Lawyer's Reviews > Cannery Row

John Steinbeck's Nostalgia: Cannery Row

It won no Pulitzer Prize. It does not figure into the reason John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature. Yet, I love this book. Cannery Row evokes a place that no longer exists, covering a period roughly that of the Great Depression in Monterey, California.

Steinbeck drew on his friendship with Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist , as his central character "Doc" for his novel. They had been friends since the early 1930s. Ricketts taught Steinbeck marine biology. Ricketts real persona is contained in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Like "Doc," Ricketts operated a marine laboratory, Pacific Biological Laboratories. Steinbeck was a fifty percent partner in the lab. Upon the publication of Cannery Row, Ricketts found himself a celebrity, something which exasperated him. However, he forgave Steinbeck his unwanted celebrity for he understood Steinbeck had written the novel with no sense of malevolence. The two had intended an expedition to study marine biology off the coast of Alaska in 1948. However, it didn't happen. Rickett's car was hit by a train. Ricketts was killed.

Steinbeck would return to the world of Cannery Row with the novel Sweet Thursday, published in 1954. Ed Ricketts lived on in Steinbeck's memory, with Doc returning as the novel's central character.

The prologue of Cannery Row grabs the reader and shakes him, much as a terrier shakes a rat.

“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. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.”

Steinbeck prepares the reader for a world of light and darkness. What follows is a series of vignettes depicting the best of life revolving around the lives of residents of the row, interspersed with Steinbeck's digressions from the plot showing the darker aspects of life.

Now, take Doc. He's the type guy who tips his hats to dogs. And they smile back at him. Doc is nice to everybody on the row. And everybody wants to do something nice for Doc. Which leads to the relatively simple plot of the book. How to do something nice for Doc.

It's Mack and the Boys who start the movement to do something good for Doc. Mack and the Boys are the homeless guys who live in the Palace Flophouse and Grill. The men without family, rarely have jobs, but who know they can go to Doc with any kind of nonsense and he can turn it into some kind of wisom.

Dora is the madam of the Bear Flag Cafe, the brothel that brooks no profanity be spoken therein. Dora of the orange hair and heart of gold who feeds homeless families. Dora, who operates an illegal business and therefore is the queen of donations, fifty dollars to the policeman's ball, rather than five. Dora's where a girl is never turned out because she's never to old, who may have only turned three tricks in the past month but still gets three meals a day.

Then there is Lee Chong, owner and operator of the Heavenly Bamboo Grocery, who owns more in debt than in actual receipts received but always seems to lives comfortably. Where good will is a currency of its own.

No, there was no Pulitzer for this novel for Steinbeck. But I love this book. Steinbeck captures the essence of life in all its raucous spirit. Its rioutous happiness of living. The quirky nature of community in the many voices that form to create its own ode to joy and its lament to the sadness that befalls each of us. But there is never a dirge. Not ever.

So there is no The Grapes of Wrath here. No Of Mice and Men. Cannery Row makes me glad to be alive. It makes me seek out the Docs of the world and do something good for him and hope I find Mack and the boys, Dora and the Girls, and Lee Chong to help.