A Traveler's Library » John Steinbeck

Steinbeck Classic Launches Pet Travel Book Club

pen4hire — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Pet Travel Thursday

Destination: The American Road Trip

Book: Travels With Charley, In Search of America by John Steinbeck

By Edie Jarolim

John Steinbeck and Charley

Woe to the author who becomes a classic, especially one who has been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. The uninitiated reader — or the one who only knows the books assigned in high school — is likely to suspect that the author’s works are going to be Good For You, and therefore not much fun.

Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the delightful Travels with Charley in Search of America: (Centennial Edition) (Centennial Edition)by John Steinbeck, which I just read for the first time. Of course it helps that Charley is a French poodle. No book with a dog as a title character can take itself too seriously.

Steinbeck was famous for such novels as The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row by 1960, when he set off on his journey from his home on Long Island, New York, to reconnect with America. He had spent a good part of the 1950s in France and England and was worried that he had become a stranger to the country that had inspired him to write.

I was a little concerned about the book’s potential for pretentiousness when I discovered that Steinbeck had named his custom-designed vehicle — part pickup truck, part RV — Rocinante, after the horse in Don Quixote. I needn’t have worried. Steinbeck not only chose the anti-hero who tilting at windmills to emulate, but he deflates his own literary conceit early on, writing: “I do not know how many people recognized the name [Rocinante], but surely no one ever asked about it.”

The real Rocinante, in The Steinbeck Center

That this memoir is neither heroic nor macho was one of the things that surprised me most about it. I’d imagined it was going to be a less druggy, more socially conscious version of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Far from it. Along with having a dog along as a conversation opener — “A dog, particularly an exotic like Charley, is a bond between strangers” — Steinbeck observes that “the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost.” Real men don’t ask for directions, and some of the funniest scenes in this book involve Steinbeck’s doing just that. When he inquires of a taciturn Maine state trooper where Deer Island is, the trooper only points, never speaks. And to the author’s annoyance, a cook at a roadside restaurant in the Twin Cities tells Steinbeck, who has been trying to find Sinclair Lewis’ birthplace, “Nobody can get lost in Minneapolis. I was born there and I know.”

He also talks quite often about his feelings of loneliness on the road. And he clearly misses the companionship of his wife. It has been said that this is the book of an old man (although Steinbeck was 58, which as we know is the new 40). If that’s so, viva maturity.

The other thing that surprised me was how contemporary this book felt. I’d expected a world preserved in amber, a quaint report from another era. Instead, this travelogue feels completely fresh, with Steinbeck complaining about the homogenization of the country, the increase of large highways, plastic wrapping, bland food…. Of a roadside restaurant he writes:

The food is oven-fresh, spotless and tasteless; untouched by human hands. I remembered with an ache certain dishes in France and Italy touched by innumerable human hands.

At the same time, Steinbeck is willing to be open minded about many of the changes in America. He visits people who live in a mobile home and, after listening to them extol the virtues of their life, muses: “Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people…the pioneers, the immigrants who people the continent, were the restless ones in Europe.”

Steinbeck’s reflections about the nature of his perceptions also struck me as being very modern — or post modern. There are many passages that give a vivid sense of place, but there are more that talk about the nature of the travel experience itself. Steinbeck readily admits his views of nature are based on his mood:

I discovered long ago in collecting and classifying marine animals that what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of not being so external after all.

I could go on, but this is the first meeting of the Pet Travel Book Club and one of the key features of a book club is a discussion. I’m interested in knowing what you thought of the book, of course, but I’m also interested in some larger questions, spurred by an article by Charles McGrath published earlier this year in The New York Times: “A Reality Check for Steinbeck and Charley.” The gist of the article is that this memoir is really a work of fiction.

Travels With Charley Map at the Steinbeck Center

Does it matter? As a one-time literary scholar, it probably should to me but it doesn’t. I also suspect that Steinbeck might have ended up being berated by Oprah, as James Frey was, and I find that disturbing.

Do you think that the dialogue is stilted, as McGrath contends?

Do you think this is a dark book, as McGrath says?

This is an unusual book club. It is also meeting on Will My Dog Hate Me , where we will discussing the book as it relates to Steinbeck’s relationship with/depiction of Charley. I hope you’ll join us there too.

Next month we’ll be reading Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

Note from VMB: What a great choice to kick off the pet travel book club! I’ve been a real Steinbeck fan, and I’ll reply in the comment section to the latest attack on him. But for now, if you want to see more at A Traveler’s Library, these posts were popular: Cannery Row , Steinbeck and McMurtry (with my own review of Travels With Charley), and a guest post by Jessie Vogts about an interview with the author of Steinbeck’s California, a terrific guide for travelers to Steinbeck’s homeland.

All photos here were taken by Vera Marie Badertscher at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. Please do not reuse without permission. The title links to Amazon allow you to conveniently shop for Steinbeck books or anything else that strikes your fancy and at the same time earns a few pennies for Edie Jarolim. She thanks you.

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

Steinbeck and Northern California

pen4hire — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:39:13 +0000

The Great American Road Trip

Destination: Northern California (Monterey)

Book: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Monterey Bay

In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck makes poetry of an once ordinary place, Monterey California, and makes mythological figures of working men and women. (A little trick that he specialized in). In the introduction to Cannery Row, he asks: “How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise–the quality of light, the tone, the habit, and the dream–be set down alive?’

And comparing writing to his other passion, marine biology and the capture of sea creatures, he answers, “…open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.”

Cannery Row stacks up as a light weight compared to other Steinbeck novels like East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, or Grapes of Wrath, but it still tells a story about fascinating characters and shines a sharp clear light on a particular place.

A Steinbeck fan on a road trip to Cannery Row in Monterey today, will notice mostly how it no longer resembles the smelly, working fishing business of Steinbeck’s novel. Artists and sellers of cyrstals and fried clams fill Monterey’s docks instead of prostitutes, Chinese grocers, and semi-literate roustabouts. There is a Cannery Row, but it is not the hard-working, gritty place of Steinbeck’s novel. See the happy tourists spending money!

red starfish

On the other hand, you can find a tribute of sorts to Doc, the main character of Cannery Row, at the grand Monterey Bay Aquarium. Doc’s business consisted of harvesting sea animals and selling them to laboratories. Doc is based on Steinbeck’s real life marine biologist friend, Ed Ricketts. They went tide pool exploring together and took a well know trip: The Log from the Sea of Cortez .

If you take a road trip along the northern California coast, you will find Pacific Grove (butterfly migration), Monterey, and then Carmel (the quaint upscale village we visited last summer) all clustered along the shore along with Pebble Beach golf course and the Seventeen-Mile Drive. A road trip down California’s Route 1 and a stop over at the Monterey Peninsula cannot be beat, whether you are looking for a romantic getaway, a girlfriends’ weekend or a family trip.

We took our young boys many years ago and stayed in a modest cabin in Pacific Grove. Steinbeck himself lived in a modest cabin in Pacific Grove once upon a time. Nowadays you’ll have to stay farther away from the ocean to find “modest.” Nevertheless, it is a great area for beaches, golf, hiking, shopping for artsy items, eating seafood, and driving through some stunning scenery with rocky seascapes and centuries-old Monterey pines. While you are in the neighborhood, you may want to pop inland to Salinas to see the National Steinbeck Center.

The eternity of sea and impermanence of primitive sea life in tide pools permeates the story and the characters of Cannery Row. One of the attractions for me is that Steinbeck gives his full attention and sympathy to characters that other writers would turn away from as unworthy or repulsive.

For instance, you have to love Dora Flood, the madame with “flaming orange hair”, who runs a down-at-the-heels, but clean whorehouse. She has, Steinbeck says, “through the exercise of special gifts of tact and honesty, charity and a certain realism, made herself respected…”

Nothing much happens in this novel. The story, such as it is, has to do with five not-too-bright young thugs who decide to “do something nice for Doc.” Their good deeds go astray in every possible way. People in Cannery Row just make the best of life, going with the flow so to speak, like the sea creatures who exist in the ebb and flow of the tidepool.

Carmel Beach Sunset

Steinbeck and McMurtry Hit the Road

pen4hire — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:38:29 +0000

Destination: The American Road

Books: Roads, by Larry Mc Murtry
Travels With Charley In Search of America, by John Steinbeck.

“Where does the road go?” asked a young Larry McMurtry of the road running past his North Texas ranch.

“What are Americans like today?” John Steinbeck asked when he set out from the East Coast in 1960 to re-acquaint himself with the country he wrote about.

Steinway's camper truck, Rocinante

The questions shape the trips and the books of these two authors. McMurtry traveled most of the main freeways across the country north to south and east to west, but he did it in short spurts. He traveled forty years later than Steinbeck’s circle around the map. By the end of the 20th century, the great highway system was not only complete, but beginning to age in places. In ROADS: The Great American Highway Book, McMurtry stuck to the “great roadways” with “a desire to be on the move rather than take the pulse of the nation.”

“It is now possible,” he writes,” to drive coast to coast without speaking to a human being at all; you just slide your card, pump your gas, buy a couple of Hershey bars, perhaps heat up a burro and put the pedal back to the metal.” The people along the way are superfluous to McMurtry. “For the road, like the river, very often merely passes through long stretches of countryside, having little effect on the likes of people who live only a few miles from it.”

I was curious about how he would keep me interested on the bland freeways without human contact, and the answer came halfway through the book. He did not. His train of thought rambles over authors associated with various places, which I was interested in and I will return to those another day. But overall, the book Roads does not add much to the traveler’s library.

Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, offers treats on every page. Clearly the desire to take the pulse of the nation makes more interesting subject matter than random musings of the traveler. Besides, I find Steinbeck’s prose endlessly entertaining.

In contrast to McMurtry, he avoids the freeways, and his take on them, while similar to McMurtry, comes in a very different tone. “These roads are wonderful for moving goods, but not for inspection of a countryside. He concludes that, “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a thing.”

Exactly right. As so many of his sentences are.

Charley the poodle provides drama, dialogue, incidents and scenes that keep things lively. Although Steinbeck never quite satisfactorily answers his basic question, he concludes, “I do know this–the big and mysterious America is bigger than I thought. And more mysterious.” If you read the 1962 edition, you will not see that closing line. The Penguin Centennial version restored Steinbeck’s originally proposed ending, which talks about his attendance at the Inaugural of John F. Kennedy.

This book has earned a place on the list of indispensable books for the traveler’s library. Tomorrow I will share titles other people have recommended for the road, but I will maintain that Travels with Charley is at the top of American road trip book lists.

And I will return to both these authors when I talk about Texas.

So, your turn. What road trip books do you like? And what makes a good road trip book?

The links to book titles that lead you to Amazon are there for your convenience. Although it costs you no more, when you buy anthing from Amazon after using one of the links on this site, you are supporting A Traveler’s Library. Thank you. The photo of Rocinante, Steinbeck’s camper is courtesy of a photographer on Flickr. Click the photo to get more information.

(Please share this post and consider subscribing by RSS or e-mail.)

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.