Curtains and Community on Cannery Row
Another way of looking at how 'home' can come in different forms
I’ve been thinking it’s time to re-read the Grapes of Wrath. The refusal of the land to submit to human control and want, and the drifting of people without homes across the country, is already enough to suggest it, even before the Great Depression came roaring back to public consciousness with the news of failing banks.
Maybe it’ll end up in my reading pile, but a different Steinbeck book has been rattling around my mind even more, given the theme of recent posts. We’ve been asking questions such as, What are we willing to recognize as a house, or as a home? Are we willing to afford people the right to meet their basic human needs in public, both if they’ve no other option, or simply because we make a better world by doing so?
And Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is, in many ways, about how people not only survive but make home and community in the margins. I first read it sometime in my teens, and while there are any number of memorable scenes, it’s the image of the Malloy family in their makeshift house that has stayed with me throughout the years. Their story takes place in a very short chapter that illustrates the extent to which the emotional attachment we associate with having a home—down to strong feelings about textiles!—can occur even for structures that many would never dream of stepping foot inside. I thought it worthwhile sharing here, to aid anyone who’s never had to sleep in makeshift quarters to consider the real possibility that such places might feel like, and be, home:
CHAPTER VIII
In April, 1932, the boiler at the Hediondo Cannery blew a tube for the third time in two weeks and the board of directors, consisting of Mr. Randolph and a stenographer, decided that it would be cheaper to buy a new boiler than to have to shut down so often. In time the new boiler arrived and the old one was moved into the vacant lot between Lee Chong’s and the Bear Flag Restaurant, where it was set on blocks to await an inspiration on Mr. Randolph’s part on how to make some money out of it. Gradually, the plant engineer removed the tubing to use to patch other outworn equipment at the Hediondo. The boiler looked like an old-fashioned locomotive without wheels. It had a big door in the centre of its nose and a low fire door. Gradually, it became red and soft with rust and gradually the mallow weeds grew up around it and the flaking rust fed the weeds. Flowering myrtle crept up its sides and the wild anise perfumed the air about it. Then someone threw out a datura root and the thick fleshy tree grew up and the great white bells hung down over the boiler door and at night the flowers smelled of love and excitement, an incredibly sweet and moving odour.
In 1935 Mr. and Mrs. Sam Malloy moved into the boiler. The tubing was all gone now and it was a roomy, dry and safe apartment. True, if you came in through the fire door you had to get down on your hands and knees, but once in there was head room in the middle and you couldn’t want a dryer, warmer place to stay. They shagged a mattress through the fire door and settled down. Mr. Malloy was happy and contented there and for quite a long time so was Mrs. Malloy.
Below the boiler on the hill there were numbers of large pipes also abandoned by the Hediondo. Toward the end of 1937 there was a great catch of fish and the canneries were working full time and a housing shortage occurred. Then it was that Mr. Malloy took to renting the larger pipes as sleeping-quarters for single men at a very nominal fee. With a piece of tar paper over one end and a square of carpet over the other, they made comfortable bedrooms, although men used to sleeping curled up had to change their habits or move out. There were those too who claimed that their snores echoing back from the pipes woke them up. But on the whole Mr. Malloy did a steady small business and was happy.
Mrs. Malloy had been contented until her husband became a landlord and then she began to change. First it was a rug, then a wash-tub, then a lamp with a coloured silk shade. Finally, she came into the boiler on her hands and knees one day and she stood up and said a little breathlessly: "Holman's are having a sale of curtains. Real lace curtains and edges of blue and pink — $1.98 a set with curtain rods thrown in.”
Mr. Malloy set up on the mattress. “Curtains?” he demanded. “What in God’s name do you want curtains for?”
“I like things nice,” said Mrs. Malloy. “I always did like to have things nice for you,” and her lower lip began to tremble.
“But, darling,” Sam Malloy cried, “I got nothing against curtains. I like curtains.”
“Only $1.98,” Mrs. Malloy quavered, “and you begrutch me $1.98,” and she sniffled and her chest heaved.
“I don’t begrutch you,” said Mr. Malloy. “But, darling—for Christ’s sake what are we going to do with curtains? We got no windows.”
Mrs. Malloy cried and cried and Sam held her in his arms and comforted her.
“Men just don’t understand how a woman feels,” she sobbed. “Men just never try to put themselves in a woman’s place.”
And Sam lay beside her and rubbed her back for a long time before she went to sleep.”
The story gets a bit of follow-up in the next chapter:
Mack went out and he teetered down the chicken-walk and across the track. Mr. Malloy was sitting on a brick in front of his boiler.
“How are you, Sam?” Mack asked.
“Pretty good.”
“How’s the missus?”
‘Pretty good,” said Mr. Malloy. ‘You know any kind of glue that you can stick cloth to iron?”
While I always enjoyed this scene, I had forgotten that Steinbeck revisits the same vacant lot toward the novel’s end, giving us a parallel quest for home. Only it’s not humans who find the lot a more than fitting place to dwell:
CHAPTER XXXI
A WELL-GROWN gopher took up residence in a thicket of mallow weeds in the vacant lot on Cannery Row. It was a perfect place. The deep green luscious mallows towered up crisp and rich, and as they matured their little cheeses hung down provocatively. The earth was perfect for a gopher-hole too, black and soft and yet with a little clay in it so that it didn't crumble and the tunnels didn't cave in. The gopher was fat and sleek and he had always plenty of food in his cheek pouches. His little ears were clean and well set and his eyes were as black as old-fashioned pin-heads and just about the same size. His digging hands were strong and the fur on his back was glossy brown and the fawn-colored fur on his chest was incredibly soft and rich. He had long curving yellow teeth and a little short tail. Altogether he was a beautiful gopher and in the prime of his life.
He came to the place over-land and found it good and he began his burrow on a little eminence where he could look out among the mallow weeds and see the trucks go by on Cannery Row. He could watch the feet of Mack and the boys as they crossed the lot to the Palace Flophouse. As he dug down into the coal-black earth he found it even more perfect, for there were great rocks under the soil. When he made his great chamber for the storing of food it was under a rock so that it could never cave in, no matter how hard it rained. It was a place where he could settle down and raise any number of families and the burrow could increase in all directions.
It was beautiful in the early morning when he first poked his head out of the burrow. The mallows filtered green light down on him and the first rays of the rising sun shone into his hole and warmed it so that he lay there content and very comfortable.
When he had dug his great chamber and his four emergency exits and his waterproof deluge room, the gopher began to store food. He cut down only the perfect mallow stems and trimmed them to the exact length he needed and he took them down the hole and stacked them neatly in his great chamber, and arranged them so they wouldn't ferment or get sour. He had found the perfect place to live. There were no gardens about, so no one would think of setting a trap for him. Cats there were, many of them, but they were so bloated with fish-heads and gus from the canneries that they had long ago given up hunting. The soil was sandy enough, so that water never stood about or filled a hole for long. The gopher worked and worked until he had his great chamber crammed with food. Then he made little side chambers for the babies who would inhabit them. In a few years there might be thousands of his progeny spreading out from this original hearthstone.
But as time went on the gopher began to be a little impatient, for no female appeared. He sat in the entrance of his hole in the morning and made penetrating squeaks that are inaudible to the human ear but can be heard deep in the earth by other gophers. And still no female appeared. Finally in a sweat of impatience he went up across the track until he found another gopher-hole. He squeaked provocatively in the entrance. He heard a rustling and smelled female, and then out of the hole came an old battle-torn bull gopher who mauled and bit him so badly that he crept home and lay in his great chamber for three days recovering and he lost two toes from one front paw from that fight.
Again he waited and squeaked beside his beautiful burrow in the beautiful place, but no female ever came, and after a while he had to move away. He had to move two blocks up the hill to a dahlia garden where they put out traps every night.1
The parallels and lessons between the passages are obvious enough. I like how (as we also discussed with with regard to John S. Taylor’s A Shelter Sketchbook) the creaturely capacity for building and home-making is clearly ascribed as a shared trait of humans and other animals. But just as shared is the need for companionship and community in some form, and despite the most palatial of gopher holes, our gopher protagonist finds himself without a home—while the Malloys certainly have a home together in their curtain-bedecked boiler.
An unspoken commonality between the Malloys and the gophers is that most forms of authority wouldn’t hesitate twice to kick either out of their living space, preempting their rights to what they have made and built in favor of other rights and wants (the cannery to its environmental waste; the gardener to their love of dahlias). We might just sit with that for a moment, and wonder if there isn’t more of a connection between our treatment of animals and other humans than we’re likely to admit on a daily basis.
It leads us to some good questions: do we think we have a right to make a home, even if it doesn’t conform to middle-class housing standards? The Malloys have found and made shelter, and the iron walls of the boiler are no tent. If you were a city official, would you force them out? Why?
And what about the gophers? The right to be, the right to a habitat, the right to be a habitat—our need for shelter is bound up with the broader push for the ability of any living thing, be it a person or a river, to exist for its own sake, and not that of capital-centered economy. But what might it look like to realize those rights?
I happen to think it could look like letting someone live in a boiler, if they chose to do so; or in a tent; or open-air under the pines in the woods (as many a character in both Cannery Row and the accompanying Tortilla Flat likewise do). Why are we so afraid to let people live and make a home in these ways?
There’s lots to unpack here. More coming soon.
Until then,
Meg
We’re taking a little license here in reproducing these passages; by original copyright law at the date of publication this would be in public domain, but litigious heirs have fought to extend the copyright even well beyond the expanded framework from the 1970s. This website is pretty small fry, though, so we’ll take that risk. Speaking of which: always feel free to link or share what’s here, as long as you provide attribution.