Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949 (first published 1945)
Here in Australia, we have two public broadcasters. By far the best of the two is SBS and some of its best programming is on the cooking channel where the series of Rick Stein are on high rotation. Quite often my wife and I will sit down and watch an episode of one of his culinary adventures, which are always a wonderful mixture of food, history, and literature (Stein studied literature at university). In his series Road to Mexico, he stops off at Monterey, where he rhapsodizes on Steinbeck's Cannery Row before checking out the local restaurant. Watching it the other week, my wife then began to begin a similar rhapsody on the work, which she read many years ago, so here we are.
While by no means an expert on twentieth century US literature, I have read quite a bit of Hemingway and Faulkner, some Mailer, Roth, and Fitzgerald, and a couple of Sinclair Lewis' books - but until now I've never read any Steinbeck. After reading Cannery Row I'm not sure whether I'll read any more. Sitting somewhere between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but with a big dose of Lewis' moralism, Steinbeck is the quintessential US writer of that era. While he tries to dose his social realism with some literary flourishes, as a whole I think Cannery Row falls a little flat. The characters are to some extent cardboard cut-outs, the trope of portraying bums as the most noble part of humanity ("the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties") is a bit tired, especially when what's really being portrayed is alcoholism and waste.
Steinbeck works hard to inject nobility into Mack and his compatriots, and a noble pathos into the Doc. He succeeds in moments, but fails in the whole. Steinbeck wants to have a go at capitalism and does (although he paints Lee Chong the storekeeper as essentially a good guy), but perhaps has not chosen his heroes well.
Mack and the other residents of the Palace Flophouse and Grill don't have many heroic qualities. Their petty thievery and sponging have no noble purpose, and the rather thin storyline doesn't help their cause either - the party they hope to throw for Doc (and just why are they throwing the party? Poor plot development by Steinbeck) is one that Doc is going to pay for, one way or another. And as for Doc, his highbrow past-times of listening to Monteverdi and quoting from Black Marigolds may fit with his character, but it's hard to believe that people such as Mack could grow to appreciate them.
It's clear to me from my reading of other great American drunken writers that Steinbeck too was an alcoholic. The way he writes about drinking: the huge amount of alcohol consumed, the naturalness with which the characters undertake that consumption, the naturalness of the description of the aftermath of such debauches, shows that for Steinbeck to get drunk all the time was as natural as having a whiskey first thing in the morning.
So, I've ripped apart the premiss and story of this short book - what about the writing? There are stretches of really good writing in Cannery Row, mostly the descriptions of the landscape around Monterey, and of the dawns and sunsets, and of the daily activities of the residents. Some of the writing is laboured, especially when Steinbeck is reaching for literary affect, which seems to me to be out-of-place in such a book. Some of the interstices are padding (Henri's nightmare vision/delerium tremens, the gopher, Frankie) that don't move the narrative along at all, and in some cases seem to be vestiges of other plot lines that may have existed in an earlier draft but have been mostly excised in the published version.
In the end, I found Cannery Row to be a depressing book, perhaps not in the way Steinbeck was intending it to be. It re-affirmed for me that there is nothing noble in wasting a life in drifting and drinking, attempting nothing, and even the best writers cannot impose such nobility on it.
