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84 the story of carol and john steinbeck is enmeshed with that of marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts, a remarkable man whose scientific curiosity was as deep as his philosophical ruminations; whose love of Walt Whitman’s poetry and Gregorian chants was as palpable as his tolerance for nearly everyone who entered his orbit. From 1930 to 1948, the year Ricketts was hit by a train rumbling through New Monterey, he was Steinbeck’s most intimate male companion. When Ed died, Steinbeck buried part of his own soul. While Ed lived, he was the third element in a creative triad, a tight and vibrant phalanx—Carol, John, Ed—whose emergent voices would resonate in all the books that John Steinbeck wrote during the 1930s. Scores of friends from that era insist that without Carol and Ed, John Steinbeck would never have developed into the writer he did. That duo of comrade and wife steadied and stimulated, absorbed and provoked him. When he met John and Carol Steinbeck in 1930, Ed Ricketts owned a biological supply laboratory that was wedged between sardine canneries on Ocean View Avenue in New Monterey, more commonly known as Cannery Row—an enclave of canneries and reduction plants, little Chinese stores and brothels and cafes and houses for cannery workers and superintendents alike. Ed started the business in 1923, when he and his wife Anna first came to the Monterey Peninsula from Chicago. With his partner, Albert Galigher, Ed opened a laboratory and collected marine specimens, mainly from the California coast, sending animals to high school and college science classes for study and dissection. Although Ed’s first lab was in Pacific Grove, he moved his lab to Cannery Row in July 1928, and the clapboard structure at 800 Ocean View Avenue eventually became his home and lab as well as a local salon, a hub for parties, a place of wild enthusiasms, and a retreat for anyone interested in serious conversation or a cold beer. As Steinbeck described Ed through the character Doc in Cannery Row, he looked “half Christ and half satyr,” which was true in art and in life. Ed was c h a p t e r f o u r At Ed Ricketts’s Lab at e d ricketts’s lab 85 a lonely and “set apart man” who sometimes plummeted to the same inner blackness that Steinbeck did, who had a phobia about rats, and who insisted that “people who are concerned with ‘the eternal verities’ would do well to remember that fun is one of them.” Ed was a paradox, as Steinbeck described him, a “very complicated man.” He had “a genius for human relationships,” said Toni Jackson, his common-law wife of the 1940s, a man sought out by legions, an innovative scientist, a vivid presence, an enigma. Like Danny and his house in Tortilla Flat, complex Ed and his hybrid lab were one entity, real and mythic. His lab was a homeplace, “a haven,” insisted one friend, that, like Steinbeck’s description of Cannery Row, held the gathered and the scattered, Carol and John included. The centripetal pull of compassionate , kindly Ed held disparate parts together, a mix of people, a network of ideas, a tapestry of music and philosophical speculation and antic maneuvers. In Steinbeck’s art, Ed’s presence is centrifugal, projecting outward into myth, the Doc of “The Snake” and Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday and the musical Pipe Dream. Five years older than John, slight of build, gauntly handsome and ever curious, Ed Ricketts drew people to him magnetically—not only Carol and John, but also artists, writers, and friends both wise and ridiculous. And women, many women. (He took most to bed—including Carol in 1940, one friend insisted.) Local and visiting scientists from nearby Hopkins Marine Station went to Ed’s to talk about invertebrates, and bums who squatted in abandoned pipes across from his Cannery Row lab or lived under wharfs put the touch on Ed for money, dropping by the front door to ask if Ed needed frogs—like Mack from Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. He “took under his wing” a friendless little boy, ill-fed, ravaged by eczema, slow to understand, who became Frankie in Cannery Row, the forlorn boy who loves Doc. He befriended Won Yee, who owned a Cannery Row grocery with a gambling room in back, and engaged the Chinese man in philosophical discussions. All found refuge in Ed’s attentiveness and sweet temperament...

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