John Steinbeck
Sweet Thursday
Prologue[2]
One night Mack lay back on his bed in the Palace Flop house and he said, “I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row.[3] I would of went about it different.”
And after a while he rolled over and raised his head on his hand and he said, “I guess I’m just a critic. But if I ever come across the guy that wrote that book I could tell him a few things.”
“Like what?” said Whitey No. 1.
“Well,” said Mack, “like this here. Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.”
“Go on,” said Whitey No. 1.
“Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing—I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too,” he went on. “I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it—but not too much of that.”
“You sure are a critic,” said Whitey No. 2. “Mack, I never give you credit before. Is that all?”
“No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”
Eddie said, “Mack, if the guy that wrote Cannery Row comes in, you going to tell him all that?”
Whitey No. 2 said, “Hell, Mack can tell anybody anything. Why, Mack could tell a ghost how to haunt a house.”
“You’re damn right I could,” said Mack, “and there wouldn’t be no table-rapping or chains. There hasn’t been no improvement in house-haunting in years. You’re damn right I could, Whitey!” And he lay back and stared up at the canopy over his bed.
“I can see it now,” said Mack.
“Ghosts?” Eddie asked.
“Hell, no,” said Mack, “chapters….”
1
What Happened In Between
When the war came to Monterey and to Cannery Row[4] everybody fought it more or less, in one way or another. When hostilities ceased everyone had his wounds.
The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons, but that didn’t bring the fish back. As with the oysters in Alice,[5] “They’d eaten every one.” It was the same noble impulse that stripped the forests of the West and right now is pumping water out of California’s earth faster than it can rain back in. When the desert comes, people will be sad; just as Cannery Row was sad when all the pilchards[6] were caught and canned and eaten. The pearl-gray canneries of corrugated iron were silent and a pacing watchman was their only life. The street that once roared with trucks was quiet and empty.
Yes, the war got into everybody. Doc[7] was drafted. He put a friend known as Old Jingleballicks[8] in charge of Western Biological Laboratories[9] and served out his time as a tech sergeant in a V.D. section.
Doc was philosophical about it. He whiled away his free hours with an unlimited supply of government alcohol, made many friends, and resisted promotion. When the war was over, Doc was kept on by a grateful government to straighten out certain inventory problems, a job he was fitted for since he had contributed largely to the muck-up. Doc was honorably discharged two years after our victory.[10]
He went back to Western Biological and forced open the water-logged door. Old Jingleballicks hadn’t been there for years. Dust and mildew covered everything. There were dirty pots and pans in the sink. Instruments were rusted. The live-animal cages were empty.
Doc sat down in his old chair and a weight descended on him. He cursed Old Jingleballicks, savoring his quiet poisonous words, and then automatically he got up and walked across the silent street to Lee Chong’s grocery for beer. A well-dressed man of Mexican appearance stood behind the counter, and only then did Doc remember that Lee Chong was gone.
“Beer,” said Doc. “Two quarts.”
“Coming up,” said the Patrón.
“Is Mack around?”
“Sure. I guess so.”
“Tell him I want to see him.”
“Tell him who wants to see him?”
“Tell him Doc is back.”
“Okay, Doc,” said the Patrón. “This kind of beer all right?”
“Any kind of beer’s all right,” said Doc.
Doc and Mack sat late together in the laboratory. The beer lost its edge and a quart of Old Tennis Shoes took its place while Mack filled in the lost years.
Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone. Names were mentioned sadly, even the names of the living. Gay was dead, killed by a piece of anti-aircraft fallback in London. He couldn’t keep his nose out of the sky during a bombing. His wife easily remarried on his insurance, but at the Palace Flop house[11] they kept Gay’s bed just as it was, before he went—a little shrine to Gay. No one was permitted to sit on Gay’s bed.
And Mack told Doc how Whitey No. 1 took a job in a war plant in Oakland and broke his leg the second day and spent three months in luxury. In his white hospital bed he learned to play rhythm harmonica, an accomplishment he enjoyed all the rest of his life.
Then there was the new Whitey, Whitey No. 2, and Mack was proud of him, for Whitey No. 2 had joined First Marines and gone out as a replacement. Someone, not Whitey No. 2, said he had won a Bronze Star, but if he had he’d lost it, so there was no proof. But he never forgave the Marine Corps for taking his prize away from him—a quart jar of ears pickled in brandy. He’d wanted to put that jar on the shelf over his bed, a memento of his service to his country.
Eddie had stayed on his job with Wide Ida at the Café La Ida. The medical examiner, when he looked at his check sheet and saw what was wrong with Eddie, came to the conclusion that Eddie had been technically dead for twelve years. But Eddie got around just the same, and what with the draft taking everybody away he very nearly became a permanent bartender for Wide Ida. Out of sentiment he emptied the wining jug into a series of little kegs, and when each keg was full he bunged it and buried it. Right now the Palace is the best-endowed flop house in Monterey County.
Down about the middle of the first quart of Old Tennis Shoes, Mack told how Dora Flood had died in her sleep, leaving the Bear Flag bereft. Her girls were brokenhearted. They put on a lady-drunk that lasted three days, stuck a “Not Open for Business” sign on the door, but through the walls you could hear them doing honor to Dora in three-part harmony—“Rock of Ages,” “Asleep in the Deep,” and “St. James Infirmary.”[12] Those girls really mourned—they mourned like coyotes.
1
DEDICATION: Elizabeth R. Otis (1901–81), Steinbeck’s literary agent and confidante, and cofounder in 1928 of New York literary agency McIntosh and Otis. Steinbeck’s voluminous correspondence with Otis covered thirty-seven years, from 1931 to his death in 1968; a sampling is available in
2
PROLOGUE: Originally titled “Introduction Mack’s Contribution,” a much longer version of the prologue (156 lines long as opposed to 47) appears in the original autograph manuscript, the typed manuscript, and the unrevised galley proofs of
3
that book
I used the laboratory and Ed himself in a book called
4
Cannery Row: Site of numerous fish canneries, fish reduction plants, and processing and packing houses along Ocean View Avenue, Monterey. The street was renamed Cannery Row in 1958. That section of town was called New Monterey, which, Susan Shillinglaw explains in
5
“As with the oysters in
6
pilchards: California sardine
7
Doc: Marine biologist, pioneering ecologist, and intellectual polymath Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (1887–1948) was the model for Steinbeck’s fictional Doc. Steinbeck’s portrayal of Doc is often biographically accurate regarding Ricketts’s physical gestures and appearance, his personal habits and tastes, and his cultural interests (especially in music, literature, and philosophy). Steinbeck embroiders, too: Ricketts attended the University of Chicago (1919–22) but never graduated, whereas his fictional counterpart holds a PhD from that institution. The research award Doc receives from Old Jingleballicks in chapter 37 may have been compensation for Ricketts’s failure at winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. On the other side, in order to emphasize Doc’s romantic adventures, Steinbeck ignores Ricketts’s role as a husband and a father to three children from his marriage to Anna “Nan” Maker in 1922. (The couple later separated but were never legally divorced.) “Half-Christ and half-goat,” Steinbeck summed him up in his 1951 elegy “About Ed Ricketts,” itself an exercise in paradox, selective memory, and impressionism. Steinbeck’s eighteen-year relationship with Ricketts was profoundly beneficial, as Richard Astro established in
8
Old Jingleballicks: Eccentric Old Jay’s prototype has never been positively identified by scholars, though it is possible he was in some way connected with Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, perhaps its onetime director W. K. Fisher, who was initially critical of the quality and nature of Ricketts’s scientific work. In “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), Steinbeck says only that Ricketts “hated one professor whom he referred to as ‘old jingleballicks.’ It never developed why he hated ‘old jingleballicks’ ” (p. xviii).
9
Western Biological Laboratories: Doc’s business was modeled on Edward F. Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Laboratories, cofounded in 1923 in Pacific Grove with Albert Galigher (his former University of Chicago roommate). In the late 1920s, Ricketts, by then the lab’s sole owner, moved the business to 740 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey. Later, the street was renumbered, then renamed, with Ricketts’s lab becoming 800 Cannery Row. The building, now a private social club, still stands. Recently it received a California Governor’s Historic Preservation Award.
10
our victory: Victories by Allied forces over Germany and Japan that ended World War II took place in May and August 1945.
11
Palace Flop house: A shed, once owned by Horace Abbeville and used to store fish meal, that figures prominently in
12
“Rock of Ages…St. James Infirmary”: “Rock of Ages” (1776) written by Augustus M. Toplady; “Asleep in the Deep” (1897) written by Arthur J. Lamb, with melody by Henry W. Petrie; “St. James Infirmary,” a folk song of indeterminate authorship, was recorded by many artists, including Louis Armstrong in 1928.