Literary Bex

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Finished 2.16.11

It is a well known fact amongst people-who-know-me that I detest John Steinbeck.  Loathe.  Hate.  Despise.  Abhor.  Dislike.  Abominate.  Repudiate.  Spurn.  Deride.  Hate.  I wouldn’t lift a finger if Montag and his pals burned the whole lot of his works.  I never knew I could hate an author so wholly until I met Steinbeck.  When The Grapes of Wrath was on my summer reading list it turned into “The Summer Bex Hated Literature” [I spent more time in high school reading than I did anything else (My sister who stopped doing summer reading in the 9^th grade because she inherently hates reading novels had to put together a reading schedule for me just to get through the fucking thing {I hated John Steinbeck})].  When I got to college fellow English majors couldn’t understand what my deal was: how could I so entirely despise a man and his works when they had nothing but love for him?  And I, so blinded by my hate, berated Steinbeck all the more.  They walked away saddened, shaking their heads in despair.  It was as if I had set fire to their hair and cackled while doing so.  But I wouldn’t budge: Steinbeck was a whole pit of suck as far as I was concerned.

Then I met someone who loves Steinbeck very much and I think it actually was as if I had set fire to his hair when I said “I hate Steinbeck.”

But as much as I will never enjoy The Grapes of Wrath, people-who-know-me know that I am not an unreasonable person.  I fully admit that it was ten years ago and I had a shitty English teacher who didn’t teach us the book, then chastised us for not understanding it (my fellow classmates will disagree, but that is what happened).  And I know that I have matured since I was seventeen, both as a person and as a reader.  I now know how to read, and I how to analyze literature, and I know how to appreciate a piece for what it does well even if I don’t like it.  And I know that this is mostly due to the wisdom and prompting and outright insistence of my college professors (thanks, guys!).

So when my new friend gave me his absolute favorite book, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, in hopes that I would give his favorite author another chance, knowing full well I might hate it just as much as I hate his other works: I figured it was time.  It was time to give J-Dog another go, like eating asparagus once a year just to make sure it is actually gross (it is).

And, well, shit…. I just enjoyed Steinbeck.

Seriously.  I sat on the 83 bus Thursday afternoon on my way to work and reread the final chapter (because I had just read it while waiting for the 83 bus and couldn’t believe what I was feeling); I started crying a little.  It was so beautiful and inspiring and such a pleasant, gentle reminder to live life as fully as you can, no matter your circumstance that I couldn’t help but weep a little… on the bus.

I learned some things by reading a new work by an author I am familiar with and biased against.  I was able, for the first time, to figure out 1) what exactly rubbed me the wrong way before and 2) why I think of Steinbeck as a very male author.

1) His use of imagery.  Which makes me sound like the world’s biggest hypocrite when you think back to last November when I read Light Boxes by Shane Jones and praised his use of imagery, but nonetheless Steinbeck’s works are often full of beautiful, poetic passages that don’t do anything to further the plot.  There’s little to no reason for these passages as far as the rest of the story is concerned and that always bothered my pragmatic mind.  (The chapter about the turtle crossing the road, I felt, was a puzzle that had to be solved and I tried, damnit!  I tried to solve that puzzle, only to completely miss the point.)

Once I got over the incongruous passages and accepted them for what they are, I was able to enjoy them.  Their seemingly random beauty inserted between bits of plot help paint the picture Steinbeck is creating of Cannery Row and its inhabitants.  He sets up the entire novel in the introduction when he writes that “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream” and that in order to tell its story he, the narrator/author, “must let [it] ooze and crawl of [its] own will” onto the page.  The entire novel is set up to be somewhat meandering, slowly revealing the people of Cannery Row, their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their despairs, their sorrows, their way of life.  His introduction allows for the poetic bits and causes them to be just as important as the plot and the characters.  The poetic bits work to enhance the setting and therefore strengthen the rest of the story.

2) Steinbeck’s novels always seemed to be about the plight of man or “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do” – despite Rosasharn in The Grapes of Wrath being all Earth Mother and nourishing the broken and wounded.  Tom Joad and George Milton however, are all about their duty to their families and doing what needed to be done in this very stoic, masculine, Father Knows Best kind of way.  It’s very nearly a British sense of duty with the romanticism of men pulling themselves up by their bootstraps out of circumstances that were out of their control and surviving despite all odds; stories about men feeling down about life; stories about men having to make difficult decisions with the weight of the world on their shoulders: these stories bored me.   The women in them never seemed to have much power or control over anything: and that offended me.  But it was a difficult time for many people.  Most American’s nowadays probably couldn’t hack another Dust Bowl.  They probably wouldn’t know what to do if their entire livelihood was destroyed by something outside the realm of human control.  Feeling utterly useless and obsolete has got to be horribly degrading and being able to pick up and try not to let it defeat you is really quite admirable.

The residents of Cannery Row (specifically Mack and the boys) do their best to live their lives despite their meager existence; each of the residents have their quirks, their fears, their reasons for being where they are and doing what they are doing.  Doc enjoys his life and his work and its simplicity; Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer who wields control over what transpires in his store, is very content to be the neighborhood purveyor; Dora and the girls at the Bear Flag are honest, they are not victims, nor do they let men push them around, their bartender/bouncer is there to take care of anything they can’t, but the women themselves are beholden to no man; Henri, the painter, continually builds his boat; and Mack and the Boys work when necessary and lounge the rest of the time.

Steinbeck glorifies the lives of his characters in Cannery Row.  He shows us their well meaning hearts and romanticizes their simple lives.  He hides the dirt and anxiety and worry and hard work required of them.  He has a man who prefers jail to living at home with his wife, but doesn’t mention what drives her to be abusive, or why the man would rather be in jail.  We know that couple lives in the abandoned boiler in the empty lot, but we don’t know where they came from and why they can’t afford an actual home.  Mack and the boys came from different places, each man has his own story, each one was a child once with parents and a home, we even know that Mack was married once, but how they came to be vagrants is unknown.  All we know is what they have made of themselves; we do not know their journey.  This romantic snapshot of their lives is misleading for the reader.  We are led to believe that their way of life is idyllic, that it is desirable, even; they are “the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties”.  Steinbeck leaves out the hard road that brought them to the empty lot on Cannery Row, sleeping on the ground and scavenging for food. 

On the flipside he glosses over the entirely normal “get up-go to work-come home-eat dinner-go to bed” routine lives of the other characters.  He shows the reader glimpses of their lives, but hardly notes that Doc has friends with ‘normal’ lives and regularly dates women, who probably also have ‘normal’ lives, and that Chong is married and has a family.  Steinbeck shows us the strange and downtrodden, but he also shows us how they and the socially acceptable manage to live their lives as fully as possible, complete with love, passion and curiosity.  He shows us the man who couldn’t sleep for wondering what the skater did when he had to urinate; he shows us the soldiers and their girls who stayed up all night having a good time and watched the sunrise on the beach; he introduces us to the captain who entertains Mack and the Boys and helps them go frog hunting while his wife is away; and finally Doc’s birthday party.  Shenanigans may have ensued and the party guests may often be lonely or sad or trapped (by society, by the times, by prisons of their own making) but at the party everyone had a great time and was all the better for having gathered together with the best of intentions and having made merry. 

In the final scenes Steinbeck has Doc read stanzas from the 11^th century Sanskrit poem “Black Marigolds” by Bilhana Kavi and translated by E. Powys Mathers; a poem about a man who, even though he isn’t to be with the woman he’s talking about, still remembers her and their encounters.  He is happy about the time he spent with her.  And even though he’s about to die (or be killed, I believe) he is happy because he knows that he has lived life to the fullest.  The final stanza (the bit that made me cry openly on the bus) goes as follows:

Even now

I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life

Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.

Just for a small and a forgotten time

I have had full in my eyes from off my girl

The whitest pouring of eternal light.

He “savoured the hot taste of life” – he lived, and lived widely.  He tried to experience everything life had to offer.  The poet fully acknowledges throughout the poem that life can be rough, the world can be unforgiving, but he made the most of it.  I love the idea of Life as a “great feast”; I can see us all at a large table indulging until we might burst, resting when we might, and beginning again when we are ready.  Being alive is something not to be taken for granted; and Time ought not be wasted.  Some people plan their lives and some go with the flow; both are capable of not wasting a second.  As long as you can say you’ve done this it matters little what your circumstances in life have been.  If you can live with no regrets, you’ve led a happy life.

All this, and more, is what I have gleaned from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, something I never thought possible.

Recommend: A very surprising ‘Yes’.