Dogging
Steinbeck
How I went looking for John Steinbeck’s
America, found my own America, and exposed
the truth about ‘Travels With Charley’
Bill Steigerwald
True Nonfiction
For Trudi,
my kids
and my mom.
Copyright 2013 Bill Steigerwald
Words & Photos
Praise & Encouragement
for 'Dogging Steinbeck'
I compared Steinbeck's published letters with his travels and saw great discrepancies. These facts have been public for years, but no one cared to mention them. … Steinbeck falsified his "Charley" trip. I am delighted that you went deep into this.
– Paul Theroux
Author of “The Tao of Travel:
Enlightenments from Lives on the Road”
I still believe John Steinbeck is one of America's greatest writers and I still love "Travels With Charley," be it fact or fiction or, as Bill Steigerwald doggedly proved, both. While I disagree with a number of Steigerwald's conclusions, I don't dispute his facts. He greatly broadened my understanding of Steinbeck the man and the author, particularly during his last years. And, whether Steigerwald intended it or not, in tracking down the original draft of "Travels With Charley" he made a significant contribution to Steinbeck's legacy. "Dogging Steinbeck" is a good honest book.
– Curt Gentry
Author of "Helter Skelter: The True Story of
the Manson Murders" (with Vincent Bugliosi)
No book gave me more of a kick this year than Bill Steigerwald's investigative travelogue "Dogging Steinbeck" ... Steigerwald’s slowly growing exasperation with Steinbeck’s dissembling is a joy to read, as is his incredulous reaction to Steinbeck scholars who wave away the esteemed author’s flagrant bullshitting. But best of all is the contemporary America that Steigerwald discovers. Where Steinbeck inveighed against comic books and processed food and crabbed that the nation had grown spiritually “flabby” and “immoral,” Steigerwald is positively Whitmanesque in his celebration of the country.
– Nick Gillespie
editor-in-chief of Reason.com
An ... idol-slaying travelogue of truth.
– Shawn Macomber
The Weekly Standard
"Dogging Steinbeck" ... is a long-overdue expose of John Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley." ... Illustrated with photos and interviews, this is a wry, wistful, but never angry tale about a great literary deception that lasted way too long.
– Tony Norman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Like more than a few writers in the past, Bill Steigerwald set out to pay homage -- in this case, to John Steinbeck's 'Travels With Charley' and discovered, to his horror, amusement, and indignation, that 'Travels' is fundamentally a work of fiction, with large sections, several episodes, and innumerable characters invented by the 1962 Nobel laureate. Steigerwald's laconic, self-deprecating style wears exceptionally well, and his pursuit of the great beast is both impressive and entertaining. Along the way he is ambushed by the Steinbeck Industry, such as it is, and finds his brilliant detective work greeted not with gratitude but churlishness. But such are the perils faced by literary pioneers, among whom Steigerwald now takes his place of honor. In the end, you will much prefer his company to Steinbeck's.
– Philip Terzian
Literary editor, The Weekly Standard
I wanted … first to express my personal admiration for the job you did. Second, to tell you that you became a kind of a journalistic hero in my travel-story about Steinbeck, because you did such fantastic detailed research on the subject, and you did it alone, in sometimes-difficult circumstances.
– Geert Mak
Dutch journalist/historian and author of
“Reizen zonder John op zoek naar Amerika
(Traveling Without John in Search of America),”
who also retraced Steinbeck’s “Charley” trip in 2010
Table of Contents
1 – Taking the Trip
2 – Stranger in Steinbeck Country
3 – On the Road
4 – John Steinbeck’s America
5 – The Dogging Begins
6 – Maine, the Big Empty
7 – Touching the Top of Maine
8 – Escape From New England
9 – Pit-stopping in Pittsburgh
10 – Westward, Ho
11 – Into the Corn Belt
12 – Making Time in North Dakota
13 – Loving Montana
14 – Sprinting to Seattle
15 – Cruising the Coast
16 – Fun in San Francisco
17 – Steinbeck Country, USA
18 – Heading Back East
19 – The Greater State of Texas
20 – Hate & Filth in New Orleans
21 – America the Mostly Beautiful
22 – The Truths About ‘Charley’
23 – Debunking the Myths About ‘Charley’
24 – The Media & Me
25 – The Truth Gets Told
Bill Steigerwald bio
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels fastest who travels alone.
– Rudyard Kipling
Introduction
I discovered two important and surprising truths when I retraced the route John Steinbeck took around the country in 1960 and turned into his "Travels With Charley in Search of America." I found out the great author’s iconic “nonfiction” road book was a deceptive, dishonest and highly fictionalized account of his actual 10,000-mile road trip. And I found out that despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom, America was still a big, beautiful, empty, healthy, rich, safe, clean, prosperous and friendly country.
“Dogging Steinbeck” is the story of my adventures on and off the road with John Steinbeck’s ghost. It’s about the dozens of good Americans I met and the great places I saw on my high-speed drive from Maine to Monterey along what’s left of the Old Steinbeck Highway. And it tells how I stumbled onto a literary scoop that forced a major book publisher to finally confess the truth about “Travels With Charley” after 50 years. Part literary detective story, part travel book, part book review, part primer in drive-by journalism, part commentary on what a libertarian newspaperman thinks is right and wrong about America, my book is subjective as hell. But it’s entirely nonfiction.
– Bill Steigerwald, April 1, 2013
1 – Taking the Trip
So it was that I determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth.
– John Steinbeck, “Travels With Charley
in Search of America”
Laughing at Steinbeck's Ghost
No one could hear me talking to John Steinbeck’s ghost. I was standing alone on a sunburned farm road in the earthly equivalent of outer space – the vast cornfields of eastern North Dakota. Fargo was 47 miles back. The closest “town” was Alice, a 51-person dot on the map of a state famous for its emptiness. The closest human was half a mile off, hidden in the brief cloud of brown dirt her combine raised as it tacked through a stiff wind across her family’s 1,400-acre farm.
It was Oct. 12, 2010. For three weeks and 1
2 states I had been retracing the 10,000-mile road trip Steinbeck made around America in the fall of 1960 and turned into his bestseller “Travels With Charley in Search of America.” From Long Island to Maine to Chicago to Seattle to California to Texas and back, wherever Steinbeck and his poodle companion Charley went on their famed journey, I was going too – exactly 50 years later.
I wasn’t following Steinbeck for any of the usual TV-docudrama reasons. He wasn’t my real father. I wasn’t hoping to find myself or lose anyone else. My old dog and I didn’t each have prostate cancer and six months to live. I didn’t even own a dog.
The unromantic, un-cinematic truth was I thought it would make a good book if I followed Steinbeck’s route and compared the country I found with the America he toured. It’d be a simple and easy way to show how much the country has changed along the Steinbeck Highway since Ike was president, Elvis was king and everything worth buying was still Made in America and sold at Sears.
I wasn’t a Steinbeck nut, a dog nut or a travel nut. I was a seasoned journalist – actually, a seasoned ex-journalist. For 30 years I had been a reporter/feature writer/ columnist/editor at the L.A. Times and two Pittsburgh daily newspapers. I had more than my share of fun and a little success working for an increasingly irrelevant 19th-century news-delivery system as it committed suicide by refusing to embrace the Internet. Then, in 2009, as I turned 62 and a minimal buyout came along at my paper, I dove from the deck of the Daily Titanic and swam off to look for books to write till I die.
Writing a book about America hooked around Steinbeck’s trip would not be complicated or controversial. Or so I thought. I figured I’d simply retrace the trail he blazed as faithfully as possible, as a journalist, using “Travels With Charley” as my guide, map and timeline.
But when I reread the book I quickly learned “Charley” made a lousy map. Though it was a nonfiction book filled with real places, real people and real events, it was often vague and confusing about where Steinbeck really was on any given date. It was not a travelogue, not a serious work of journalism and, as I soon realized, it was not an accurate, full or reliable account of his actual road trip.
Since Steinbeck, who died in 1968, left no notes, no journal and no expense records from the road, I had a lot of work to do. I plotted every town and highway he mentioned in “Travels With Charley” on a 1962 road atlas. I read the major Steinbeck biographies. I called up scholars and archivists from what I affectionately dubbed the West Coast Steinbeck Studies Industrial Complex.
In the spring of 2010 I traveled to central California’s magnificent Monterey Peninsula – aka “Steinbeck Country” – to do research and scout old Steinbeck haunts like Cannery Row. I visited libraries at Stanford, San Jose State and in New York City, looking for clues of time and place in letters he wrote from the road and in old newspaper articles.
By the time I arrived in the cornfields of Alice, I was – by default – the world expert on Steinbeck’s actual trip. I was also a little road crazy. I was doing 300 miles of drive-by journalism every day on America’s two-lane highways. I was waving my Professional Reporter’s Notebook in the faces of strangers, interviewing and photographing them, and blogging back to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
I was traveling solo. Quickly. Cheaply. Doglessly. When I wasn’t staying in a $60-a-night, 1960s-vintage mom & pop motel, I was sleeping in the back of my Toyota RAV4 along dark country roads in New England or in bright Wal-Mart parking lots.
So far, despite the Great Recession, most of America was looking pretty good. I was moving fast, but there were few signs of real poverty. I had met no people who were seriously hurting. I wasn’t going out of my way to find poster children for America’s rural poor or urban underclass. Ditto for 2010 America’s nearly 10 percent unemployed, the 10 percent foreclosed upon, the freshly bankrupted, the deeply indebted and every other real or alleged victim of Crony Capitalism-gone-bad.
Either they weren’t living and working along the Steinbeck Highway or they were invisible in a down-and-out economy that was nevertheless overflowing with material wealth. Just the pickup trucks, boats and farm equipment I saw parked for sale along the highways exceeded the GDP of Greece.
Flying down the two-lane slivers of ordinary America that never seem to get covered when bicoastal journalists parachute into Flyover Country, I had already encountered scores of the everyday citizens who make America good and make it go. In 3,500 miles I hadn’t bumped into a single soul who lived in a house made of highway signs or who’d wasted his life creating the world’s greatest Museum of Mailboxes.
But I wasn’t seeking out new acts in the hackneyed sideshow of American weirdoes and eccentrics. After three decades of practicing on-the-road journalism from Hollywood to Key West to Cut Bank, Montana, I’d seen my share of cultural embarrassments and political and religious whack jobs. America itches with crazies. I had no desire to scratch around for fresh examples of the reductio ad absurdums of American individualism that populate great road works like William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” and Andrei Codrescu's “Road Scholar.”
By the time I reached Alice, I was also a little Steinbeck crazy. He had been my invisible passenger on and off the road for 10 months. I had gotten to know the grumpy old New Dealer pretty well. We had some major political issues. But I was always thinking about him, trying to imagine what he had seen or thought as he droned through Maine’s endless pine forests or pulled into a manure-carpeted truck stop for the night in Frazee, Minnesota.
Four decades after his death, Steinbeck was arguably the most widely read American writer in the world. Yet he wasn’t as famous in his own country as I had thought. When I stopped for gas or snacks in unknown places like Milo, Maine, I’d ask clerks if they knew that the great author John Steinbeck had passed down their main street exactly 50 years ago. The name Steinbeck might as well have been Solzhenitsyn.
I usually had to remind dumfounded young and old people alike who the heck the Nobel Prize-winner was. “‘The Grapes of Wrath’? ‘Of Mice and Men’”? I’d prompt. “Oh yeah,” they’d say. “I think I read them in high school.”
I wasn’t in the habit of speaking out loud to Steinbeck’s ghost. But I couldn’t help it. In “Travels With Charley” he says he camped overnight on the little Maple River somewhere near Alice and met a traveling Shakespearean actor who carried a letter from John Gielgud folded in his wallet.
Long before I reached the boondocks of eastern North Dakota I knew Steinbeck’s encounter with that actor never happened in the real world. It was pure fiction. I already knew from my research he had invented the entire scene – and many others in “Travels With Charley.”
But when I actually stood in the middle of that absurd ocean of agriculture and looked around, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the ballsy lie Steinbeck told his readers – and got away with for half a century. “Hah,” I blurted, as a million dead cornstalks rattled in the hard chilly wind. “Who were you trying to kid, John? Who did you think would ever believe you met a Shakespearean actor out here?”
Steinbeck's Mythic Journey
In the fall—right after Labor Day—I’m going to learn about my own country. I’ve lost the flavor and taste and sound of it. It’s been years since I have seen it. Sooo! I’m buying a pick-up truck with a small apartment on it, kind of like the cabin of a small boat, bed, stove, desk, ice-box, toilet—not a trailer—what’s called a coach. I’m going alone, out toward the West by the northern way but zigzagging through the Middle West and the mountain states. I’ll avoid cities, hit small towns and farms and ranches, sit in bars and hamburger stands and on Sunday go to church. I’ll go down the coast from Washington and Oregon and then back through the Southwest and South and up the East Coast but always zigzagging. Elaine will join me occasionally but mostly I have to go alone, and I shall go unknown. I just want to look and listen. What I’ll get I need badly—a re-knowledge of my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes and its changes. It’s
long overdue—very long. New York is not America. I am very excited about doing this. It will be a kind of a rebirth.
– John Steinbeck, letter to Mr. and Mrs.
Frank Loesser, Sag Harbor May 25, 1960
John Steinbeck and Charley began their famous road adventure in Sag Harbor on the morning of Friday, Sept. 23, 1960. Sag Harbor was still cleaning up after a direct hit by Hurricane Donna, one of the 20th century’s most potent storms. As Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon were getting ready to debate who was tough enough to be the next boss of the embattled Free World, Steinbeck and Charley hopped three ferries to Connecticut and rode north into the heart of New England.
Steinbeck was 58 and a giant of world literature – the kind that aren’t made in the USA anymore. He was also in lousy health. He had already experienced a series of “episodes” – small strokes – that betrayed the weakening heart that would slowly kill him over the next eight years. After living in New York City and traveling heavily in Europe for 20 years, he felt out of touch with his own country, which he was. He had decided he needed to reacquaint himself with America and its Flyover People and to do it alone and by highway.
Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 1