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.
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.
I haven’t read Travels, but this seems a pretty fair assessment, Joel. The other thing I would add is that novel writing and non-fiction writing are very different animals. Being good at one does not ensure being good at the other. C.S. Lewis is one writer I can think of who was consistently great at both.
I am naturally a novelist, and have been all my life; storytelling comes easily to me, whereas I find the creative non-fiction writing I do on Substack much more challenging (and I admire those who do it well -- like yourself!).
Thanks, Peco! They’re definitely different disciplines. I’m reading Steven King’s On Writing right now and it’s interesting how much advice simply doesn’t translate from one to the other.
With a hat tip to your own Eastern Orthodoxy, perhaps we can conclude that Steinbeck started out as a kataphatic traveller and ended up a apophatic traveller.
America is not the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Steinbeck could not find these on the backroads of America in herself.
I enjoyed the book as a travelogue as a young person. I found it very inspiring. And after a life of travels, your characterization of the book rings true. Those things you write about are what I have found in our fair land as well. Rural Nebraskans are very different from North Shore Chicagoans. Or North Coast Californians. And New JerseyIans. Ad infinitum. Yet we are all made in the image of God and are also sons of Adam. That creator God loves things that are interesting and different. And so we are as well.
I’m a Steinbeck lover (East of Eden is my favorite classic), and also enjoyed Travels with Charley quite a bit for most of the reasons you didn’t like it. But I really liked reading your perspective. You wrote convincingly—but quite not enough to change my mind!
This is a book I didn't love; it didn't seem to have any interesting takes or new ways of seeing, well, anything. It felt dry and often boring. And yet, I seem to be in the minority because so many reading friends really enjoyed it. So I keep it on my shelf because it's a "classic" even though I'm not sure I would recommend it.
I liked seeing the country with Charley and his master but wouldn’t consider it a great book. His time in New Orleans left me with nausea and fury. The vitriol aimed at a young girl trying to go to school affected me for days.
I get that. That was, I’ll say, another part of the book that felt somewhat shallow and lifeless to me. Could have been just me but it felt more like someone describing an accident he witnessed than trying to account for what was going on.
Yet the New Orleans episode -- little Ruby Bridges being escorted through an angry ugly crowd of white folk to a virtually empty school building by federal marshals -- is almost always praised by scholar/critics for its power and anger. I say it's better than most of the scenes he describes in 'TWC' because, unlike other parts he invented or tried to embellish, he was actually there in NO to see and hear and feel the actual events. He actually committed journalism that morning -- good drive-by journalism.
That’s a fair point, Bill. Sadly, it comes after a long string of letdowns that colors the episode. I kept waiting for him to do what he said he was going to do at the start. Alas, he was too tired and spent to try, apparently.
Agreed. He was lucky that the NO school integration protests caught his attention and he decided to witness the scene for himself. It saved a weak and nerdy book from being even worse because it was the only part with an edge.
It's a fascinating piece on so many levels. I was thinking about de Tocqueville before you mentioned him, and how he remains a point of (useful) reference centuries after his time in your country.
Also about why good journalists often fail to replicate their reportorial virtues when shorn of deadline and word count.
Finally, about his Russia Journal. I spent a total of ten years based out of Moscow, I am also a photojournalist, and Of Mice and Men was required reading at school in short trousers. So it should have pressed a lot of buttons.
But it failed to. Not because the often casual judgments and clichés don't sit well with today's hyper-sensitive offence-industry. But because it's quite bad reporting - Russia is a lot more complex than he seems to be willing to trouble himself about - and he also generally falls short when it comes to incisive comment or humour that isn't stale or reached for. The book falls very unhappily between genres.
I also think the collaboration is unsuccessful - like one of those 70s 'supergroups' that were far less than the sum of their parts.
Capa is a famously unreliable narrator himself - I am sure you know how he invented his persona more than once. And while the duo clearly had an uproarious time, the book doesn't bring the reader in on the fun. At least, I wasn't having as vicarious a good time as I had hoped.
But - friendship above all else, in such matters, as you say!
(The Russians have a saying: 'there can be no comrades when it comes to the matter of taste and choice of colour'.)
I think this to be it ... Steinbeck is a shallow observer and poor reporter ... Maybe also he was much older ... I can attest to this and being older you sometimes just don't care as much about these questions he/we have! Years ago I thought it would be epic to re-trace his route and blog it. I found it's been done by others. Maybe I'll revisit this idea again. Note: I believe he was not in good health during this trip. And died shortly after... like a year or two?
Boy, I’ll have to read this again. I’ve been meaning to for a while. My first travel with Charley was in late elementary school or early junior high. It was one of the first “grownup” books I read in a school context. My (mostly favorable) memory centers on how the narrator’s character/mind/personality etc. was illuminated through the medium of his encounters with other people. Plus the teacher loved it.
The audiobook with Gary Sinise as the narrator is particularly good--and you can listen to the book while you are driving around searching for America! I enjoy Steinbeck's descriptions of life in America, fabricated or not. It would be good if other authors emulated his way of describing a scene or person, even if the subject matter is not something you like. It's a book I've returned to several times.
That being said, you could do better with others, like John McPhee's Uncommon Carriers or something similar. Anything by McPhee, actually.
McPhee's "The Pine Barrens" is terrific, probably because he focused on just this one region of New Jersey which is somewhat anomalous for that state.
Also better than Steinbeck if you're taking the long route is William Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways," which coincidentally I just reviewed on my own Substack:
Not too far off the subject I hope: in the film version of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad pilots the struggling family’s truck across the Colorado River into California on an arch bridge carrying Route 66.
30 years later that same bridge, now painted white, carries only a gas pipeline, but can be seen in the background as Henry’s son Peter and Dennis Hopper blow by on I-40 riding their Harley choppers in the opening credits of Easy Rider
I recently picked up Travels With Charley to read the context of his famous quote about Texas being a "state of mind." As an immigrant, I was also excited to read about this travel through America. I enjoyed the book, but I agree with your review: Often, and at least that's how I felt regarding Texas, he seemed to have good insights, but then he failed to develop them fully. Some comments seemed artificial to me, too, like his insisting (too much) on Texans' ostentatious display of wealth—but maybe my perspective is a bit in the way, too ;)
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.
This is very helpful context. Thanks for sharing it.
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.
I grew up in Northern California and loved his reflection on the redwoods. There’s something otherworldly almost about those big trees.
100%!
I haven’t read Travels, but this seems a pretty fair assessment, Joel. The other thing I would add is that novel writing and non-fiction writing are very different animals. Being good at one does not ensure being good at the other. C.S. Lewis is one writer I can think of who was consistently great at both.
I am naturally a novelist, and have been all my life; storytelling comes easily to me, whereas I find the creative non-fiction writing I do on Substack much more challenging (and I admire those who do it well -- like yourself!).
Thanks, Peco! They’re definitely different disciplines. I’m reading Steven King’s On Writing right now and it’s interesting how much advice simply doesn’t translate from one to the other.
With a hat tip to your own Eastern Orthodoxy, perhaps we can conclude that Steinbeck started out as a kataphatic traveller and ended up a apophatic traveller.
Hilarious, yes.
America is not the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Steinbeck could not find these on the backroads of America in herself.
I enjoyed the book as a travelogue as a young person. I found it very inspiring. And after a life of travels, your characterization of the book rings true. Those things you write about are what I have found in our fair land as well. Rural Nebraskans are very different from North Shore Chicagoans. Or North Coast Californians. And New JerseyIans. Ad infinitum. Yet we are all made in the image of God and are also sons of Adam. That creator God loves things that are interesting and different. And so we are as well.
I’m a Steinbeck lover (East of Eden is my favorite classic), and also enjoyed Travels with Charley quite a bit for most of the reasons you didn’t like it. But I really liked reading your perspective. You wrote convincingly—but quite not enough to change my mind!
Here’s to disagreement, cheers
Thanks for hanging with me!
This is a book I didn't love; it didn't seem to have any interesting takes or new ways of seeing, well, anything. It felt dry and often boring. And yet, I seem to be in the minority because so many reading friends really enjoyed it. So I keep it on my shelf because it's a "classic" even though I'm not sure I would recommend it.
I enjoyed your review and perspective on Travels.
I think we’re pretty much of the same mind on it.
I liked seeing the country with Charley and his master but wouldn’t consider it a great book. His time in New Orleans left me with nausea and fury. The vitriol aimed at a young girl trying to go to school affected me for days.
I get that. That was, I’ll say, another part of the book that felt somewhat shallow and lifeless to me. Could have been just me but it felt more like someone describing an accident he witnessed than trying to account for what was going on.
Yet the New Orleans episode -- little Ruby Bridges being escorted through an angry ugly crowd of white folk to a virtually empty school building by federal marshals -- is almost always praised by scholar/critics for its power and anger. I say it's better than most of the scenes he describes in 'TWC' because, unlike other parts he invented or tried to embellish, he was actually there in NO to see and hear and feel the actual events. He actually committed journalism that morning -- good drive-by journalism.
That’s a fair point, Bill. Sadly, it comes after a long string of letdowns that colors the episode. I kept waiting for him to do what he said he was going to do at the start. Alas, he was too tired and spent to try, apparently.
Agreed. He was lucky that the NO school integration protests caught his attention and he decided to witness the scene for himself. It saved a weak and nerdy book from being even worse because it was the only part with an edge.
It's a fascinating piece on so many levels. I was thinking about de Tocqueville before you mentioned him, and how he remains a point of (useful) reference centuries after his time in your country.
Also about why good journalists often fail to replicate their reportorial virtues when shorn of deadline and word count.
Finally, about his Russia Journal. I spent a total of ten years based out of Moscow, I am also a photojournalist, and Of Mice and Men was required reading at school in short trousers. So it should have pressed a lot of buttons.
But it failed to. Not because the often casual judgments and clichés don't sit well with today's hyper-sensitive offence-industry. But because it's quite bad reporting - Russia is a lot more complex than he seems to be willing to trouble himself about - and he also generally falls short when it comes to incisive comment or humour that isn't stale or reached for. The book falls very unhappily between genres.
I also think the collaboration is unsuccessful - like one of those 70s 'supergroups' that were far less than the sum of their parts.
Capa is a famously unreliable narrator himself - I am sure you know how he invented his persona more than once. And while the duo clearly had an uproarious time, the book doesn't bring the reader in on the fun. At least, I wasn't having as vicarious a good time as I had hoped.
But - friendship above all else, in such matters, as you say!
(The Russians have a saying: 'there can be no comrades when it comes to the matter of taste and choice of colour'.)
I’m largely unfamiliar A Russian Journal. Being unwilling to “trouble himself” is a great way to describe the deficiencies in Travels.
Great piece friends should be able to have disagreements.
On that we agree!
Fine piece of writing.
Thanks!
I think this to be it ... Steinbeck is a shallow observer and poor reporter ... Maybe also he was much older ... I can attest to this and being older you sometimes just don't care as much about these questions he/we have! Years ago I thought it would be epic to re-trace his route and blog it. I found it's been done by others. Maybe I'll revisit this idea again. Note: I believe he was not in good health during this trip. And died shortly after... like a year or two?
Boy, I’ll have to read this again. I’ve been meaning to for a while. My first travel with Charley was in late elementary school or early junior high. It was one of the first “grownup” books I read in a school context. My (mostly favorable) memory centers on how the narrator’s character/mind/personality etc. was illuminated through the medium of his encounters with other people. Plus the teacher loved it.
The audiobook with Gary Sinise as the narrator is particularly good--and you can listen to the book while you are driving around searching for America! I enjoy Steinbeck's descriptions of life in America, fabricated or not. It would be good if other authors emulated his way of describing a scene or person, even if the subject matter is not something you like. It's a book I've returned to several times.
That being said, you could do better with others, like John McPhee's Uncommon Carriers or something similar. Anything by McPhee, actually.
McPhee's "The Pine Barrens" is terrific, probably because he focused on just this one region of New Jersey which is somewhat anomalous for that state.
Also better than Steinbeck if you're taking the long route is William Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways," which coincidentally I just reviewed on my own Substack:
https://lakefrontreview.substack.com/p/blue-highways-by-william-least-heat
Not too far off the subject I hope: in the film version of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad pilots the struggling family’s truck across the Colorado River into California on an arch bridge carrying Route 66.
30 years later that same bridge, now painted white, carries only a gas pipeline, but can be seen in the background as Henry’s son Peter and Dennis Hopper blow by on I-40 riding their Harley choppers in the opening credits of Easy Rider
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=neuAP3pwVRc&pp=ygUjR3JhcGVzIG9mIHdyYXRoIGNyb3NzaW5nIHRoZSBicmlkZ2U%3D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0BKlRqci4Ig
Thanks for this review!
I recently picked up Travels With Charley to read the context of his famous quote about Texas being a "state of mind." As an immigrant, I was also excited to read about this travel through America. I enjoyed the book, but I agree with your review: Often, and at least that's how I felt regarding Texas, he seemed to have good insights, but then he failed to develop them fully. Some comments seemed artificial to me, too, like his insisting (too much) on Texans' ostentatious display of wealth—but maybe my perspective is a bit in the way, too ;)
Thanks for the review. Always wanted to read that book--never have--now not sure that I'll ever bother!