. Spinning .

When a writer wants to express more than a story, when he wants to reveal not just a personality but a human trait, one of the best means is through one of the characters in a segment of story.  Steinbeck has established the character of Doc as knowledgeable, tolerant, patient and kind.  A bit of a loner, too, although he numbers all he knows as among his friends.

The following is a bit of backstory relating to Doc’s early years at University, where he takes off on a walking trip after a bit of a trial.

And everywhere people asked him why he was walking through the country.

Because he loved true things he tried to explain.  He said he was nervous and besides he wanted to see the country, smell the ground and look at grass and birds and trees, to savor the country, and there was no other way to do it save on foot.  And people didn’t like him for telling the truth.  They scowled, or shook and tapped their heads, they laughed as though they knew it was a lie and they appreciated a liar.  And some, afraid for their daughters or their pigs, told him to move on, to get going, just not to stop near their place if he knew what was good for him.

And so he stopped trying to tell the truth.  He said he was doing it on a bet–that he stood to win a hundred dollars.  Everyone liked him then and believed him  They asked him in to dinner and gave him a bed and they put lunches up for him and wished him good luck and thought he was a hell of a fine fellow.  Doc still loved true things but he knew it was not a general love and it could be a very dangerous mistress.  (p. 99)

Ain’t that the truth.  Does honesty scare people?  Do they only understand someone on their own terms?  Do we live in our own created world of normal, exclude anyone different, fear if their aspirations seem loftier in purpose and so degrade it by relegating it to an oddness in another?

And the sentence, "afraid for their daughters or their pigs," — is not, I don’t feel, a leveling of women to animals, but rather a metaphor for what is important to them; honor, and property, the loss of either is more vital to maintain and protect than being open to honesty. 

Steinbeck is religious about reaffirming his images within a few pages of what he has presented.  In this short chapter on Doc, we learn that he carries around a suggestion once made to him to try a beer milkshake.  He realizes, having learned the ways of human nature, that this request would be suspect.  But on this short journey he is making to seek specimens, and after being annoyed by a hitchhiker, the moment is right:

Doc walked angrily to the counter of the stand.

The waitress, a blonde beauty with just the hint of a goiter, smiled at him.  "What’ll it be?"

"Beer milk shake," said Doc.

"What?"

Well here it was and what the hell.  Might just as well get it over with now as some time later.

The blonde asked "Are you kidding?"

Doc knew wearily that he couldn’t explain, couldn’t tell the truth.  "I’ve got a bladder complaint," he said.  "Bipalychaetorsonectomy the doctors call it. I’m supposed to drink a beer milk shake.  Doctor’s orders."

(…) "It sounds awful," said the blonde.

"It’s not so bad when you get used to it," said Doc.  "I’ve been drinking it for seventeen years."  (p. 101)

And so we go through life, learning what can be openly expressed, and what is best left unsaid, kept to ourselves.  This is the plane of life on which we commonly operate, on which we interact with each other.  Is heaven–if there be one–a place without veils?

There are several forms of imagery:  simile, metaphor, solid description.  Steinbeck uses them all to best advantage, but in his description he is concise, that is, using many words perhaps, but each word is strung in a list that results in a rat-a-tat-tat picture-perfect target hit with his bullets:

Coffee in its own can was simmering on its own rock, far enough from the flame so that it did not boil too had.  Mack awakened, started up, stretched, staggered to the pool, washed his face with cupped hands, hacked, spit, washed out his mouth, broke wind, tightened his belt, scratched his legs, combed his wet hair with his fingers, drank from the jug, belched and sat down by the fire.  "By God that smells good," he said.

Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.  Mack’s process was loosely the one all of them followed.  (p. 74)

Steinbeck uses this "listing" method quite often, when giving a description in full sentences of "then he…" would have seriously detracted from the story and slowed the pace.  This quickness of action gives a full image, and keeps it interesting and lively.

Here’s imagery:

The Carmel is a lovely little river.  It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have.  It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live.  In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in.  Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it.  Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water.  The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take in water for the orchards and vegetables.  The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk.  Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs.  It’s everything a river should be.  (p. 72)

He’s no slouch at simile either:

Behind him the rabbits stirred in the bush.  Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you’d shake a rug.  (p. 71)

Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. (p. 81)

And personification: 

The water chuckled on the stones where it went out of the deep pool. (p. 78)

The more I read the masters, the more I am convinced that good writing is quite possibly primary to even good story. 

There are, of course, some deeper things I’ve discovered in Cannery Row that need be more fully covered.  A two-page chapter slipped in, seemingly unrelated to the story but bursting with metaphorical sense of it.  These, I need to get back to.

I’m sure the comparison has been made, not only in the writing styles of Steinbeck and McCarthy, but in these two novels in particular.

Each holds a treasure box of character, history and a hard look at a society that may be very different than our own.  A group of ne’er-do-wells, surviving as best they can in the downtimes of America, in the downtimes of their lives, their environment. 

While Bud Suttree is the obvious protagonist in Suttree despite the indepth personality McCarthy bestows upon the others, I am finding it harder to select the main character in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.  While Doc seems to be the levelheaded philosophical intellectual as is Bud Suttee, I realize that the character of Mack, a leader of a work-whenever-the-need-arises-only band of men seems to be the main interacter with all the others.  He is the second character introduced in the novel, immediately after the grounding of Lee Chong and his grocery store.  He is portrayed as a wily, clever manipulator, though most are aware of this and attempt to prepare for him.  He is a winner of whatever he seeks to gain–though it not be much.

And my beloved Harrogate of Suttree seems to come in the guise of Hazel, one of Mack’s main group:

"Oh!" said Hazel, and he cast frantically about for a peg to hang a new question on.  He hated to have a conversation die out like this.  He wasn’t quick enough.  While he was looking for a question Doc asked one.  Hazel hated that, it meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum.  Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits.  He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories.  Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up.  (p. 34)

There is a difference in intelligence between Hazel and Harrogate, the latter being more able to see to his own survival via great schemes that haven’t been thought out all the way through (the bats!) while Hazel’s concentration is more geared towards being sociable, likeable, needing the wealth of simple communication to survive.  But there is an innocence about both that is endearing. 

Steinbeck gives his characters more of an individuality that does not seem as yet as reliant on the another for story.  Although they do touch and meet just as Bud Suttree’s friends and certainly Harrogate stands out as a strong second to Suttree in importance to the narrative.

While there seems to be a narrative structure introduced by “In the evening, just at dusk, a curious thing happened on Cannery Row.” (p. 24) for example, the chapters appear more to be unrelated episodes from the overall lives of those characters Steinbeck has presented.

We get the basis of the setting in Lee Chong’s grocery store, then his acquisition of the warehouse which becomes the Palace Flophouse, and then by directing us around the locale we are given Dora and her Bear Flag Restaurant, a whore house she has madamed for fifty years.

This method of grounding the reader within the setting and tieing in the characters to their spaces reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and it is an excellent way of bringing the reader into the world of the story.  While Suttree does follow a more linear narrative structure, we are unsure of the exact passage of time in Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s establishment of setting however does give us the feel of building Cannery Row to its present state at the time of story, and allows some history to reinforce the image.