The Tidepool and the Stars: The Ecological Basis of Steinbeck's Depression Novels

In the concluding chapter of Exile's Return Malcolm Cowley had the following comment to make on the 1930s:  "The 1930s were the Pentecostal years when it seemed that everyone had the gift of tongues and used it to prophesy the millennium."  Among the host of writers who seemed to possess this gift, none appeared in the popular imagination to embody it more perfectly than John Steinbeck, whose novels on the marginal workers and dust bowl refugees appeared to take as their text the Biblical exhortation, "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust."

Between 1936 and 1939 Steinbeck published In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath-three novels dealing with the struggles and sufferings of the homeless and the dispossessed.  The theme had never seemed more appropriate, for the 'thirties was a time of vast discontents when millions of hungry and homeless persons roved ceaselessly over the land, looking for a place to take root.  It was a time when the spirits of men were borne low and a sense of defeat hung over everyone. Everywhere one saw soup kitchens and Hoovervilles, bonus marchers and apple sellers, and through it all, like a heavy underlining of tragedy, the long shabby ranks of the unemployed waiting before barred doorways.  Drought and flood on an unprecedented scale had deepened and made sharper the general sense of misery occasioned by the collapse of the economic system.  Men watched the headlines anxiously as though awaiting an amnesty or moved with the angry crowds which gathered to hear any speaker who thought he could offer an answer.

To a nation suffering general economic collapse Steinbeck's works seemed to come as a fitting literary echo to one of the most widely quoted expressions of the decade: "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."  These words were uttered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "not in despair," as he told the nation, but "in hope," and in the Pentecostal spirit of the times it would have seemed contrary, not to say contentious, to suggest that Steinbeck was neither with nor of his times or that his vision, which could break forth in utterance of almost Hebraic grandeur, was of an ultimately different order.

But the mantle of prophet or disciple of social salvation rests uneasily on John Steinbeck's shoulders, for although each of these novels reveals an obvious concern with the plight of the exploited and underprivileged, the theme of social protest by no means exhausts their possibilities or comprehends the larger meanings implicit in the works.  

Men gather sustenance where they may and take their moral support where they can find it.  The 'thirties took from Steinbeck what the 'thirties needed, and men tended to see in his novels a scathing indictment of exploitation and a plea for social justice.  That view, self-consistent as it may be on one level, fails to suggest the deeper significance of Steinbeck's thought.  For despite the apparent primacy of the social frame of reference, Steinbeck's handling of his theme goes far beyond the limits of social interpretation.  It is not traditional social philosophy, but biological science that dominates in his thought, and he sees his disinherited protagonists not as an economic by-product but as a biological excess.

Steinbeck's reputation rests largely on the three depression novels-In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath together with Sea of Cortez, a philosophical treatise and log of a biological expedition which he wrote in collaboration with his friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist. These works have proved a continuing source of puzzlement to critics and laymen alike and have been subjected to a number of widely differing interpretations which vary according to the level of culture on which the judgment is made or the period in which it is issued.  Each period has seen his work in a different light, and if early critics went to one extreme in interpreting his works as a call for a social uprising, later critics sometimes went to the opposite pole of depicting him as heartless and amoral.  

Steinbeck's disappointment at the critical treatment he received is well known.  In a letter to the editors of The Colorado Quarterly he once described criticism as "a kind of ill tempered parlor game in which nobody gets kissed."  Not long after, he wrote to another editor engaged in compiling a collection of Steinbeck criticism:

"It is interesting to me that so many critics instead of making observations, are led to bring charges.  It is not observed that I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as man.  It is charged that I have somehow outraged members of my species by considering them part of a species at all. And how often the special pleaders use my work as a distorted echo chamber for their own ideas!"

The problem that plagued earlier critics plagued the later ones as well. Briefly stated it was how to reconcile the social concern manifested in The Grapes of Wrath with the allegedly "Social Darwinist" doctrine which as one critic put it "dominates" both In Dubious Battle which preceded it in 1936 and Sea of Cortez which followed it in 1941.  

Various attempts, all of them unsuccessful, were made to resolve this seeming contradiction.  Some went so far as to draw a line down the middle of the depression novels, dividing them into different phases or periods.  It was argued that Sea of Cortez clearly heralded a turning away from the social concerns of the 'thirties and a shift toward a detached and amoral philosophy based on "is" thinking, although no satisfactory explanation could be given for the appearance of In Dubious Battle (which Steinbeck himself admitted had no author's point of view) so early in the cycle.  

But Sea of Cortez did not break with the past or initiate a new line of reasoning.  Rather, it summed up and gave philosophical finish to ideas which had been the subject of considerable speculation between Ricketts and Steinbeck all during the 'thirties.  In June of 1941 while he was still at work on the manuscript of Sea of Cortez Steinbeck made it clear that he regarded it as belonging to the works of this period, as a part of a cycle, as part of a whole.  In a letter to his publisher Pascal Covici he wrote:

"When this work is done I will have finished a cycle of work that has been biting me for many years."

It is impossible to account for the tone of Steinbeck's work in this period unless the influence of Ed Ricketts is taken into account.  Non-teleological philosophy, or "is" thinking-a non-judgmental approach to the study of human behavior-owes a great deal to his writing.  

It was in 1930 that Steinbeck and Ricketts met-in a dentist's office as Steinbeck tells us in his short piece, "About Ed Ricketts."  Instantly attracted to one another, they became close friends, and in time Steinbeck became a partner in Ricketts' marine laboratory in Monterey.

By all accounts Ricketts was a remarkable individual.  His intelligence, originality, and charm are attested to by all who came to know him.  Almost twenty years after his death one could still find references to him and stories about him in the small newspapers of the Monterey peninsula.  As Steinbeck put it, "he haunts the people who knew him."  There is considerable evidence to support Rickett's claim that "99 34/100%" of the essay on non-teleological thinking in Sea of Cortez was his own and that the book contained, in addition, numerous excerpts from other unpublished works by him.  One can only speculate as to the precise extent to which the concepts underlying Steinbeck's fiction originated with Ricketts.  The two men worked so closely during this period that, as Steinbeck later recalled in the essay "Abo