Whatever Happened to Cannery Row?
From Buzzflash.com
ARGUABLY, THERE’S NOTHING POLITICAL ABOUT JOHN STEINbeck’s novel Cannery Row. It chronicles the lives of some of the residents of Monterey, California, in the early twentieth century, before the great ecological disaster (mostly overfishing—it’s still debated) of the mid-1940s that wiped out the sardine harvest and threw the boom-town into bust. There’s Doc, the central focus of the novel, based on a close friend of Steinbeck’s, Edward F. Ricketts, one of America’s most famous marine biologists; and Mack, who’s always trying to do good and never quite making it; and an entire cast of characters who reflect the aura of America in the 1930s.
On the other hand, one could argue that the book is entirely political, today, because it shows us a slice of America before the Great Corporate Homogenizers got hold of us; before we walled ourselves into our highly mortgaged houses to stare for hours, alone, at our TVs, eating the mental gruel of multinational corporations; when the real American Dream was grounded in community, safety, friendship, and a healthy acceptance of eccentricity.
In 1968 I hitchhiked from Michigan to San Francisco, lived there for half a year, and then hitchhiked back. Every city and every Main Street was different. Restaurants were locally owned. Hotels and motels had eccentric names. It was fascinating, an exploration in a very literal sense, discovering hundreds of communities that were uniquely different from one another.
Then came Reagan’s “revolution.” When he stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act for all practical purposes, mega-corporations moved in. For much of the 1990s, I made a living in part as a consultant to a variety of organizations, leading me all around the United States (and the world). I logged more than 7 million miles just on Delta Air Lines. And I saw the quirky, unique, personality-rich cities of America being replaced by chain stores, chain restaurants, chain hotels, and franchises. Today, if you were to parachute randomly into any town or city in America, it might take you days to find a commercial landmark that would uniquely identify the place. In this regard, in that it shows us how different the pre-Reagan America was from the post-Reagan America, Cannery Row is a political book.
I didn’t go looking for Cannery Row. As I sat with my father in the summer of 2007, helplessly watching him choke and gag on his own blood as he died from asbestos-caused mesothelioma (thanks in part to one of Dick Cheney’s companies) while my brothers and I tried to comfort him, I saw the book beside his bed. He was an inveterate reader—there are about 20,000 books in his basement—and he’d often read and reread his favorites over and over again. After his funeral I picked up Cannery Row and took it with me to read on the plane ride home from Michigan to Oregon.
What I found in Cannery Row was a time and an America that my parents had often spoken of to me. It reminded me of my mother’s stories about squeezing the last of the toothpaste from the tube in a doorjamb because there was barely enough money for toothpaste or toilet paper much less cosmetics. I was reminded of my dad’s stories of going down to one of Al Capone’s speakeasies as a kid on the South Side of Chicago to get a pail of bootleg beer to bring to his father and uncles as they sat on the stoop in the row houses.
It was a time of challenge and a time of opportunity. It was America before Reagan.
In one of my dad’s last e-mails to me, he talked about that era:
Thank you for the wonderful dedication in Screwed. It made me think of what I did in life other than try to lead a good life and do no harm to others. I’m happy with my life, although it was selfish because I did the things I did with no sacrifice on my part. Then I thought of your mother. She was the one who gave up all her early ambitions and dreams for me and her family.
She wanted to be a writer—worked her way through college to complete her dreams. I still have many of her early writings (if she hasn’t tossed them), which were very good. She worked at an airport for money and flying lessons, she took care of a family for room and board, plus all summer with a bunch of girls to earn tuition money. After she graduated she turned down a great job working for the oil companies in Saudi Arabia just so she would not leave her mother alone…. After we were married she started to write again. But then you came on the scene…. I have hoped that you could and would write about her as you have about me. I think she deserves it much more. She is the true hero of our family.
They were the last words of his I ever heard, and those in an e-mail, as he couldn’t speak by the time I got to Michigan.
I realize that telling you a story about my hitchhiking across America, or about my father, isn’t telling you the story of Cannery Row, but in a way it’s very much the story of Cannery Row. The stories are meta to the novel. My dad was a huge fan of Steinbeck, presumably because he knew so well the America about which Steinbeck wrote.
Beyond that, telling you the storyline of Cannery Row would be a disservice. It’s a novel, and one shouldn’t have even an inkling of where a novel is going when one starts to read it. It was only after I finished the book that I began to research its history and found a rich treasure trove of information on the web about the real Cannery Row, the real Monterey of the 1930s, and the real Ed Ricketts. I hope you will, too.
But first indulge yourself in a bit of old-fashioned escapism—step back to the time of the Republican Great Depression and meet a wonderful cast of characters in a story that will leave you smiling, wistful, and newly informed.
Maybe, hopefully, we’ll all live to see that true spirit of America—its people so brilliantly drawn by Steinbeck in Cannery Row—again emerge as we Americans awaken from our dream-fog of consumerism and hellish wars and rediscover the sense of self and community and purpose and the egalitarian values of community on which this nation was founded.
From Buzzflash.com, © 2007, published by Thom Hartmann.