2,552: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.  When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.  In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.  Nothing has worked.”

Travel writing and I have a bittersweet relationship.  In a world in which I didn’t have to work for a living, didn’t have responsibilities and didn’t have a penchant for luxury hotels with cool, Egyptian cotton bed linen and cocktail bars, I would be a traveller, dragging Mrs F and mini-Falaise to all parts of the compass, just to see what’s there.  Deep down though, that kind of lifestyle wouldn’t really work for me.  I’m always glad to get home from a trip, I don’t deal well with the discomforts of travel and I don’t have the social skills that seemingly enable travel writers to get into story-worthy situations.

All that means that I love reading about travel but always suffer the contradictory pangs of wanderlust and inner knowledge that I’m just not cut out for that kind of life.  Nevertheless, travel writing remains one of my favourite genres and Travels with Charley has been a part of my collection since I first read it in the mid-1990s.  So, when the Classics Circuit announced its Steinbeck tour, I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with it.

In 1960, a depressed and ill Steinbeck, having long moved away from his roots and feeling a need to reconnect with America, bought a pick-up truck and had a small cabin built on its flat bed.  He then set off on a long loop around America with only his French poodle, Charley, as a companion.  Never revealing his own identity, he sought to meet and engage with people throughout the country.

What emerges is part travel journal, part memoir and part opinion piece.  Steinbeck notes a decline in local cultures as cities expand, with a homogenous culture spreading its wings.  He sees the beginnings of the destruction of the environment, the iniquities of racism and the growth of consumerism.

His emotional journey is a little like a drive through gentle, rolling hills.  He has moments of joy, such as his love of Montana, his pleasure at the variable weather of New England, his new impressions of San Francisco and the kindness of many of the strangers he met, like the garage owner in a nameless town in Oregon who searched and searched to find him new tires on which to continue his journey.

Of course, like the hills, his journey had valleys as well as peaks and there are episodes of palpable sadness like the visit he makes to an old hangout, Johnny Garcia’s bar in Monterey, which descends from joy to bitter recrimination as both he and Johnny realise that people change as time passes and nothing stays the same forever. He also experiences the nostalgic ache of looking into the valley where his parents’ ranch was in Northern California and remembering old times.

There is also anger, most explicitly in his description of the demonstrations against the integration of a school in New Orleans, where a gaggle of middle-aged matrons, known as the Cheerleaders, orchestrate the taunting of a tiny black child and of the white father and child who dared to defy the mob by going to school.

“But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate.  In a long and unprotected life, I have seen and  heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?”

The contrast between the powdered, supposedly God-fearing matrons of Louisiana and the tiny, frightened children, both black and white, is almost visceral.

There’s an overarching sense in Travels with Charley of the impermanence of things, of the ever-changing nature of people and places.  Maybe this is so obvious because of the changes that Steinbeck had sensed in himself with his depression, his illness and his alienation from that part of America that had driven his writings.  Steinbeck had always been a physical man and, maybe, his physical decline affected his view of the changes in America since he had last been rooted in the land:

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."

Indeed, according to Steinbeck’s son, he made his trip because he sensed he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time.  Fortunately, he was to live for another eight years and would see himself awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Earlier this year, a writer in the USA retraced Steinbeck’s journey and wrote a piece, claiming that much of Travels with Charley was made up, including the amount of time he spent apart from his wife, the amount of time he spent in his truck, Rocinante and most of the dialogue.  Indeed, there is something very stagy and artificial about many of his encounters.

But, does this matter?  I’ve always suspect that much of the best travel writing has something of the fictional about it.  I don’t really believe that all of the reported conversations can be word for word accurate or that every single encounter happened.  It doesn’t matter.  Unless a book sets out to be a factual description of a place or a piece of journalism, I’d rather read a better book that has been “enhanced” than a more mundane book that remains strictly accurate.

In the end, regardless of the facts, Travels with Charley is a beautiful, melancholic, piece of writing with flashes of humour and some serious opinions that still ring true today.

If you’d like to read more posts on Steinbeck’s works, the other tour participants today are:

Bibliographing on The Acts of King Arthur

Becky's Book Reviews on either The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden