Sweet Thursday (27 page)

Starred notes below also appear in Robert DeMott and Brian Railsback, editors,
John Steinbeck: “Travels with Charley” and Later Novels 1947–1962
(New York: Library of America, 2007), pp. 979–82. Special thanks to my research intern, Tracy Kelly, and to Steinbeck specialist Carol Robles for assistance.

DEDICATION

Elizabeth R. Otis (1901–81), Steinbeck's literary agent and confidante, and cofounder in 1928 of New York literary agency McIntosh and Otis. Steinbeck's voluminous correspondence with Otis covered thirty-seven years, from 1931 to his death in 1968; a sampling is available in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1975),
Letters to Elizabeth
(1978), and in the Appendix to
The Acts of King Arthur
. The main collection is housed at Stanford University Library's Department of Special Collections and University Archives. Access the individual Container List of the Steinbeck–Otis correspondence in the John Steinbeck Collection, 1902–1979, at content.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf3c6002vx&chunk.id=dsc-1.8.6.

PROLOGUE

Originally titled “Introduction Mack's Contribution,” a much longer version of the prologue (156 lines long as opposed to 47) appears in the original autograph manuscript, the typed manuscript, and the unrevised galley proofs of
Sweet Thursday
(all housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin). It is not known why Steinbeck excised such a large portion of the text.

that book
Cannery Row
: Steinbeck's earlier roman à clef novel (1945), set in pre–World War II Monterey, featuring the protagonist Doc (based on Edward F. Ricketts) and including in its cast of characters numerous other lightly fictionalized, loosely disguised real-life persons. The novel is dedicated “For Ed Ricketts / who knows why or should.” On the dedication page of the copy Steinbeck presented to Ricketts, he wrote, “with all the respect and affection this book implies.” In his memoir “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), Steinbeck wrote:

CHAPTER
1

Cannery Row: Site of numerous fish canneries, fish reduction plants, and processing and packing houses along Ocean View Avenue, Monterey. The street was renamed Cannery Row in 1958. That section of town was called New Monterey, which, Susan Shillinglaw explains in
A Journey into Steinbeck's California
(2006), was “not Spanish Monterey, not Methodist Pacific Grove, but the shoreline and sloping wooded hills between these places…” (p. 107)

“As with the oysters in
Alice
…”: From “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem in chapter four of
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
(1871), by British writer and mathematician Charles L. Dodgson (1832–98), whose pseudonym was Lewis Carroll: “‘O Oysters,' said the Carpenter, / ‘You've had a pleasant run! / Shall we be trotting home again?' / But answer came there none—/ And this was scarcely odd, because / They'd eaten every one.”

pilchards: California sardine (
Sardinia caerulea
). At eleven to fourteen inches in length, it was the state's most important commercial fish until midcentury. According to a graph in Richard F. G. Heimann and John G. Carlisle's
The California Marine Fish Catch for 1968 and Historical Review, 1916
–
1968
, reprinted in Michael Hemp,
Cannery Row
(1986), in 1941–42, the Monterey area sardine catch was a record 250,287 tons. The canning boom driven by World War II saw Monterey become “the Sardine Capital of the World,” though in 1947–48, around the time of Doc's discharge from the army, the catch was 17,630 tons (p. 110). Marine scientist Ed Ricketts studied the sardine extensively during his later career, and in his final article on the subject, published in the
Monterey Peninsula Herald
in 1948 (shortly before his death) and reprinted in Ricketts,
Breaking Through
(2006), concluded that if “conservation had been adopted early enough, a smaller but streamlined cannery row…would be winding up a fairly successful season, in stead [
sic
] of dipping, as they must be now, deeply into the red ink of failure” (p. 330). As Katherine Rodger asserts in her Introduction to
Breaking Through
, his “pleas for moderation fell on deaf ears…” (p. 73). In 1953 to 1954, the year
Sweet Thursday
was published, a greatly reduced Monterey fleet brought in fifty-eight tons.

Doc: Marine biologist, pioneering ecologist, and intellectual polymath Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (1887–1948) was the model for Steinbeck's fictional Doc. Steinbeck's portrayal of Doc is often biographically accurate regarding Ricketts's physical gestures and appearance, his personal habits and tastes, and his cultural interests (especially in music, literature, and philosophy). Steinbeck embroiders, too: Ricketts attended the University of Chicago (1919–22) but never graduated, whereas his fictional counterpart holds a PhD from that institution. The research award Doc receives from Old Jingleballicks in chapter 37 may have been compensation for Ricketts's failure at winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. On the other side, in order to emphasize Doc's romantic adventures, Steinbeck ignores Ricketts's role as a husband and a father to three children from his marriage to Anna “Nan” Maker in 1922. (The couple later separated but were never legally divorced.) “Half-Christ and half-goat,” Steinbeck summed him up in his 1951 elegy “About Ed Ricketts,” itself an exercise in paradox, selective memory, and impressionism. Steinbeck's eighteen-year relationship with Ricketts was profoundly beneficial, as Richard Astro established in
John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts
(1973). Besides their collaborative book,
Sea of Cortez
(1941), Steinbeck drew on Ricketts's ideas so deeply and so often that after Ricketts's death in May 1948, Steinbeck told mutual friends in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1976): “Wouldn't it be interesting if Ed
was
us. And that now there wasn't any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him. I've wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which” (p. 316). Excellent resources with which to survey the world of Ed Ricketts are Katharine A. Rodger's
Renaissance Man of Cannery Row
(2002) and her
Breaking Through
(2006), as well as Eric Enno Tamm's
Beyond the Outer Shores
(2004).

Old Jingleballicks: Eccentric Old Jay's prototype has never been positively identified by scholars, though it is possible he was in some way connected with Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, perhaps its onetime director W. K. Fisher, who was initially critical of the quality and nature of Ricketts's scientific work. In “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), Steinbeck says only that Ricketts “hated one professor whom he referred to as ‘old jingleballicks.' It never developed why he hated ‘old jingleballicks'” (p. xviii).

Western Biological Laboratories: Doc's business was modeled on Edward F. Ricketts's Pacific Biological Laboratories, cofounded in 1923 in Pacific Grove with Albert Galigher (his former University of Chicago roommate). In the late 1920s, Ricketts, by then the lab's sole owner, moved the business to 740 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey. Later, the street was renumbered, then renamed, with Ricketts's lab becoming 800 Cannery Row. The building, now a private social club, still stands. Recently it received a California Governor's Historic Preservation Award.

our victory: Victories by Allied forces over Germany and Japan that ended World War II took place in May and August 1945.

Palace Flop house: A shed, once owned by Horace Abbeville and used to store fish meal, that figures prominently in
Cannery Row
(1945). The Palace Flop house was deeded to Chinese merchant Lee Chong as payment for a grocery debt.

“Rock of Ages…St. James Infirmary”: “Rock of Ages” (1776) written by Augustus M. Toplady; “Asleep in the Deep” (1897) written by Arthur J. Lamb, with melody by Henry W. Petrie; “St. James Infirmary,” a folk song of indeterminate authorship, was recorded by many artists, including Louis Armstrong in 1928.

Bear Flag: The Bear Flag, so named because it featured a grizzly bear (once native to California), was raised at Sonoma, California, on June 14, 1846, by a group of American settlers led by Captain John C. Frémont in a revolt against Mexican rule. In 1911 California's state legislature adopted it as the state flag.

G.I. bill: The popular name for the Ser viceman's Readjustment Act (1944), which provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans.

Fort Ord: Originally called Camp Gigling when it was established in 1917, the Fort Ord Military Reservation (1940–94) was located on the Monterey Bay Peninsula between Marina and Sand City. At more than twenty-seven thousand acres, it was one of the largest U.S. Army bases on the West Coast and housed as many as fifty thousand troops. After World War II it became a facility for basic combat and advanced infantry training. Part of the base is now the site of California State University, Monterey Bay.

Point Pinos: Located at the northern end of the Monterey Peninsula, Point Pinos was named by Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602. It became the site of the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the West Coast (established in 1855).

CHAPTER
2

egg-heady: Highly academic, intellectual, or studious.

pachucos: Members of Mexican-American youth gangs in the southwestern United States from the 1930s to the 1950s. The pachuco style and culture originated in El Paso, Texas, but moved quickly westward and became especially prominent in East Los Angeles. Pachucos sported loose-fitting “zoot suits” (oversized trousers and jacket, with a characteristic broad felt hat), which presented an exaggerated version of gangster clothing of the 1930s. Pachucos spoke a unique dialect called Calo, a hybrid blend of formal Spanish with English and Gypsy words.

lagged with loaded pennies: Joseph and Mary may have used illegally weighted pennies for the coin toss that determined who would be first to break (“lag”) at pool.

badger game…Spanish treasure: Illegal or unethical confidence games. The badger game, for instance, is a dishonest trick in which a person is lured into a compromising situation and then blackmailed.

François Villon: French poet, thief, and general vagabond (ca. 1431–ca. 1474).

muggles: A slang term for marijuana.

wetback: Derogatory name applied to undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. The term is thought originally to refer to people crossing the border by swimming across the Rio Grande. Generally, Steinbeck's use of racially charged terms such as “Chink” and “spick” reflects the attitudes and habits of his characters, not necessarily of the author. His attitude toward Mexican nationals—if not exactly fully realistic or authentic—is nonetheless generally positive and respectful, especially when it is noted that
Sweet Thursday
appeared during the same year the United States government's Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice launched Operation Wetback (1954), which targeted illegal Mexican nationals in the southwestern United States and eventually succeeded in deporting eighty thousand of them.

Espaldas Mojadas: Joseph and Mary's group is Wetbacks.

“Ven a Mi…que Llora”: Spanish song titles: “Come to Me, My Sorrowful Girl,” “Woman from San Luis,” and “The Little White Cloud That Cries.”

charro
: The Spanish word for the colorful, even gaudy, traditional outfit of the Mexican cowboy.

I. O. O. F.: In de pen dent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization devoted to improving and elevating the condition of humanity through friendship, love, and truth. Derived from seventeenth-century British orders, the first American I.O.O.F. lodge was chartered in Baltimore, Mary land, in 1819. In 1851, membership was extended to women.

CHAPTER
3

Velella:
Velella velella,
commonly known as By-the-Wind Sailor or Purple Sail, is a jellyfish that resembles a miniature Portuguese mano'-war. Usually blue in color, these jellyfish travel by means of a small stiff sail that catches the wind. They can become stranded on beaches by the millions.