***The Song Of The Fellahin- John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Cannery Row, written by John Steinbeck, 1945

Fellahin. Fellahin, pure and simple, that is what the old time American author John Steinbeck (and Nobel Prize for Literature) has written about in his book under review, Cannery Row. He might not have known the word, or if he had known the word might have not chosen to characterize the characters, the misfit in the new American dispensation then, in his book that way but that is what he did, moaned for man, moaned a song to the brethren, the marginal ones, the forgotten ones, hard against the Monterey ocean breeze night. Yes, Steinbeck might very well have not chosen a word that I remember picking up from two sources; first, my seventh grade history teacher when he was talking about the Suez Crisis, Egypt, Palestine or some such thing describing who was getting screwed, getting dispossessed from the land, in the process, although he would not have used that word “screwed”; second, from Jack Kerouac used in On The Road and other of his books to describe his own brushes with the fellahin world from his hometown mill town of Lowell loaded up with those who came down from the Quebec farms, hungry, looking for work to the hermanos, the braceros who too had lost their homeland land working the sun-sweated fields of fertile California for somebody else that he ran into when he was free-booting the continent. (And trying to on the road hustle some sweet Latina, and some sweated field labor money to keep moving along.)

I have written plenty about the fellahin of the world, you know the peasants, although not peasants like those serfs and sharecroppers who back break work the land and never get ahead, but rather those like the Lowell kindred, mill hands and sweat shop workers they are of the same ilk, a lot like the braceros too, those on the margins, the drifters, the midnight sifters, the guys and gals who just could not make it in a world that didn’t create and had no say in creating, or running. And so they too ran out of luck, just like half the guys in Cannery Row, guys who got work when there was work, did good work while they worked, laid around when slack time came, looked for that slack time, and always, always some misery bottle at hand. Guys who were too footloose to settle down, to marry, or marry for long, to settle down into that white picket fence dream, guys just trying to figure out how to keep moving west with that damn pacific Pacific Ocean in the way.

Yeah, I have seen, hell, have half-been, one of these guys old Steinbeck put together, guys like Mack, Hazel, Eddie, Henri, righteous guys by their own lights but guys who just couldn’t make a go of it. Woody Guthrie wrote songs about these kindred of the dust bowl Okies/Arkies migrations, at a time when half the hillbillies in the hills and hollows who had enough energy to move after generations of just staying put, mostly the younger ones who saw the writing on the wall got on the road, the road west, the road east already too crowded, already sewn up. By the late 1930s and early 1940s half of California seemed to be filled with such guys, sometimes with families, many times without, in old beat down jalopies barely held together with baling wire, a few possessions and a smacky grin. Yeah, Woody wrote songs about them, made heroes for a day out of them, called them kindred but never got to the why of what ailed them, or him either. Couldn’t get it figured out why that bedroll knapsack existence held him and them in its thrall, couldn’t figure out what train smoke and dreams had to do with it all. Nice try though amigo.

Nelson Algren, a guy who knew about the dark side, knew the junkie crowd cold, caught the tenor of this crowd too in his time when they gravitated toward the slums and skid rows of the Midwestern cities, these hungry boys, the Dove Linkhorns of the fellahin world to put a name to such men, always, always figuring out how to cut corners, how to con some poor rube out his, or just lay around waiting, who the hell knows, waiting for something.  Algren in some book he wrote, maybe Walk On The Wild Side , put it down on paper, told us about their forebears, those “master-less men” the preachers and politician of Europe, especially England, were always railing about, guys who couldn’t adjust to the time clock of the factory age. Guys who were being tossed out of the old country, wherever that old country was, sometimes, hell, many times, just before the jail beckoned. America populated not by, as the misty legends have it, sturdy yeomen, although they came too, but pig thieves, poachers of the squire’s land, highwaymen, tavern tramps, and rough trade boys, and their women too.

Told us as well that they settled in the hills and hollows and just stayed there, stayed there on the played out land, generation after generation with their unwashed kids, their unkempt cabins, and their smacky grins, when everybody else was moving west until by the 1930s they had to leave too, or else. Still they were not much for regular work, working stoop labor, casual labor, mainly, not much for fixing things up pretty, just fixing things up enough to get by. They are still with us, fewer maybe, but until a few years ago, no, make that maybe a couple of decades ago you could go to the center of any large or medium town and you would not have had to look hard to find them. Just follow the churchly good folks-provided soup kitchens. Woody had been knee deep with them, Algren had chronicled their progeny, the “restless boys” like that condition had been inherited in their DNA from ancient times (that restless stain that drove, occasionally still drives me when I get to some destination and am antsy to get to the next place), the mad max biker guys chain-whipping whatever they did not understand about the modern world, the midnight chicken run hot-rod boys from the valleys who lived to run wild in the hopped-up night, all the misfits thrown up by a system that could not usefully use their skills. The hitchhike boys waiting by the hour in desolate, rain splashed Big Sur, hoping against hope for a ride out of the wet trees. Hey, Steinbeck too had them down pat, or their nameless fathers, not just in this book under review but in his dust bowl migration classic, The Grape Of Wrath, so he had pretty close tabs on these brethren.                             

Hell I have kept pretty close tabs on them myself, had started to notice then in my old growing up hometown of North Adamsville, that’s in Massachusetts, in my old neighborhood in that town there were plenty of guys like Steinbeck described who lived in ill-kept rooming houses wreaking of sweat, bug spray, and bad booze, mainly, sometimes boarded up with some widowed Irish lady whose kids had gone off and she had an extra bedroom for a guy who was quiet and didn’t drink until all hours under her roof, who nevertheless kept the bartenders busy at the six local taverns that dotted the area. Closer at hand though were the corner boys, corner boys for each generation, including my own, and including me, who would inevitably produce a fair share of guys who just could not adjust to the nine-to-five fifty-week grind, to married life, to the whining kids, although some tried for a while but they in their turn filled the taverns, the rooming houses, the jails if it came to that when they came of age. I knew a fistful of guys like Steinbeck’s Mack who just couldn’t do things right no matter how hard they tried like it was something deep inside that caused them to constantly fuck up, guys who had to make laborious plans with too many moving parts to work out reasonably well, guy who loved the bottle more than any other thing even a good woman if you asked him to choose, and who, and everybody can appreciate this these days with data-blasts confronting you every waking moment, just wanted to exercise their rights to be forgotten.

So it was not a big stretch, was not hard to for me to go from North Adamsville to a fictionalized  Cannery Row to feel at home with Steinbeck’s characters. Here’s where things get funny sometimes though. The impetus for reading, or rather re-reading the book, was that I had taken a recent trip out to Big Sur in California which included a stop in Monterey, a place that I had not been in since the late 1980s when Cannery Row, then falling apart, then with even itinerant work becoming scarce, then with more vacant lots and factories than you could shake a stick had a thriving skid row. That was a time, the late 1980s, though when I was down on my own luck, had been trying to dry out from my own addictions, was trying to get my head together, had been close to the skid row environs.

And also a time when I had run Thea into in downtown Monterey, at least that is what I always called her then, although who knows if that was her real name, and I didn’t care about her name all that much anyway. Thea, a woman who had come out the 1960s experiences a little shattered with a few addictions of her own and who, when I asked, told me that she worked in “Madame” Fiona’s whorehouse, the best, fairest and easiest to get into (if you had the dough) whorehouse in all of Central California at the time. Thea had, after getting hold of her drug addictions, had proven to Fiona to be a protégé worthy of spending some on since the guys sure did like when as Thea said she “curled their toes” (which is who I learned the expression from although it can be found in many old country blues songs which since she shared my interest in blues music is probably where she got the expression from) had worked herself up to be Fiona’s best girl.  This Fiona was a piece of work, a woman who in her youth had worked the streets before getting a break with the famed “Madame” Flora who everybody said had a heart of gold and who very well might have been the model for Steinbeck’s Dora (in any case if you stop at Cannery Row today you can see a sculpture which includes Steinbeck and Flora joined together in the same place if he did not know her).Thea and I stuck together for a little while, stick while she helped me slide off my addictions, although I always paid the freight when she curled my toes, until one night some guy in three-piece suit took her away with him to some promised land. But while I was with her she in her simple honest ways could have been a character right out of Steinbeck’s’ Dora’s brothel. Adios, sister.          

Of course that was the rag end of old Cannery Row, the place of broken, unformed, or maybe better no dreams since dreams come at a pretty high price. Now the place after that recent visit has been turned into a theme park shopping area which endlessly haunts the ghosts of the old skid row bums who once proudly inhabited the locale. So the old skid row is gone, the old characters that novelists could make sing in the night, make you wish you could stomach that Ripple or Thunderbird wine. But guess what, if you looked closely at the whole town, or rather the main drag, Lighthouse Avenue, and the adjoining streets you see telltale signs that the brethren are still around, or their progeny. Things like the plethora of second-hand stores, you know Goodwill, the Sallys (Salvation Army who saved my ass more than one time) the low-rent bars (mixed in with a few high-end ones but clearly with two different clienteles in mind), the flophouses, mostly old run down Victorians houses cut up every which way to make single rooms, and probably the whorehouses too although I cannot vouch for that last named place. Moreover walking a few streets to get a feel I passed a number of brethren who could have popped right out of Steinbeck’s short novel. Like I said they are harder to find today but in any city they are still trying to hold on against gentrification, against scorn, against the ill-will of proper society.             

So what Steinbeck provides in his little novel is a little, sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic and sometimes bizarre look at how the fellahin world survived day to day in Monterey back in the days before World War II when the canneries in that local were humming, humming enough to provide work for the solid working guys, and humming enough to keep the guys Steinbeck was looking at working when they wanted to work. Of course it all depended on the sardines, sardines, and more sardines so a town like Monterey would have more than its fair share of drifters, casual labor, and con men coming through. Now all that is gone, has been gone for a long time since the ships went elsewhere, or the sardine supply went out of fashion or dwindled and now the Row is strictly a themed-tourista attraction with shops and sightseeing stuff and upon recent inspection not a drifter, grifter, or midnight sifter within those few streets which formerly provided the life-line to the skid row denizens. But Steinbeck knew the place when it was jumping with all kinds of interesting characters and gave us some well-thought out vignettes based on those few streets.       

Of course the central figure, Doc (who may or may not have had an appearance like Nick Nolte who played the role in the loose 1980s film adaptation of the book), was not a fellahin at all but a college guy, a rather hard-working small businessman specializing in providing marine specimens to a waiting world for whatever reason people would want to experiment on such sea critters. And right next to Doc in hard-earned, hard-working respectability was Lee Chong, owner of the local mini-Wal-Mart of his day but most importantly, for those on the edge of society, those very casual workers, those guys who like to sit around and think about how to cut the corners, a source of credit to hold them over until… Up to a point. And right next to Doc and Lee in the hard-working ethos was Dora, who ran the fairest, easiest, best kept little whorehouse in town.

After those three though everybody else of any consequence to the story was strictly from hunger, strictly from cheap street, strictly from skid row, strictly, oh well, that is enough strictlys. And it is the antics of those denizens, the aforementioned Mack, Hazel (a guy, and how he got that name is a long story so let’s just keep it he was a guy, alright), Henri, Eddie, Jones and their hangers-on who drive the story, drive Doc actually to despair, delight, anger, humility, dismay, confusion, and about seven other emotions before they are done.     

See everybody liked Doc (a few loved him, and not just the unacknowledged women whom he bedded anonymously to the sounds of classical music coming from his gramophone in the wee hours) and since he was a key “go to” guy for every problem in their fellahin world they wanted to do something for him, show him he was aces with them. But like a lot of skid row denizens who have a hard time with the minutia of daily life this crew acted like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Balled up every attempt to honor Doc.     

Get this, one of the central projects of the book is a couple of attempts to throw a party for Doc. Of course guys with no dough, no way to get dough easily, no place, no presentable place for the party except to have it at Doc’s, and, let’s face it had the jitters from drinking lots of rotgut liquor (you know, Ripple, Thunderbird, one whiskey they called “Old Tennis Shoe,” one guy, a substitute bartender, Eddie, even put the night’s customer’s leavings in a jug so who knows what to call that) have no business, no righteous business planning anything as elaborate and delicate as a party. But they tried, tried to raise dough by hunting for frogs which Doc was willing to pay for in his business, tried to hold their hands off the liquor waiting for Doc to return from out of town but as all such things must go they wound up destroying Doc’s place. Needless to say he returned and was mad as hell over the destruction. Of course that did not stop the guys from giving it another try after Doc put the deep freeze on them, and on the town it seemed. This time Doc was ready though, ready to cut his losses in any case, and while this party created almost as much destruction as the first Doc brushed it off, took the good intent at face value. Yeah, Steinbeck gives us some days in the life of the fellahin, and a well-written song to them too.