William Souder, John Steinbeck Biographer
The author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (William Souder, above) joins an all-star speaker lineup for the Monterey Library’s 75th anniversary publication party for Cannery Row, the “poisoned cream puff” of a novel resented by locals when it appeared but revered by readers ever since for its humorous depiction of human society—high and low—along Monterey’s historic waterfront. The six-week-long celebration kicked off on September 16 with a Zoom webinar led by veteran Steinbeck scholars Robert DeMott and Susan Shillinglaw (in photo left) and by Gerry Low-Sabado, a fifth generation Monterey native and well-known Chinese-American community preservationist. The six-week-long celebration includes lectures, films, and special events and ends on November 7 with public readings, virtual tours of Cannery Row, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Ed Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Laboratories—the latter led by Shillinglaw and Mike Guardino of the Cannery Row Foundation—and a panel discussion of “Why We Read Cannery Row in 2020” that includes Souder; Donald Kohrs, librarian and archivist of the nearby Hopkins Marine Station; and Katie Rodgers, the pioneering editor of Ricketts’s letters, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row, and of Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts. Registration for California’s “Cannery Row Days: A Novel Celebration” is free and open to the public (thanks to Zoom) wherever in the world COVID-19 days may have you cornered. Sessions in the series will be recorded and available for viewing at the Monterey Library website.
About William Ray
I do not believe that Steinbeck was “mad at the world” for many reasons including:
1. John Steinbeck was a highly evolved (level four) Introverted SENSATION Thinking type. No psychological type is better equipped to stand back and coldly observe even the most startling, joyful, or terrifying event and perceive it with more objective honesty. This ability is a key attribute of a successful journalist.
2. Steinbeck, like Ricketts, was an adept practitioner of what he and Ricketts called non-teleological thinking (actually non-teleological cognition). They both were highly evolved mature individuals and as a result, had their unconscious perception influences cornered and less intrusive.
3. Their perspective acknowledges the practical fact that the feeling tones resulting in an individual to be “mad” or “angry” cause filters for perception such that the image perceived may be dramatically altered from reality. For example, the influence of the shadow on interpersonal perception. (In Cannery Row the shadow reaction of the lesser evolved, Mack to the Bear Flag’s previous watchman William.)
Certainly there is plenty of things in this world that would inspire an individual to be angry or mad, but I do no believe those emotions were much of an Influence on John Steinbeck or Ed Ricketts.
Clinton, NC