Cannery Row—John Steinbeck

What's up, Doc?

I try to approach everything in the Decade list naively. The less I know about a work before tackling it, the better. Obviously, in some cases, I will have already read the book, but generally not. Cannery Row, however, posed a unique problem. I’ve enjoyed various works by Steinbeck over the years, thanks to having read The Pearl for my high school American Literature class. Recently, during the years-long lull in the Decade Project, I continued to build my personal library in anticipation of resuming, and somewhere in there I bought a complete set of Steinbeck’s writings offered by Library of America. This set covers all his major works and short story collections, with a few minor omissions, such as his first novel, Cup of Gold, and his satirical The Short Reign of Pippin IV, the latter of which I had actually read in high school, perversely, just because no one seemed aware Steinbeck had written such a thing. Anyway, since I couldn’t maintain the pace of the Project for several years, I settled down with this set and slowly, lovingly, read the entire collection. So this week I wanted to see how I would react to rereading Cannery Row, having plowed through nearly the entire output of Steinbeck’s prolific career.

I enjoyed myself immensely. Despite the cringeworthy assumptions about gender roles, the casual violence, the racial slurs, and all the other reasons I might offer to condemn this relic from the 1940s, I laughed aloud more often than I have while reading any other book in a long time. Beyond Steinbeck’s great storytelling, his nostalgia for a very hard moment in his life shapes this book; and, despite the novel’s brevity, I regretted having to say goodbye to the characters as much as I would have regretted resurfacing from a much longer saga. Perhaps the same feelings prompted him to recreate the Cannery magic nine years later by writing Sweet Thursday.

The stories that fill the pages of this novel take place almost entirely within a short stretch of Cannery Row, a street on the outskirts of Monterey, California. Steinbeck weaves together several anecdotes into a glorious, delightful mosaic of words that radiate love for the street’s eccentric denizens, human and otherwise, but especially for his friend and mentor, Ed “Doc” Ricketts, to whom Steinbeck dedicated the book.

Doc, transparently modeled after Ricketts, sits at the moral center of the community, as a wise and caring person who, while neither a medical doctor nor a psychologist, helps anyone who comes to him sick in body or soul. He works long hours at the Western Biological Laboratory, where he collects and ships out marine animals for universities and researchers. Doc clearly cares more about people than money, so he doesn’t mind getting scammed by a struggling neighbor or two. While the community revolves around Doc, the plot revolves around Mack, a large, lazy man with a big heart and bigger schemes but no self-discipline. Mack and four others, collectively referred to as “the boys,” move into a warehouse and make it a home: the Palace Flophouse. You can tell Steinbeck admires Doc but envies the boys and their unencumbered, simple life. Having no wives, no jobs, no possessions, no pressures, the boys philosophize about life and drink steadily. One of the boys works at a bar and empties the customers’ unfinished wine, beer, and liquor into a gallon jug that he takes back with him to the Palace Flophouse every night. Steinbeck seems to offer their lifestyle as a utopian ideal.

We meet many other characters, on the path to the chaotic ending. We meet Henri the painter, who Steinbeck says,

… was not French and his name was not Henri. Also he was not really a painter. Henri had so steeped himself in stories of the Left Bank in Paris that he lived there although he had never been there. […] It is not known whether Henri was a good painter or not for he threw himself so violently into movements that he had very little time left for painting of any kind.

We also meet Dora, owner of a “stern and stately whorehouse,” the Bear Flag Restaurant.

As for Dora—she leads a ticklish existence. Being against the law, at least against its letter, she must be twice as law abiding as anyone else. There must be no drunks, no fighting, no vulgarity, or they close Dora up. Also being illegal Dora must be especially philanthropic.

The trouble all begins when Mack and the boys get it into their heads to do something nice for Doc and throw him a party. The first attempt fails because Doc takes longer than expected to return from a specimen-collecting trip in far away La Jolla. The party starts without him, gets out of hand, and does serious damage to the lab. The second party, however, comes as a stroke of sheer genius: “You gave him a party he didn’t get to,” said Dora. “Why don’t you give him a party he does get to?”

“Jesus” said Mack afterwards talking to the boys. “It was just as simple as that. Now there is one hell of a woman. No wonder she got to be a madam. There is one hell of a woman.”

Within that simple framework, Steinbeck intertwines histories, biographies, anecdotes, flights of lyric description, hallucinations, and philosophical reflections.

Steinbeck didn’t find a successful style and stick to it, cranking out one popular work after another. In fact, when editors suggested changing the ending to The Grapes of Wrath, he said, “… I am not writing a satisfying story. I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags. I don’t want him satisfied.” This willingness to defy reader expectations appeals to me. Reading the entire corpus of his work, one sees how he kept experimenting throughout his career. Some experiments failed badly, and some met with great success. But he never tired of trying new approaches, and so I never tired of reading him. Even in this work, he doesn’t aim to make us laugh at every anecdote.

Dashed off in a mere six weeks in 1944 and then published in 1945, Cannery Row contains not a single reference to the ongoing world war, yet the lifestyle of the boys oddly resembles that of an army squadron camped far from the front lines. In fact, Steinbeck says of this novel, “It was kind of a nostalgic thing … for a group of soldiers who had said to me ‘Write something funny that isn’t about the war. Write something for us to read—we’re sick of the war.’” If indeed he wrote this for “our boys overseas,” the annoying absence of believable women in the novel might simply reflect Steinbeck’s reluctance to induce homesickness in his main audience.

This weekend Jeri and I will celebrate our 40th anniversary, so I may not have a reflection ready to post by Monday. However, I do plan to tackle Don Delillo’s White Noise next. I’ve recently read it, so I might get away with only a short refresher.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

White Noise — Don Delillo

Steinbeck Novels 1942-1952: The Moon Is Down / Cannery Row / The Pearl / East of Eden (Library of America) — The edition I used

Cup of Gold — John Steinbeck

The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication — John Steinbeck

Other works of Steinbeck in the Library of America editions.

John Steinbeck : Novels and Stories, 1932-1937 : The Pastures of Heaven / To a God Unknown / Tortilla Flat / In Dubious Battle / Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936-1941: The Grapes of Wrath, The Harvest Gypsies, The Long Valley, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Bright / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent

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