A Sketchy Parable of Our Divisive Era
Reviewing John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels with Charley in Search of America’
I’m about to step in it. I know, I know. Some of you are huge fans of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. You suggested I read it. You’ll likely disagree with some of what follows, maybe all of it. Let’s stay friends. I promise: We share more in common than one memoir. For instance, many of you are Americans. Same here. What does that mean? Funny you should ask. Beats me. Beat Steinbeck too.
Reasons unending exist to read a classic like Travels with Charley: your uncle suggested it; your bookclub selected it; you’ve had a copy for fourteen years and, well, it’s Wednesday, so why not? Maybe the best reason right now is that Steinbeck’s acclaimed memoir mirrors our own moment in useful ways.
By the fall of 1960 Steinbeck felt he’d lost touch with his country and wanted to rediscover it. What better way than by road? He purchased a three-quarter ton truck with a large camper top, which he jokingly dubbed Rocinante for his quixotic adventure, loaded it with books, booze, and other staples, and hit the asphalt with his eponymous poodle Charley for a ten thousand mile tour of the nation.
“I discovered that I did not know my own country,” he says up front. Would he find it?
Curiously, he begins dodging the question early on. “There are customs, attitudes, myths and directions and changes that seem to be part of the structure of America,” he says. “And I propose to discuss them as they were first thrust on my attention.” But then, don’t count on recognizing the resultant picture.
“I cannot commend this account as an America you will find,” he says. After all, two people can take the same journey, inhabit the same space, and walk away with different impressions, “two truths,” as he says. I respect the point—in fact, I think it’s the whole point, a thought I’ll come back to—but it feels as though he’s avoiding the very responsibility he assigns himself: America is a puzzle. I will unravel it . . . But probably not to your satisfaction.
Halfway through the account he doubles down on his evasion. “I came out on this trip to try to learn something of America,” he says, talking to Charley.
Am I learning anything? If I am, I don’t know what it is. So far, can I go back with a bag full of conclusions, a cluster of answers to riddles? I doubt it, but maybe. When I go to Europe, when I am asked what America is like, what will I say? I don’t know.
Part of the trouble is that—and here’s where I start digging my grave—Steinbeck is a shallow observer and poor reporter. For most of the drive, he skips across the surface of the country and his commentary skids along behind with only glancing penetration. Though he does report many conversations, they do little to illuminate the nation under scrutiny. This is baffling because journalism played a formative role in Steinbeck’s development as a writer. I expected more.
Steinbeck conjures no larger picture to which these conversations contribute. Pitstop vignettes feel like disconnected, one-off moments, more baffling than elucidating when laid atop each other. If you’re looking for sociology, cultural studies, psychology, or philosophy, you’ll find more of it in his novels than Travels with Charley. The promised discussion of customs, attitudes, and myths? Present but barely accounted for.
As such, it’s no surprise as he rounds third for home that he still can’t quite come up with what he set out to find. “It would be pleasant to be able to say of my travels with Charley, ‘I went out to find the truth about my country and I found it.’ . . . I wish it were that easy. But what I carried in my head and deeper in my perceptions was a barrel of worms.” And again, near the end: “The more I inspected this American image, the less sure I became of what it is.”
I take this two ways. First, as a project, Steinbeck’s journey chalks up as a failure. “Maybe understanding is possible only after,” he says. But I don’t get the impression he ever understood the trip, not in the sense of having arrived at theory, a take, or series of generalizations that would capture something essential about the nation. It proved too big for him, too messy.
There’s nothing cumulative about his insights except the several statements that he has none. The passing comments about migrant workers, economics, pollution, plastics, racism, and other issues only pass, rarely land, and don’t add up to much. You feel as though he’s tired for much of the trip and lacks the luxury of integrating anything he’s learning. He’s out of steam by the time he rolls through the Southwest and never manages to pull his thoughts together. He may be John Steinbeck, but he’s no Alexis de Tocqueville.
Second, and despite my dissatisfactions, I think we can see the book an accidental success. Steinbeck’s inability to create a coherent picture of the country should humble our assumptions such a task is possible in the first place. America remains a puzzle. That’s why none of us can agree on what it is or what it means—something worth remembering as we careen toward the next election. What’s obvious to one is illusory to another.
There really are two countries, two truths, if not infinitely more. America may represent an ideal as much as a place, but the definition has always been up for grabs and open to varying interpretations, sometimes within the same person. This shows up in Steinbeck’s own account.
“I admire all nations,” he says recalling an asinine bureaucratic skirmish at the U.S.-Canada border, “and hate all governments.” So the crusty old writer is a libertarian, maybe a conservative. No. However many passages later, we find him in a fiery debate with conservative family members while he asserts his liberal values. “Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement and venomous,” he says.
Turns out it’s all fairly complicated—within communities, within families, and within individuals. Try scaling that up to the nation and finding anything approaching coherence. Steinbeck did and failed. We seem to be failing right now ourselves. When not talking down to each other, we’re talking straight past.
But this is where I can also say Travels with Charley is genuinely successful, maybe in spite of itself. Despite convincing evidence Steinbeck embellished, even fabricated, many passages, the story shines a light on the nation in another important way: the book’s reception and ongoing popularity.
Travels was an instant success and has sold well over a million copies—not because Steinbeck could distill and display the grand themes of the country, faithfully report its culture, or offer searching analyses of its challenges, but because of his individual snapshots, all the little stories and moments with quirky, kind, hospitable, helpful, lovable, resilient characters that readers could imagine and appreciate. Those are all traits we seek in others and more or less hope to find in ourselves.
The big idea, such as it is, hovers somewhere outside and above the book itself. We don’t have to cohere or see things the same way to be admirable and even delightful to each other. Travels reminds us our differences are inherently interesting, valuable, even mutually uplifting. So, despite my personal dissatisfaction with Steinbeck’s book, it offers a decent argument for why we can still be friends, especially if you’re a raging fan.
Travels with Charley was the sixth book in my classic memoir goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve reviewed so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year:
January: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
February: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
March: Richard Wright, Black Boy
April: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
May: Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland
June: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
July: Stephen King, On Writing
August: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
September: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
October: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
November: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
December: Beryl Markham, West with the Night
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By the time he got home, the writing world was coming unwound. A few months after his trip, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide. When Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize soon after, he called his friend William Faulkner (a previous winner) for a bit of advice about what to say. Faulkner said he couldn’t offer much help because “I was drunk at the time.” In just a matter of weeks, Faulkner was dead too – mainly from drinking himself to death as F. Scott Fitzgerald did a decade earlier.
In a private journal entry Steinbeck lamented the tendency – specifically here, Faulkner – for famous writers to lose touch with mankind. He wrote
“A letter today enclosed an interview with Bill Faulkner, which turns my stomach. When those old writing boys get to talking about The Artist, meaning themselves, I want to leave the profession. I don’t know whether the Nobel Prize does it or not, but if it does, thank God I have not been so honored. They really get to living up to themselves, wrapped and shellacked. Apparently, they can’t have any human intercourse again.”
The self-destructiveness of these masters of human insight isn’t easily summarized, but considerable measure must be placed on their brooding, angst-riddled, and egotistical introspection. Steinbeck stands apart because he understood that great writing might result from a clear-eyed examination of the human heart, but none of it matters unless mankind is both reached and helped. Travels with Charley is as much fiction as non-fiction and his characters were certainly composits. The book reveals an old man grasping for life context through human connection and for that I’m grateful. He did better than most.
Thanks for this.
I hope we don't pile on John Steinbeck as he deserves for fabricating much of Travels with Charley. I discovered him along with Jack London as a young teen and California native. Loved The Pearl and the Red Pony and I resonate with his beautiful descriptions of West coast landscapes. You feel a special kinship with Steinbeck if you've played in Monterey tide pools or smelled the manure off-gassing from a Salinas lettuce field.
I loved Travels with Charley precisely because it reads as a trip rather than as an analysis. I can imagine Steinbeck, "ailing, out-of-sorts ... pretty much depleted as a novelist", according to the NYT, desperately needing to satisfy his own expectations of himself and fill the hungry maw of his publishers and public, doing what he needed to do to make his deadline and satisfy his editors. He starts off with a grand ideal, the trip disappoints, and he has to scramble. Every writer knows this feeling more or less. For me, the messiness of the book is a virtue. It doesn't excuse the fake stuff, just makes it easier to understand.