Like most of the middle age-plus pupils in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute classes I teach at the University of Richmond, I first read John Steinbeck’s fiction as a young adult. But I chose a work of nonfiction written by Steinbeck in middle age—Travels with Charley In Search of America—to open the course I teach in American literary classics. Before we begin, I advise those who read Travels with Charley when they were young, as I did, to disregard first impressions and read it again with fresh eyes. As Steinbeck observes at the outset of the journey, what we see is determined by how we view: So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world. You don’t even know where I’m going. I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
As Steinbeck observes at the outset of the journey, what we see is determined by how we view.
Later, discussing the book’s significance in middle age, we recall how we explored Steinbeck’s America in our teens and twenties—driving, and riding trains, buses, and planes; experimenting with ideas; testing the patience of people who were our parents’ and Steinbeck’s age during the turbulent decade of the sixties. For many of us, the need to experience our parents’ world through the “morning eyes of youth” was the reason we read Travels with Charley the first time around. Even in middle age, Steinbeck understood the impulse to escape: 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 greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job . . . I fear this disease incurable.
Even in middle age, Steinbeck understood the impulse to escape.
Reading Travels with Charley in maturity gives my students renewed respect for Steinbeck’s courage in answering the call of the road by driving a fitted-up camper solo from one coast to the other, with his wife’s poodle as companion and a deep understanding that “after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” Steinbeck’s itinerary in 1960 included destinations he visited on book tours years before—places he visited without fully experiencing them—and avoided high-speed super-highways, which were spreading like cancer across the map of post-war America. Steinbeck’s recognition that “When we get these thruways across the whole country . . . it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing” resonates with us as we recall the places we passed through along the way and reflect on the influence Travels with Charley continues to exert on how Americans think America is or was or ought to be.
We reflect on the influence Steinbeck continues to exert on how Americans think America is or was or ought to be.
All of us are amazed that Steinbeck could travel cross-country incognito until he came to Salinas, the home town he abandoned in 1925, and some identify with the sense of rejection he felt from family members and friends who failed to understand the values and ideas he expressed in the books he wrote in the 1930s. Like Thomas Wolfe, he became a stranger among his own people, though he knew better than to blame them. “Through my own efforts,” he notes, “I am lost most of the time without any help from anyone,” and he recognizes lost-ness in the people and places he encounters in Travels with Charley. A waitress has “vacant eyes” which could “drain the energy and excitement” from a room. “Some American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash . . . surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles [and] smothered in rubbish.” Observed firsthand, the anger of housewives protesting school desegregation in New Orleans seems inhuman and insane. “I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes,” he concludes, “a quick and vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically, dogs think humans are nuts.”
Like Thomas Wolfe, he became a stranger among his own people, though he knew better than to blame them.
We try to avoid issues of race in class (though everyone recognizes that they still exist). As Steinbeck notes, “A dog is a bond between strangers,” and because many of us are empty-nesters, we focus instead on Steinbeck’s feelings for his dog Charley, who “loved deeply and tried dogfully,” and on the improved status of pets in his writing after Of Mice and Men. Reading or rereading Travels with Charley opens middle-aged eyes to the need for connection and companionship Steinbeck felt at a time of life when sudden loss or change—in a family or a country or a culture—can lead to alienation, loneliness, and depression. Those who think and feel after 50 will recognize the danger of despair. John Steinbeck, who made lifelong learning a creative enterprise, responded by creating an adventure for himself and us that makes Travels with Charley rewarding reading at any age.
Photo of Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning class courtesy University of Richmond.
About Murray Ellison
Before he teaches his next Osher class about the lessons to be found in re-reading ‘Travels With Charley’ again as an adult, I’d urge Murray Ellison to go to Amazon.com and at least skim my obviously still under-known nonfiction book ‘Dogging Steinbeck.’ In great and often un-appreciated detail it tells the true story of Steinbeck’s iconic road trip, who he traveled with, who he really met, how fast he actually drove, where he stayed overnight, what many fictions and fibs he and his publisher Viking Press passed off as true and what he left out about his actual trip (which in many ways was more interesting than the one he spun in his nonfiction best-seller). Also, for the record, JS’ trip was in the historic fall of 1960, not 1961, and he did not travel solo on his 10,000-mile journey (his wife Elaine was by his side on more than 40 of the 75 days he was gone from Sag Harbor). I’d urge Mr. Ellison to have his class read ‘TWC’ first, then read my book. My ‘true nonfiction’ may not be appreciated by Steinbeck lovers, but i guarantee it will enrich and enliven his classroom discussions.
We concur and we apologize for the chronology error, now corrected, which was introduced during editing.
Steinbeck certainly stretched “the Truth” more than just a bit; that’s why I recommend “Dogging Steinbeck (although, truth be told, I haven’t read that book). Steinbeck himself claimed that truth was “all fiction.” But Steinbeck is, nonetheless, my favorite writer; and “Cannery Row” my Bible.
Cannery Row is MY “bible” too…!!!
“Travels With Charlie” is a beautifully written book. Enjoy it as it is. Stop picking it apart and stop criticizing and over-analyzing it.
I don’t care that Steinbeck embellished and fabricated some—or most— of his journey throughout various American cities and towns. So what if Steinbeck’s wife accompanied him much of the time?
This is an amazing story of America…..seen through the intellect and intuition of a legendary man.
Steinbeck’s written words are filled with wit and wisdom.
This book is a complete joy and I absolutely love it.
And even if it’s mostly a “novel”—I still love it.
So…..if you don’t like “Travels With Charlie”…..stop complaining and let others enjoy the book, instead of trashing it.
Thanks for the various responses to my essay on teaching Travels with Charley. One of my students introduced the book disputing the details of the author and brushed them aside. Instead, we decided to delve more deeply into the deeper truths that Steinbeck had discovered about himself and America. If we look at Steinbeck’s works of fiction, we would never critique them because he actually experienced some of the events in his life. Some people erroneously assume that books should either be categorized as fiction or non-fiction, where there is a gradual line between the 2 genres, with most containing elements of both.Memory becomes cloudy after time, and authors consciously or unconsciously chose to emphasize what they want to remember in memoirs and novels.
The words ‘nonfiction’ and ‘fiction,’ like ‘true’ and ‘untrue,’ are words that have meaning in the real world. Yes, novelists and good nonfiction writers each use dramatic or fictional techniques. The important question is, or should be, did the nonfiction writer — in this case Steinbeck — go too far when he/she was stretching the facts or the truth?
Should Steinbeck, because he was a great novelist, or because we love his fiction, be given a free pass to “enhance” or pad his nonfiction writings with loads of fiction or a sprinkling of lies? Shouldn’t readers be warned by reviewers or educators that some of what they’re reading isn’t actually true or meant to be taken literally?
The publishers of “TWC” thought so. After my trouble making, in 2012 Penguin had Jay Parini carefully and unobtrusively re-write the book’s long introduction to warn/”remind” readers, albeit fifty years late, that Steinbeck was at heart a novelist and what they were about to read was significantly fictionalized.
Parini neglected to point out, however, that along with his fictionalizing, most of it innocent or irrelevant or obvious to an adult reader, Steinbeck significantly pulled his punches about what he really thought about the America. Like the details of his trip, the “truths” about America that Steinbeck reveals in ‘TWC’ were not so honest either.
As I also point out in ‘Dogging Steinbeck,’ ‘TWC’ was written, marketed, sold, reviewed and then taught for half a century as “a nonfiction book.” It was a non-discounted, $5, No. 1 NYT best-selling nonfiction book ($35 in today’s money.) More than a million people bought it thinking they were getting a reasonably honest account of what an important writer thought about America and its people. They didn’t get it.
I’d think anyone truly interested in the character and thinking of Steinbeck would want to know why they didn’t.
John Steinbeck was honest about his liabilities as a working journalist, and about borrowing real-life incidents from third-party sources, sometimes paid, for his novels and short stories. Bill Steigerwald’s findings about fact vs. fiction in ‘Travels with Charley’ support the conclusion that the author of ‘A Russian Journal,’ ‘Sea of Cortez,’ and ‘Letters to Alicia’ crossed the line with greater frequency than we thought.