous but gave little and received much. His thinking was as paradoxical as his life. He thought in mystical terms and hated and distrusted mysticism. He was an individualist who studied colonial animals with satisfaction.

We have all tried to define Ed Ricketts with little success. Perhaps it would be better to put down the mass of material from our memories, anecdotes, quotations, events. Of course some of the things will cancel others, but that is the way he was. The essence lies somewhere. There must be some way of finding it.

Finally there is another reason to put Ed Ricketts down on paper. He will not die. He haunts the people who knew him. He is always present even in the moments when we feel his loss the most.