As far as women were concerned, he was completely without what is generally called “honor.” It was not that he was dishonorable. The word simply had no meaning for him if it implied abstemiousness. Any man who left a wife in his care and expected him not to try for her was just a fool. He was compelled to try. The woman might reject him, and he would not be unreasonably importunate, but certainly he would not fail for lack of trying.
When I first met him he was engaged in a scholarly and persistent way in the process of deflowering a young girl. This was a long and careful affair. He not only was interested in a sexual sense, but he had also an active interest in the psychic and physical structure of virginity. There was, I believe, none of the usual sense of triumph at overcoming or being first. Ed’s physical basis was a pair of very hot pants, but his secondary motive was an active and highly intellectual interest in the state of virginity and the change involved in abandoning that state. His knowledge of anatomy was large, but, as he was wont to say, the variation in structure is delightfully large, even leaving out abnormalities, and this variation gives a constant interest and surprise to a function which is basically pleasant anyway.
The resistance of this particular virgin was surprising. He did not know whether it was based on some block, or on the old-fashioned reluctance of a normal girl toward defloration, or, as he thought possible, on a distaste for himself personally. He inspected each of these possibilities with patient care. And since he had no shyness about himself, it did not occur to him to have any reluctance about discussing his project with his friends and acquaintances. It is perhaps a fortunate thing that this particular virgin did not hear the discussions. They might have embarrassed her, a matter that did not occur to Ed. Many years later, when she heard about the whole thing, she was of the opinion that she might still be a virgin if she had heard herself so intimately discussed. But by then, it was fortunately, she agreed, far too late.
One thing is certain. Ed did not like his sex uncomplicated. If a girl were unattached and without problems as well as willing, his interest was not large. But if she had a husband or seven children or a difficulty with the law or some whimsical neuroticism in the field of love, Ed was charmed and instantly active. If he could have found a woman who was not only married, but a mother, in prison, and one of Siamese twins, he would have been delighted.
It will be impossible to put down much anecdote concerning his activities. The more interesting affairs were discussed with such freedom, not only by Ed but by any number of amateur referees, that they acquired a certain local fame. This may be perfectly acceptable as confirmed gossip, but in print the protagonists might be inclined to consider the histories libelous, and they surely are.
His taste in women was catholic as long as there were complications and no thin lips. Complexion, color of hair and eyes, shape or size, seemed to make no difference to him. He was singularly open to suggestion.
Ordinarily Ed was able to view his fellow humans with the clear sight of objectivity only slightly warped by like or dislike. He could give the best and most valuable advice based on great knowledge and understanding. However, when the strong winds of love shook him, all this was changed. Then his objectivity was likely to blow sky-high.
The object of his affection herself contributed very little to his picture of her. She was only the physical frame on which he draped a woman. She was like those large faceless dolls on which clothes are made. He built his own woman on this form, created her from the ground up, invented her appearance and built her mind, furnished her with talents and sensitivenesses which were not only astonishing but downright untrue. Then the woman in process was likely to come with surprise to the conclusion that she loved poetry she had never heard of, and could not understand if she had, that she breathed shallowly over music the existence of which was equally unknown to her. She became beautiful but not necessarily in any way that was familiar to her. And her thoughts—these would be likely to surprise her most of all, since she might not have been aware that she had any thoughts at all.
I cannot think of this tendency of Ed’s as self-delusion. He simply manufactured the woman he wanted, rather like that enlightened knight in the Welsh tale who made a wife entirely out of flowers. Sometimes the building process went on for quite a long time, and when it was completed everyone—even Ed—was quite confused. But at other times the force of his structure changed the raw material until the girl actually became what he thought her to be. I remember one very sharp example of this.
One of our friends was a sardine fisherman who had an interesting and profitable avocation. The sardine season continues only part of the year, leaving some months of idleness, which is the financial downfall of most fishermen. Our friend, however, was never idle and never broke. He managed, booked, protected, disciplined, and robbed a string of women—never many, rarely over five. He was successful and happy in his hobby. He was our friend and we saw a good deal of him.
This story is to illustrate the force and reasonableness of Ed’s woman-building. I don’t know how he got confused in this matter but he did, and the subsequent history bears out my belief in his success.
Our friend, in a moment of playfulness, brought one of his clients to a party, a small but unfragile blonde of endurance and experience. Ed met her and in a lapse of reason made an error about her. He went to considerable effort to get her away from her protector. He had an idea that she was not only inexperienced but quite shy—this last probably because she barely had acquired the power of speech and did not trust it as a means of communication. Ed thought her beautiful and young and virginal. He took her away on a vacation. He rebuilt her in his mind. And he tried to seduce her, he tried manfully, persuasively, philosophically, to seduce her. But he had built too well. In some way he had convinced her that she was what he had mistaken her for and she resisted his advances with maidenly fiber and consistency. At the end of a month he had to give up. He never did get to bed with her. But he took up so much of her time that she had to work very hard to make a stake for our friend when the sardine season was over.
In Ed’s ecstasy he was able to make true things which lacked a certain scientific verification. One of his loves, one of his greatest, lasted a number of years. Every night he wrote a letter to his love, sometimes three lines, sometimes ten pages of his small, careful typing. He told me that she did the same, that she wrote to him every day, and he believed it. And I know beyond any doubt that in five years he received from her not more than eight childish scribbled notes. And he truly believed that she wrote to him every day.
Ed’s scientific notebooks were very interesting. Among his collecting notes and zoological observations there would be the most outspoken and indelicate observation from another kind of collecting. After his death I had to go through these notebooks before turning them over to Hopkins Marine Station, a branch of Stanford University, as Ed’s will directed. I was sorry I had to remove a number, a great number, of the entries from the notebooks. I did not do this because they lacked interest, but it occurred to me that a student delving into Ed’s notes for information on invertebratology could emerge with blackmail material on half the female population of Monterey. Ed simply had no reticence about such things. I removed the notes but did not destroy them. They have an interest, I think, above the personalities mentioned. In some future time the women involved may lovingly remember the incidents.
In the back of his car Ed carried an ancient blanket that once had been red but that had faded to a salmon pink from use and exposure. It was a battle-scarred old blanket, veteran of many spreadings on hill and beach. Grass seeds and bits of seaweed were pounded and absorbed into the wool itself. I do not think Ed would have started his car in the evening without his blanket in the back seat.
Before love struck and roiled his vision like a stirred pool, Ed had a fine and appraising eye for a woman. He would note with enthusiasm a well-lipped mouth, a swelling breast, a firm yet cushioned bottom, but he also inquired into other subtleties—the padded thumb, shape of foot, length and structure of finger and toe, plump-lobed ear and angle of teeth, thigh and set of hip and movement in walking too. He regarded these things with joy and thanks-giving. He always was pleased that love and women were what they were or what he imagined them.
But for all of Ed’s pleasures and honesties there was a transcendent sadness in his love—something he missed or wanted, a searching that sometimes approached panic. I don’t know what it was he wanted that was never there, but I know he always looked for it and never found it. He sought for it and listened for it and looked for it and smelled for it in love. I think he found some of it in music. It was like a deep and endless nostalgia—a thirst and passion for “going home.”
He was walled off a little, so that he worked at his philosophy of “breaking through,” of coming out through the back of the mirror into some kind of reality which would make the day world dreamlike. This thought obsessed him. He found the symbols of “breaking through” in
Faust,
in Gregorian music, and in the sad, drunken poetry of Li Po. Of the
Art of the Fugue
he would say, “Bach nearly made it. Hear now how close he comes, and hear his anger when he cannot. Every time I hear it I believe that this time he will come crashing through into the light. And he never does—not quite.”
And of course it was he himself who wanted so desperately to break through into the light.
We worked and thought together very closely for a number of years so that I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research. And then I went away to another part of the country but it didn’t make any difference. Once a week or once a month would come a fine long letter so much in the style of his speech that I could hear his voice over the neat page full of small elite type. It was as though I hadn’t been away at all. And sometimes now when the postman comes I look before I think for that small type on an envelope.
Ed was deeply pleased with the little voyage which is described in the latter part of this book, and he was pleased with the manner of setting it down. Often he would read it to remember a mood or a joke.
His scientific interest was essentially ecological and holistic. His mind always tried to enlarge the smallest picture. I remember his saying, “You know, at first view you would think the rattlesnake and the kangaroo rat were the greatest of enemies since the snake hunts and feeds on the rat. But in a larger sense they must be the best of friends. The rat feeds the snake and the snake selects out the slow and weak and generally thins the rat people so that both species can survive. It is quite possible that neither species could exist without the other.” He was pleased with commensal animals, particularly with groups of several species contributing to the survival of all. He seemed as pleased with such things as though they had been created for him.
With any new food or animal he looked, felt, smelled, and tasted. Once in a tide pool we were discussing the interesting fact that nudibranchs, although beautiful and brightly colored and tasty-looking and soft and unweaponed, are never eaten by other animals which should have found them irresistible. He reached under water and picked up a lovely orange-colored nudibranch and put it in his mouth. And instantly he made a horrible face and spat and retched, but he had found out why fishes let these living tidbits completely alone.
On another occasion he tasted a species of free-swimming anemone and got his tongue so badly stung by its nettle cells that he could hardly close his mouth for twenty-four hours. But he would have done the same thing the next day if he had wanted to know.
Although small and rather slight, Ed was capable of prodigies of strength and endurance. He could drive for many hours to arrive at a good collecting ground for a favorable low tide, then work like a fury turning over rocks while the tide was out, then drive back to preserve his catch. He could carry heavy burdens over soft and unstable sand with no show of weariness. He had enormous resistance. It took a train to kill him. I think nothing less could have done it.
His sense of smell was very highly developed. He smelled all food before he ate it, not only the whole dish but each forkful. He invariably smelled each animal as he took it from the tide pool. He spoke of the smells of different animals, and some moods and even thoughts had characteristic odors to him—undoubtedly conditioned by some experience good or bad. He referred often to the smells of people, how individual each one was, and how it was subject to change. He delighted in his sense of smell in love.
With his delicate olfactory equipment, one would have thought that he would be disgusted by so-called ugly odors, but this was not true. He could pick over decayed tissue or lean close to the fetid viscera of a cat with no repulsion. I have seen him literally crawl into the carcass of a basking shark to take its liver in the dark of its own body so that no light might touch it. And this is as horrid an odor as I know.
Ed loved fine tools and instruments, and conversely he had a bitter dislike for bad ones. Often he spoke with contempt of “consumer goods”—things made to catch the eye, to delight the first impression with paint and polish, things made to sell rather than to use. On the other hand, the honest workmanship of a good microscope gave him great pleasure. Once I brought him from Sweden a set of the finest scalpels, surgical scissors, and delicate forceps. I remember his joy in them.