In seven stories, Steinbeck traces the fates and dreams of an eccentric cast of characters, from sailors and ranchers, to doctors and immigrants—as each struggles to carve out a living in the often inhospitable environment of rocky cliffs, crashing surf, and rough patches of land along the California coast and the Big Sur. In “Blind Luck,” a wayward orphan finds his calling at sea, only to learn that life must concede to the whims of authority and the ravages of nature. In “Dark Watcher,” with the country at the start of the Great Depression, a professor craves a plausible discovery to boost his academic standing—and encounters the Indian myth of a shadowed horsemen that may ruin his career. “An Unbecoming Grace” tracks the route of a country physician who cares for an ill-tempered cur—but feels more concern for the well-being of the patient’s beleaguered young wife. The collection concludes with “Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo,” a novella that follows the tragic love story between a young apothecary and the woman he hopes to marry.
Deeply felt and richly imagined, full of compelling drama and historical authenticity, Down to a Soundless Sea heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction. Thomas Steinbeck has written stories as memorable and rugged as the coastline that inspired them.
In seven stories, Steinbeck traces the fates and dreams of an eccentric cast of characters, from sailors and ranchers, to doctors and immigrants—as each struggles to carve out a living in the often inhospitable environment of rocky cliffs, crashing surf, and rough patches of land along the California coast and the Big Sur. In “Blind Luck,” a wayward orphan finds his calling at sea, only to learn that life must concede to the whims of authority and the ravages of nature. In “Dark Watcher,” with the country at the start of the Great Depression, a professor craves a plausible discovery to boost his academic standing—and encounters the Indian myth of a shadowed horsemen that may ruin his career. “An Unbecoming Grace” tracks the route of a country physician who cares for an ill-tempered cur—but feels more concern for the well-being of the patient’s beleaguered young wife. The collection concludes with “Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo,” a novella that follows the tragic love story between a young apothecary and the woman he hopes to marry.
Deeply felt and richly imagined, full of compelling drama and historical authenticity, Down to a Soundless Sea heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction. Thomas Steinbeck has written stories as memorable and rugged as the coastline that inspired them.
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Overview
In seven stories, Steinbeck traces the fates and dreams of an eccentric cast of characters, from sailors and ranchers, to doctors and immigrants—as each struggles to carve out a living in the often inhospitable environment of rocky cliffs, crashing surf, and rough patches of land along the California coast and the Big Sur. In “Blind Luck,” a wayward orphan finds his calling at sea, only to learn that life must concede to the whims of authority and the ravages of nature. In “Dark Watcher,” with the country at the start of the Great Depression, a professor craves a plausible discovery to boost his academic standing—and encounters the Indian myth of a shadowed horsemen that may ruin his career. “An Unbecoming Grace” tracks the route of a country physician who cares for an ill-tempered cur—but feels more concern for the well-being of the patient’s beleaguered young wife. The collection concludes with “Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo,” a novella that follows the tragic love story between a young apothecary and the woman he hopes to marry.
Deeply felt and richly imagined, full of compelling drama and historical authenticity, Down to a Soundless Sea heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction. Thomas Steinbeck has written stories as memorable and rugged as the coastline that inspired them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345455772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2003 |
| Series: | Ballantine Reader's Circle Series |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.48(w) x 8.16(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Night Guide
Eighteen fifty-nine was the devil’s own year for gales along the Sur coast, but their raucous zenith was registered near the end of April. Crashing up from the south-southwest with piratical ferocity, the cycle of gales unburdened enough water to send the Little and Big Sur Rivers four to six feet over their banks. The runoff from Pico Blanco alone kept the Little Sur at near flood for two weeks.
Sadly, every mortal creature that made the rugged coast a refuge suffered from the shattering blows of an outraged sea. Cresting rollers twenty feet high and two miles long mined into the impenetrable cliffs and rocks for days on end. Inevitably, every rookery, bower, haul-out, and nesting sight on the Monterey coast was swept away. The corpses of every known species of coastal life littered what shore there was left. The sharks enjoyed abundance for days after each gale.
The evidence of destruction was to be had from all quarters. Salmon Creek to Santa Cruz reported roads, byways, and trails strangled in mazes of uprooted and shattered trees. The prodigious rains, sometimes so heavy and horizontal that simple breathing became hazardous, drilled the soil so incessantly that broad landslides were abruptly carved from the mountainsides. Several large rockslides unalterably isolated the more remote mining claims.
It was during a blessed lull between the repetitive coastal tempests that Boy Bill Post moved his wife from Monterey to a newly purchased piece of land bordering Soberanes Creek. His land formed a part of the old San Jose y Sur Chiquito land grant, and he had fixed it in his mind that his acres would be prime for cattle. There appeared to be abundant grazing in the hills and pastures, and the splendid ocean views gave him constant pleasure.
Serious anxiety regarding the recent inclination of weather set Boy Bill Post to hurriedly construct a cabin to shelter his new family. This urgency was magnified by the impending birth of the Posts’ first child.
Boy Bill Post had married a handsome Rumsen Indian girl. Her name was Anselma Onesimo and her people had lived along Carmel Valley and its bountiful river for centuries. According to Anselma, her tribe had sprung from beneath the earth on the day of creation. The Rumsen people considered the Sur Mountains as spiritual ground and spoke of Mount Pico Blanco as the navel of the world.
The constraints of time were suddenly made more per-tinent by the return of the southern gales. Bill’s plans for their cabin were instantly altered to accommodate present needs and it quickly became a slant-roofed, one-room hut near Soberanes Creek. This proved not to be the most favorable of locations.
The expectant father desperately hand split cedar shakes by the hour without recourse to food or rest. Anselma’s lying-in time was uncomfortably close at hand, and Boy Bill Post desperately raced his hammer against the lightning-rent tempest that momentarily threatened to descend upon their heads.
Anselma’s cries from within the rude shelter informed Bill Post that his firstborn and the gale might possibly arrive simultaneously. Then a sudden explosive crash of thunder heralded the initial, pelting pebbles of rain. It also proclaimed the welcome cries of his first child.
Post managed to secure the last few cedar shakes to the roof just in time to greet Charles Francis Post. Bill’s gift to his burgeoning family was a tight shelter and dry stores. Not much in the way of a defense against the wrath of God perhaps, but better than canvas and poles in those wilds.
March 1, 1859, the day the majestic gales attended the birth, also marked the sad loss of four sound ships. To seal the bargain, the coast of Monterey was sorrowfully altered by rock-grinding waves and carnivorous tides. There were other unique signs accompanying the birth, according to the mother, but it wasn’t for some time that anyone realized that young Frank was also the first child born in the high Sur under the American flag.
In any event, the child’s nativity was accredited as genuinely auspicious, and it was noted by family members that unusual events occurred on the anniversary of that particular date every year.
By the first of June that same year, Bill Post had built his new family a credible home higher up on the banks of the Soberanes, and he had begun to move on a few head of livestock to see how they fared before establishing a larger herd.
Bill Post had grown into a man of relatively broad experience. He was the son of a successfully retired sea captain from New London, Connecticut, and the family counted itself honored to have had ancestors aboard the Mayflower. A typical Yankee, both innovative and practical, Bill always felt equal to any task he set for himself.
In 1858 Bill Post had had the good sense to marry Anselma, and though he appraised his life as rich in experience, nothing had quite prepared him for fatherhood. He found himself looking for direct reflections of his own instincts and manner in the person of the child. This seemed only natural to Anselma, though Bill’s observations took on an unsettling character the more he studied the matter. Baby Charles Francis Post seemed remarkably self-absorbed and uncommonly introspective for an infant.
Anselma quietly insisted there was absolutely no reason for concern. It was the child’s Rumsen Indian blood at play. Indian babies were rarely clamorous unless soiled or left without proper attention. Indeed, Anselma exhibited great interest in her child’s reflective temperament. She said it was a sign of great insight. This did little to assuage his father’s concern, however, and Bill continued focusing closely on his firstborn for signs of some subtle indisposition.
Bill never ascertained anything beyond his own overanxious concerns, for Frank bloomed quite normally, though he remained quiet when he had nothing of importance to say. The child retained information easily and brought a fixed and patient concentration to every new experience. By the time the boy was three, Bill Post was forced to accept Anselma’s elementary appraisal of the situation. Little Frank assuredly perceived and understood more than most tykes his age, but he kept his insights to himself, as did all his mother’s people.
Little Frank loved to trail behind his mother as she drifted off into the barrens or high passes on one of her herb and medicine-gathering expeditions. Sometimes they would come across other parties of foraging Rumsen and happily move along together for a day or two exchanging news, gathering pine nuts and birds’ eggs, and hunting small game when the opportunity presented itself.
This singular practice made Bill Post extremely uncomfortable from the outset, and he voiced innumerable objections to the custom. But if he thought for a moment he might discourage his wife’s basic Indian compacts and traditions, he was pitifully mistaken. Anselma considered foraging as an important part of an ancient and magic family responsibility. The very process required vast knowledge and humble reverence, and Heaven help anyone who interfered.
After a while Bill came to see that thorny point for himself and, with his usual Yankee practicality, let Anselma do as she pleased. He just got used to it, as he was meant to. He also became acclimated to little Frank, who sometimes looked at his father as though they had met somewhere else, in another time–a very disconcerting air when adopted by a child.
Bill also became accustomed to his son’s long, ruminative pauses when asked a question. Little Frank seemed to ponder every inquiry seriously, regardless of magnitude. He always answered with disarming simplicity and truthfulness. These were not qualities Bill Post necessarily wanted his son to disavow in favor of thoughtless social spontaneity, so he adopted a circumspect manner when conversing with the child on any important subject.
From little Frank’s perspective the whole world made sense. A moment’s balanced reflection always served to place every reality on an even plane. The truth always made itself brightly evident to him. Even awash in a sea of distortion, the truth was easily defined and understood. His reluctance to speak about all he knew was bred in the bone, as his mother had always contended. The fixed symmetry evident in all things, spiritual and physical, was perfectly resolved to little Frank’s way of thinking.
It was with his mother that Frank shared the greatest and most diverse of dialogues. Oddly, much of it was nonverbal and needed little in the way of physical inflection to disclose infinite subtleties. The boy fairly exercised himself in all the languages at hand without showing much preference for any one in particular. English, Spanish, and Rumsen phrases were all the same to little Frank. He would happily express himself using elements of all three languages simultaneously.
Though he found it peculiar, it never disturbed the child when his father failed to hear or discern the more enchanted particulars that always appeared so obvious to the boy, but he possessed a native discretion and never discussed that part of his world with anyone but his mother and then only in their own special dialects. There could be little doubt of Frank’s Indian inheritance, but this was not to say that Bill Post had not left his mark. The child displayed evident qualities of ingenuity, endurance, and courage typical of a Connecticut Yankee. The boy even possessed the amiable aspect and rolling gait of a Grand Banks seaman as irrefutable proof of his father’s bloodline.
Little Frank also shared his father’s passion for birds and the broad vistas of the Pacific. Father and son spent many evenings watching the sunset beyond the opalescent horizon while the gulls wheeled and called overhead. Bill would try to explain what lay beyond the oceans, but his son focused only on what could be seen. It would have been all the same to the boy if nothing whatsoever lay over the horizon. He loved the beauty of the sea for its own sake and asked nothing more of it.
Bill noticed that prolonged contemplation of the bright ocean panoramas occasionally made his son almost giddy. It was then that little Frank would talk mysteriously of the Ancients who had once lived in these mountains, the humans who had stared out over those same bright waters before time was recorded. Bill Post often found his son’s manner of expression curious; the object of the boy’s focus was so unlike that of other children his age.
If Bill Post ever required valid proof of his son’s native predispositions, it materialized on a dangerous night in mid-March. It was a night rent with contrary gales, hazardous winds, and lightning that owned the skies for minutes on end. It was a night not unlike that of Frank’s birth, with its attendant natal pyrotechnics. The boy was a hardened veteran of tempests of equal ferocity since that auspicious night, but storms inspired curiosity rather than fear in the child. Indeed, little Frank rather enjoyed a really spirited southwester. He would ask his father to take him to watch the monstrous seas cleave themselves against the great rocks of the coast.
On this particular night, little Frank took no joy in the storms, nor in the safety and warmth afforded by his soft bed and downy quilt. His mother had departed on one of her usual hunting expeditions into the mountains three days earlier. She had promised to return before the weather broke. Frank’s father had heartily regretted letting Anselma continue with her usual native routines because she was carrying another child. He felt uneasy about the effects her strenuous endeavors and the wilderness might have on mother and unborn child alike.
At any other time little Frank would have thought nothing of his mother’s departure except to feel slightly neglected because he could not accompany her. He had come down with a slight cold, and his father had insisted that the boy stay at home until the symptoms subsided.
The shattering tempest grew in intensity, and it was about midnight when Frank heard his father rise, dress, and depart to check the barn and the frightened stock. It was then that a feeling of apprehension and barren anxiety settled on the boy’s soul like a wet hide. It made him shiver. Something was wrong, and little Frank was at a loss to know why he felt so distraught. Sitting up, he looked out the rain-streaked window. In the distance, he could see the light of his father’s storm lantern moving about inside the barn, so he knew that his father was fine. But he worried sorrowfully about his mother. He was almost sick wondering where she was on such a raging night. The boy closed his eyes tight to drive away the unwelcome images, but he became aware of an even stronger light trying to edge its way past his closed lids to gain his attention.
At first the child thought it was his father’s lantern, but when he opened his eyes he realized the light came from a different source altogether. This light shimmered in the corner of his room, shimmered with a gentle luminescence unlike anything the child had ever seen before. He had noticed the wakes of passing ships glow with the same quality in the moonlight, and this pale glow, akin to the water’s strange radiance, shed little of itself on the immediate surroundings.
The glow took the form of a tapered pillar at first, but when his eyes became accustomed to the subtle and wonderful color variations emanating from the luminescence, he became convinced that the light was a who and not a what. This realization infused him with a warmth and confidence that seemed totally natural and admissible. It was as if he had always known about this phenomenon even though he had never experienced it before.
The glowing pillar moved slowly toward the door to Frank’s room, and there it waited shimmering with green, blue, and violet pulses of brilliance. The boy nodded with instant comprehension, jumped from his cot, and quickly dressed. A lightning flash suddenly raced across the sky. The crash of its thunder followed almost immediately. Alert to the storm once more, the boy pulled on his boots. Little Frank was not fond of wearing shoes of any description. He was happiest with the soft dirt between his toes, but he obeyed the thought as it came to him.
The glowing pillar floated through the cabin to the front door and waited. Grabbing his jacket and rabbit-skin cap, Frank followed the light out into the storm. There was no sign of his father anywhere, so the boy followed the radiance without further pause. The brilliance guided the boy precisely over well-used paths through the eastern pastures until it reached the mountain. There the guide waited for the boy before slowly ascending a craggy trail that led to the high ridges. Frank had followed his mother over many of those same paths gathering medicinal plants.
As the boy began to climb the trail, the storm, which had been furious for the past six hours, turned dangerous in the extreme. Lightning fingered across the sky in every direction at once. The explosions of thunder made the earth tremble beneath the child’s feet, and the rain pelted down like hail to the point of pain. Faithfully, the illumination never distorted or wavered from the path, so Frank followed without fear. The winds rose to the tenor of plaintive screams, so that every limb and leaf, every blade and bush was helplessly torn and wrenched in obedience to its whims.
As he climbed, Frank witnessed ancient trees cleaved down the center by the stress of contrary winds first raging from the west and then rounding the compass. Sometimes the gusts appeared to sweep from all directions at once. Downed tree limbs and torn vegetation became more dense the higher he climbed, but still the glowing guide remained constant and reassuring, never deviating a degree from the center of the trail, never disordered by wind or the cutting sheets of rain.
Near the top of the track a shallow dale gave spartan shelter to a grove of ancient and distorted oaks. Little Frank struggled over the rise and, clutching his collar against the rain, watched as the light moved to the center of the grove and then stopped. As the boy followed, he noticed a slight alteration in its quality. Changing from the cooler, calming colors, the light now became resplendent with bright streaks of yellow and gold. Vibrant flashes of crimson amplified the sense of urgency. Then, within the briefest moment, the guide flared brilliantly and was gone, leaving only its ghost image imprinted on the boy’s eyes. Little Frank waited a few seconds for his vision to clear and then walked to the spot in the grove where the flickering pillar had last stood. Bursts of lightning conveniently illuminated his way so that the path was well defined.
At the bottom of the path little Frank spotted a fallen tree, its great mass of roots exposed and waiting for death. Another flash of lightning and the boy sighted something else: a figure pinned under a lattice of heavy limbs and branches. The boy instantly recognized his mother reaching out and calmly calling his name.
Frank ran to her, gripped her hand, and began sputtering questions in their special dialect. Anselma quieted her son and said that she was unhurt, just trapped. The large limb lying across her back would have to be raised for her to slide free under her own power. The limb was sixteen inches broad and with the attendant branches, a considerable mass of wood for anyone to move.
Without thinking further, the boy attempted to raise the limb, but his little arms were no match for its girth. Then he remembered watching his father clear tree stumps from the pasture. He looked about until he found a stout broken limb. He wedged the hefty bough under the offending limb in such a manner that, should he have the strength to push the branch up over his head a short ways, his mother might pull herself free. But the weight of the limb precluded a four-year-old boy from doing anything of the kind.
A standard contention of the ages asserts that the bonds between mother and child may easily accommodate the insuperable. So, lacking all sense of the improbability of the task at hand, little Frank pushed up on his makeshift lever and moved forward.
He managed to push the branch up over his head. He repeated the exercise twice more, and before he knew it his mother was standing by his side saying that it was safe to release the limb.
The boy let go and smiled up at his mother. Anselma knelt to see to her son. They were both soaked to the bone, but once satisfied that her child was not injured in any way, Anselma shouldered her bag and shepherded Frank down the steep trail by the incessant flashes of blue-white lightning.
When they at last neared the house, Anselma saw her husband’s storm lantern approaching from the direction of the road. Bill Post ran forward, gathered his little family in his arms for a moment, and then quickly ushered them toward the safety of the house. The relief in his eyes almost came to tears. Back under shelter, Bill quickly stoked the fire and went to fetch fresh towels from the cupboard. While Anselma saw to dry garments, Bill retrieved a bucket of rainwater from the overflowing butts on the porch. He hung a small cauldron from its iron hook over the fire and set the water to heat so Anselma might bathe the child and prevent further chill.
Bill Post at last spoke of his anxiety. When he returned to the house and found the front door wide open and little Frank gone, he had not known where to look. He had searched for two hours without a sign. Happily, Bill observed that his wife and child seemed hardly fazed by their wild adventure. So while he fed them honey and warm bread, he asked them to recount what had happened. There was never a note of reproach or recrimination in his voice. Bill Post was far too happy to have his loved ones safe at home for gratuitous displays of troubled indignation.
True to her pure Rumsen nature, Anselma leaned toward the taciturn. Her speech was known for its veracity and brevity, and Bill did not live in hope of a colorful or detailed explanation. She spoke of coming down the trail when a great wind tore a tree from the earth and trapped her beneath its branches. Then her son found her and helped her escape by shifting the biggest limb. There was nothing more to say for the moment.
Bill shook his head and looked to his son, though he entertained little hope of much help in that direction. Even before his father spoke, Frank piped up with his mixed patois of English, Spanish, and Rumsen. It always took a moment to coax Frank to pick one language and stick with it. The boy told his father that he had been in bed when his mother’s spirit had come for him in a light. She had led him up the mountain to move the tree so she could come home. Frank said his meager piece with an air of all-inclusive acceptance, as though this kind of experience was an everyday occurrence. Again Bill shook his head, but he was patient enough to realize that it might take days to secure all the details of the story.
As Anselma tucked her child under his goose-down quilt that night, the boy looked at his mother and asked whether he could someday learn to call her with the light when he was in trouble. Anselma looked at her son, caressed his face, and told him that the light was not something one learned how to do. Love made it happen. Little Frank smiled, blinked once or twice, and fell asleep, content with the answer.
The next day, after the storms had passed well east, Bill Post rode out with the Ortiz brothers to survey the general damage and do what they could to clear the trails. Bill eventually had to rig two mules with a wagon harness to help move the heavier debris.
Later that day and only out of curiosity, Bill and his men rode up the ridge trail to inspect the site his wife and son had spoken of. It was just as they had said, possibly worse to Bill’s way of thinking. The local damage was extensive due to the erratic winds.
That evening over supper Bill asked Anselma about the boy lifting the tree to let her escape. Could she by any chance have been mistaken? Could the tree not have moved in the wind? Anselma looked at her husband coolly and shook her head.
Bill continued in a rather abashed manner. With just a tinge of a blush, Bill said he had asked only because it had required the labor of two sturdy mules and a horse just to haul the offending snag a few feet off the trail.
Anselma smiled, shrugged, stroked her husband reassuringly on the forearm, and kissed away the small tears of relief that scrolled down his cheeks.
Reading Group Guide
1. Reading Group Questions and
Topics for Discussion
1. Discuss the implications of “home” in Down to a Soundless Sea. The collection opens with Bill Post constructing a home for his new family, Chapel Lodge in “Blind Luck” never has a real home growing up, and Dean in “An Unbecoming Grace” makes his home by throwing its original settler over a cliff and renaming the homestead for himself. What does the concept of “home” imply specifically in these stories of the newly settled Monterey Coast?
2. “The Wool Gatherer” ends with the line, “John kept that receipt for years to remind him of his bear and the expense incurred by magic visions.” What might this reference to “expense” imply, especially in a family of storytellers like the Steinbecks, who hold the “magic visions” of fiction in such high esteem? In the end, was John Steinbeck’s pursuit of his Great Sur Bear worth the expense and trouble of tracking it that summer of 1920?
3. Many, if not all, of the characters in Down to a Soundless Sea are self-made. What are some pressures of the West after the turn of the century that force them to practice their personal industry? What are some freedoms that the Monterey County of that era allows them?
4. In his “Author’s Note,” Steinbeck notes how difficult it can be to “attempt duplication of language used by the original participants and make it ring true for the modern car.” Steinbeck does so in a number of ways: for example, the Portuguese captain seeks “a fitting dog’s body to take the axe when the cards turned sour,” the Partington brothers of “The Dark Watcher” were “not known for salting the mines of accuracy.” How do such phrases contribute to a tone of live storytelling? What other devices does Steinbeck use to emphasize these stories’ oral history?
5. Many of the characters in Down to a Soundless Sea are immigrants, from Chow Yong Fat to the dually surnamed Simon Gutierez O’Brian. Discuss the struggles that faced immigrants in the Monterey Coast area of this era. What support systems did it offer them? How does the liberation they found there compare to the hardships that confronted them?
6. Down to a Soundless Sea opens with the birth of Charles Post and closes with the death of Sue May Yee. Both events occur during great storms. Discuss this circularity. Do you see any other correlations in the way Steinbeck chooses to order the stories of this collection?
7. What does Down to a Soundless Sea have to say about the regard for learning in the early days of the Monterey Coast? Consider characters like Doc Roberts in “An Unbecoming Grace,” Sing Fat in “Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo,” and Professor Gill in “The Dark Watcher.”
8. Many of the characters of the collection appear in more than one story: the Post family, introduced in “The Night Guide,” reappears in “The Dark Watcher”; the captain “smuggling Chinese ‘illegals’ ” in “Blighted Cargo” references Chow Yong Fat’s experience in “The Imperial Duchess of Woo”; Chapel Lodge chances across Captain Leland after many years in “Blind Luck.” How does this comment on the community of the Monterey Coast at the century’s beginning, especially in a time when travel and communication were more difficult?
9. The antagonists of Down to a Soundless Sea have all the deliciously vile characteristics of the good villains of oral storytelling. Are there any redeeming qualities to characters such as Simon Gutierez O’Brian in “Blighted Cargo” and the Stoat in “An Unbecoming Grace”?
10.Water is very significant in this collection set on the Monterey Coast. When is water a negative force in these stories? When is it positive? How is the sea “soundless” in all senses of the word “sound,” connoting stability, measurability, noise, or something free of flaws?
11. The intimate stories of Down to a Soundless Sea read like stories told by the fireside, stories told in person. Discuss the differences between oral storytelling and the writtentale. What are some advantages of the story on the page? What is gained by stories told in person?
12. A reader comes away from Down to a Soundless Sea feeling connected to its vibrant characters. Although the modern plight is markedly different from that of the newly settled Monterey Coast, how do you feel that your experience is similar to theirs? How are the hardships of modern life different from those of turn-of-the-century California?
Interviews
Down to a
Soundless Sea
Thomas Steinbeck
A Reader's Guide
An Interview with Thomas Steinbeck
Q: An aura of performance, as suggested by the author's note, permeates Down to a Soundless Sea. As a devout raconteur, do you see these stories as attempts to translate the experience of storytelling? Does the act of fixing them on the page complicate or simplify the stories?
A: In my humble opinion, all storytelling, and in turn writing, by virtue of its human origin, entails profound elements of performance. Authors either perform on their own account, such as historians, journalists, and essayists; or, like novelists and playwrights, they fashion characters to perform specific roles at the author's behest. One way or the other, the puppeteer remains the same. It is specifically because I'm a carrier of raconteur's disease, in its most virulent form, that I have come to realize that one can never really cross-pollinate the act of live storytelling with its literary reflection. But I can think of any number of great authors who have come within a hairsbreadth of convincing me they could. I've never known a story, whether true or false, to remain fixed to any page for long. If it has legs at all, it will self-propagate through numerous generations and variations, ntil not even the author would recognize his own child. On the other hand, if a story's basic structure should prove totally paraplegic, the moral hopelessly pathetic, and the general presentation tragically pointless, it will probably find great success as a television movie of the week. Which goes to prove, you can't keep a dead man down.
Q:These stories are animated by anattention to history and the shared import of the oral tradition. Is writing, in this sense, a collaborative venture?
A: All reasonable stories are basically collaborative affairs insofar as they are, in the main, salvaged from an oral tradition and therefore rewoven from previously milled strands. Some are reborn from the ashes of ancient myths, some are rooted in our personal or national histories, while still others, like Robin Hood or Frankenstein's Monster, are inextricably bound to “popular culture,” and therefore recycled and repackaged continuously as demand requires. It is true that I indulge an energetic interest in histories of every category, such as they are, but the one all-encompassing fact I have learned through my years of reading is that there are as many colorfully different versions of history as there are colorful authors writing about it. It then should follow that as simple weavers of entertaining stories, most writers should have plenty of room in which to maneuver their narratives. It remains a mystery that so many plots keep colliding into each other in such an open channel. “Damn the hyperbolae! Topsails set ahead!”
Q:We don't use phrases like “to put the tail on the dog” or “kissing feathers”much anymore.What kind of research went into the colorful vocabulary of these stories?
A: To unearth accurate tints of dialect, phrasing, and language long since out of common usage, I find it helpful to read letters and articles written during the era I'm exploring. I've discovered it interesting that many phrases in present usage have parallels in past dictums that use different key phrases meaning very much the same thing as they do today. For instance, “To put the tail on the dog” means the same as inserting a “drag-line” into a yarn with an appropriate hook to fit the moral of the story, a spontaneous “punchline” in modern terms. And the phrase “kissing feathers” means the same as pressing one's face into the pillows of exhausted repose.
Q:Are any of the characters, such as the faux-crazed scholar Clarke in “An Unbecoming Grace,” based on real people from the Monterey Peninsula?
A: Almost all the characters in the book are based on real people and their life experiences. In some cases, as in the story “The Night Guide,” the key incident was related to me by Bill Post, the grandson of the boy described in the narrative. All the stories came down to me through a long oral tradition, and of course the best stories are always about real people. As a writer, one is hard-pressed to invent material that is as entertaining and informative as reality.
Q:You seem attracted to youthful and wayward protagonists. Is this simply a consequence of genre or is it evidence of a more personal inclination?
A: I'm not principally attracted to any one character for any particular reason. I always attempt to portray people as I find them, warts, halos, and all. I studiously avoid prejudice for artistic reasons only. Bias clouds vision, and chauvinism hobbles creativity. Since I have never come across anyone who stands without blame in one realm or another, it would appear senseless to portray them in any but the most realistic contours and hues. Pure objectivity may be impossible in a subjective world, but like Diogenes and his search for an honest man, impartiality is hardly an unrewarding lamp to follow. The process has its own tar pits, of course, but if I'd been looking for a sure thing, I wouldn't have become a writer.
Q: Often your characters struggle with the vast inequities of society.How has this struggle been updated since the time of these stories? Do you encounter similar characters in modern-day Monterey?
A: Social inequity (in some instances applied on a statutory basis), and the implied manipulation of inequality, has been one of the darker hallmarks of human society since our troglodyte ancestors decided who was going to get the dry part of the cave. The struggle of any one minority to liberate its momentum from the constraints so stringently applied by the rest of society appears to be a never-ending repetition of a primeval human dilemma. Class paranoia has always insisted on the necessity of maintaining the status quo, regardless of how socially counterproductive and morally bankrupt such instincts prove to be. In that regard, one can't swing a broken promise without striking parallels in all directions. My characters are taken from life portraits, and therefore I assume they endure the same social spurs as the rest of us. In a nutshell, little has changed in human affairs since before written history. It's no great challenge to find identical threads binding past to present, and present to future when it comes to the conduct of human affairs.
Q: In Down to a Soundless Sea, you've created a wellrounded world in a relatively limited geographical area. Were you intentionally seeking to showcase this microcosmic diversity?
A: The fact that all the stories in the book concern people who once lived in the Big Sur was no accident, but the location was by no means chosen as a literary device. Though I would not fault a reader for coming to that conclusion. In truth, the microcosmic aspect of the completed work didn't occur to me until after I'd finished the manuscript. I had spent so much time immersed in the details of each individual story that the ultimate impact of the format never came to mind.
Q: In these stories, each sentence benefits from a lush architecture of language. Do you approach writing as an arduous craft that requires intricate planning and careful construction or is your method more organic and improvisational?
A: If I could truly understand, and calibrate for the edification of others, how I do what I do, I probably wouldn't do it at all. Everything in life is relatively arduous, and most human endeavors require some degree of careful planning. I find this human concern admirable every time I drive my car or board an aircraft. But I must confess that writing for me is a means and an end in itself. I write to become a better writer. Like all great crafts, the more you do, the better you get. Many times this requires grasping for technical literary straws, which rarely serve the purpose, and other ventures seem to come into bloom with little or no assistance from me whatsoever. But if one can't resist the search for labels, then I will plead no contest to “organic” and “improvisational” for lack of a better list of charges.
Q: Redemption, when and if it arrives in these stories, is marked by a quiet, simple, and lonely sort of dignity. What is it about this dignity that appeals to you as a writer? As a person? Does it strike you as a specifically small-town or California coast kind of dignity?
A: I rarely think in terms of downfall or redemption as a central theme, if only because spiritual journeys between those two well-defined extremes are literarily predictable as a plot vehicle. I really don't concern myself with the moral ambiguities of society or individuals unless those insights might lead to a greater comprehension of instinct, motive, or conduct. Whether or not the struggles of individual characters are worthy to be labeled as ‘dignified' is speculative. At the very least, it's a decision I would rather leave to the reader.
Q: In congruence with the title, the strongest character in Down to a Soundless Sea is perhaps nature itself. Many of the stories are centered on man's timeless struggle with nature and end with his eventual concession to it.What do you see as the proper, or necessary, approach that man must take in his relationship with the natural world?
A: It has been my general experience that mankind, though doomed to fiddle and fudge with everything within reach just for the hell of it, habitually ignores the subtle fluidity and changing pulse of the natural world, usually with horrific consequences. Gilgamesh, Osiris, and Noah could all testify to the challenging implications of rising water. The human lexicon of myths repeatedly chronicles mankind's run-ins with the deadlier forces of nature. As always, the moral rests on the once and future premise that survival requires not just insight, but ever-vigilant flexibility. And it appears, according to most mythological and meteorological references, that only those creatures capable of swift adaptation, and prepared to take advantage of natural chaos, survive it. In other words, if the waves have already covered the temple, don't bother building a damn boat. At that point you have better odds with prayer. For a writer with a terminal case of historic curiosity, I find the interplay among humans, their all-prevailing selfdelusion, and the dynamic forces of nature, an abundant source of intellectually nutritious material; manna from chaos, as it were. As an unbiased observer, I prefer not to take sides in the struggle between man's nature and Nature itself. Suffice it to say that I never bet on long odds, and from my vantage point, the forces of nature have the deck stacked and the bones loaded against us. If it weren't for mankind's inflated image of self-importance, humans would have realized that they don't own the world. The world owns them. Perhaps it's this secret knowledge that fuels the contest between the savage and the coming of the night.