Ed Ricketts and the Episcopal Church

October 12, 2013 by 2 Comments

Ed Ricketts, child of the Episcopal Church, shown as an adultLike John Steinbeck, the writer’s friend Ed Ricketts was reared in the Episcopal Church, a coincidence of some importance. Described in Cannery Row as “half satyr, half Christ,” “Doc” Ricketts inspired the creation of identifiably Doc-like characters in works of fiction written by Steinbeck over two decades, including In Dubious Battle and Sweet Thursday. The friendship with Ricketts was fundamental to Steinbeck’s thinking through the 1930s and 40s, and the Bay of California scientific expedition undertaken by the men in 1940 produced Sea of Cortez, a collaborative meditation on the meaning of life that reaches an emotional peak on Easter morning in a passage foreshadowing The Winter of Our Discontent, a later Holy Week narrative with an Episcopal church setting.

Intimate Lives That Included Episcopal Church Training

Reared in Chicago, Ed Ricketts—like Steinbeck—attended Episcopal church services as a boy and received Christian training in Episcopal church Sunday school and confirmation classes. Intelligent, introspective, and independent-minded college dropouts, both men outgrew Episcopal Church teaching as adults, becoming skeptical about religion, passionate about science, and unconventional in behavior. When they met in 1930, Ricketts was running a biological-specimen business in Pacific Grove, California, and working on a pioneering textbook of coastal ecology eventually published by Stanford University. Steinbeck, recently married and undiscovered as a writer, was younger and less sophisticated. As he noted in his profile of Ricketts years later, Steinbeck learned deeply about many subjects, including music, from the man with whom he shared a deep personal connection based in part on shared experience in the Episcopal Church.

Reared in Chicago, Ed Ricketts—like Steinbeck—attended Episcopal church services as a boy and received Christian training in Episcopal church Sunday school and confirmation classes.

Their surviving letters demonstrate the intimacy of their relationship and their familiarity with Episcopal church doctrine, custom, and culture. Writing to Steinbeck in 1946, for example, Ricketts reflected with characteristic irony and humor on his mother’s recent death: “Directly after mother was taken very sick, she wanted an Episcopal priest. Terribly unfortunate that a few months before this, the satyr [in him] caught up with him again. . . . The wicked old women, of the church that was founded by charitable Christ, turned on him viciously.”  The parish in question was All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Carmel, the same Episcopal church where Steinbeck served as the godfather for his sister Mary’s younger daughter in 1935.

‘The wicked old women, of the church that was founded by charitable Christ, turned on him viciously.’

As a result of the clerical misbehavior detailed in the letter, Ricketts’ dying mother was visited by the rector of St.-Mary’s-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Pacific Grove, the same Episcopal church where Thom Steinbeck, the author’s son, would be married 50 years later. The Steinbeck family cottage where the writer and his wife were living when Ricketts and Steinbeck first met—and to which Steinbeck retreated when Ricketts died—is located only two blocks from St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. Both literally and figuratively, the Episcopal Church loomed over the lives of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts—the man he called his soul mate—from the beginning to the end of their intimate, intriguing relationship.

Photo by Bryant Fitch (October 1939) http://www.caviews.com/ed.htm

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Did John Steinbeck Work as A Citizen Spy for the CIA?

October 4, 2013 by 8 Comments

Redacted CIA memo mentioning John Steinbeck shownMy discovery of John Steinbeck’s connection to the CIA could be described as payback for a youthful indiscretion—my own, not the author’s. While reading The Grapes of Wrath in high school, I skipped the “turtle” and other chapters that seemed to me superfluous to the plot line of the Joads’ journey west. The punishment for my teenage sin of omission came years later, when it first occurred to me that John Steinbeck was a CIA spy. The insane-sounding proposition grew from incongruities in Steinbeck’s life that—unlike Tom Joads’ turtle—I found I couldn’t ignore.

Steinbeck: Citizen Spy book cover shown with subtitle: The Untold Story of John Steinbeck and the CIA

FOIA to the CIA: What Do You Have on John Steinbeck?

Why was Steinbeck never called before the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities, despite his alleged ties to Communist organizations? Why did the CIA admit to the Church Committee in 1975 that Steinbeck had been a subject of the illegal CIA mail-opening program known as HTLINGUAL? Did Steinbeck’s connections to known CIA front organizations, such as the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the Ford Foundation, amount to more than mere coincidence? Did the synchronicity continue when Steinbeck did freelance writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal and New York Herald Tribune? Both newspapers were linked to MOCKINGBIRD, another CIA operation, in Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article “The CIA and the Media.” Why did the CIA redact portions of Steinbeck’s FBI files before they were released under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that permits full or partial disclosure by government agencies of previously classified documents on request?

Why was Steinbeck never called before the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities, despite his alleged ties to Communist organizations?

There was only one source—the CIA itself—that could definitively answer my questions and confirm or disprove my developing conclusions. I submitted my FOIA request to the CIA in January 2012. With characteristic bureaucratic speed, the CIA responded after eight months, in August 2012, sending me copies of two letters written in 1952. In the first, penned on personal stationery in his own handwriting, Steinbeck offers to work for the CIA. In the second, then-CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith accepts Steinbeck’s offer. The text of these letters and others can be found in my book, Steinbeck: Citizen Spy, at my website or in the FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

The CIA Director Accepts the Author’s Offer of Help

Jan 28, 1952

Dear General Smith:

Toward the end of February I am going to the Mediterranean area and afterwards to all of the countries of Europe not out of bounds. I am commissioned by Collier’s Magazine to do a series of articles—subjects and areas to be chosen by myself. I shall move slowly going only where interest draws. The trip will take six to eight months.

If during this period I can be of any service whatever to yourself or to the Agency you direct, I shall be only too glad.

I saw Herbert Bayard Swope recently and he told me that your health had improved. I hope this is so.

Also I wear the “Lou for 52” button concealed under the lapel as that shy candidate suggests.

Again—I shall be pleased to be of service. The pace and method of my junket together with my intention of talking with great numbers of people of all classes may offer peculiar advantages.

Yours sincerely,
John Steinbeck

‘If during this period I can be of any service whatever to yourself or to the Agency you direct, I shall be only too glad.’

ER 2-5603
6 February 1952
Mr. John Steinbeck
206 East 72nd Street
New York 21, New York

Dear Mr. Steinbeck:

I greatly appreciate the offer of assistance made in your note of January 28th.

You can, indeed, be of help to us by keeping your eyes and ears open on any political developments in the areas through which you travel, and, in addition, on any other matters which seem to you of significance, particularly those which might be overlooked in routine reports.

It would be helpful, too, if you could come down to Washington for a talk with us before you leave. We might then discuss any special matters on which you may feel that you can assist us.

Since I am certain that you will have some very interesting things to say, I trust, also, that you will be able to reserve some time for us on your return.

Sincerely,
Walter B. Smith
Director

O/DCI:REL:leb
Rewritten: LEBecker:mlk
Distribution:
Orig – Addressee
2 – DCI (Reading Official) [“w/Basic” has been handwritten beside this line and scratched out]
1 – DD/P [a check mark and w/Basic handwritten in]
1 – Admin [This has been scratched out] handwritten is “w/Basic”

‘You can, indeed, be of help to us by keeping your eyes and ears open on any political developments in the areas through which you travel.’

Did Steinbeck’s CIA Connection Start in Russia?

Reread A Russian Journal  with the possibility that Steinbeck was working for the CIA prior to 1952 in mind. When Steinbeck traveled to the USSR with Robert Capa in 1947—the second of three trips the author made to the Communist state during his lifetime—Walter Bedell Smith happened to be the U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Steinbeck notes in his account of his and Capa’s Russian journey that they dined with Smith during their stay.

This experience helps explain the personal tone of familiarity expressed in Steinbeck’s 1952 letter to Smith offering to help the CIA. It also suggests the possibility that Steinbeck used his access while in the USSR to gather intelligence for the U.S. government from the Russian interior. While visiting a factory in Stalingrad, Steinbeck observes that the Russians are still melting down hulls from German tanks to make tractors fully two years after the end of World War II, lamenting his frustration at not being able to get current production figures for the facility. Such information would have been particularly important to the U.S. government in 1947, as the Cold War became hotter and American travel behind the Iron Curtain more difficult.

While visiting a factory in Stalingrad, Steinbeck observes that the Russians are still melting down hulls from German tanks to make tractors fully two years after the end of World War II, lamenting his frustration at not being able to get current production figures for the facility.

The 1952 exchange between the author of The Grapes of Wrath and the Director of the CIA provides a new set of parameters for understanding John Steinbeck’s life. In my book I carefully examine each of the letters resulting from my FOIA request to the CIA, the writer’s heavily CIA-redacted FBI files, Thomas Steinbeck’s thoughts on the matter, and likely avenues through which the elder Steinbeck could have served his government covertly both before and after 1952. Viewing the author’s life in terms of possible links to the CIA opens vistas for better comprehending certain works, such as The Short Reign of Pippin IV, that his literary agent, editor, and others discouraged him from writing. In recommending my book to a Steinbeck blogger, a noted Steinbeck scholar described the possible CIA-Steinbeck connection detailed in Steinbeck: Citizen Spy as “a potential game-changer.”

Time will tell.

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John Steinbeck’s Life in the Episcopal Church

September 26, 2013 by 1 Comment

John Steinbeck pictured second in line leaving St. Paul's Episcopal ChurchJohn Steinbeck was baptized, reared, and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. He also requested and received a Church of England funeral and throughout his life admired the soaring aesthetics of his Anglican church heritage, particularly the Tudor language of the King James Bible and the lyrical liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. Unfortunately, details of the author’s upbringing, adulthood, and death in the Episcopal Church have been overlooked by critics who have characterized the writer as a humanitarian agnostic, a scientific atheist, or a myth-making literary symbolist, depending on the work in question, the period in Steinbeck’s life, or the critic’s point of view. But the facts of Steinbeck’s lifelong affiliation with the Episcopal Church are indisputable.

St. Paul's, an Anglican church, pictured in Salnas, CaliforniaSt. Paul’s: The Steinbecks’ Adopted Episcopal Church

Though neither of Steinbeck’s parents was brought up as a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States—the American branch of the Church of England, part of the worldwide Anglican church communion—Ernst and Olive Steinbeck reared their children, including their son John, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Salinas, California. A traditional Anglican church by early 20th century standards, the parish kept good records. They suggest that the people of St. Paul’s thought of themselves as frontier inheritors of Church of England liturgy, music, and sociability. Even the church’s design (shown above) was Church of England country-parish gothic. As a boy, Steinbeck wore the traditional surplice and sang in the junior choir (shown recessing from the church behind the crucifer in the image at the top of this page).

St. Mary, a Church of England building, pictured in SomersetSt. Mary’s Anglican Church: In Quest of King Arthur

In 1945, Steinbeck had his first son, Thom, baptized as an infant at Old St. James Episcopal Church in Monterey. But except for family events at other Episcopal church sites in nearby Watsonville and Carmel—including the baptism of various nieces—the author isn’t known to have attended Anglican churches outside California until he moved permanently to New York with his third wife in 1950. Steinbeck’s letters reveal that while researching the history of King Arthur in the British Isles, John and Elaine Steinbeck became occasional worshippers at St. Mary’s Anglican Church, an ancient Church of England building in Somerset’s Bruton parish—the namesake of Virginia’s Bruton Parish, the pre-Revolutionary Episcopal church located in Colonial Williamsburg.

Gothic Episcopal church interior of St. James, Manhattan, picturedSt. James Episcopal Church in Midtown Manhattan: Setting for Steinbeck’s Church of England Encore

Before he died in 1968, Steinbeck requested a “Church of England” funeral. The venue? Madison Avenue’s famous St. James Episcopal Church, a fashionable parish with Church-of-England traditions and high-Anglican church tastes. The details of Steinbeck’s dramatic Anglican church service were reported in The New York Times. The actor Henry Fonda read poetry and passages from the Bible, and guests included the humorist Budd Schulberg, Steinbeck’s Hollywood screenwriter friend. Like the California Anglican church where the author sang in the junior choir, the midtown Manhattan Episcopal church chosen for Steinbeck’s funeral is gothic in architecture, Church of England in spirit, and appropriately theatrical in setting for a celebrity’s service. Elaine Steinbeck was a former Broadway stage manager and knew how to put on a show. But the author’s lifetime affiliation with Episcopal church gives away the ending: Steinbeck’s  final curtain came down in a familiar house.

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