I learned that when we write about a place like Cannery Row, we should never forget that places can only come to life and live on the page once characters and relationships between characters are described and made meaningful. As John Gardner wrote, a successful novel must possess the quality of "a continuous dream."
Ask yourself: Have you ever once had a dream without any characters in it? I haven't.
In his novel Cannery Row, Steinbeck is writing about a place that existed during the Great Depression and still exists today. Steinbeck is a patient builder, and he begins by describing and making real for his readers a single store that is central to the neighborhood, Lee Chung's grocery. Yes, he describes Lee Chung's but as he does so, he's actually describing Chung's personality as revealed by how he runs his grocery store. For example, Lee Chung gives credit to practically all his customers, which not only says a lot about Mr. Chung, but also about his customers, i.e., that they are in need of credit.
Steinbeck's choice of the first sentence to begin chapter one: "Lee Chong's grocery, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply."
That first sentence is not "artistic." It's not exactly funny but, in it's succinctness, it does make me smile. (The novel as a whole is comic, and at times comedic; it's poignantly funny.) It doesn't tax the reader with image. You don't have to imagine anything. It's about a business and the man who created the business and the purpose it serves in the larger community. During the course of the second and third sentence of Cannery Row, I counted fourteen mentions of specific product categories that can be purchased at Lee Chung's by "a man" both "to live and be happy," which tells you something about the world Steinbeck is writing about that, at that point, purposely excludes women. And after another sentence of detail, he concludes his first paragraph with a sentence reflexive back to the larger community: "The one commodity Lee Chong did not keep could be had across the lot at Dora's." We later learn "Dora's" is a house of prostitution.
With restraint and consummate skill for expressing far more than his individual words seem to be saying, Steinbeck ennobles Mr. Chung, raises him up from a simple grocer to perhaps the closest thing Cannery Row in those days may have had to a power broker: "Lee's position in the community surprised him as much as he could be surprised. Over the course of the years everyone in Cannery Row owed him money. He never pressed his clients, but when the bill became too large, he cut off credit. Rather than walk into the town up the hill, the client paid, or tried to."
We're now at the beginning of the third paragraph and both Steinbeck and we, his readers, are yearning to learn something about Mr. Chung's physical description. So far not a word has been said about that. Steinbeck starts out seeming to give us what we want but then, like a ball in a pin-ball machine, he ricochets off in a completely different direction: "Lee was round-faced and courteous." What do those two thoughts have to do with one another? Nothing! Why do they deserve to be in the same sentence? They don't except that John Steinbeck decided they should be. Then the next sentence, which truly ennobles Lee Chung yet makes me laugh out loud: "He spoke a stately English without ever using the letter R." What a loving, entertaining way to say he spoke with a Chinese accent?
We couldn't have a finer enunciation of the deeper values that dwell at the heart of this novel: A belief in the nobility of the common person, that all people deserve respect; that all fictional characters deserve their humanity on the page.
At so many points in this novel, characters are shown in tremendously vulnerable circumstances, speaking their truth. I intend to share some of that with you in upcoming EWAs.
I came across a number of conversations between two characters of starkly distinct intellectual and emotional attainments in Cannery Row. Those scenes were tremendously moving and powerful to me. They reminded me of the power I remembered from having read Of Mice and Men, which Steinbeck published in 1937, earlier in his career. He published Cannery Row in 1945. Interestingly, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, six years before his death.
Perhaps I have so much reverence for John Steinbeck's writing ability as displayed in the opening pages of Cannery Row, because I believe what he's doing here is extremely hard to sustain without it going dead, flat, boring or all three. I've tried and I know. John Steinbeck pulls it off because he's more than happy to jump around from one sentence to the next, until, looking back we, his readers, realize he hasn't actually been jumping around so much as weaving for us a looser narrative fabric than perhaps other writers weave (for example, John Irving) but despite this looser weave, Steinbeck's narrative fabric is no less durable. As an example, discussing Lee Chung's "fortune," Steinbeck writes:
"What he did with his money no one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't get it. Maybe his wealth was entirely in unpaid bills. But he lived well and had the respect of his neighbors. He trusted his clients until further trust became ridiculous. Sometimes he made business errors, hut even these he turned to advantage in good will if in no other way. It was that way with the Palace Flophouse and Grill. Anyone but Lee Chong would have considered the transaction a total loss."
I'm smiling all through that paragraph. Aren't you? Consider the sentence, "Maybe his wealth was in unpaid bills." Admittedly it's dry humor; I think it's hilarious. And this: "He had the respect of his neighbors." Doesn't that make you smile? I find an abiding love and warmth for people throughout this book that draws me to Steinbeck's body of work. At this point in Cannery Row I think Steinbeck is warming us up. He's teasing us. He's giving us snippets of the story to come. "The Palace Flophouse and Grill." What a name! Who would give a place a name like that? Well, we're about to find out who named it and why that person gave it that name. Steinbeck is selling us on wanting to read his novel. But he had me from the opening paragraph. He didn't have to try that hard to sell me, but I'm certainly glad he did.
Next month: Story structure and pacing in Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
