Cannery Row: A Review

Steinbeck's slim volume is the best example of his understanding of the human condition thanks to its real-life inspiration

So I guess I'd consider myself something of a Steinbeck aficionado now. I've read all the big stuff, his trinity depicting the great melting pot of 20th century America, I've read various parts of A Life In Letters and now I'm reading Cannery Row, which I think - this may be controversial - is better than anything else he did.

The reason I love this more than I do East of Eden or Grapes is mainly to do with a preference for the narrative and chosen style, which obsessed Steinbeck to such an extent he would write letters to friends, agents and colleagues explaining in sometimes near-tortuous detail what he was thinking of concocting next. Letters offers Steinbeck's near-reverent belief in qualities central to literary tradition; redemption, faith, cynicism, strength and weakness.

All language you associate with someone who's won the Nobel Prize (spoiler - if you didn't know...) and inherent in the great writers; Dostoevsky for example immediately springs to mind. And part of me likes Steinbeck so much just for writing these letters, for understanding the power of expression and his honest appraisal of its cathartic quality (Steinbeck's honesty when discussing his abilities was brutal). They're contained in the introductions to  most of his work, including Cannery Row, and reveal what you always want when reading an author you connect with; their personality incarnate.



Ecologist Ed Ricketts, the inspiration for
 Doc in Steinbeck's Cannery Row

Ironic that Steinbeck was always cautious-even paranoid- about success and the adulation his major works brought but reading his pre-emptive thoughts on his composition are gently moving and make for rewarding reading. The Californian was by professional accounts a shy, almost insecure man, given to throwing his faith in with those he trusted deeply.

Amongst those are Ed Ricketts, immortalised in CR as Doc, the worldly researcher who lives in his lab and exhibits a patience which has an almost supernatural longevity with the bums and deadbeats of the Row. Ricketts was by trade a marine biologist which sounds for all the world to be a fine thing to call a job, when the description entailed going out to sea to study the life that resided there.

After the breakup of marriage number two, Ricketts was joined by the wounded and harried Steinbeck to explore the southeastern coast of the United States. Their discoveries and philosophic conclusions became the backbone to The Log of the Sea of Cortez.

It seems safe to say Steinbeck was not a man to take any part of his existence lightly when his letters give such strong evidence that it troubled him so heavily - although this would sometimes present itself in strange manifestations as when the author left Stanford without completing a qualification and instead finding himself as a labourer and part time journalist in New York City.

The great paradox central to that particular example shrinks when compared to the steady, unyielding labor afforded to work like East of Eden. But that's not so manifest here, and the better for it. What I really enjoyed about Cannery Row was the closeness; the conscious lack of echo, weight. The un-literary nature of the work, which for me in turn engendered a greater semblance of reality.

I found it disheartening, when reading through reviews of the novel, that nowhere was it considered the equal of its weightier forebears aside from the New Yorker, who claimed it as Steinbeck's best work. A question as fine as sand for sure, but the framework for literary merit seems (or seemed) to consist of how many references to the Old Testament you could get in there.

Sure, that's glib, especially considering I really enjoyed East of Eden and as a piece of literary journalism, Grapes still for me has no equal. But surely the lack of flesh and blood in his 'great' works, the relaying back to already fictional character, is of a different, maybe less powerful quality than a Doc or a Mack. Like the copying of a document, over and over again, the print fades and takes on a new form or dies.

Instead what I feel Steinbeck achieved through Cannery Row is a sense of inward peace; I don't think this work challenged him greatly, certainly not to the strenuous levels Eden certainly did, and the lack of it seems to have conversely produced some of his efficient writing, floating away from the land Steinbeck inhabited in much of his work.

Just this evening I was reading about the inspiration to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, a rather sinister tale of reincarnation which came from a road the Kings lived on during his tenure at the University of Maine.

Inspiration is for the inspired, perhaps. But for me, and perhaps if you want to write yourself, Cannery Row is a plaintive success in depicting human character. The great and pleasing irony is that it owes nothing to its forebears to achieve its success.

Picture courtesy of Stanford University and pbbookends.blogspot.com