A Few Selections from John Steinbeck

Modern Day Monterey, photo courtesy http://pdphoto.org/   Thanks, Jon!

TORTILLA FLAT - John Steinbeck (207)
©1935 This is an early novel of Steinbeck’s, and the one that put him on the road to literary success. The author based his characters on actual people he knew and liked, but the book is still being criticized as a stereotypical view of Hispanics as drunk and lazy.

The dialog of the characters is also strange. They use words like “thee,” “thou” and “thine,” which threw me off a little, because Mexican-Americans don’t speak like that.  In the author’s biography I read recently, it said that this book was based on the Arthurian legends that Steinbeck read and enjoyed so much as a boy.

That said, the story is not much of a story, but more of a character sketch: in this case, the character is Tortilla Flat, a shabby village on the outskirts of Monterey, California where the jobless and homeless and poor paisanos live a hand-to-mouth existence. The reader gets to know the parish priest, shady ladies, local business people, and a band of drunken, petty thieves quite well.

Danny is a young man who returns from service in WW1 to find that he has inherited two houses in Tortilla Flat from his grandfather. He invites a friend to rent one of his houses, and the friend invites a friend, and the house gets sublet a number of times, but nobody pays any rent. When the house accidentally burns to the ground, its occupants move in with Danny. At any one time there could be 6 men and 5 dogs living in Danny’s house. Only Danny has a bed. Everyone else sleeps on the floor.
This set-up reminds me of the hippie communes of the late 60s. Somebody would rent a house, then invite a friend to share the rent, who invites a friend, and pretty soon you have one crowded house where nobody is working or paying rent. Instead they’re partying all day and night.

Steinbeck’s little round-table group spend much of their time drinking wine, chasing women, and gossiping about their Tortilla Flat neighbors. Except for occasional work cutting squid for Chin Kee, all these friends are unemployed. They cheat, borrow, beg or steal whatever they need from their neighbors. Their principal activity is getting drunk together.

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking, “Come on, somebody do something!” But by the time I got to the end I realized that I was only reading it superficially, for a plot. So much more is being said here about friendship, loyalty, love, hard times, alcoholism, etc. The characters are well-drawn, lovable bums and the story is lightened with comedy, sharpened with drama, and sweetened with romance. The ending was a surprise to me. I think this is a book I might like to read again someday. I’d also like to see the old 1942 Spencer Tracy movie of it.


CANNERY ROW - John Steinbeck (196)
©1945 This book reminded me a lot of Steinbeck’s earlier novel, Tortilla Flat, except that it is a bit longer and the plot is more involved. Both books were set in the same area (Monterey, California), different neighborhoods, different people. They both featured the lives of the Depression-era poor. Tortilla Flats had a group of six homeless, shiftless vagabonds and five dogs living in one house. Cannery Row had five men and one dog sharing an abandoned warehouse they fixed up and named the Palace Flophouse and Grill. The theme of both books seems to be “Let’s Party!” and even though the characters couldn’t afford to, they found ways to have fun despite the bad times they were going through.

I think the reason Steinbeck was such a brilliant writer is because he wrote about what he knew. He was born in nearby Salinas and lived much of his life in the Monterey area. He got to know the people. One of the main characters in this book, a marine biologist named Doc, is based on his good friend Ed Ricketts who collected and sold marine specimens. Steinbeck often helped him on his collecting trips to tide pools, so he was able to write about such a life convincingly. All of the characters in this book, from Mack and the Boys to shopkeeper Lee Chong to Dora, the outrageous madame of the Bear Flag “restaurant,” are so finely rendered, as is the landscape of the Monterey area and the waterfront district called Cannery Row.

Tortilla Flat was a simple, comedic sketch of a neighborhood and some of its residents. Cannery Row was more like a string of short stories that came together as a heart-warming novel of a poor neighborhood, filled with interesting people, plenty of humor, and friendship. Of the two, I recommend Cannery Row as an introduction to Steinbeck’s literary brilliance.

THE MOON IS DOWN - John Steinbeck (188)

©1942  This minor novel by Steinbeck is a war novel in which the townspeople of an occupied village in Northern Europe resent being taken over by a foreign army. Although he doesn’t name the country, it’s presumed to be Norway, and the town is a strategic coastal shipping center for the coal region. It is also assumed that the invaders are the Nazis.

In 1945, Steinbeck received the Haakon Vll Cross of Freedom for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement. While not my favorite of his many works, it was still good reading.