BEFORE STEINBECK COULD BEGIN to write the sorts of new books he planned, he had to lay their foundation. He intended to approach philosophy by way of science and, by the first of January 1940, was spending most of his time studying texts and taking notes. Steinbeck had cause to regret his youthful indolence at Stanford—there were great gaps in his education. For years he had considered himself a serious amateur naturalist and collector, yet now Steinbeck realized how little he actually knew of the basic history and process of science. With Ed Ricketts guiding his reading, Steinbeck immersed himself in re-education. He and Carol divided their time between Los Gatos and Pacific Grove, with Steinbeck staying at Ricketts’s laboratories for long hours. During the time they spent together, Steinbeck and Ricketts began working toward the goal of a scientific expedition, one result of which would be a collaborative book. Thanks to the success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck could afford to underwrite an expedition of some ambition. In preparation, he, Carol, and Ricketts went on several collecting trips along the California coast. As they traveled, worked, read, and talked together, the larger expedition took shape. The group would charter a vessel in the spring and equip it for a lengthy examination of marine invertebrates in the littoral of the Gulf of California.
The new work invigorated Steinbeck. His neuritis bothered him less, and he felt stronger than he had in years. He was learning a great deal very quickly, applying himself to his studies with far more discipline than he had managed in college. Ed Ricketts was a good teacher. Together, Ricketts and Steinbeck pursued scientific points on into philosophy, their debates lasting long into the night. Marine invertebrate biology was only a starting place for their discussions. Because they both saw the universe in ecological terms, with all of its aspects part of the same, single system, Steinbeck and Ricketts allowed themselves to seek great truths from small observations. They planned several collaborations. Certainly there would be an account of the long collecting trip. With luck they would make some discoveries and thus produce a book that would make a genuine contribution to serious science. Nor would popular audiences be neglected by the literary partnership between Steinbeck and Ricketts. Steinbeck began making notes and plans for handbooks to be written for lay readers, those who lacked advanced scientific training. It occurred to both that out of all of the work would come some philosophical writing as well. Neither Pat Covici nor Elizabeth Otis were excited about the new direction Steinbeck was taking. Steinbeck did not hear their hesitation. He felt drawn to his ledgers more strongly than ever. It was as if everything he had written so far was in preparation for the exhausting, exhilarating work he had now undertaken.
Some of the preparation was just fun. Steinbeck and Ricketts devoted a good deal of time and thought to the selection of the right boat. They spent hours on the docks in Monterey, examining fishing vessels spacious enough to accommodate lab tables, specimen jars, and preserving chemicals, as well as provisions. Steinbeck’s fascination with well-made and well-run machinery benefited them. He distrusted any boat whose engine room was not spotless, confessing to a belief in an almost mystical bond between engine and operator. When they discovered boats that were suitable for their purposes, Steinbeck and Ricketts often encountered resistance from the boat owners. A biological expedition made little sense to many of the hard, practical sardine fishermen. It took weeks for Steinbeck and Ricketts to come into contact with a willing shipmaster, but finally they met Anthony Berry. Berry was intrigued by the plan. Steinbeck and Ricketts chartered Berry’s Western Flyer and began assembling a crew. The Western Flyer was seventy-six feet long and was equipped with a lovely, immaculately maintained engine. They would set out in March.
Occasionally Steinbeck stole time from the preparations and returned to Hollywood. He was a man of some prestige there now. Both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men were box office successes. Steinbeck himself was enormously pleased with both pictures. The trips to Hollywood also permitted Steinbeck to visit Gwyn Conger. Steinbeck’s delight in her company continued to grow. Although he tried to remain tentative in his relationship with Gwyn, he knew that he was falling in love. As the start of the expedition neared, Steinbeck stayed close to Monterey. All of the excitement of packing the Western Flyer distracted him from the guilt he felt over Gwyn. He and Carol made extra efforts to work together well. Quarters aboard the Western Flyer would be close; domestic difficulties would interfere with the hard scientific work that lay ahead. On March 11, Steinbeck, Carol, and Ricketts joined Berry and his crew on board the Western Flyer. A raucous bon voyage party delayed the planned morning departure until early afternoon. Once under way the Western Flyer showed her ability to make good speed and handle seas well. Steinbeck set up his bunk in the engine room and slept deeply, lulled by the sounds of the engine.
After taking on final provisions in San Diego, the charter passed south of the Mexican border. For nearly a week the boat ran south along the coast of Lower California. Steinbeck was fascinated by the way the water deepened in color, becoming a rich blue that teemed with life. He stood for hours on deck, absorbing every detail of the seascape. To save time, the Western Flyer sped onward day and night. Steinbeck thought of Charles Darwin and envied the great naturalist the more leisurely pace mandated by the age of sail. Steinbeck could happily have spent days at any point along the route, collecting specimens, recording observations, defining an ecology. Although they collected some specimens as they fared south, the primary destination was the Gulf of California. The more time they saved getting there, the more comprehensive their examination of the littoral’s ecology would be. By the seventeenth, the Western Flyer had rounded the peninsula’s southernmost point. Steinbeck saw that even a well-bounded body of water such as this would be impossible to catalog in a trip of only a few weeks. He referred to the Gulf by its original, Spanish name, the Sea of Cortez.
The vast variety of littoral invertebrates was daunting. Ricketts kept the expedition constantly on the move. They all worked double and triple shifts, just to keep up with the labeling of their samples. In addition to scientific records, Steinbeck kept notes toward the book he and Ricketts would write. As well as a scientific account of the findings, Steinbeck wanted to put together a volume that would provide the reader with a sense of the natural environment in which the specimens lived. He wanted readers to know how the air tasted when he collected an anemone. He wanted them to feel the salt spray as the Western Flyer pushed on to another collecting site. Such a book would combine science, poetry, and philosophy, producing a mixture unlike anything Steinbeck had ever read:
“We collected down the littoral as the water went down. We didn’t seem to have time enough. We took samples of everything that came to hand. The uppermost rocks swarmed with Sally Lightfoots, those beautiful and fast and sensitive crabs. With them were white periwinkle snails. Below that, barnacles and Purpura snails; more crabs and many limpets. Below that many serpulids—attached worms in calcereous tubes with beautiful purple foliate heads. Below that, the multi-rayed starfish, Heliaster kubiniji of Xanthus. . . . In the lowest surf-levels there was a brilliant gathering of the moss animals known as bryozoa; flatworms; flat crabs; the large sea cucumber; some anemones; many sponges of two types, a smooth, encrusting purple one, the other erect, white, and calcereous. There were great colonies of tunicates, clusters of tiny individuals joined by a common tunic and looking so like the sponges that even a trained worker must await the specialist’s determination to know whether his find is sponge or tunicate. This is annoying, for the sponge being one step above the protozoa, at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, and the tunicate near the top, your trained worker is likely to feel that a dirty trick has been played upon him by an entirely too democratic Providence.”
Providence, or the universe’s lack thereof, was much on the group’s mind. When they were not working, they talked. Steinbeck, his wife, and his closest friend launched themselves into freewheeling discussions after work was done. Speculative thinking, the more speculative the better, was prized among the conversationalists on board the Western Flyer. These thought experiments allowed them to extend what they were learning about the littoral of the Sea of Cortez to all of life, to all of creation. The nature of that creation came to occupy the center of their thoughts. The Steinbecks and Ricketts devoted many of their discussions to teleology, a philosophical system that, basically, seeks to ascribe a purpose to the evolution of the universe and its life. The purpose, for example, of lower life forms is to provide food for higher species. The purpose of the universe is to provide a home for living things; the purpose of living things is to inhabit the universe. Teleology underlay most religions, much of the arts and sciences. Its outlook was anathema to Steinbeck. He began developing nonteleological arguments, which he would distill into the book about the Sea of Cortez expedition.
Steinbeck felt that there was no guided or directed purpose to the universe. Such ideas, in fact, struck him as dangerous. They were dishonest, based more on hopefulness than on hard, realistic observation. Teleology made for dangerous political thinking as well. A teleologist, he reflected, saw leaders as those who give instruction and direction to their followers. Steinbeck himself had sought to refute that notion in The Grapes of Wrath. Leaders, he felt, were the results of mass movements. The readers and reviewers had missed his point in the novel. Perhaps science would give him the opportunity to make his case more clearly. Nonteleological thinking would guide the composition of the record of the collecting trip. The book would contain examples and discussions of the conclusions Steinbeck and Ricketts reached. The examples would make dramatic the patterns of nature. From those patterns, Steinbeck believed, nonteleological conclusions were the only sorts of truths that could be found:
“All night the hissing rush and splash of hunters and hunted went on. We had never been in water so heavily populated. The light, piercing the surface, showed the water almost solid with fish—swarming, hungry, frantic fish, incredible in their voraciousness. The schools swam, marshaled and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to depth and direction and speed. There must be some fallacy in our thinking of these fish as individuals. Their functions in the school are in some as yet unknown way as controlled as though the school were one unit. We cannot conceive of this intricacy until we are able to think of the school as an animal itself, reacting with all its cells to stimuli which might not influence one fish at all. . . . In the little Bay of San Carlos, where there were many schools of a number of species, there was even a feeling (and ‘feeling’ is used advisedly) of a larger unit which was the interrelation of species with their interdependence for food, even though that food be each other. A smoothly working larger animal surviving within itself—larval shrimp to little fish to larger fish to giant fish—one operating mechanism. And perhaps this unit of survival may key into the larger animal which is the life of all the sea, and this into the larger of the world. There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive! And the forms and species and units and groups are armed for survival, fanged for survival, timid for it, fierce for it, clever for it, poisonous for it, intelligent for it. This commandment decrees the death and destruction of myriads of individuals for the survival of the whole. Life has one final end, to be alive; and all the tricks and mechanisms, all the successes and all the failures, are aimed at that end.”
The group instinct so carefully observed in marine life was also evident on shore. Steinbeck found a strong German presence in the Mexican ports at which the Western Flyer paid call. In Europe, as the Sea of Cortez undertaking proceeded, the Nazis were on the march, overrunning France and much of Scandinavia. In Mexico the Nazi message was delivered not by tanks, troops, and bombers, but by propaganda. If the Nazis could rally the support of the Mexican people, the United States would be forced to use its resources for the defense of its own borders rather than for the aid of those nations under direct Nazi attack in Europe. Steinbeck was concerned. He saw no evidence of American countermeasures. Steinbeck added political notes and ideas to his files and began to consider the best way to deliver his message to officials in Washington.
By April 20, 1940, the journey was ended. The Western Flyer was once more docked in Monterey. Ricketts and Steinbeck supervised the off-loading of their specimens. Ricketts was eager to begin arranging their findings and photographs for publication, but Steinbeck could not concentrate on the book. Little more than a month passed before he was back in Mexico, this time at work on a film script for a movie that he would, in part, produce. The film was to be a documentary about life in a traditional Mexican village. Steinbeck insisted that the motion picture deal with the conflict between superstition and science, and gave the documentary a narrative. He called his script The Forgotten Village and in the simplest language told the story of a people torn between tradition and the need for modern medicines. The script was barely three dozen handwritten pages long. He and Carol stayed in Mexico City as the script was developed. Steinbeck was once more struck by the force and pervasiveness of the Nazi propaganda. Back in the United States in June, he traveled to Washington and sent his concerns by letter to President Roosevelt.
Steinbeck’s name carried greater weight than ever. The Grapes of Wrath had just been announced as the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. Roosevelt invited Steinbeck to the White House to discuss the author’s Mexican observations. Steinbeck, aware of the power of motion pictures, recommended that the government endorse the use of motion pictures for outright propaganda and thus beat the Nazis at their own game. Roosevelt listened politely to Steinbeck’s suggestions, but did not turn them into policy.
The collaboration with Ed Ricketts continued to give Steinbeck difficulty. Ricketts felt that Steinbeck was not paying proper attention to the book about their scientific adventure. Covici urged Steinbeck to write another novel, rather than a book that would sell only a fraction as many copies as a work of fiction. Steinbeck’s relationship with Carol continued to collapse. He arranged many meetings with Gwyn Conger, and they developed a series of codes by which they could leave secret messages for each other. Often they met at Carol’s cottage in a canyon near Los Angeles. Steinbeck was tormented by the deception and worried as well by Carol’s ill health and depression. The production of The Forgotten Village made demands on Steinbeck’s time that Ricketts bitterly resented. Steinbeck divided his time between Monterey and Mexico. In the fall he returned briefly to Washington for another meeting with President Roosevelt. This time Steinbeck suggested to him that the United States begin producing large quantities of counterfeit German currency that could be scattered behind Nazi lines in hopes of ruining the German economy. The plan attracted some excitement in Washington, but was never put into effect.
It was January 1941, before Steinbeck got down to consistent work on his portion of the Sea of Cortez book. He and Carol separated for two months, with Carol vacationing in Hawaii. Gwyn Conger came to Monterey for long visits, and Steinbeck traveled to Los Angeles occasionally. For all that, he was soon producing manuscript at the rate of several thousand words a day. Collaboration did not come easily to Steinbeck. Despite his studious efforts, he was not scientist enough to participate fully in the annotated catalog portions of the book, although his style and personality can be found in some of the notes. Nor was Ricketts completely comfortable in writing narrative. The two debated and argued over the form of the book, each absorbing the other’s point of view while compensating for the other’s weaknesses. Steinbeck strived for the most precise language he’d ever used. He and Ricketts thrashed out their philosophical differences. The power of nonteleological thinking formed the center of their narrative. This outlook lay behind everything in the book, and its authors’ convictions took center stage in long, reflective, philosophical passages.
Away from his desk, Steinbeck found reflection impossible. When Carol returned from Hawaii in April, Steinbeck revealed to her his affair with Gwyn. In fact, Gwyn joined the Steinbecks almost immediately. The confrontation was angry and tearful. Both women claimed to be carrying Steinbeck’s child. For a time Steinbeck swore off Gwyn, but before April was out, it was clear that he and Carol were finished. Steinbeck retired to the cottage at Pacific Grove. In that community, where he and Carol had spent so many of their early days together, he managed to complete his work on the narrative portion of the marine biology book. There remained a good deal of work to be done on the manuscript, but Steinbeck was unable to devote more than partial attention to it. A number of responsibilities and projects tugged at him.
Primary among them was Carol. Under the terms of their separation, she received one thousand dollars each month. She had not yet formally filed for divorce, but Steinbeck knew that when she did it would be expensive. The Los Gatos ranch was sold by late summer. An accounting was made of Steinbeck’s finances and holdings. He was eager for a fair settlement of his assets, planning to give Carol at least half of his earnings on books written during their marriage. Steinbeck’s old friend Webster Street agreed to handle the legal proceedings as Carol reconciled herself to divorce.
The Forgotten Village also occupied Steinbeck’s time. Filming had been completed the previous fall. A picture book reproducing Steinbeck’s spare script along with black-and-white stills from the movie had been published by Viking in May 1941. In October, with the film set to open in East Coast theaters, the New York State Board of Censors found The Forgotten Village to be obscene and prohibited its showing. The film, in its honest depiction of peasant life, included images of childbirth and nursing, which New York’s censors would not allow the public to see. Steinbeck traveled East and threw himself into the battle. Eleanor Roosevelt also attempted to intercede on behalf of the honest little film. It was winter before the ban was lifted, and the movie was all but forgotten in the excitement and uncertainty following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The collaboration between Steinbeck and Ricketts, which was far more dangerous to contemporary minds and morals, faced no censorship. Its commercial prospects, slim in the best of times, were further reduced by the war. Published shortly before the Japanese attack, it bore the title Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Exploration. A series of beautiful color plates in the center of the long book was followed by dozens of black-and-white drawings, photographs, and charts. The narrative account of the adventure filled nearly half the book, with the rest composed of closely written phyletic notes and references which cataloged the group’s findings and specimens. The title page showed the authors as equal collaborators: John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts.
Collaboration of another sort was on Steinbeck’s mind as the first year of the war began. In the fall he had begun work on a new piece of fiction, a play in which he portrayed an American town conquered by a totalitarian enemy. Part of the focus of the play was directed at the portrayal of collaborators, traitors. Steinbeck balanced that with an underground resistance movement against which no army, however mechanized and efficient, could survive forever. Steinbeck called his play The Moon Is Down. He wrote the play quickly and early in the new year completed a second draft which moved the action to an unnamed but obviously Scandinavian country. Steinbeck wanted only to give an accurate representation of human behavior. His objectivity demanded that he show both conqueror and conquered as human beings; his philosophy turned the characters into members of groups that were themselves part of larger groups. Steinbeck also wrote a version of The Moon Is Down as a short novel, which Viking scheduled for spring publication.
When the book appeared in March, it was clear that the public attraction to Steinbeck’s work had not died down. His new novel was nearly as big a success as The Grapes of Wrath. Viking sold nearly a hundred thousand copies of The Moon Is Down before the book’s official publication day, despite harsh and sometimes hostile reviews. Steinbeck’s objectivity, derived more from his scientific studies than from traditional literature, was misunderstood once again. The cartoonist James Thurber denounced Steinbeck for writing a book that was sympathetic to the Nazis. Other critics sounded similar notes. The public, though, knew better. Readers recognized and responded to the human drama and truth in The Moon Is Down, lifting the printings of trade and book club editions close to three hundred thousand copies in barely a month.
The play opened in April to reviews similar to the novel’s. Audiences, however, were large, and before the month was out, motion picture rights were purchased for well over a hundred thousand dollars. Even more gratifying was the news from Europe that the Nazis, whom Steinbeck’s critics said he sympathized with, feared the book. In occupied countries a person could be executed for having a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down. Such threats did not stop the book from being circulated in crudely printed and even handwritten editions.
Steinbeck wanted to join the war effort in more than literary fashion. The nation was mobilizing its resources as never before, showing Steinbeck his phalanx most dramatically. He wanted to march with that phalanx into combat, but his government had other plans for him. By the spring of 1942, after a meeting with Franklin Roosevelt, Steinbeck was involved in writing a book about American bombers and their crews. On assignment from the Air Corps, Steinbeck spent a month rising at dawn with Air Corps trainees and sharing the routine of their military education. He had taken flying lessons earlier in his life, but now found himself aloft for most of each day. Steinbeck, surrounded by efficient men who formed well-organized groups, enjoyed himself immensely. By the end of summer he had completed a small book about the Air Corps. It was called Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. Steinbeck donated his earnings from the book to a military charity.
Soon he was at work on a more commercial piece of propaganda. Twentieth Century Fox, like all of Hollywood’s studios, was producing a number of films that served as entertainment and as patriotic calls for unity against the Axis. Steinbeck was signed to write a script based on the desperate, dangerous battle against German submarines, which were sinking many Allied ships. Specifically, Steinbeck’s script would deal with the survivors of a torpedo attack, a group of individuals brought together in a lifeboat. Alfred Hitchcock would direct the film. Steinbeck had previously encountered Hollywood only as an outsider whose work was being adapted. The Forgotten Village had been an independent production in which Steinbeck had invested his own money. Now he served as a screenwriter working with a major studio and a renowned director. He learned quickly that although the words spoken on screen were created by the writer, it was the director and the producer who held the real power in Hollywood. Steinbeck was pleased with his original script for Lifeboat. He had managed to sound the call for arms while also telling an exciting story and presenting insights about the functioning of groups. Hitchcock made many changes that angered Steinbeck. Lifeboat, when it appeared the following year, was a polished, frivolous film filled with what Steinbeck considered to be racist innuendo. Disillusioned long before the filming was completed, Steinbeck was ready to get out of Hollywood. He and Gwyn moved to New York.
In March 1943, Steinbeck’s divorce became final, and he was free to marry Gwyn Conger. They had been living together since Steinbeck and Carol had separated, and they were married within a few weeks of the divorce decree. Steinbeck and Gwyn settled in a comfortable house outside New York City. Their marriage was only a couple of months old when Steinbeck was cleared to travel to combat zones as a war correspondent. He announced that he was ready to go overseas immediately. Steinbeck would file his stories on assignment with the New York Herald Tribune; abroad, the pieces would appear in London’s Daily Express. Gwyn was displeased. She tried to dissuade Steinbeck from his plans by telling him that she was pregnant. Her claim was no more true now than earlier. Steinbeck ignored Gwyn’s anger as much as he could and in early June set sail for England. He filed his first piece quickly, and with it made clear that he would bring not only his talent but also his special concerns to his journalism:
“The troops in their thousands sit on their equipment on the dock. It is evening, and the first of the dimout lights come on. The men wear their helmets, which make them all look alike, make them look like long rows of mushrooms. Their rifles are leaning against their knees. They have no identity, no personality. The men are units in an army. The numbers chalked on their helmets are almost like the license numbers on robots.”
For nearly four months Steinbeck absorbed material and transformed it into clearly written newspaper pieces. He had no trouble finding stories, and the stories he wrote attracted attention and comment. He was able to give readers at home a real sense of the human cost of the war, reminding his audience that faceless armies were composed of individuals. Some of the other journalists, whose names and works were less celebrated than Steinbeck’s, were jealous of his abilities. Steinbeck created word portraits that held no real news, yet somehow told more truth about the war than pages of straightforward reporting. After filing eight weeks’ worth of human interest dispatches from England, Steinbeck was ready to see some real action. He wanted to join the phalanx in battle.
He got his chance in September. After a trip to North Africa, Steinbeck spent several harrowing, exhilarating nights onboard PT boats off the coast of Italy. The boats were harassing German installations north of Naples in an attempt to convince the Nazis that an invasion was forthcoming. Later in the month Steinbeck moved south, joining the Allied forces at the actual invasion site, the beaches at Salerno. The invading army met heavy resistance from German artillery and machine guns. Steinbeck now saw war close up, watching as newly arrived young men became hardened veterans in a matter of hours. The brutality and senselessness of combat moved Steinbeck profoundly. He was in awe of the courage displayed by the American troops. Steinbeck displayed courage of his own, as well as a willingness to break the rules and conventions by which correspondents were bound. Steinbeck often removed his war correspondent’s badge to take up a weapon. He encountered a friend from Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who was now leading small detachments of commandos on night raids against Nazi radar facilities. On the raids Steinbeck performed as a commando himself and acquitted himself well in dangerous situations.
The Herald Tribune was pleased with Steinbeck’s work and encouraged him to continue reporting from Europe. But Steinbeck was ready to return to the United States. He had accomplished all the goals he’d set himself, learning about combat and proving himself equal to its challenges. He had seen men and women rise to the heights of heroism and had seen others fall, their bodies shattered by shrapnel. Steinbeck knew that those he observed and wrote about were participants in a mass movement whose end result would be the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny. He also knew that the price paid not only in the lives of soldiers but also in the lives of civilians including innocent children was enormous. Somehow he would have to accommodate his new experiences and insights in his writing. He was ready to return to fiction.