The Bowery of Monterey

CANNERY ROW--John Steinbeck--Viking ($2).

The Monterey, Calif. of John Steinbeck's imagination is the easiest-going community in American literature. It is inhabited by gentle, poetic Filipinos, Mexicans, sardine fishermen, artists, writers, big-hearted prostitutes and understanding bums. Rain seems never to fall there; mice & men are equally children of nature and for the most part get along well together. This Monterey somewhat resembles Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but things generally work out better for Steinbeck's people than they did for Anderson's, and Steinbeck's characters drink more--a curious elixir which has the magical property of leaving no hangover.

Snails and Sanskrit. Cannery Row is the Bowery of this beautiful little city. Even its canned heat is palatable: "That stuff ain't so bad," says one of its leading citizens. On Cannery Row, in addition to the sardine canneries, stands Dora's house of prostitution, the "Bear Flag Restaurant," with twelve girls, a bouncer, a bar, a flawless reputation and a steady trade from the fishermen who come in at the front door and the leading citizens who sneak in at the back. There is also Lee Chong's grocery, packed to the rafters with local color, unpaid bills, mementos of the Panama Pacific Exposition, bottles of beer and presumably (though Author Steinbeck scarcely mentions it) food. And there is the Western Biological Laboratory, dealing in snails, spiders; rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, barnacles, crabs, starfish, frogs, cats, sharks, octopuses. Its proprietor, a bearded beer drinker named Doc, is "half Christ and half satyr," a benevolent California intellectual who plays Gregorian chants on his phonograph, and brings tears to the eyes of the girls from Dora's with his readings of E. Powys Mathers' translations from the Sanskrit.

The achievement of Cannery Row is that Author Steinbeck makes all this credible and some of it funny. Scarcely a novel, except in the sense that the action revolves around a single group of characters, it is brief, episodic, formless. Author Steinbeck suggests that he just opened the pages and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

Death on a Heap. The first one to crawl into Cannery Row is that of Horace Abbeville, his two wives and six children. When Horace could no longer get credit at Lee Chong's grocery, he squared his account by deeding the Chinese his abandoned house full of fish meal. Then "Horace Abbeville walking very straight went across the lot and past the cypress trees and across the track and up the chicken walk and into the building that had been his, and he shot himself on a heap of fish meal."

Thus Lee Chong became a landlord. Presently he was visited by Mack, leader of a group of homeless boys, apparently pretty well along in years, named Hazel, Eddie, Hughie and Jones. (Hazel was named Hazel because his mother, after bearing seven children in eight years, thought at first he was a girl and never got around to changing his name after she discovered her error.) Eddie was a part-time bartender who brought the gang jugfuls of his patrons' unfinished drinks. Mack was an ex-soldier, a goodhearted moocher who idolized the scholarly Doc. Mack intimidated Lee Chong into letting the gang live in the Abbeville building.

Most of the rest of Cannery Row is given over to an account of Mack's party for Doc. But little anecdotes of Monterey life slip in between the chapters: the story of William, the bouncer at the brothel, who was high-hatted by Mack's gang (said Mack, "I hate a pimp") and disconsolately stuck an ice pick in his heart; the story of Mr. & Mrs. Malloy, who in 1935 moved into an abandoned boiler in a vacant lot on Cannery Row, and quarreled because Mrs. Malloy wanted curtains for the windows that weren't there; the true story of Josh Billings, the famed humorist, who died in Monterey and whose insides, removed by a local undertaker, got carelessly scattered around town.

Saturnalia. Mack's party for Doc was premature. To finance it the boys collected 500 frogs (for which Doc would pay 5-c- apiece), then traded the frogs to Lee Chong for liquor which they drank while waiting for Doc to show up. When he finally arrived, his house was a shambles. But no Steinbeck story of Monterey could end on so grim a note. All Cannery Row cooperated to make up for the destruction by giving the music-loving old scientist a party they could enjoy, and the book ends with the sound of revelry by night, a saturnalia of middle-aged harlots, party-crashing fishermen, aging racketeers, fighting, weeping, embracing, dancing and reading verse.

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