Cannery Row: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Steinbeck introduces Lee Chong, a grocer who runs a well-stocked store, which opens early in the morning and doesn’t “close until the last wandering vagrant dime ha[s] been spent or retired for the night.” A fastidious man, Lee is not necessarily greedy, but won’t turn away from potential profits, either. However, almost everyone in Cannery Row has at one point in time owed him money, though he doesn’t make a habit of chasing them down. That said, he will stop giving them credit if their debts become too large. Lee is a good businessman, adding that when he makes mistakes in his calculations or dealings, he still manages to “turn” these “errors” to his “advantage,” though sometimes his profit comes in the form of “good will” instead of money.

One night, Lee Chong stands in the grocery store in front of the pints of whiskey (called Old Tennis Shoes). This is his customary place in the shop because he doesn’t want people like Mack and his friends to steal the liquor. On this particular evening, he contemplates a business deal he made earlier in the day, when Horace Abbeville—who has “two wives and six children” and an enormous outstanding debt at Lee’s store—walked in and said, “I guess I owe you plenty dough.” He then added, “I hate to have my kids with that hanging over them. Why, I bet you wouldn’t let them have a pack of spearmint now.” As such, he gives Lee ownership of his fishmeal storehouse, which is across the street. Lee accepts this deal and agrees to clear all of Horace’s debt.

After Lee and Horace strike this deal, Lee gives him a flask of Old Tennis Shoes, at which point Horace walks to the storehouse and shoots himself “on a heap of fish meal.” “And although it has nothing to do with this story,” Steinbeck writes, “no Abbeville child, no matter who its mother was, knew the lack of a stick of spearmint ever afterward.” Lee, for his part, feels as if a man has a “right to kill himself,” but he can’t help but think that “sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.” Feeling guilty in this way, he pays for Horace’s funeral and gives both his wives free groceries.

Having heard that Lee now owns the fishmeal storehouse, Mack comes into the grocery store to make a proposition regarding the building. He is “the elder, leader, mentor, and to a small extent the exploiter of a little group of men who [have] in common no families, no money, and no ambitions beyond food, drink, and contentment.” Despite these qualities, though, Mack and his friends don’t “destroy themselves” in their “search for contentment,” but rather pursue happiness “casually” and “quietly,” and when they attain it, they “absorb it gently.” As soon as Mack enters the grocery store, Lee scans the place to see if any of his cronies have entered with him to steal produce, but Mack comes straight up to him and asks if he and his crew can move into the storehouse since it’s empty anyway.

“We’ll keep up the property,” Mack says to Lee, insisting that he and his friends won’t let anyone “break in or hurt anything” in the storehouse. “Kids might knock out the windows, you know—Place might burn down if somebody don’t keep an eye out,” he adds. For a moment, Lee considers this request, realizing that he has no choice but to allow Mack and his gang to move in. After all, if he says no, he knows they’ll covertly break the windows themselves so that they can emphasize how important it is that Lee find someone to “watch over and preserve” the place. As such, Lee decides to grant Mack his wish, but since he must maintain his image as a businessman, he sets the rent at five dollars per week—a sum he knows Mack and his friends will never pay.

“And that was the way it was,” Steinbeck writes about Mack and Lee’s deal, adding that, although Lee never receives any money, he doesn’t feel as if he has “suffered a total loss,” for this is not the way his mind “work[s].” After all, the place doesn’t catch fire, none of the windows break, and Mack and his friends make a point of spending all their money—when they have it—at Lee’s grocery store.

Slowly, Mack and his friends begin to turn the storehouse into a functional—albeit unconventional—home. Dubbing it “the Palace Flophouse and Grill,” they decorate it with furniture that they find or steal, always making a point of painting the pieces a new color so that no one will recognize them as stolen items. “The Palace Flophouse and Grill began to function,” as Mack and “the boys” take to sitting in front of the house and looking across the lot into the windows of Western Biological, where Doc works and lives. And when Doc leaves the laboratory to buy beer at Lee Chong’s, Mack says, “That Doc is a fine fellow. We ought to do something for him.”