Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck

 I finally checked off a long pending item on my reading list, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, published in 1945.[1]Cannery Row is the story of life on a small stretch of street based on Ocean View Ave. in Steinbeck’s home town of Monterrey, California. Ocean Ave. has since been renamed Cannery Row. Although he cheekily declares in his dedication that all characters “are, of course, fictions and fabrications,” they are indeed modeled on Monterey residents the author knew. Doc, the main protagonist is a facsimile of Ed Ricketts, a noted California scientist and the author’s closest friend, to whom the book is dedicated. Other characters, like Mack and his band of homeless men and Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer, are likewise depictions of people in Steinbeck’s acquaintance. Like other Steinbeck novels, Cannery Row depicts individuals living on the margins of society.[2]

 

Honestly, I did not enjoy the book but struggled to put my finger on the exact reason why until I read a contemporary review of Cannery Row by Joseph Warren Beach in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among other things, Warren criticizes Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing for a way of life which he demonstrates to be precarious and unsatisfying.”[3] This really hit the mark for me. There is too much of a romantic flavor to the lives of Mack and the boys. I make no claims to be an expert on homelessness or life on the streets, but I do know it is a terribly difficult and rough existence filled with risk and danger, not a romantic rebellion against the dehumanizing aspects of a capitalist/industrial society. 

 

My strongest personal connection with the story was not Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing” but with Doc’s work. He is a naturalist who collects specimens, like frogs, octopi, and starfish, that he ships to his clients for research purposes from his lab, Western Biological. As many roads to me seem to lead back to my pal William T. Hornaday, so did this one. As a young man, Hornaday served in the employ of Henry A. Ward’s Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Between 1874 and 1879 a young Hornaday travelled to Florida, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia in search of specimen’s that Ward sold to the ballooning number of museums in American cities and universities in the decades following the Civil War. While Doc sent live animals for scientific research, Ward shipped skeletons, skins, and taxidermically-prepared (a.k.a. “stuffed”) specimens as learning objects. At a time before zoos access to most animals was limited to their remains – a fact that Hornaday would work to change in his twenty-five-year reign as director of the New York Zoological Park, more commonly called the Bronx Zoo.[4]

 

I doubt Hornaday, or Ward, for that matter, would appreciate the comparison. Both were men of the Victorian age in which they lived and upheld its rigid moral code. Certainly, they would have denounced Doc’s proto-Beatnik/Hippie lifestyle. They certainly would look at Mack and the boys with undisguised contempt. Steinbeck might have sympathetically portrayed them as noble individuals who refused to be cowed by the capitalist economy into a robotic existence, but Hornaday and Ward would be repulsed by their lack of morality, thirst for drink, unwillingness to work for their keep, and their abandonment of their families. In other words, their having forsaken any sense of responsibility. Hornaday, who was an outspoken supporter of 100% Americanism during World War I, would undoubtedly have described Mack and the boys as slackers, or much worse, during World War II.

 

 

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[1] John Steinbeck, Novels 1942-1952 (New York: The Library of America, 2002).

[2] San Jose State University, “Cannery Row – Critical Reception,” Steinbeck in the Schools, August 23, 2020, https://sits.sjsu.edu/curriculum-resources/cannery-row/critical-reception/.

[3] Joseph Warren Beach, "SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS ANTIDOTE." The Virginia Quarterly Review 21, no. 2 (1945): 291. Accessed August 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26441972.

[4] See Gregory J. Dehler, The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday & His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

My history grandparents, part 2 of 3, Paul Boyer and Merle Curti

In a previous blog post I introduced Allen Nevins as one of my historical grandparents. Nevins strongly influenced my love of biography as a method for studying and presenting the past. In this installment I will discuss the importance of two other historical grandparents who pointed in quite a different direction: cultural and social historians Paul Boyer and Merle Curti. 

 

The first PHD-level history course that I took at Lehigh University in the fall of 1995 was U.S. History in the Twentieth Century taught by the late John Pettegrew. I believe it was his first graduate class at Lehigh. Compared to the older professors that I had at St. John’s, Pettegrew was young and dynamic, only a couple of years older than myself and perhaps younger than some of the older students in the class. As an intellectual historian, he also was more interested in theoretical frameworks, for example including works by Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan, among others, as required texts, for contextualizing the past. We hit the ground running in the first week of seminar by reading the classic Peter Novick work, That Noble Dream, and supplemented that hefty tome with several articles on narrative usage in historical writing. As we moved through the century, Dr. Pettegrew emphasized the importance of ideas and culture in framing norms, ideology, choices, politics – well, everything! His expansive definition of source materials included films, images, music, recordings, and other such items, that I never before really thought of as historical records. It seems like a “no-brainer” now, but it was an eye-opener at the time. 

 

Pettegrew spoke openly of those who shaped his development as an historian. The most direct and strongest influence was that of his mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the great Paul Boyer. In books like Purity in Print (1968), Urban Masses and Moral Order (1978), and By Bomb’s Early Light (1985), Boyer examined the conflict between cultural and societal norms and those who dared to challenge these rules. Whether it was comic books, progressive social reform, witch trials, or atomic bombs, Boyer studied this tension, the power of the state, competing ideas, and the power of fear and hysteria. One generation back from Boyer stood Merle Curti, a pioneer intellectual and social historian, whom John described as a grandfatherly figure who freely gave his time to a young historian. Pettegrew’s gratitude for Curti’s generosity is evident in an article he wrote in 1998 for The History Teacher. Curti is probably most remembered today as the author of Roots of American Loyalty, which moved along the same track as Boyer would later, which is to say, how loyalty was defined, determined, challenged, and punished, over the course of American history. We read a fragment from Curti’s classic in that first seminar, but I have since read the complete book. Written in 1948, it is clearly dated and of an older style, but still worth a sampling if you are drawn to the historiography of the concepts Curti reviewed. 

 

Training I received in cultural, intellectual, and social history at Lehigh vastly expanded my horizons. This did not contradict biography, but complemented it. Individuals were better understood when placed in their cultural and social milieu. I learned to better appreciate ideas and their implementation. Deeds, or end products like policy, were important, but I became more concerned with understanding the process of how individual agency, cultural/social environment, and clashing ideas and purposes, forged an outcome.