Smoothing a little row over the current status of Cannery Row and the Monterey that Steinbeck knew

In writing recently about our evening on Monterey’s Cannery Row, I deplored the tawdry commercialization of the seedy locale made famous in American literature by John Steinbeck.

I complained that we had paid about $60 for a mediocre meal in a Cannery Row restaurant, admitting that the view was superb, and that the old canneries had been turned into souvenir shops and other tourist traps.

I was especially dismayed to find a bronze bust of Steinbeck by the sidewalk on Cannery Row, gleaming with dew in the street light. I wondered what the author of “Cannery Row” and “Sweet Thursday” would think of Cannery Row today.

I have been rebuked by several citizens of the Monterey Bay area, most pointing out that one mediocre meal is not a fair test of a neighborhood. My criticism was dismissed as hasty and unfair.

One said there are several fine restaurants on the row; another observed that I had no way of knowing what Steinbeck would think of it today, and that he might write a book about the way it is.

True Boardman, who left Hollywood for Pebble Beach, admits that Cannery Row is not the way it was when Steinbeck wrote about it.

“I saw it pretty much as it was in those days when I played a one-night stand in Monterey in 1926 as the very junior member of a touring company of ‘The Green Hat,’ starring Ruth Chatterton . . . and I loved the place as it was then--tawdry and stinking and noisy as Steinbeck had described it. . . .

“So today it’s different. What isn’t? Down there, what’s happened to the Hollywood Boulevard we knew as teen-agers?

“Cannery Row only a tourist trap? Its attractions ‘meretricious’ and ‘pretentious’? Come on, Jack. How can you really make a fair judgment in only a few hours? What about the places you didn’t possibly have time to see? Art galleries; some really fine shops; the Aquarium, which has been rated one of the two or three best in the world. . . .”

Boardman adds: “As for the overpriced restaurant you endured, somebody certainly steered you wrong. There is fine food and wine and at sensible prices on the row. . . .

“Come back when you have time, and we’ll prove it to you. I’ll even take you to one place where the spirit of yesterday remains tourist-proof and where it is reputed that on very special nights at very special times the ghost of Steinbeck may be sharing your table. . . . There’s still magic in the place, Jack. . . .”

I have since visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which occupies one of the old canneries, and have agreed that it is great.

I am also willing to go back to try the row again. As I said, the view from the restaurant we ate at was superb; the service was attentive if somewhat flamboyant; and as for the food, any fish can turn mediocre on any given night. The wine was excellent.

Perhaps what soured me on the evening was returning to our motel and finding we had missed the Blues Festival in the fairgrounds across the street. We could have had ribs for $2.

As for how Steinbeck might react to Cannery Row today, I have a clue from Barnaby Conrad, author of “Matador” and director of the annual Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference.

Not long before Steinbeck’s death, Conrad was with him on his first visit to the row in 24 years. They were making a film of Steinbeck’s short story, “Flight,” of which Conrad was the writer and producer.

“We shot an opening segment of John talking about the story against the Monterey coast. He dreaded going down Cannery Row, but Elaine, his beloved wife, was anxious to see it, so he went, but refused to look at most of it.

“‘Oh, look!’ she said. ‘There’s the Steinbeck theater--look, John!’

“He wouldn’t stop the car and he became very morose as we fled the town which bore so little resemblance to the one he and Doc Ricketts had loved.

“I remember the conversation on the way out along the ocean. Elaine, to change the subject, said, ‘There’s a seal! I want to be a seal in my next life. What do you want to be, Barney?’

“I replied: ‘A peregrine falcon. And how about you, John?’

“He didn’t answer for a minute and then growled, ‘A chocolate-flavored bug.’

“I laughed and said, ‘Why that?’

“He said, ‘Because Ed Ricketts once tasted a chocolate-flavored bug and though he searched the rest of his life he could never find another.’ ”

Steinbeck explained that Ricketts didn’t eat the bug, he simply tasted it in the interests of scientific analysis.

Conrad concluded: “Elaine called him her ‘Chocolate-Flavored Bug’ ever after that.”

Another aspect of Steinbeck’s nature is lighted by Jackson Leighter, a friend of the Nobel Prize-winning author.

“Your piece about Monterey brought to my mind many happy days and nights spent with John Steinbeck,” he writes. “John, as you know, actually lived in Pacific Grove.

“I particularly recall one evening with John and his fine wife at a theater restaurant in Westport, Conn. John had just moved to Long Island Sound.

“I remarked, ‘John, I don’t know how you could ever abandon Pacific Grove’s environs. It was heaven on earth.’

“John replied, ‘That is why I left. I want to save something for the next world.’

“I pray he did.”

But if Boardman is right, and Steinbeck’s ghost is haunting Cannery Row, then he must not have liked it where he went.