Cannery Row; John Steinbeck, 1945

Prior to Monterey, California being the strange and flashy tourist destination that it is today, it was a small seaside village surviving off the sardine industry. In Steinbeck’s 1945 version, the fringe denizens consist of a Chinese owner of a grocery/thrift store, who runs his shop shrewdly but allows the multitude of debts to trickle back in their own good time, a whorehouse owned by Dora, a considerate and forthright woman who keeps her business as clean and honest as the most upstanding of establishments, a group of loveable bums who homestead in an abandoned warehouse, which they later term “The Palace Flophouse and Grill”, and Doc, a marine biologist who owns and runs a company called Western Biological Laboratories, where he collects samples of species during the day and at night, when not drinking or entertaining women, listens to opera and Gregorian chants.

I had known Steinbeck was a naturalist, but never cued in on how significant this view on life played into his books. Throughout, whether it be groupings of octopi, frogs, starfish or puppies, communities of animals appear within the various vignette styled stories and reflect the human communities found in Cannery Row, both with the village as a whole and within the personal residences of the characters. And as with ecology, communities inevitably interact, the centering plot being a group attempt to throw Doc a surprise birthday party. As can be expected with Steinbeck, he creates these interactions and connectedness in a brine so thick with personality, they’re preserved in an enjoyable relevancy waiting to be opened for generations of readers to come.

This layered micro-cosmology is even shown in the baking of a birthday cake, where “when the batter was completed it writhed and panted as though animals were squirming and crawling inside it.” I guess you could say that tidal pools are not always hypnotically glowing sea urchins, the insides of cakes can collapse, and Steinbeck’s characters are as much fools, sons of bitches and sinners as they are saints, martyrs and wise men. That’s the other side of it. And the hidden terrors of violence and death, while not always floating atop the surface of life’s everyday waters, do lurk in the rocky edges and influence behaviors. To balance this, basic survival becomes a shared characteristic, where life is not perfect, but it does flourish, albeit unpredictably varied with both comedy and tragedy, sadness and ecstasy.

And that’s where the reader can find their admiration for the inhabitants of Cannery Row. These are characters directly connected and aware of the most fundamental elements of life and inevitably create their lives on their own terms. Outsiders to mass American systems of thought, ignoring the town parades, and instead embodying a rugged balance between personal instinct and group awareness, as can be found in so much of American literature.