s.penkevich's Reviews > Cannery Row

‘The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.’

Of all the Steinbeck novels, I find Cannery Row to strike me as the most pure and blissful. It’s a novel that seems to peacefully rock my well-being like a boat on the calm waters of a warm, summer day. Published in 1945, Steinbeck says he wrote it ‘for a group of soldiers who said to me: ‘Write something funny that isn’t about the war. Write something for us to read - we’re sick of war.’’ While this novel is humorous indeed, it is also not without a looming melancholy that textures the narrative in a bittersweet but comforting way, feeling the ache of the weight of the world just beyond the peripheries but enjoying a temporary reprieve in the small joys of the story. Cannery Row is a quiet examination of humanity that celebrates kindness and shows solidarity with those often overlooked or outcast in society, emphasizing them as figures of goodness that shine like a candle against the shadow of darkness in the world built by greed and power, but is also a loving tribute to nature, language, and the way we shape our world that succinctly culminates the many lessons of his earlier novels into one heartwarming tale.

‘It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.’

Not unlike Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck focuses in on the daily activities of the average person, specifically the poor, unhoused and jobless. The town’s ‘inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody,’ writes Steinbeck, adding that ‘had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.’ The Everybody of the town he writes about clearly defines these characters as the Everyperson, the people Steinbeck has always wanted to empower and spotlight in his fiction. The plot of the novel mostly surrounds Mack and ‘the boys’—the local drifters, drunks and such—planning a party for Doc, the local biologist, and their misadventures to raise money and plan the party, but Steinbeck writes it all as if it were high stakes adventure rife with universal truth and beauty. There is a similarity to Tortilla Flat again here as something as goofy as collecting frogs and crashing in a stranger’s house come across as Arthurian adventure and moral lessons with Mack as their heroic leader.

‘Mack was the elder, leader, mentor, and to a small extent the exploiter of a little group of men who had in common no families, no money, and no ambitions beyond food, drink, and contentment’

A key to Steinbeck’s morals teachings are the ways he discusses how our actions speak volumes about what society values and how we choose to shape ourselves as well as the world around us. While the characters of Mack and the boys are those society tends to think of as having fallen into vice, Steinbeck reveals them as those of true virtue, as Doc says here:

‘Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.’

The unhappiness that weighs down the rest of the world, Steinbeck says, is from the pursuit of wealth and power, which he deems trivial matters that do not bring value at the end of life. ‘What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?’ he questions in a twist on Mark in the Bible asking ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ Steinbeck argues that the draw to wealth and power is strong and most give in to it’s call, thusly sacrificing their soul and happiness, a theme strongly addressed in his novella The Pearl. He warns against giving in to temptations too strongly such as writing ‘where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.’ Furthermore, Steinbeck looks at the way we react in the face of society, and how many conform in order to fit in at the expense of themselves instead of embracing themselves and not worrying if society accepts them or not. ‘For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things.’ Once again he reminds us ‘the last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.’

Steibeck also shows how we shape the world through the ways we perceive it, and speak it. He writes

‘The Word is symbol of delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and the back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.’

I love this quote. Here we see nature as constant, a being-in-and-of-itself, but we tend to understand and conceptualize the world through language. This becomes subjective, and it sets up how language is faulty and through our own individual perceptions on the world we often misread or talk past one another. It also has biblical connotations, such as Adam naming the animals of the world putting them under his domain.

While much of the humor revolves around Mack and his misadventures, the real heart of the novel is the character Doc, who is based on Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts. Ricketts was also the basis for Doc Burton in In Dubious Battle, Jim Casey in The Grapes of Wrath, and Doctor Winter in The Moon Is Down. Doc is melancholy, which inspires Mack to throw a party for him, and it’s a melancholy that matches the feeling of the world at the time. While the war is never present in the novel (taking place before it began), it was all too present in the lives of the reader and this melancholy represents the need everyone felt to feel something beautiful, such as why he wrote this book for the soldiers that asked for a non-war novel (its a bit meta, I suppose). Doc’s musings on life and humanity are a key element of the novel, such as when he finds a dead woman and notes ‘his eyes were wet the way they get in the focus of great beauty,’ an expression on how life and death are two sides of the same coin.

Doc is also a reminder that we should feel our feelings and that allowing oneself to come to terms with sadness is healthy. ‘Doc was feeling a golden pleasant sadness,’ Steinbeck writes. He also reminds us to look for and embrace kindness. Doc allows Mack to throw the party in his own house, knowing the party means so much to Mack. He does this at the expense of his own stuff and home, knowing things will get destroyed in the process, which is a beautiful and touching moment where we see him reciprocate the kindness Mack wants to show him recognizing that allowing Mack to give his ‘gift’ is Doc’s gift to him.

‘Our Father, who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the housefly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys.’

This is a lovely little book where Steinbeck is often at his best. It has the whimsicality of his early novels and is delivered in such refined and gorgeous prose. All the major themes of his come together in a peaceful little narrative that aims at reminding us to see the good in others and to embrace kindness. Doc is such lovable character, and I will always think of my father with this book as we both read it at the same time and, upon reading of Doc ordering a ‘beer milkshake’ decided to try to make one himself. This is a heartwarming read that has much more weight and meaning than the simplicity of the novel would imply.

4.5/5

‘In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row.’