Compiled by
Robert 'Roy' J. van de Hoek
December 21, 2000
Winter Solstice - at the lowest Low Tides & Highest High Tides
Malibu, California
Philosophy on Canner Row
Joel W. Hedgpeth
1971
Steinbeck: The Man And His Work
Proceedings of the 1970 Steinbeck Conference
Sponsored by
Oregon State and Ball State Universities
Edited by
Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi
Corvallis:
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages 89-129
It is no easy thing to tell a story plainly and distinctly by mouth; but to tell one on paper is difficult indeed, so many snares lie in the way. People are afraid to put down what is common on paper; they seek to embellish their narratives, as they think, by philosophical speculations and reflections; they are anxious to shine, and people who are anxious to shine can never tell a plain story.
GEORGE Borrow, Lavengro.
There is a kind of naturalist ... who devotes much of his time and energy to the study of nature, doing this because of his love for it and faith in it as that through which his own life and all other lives exist and have meaning and worth.
WILLIAM EMERSON RITTER
and
EDNA W. BAILEY, The Organismal Conception.
I
Edward Flanders Ricketts was born in Chicago on May 14, 1897. Most of his childhood was spent in Chicago, and his family background was what might be called undistinguished middle class. The neighborhood on the west side near Garfield Park was, his sister Frances remembered, "deadly respectable, not very good or very bad people, not perhaps very typical of city life. Anyway it was very uninteresting to Ed who loved a little more drama. I suppose that is why he roamed over all the rest of the city. Our early life was spent rather in the shadow of a small Englishy Episcopal church which our parents were pillars of." It does not sound like the environment to produce the sort of naturalist that Ed Ricketts developed into, but more like that to have spawned the literary inclined Donald Culross Peattie, born in Chicago a year later. but boys do wander about the cities they live in, and the little events during such wanderings that may have had a large part in shaping their way of looking at the world are seldom remembered and even less often
II
Between Pacific Tides,the book that was to establish Ed Ricketts' reputation as a seashore biologist, had its origins as a sort of cottage industry among a group of people at Pacific Grove during the Depression. Ed's friends, who enjoyed going with him on low tide collecting trips, encouraged him to write all these things up. In the beginning it was to be a little book for beginners, and Jack Calvin, a struggling free-lance writer of Sunday school stories and the like, would help make the writing intelligible for the layman. Calvin would also take the photographs, and his brother-in-law, Ritchie Lovejoy, would prepare some drawings. The scope of the book grew and grew and by mid-1930 there was enough of it to send to publishers for consideration. The going was hard: eastern publishers were not interested in western regional books; sales of Johnson and Snook's Seashore Animals of the Pacific Coast(Macmillan, 1927) were slow and the subsidy by Ellen Browning Scripps was probably the main reason that book was published at all.
In a letter to the Stanford
III
When Ed Ricketts died on May 11, 1948, Steinbeck was at first distraught - he wanted to burn the town down because he had not arrived in time. Nevertheless, he lost no time in removing Ed's safe from the lab and took custody of Ed's journals when it was finally opened. The Stanford Press approached him about the possibility of completing The Outer Shores(evidently the Press had already expressed an interest in this work), but he could promise no more than attempt to edit the notes (which was never done). He did write that he intended to edit Ed's journals, but he would not estimate the time it might take. ......................In some ways this is a sort of trivial entry, inspired perhaps by reading the long lists in Finnegan's Wake. Obviously, however, Ed would have kept on working over ideas, sharing them with people and developing them, perhaps not always from the basis of the great works he listed for that particular day, but some of them he would have kept with him longer than the brief time that was spared to him after writing this "desert island" list. I would hope that his taste for poetry might have become refined; at least T.S. Eliot could have spoken to him, and could have written no more appropriate epitaph than this:
Old men ought to be explorers
Her and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
(East Coker)
SOURCES
Sources for this account of Ed Ricketts include, in addition to the profile "About Ed Ricketts" by John Steinbeck in The Log from the Sea of Cortezand (judicicously) Cannery Row,my own notes and letters (correspondence with E.F. Ricketts, 1935-1948), letters from Ricketts' sister, Mrs. Fred Strong of Carmel, correspondence with the Stanford University Press (both my own and letters by Ricketts and Steinbeck in the permanent Between Pacific Tidesfile), and the Ricketts papers at Hopkins Marine Station........................
APPENDIX
1. A bibliographic summary of Between Pacific Tides.
Although the current (1968) edition of Between Pacific Tidesis officially the fourth edition, it is actually the fifth.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are indebted to Edward F. Ricketts, Jr., Alan Baldridge, Librarian of the Hopkins Marine Station, and Peter Lisca for permission to use quotations from the letters, journals, and papers of Edward F. Ricketts; ...
