Mack and the Boys of Cannery Row

One of the inspirations for writing The New American Diaspora was rereading the remarkably prescient The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, published in 1939. That experience led me to reread more Steinbeck, including Cannery Row, published in 1945

During this period, I also reread some Hemingway novels and nothing outside some of the short stories held up except for the technique and I don't read to admire technique, or craft as its called today. I read for soul and enlightenment.

With Steinbeck, everything holds up, including his underrated technique. Hemingway thought war, bullfighting and killing marlins was the highest expression of human behavior. Steinbeck thought organizing farm workers and paying attention to the underclass was. Hemingway gets the Ken Burns treatment. Steinbeck gets nothing. But he should, because the dispossessed, struggling Americans he wrote about are timeless, unlike almost all of Hemingway's elite American characters, most of whom aren't even existing in America.

I might also add that iterations of Steinbeck's characters are sitting ten feet away from me as I write this. Hemingway's are in the museums. The Grapes of Wrath will outlast The Sun Also Rises by 300 years. Same with Travels with Charley outlasting A Moveable Feast.

It's probably been 35 years since I read Cannery Row for the first time. Upon this new reading, I was astonished at its relevance to my writing about American dispossession and homelessness and how hilarious the novel is in stretches, well, actually the whole book. There isn't one sentence of humor in all of The Grapes of Wrath that I can recall. In Cannery Row, it feels as if Steinbeck was trying to soften the edges of the downtrodden, thereby providing the reader with imaginings that life for these people is not altogether misery and hopelessness. It struck me as I read the book that some of my writing in this newsletter could use a little more Cannery Row and a little less The Grapes of Wrath. We'll see how that unfolds as this project deepens.

In many ways, writing with humor about people who are dispossessed and marginalized is so much harder to do because you have to look below the surface and that's hard to do when you walk or bicycle or drive by a homeless encampment and see squalor and bizarre behavior.

Cannery Row is set on Monterey Bay and beings with a mesmerizing short opening chapter that invites readers to read the book and consider the stories of certain checked-out Americans like marine animals crawling into your consciousness on shifting tides. I have never read an opening quite like this one for an American novel, except for perhaps Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey. Both are distinguished by their originality in placing human beings in the context of a watershed and how one's living near a certain part of watershed, say a river or a bay, operates on human beings and influences their thoughts and actions.

After the opening, we meet the kindly and enigmatic Doc, who collects and sells all manner of marine life, and Mack and the Boys. Mack is the semi leader of the Boys, a motley collection of drifters and vagrants who all ended up living outdoors around Monterey Bay and sometimes assisting Doc with his collections or doing other odd jobs, but mostly drinking and laying about.

A Chinese grocer named Lee Chong owns a disused building and Mack finagles an arrangement with him where he and the Boys move into the building, fix it up, generally keep it free from possible vandalism, squatting and decay, in exchange for free rent.

That sounds like a brilliant policy idea for the City of Portland to encourage. Why not negotiate with private property owners to house three or four people in an abandoned restaurant or dental office tagged with graffiti and going to seed? If I owned such a property I'd be all over the City about this to subsidize utility bills and waive zoning regulations for the short term, or mostly likely long term knowing America's future. It would get people off the streets, invest them in maintaining the residences, and prove exponentially cheaper than building new structures.

It's called barter and Habitat for Humanity has been doing something successfully like it for decades.

But I stray too far into public policy, which isn't nearly as enjoyable to write about as Mack and the Boys.

They all work every now and then and then blow their pay on booze. They scrounge and they salvage. They love their bird dog Darling. They are alcoholics and perhaps partake in the opium or marijuana of the day. They have families elsewhere or none at all. They start furnishing the building with the discards from the middle and upper classes (sound familiar?). They plant fuchsias to decorate their home (sound familiar?). They have no thought for the future. They are instantly likable and highly corruptible. They help each other survive. In that era, they had only each other. There was no government safety net such as the one that sort of exists today. They will mess up. They know it. Doc knows it. But they still move forward together as neighbors, occasional partners, and occasional friends.

Is Steinbeck romancing the downtrodden and checked out in Cannery Row?

Sure he is. It's a novel, almost a tale, and meant to make you laugh and think about something more serious when laughing, which is about the toughest trick there is in writing fiction or nonfiction.

A great book becomes even greater when a new generation of readers picks it up and/or an older generation rereads it in the light of new historical and cultural developments and finds fresh relevance in the story. Cannery Row is such a novel. Read it. It used to be taught to millions of high school students (I taught it once) but those days are long gone. It's never coming back as curriculum, but perhaps will return as something more useful. Insight. Perspective. Ideas.

Cannery Row made me laugh and think and also induced me to reappraise my relationship (for the 17th time) with my version of Mack and the Boys, namely Mark and a small circle of homeless men in my neighborhood I have come to call the Old Crow Book Club. These men remind me somewhat superficially of Doc's encounters with Mack and the Boys. In a couple sections of the novel, I laughed aloud and said, Christ, I'm like Doc to these guys, listening to their hilarious stories, paying them for small jobs (such as distributing my books in street libraries) and infrequently supplying them with books and cheap booze.

It goes without saying but I'll say it: Mack and the Boys and Mark don't constitute the majority of homeless people. If they did, there wouldn't be a national crisis.

Steinbeck almost makes you wish you were hanging out with Mack and the Boys and embracing the minimalist, carefree way they live.

No writer I am familiar with could do that with fiction today with the encampments I've seen. I wouldn't dare try it in a novel.

In one passage, Doc is explaining Mack and the Boys to a friend: He says:

In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want.

Consider that. Consider this: I don't want to live like Mack and the Boys. I couldn't hack it. But I do want some of their humor and mojo in my life. Writing about them is a start.