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From “Strange” Collecting Places to Tacitus’ Historiae and Back Again:
Lessons in the Art of Seeing and Thinking, from John Steinbeck
(Excerpts from an Essay by Leonard G. Schulze)
“As Strange an Operation”
Last year my brother-in-law Kirby, a chemical engineer with a life-long commitment to good literature, gave me a copy of Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, nominally the record of a “biological expedition” undertaken in 1940 by John Steinbeck and his close friend, drinking buddy, and intellectual companion Edward F. Ricketts. Ricketts was an eccentric marine biologist, ecologist, and amateur philosopher who ran a business during the 1920’s and 1930’s on Cannery Row called Pacific Biological Laboratories, Inc., which Steinbeck describes “as strange an operation as ever outraged the corporate laws of California.”
In a long career as a literary scholar and professor, I had not read Sea of Cortez, and I was thankful for the gift and for Kirby’s thoughtfulness. He said he had found it stimulating in ways that differed from more canonical works like The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden, or Of Mice and Men, masterpieces all. And sure enough: from the first paragraphs on, I began to get a sense of the distinctive quality, the intellectual adventuresomeness, of Steinbeck’s prose itself. I told Kirby I would try to articulate what makes this small book so significant. This essay, in observance of Steinbeck’s 119th birthday on February 27, 2021, is the result, offered here in gratitude to Kirby and in homage to Steinbeck.
In the appendix to this book, bearing the title “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck provides a poignant portrayal of Rickett’s demise following the expedition, when a train struck his beat-up sedan. Steinbeck offers an extended meditation on the complex character of his old friend, whose absence remains a paradoxical presence in the lives of his friends: “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.” The relationship between this “appendix” and the “leisurely journal” of the log of the expedition is one of the pleasures of this book. I will try to describe some of the paradoxical delights with which the text rewards a patient reader.
“A Better-Sounding and More Exciting Name”—And Horizonless Curiosity
In the introduction, Steinbeck alerts the reader that the “research” promised in the title is anything but “a controlled experiment” in any methodologically rigorous scientific sense. On an even more basic level, and very early on, he also gives notice that the very act of naming anything, including the events and findings he is about to narrate, always involves habits of mind and motives worthy of our attention.
We made a trip into the Gulf [of California]; sometimes we dignified it by calling it an expedition. Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and a more exciting name. We stopped in many little harbors and near barren coasts to collect and preserve the marine invertebrates of the littoral. One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip—and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition—was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. That plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth. But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny.
Lexical and semantic reflections about the difference between a “trip” and an “expedition”—as well as pronouncements on the aesthetics and kinetics of proper names—prepare us, perhaps, for deeper excursions into the nature of truth—and truth-telling. The alleged scientific motive behind the trip is labeled as “simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth.” The truth, we are told, resides not in any “objective” knowledge of the phenomena being investigated—however reliable such knowledge might seem—but rather in the curiosity of the “knowers” themselves.
How shall we think about the “truth” of curiosity? Steinbeck’s prose itself, if we pay close attention to its texture and dynamics, instructs us both what’s involved, and what’s at stake, in such thinking. Patient engagement with the flow of the language brings intellectual adventures and delightful encounters with his lively mind. Its restlessness challenges and rewards us in equal—if paradoxical—measures.
“Telling” such truth about “unlimited curiosity” entails immersing ourselves in the generative but inchoate energy of the mind—before the mind has disciplined itself to follow established methodological road maps. Steinbeck is inviting us into the experience of a mind exploring the unruly process of coming to terms with itself. That experience is a rich adventure, and I urge the reader of this essay to accept Steinbeck’s invitation.
We are told that the authors’ curiosity is not only wide, but literally horizonless! The epistemological stakes of this trip/expedition have just been significantly raised—perhaps beyond reach! As we begin to doubt the feasibility of the project, however, Steinbeck immediately invites our minds to join his in evoking kindred minds and spirits, themselves driven by “wide and horizonless” curiosity. In a few sentences, the focus of this story shifts from little harbors and barren coasts to the expansive minds and achievements of Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz, Carl Linnaeus, and Pliny (the Elder, I presume: the author of the ambitious and encyclopedic Naturalis Historia, who perished attempting to rescue a friend and his family from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius).
Steinbeck’s prose abruptly shifts our attention from small marine fauna to a dizzying colloquy of geniuses who over two millennia have shaped our views on the very nature…of Nature. Our access to these thinkers is announced by way of simile, the figure of speech that asserts the possibility of shared identity across gaps of apparent differentiation, and of contemplating unity where many might see troubling incongruity.
The narrative flow of The Log from the Sea of Cortez invites the reader into that epistemological adventure. Over more than 200 pages, Steinbeck takes his readers on trip after trip into the mental terrain circumscribed by disciplined observation and description on the one hand, and interpretive, indeed, speculative extrapolation of the meaning of those empirical “findings” on the other hand. Taken as a whole, the text defies the boundaries normally associated with any genre, including “literature” or “fiction,” as well as “scientific report” or “research findings.”
As the introduction to the log asserts, “…there is no reason” why either disciplined description of marine phenomena or reflective musing about what we learn from them, should be inaccurate.
“A Picture More Complete and Even More Accurate”
“…Spine-count description need not suffer because another approach is also used. Perhaps out of the two approaches, we thought, there might emerge a picture more complete and even more accurate than either alone could produce. And so we went.” And so let us follow.
Accompanying Steinbeck and his fellow voyagers for a while, we may learn whether “a picture more complete” emerges—perhaps “even more accurate” than a narrower approach could produce. Here’s a sample from the entry of April 2, 1940:
…we caught a number of very short fat stinging worms (Chloeia viridis), a species we had not seen before, probably a deep-water form torn loose by the strength of the current. With a hand-net we took a pelagic nudibranch, Chioraera leonine, found also in Puget Sound. The water swirled past the boat at about four miles an hour and we kept the dip-nets out until late at night. This was a strange collecting place. The water was quite cold, and many of the members of both the northern and the southern fauna occurred here. In this harbor there were conditions of stress, current, waves, and cold which seemed to encourage animal life. And it is reasonable that this should be so, for active, churning water means not only a strong oxygen content, but the constant movement of food. And in addition, the very difficulties involved in such a position—necessity for secure footing, crowding, and competition—seem to encourage a ferocity and a tenacity in the animals which go past survival and into successful reproduction. Where there is little danger, there seems to be little stimulation. Perhaps the pattern of struggle is so deeply imprinted in the genes of all life conceived in this benevolently hostile planet that the removal of obstacles automatically atrophies a survival drive. With warm water and abundant food, the animals may retire into a sterile sluggish happiness.
Then, following the anthropomorphism attributing “happiness” to short fat stinging worms, comes a full-blown leap into speculations/assertions about the nature of “man.” Steinbeck’s prose suggests some humility even as that unexpected jump is made; the two preceding declarative sentences contain hedging qualifiers: “perhaps,” and “may.” The post-leap sentence offers some of that humility (“seemed”), but such modesty is immediately qualified by a resounding “certainly.” Then, leaving these ambiguities behind, the next sentence proudly marches forth in assertive confidence: “surely.”
"This has certainly seemed true in man. Force and cleverness and versatility have surely been the children of obstacles. Tacitus, in the Histories, places as one of the tactical methods advanced to be used against the German armies their exposure to a warm climate and soft rich food supply. These, he said, will ruin troops quicker than anything else. If these things are true in a biologic sense, what is to become of the fed, warm, protected citizenry of the ideal future state?"
Are we to infer that Steinbeck is championing a kind of social Darwinism, and that the weak and soft among us deserve the fate of victimhood when we are confronted by the fittest? Given Steinbeck’s other writings—he had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath—my sense is that such a conclusion is not warranted. But that is a topic for another essay. In any case, the entry concludes not with certitude, but rather a formal retreat into possibility: “If these things are true…” What are we to make of this dance of dubiety and confidence?
“Being a Naturalist”
A few additional examples of this stylistic/epistemological kinaesthetics may amplify what I think is going on in this writing. Here is an extract from the log entry of March 29, 1940:
On this day, the sun glowing on the morning beach made us feel good. It reminded us of Charles Darwin, who arrived late at night on the Beagle in the Bay of Valparaiso. In the morning he awakened and looked ashore and he felt so well that he wrote, “When morning came everything appeared delightful. After Tierra del Fuego, the climate felt quite delicious, the atmosphere so dry and the heavens so clear and blue with the sun shining brightly that all nature seemed sparkling with life.” Darwin was not saying how it was with Valparaiso, but rather how it was with him. Being a naturalist, he said, “All nature seemed sparkling with life,” but actually it was he who was sparkling. He felt so very fine that he can, in these charged though general adjectives, translate his ecstasy over a hundred years to us. And we can feel how he stretched his muscles in the morning air and perhaps took off his hat—we hope a bowler—and tossed it and caught it.
On this morning, we felt the same way at Concepción Bay. 'Everything appeared delightful.' The tiny waves slid up and down the beach, hardly breaking at all; out in the Bay the pelicans were fishing, flying along and then folding their wings and falling in their clumsy-appearing dives, which nevertheless must be effective, else there would be no more pelicans.”
The first paragraph of this entry exposes to our view a Darwin who might more plausibly be found among the company of Romantic poets sixty years before The Origin of Species was published. Steinbeck’s aside, “being a naturalist,” smuggles in a sense of decorum in suggesting an epistemological connection between Darwin’s imagination and his profession, with the grounding term being his profession. Considering the affective identification with nature, however, does not require starting from one’s status as a naturalist, unless the term is understood exceedingly broadly. Wordsworth, for example, records similar emotions when he sees a rainbow, but describes them with an almost wistful sense of his age and distance from his youth. I ponder, who is more a “naturalist,” Darwin or Wordsworth?
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Easter Sunday 1940
The systole-diastole itinerary of the Ricketts-Steinbeck narrative provides unexpected riches for the reader willing to indulge its rhythms. Allow me to conclude these exploratory reflections with the entry for Easter Sunday, March 24, 1940. This seventeen-page entry, the longest in the journal, invites the reader on a peripatetic adventure of perceiving, thinking, and reflecting that is Steinbeck at his best. The entry begins languidly enough with the sights, sounds, and smells of the beach and lagoon of San José Island, about 300 kilometers north of Cape San Lucas. (The named geographic specificity of this starting point is noteworthy.)
"The beach was hot and yellow. We swam, and then walked along on the sand and went inland along the ridge between the beach and a large mangrove-edged lagoon beyond. On the lagoon side of the ridge there were thousands of burrows, presumably of large land-crabs, but it was hopeless to dig them out. The shores of the lagoon teemed with the little clicking bubbling fiddler crabs and estuarian snails. Here we could smell the mangrove flowers with the foul root smell, and the odor was fresh and sweet, like that of new-cut grass. From where we waded there was a fine picture, still reflecting water and the fringing green mangroves against the burnt red-brown of the distant mountains…"
And then…the sensory immediacy of the language yields at least momentarily to a simile that shifts our attention to the fanciful symbolic world of Gustave Doré, a realm of human culture that serves as a simile offering access to spiritual stresses that hardly seem consonant with the “fresh and sweet” smells of nature:
…all like some fantastic Doré drawing of a pressed and embattled heaven…
(To be continued...)
Lessons in the Art of Seeing and Thinking, from John Steinbeck
(Excerpts from an Essay by Leonard G. Schulze)
“As Strange an Operation”
Last year my brother-in-law Kirby, a chemical engineer with a life-long commitment to good literature, gave me a copy of Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, nominally the record of a “biological expedition” undertaken in 1940 by John Steinbeck and his close friend, drinking buddy, and intellectual companion Edward F. Ricketts. Ricketts was an eccentric marine biologist, ecologist, and amateur philosopher who ran a business during the 1920’s and 1930’s on Cannery Row called Pacific Biological Laboratories, Inc., which Steinbeck describes “as strange an operation as ever outraged the corporate laws of California.”
In a long career as a literary scholar and professor, I had not read Sea of Cortez, and I was thankful for the gift and for Kirby’s thoughtfulness. He said he had found it stimulating in ways that differed from more canonical works like The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden, or Of Mice and Men, masterpieces all. And sure enough: from the first paragraphs on, I began to get a sense of the distinctive quality, the intellectual adventuresomeness, of Steinbeck’s prose itself. I told Kirby I would try to articulate what makes this small book so significant. This essay, in observance of Steinbeck’s 119th birthday on February 27, 2021, is the result, offered here in gratitude to Kirby and in homage to Steinbeck.
In the appendix to this book, bearing the title “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck provides a poignant portrayal of Rickett’s demise following the expedition, when a train struck his beat-up sedan. Steinbeck offers an extended meditation on the complex character of his old friend, whose absence remains a paradoxical presence in the lives of his friends: “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.” The relationship between this “appendix” and the “leisurely journal” of the log of the expedition is one of the pleasures of this book. I will try to describe some of the paradoxical delights with which the text rewards a patient reader.
“A Better-Sounding and More Exciting Name”—And Horizonless Curiosity
In the introduction, Steinbeck alerts the reader that the “research” promised in the title is anything but “a controlled experiment” in any methodologically rigorous scientific sense. On an even more basic level, and very early on, he also gives notice that the very act of naming anything, including the events and findings he is about to narrate, always involves habits of mind and motives worthy of our attention.
We made a trip into the Gulf [of California]; sometimes we dignified it by calling it an expedition. Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and a more exciting name. We stopped in many little harbors and near barren coasts to collect and preserve the marine invertebrates of the littoral. One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip—and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition—was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. That plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth. But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny.
Lexical and semantic reflections about the difference between a “trip” and an “expedition”—as well as pronouncements on the aesthetics and kinetics of proper names—prepare us, perhaps, for deeper excursions into the nature of truth—and truth-telling. The alleged scientific motive behind the trip is labeled as “simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth.” The truth, we are told, resides not in any “objective” knowledge of the phenomena being investigated—however reliable such knowledge might seem—but rather in the curiosity of the “knowers” themselves.
How shall we think about the “truth” of curiosity? Steinbeck’s prose itself, if we pay close attention to its texture and dynamics, instructs us both what’s involved, and what’s at stake, in such thinking. Patient engagement with the flow of the language brings intellectual adventures and delightful encounters with his lively mind. Its restlessness challenges and rewards us in equal—if paradoxical—measures.
“Telling” such truth about “unlimited curiosity” entails immersing ourselves in the generative but inchoate energy of the mind—before the mind has disciplined itself to follow established methodological road maps. Steinbeck is inviting us into the experience of a mind exploring the unruly process of coming to terms with itself. That experience is a rich adventure, and I urge the reader of this essay to accept Steinbeck’s invitation.
We are told that the authors’ curiosity is not only wide, but literally horizonless! The epistemological stakes of this trip/expedition have just been significantly raised—perhaps beyond reach! As we begin to doubt the feasibility of the project, however, Steinbeck immediately invites our minds to join his in evoking kindred minds and spirits, themselves driven by “wide and horizonless” curiosity. In a few sentences, the focus of this story shifts from little harbors and barren coasts to the expansive minds and achievements of Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz, Carl Linnaeus, and Pliny (the Elder, I presume: the author of the ambitious and encyclopedic Naturalis Historia, who perished attempting to rescue a friend and his family from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius).
Steinbeck’s prose abruptly shifts our attention from small marine fauna to a dizzying colloquy of geniuses who over two millennia have shaped our views on the very nature…of Nature. Our access to these thinkers is announced by way of simile, the figure of speech that asserts the possibility of shared identity across gaps of apparent differentiation, and of contemplating unity where many might see troubling incongruity.
The narrative flow of The Log from the Sea of Cortez invites the reader into that epistemological adventure. Over more than 200 pages, Steinbeck takes his readers on trip after trip into the mental terrain circumscribed by disciplined observation and description on the one hand, and interpretive, indeed, speculative extrapolation of the meaning of those empirical “findings” on the other hand. Taken as a whole, the text defies the boundaries normally associated with any genre, including “literature” or “fiction,” as well as “scientific report” or “research findings.”
As the introduction to the log asserts, “…there is no reason” why either disciplined description of marine phenomena or reflective musing about what we learn from them, should be inaccurate.
“A Picture More Complete and Even More Accurate”
“…Spine-count description need not suffer because another approach is also used. Perhaps out of the two approaches, we thought, there might emerge a picture more complete and even more accurate than either alone could produce. And so we went.” And so let us follow.
Accompanying Steinbeck and his fellow voyagers for a while, we may learn whether “a picture more complete” emerges—perhaps “even more accurate” than a narrower approach could produce. Here’s a sample from the entry of April 2, 1940:
…we caught a number of very short fat stinging worms (Chloeia viridis), a species we had not seen before, probably a deep-water form torn loose by the strength of the current. With a hand-net we took a pelagic nudibranch, Chioraera leonine, found also in Puget Sound. The water swirled past the boat at about four miles an hour and we kept the dip-nets out until late at night. This was a strange collecting place. The water was quite cold, and many of the members of both the northern and the southern fauna occurred here. In this harbor there were conditions of stress, current, waves, and cold which seemed to encourage animal life. And it is reasonable that this should be so, for active, churning water means not only a strong oxygen content, but the constant movement of food. And in addition, the very difficulties involved in such a position—necessity for secure footing, crowding, and competition—seem to encourage a ferocity and a tenacity in the animals which go past survival and into successful reproduction. Where there is little danger, there seems to be little stimulation. Perhaps the pattern of struggle is so deeply imprinted in the genes of all life conceived in this benevolently hostile planet that the removal of obstacles automatically atrophies a survival drive. With warm water and abundant food, the animals may retire into a sterile sluggish happiness.
Then, following the anthropomorphism attributing “happiness” to short fat stinging worms, comes a full-blown leap into speculations/assertions about the nature of “man.” Steinbeck’s prose suggests some humility even as that unexpected jump is made; the two preceding declarative sentences contain hedging qualifiers: “perhaps,” and “may.” The post-leap sentence offers some of that humility (“seemed”), but such modesty is immediately qualified by a resounding “certainly.” Then, leaving these ambiguities behind, the next sentence proudly marches forth in assertive confidence: “surely.”
"This has certainly seemed true in man. Force and cleverness and versatility have surely been the children of obstacles. Tacitus, in the Histories, places as one of the tactical methods advanced to be used against the German armies their exposure to a warm climate and soft rich food supply. These, he said, will ruin troops quicker than anything else. If these things are true in a biologic sense, what is to become of the fed, warm, protected citizenry of the ideal future state?"
Are we to infer that Steinbeck is championing a kind of social Darwinism, and that the weak and soft among us deserve the fate of victimhood when we are confronted by the fittest? Given Steinbeck’s other writings—he had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath—my sense is that such a conclusion is not warranted. But that is a topic for another essay. In any case, the entry concludes not with certitude, but rather a formal retreat into possibility: “If these things are true…” What are we to make of this dance of dubiety and confidence?
“Being a Naturalist”
A few additional examples of this stylistic/epistemological kinaesthetics may amplify what I think is going on in this writing. Here is an extract from the log entry of March 29, 1940:
On this day, the sun glowing on the morning beach made us feel good. It reminded us of Charles Darwin, who arrived late at night on the Beagle in the Bay of Valparaiso. In the morning he awakened and looked ashore and he felt so well that he wrote, “When morning came everything appeared delightful. After Tierra del Fuego, the climate felt quite delicious, the atmosphere so dry and the heavens so clear and blue with the sun shining brightly that all nature seemed sparkling with life.” Darwin was not saying how it was with Valparaiso, but rather how it was with him. Being a naturalist, he said, “All nature seemed sparkling with life,” but actually it was he who was sparkling. He felt so very fine that he can, in these charged though general adjectives, translate his ecstasy over a hundred years to us. And we can feel how he stretched his muscles in the morning air and perhaps took off his hat—we hope a bowler—and tossed it and caught it.
On this morning, we felt the same way at Concepción Bay. 'Everything appeared delightful.' The tiny waves slid up and down the beach, hardly breaking at all; out in the Bay the pelicans were fishing, flying along and then folding their wings and falling in their clumsy-appearing dives, which nevertheless must be effective, else there would be no more pelicans.”
The first paragraph of this entry exposes to our view a Darwin who might more plausibly be found among the company of Romantic poets sixty years before The Origin of Species was published. Steinbeck’s aside, “being a naturalist,” smuggles in a sense of decorum in suggesting an epistemological connection between Darwin’s imagination and his profession, with the grounding term being his profession. Considering the affective identification with nature, however, does not require starting from one’s status as a naturalist, unless the term is understood exceedingly broadly. Wordsworth, for example, records similar emotions when he sees a rainbow, but describes them with an almost wistful sense of his age and distance from his youth. I ponder, who is more a “naturalist,” Darwin or Wordsworth?
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Easter Sunday 1940
The systole-diastole itinerary of the Ricketts-Steinbeck narrative provides unexpected riches for the reader willing to indulge its rhythms. Allow me to conclude these exploratory reflections with the entry for Easter Sunday, March 24, 1940. This seventeen-page entry, the longest in the journal, invites the reader on a peripatetic adventure of perceiving, thinking, and reflecting that is Steinbeck at his best. The entry begins languidly enough with the sights, sounds, and smells of the beach and lagoon of San José Island, about 300 kilometers north of Cape San Lucas. (The named geographic specificity of this starting point is noteworthy.)
"The beach was hot and yellow. We swam, and then walked along on the sand and went inland along the ridge between the beach and a large mangrove-edged lagoon beyond. On the lagoon side of the ridge there were thousands of burrows, presumably of large land-crabs, but it was hopeless to dig them out. The shores of the lagoon teemed with the little clicking bubbling fiddler crabs and estuarian snails. Here we could smell the mangrove flowers with the foul root smell, and the odor was fresh and sweet, like that of new-cut grass. From where we waded there was a fine picture, still reflecting water and the fringing green mangroves against the burnt red-brown of the distant mountains…"
And then…the sensory immediacy of the language yields at least momentarily to a simile that shifts our attention to the fanciful symbolic world of Gustave Doré, a realm of human culture that serves as a simile offering access to spiritual stresses that hardly seem consonant with the “fresh and sweet” smells of nature:
…all like some fantastic Doré drawing of a pressed and embattled heaven…
(To be continued...)
