Cannery Row 1011Among its many strengths, one of Cannery Row’s
most impressive accomplishments is the way it
shows the interpenetration of different realms—the
human, the human made, and the natural—to create
a seamless picture of the ecology of a place where
humans live in close interrelationships with each
other and with the natural world.
Sarah Perrault
SucceSS in Cannery Row
The stories in Cannery Row revolve around a core
set of characters, none of whom are convention-
ally successful, but whose lack of standard forms of
success—financial, marital, or otherwise—demon-
strates the shallowness of an American tendency
to measure the values in terms of dollars earned or
social status attained rather than in terms of harder-
to-gauge indexes such as pleasure and intellectual
satisfaction.
The first such character, and the protagonist of
the book, is Doc, a marine biologist who owns the
Western Biological Supply. Doc lives and works in
his laboratory building at the edge of the ocean, col-
lecting, preparing, and selling biological specimens.
Although Doc runs a steady business, he measures
his happiness in the classical music he loves and
plays for other Cannery Row residents, and in how
well he understands the world. Doc, we are told,
“dug himself into Cannery Row to an extent not
even he suspected” to the extent that he becomes the
row’s “fountain of philosophy and science and art.”
He is driven not so much by orthodox concepts of
success as by his relentless curiosity: For Doc, “Once
a think got into your head you couldn’t forget it,”
and he “loved true things.”
Lee Chong, who owns a grocery store (not to
mention a warehouse occupied, rent-free, by a group
of bums), and Dora, who runs a brothel, offer other
alternatives to traditional concepts of success. Unlike
Doc, both are financially well off: Lee Chong’s gro-
cery “opened at dawn and did not close until the last
wandering vagrant dime had been spent or retired,”
and Dora’s brothel is “no fly-by-night cheap clip-
joint but a sturdy, virtuous club.” However, despite
their entrepreneurial acumen, both Lee Chong
and Dora make compromises that cost them even
greater monetary success.
Lee Chong, whose grocery employs his family
members and carries stock ranging from food to
fishing tackle, is shown again and again as balanc-
ing the virtues of having a good income and having
community ties. For example, after explaining that
Lee Chong’s store does a steady business, 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 he
had the respect of all his neighbors.” Similarly, Dora
“has through the exercise of special gifts of tact and
honesty, charity and a certain realism, made herself
respected by the intelligent, the learned, and the
kind.” Her philanthropy ranges from keeping “girls”
in her house who, as she says, “don’t turn three tricks
in a month but they go right on eating three meals
a day,” to organizing her women to help feed and
nurse the sick of Cannery Row during an influenza
epidemic.
But the characters who most obviously fly in the
face of traditional definitions of success are Mack
and his cadre of unemployed companions, whom
Steinbeck refers to throughout the book as “the
boys.” Mack and the boys live in an empty ware-
house they dub “the Palace Flophouse and Grill,”
and although they occasionally take work at the
canneries, they generally stay only long enough to
satisfy some need before returning to their leisurely
lifestyle. Mack and the boys “were not mercantile
men. They did not measure their joy in goods
sold, their egos in bank balances, nor their loves
in what they cost.” Where most other “men in fear
and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to
secure certain food, where men hungering for love
destroy everything lovable about them,” Mack and
his friends “avoid the trap, walk around the poison,
step over the noose while a generation of trapped,
poisoned and trussed-up men scream at them and
call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-
the-town, thieves, rascals bums.” While those latter
men seek conventional success, Mack and the boys
delight in watching their puppy Darling, in eating a
chicken stew cooked over an open fire, and in “sit-
ting on the pipes in the vacant lot, dangling their
feet in the mallow weeds and taking the sun while
they discoursed slowly and philosophically of mat-
ters of interest but of no importance.”