Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

13. At Sea in the Tide Pool

THIRTEEN At Sea in the Tide Pool: The Whaling Town and America in Steinbeck's The Winter ofOur Discontent and Travels with Charley Nathaniel Philbrick The eastern towns ofNantucket and Sag Harbor, where Steinbeck chose to spend his later years, were first jumping-off places for exploitation of the American West, for the harvesting ofthe Pacific's whales and ofCalifornia's goldfields, then tourist attractionsfor the harvesting ofvisitor dollars. In his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck uses the history and development of a whaling town to achieve an overarching vision of the American psyche, a vision corroborated by his investigations in the nonfiction Travels with Charley, and elaborated in America and Americans. Throughout these late works, Steinbeck's ecological understanding of the tide pool's teeming and competitive life informs his fears for the future ofa people whose "predatory nature" must confront the "terrible hazard ofleisure " (AAA 138-39). John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) is a novel that seems almost calculated to be critically unpopular. Certainly, the book's setting, an old whaling town on the East Coast, is a highly improbable one for an author so strongly associated with his native California. For those who adhere to the theory that it was his Gatsbyesque reverse migration to the East that destroyed him, Winter exemplifies what went wrong with Steinbeck in the 1950s and 1960s. By living the life of a famous writer on a foreign soil, he cut himself off from the nourishing wellsprings of his past; instead of Salinas and Monterey, he now turned to Nantucket Island and Sag Harborwhaling towns turned summer retreats for the well-to-do. How 230 Philbrick could the author of The Grapes ofWrath (1939) dare look to a place so far removed, both geographically and economically, from his own beginnings? This essay is written with the conviction that the charges I have just repeated overlook an important point of continuity throughout Steinbeck's life on both coasts. While for most Americans in the second half of the twentieth century, the whale fishery was a distant part of the nation's past, Steinbeck had a more immediate connection to whaling, which was very much alive during his youth in California . Once we recognize that his engagement with the old whaling towns of Nantucket and, most important, Sag Harbor opened a kind of cultural conduit to his past, we can begin to appreciate The Winter ofOur Discontent as the novelistic culmination of a career in which his philosophical and ecological interest in the tide pools of The Log from the Sea ofCortez (1951) evolved into the social and cultural preoccupations of Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966). By fusing his own background with that ofa nation, the whaling town provided the setting with which Steinbeck would begin the exploration of his final great theme: the meaning of America. I In Travels with Charley Steinbeck quotes from a "rude poem" describing how the California of his youth came into being: The miner came in forty-nine, The whores in fifty-one. And when they got together, They made a Native Son. (174) As it turns out, a significant number of these miners were from Nantucket . The combination of a disastrous fire in 1846 and a sandbar at its harbor mouth sent the island into a terminal decline well ahead of most other whaling ports on the East Coast, and many Nantucketers left to seek their fortunes in California. In 1850, 650 Nantucketers were reportedly either sailing for California or already there. In just nine months, the island lost a quarter of its voting population to the goldfields, causing a portion of San Francisco to be called "New Nantucket" (Cuba 1965,212; Macy 1970, 291-92). As the gold- The Whaling Town and America 231 fields lost their allure, the San Francisco whale fishery entered into an era of remarkable expansion in the 1880s with the outfitting of a new class of steam whalers designed to exploit the arctic whale fishery (Bockstoce 1986,213). Thus as whaling ceased to be an economically viable endeavor in the East (the last whaler left Nantucket in 1869), it acquired a new lease on life in the West.1 One hundred miles to the south of San Francisco, Steinbeck's native Monterey had its own distinct whaling identity. In 1854, it became the site of the first shore...