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Cannery Row (novel)
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Cannery Row is a novel by John Steinbeck. It was published in 1945. A film version was released in 1982. A stage version was produced in 1995.
Cannery Row takes place on a small street lined with sardine fisheries in Monterey known as Cannery Row. It revolves around the people living there during the Great Depression: Lee Chong, the local grocer; Doc, a marine biologist based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts; and Mack, the leader of a group of bums. The novel is by turns nostalgic, comical, and sad.
Plot summary
Cannery Row has a simple premise: Mack and his friends are trying to do something nice for their friend Doc.
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Encyclopedia
Cannery Row is a novel by John Steinbeck. It was published in 1945. A film version was released in 1982. A stage version was produced in 1995.
Cannery Row takes place on a small street lined with sardine fisheries in Monterey known as Cannery Row. It revolves around the people living there during the Great Depression: Lee Chong, the local grocer; Doc, a marine biologist based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts; and Mack, the leader of a group of bums. The novel is by turns nostalgic, comical, and sad.
Plot summary
Cannery Row has a simple premise: Mack and his friends are trying to do something nice for their friend Doc. Mack hits on the idea that they should throw a party, and the entire community rapidly becomes involved. Unfortunately, the party rages out of control, ruining Doc's lab and home. In an effort to return to Doc's good graces, Mack and the boys decide to throw another party - but to make it work this time. A collection of linked vignettes describe the lives of the locals and the collective life of Cannery Row.
Cannery Row also encompasses many subplots in between the main plot of the novel.
Steinbeck revisited these characters and this setting nine years later, in his novel Sweet Thursday.
Characters
Lee Chong
Lee Chong is the shrewd Chinese owner and operator of the neighborhood grocery store known as "Lee Chong's Heavenly Flower Grocery." "The grocery opened at dawn and did not close until the last wandering vagrant dime had been spent or retired for the night. Not that Lee Chong was avaricious. He wasn't, but if one wanted to spend money, he was available." "No one is really sure whether Lee ever receives any of the money he is owed or if his wealth consisted entirely of unpaid debts, but he lives comfortably and does legitimate business in the Row."
Doc
Doc is a marine biologist who studies and collects sea creatures from all along the California coast. Most of these creatures are preserved in some way and are sent all over the country to universities, laboratories, and museums. "You can order anything living from Western Biological, and sooner or later you will get it." Doc is described as "deceptively small" with great strength and the potential for passionate anger. He wears a beard, very strange and unpopular at the time, and has great charisma. "Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him." Doc is also the smartest man in Cannery Row, interested in knowing something about everything. "Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon," Steinbeck wrote. "Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, 'I really must do something nice for Doc.'"
The character of Doc is based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts, to whom he also dedicated the novel. Ricketts is a noted marine biologist and was the one who got Steinbeck interested in the subject. Doc's Western Biological Laboratory is a reference to Rickett's real Pacific Biological Laboratories, which stood at 800 Cannery Row from 1928 to 1948.
Dora Flood
Owner and operator of the Bear Flag Restaurant, Dora possesses a keen business mind as well as a strong spirit. Despite the fact that she runs a whorehouse, she exudes morality in all her practices - selling no hard liquor, keeping an honest price on the services of the house, and allowing no vulgarity to be spoken on the premises. Dora is also kind to those who have helped her, never turning out a girl too old or infirm to work: "some of them don't turn three tricks a month, but they go right on eating three meals a day." Being an illegal operation, Dora has to be "twice as law abiding" and "twice as philanthropic" as anyone else in Cannery Row. When the general donation for a policeman's ball is a dollar, Dora is asked for and gives 50. "With everything else it is the same, Red Cross, Community Chest, Boy Scouts, Dora's unsung, unpublicized dirty wages of sin lead the list of donations." During the darkest days of the Great Depression, Dora paid people's grocery bills and fed their children, very nearly going broke in the process. Dora runs a clean, respectable business that plays an important role in Cannery Row's ecosystem.
Mack
Described as "the elder, leader, mentor and to a small extent exploiter of a little group of men who had in common no families, no money, and no ambitions beyond food, drink and contentment. But whereas most men in their search for contentment destroy themselves and fall wearily short of their targets, Mack and his friends approached contentment casually, quietly, and absorbed it gently." Mack has few compunctions about lying, stealing, or swindling, but his intentions are generally good, so he is able to justify his actions and those of his friends as means to an end. It is said he is really smart and "Could be president if he wanted to be." He and his group of friends are known to all as "Mack and the boys" and spend a great deal of their time in an abandoned storage shed they christen "The Palace Flophouse and Grill."
Hazel
Hazel is a dim but good, strong, and loyal young man living with Mack and the boys in the Palace Flophouse. His name is feminine because his mother was tired when he was born (the eighth child in seven years) and named the baby after an aunt who was rumored to have life insurance. When she realized that Hazel was a boy she had already gotten used to the name and never changed it. Hazel "did four years of grammar school, four years of reform school, and didn't learn anything in either place." Hazel loves to listen to people's conversations and remembers everything he is told, but can hardly make sense of any of it.
Eddie
Another resident of the Palace. Eddie is a part-time bartender who supplies the boys with "hooch" poured off from whatever patrons leave in their glasses at Ida's Bar. "He kept a gallon jug under the bar and in the mouth of the jar was a funnel. Anything left in the glasses Eddie poured into the funnel before he washed the glasses... The resulting punch he took back to the Palace was always interesting and sometimes surprising. The mixture of rye, beer, bourbon, scotch, wine, rum and gin was fairly constant, but now and then some effete customer would order a stinger or an anisette or a curaçao and these little touches gave a distinct character to the punch."
Chinaman
The enigmatic figure of "The Chinaman" appears in the story several times. He walks quietly through the town, usually while the narrator is himself on the way down to the ocean. This association with the eternal sea suggests that Steinbeck may be using the character of the Chinaman to remind us that the fast-paced and hilarious adventures of the Cannery Row characters are merely ripples in the vast sweep of human experience.
Locations
Cannery Row is the living backdrop for the book. As described in the opening paragraph:
"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. 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."
Lee Chong's Grocery
Lee Chong's is the first location we are introduced to in the novel, the hub of commerce in Cannery Row. Lee Chong's store is truly a "general store" in which you could buy, "clothes, food both fresh and canned, liquor, tobacco, fishing equipment, machinery, boats, cordage, caps, pork chops. You could buy at Lee Chong's a pair of slippers, a silk kimono, a quarter pint of whiskey and a cigar. You could work out combinations to fit almost any mood." Almost everyone in the area owes money to Lee Chong, but he is generous with his debtors because he has found they will usually pay him back rather than make the long trek to the next nearest store over in New Monterey.
The Palace Flophouse and Grill
Home of Mack and the boys. The house was originally a storage shed for fish meal and was given to Lee Chong to clear a debt. Mack convinces Lee Chong that letting him and boys move in will keep it safe from vandals and arsonists (an implicit threat). To save face, Lee asked Mack for five dollars a week in rent (all the while knowing he would never see a dime of it). Lee figured that if Mack and the boys ever had any money they would spend it at his place and would have very little reason to steal from him, as he had the right to evict them at any time. "The saving to Lee Chong in cans of beans and tomatoes and milk and watermelons more than paid the rent. And if there was a sudden and increased leakage among the groceries in New Monterey that was none of Lee Chong's affair." The Palace received its name from Hazel, who juxtaposed what he knew (flophouses) with something wonderful he didn't know (Palaces). As the weeks went on furniture and paint and other niceties began appearing in the Palace, and, piece by piece, it became a home to Mack and the boys and their adopted mongrel dog, Darling.
The Bear Flag Restaurant
The Bear Flag is the local whorehouse, owned and operated by Dora Flood. It is described as, "A decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a glass of beer among friends... a sturdy, virtuous club," where profanity and hard liquor are not allowed. The Bear Flag is respected (if not liked) by the residents of Cannery Row for the simple fact that many of them depend on it. When a sickness spreads through Cannery Row, it is the girls of the Bear Flag who go delivering soup and company to the sick while they recuperate, and on the list of generous donors to local charities or events, the Bear Flag is always at the top.
Western Biological Laboratories
Doc's home and office. The lab is a place where all kinds of living things are kept and preserved: live rattlesnakes, starfish, octopi, etc. Doc makes frequent trips up and down the California coast to collect specimens from the ocean. He sells them for dissection or observation at universities, museums and labs all across the country. Doc also has a library's worth of books, records, and an old phonograph player. Scattered around the walls are reproductions of great works of art, "pinned here and there at eye level so you could look at them if you want to." Doc loves his records, each song evoking a different emotion in him. Doc is also known to bring a girl home from time to time, though these flings never seem to last.
La Jolla
Doc goes on a trip to collect octopi from the tide pools in La Jolla, California.
Major themes
Camaraderie
The residents of Cannery Row work together to hold a party for Doc. They struggle to find the date, get the funds, find the location and even fail at the first try of conducting the party. But this endeavor pulls together and exemplifies the vastly different skills and resources of the residents to make a culminating goal for the book.
Contentment
Mack and the boys at the Palace Flophouse need little and appreciate much, and whatever they do need they acquire by their cunning. Doc is happy with his station in life and in the community (but many worry about his being lonely without a companion). Lee Chong could very easily go after the people in Cannery Row and collect on the debts he is owed, but chooses to let the money come back to him gradually. "Henri the artist" is happy building his ever-changing boat and will continually dismantle it and start again so that he can continue building it. Cannery Row is content because it is not ambitious to be anything other than it is.
Prostitutes
Steinbeck expresses a certain respect for prostitution for its honesty of motives, while reserving moral judgment to the reader. In Of Mice and Men, George has a small monologue in which he states that a man can go into a whorehouse and get a beer and sex for a price agreed upon up front - unlike less professional relationships, you know what you're going to get and what you will have to pay for it. The same theme of respect is expressed in Cannery Row in Steinbeck's descriptions of the Bear Flag: it is a business that provides a service in demand, it is run clean and honestly, and it benefits the community. But in Sweet Thursday, the wall of honor in the Bear Flag displays the gold stars which represent girls which have moved on to find love, establish families and careers. The gold stars are an acknowledgment that other worthwhile goals in life exist beyond the Bear Flag.
Overcoming superficial views of people
Throughout the story characters such as Dora Flood, Mack, and Doc are all expanded upon and they reveal that they are much more complicated than they seem. For example, Dora Flood is the owner of the brothel and is disliked by the women of the town because of her business, but she is very generous and for two years donates groceries to hungry people. Doc, who is a loved and respected member of society, is, deep down, a very sad and lonely person who, until the end of the story, never opens up to other people.
Sweet Thursday
Steinbeck later wrote a sequel called Sweet Thursday, in which several new characters are introduced and Doc finds love, with the active help of his friends. The film version of Cannery Row incorporates elements from both books.
On Film
A film version was released in 1982, starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. The screenplay, by David S. Ward (The Sting, Major League), took many liberties with the source material, drawing scorn from the Steinbeck Estate.
On Stage
In 1994 the Western Stage of Salinas, CA comissioned J.R. Hall to adapt the novel for the stage. It was produced a year later as part of the The National Steinbeck Festival. Subsequently, it has been revived by the Western Stage in 2005, and by the Community College of Allegheny County, in Pittsburgh, PA in 2007.
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