The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  There are about thirty people in Ring’s. Solid bald men; younger men in dark glasses; middle-aged ladies in suits; an intense young woman in a check suit and matching deerstalker cap; a mother of two, with the yawning two; a Chinese lady. The solemn young man with steel-rimmed glasses, drooping moustache, leather waistcoat and patched jeans is one of the Peninsula’s artists; he and his wife run an ambitious boutique called Pin Jabs. He used to cycle up to the Row from Monterey in the old days. But most of the people here are new. Many have read Cannery Row and say they adore it; but some have not read any more Steinbeck.

  The chairman, a gentle, slow-speaking sculptor of sixty-four, is one of the few people now on the Row who knew Steinbeck. He is a longtime Californian and knew Steinbeck in the 1930s, in the days of failure and poverty, when “if you didn’t know about his background you wouldn’t have known he was a writer.” Steinbeck never spoke about his work; he was, outwardly, like the people he mixed with and wrote about. But the sculptor remembers the writing of the last page of The Grapes of Wrath. The novel ends in a black night of flood, when, the world a void, her own baby born dead, her family scattered, Rose of Sharon offers her breast to a lost and starving old man.

  “I happened to be in his house that night. A little house he had then in Los Gatos. It was about three o’clock. I’d gone to bed and I heard him call out, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ I got up, everybody else got up, and he read out this last piece. The only piece I ever heard him read out.”

  The sculptor is willing to forget Steinbeck’s later books; for the early, Californian books, “when he was like in his own place,” he feels the deepest affection; and his attitude to Steinbeck comes close to piety.

  He rises now, calls the meeting to order, and asks for ideas for Cannery Row pageants or “projects” that might get financial support from the Monterey Bicentennial Committee and so get the tourists in next year.

  “The only project we have so far is getting perhaps one of the old tanks and making a little house of it and having explanatory material there about the family that lived there.” The Malloys of Cannery Row set up house in an old locomotive boiler, crawling in through the fire-door; they rented out subsidiary pipes to lodgers; but then Mrs. Malloy began to cry for curtains and nagged her husband away. “Only thing we have so far. We need projects. I sure need your help.”

  “I’ve just finished Cannery Row,” a young woman says. After such a flourish, what? She suggests “a little kind of walking tour. With a map. Have the different spots, like Doc’s place, what was there then, what’s there now …”

  “I suppose some kind of designation on the buildings.”

  “We don’t want to get too historical.”

  The girl in the deerstalker suggests a tour of the surviving cannery.

  “You mean the sequence of the machinery. Where the fish came in, where they went out …”

  “What we want is a brochure like the Hearst Castle—”

  “This isn’t a Hearst Castle. This is spread out a little.”

  “—simultaneously bringing out the historical aspect.”

  Speech is slow, lingering. The ideas come slowly, linger, fade. A Steinbeck film festival. Steinbeck plays. The hiring of a “colourful character” to wander about the Row. Each shop featuring one Steinbeck book.

  “If there could be a trade fair,” the girl from Pin Jabs says.

  “We have a lot of vacant lots. A lot of the action of the book took place in vacant lots, and—”

  “Things happen in the vacant lot, and we get no activity at the other end. We want something that will give complete activity from A to Z.”

  “Something more like Doc’s Birthday. Let Cannery Row be Cannery Row, and downtown be downtown.”

  “You’re talking about something that’s got to have some life going in it for three, four months.”

  “… dancing in the streets.”

  “For three, four months?”

  “… in the empty lots. Every two hours have a different band.”

  “Trouble is, we talk about sunny California. But it gets pretty cold at nights.”

  “They could have like a pass to Cannery Row. It could cost five dollars and they could get a drink in the different places. A pass. The Gold Key of Cannery Row.”

  “You don’t want to scare off the elderly.”

  The mother of the two rises with the two, now quite stupefied. She says she has to go. But she wants to say one thing. She is a mother of two, plump and pretty and perfectly serious; she gets respectful attention. They’ve got to raise money for the advertising, she says; and she has a couple of suggestions. “Like have a carnival down here or something. Whole day.” She loses her audience. She suggests auctions. “The restaurant people could auction a meal.” The restaurant people don’t twitch. “The other people could auction—”

  There is a decent pause after she and the two leave.

  “We’re talking about auctions and things. We’re talking about nickels and dimes.”

  They are not tycoons, these people who have invested in the Cannery Row name; they are a little like people infected by the atmosphere which they are promoting. They call themselves “the little people.” The big people are offstage: the owners of the cannery buildings, investors in real estate, to whom the rents and a percentage of the profits go. Older, non-tourist businesses might go on. Like the Natural Science Establishment, which for more than a decade has been offering embalmed cats, among other things. “We can make immediate shipment of any quantity. All our embalmed cats are shipped in waterproof plastic bags.” But for the last six or seven years the little people have been coming and going with their boutiques and batiks. Where is yesterday’s “Den of Antiquity”? Can “Anti-macassar Factory and Psychedelic Tea Cozies” depend on its sense of fun? Not all ventures on the Row last; at least one sculptor has hanged himself.

  In fifteen years, when the leases begin to run out, the high-rise hotels will go up on this reclaimed bit of pretty Californian coastline. But by that time the Cannery Row myth, which the busy little people have created, will have grown hard.

  MYTHS grow fast here. California, of the sun and the fruit and the cool Pacific shore, is where Americans go when they have been weakened by America. And the twenty-five or thirty square miles of the Monterey Peninsula are special. “It seems,” says Wesley Dodge, one of the new “big people” of the Row (he’s made eighty times his investment in cannery buildings and machinery), “it seems like there’s always been a group or something here that’s anti to what the mass is interested in.” There have been beatniks and hippies. (“Hippies have money,” the girl from Pin Jabs says, with respect and hope.) In the old days it was the bums with their “bindles,” riding the freight cars to the Peninsula from all parts of the country.

  And not only bums and beatniks. Many years ago a visiting Hindu yogi reported that the vibrations at Pacific Grove, to the west of Monterey—it begins where Cannery Row ends—were as good as anything he had found in the Himalayas. The leading bookshop in Monterey, among the restaurants and gift-shops on Fisherman’s Wharf, is mystically inclined. And something of mystic exhilaration remains in the ordered pinewoods and timber lodges of Asilomar, a noted conference centre, where even on this Fourth of July weekend they are gathering for a Philosophical Roundtable.

  Bang! Boom! With AURAS flashing, sparkling and colorful as Fourth of July skyrockets, here we are CELEBRATING our latest Conference series get-together. WELCOME EACH AND EVERYONE!! We think we’ve a joyous and full-filled PROGRAM, so once again please write down those DREAMS, VISIONS, IMPRESSIONS and share them with all of us along with that SPECIAL PAST LIFE COSTUME for our BIG PARTY NIGHT JUBILEE.

  The Roundtable’s cause is reincarnation. But the thin young girl from San Diego, whose sister was in it first, says that the aim is “to bring back like the people to God.” Her eyelids are coloured green; her painted eyebrows slant upwards in a waving line. The weekend costs forty-five dollars.

&nb
sp; Pacific Grove also has a famous festival in honour of the Monarch butterfly; a legend has been worked out which involves a lost princess and her sorrowing Indian subjects. Just to the south of the vibrations and the butterflies is an area of golf courses and country clubs dedicated to Treasure Island. Stevenson came to Monterey as a young man and used the topography of part of the Peninsula in that book; everything is appropriately named. And then there is Carmel-by-the-Sea.

  If Monterey, just two miles away, is Mexican, then Carmel is English. Everything in Carmel is small. The houses are small, the signs are small, the shops are small and their windows display the littlest things. The smallness goes on and on; it becomes tininess, it becomes grand; it is tininess on the American scale. On a main street a cluster of rustic doll’s houses with geraniums outside the tiny windows turns out to be an expensive motel. There are crooked little roofs, crooked little gates. A shop is called Hansel and Gretel, a house The Wooden Shoe.

  Steinbeck called them “the Pixie people of Carmel.” There was a vogue here in the 1920s for doll’s houses for real people. There are no street lights in Carmel, no postal deliveries; the houses have no numbers; and there is a fiercely protective city council. The whole elfin English thing has become confused with an ideal not so much of literature and art as of the literary and artistic life, of culture flourishing in a certain “atmosphere” and expressing itself in a separateness from commercial America. The place is a raging commercial success. Four million tourists come every year; people come back again and again. There are 150 shops and boutiques. Every block of the rustic shopping centre is cross-hatched, sometimes on more than one level, with arcades, each with its directory of linked wooden slabs hanging from a wrought-iron standard.

  Carmel deals, above all, in art. In galleries that look like those in Bond Street, in glass-fronted studios that are like film-sets, answering every concept of the glamour of the artistic life, waves break on rocks in sunlight and moonlight, at sunrise and sunset; Monterey cypresses bend before the wind in every twentieth-century idiom. “Verdult Art Gallery presents a showing of Dutch Master Paintings by William Verdult.” “The immediate acceptance of her work by the public brought her to the decision that the painting profession was to be hers and her speciality in the art field was to be the ever present challenge of an ever changing sea.” “While in high school, Garcia worked … for Ed Ricketts, the noted marine biologist and true-life model for ‘Doc’ in John Steinbeck’s novel, Cannery Row … Although primarily an impressionist, Garcia’s style has ranged from realism to abstraction.”

  In the setting, it is the quantity of this art, the confidence of it all, and again the quantity, that unsettle the visitor. It is as though, at its geographical limits, a culture is parodying itself: rich middle America, middle in everything, paying its holiday tribute to art, the idea of artists and freedom, and buying prettiness.

  At Seaside the blacks are starting a boycott of something. At Fort Ord, just a couple of miles away, soldiers in green fatigues are training for Vietnam. Beyond that, the endless level lettuce-fields of Salinas, the bitter landscape of stoop-labour. But America ends where the Monterey Peninsula begins. On the Peninsula all is fairyland.

  To be received into fairyland: it is a strange fate for Steinbeck, the novelist of social conscience, the angry man of the 1930s, the propagandist for the unions, the man who always scoffed at the myth-making capacity of his Peninsula. Probe among the shopkeepers and you find that Steinbeck didn’t care, after Doc’s death, what happened to Doc’s lab. Look up the files of the Monterey Peninsula Herald and you find that in 1957, when there was some talk of preservation, Steinbeck, writing from Manhattan, where he had moved, was for pulling the whole Row down.

  Or perhaps, he wrote, the canneries “should be kept as a monument to American know-how. For it was this forward-looking intelligence which killed all the fish, cut all the timber, thereby lowering the rainfall. It is not dead either. The same know-how is lowering the water-table with deep wells so that within our lifetime California will be the desert we all look forward to.”

  This is the sort of anger Monterey forgives and forgets. It is true that during the war the annual sardine catch suddenly doubled, to nearly a quarter of a million tons. But it is better for legend that the fish of Monterey should be as mysterious as the butterflies of Pacific Grove. It is better to say, as the lady from Carmel said, that “the sardines just flipped their tails and went away.”

  Steinbeck himself bears some responsibility. His sentimentality, when prompted by anger and conscience, was part of his strength as a writer. Without anger or the cause for anger he writes fairytales. He has the limitations of his Peninsula. He yielded to the success of Cannery Row; he wrote a sequel, Sweet Thursday. He parodied his charm; he turned the Row into fairyland.

  DON WESTLAKE’S mother worked in a cannery from 1936 until 1950. Westlake himself began to work part-time in the cannery cafeteria when he was twelve. He graduated from the local high school in 1952; he is now in his early thirties. Westlake’s mother and stepfather, Californian for five generations, left Monterey for Oregon last year. Westlake himself now lives in San Francisco and is a public relations man for a pharmaceutical firm.

  He is tall and lean, easy of manner, the image of the healthy, educated Californian; and his Cannery Row background comes as a surprise. But it is Cannery Row that has driven him, as, he says, it has driven many of the sons of those “Okies” who worked in the Row.

  “They weren’t all Italians and Poles. Many people don’t know that. Okie: that was the worst insult in the world. It was to be just next to an animal. But you have to be careful nowadays. The sons of those people are the leaders of California. You use the word in distinguished company and you notice strange looks.” Not all broke away. “Some of the boys I knew fell into their parents’ way of life. Some have been to jail. As far as I’m concerned they could burn the whole Row down. It’s all right for the tourists. But they and Steinbeck are romanticizing something that wasn’t there. Living in pipes and boilers. That wasn’t funny. Those people were human derelicts. They had nowhere else to live.”

  Westlake talks less with anger than with distress. He talks like a man who will never exorcize a personal hurt.

  “And the place used to stink. Not only the fish. The heads and tails they cut off and turned into fertilizer. Every cannery had its fertilizer plant. The fish came in in the morning. There were no sonic devices in those days. You could tell where the sardines were only by the phosphorescence at night. Every cannery had a special whistle, and when the catch came in the cannery would blow one whistle for their cutters and a later one for their packers. When you heard your whistle you would get up and drive down to the Row. We lived at Seaside; it was always the lower-class, working area.

  “The girls would stand at a long trough, in front of what looked like a tractor-tread. They would drop one sardine in each tread. You would start at three in the morning and go on for twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours, until the packing was finished. In the thirties the girls were paid by the can. Sometimes they got no more than twenty-five dollars a week. During the war, when the unions came in, they were paid by the hour.

  “Something you don’t hear much about now is the fish poisoning. The pilchard sardine has a toxin to which some people are allergic. The hands then become red and raw and pitted and scaled like a fish. Blood poisoning can make the hands red right up the arm. Some people lost fingers through the gangrene. In those days the only cure for this fish poisoning was to soak your hands in epsom salts. My mother never had it badly. But you would see these frightened people soaking their hands in epsom salts. They were frightened because if their hands went bad they wouldn’t get any more work for the rest of the season. And when the season was over there was no work for anyone. It was a boon to Monterey when the canneries were forced to close down and the people who were being exploited were forced to leave. Though most of those refugees from Monterey are still in packing. Fruit packing, in
the valleys.”

  The only place Westlake remembers with affection is the Bear Flag, the brothel Steinbeck wrote about, one of six on the Row at its wartime peak.

  “It was my favourite hang-out when I was five. Some nights my stepfather and I would drive up to meet my mother and we would have to wait until the packing was finished. The girls would take me in then from the car. I can’t remember what they looked like. All I remember is they were big motherly types. I was always warm and comfortable when I was there.”

  “SENTIMENTAL?” says Wesley Dodge, the post-cannery millionaire on the Row. “You going to be sentimental about whores? They’re talking about things I didn’t participate in. I didn’t participate in the whores.”

  Dodge is a fat, pink man with glasses. He is sixty-four and says he is too old to be happy; but he smiles easily. His office, in a converted cannery, is where the women’s lavatories used to be. “Twenty on that side, twenty on this side.” The purchase of this particular cannery was one of his coups. “Flause was asking two hundred forty thousand dollars. I said, ‘Mr. Flause, I don’t want to give you a price. We are too far away. Mr. Flause, all I will give you is seventy thousand dollars.’ I called on the man every day for two years. I never mentioned price again. I would go around the cannery with him, inspecting the machinery. And he would turn the motors on, just to keep everything in order. One day he put his foot on a pump and it fell over and he said, ‘Dodge, you’ve just bought yourself a cannery.’ I paid a deposit, and as I sold the machinery, I paid him.”

  If the idle canneries had come up for sale all at once, Dodge and his associates mightn’t have been able to buy the 70 per cent of Cannery Row they did buy. But the cannery owners held on, hoping that the sardine might come back. For a time some canned anchovies, labelling them “sardine-type.” “The canneries dropped over nine years. One by one.”