{hundred things} passage 001: Cannery Row
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem,
a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a
tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row
is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and
rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and
weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of
corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and
whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and
laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are,
as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers,
and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody.
Had the man looked through another peephole he
might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs
and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
I'm going to keep my opening statement short and to the point:
This is my favorite passage of anything I've ever read.
It was four years ago, give or take a few months, when my American Lit teacher handed out copies of Cannery Row to everyone in the class -- and it was a big class, double the amount of students since it was a joint history-lit block period -- and then read us the preface of the book.
I remember that he had turned off the lights -- not a big deal, since the room was double the size of a normal room, and had large windows on the western wall -- and he had moved himself to the corner of the room, removing himself from the picture as much as he could. I remember appreciating how well he read it.
I don't remember what my reaction was, that first time hearing, that first time re-reading it on my own.
But over the years, it's stuck with me.
I've read it, and re-read it, and re-read it again, more times than I can remember. On more than one occasion, I've read it aloud to myself, just to feel the words on my tongue, because they are good words.
And it's a stupid simplistic clause, to say they're good words, but it's true. Having had slogged through The Pearl for seventh grade ALA and The Moon Is Down because I liked the title, I hadn't actually thought that highly of Steinbeck's work, but four years and counting and I have not encountered a passage that resonated with me as much as this has, never have I seen a passage that is so wonderfully and meticulously crafted to the point where it reads flawlessly.
And this, to me, is flawless. For me, I sometimes think that part of writing well is knowing what to do, but also knowing what not to do. And to me, the most important thing he does not do is that he does not say "Cannery Row in Monterey, California [...]." He knows the flow of the passage, he knows the shape of the first line. With the repetition of "in" and then "a" in the first sentence, it allows for the repetition of "and" in the rest of the passage, and he knows when to use commas and when to use 'and' because he knows this passage. It's crafted perfectly, from the short one word (one quality) descriptors in the first sentence, to the more flowing gathered and scattered second sentence, to spacing out the quotes into a sentence each.
And it is beautiful, because Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, but it's the same for the book itself -- it's a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. And how he can describe the setting, and be describing the characters, and secretly be describing his own novel absolutely astounds me.
One paragraph, four sentences, one hundred-fiteen words, and each word is a good word. There is not one word, one comma out of place, everything just flows together perfectly.
And I'm not going to lie and say I want to write like John Steinbeck, but I'm not going to lie and say Cannery Row hasn't influenced my writing. The way he sculpts his sentences, descriptor after description, stream of conscious that is in equal parts dreamy and solid, how his descriptions can be blunt but not lacking in emotion, yeah, not gonna lie, I'd like to be able to do that (better). I'd like to evoke a fraction of what the single passage above could evoke from me.
But my own desires and ambitions are periphery, and afterthought once I've put the book down, because while I'm reading, I'm very much there, amongst the tin and iron and rust and splintered wood...