Who wouldn't rather read a straight-on story-story, involving colorful characters doing interesting things in a 'dramatic' situation, instead of yet another peekaboo story-about-storying?
—John Barth, Where 3 Roads Meet
"Strange how I keep the tone of Salinas in my head like a remembered symphony."
—John Steinbeck
"That the central theme of _Cannery Row_ is actually a rejection of this type of mindless materialism [that of Cannery Row now], and instead a celebration of the spiritual and the marginal in society, must be one of the most ironic, if not tragic, footnotes in American literary history."
—Eric Enno Tamm,
Beyond the Outer Shores
I woke up this morning at 4 AM and listened to an hour of Morning Edition in bed before deciding I was not going to be able to fall back asleep. I heard on repeat stories of Mitt Romney's wife, republican governors, and Hurricane Isaac blowing hot, moist air over the gulf. Horrific visions of a storm-ravaged United States governed by President Mitt Romney taunted me, and at a quarter past five I got up and fried some leftovers and filled my grumbling stomach. I made coffee and loaded my dad's car with things to move out of the house, deciding I would type something up when I got to their house, my computer already there. I realized I forgot my notebook halfway through the trip.
I would have to write something new.
The 24th of this past December I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and could not fall back asleep. I similarly laid in bed listening to Morning Edition until it repeated itself, and then began looking through a book I had just received as an early Christmas present—A Journey into Steinbeck's California—always eager to gain new perspectives on the symbiosis between the place I lived and the author it produced, the place he lived and the works he produced.
My friend Bill worked at Steinbeck's Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum on Cannery Row (formerly Ocean View Avenue, renamed for the early '80s tourist rebranding of the abandoned strip of of former canneries) in the summer of 2006. The great insight made that year involved Steinbeck's youth, the adrift post-graduate years, the era of a writer's life that I presently still inhabit. He moved to Los Angeles with his wife Carol and became engrossed in what the book refers to as a “zany venture” with his old college roommate Carlton Sheffield: using a new Swiss-manufactured impression material called Negacol to create life-like busts of people. Carlton thought the “vague but optimistic undertaking” would find “a good market for personalized masks of individuals, made and finished to order like portraits or photographs...” In spite of great enthusiasm the project, as all primary, youthful endeavors tend to fail, the heady Negacol years ended merely with creepy lifelike impressions of the seven entrepeneurs and no great effect on the legacy of California. Steinbeck went on instead to write great books and win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But what did this untold tale mean, and why were we discovering it in the moment that Bill worked at a wax museum narrated by a wax John Steinbeck (an actor from Carmel did the recording)? Was the museum—found in the basement of an old cannery whose upper layers were converted to candy shops and kitsch restaurants—some kind of wormhole to truth? The pieces of the puzzle remain the same: Monterey then, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, Monterey now, me and my friend—but how did they fit together? For Bill it seemed obvious, and he devoted a year to a film about Negacol that destroyed his academic present and future, a film whose footage still remains in the hands of his academic adviser at California State University Monterey Bay. My destiny remains outside the visual arts, seemingly, like Steinbeck's—but I digress. When one wakes up in the middle of the night and is compelled to encounter certain pieces of information he is easily convinced he has stumbled upon the guilded path of truth.
Steinbeck's California describes the Negacol years in LA well (I have it to thank for Carlton’s quote) and it pays tribute to their importance, although it does not mention the Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum, and certainly avoids any theories about an important connection between the Negacol mania and the museum. Of course it would be preposterous to propose at this stage any deep significance to the museum, or really read into Steinbeck’s plastered years in LA. I began to respect the book for even mentioning it and even having a picture of some of the masks they made, and I pressed on as the sun began to rise on the day before Christmas.
Steinbeck returned to Monterey after LA and lived on the Peninsula 15 miles from his hometown of Salinas, and that is where I learned something I did not know.
As a segue to Steinbeck’s return to Monterey in the next stage of his biography the next chapter, “Monterey Peninsula: Circle of Enchantment,” describes the place and where it intersects with Steinbeck’s work. I should make the point that I am an enthusiastic amateur historian of Monterey, California, and so this next section was quite enjoyable to read, the way a tour guide might enjoy taking his own tour given by someone more knowledgable than him. Included was an article Steinbeck wrote about the Feast of Lanterns celebration for the Monterey Peninsula Herald, a piece of writing I didn’t know existed. Over the previous sixth months I had become fixated on an unfortunate event that occurred at the border of Pacific Grove and Monterey, the destruction (supposedly accidental razing probable arson) of the Point Alones Chinese fishing village, and the still held festival composed entirely of east-Asian stereotypes. The event is euphemised or ign0red in most tourist-friendly accounts of Monterey, but I began to find clues to the truth and was inspired to take similar bleary-eyed expeditions to the libraries, sites and historical authorities on the Peninsula, ultimately ending a disappointing Da Vinci Code-style piece of fiction by Steinbeck’s son that struck me as a poorly-written parody of my own situation. This is all another story.
I should here return to the point I made earlier of stumbling upon the aforementioned “guilded path of truth,” bleary-eyed and, half-awake, flying to revelatory conclusions on the still floating clouds of my dreams—I had just finished a book about a trip to Seattle and back that I considered to be a successful abstraction of one of the great myths, of the hero’s journey, a sort of Joseph Campbell-style avant-garde deconstruction of the difference between everything from The Odyssey to The Log from the Sea of Cortez to, of course, my own voyage. The central metaphor for this abstraction was the sport of bocce: people stopping religiously from their individual pursuits to pick up and hurl spheres with a momentary tangiable sense of purpose. I had finished this book and planned, two weeks from Christmas eve, to retake the trip, the same dates in the same places a year later, to promote the book.
Having said all that I feel that the revelation may be slightly more comprehensible when I learned the something I did no know in the chapter that followed Pacific Grove and described Steinbeck’s relationship with the part of Monterey where I lived, that is New Monterey: Joseph Campbell came to Monterey in 1932 as a 28-year-old “footloose” young mythologist. He spent months hanging out with Ricketts and Steinbeck. He fell in love with Steinbeck’s wife. He referred to this visit as “those days of the great intuitions.” As Steinbeck went with Ricketts south to the Sea of Cortez, Campbell went north to British Columbia on a collecting expedition with Ricketts. The three “glimpsed” the “great synthesizing middle-point.” He wrote to Ricketts, “You and your life-way stand close to the source of my enlightenment.”
When I typed Steinbeck’s words that came from Ricketts’ ideas—“It is advisable to look from the tide pools to the stars and then back to the tide pools again”—as the epigraph for one chapter of the book I meant it in the way that Joseph Campbell means that every story tells the same story, that, though he may be described with a thousand faces, there is only one hero. And Joseph Campbell clarified this thinking simultaneously as Steinbeck and Ricketts did—he discussed these things with them. They all influenced each other symbiotically, like creatures in a tide pool.
I finished the chapter and it was eight. I left the house and rode my bike to the hill and continued reading in coffee shops, telling everyone I saw. You know Joseph Campbell? He hung out with Ricketts and Steinbeck. The most amiable café owner of Monterey bought me my coffee and bagel because the next day was Christmas, and I tried to finish my library book because it was due before returning home. It was John Barth’s triple novella Where Three Roads Meet, a self-consciously written deconstruction of a plain incident made to tell the universal story. It is about the brief and glorious union of three great intellects trying collaboratively and individually to get at something profound.
