Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin Twentieth-Century… (original 1962; edition 1997)

I'm not much of a Steinbeck fan, not since I was assigned The Red Pony in junior high and hated it so much. I'd tried other books of his, but didn't finish.

This was different. I loved this trip, this view of America, this man and his dog. I picked it up because a friend challenged me, and she was right. ( )

This is one of the books that inspired me to take to the back roads of our great country. It is must read for those of us with asphalt in our veins.
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Two segments of the book are memorable and for separate reasons. The first thing that I found intriguing was that the author divulges information on East of Eden. He self-reflects on the inspirations that brought some of those characters to life. This is much different from the East of Eden Letters, which discusses the book before it was finished and published. Secondly, the author's meditation on civil rights is honest and filled with trepidation. ( )

this was a hard one for me to rate, because there are parts of this book that i really enjoyed, and then parts that i really wasn't that into. and i'm biased, because steinbeck is one of my favorite authors. that said, this is not a novel but an accounting of a drive he took across america, to reacquaint himself with the people and the country that are the subject of his writing. so it's a book that teaches not just about what steinbeck wants to talk about, but also about steinbeck as a person; i learned that while i love steinbeck the writer, i wouldn't really like steinbeck the man very much. i can live with that, and i suppose that i can even live with his racism because this was written in 1960 and because he was obviously so much less racist than a lot of the country at that time.

this book does do something for me - makes me really wonder what you'd see and encounter retracing his drive 50 years later. he was shocked at the change in america that occurred in the 20 years that he'd spent writing about her in new york. i wonder if the places of nature that he described are even in existence anymore. he avoided highways and thoroughfares for a good part of his trip (because you can drive through an entire state without seeing any of it that way) and i wonder if you can even make this drive today without them.

a few quotes, 2 of which are hints of the changes we've seen in 50 years.

"I've seen many migrant crop-picking people about the country: Hindus, Filipinos, Mexicans, Okies away from their states. Here in Maine a great many were French Canadians who came over the border for the harvest season. It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by people not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat."

"Some years ago at Abercrombie and Fitch I bought a cattle caller..."

"...what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all." ( )

In 1960, when John Steinbeck was 58 years old, ill with the heart disease which was to kill him eight years later and rather discontented with life, he decided to embark on a road trip around the United States in a fitted-out pick-up truck, accompanied by his standard French poodle, Charley. Steinbeck’s plan was to re-connect with the America which had informed his fiction and to assess how much it had changed over the years.

This book is the result of that trip: part memoir, part travelogue, part philosophical treatise … and part fiction. Just how much of the narrative is fiction rather than fact has been the subject of investigation and discussion in recent years, much of it instigated by the work of journalist Bill Steigerwald, who recreated Steinbeck’s trip and exposed what he argues to be the fallacies in the narrative. This article in the New York Times summarises Steigerwald’s findings and typing Steigerwald’s name into any reliable search engine will locate a range of Steigerwald’s writings on the issue, as well as some responses to his position on the book.

While I've read Steigerwald’s conclusions about Steinbeck’s journey with interest, it matters little to me that the work has been edited in such a way as to make it look like Steinbeck and Charley were travelling alone almost all the time, whereas Steinbeck’s original manuscript (held at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City) shows that Steinbeck’s wife Elaine was with him for much of the time and that he probably spent more than half the nights he was away sleeping in hotels rather than in the truck. Likewise, it matters little to me that Steinbeck’s reported conversations with people he meets on the way are fiction rather than reportage.

In relation to this, the fact that Steinbeck preserved and then donated his manuscript indicates that he was not concerned that readers might discover that there was more (or possibly less) to the journey than appears in the book. Further, the narrative itself is full of disclaimers. Steinbeck does not claim that the book is a day-by-day, diary-style account of his journey. Rather, what he conveys is a range of impressions on a number of topics, some insights into issues he considered important and some at times painful self-reflection, all conveyed in Steinbeck’s powerful yet accessible prose. On some matters Steinbeck was ahead of his time. For example, what he wrote about the destruction of the environment and the overuse of packaging products (“The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”), expressed what I doubt was a matter of widespread public concern as early as 1960.

Other parts of the narrative are much more personal. Steinbeck’s encounter with old Latino drinking buddies in a bar in Monterey is particularly poignant. As Steinbeck’s friend tries to persuade the New York resident to come “home”, Steinbeck names all of their friends who have died and concludes that [a:Thomas Wolfe|7921|Thomas Wolfe|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1188854076p2/7921.jpg] was right: “You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory."

Possibly the most powerful incident in the book is Steinbeck’s witnessing of the “cheerleaders” in New Orleans – a group of women who stood across the street from William Frantz Elementary school and yelled obscenities at Ruby Bridges - the first black child to attend the all-white school - and at the few white parents who did not comply with the white boycott of the school. Ruby, who had started at the school only a week or two before Steinbeck was in New Orleans, was escorted to school by federal marshalls. Her ordeal is recorded in this painting by Norman Rockwell.

Shortly after witnessing the behaviour of the cheerleaders, Steinbeck decided to cut his journey short and head straight back to New York City. The narrative gives the strong impression that the incident left him heart-sick and distressed.

Overall, whatever may be this book’s shortcomings as a piece of travel reportage, it's a moving and engaging piece of writing. Steinbeck had become rather a cranky old man by the time he embarked on the journey, and was an even crankier old man by time he finished it. He was certainly no longer the novelist at the peak of his powers. But there’s still passion, warmth and humour in his words and plenty for the reader who loves Steinbeck’s writing to engage with. And there's Charley. Charley is wonderful.
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