Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

12. "Working at the Impossible"

TWELVE "Working at the Impossible": Moby-Dick's Presence in East ofEden Robert DeMott Certain environments are forever haunted by the great works of literature that have imagined them for us. John Steinbeck, writing East of Eden on the island of Nantucket in Moby-Dick's centennial year, composing his own massive novel atop Sankaty Bluff, where Herman Melville himselfhad stood a century before to overlook the Atlantic swell, underwent just such a haunting. "Sailor, can you hear the Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall headlong and break on our Atlantic wall off I Sconset?II inquired Robert Lowell in "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket." Here Robert DeMott demonstrates that sailor Steinbeck indeed heard those sea wings, and that much ofMoby-Dick crept into East of Eden with the Nantucket fog. For Maggie and Bob Cook A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. -Journal ofa Novel: The "East of Eden" Letters I On Wednesday, 15 August 1951, John Steinbeck might easily have traveled the six miles or so from Footlight, his rented cottage on Baxter Road next to the Coast Guard's Sankaty Lighthouse in Siasconset, to the Unitarian Church in Nantucket for the Historical Association 's "Melville Memorial" observance, marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick. It would have been a fitting endeavor -part business, part leisure-for Steinbeck on that "muggy and thick and foggy" (SLL 428) afternoon, because he was playing 212 DeMott hooky from the manuscript of East ofEden, which he had been composing daily since February, first in New York City, then from June 18 onward, in 'Sconset, where he was summering with his wife, Elaine, and sons, Thorn andJohn. Since Steinbeck's arrival on the island, he had written obsessively each working day in the cottage's small upstairs back study. The window of his writing room faced inland, away from the inviting panorama of the Atlantic Ocean (their cottage was no more than thirty feet from the high-flown edge of Sankaty Bluff). Steinbeck worked on his "big book" right through Sunday, 12 August. Then he took lithe longest layoff"'since starting the novel (IN 145) to prepare for Elaine's birthday party on Tuesday (Benson 1984, 689-90). On Thursday, 16 August, Steinbeck made a fairly long entry in his working journal indicating that his plan for the novel's final section would "concentrate" on developing "powerful new people ... , Cal and Abra and a new Adam" (IN 146), though he did not actually compose any fiction that day. In fact he took several more days off before launching into book 4 on Monday, 20 August. This much is known and recorded; he said nothing at all in his journal or his letters about his whereabouts on August 15. Now comes my speculation, which concerns that conspicuous silence , upon which even his biographer and his widow could shed no light (Benson 1984, 691; E. Steinbeck 1992). On 15 August, I imagine, still tired from having completed the third book of East" of Eden, Steinbeck, unmoored from his manuscript, and in a receptive mood, visited-inthought, ifnot in deed-the Historical Association's dual celebration of Moby-Dick's centenary of Moby-Dick, and the ninetyninth anniversary of Melville's only visit to Nantucket (Melville published Moby-Dick, with its eighty-eight references to Nantucket, before he had ever set foot on the island). Steinbeck was already attuned to the significance of Nantucket as an historical, cultural, and literary site, for as early as 21 May, he had written to his agent, ElizabethOtis, to discuss the feasibility of doing a "pet project-a set of informal but informative articles about the island of Nantuckett [sic]" (Special Collections, Stanford University Library). His curiosity about the place and its cultural history was matched by his energetic sense ofbelonging: "This island is wonderful . I feel at home here. I wonder if it is my small amount (1/4) of my Moby-Dick in East of Eden 213 New England blood operating.... I never felt better about working" (IN 107).1 He was well on his way to becoming a Melvillean "fast fish." Steinbeck might have been aware of the Melville meeting since at least...