The Writer and the World (55 page)

Mailer signalled from the open car. Banning ran to confer, then came to us. “OK, we’ll meet up at 50th Street and Sixth Avenue, in front of the Time-Life Building. We’re just going to shake hands and cut the horse-shit with the motorcade.” Banning hadn’t liked the idea of the motorcade. The motorcade broke up; and in silence, without loudspeakers, the cars raced separately back to Manhattan.

The reception outside the Time-Life building was very good. Mailer, with his vision of New York as two cities, spoke passionately for the disadvantaged. But his best audience was always the middle-class, the educated, the bohemian, the people who held him in awe.

T
HEY HAD LAID IN THE BEER IN HEADQUARTERS.
The TV cameras and monitors had been installed. The last partition had gone, and at the end of the room they had built a platform, against a wall decorated with the campaign posters (already souvenirs, already being taken away by collectors). The mood was good. It was a victory mood, and victory meant not coming last.

“It’s been important to me,” Banning said, summing up the campaign. “Mailer’s obviously going to be important to American history. He’ll either be a force for enormous destruction or he’ll be one of the great builders. He clearly is going to do something more than write
The Armies of the Night.”

In the evening the hall began filling up: the media people (the TV reporters grave, aware of the envy of the young), the volunteers from the boroughs, a number of strays. There was a girl in half-Mexican, half-Hindu hippy costume sitting on the floor before a red candle. She had missed the point; she had also underestimated the crowd. The girl from New Jersey turned up with a Negro. Banning, dashing and unexpected in a pale-blue silk neckscarf, stood on the platform, like an actor in the lights, and repeatedly called for order. The results began to come in. They were as expected. Mailer was running above Congressman Scheuer, with 5 to 6 per cent of the votes; Breslin was doing even better in his contest for the Presidency of the Council: he was getting 10 per cent. There was applause and stamping.

Banning said that the building would collapse. “If you have the death wish, don’t wish it on other people.”

They were rebels, and the moment was high. But they were also Americans, careful of the self in every way, never reckless. They began to go.

At about midnight Mailer, Mrs. Mailer and Breslin came, cameras and lights preceding them. Through handshakes they walked to the platform.

“We can hardly claim victory,” Mailer said. It was their joke; victory was what they were celebrating. “Listen. You’ve been terrific. We’ve run further on less. We’ve spent one-tenth of what Wagner spent. I’ve got 5 per cent of the vote; he’s got 30. So we’ve done twice as well as he.” He was mischievous, the hero restored to his followers. Banning stood beside me, dissolving; it was as the girl from New Jersey had said.

The TV lights heightened colour, deepening the beauty of Mrs. Mailer. Mailer’s eyes showed as the clearest blue. The posters on the wall glowed. It was a narrow hall, the platform central, and on the monitor screens the scene was like something out of a well-organized film. So that this last moment of glamour linked to that other, on the steps of the Old Treasury Building in Wall Street.

One notice hadn’t been forgotten.
Anyone interested in GI Resistance work this summer please sign name …
There had been four signatures in the afternoon; now the sheet was full.

I
HAD LUNCH
with Mailer a week later. He had spent a few days in Cape Cod; he had been to the Frazier-Quarry fight the evening before; he was editing a film that day; he would soon have to start working on his moon shot articles. “That’s going to be a strange assignment. The astronauts won’t talk to me. They’re writing their own book.” His writer’s life was catching up with him again.

Politics seemed far away. But he was sensitive to the charge that he had split the liberal vote and helped the cause of the backlash. He thought that many of the people who had voted for him wouldn’t have otherwise voted. He didn’t think he had done well enough; he had lost some votes in the last week; not enough people had been reached. It astonished him that people who had shaken his hand and had been friendly hadn’t voted for him.

He said again that, becoming a politician, he had become duller.
But he understood now that politicians were serious when they spoke of “service.” A politician had to serve, had always to give himself, to his supporters, to the public. It was his weakness, for instance, that he couldn’t answer when people asked him whether he would clear their streets of garbage. He remained loyal to his ideas—the fifty-first state, power to the neighbourhoods—but he thought that perhaps another candidate, even someone very dull, might have done better politically with them.

Dull: it was the recurring word. It was as though, during the campaign, Mailer had redefined his writer’s role by negatives. He couldn’t assess the value of the campaign. “If you don’t win, you change very little.” Perhaps some of the ideas would survive: time alone would show. “Or it might just be a curiosity. Perhaps four years from now, at the next election, someone might say, ‘Remember when that writer ran for Mayor?’”

1969

A
WRITER
is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.

Cannery Row in Monterey, the one John Steinbeck wrote about, disfigures a mile of pretty Californian coastline. The canneries used to can sardines; but the sardines began to disappear from Monterey Bay not long after Steinbeck published his book in 1945; and today all but one of the canneries have closed down. The cannery buildings remain, where they have not been destroyed by fire: white corrugated-iron buildings, as squat and plain as warehouses, backing out into the sea over a low cliff, braced by timber and tons of concrete which now only blasting can remove. Some are abandoned and show broken windows; some are warehouses; some have been converted into restaurants, boutiques, gift-shops.

The old Row has gone: the stink of fish and fish-fertilizer, the cutters and packers who could work up to sixteen hours a day when a catch was in, the winos, the derelicts who slept in pipes in empty lots, the whores. It was what Steinbeck wrote about but transmuted. What remains is like a folk-memory of community, wine, sex and talk. The tourists come for the memory. The name, Cannery Row, was made official in 1958, long after the sardine went away; before that it was Ocean View Avenue. And today, in Ring’s Café next door to the Steinbeck Theatre in Steinbeck Circle—the whole complex on the site of a former cannery—the new shop-keepers and business people of the Row are meeting to talk about what they might do to get the tourists in in 1970.

Nineteen seventy is the bicentennial of the founding of Monterey by the Spaniards. Some people in Ring’s remember the centennial of 1947; that was the centennial of the American seizure. The main street of Monterey (today a wasteland, awaiting renewal) was painted gold and there was dancing in the streets. History in the Monterey Peninsula is this sort of fun. Steinbeck wrote angrily of Indian servitude and American land-grabbing; but there is a mixed-up myth here of a gay and gracious Mexican
past, of heroic Spanish missionary endeavour, and numerous Indian slaves, all converts, happily accepting the whip for religious misdemeanours. In the dereliction of Monterey every adobe from Mexican times is preserved and labelled; there is even a movement to have the first Spanish missionary, “the first Californian,” canonized. The American seizure is celebrated on the Fourth of July with a costume pageant devised by the Navy League and the Monterey History and Art Association: old-time señoritas and Yankees listening companionably to the proclamation of annexation.

Ring’s Café has been in Monterey for some time, but on the Row for just over a year. Like many new places on the Row, Ring’s honours the fishing past with a fishing net in its windows and wooden fish caught in the net. The proprietor is an old advertising man; from his café he publishes
The Monterey Foghorn
, a four-page satirical sheet whose cause is Cannery Row, gaiety and youth. Ring’s offers “beer, skittles and vittles”; it says it is “under no management” and has “the world’s cuisiest cuisine.” There are paintings; the Peninsula is full of artists. At the top of the inner wall a
trompe-l’œil
painting continues the braced timber ceiling of the cannery. And above the bar, among other posters, is one advertising “Doc’s Birthday.”

This was an event that Ring’s staged last year, to bring to life and perhaps to perpetuate something in the book. “Doc” was the marine biologist in
Cannery Row
, the educated man around whom the others idled. Mack and the boys gave a party for Doc’s birthday, and the party went predictably wild. Doc was a real person on the Row, Doc Ricketts;
Cannery Row
is dedicated to him. Steinbeck lent him money to buy the low unpainted wooden lab which is squashed between two cannery buildings and will now, as a men’s club, be preserved. In 1948 a Southern Pacific locomotive ran into Doc’s motorcar one evening on the level-crossing just above the Row, and Doc was killed. On the bar of Ring’s, below glass, is a large photograph of the accident: Doc on a stretcher in the grass, the wrecked Ford, the locomotive, the crowd.

Fact, fiction, folk-lore, death, gaiety, homage: it is unsettling. But it is how myth is made. Doc as the tallest “character” on the Row: it is as unquestioned now as the myth of gaiety. No one in Ring’s can say why Doc was such a character. He was nice to everybody, they say; he drank a lot; he liked the girls. It is the book, of course, and Steinbeck. But the book itself recedes.

There are about thirty people in Ring’s. Solid bald men; younger men in dark glasses; middle-aged ladies in suits; an intense young woman in a check suit and matching deerstalker cap; a mother of two, with the yawning two; a Chinese lady. The solemn young man with steel-rimmed glasses, drooping moustache, leather waistcoat and patched jeans is one of the Peninsula’s artists; he and his wife run an ambitious boutique called Pin Jabs. He used to cycle up to the Row from Monterey in the old days. But most of the people here are new. Many have read
Cannery Row
and say they adore it; but some have not read any more Steinbeck.

The chairman, a gentle, slow-speaking sculptor of sixty-four, is one of the few people now on the Row who knew Steinbeck. He is a longtime Californian and knew Steinbeck in the 1930s, in the days of failure and poverty, when “if you didn’t know about his background you wouldn’t have known he was a writer.” Steinbeck never spoke about his work; he was, outwardly, like the people he mixed with and wrote about. But the sculptor remembers the writing of the last page of
The Grapes of Wrath.
The novel ends in a black night of flood, when, the world a void, her own baby born dead, her family scattered, Rose of Sharon offers her breast to a lost and starving old man.

“I happened to be in his house that night. A little house he had then in Los Gatos. It was about three o’clock. I’d gone to bed and I heard him call out, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ I got up, everybody else got up, and he read out this last piece. The only piece I ever heard him read out.”

The sculptor is willing to forget Steinbeck’s later books; for the early, Californian books, “when he was like in his own place,” he feels the deepest affection; and his attitude to Steinbeck comes close to piety.

He rises now, calls the meeting to order, and asks for ideas for Cannery Row pageants or “projects” that might get financial support from the Monterey Bicentennial Committee and so get the tourists in next year.

“The only project we have so far is getting perhaps one of the old tanks and making a little house of it and having explanatory material there about the family that lived there.” The Malloys of
Cannery Row
set up house in an old locomotive boiler, crawling in through the fire-door; they rented out subsidiary pipes to lodgers; but then Mrs. Malloy began to cry for curtains and nagged her husband away. “Only thing we have so far. We need projects. I sure need your help.”

“I’ve just finished
Cannery Row,”
a young woman says. After such a
flourish, what? She suggests “a little kind of walking tour. With a map. Have the different spots, like Doc’s place, what was there then, what’s there now …”

“I suppose some kind of designation on the buildings.”

“We don’t want to get too historical.”

The girl in the deerstalker suggests a tour of the surviving cannery.

“You mean the sequence of the machinery. Where the fish came in, where they went out …”

“What we want is a brochure like the Hearst Castle—”

“This isn’t a Hearst Castle. This is spread out a little.”

“—simultaneously bringing out the historical aspect.”

Speech is slow, lingering. The ideas come slowly, linger, fade. A Steinbeck film festival. Steinbeck plays. The hiring of a “colourful character” to wander about the Row. Each shop featuring one Steinbeck book.

“If there could be a trade fair,” the girl from Pin Jabs says.

“We have a lot of vacant lots. A lot of the action of the book took place in vacant lots, and—”

“Things happen in the vacant lot, and we get no activity at the other end. We want something that will give
complete
activity from A to Z.”

“Something more like Doc’s Birthday. Let Cannery Row be Cannery Row, and downtown be downtown.”

“You’re talking about something that’s got to have some life going in it for three, four months.”

“… dancing in the streets.”

“For three, four months?”

“… in the empty lots. Every two hours have a different band.”

“Trouble is, we talk about sunny California. But it gets pretty cold at nights.”

“They could have like a pass to Cannery Row. It could cost five dollars and they could get a drink in the different places. A pass. The Gold Key of Cannery Row.”

“You don’t want to scare off the elderly.”

The mother of the two rises with the two, now quite stupefied. She says she has to go. But she wants to say one thing. She is a mother of two, plump and pretty and perfectly serious; she gets respectful attention. They’ve got to raise money for the advertising, she says; and she has a couple of suggestions. “Like have a carnival down here or something.
Whole day.” She loses her audience. She suggests auctions. “The restaurant people could auction a meal.” The restaurant people don’t twitch. “The other people could auction—”