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ON THE PRESERVATION OF BUTTLESTARS

By Carla J. Bundrick (Copyright July 2000)

No, that's not a misprint. Okay, so what is it?

Go back 56 years, to a man in New York City writing about a time and place he loved and missed. Go back 14 years before that, to 1930 when that same writer, Nobel prize-winning author John Steinbeck, first met Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist in Pacific Grove, California. The meeting was to be the beginning of a life-long friendship between the two men, and one that has been captured for over half a century in Steinbeck's writings.

Though a thinly-disguised Ed Ricketts was to appear in many of Steinbeck's works (eg. "The Snake" and In Dubious Battle), the character Ed is most often associated with is that of "Doc" in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. The successsful publication of Cannery Row in 1945 not only affected Ed's personal life, but the book's popularity forever changed the face of Monterey. Years have come and gone, the canneries are but memories along the fog-shrouded shores of Monterey and Pacific Grove. Now the Row is filled with restaurants, clubs and gift shops; tourism has replaced the sardine packing industry with a jingle of money never dreamed of by the two good friends.

John and Ed spent several years developing their friendship, John accompanying and assisting Ed in his collecting trips and becoming very well acquainted with the marine organisms that populated the tidepools around Pacific Grove. In fact, Steinbeck's knowledge of marine biology first began in 1923 when he took classes, along with his younger sister Mary, at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.

In 1940 John accompanied Ed to Baja California on a scientific expedition that resulted in publication the following year of the Sea of Cortez, a monumental work of science and philosophy written together by Ricketts and Steinbeck. While making preparations for the trip in 1939, Steinbeck writes in a letter to his agent Elizabeth Otis, "My dream for sometime in the future is a research scope with an oil immersion lens... Oh boy! Oh boy! Sometime I'll have one. It may interest you to know that business at the lab [Pacific Biological Laboratories] is picking up. I can't tell you what all this means to me, in happiness and energy. I was washed up and now I'm alive again, with work to be done and worth doing."

John moved to New York in November 1941. His life was busy with writing and he went to Europe to write about the War, but his memories and longings for the days on the California coast with his friends remained with him. As respite from wartime writing, Steinbeck began writing "a funny little book" which was to become Cannery Row. His descriptions of Monterey and Cannery Row, the land and the people, the tidepools and the wonderful life they contained poured out of John with a beauty and sympathy rarely matched in literature today. From his apartment John wrote the manuscript in neat tight handwriting on long pads of "legal" yellow paper. Chapter 5 begins:

"Western Biological deals in strange and beautiful wares. It sells the

lovely animals of the sea, the sponges, tunicates, anemones, the stars and

buttlestars, and sun stars, the bivalves, barnacles, the worms and shells, the

fabulous and multiform little brothers, the living moving flowers of the sea,

nudibranchs and tectibranchs, the spiked and nobbd and needly urchins, the

crabs and demi-crabs, the little dragons, the snapping shrimps, and ghost

shrimps so transparent that they hardly throw a shadow."

But when his small, precise handwritten script was typed, probably by a secretary at Viking Press, many of the marine organisms with strange names came out with "new" spellings. Techtibranchs was typed "tickle branches," nudibranchs came out "nude branches," and brittlestars became "buttlestars" (the small r i being seen as the letter u). Today the typescript still exists* with John's careful editing of the sea animals' names, but apparently "buttlestars" was overlooked, and the original misspelling wound up in print. Not only in print in the original edition of Cannery Row published by Viking Press, but in every English language edition ever printed!

Go ahead, drag out your copy and have a look. Marine biologist Joel Hedgpeth, with whom I had corresponded about this interesting matter in 1982 responded, "Buttlestars indeed. I had never noticed, or if I had, let it pass by. It's in all editions, the error, and sticks out firmly in the large type edition for the hard of seeing. I also happen to have a copy of the English edition (Heinemann), which is completely reset and note that it is buttlestars there as well."

What is stranger still is that Ed Rickett's biographer, Richard Astro, chose this same passage to quote in his work John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (1973), and copied the paragraph and its error, buttlestars and all, into his book. So now it has been preserved in yet another generation of literature. Will the awesome brittlestar ever regain its literary self-respect? Will Viking Press see the error of their ways?

Thankfully, Sweet Thursday contains the following description, but with accurate spelling, proving again that John Steinbeck took an abiding interest in and had a real love for what Ed Ricketts called "the good kind and sane little animals."

"Doc got back from his collecting about four-thirty... and submerged in sea

water in his collecting buckets were hundreds of brittlestars. He moved the

brittlestars to a large, flat-bottomed glass dish and poured some sea water

on top of them. The little animals with the snakelike arms whipped about for

a moment and then settled down. When they were quite still and resting Doc

added a little fresh water to the dish. The arms stirred nervously. He waited

a while and then added a little more fresh water. To a sea animal, fresh

water is a poison, and if it is slowly introduced it is as subtle as morphine.

It relaxes and soothes until the little creature goes to sleep and dies without

violence."

*In the Steinbeck collections at Stanford University.