A Foolish Consistency: Sparky in Cannery Row

Figure 1.

Ritzi "Tiny" Colletto (left) and Horace "Sparky" Enea on the Western Flyer in the Sea of Cortez

The late Sparky Enea, especially to those who might have met him at the Salinas Steinbeck Festival, was a colorful fellow whose historical importance derived from his having been part of the crew of the Western Flyer on its 1940 Sea of Cortez odyssey. But Enea also makes his appearance in scant but fictionalized form in a work of fiction, for John Steinbeck gives him a walk-on role in his 1945 best-seller Cannery Row.

But Enea's permanency in print is tarnished a bit. Somehow his name became transformed, when it appeared in Chapter 25 of the original Viking edition, to "Evea"; and no one then or since seems to have noticed or at least troubled to make a correction (166). Should anyone care to argue that Steinbeck was deliberately disguising the identity of his onetime shipmate, we must note that he also appears with his name correctly spelled in Chapter 11 (70) . In fact, the name continues to appear in both versions in subsequent typesettings of the novel—in the 1986 reissue (69, 157), for instance, as well as the 1994 Susan Shillinglaw-introduced Penguin edition (66,148). Moreover, and most recently, the definitive Library of America edition (2001), for all the care Bob DeMott put into its scholarly apparatus, subverts that care by persisting in the error (143, 202). Thus Enea appears damned to an eternity of doubleness!