Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

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Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 3

by Bill Steigerwald


  My last stop in Salinas that morning before climbing Fremont Peak had been his gravesite in Garden of Memories Memorial Park. Though a colorful “Steinbeck” sign pointed right at it, his small flat marker was hard to find among the weathered grey slabs and spiky old stone monuments. Seeking anonymity, simplicity and privacy even in death, Steinbeck’s ashes are interred with his parents, wife Elaine and sister Mary in the Hamilton plot, the plot of his mother’s family.

  A pot of bright yellow mums, wilted slightly and knocked over by the valley’s unrelenting wind, gave away his final whereabouts: “John Steinbeck: 1902-1968.” A 2-inch white ceramic poodle with a pink heart for its collar guarded the simple marker. I stood on Steinbeck’s grave as respectfully as possible and took a few close-ups of the tiny dog, which had been left by a "Travels With Charley" fan. Was that chintzy totem of Charley a warning to let his master’s reputation rest in peace? I had no clue. I was a journalist looking for facts, not symbols.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter. In the spring of 2010 I was a guy with no job, a melting 401(k), a fat mortgage and too many leased cars. I had already invested too much of my life in Mr. Steinbeck, his travels around the USA and what I already suspected was his blatant fudging of the truth in “Travels With Charley.” Chasing his ghost across America had become my destiny, my mission, my mad obsession, my brilliant act of entrepreneurial journalism, my big waste of money and time – I wasn’t sure which. I only knew I was too many miles down the Steinbeck Highway to turn back.

  Crashing the Steinbeck Fest

  Five months later, in August, I was back in Salinas attending the annual Steinbeck Festival. The National Steinbeck Center’s theme for 2010 was the “Travels With Charley” trip and his many travels around the world. I was an outsider among the 150 Steinbeck experts, Steinbeck worshippers, Steinbeck collectors and “Travels With Charley” nuts in attendance, and I felt it.

  That was not new or discomforting. I was used to trespassing in narrow, often alien subcultures populated by fans or insiders. As a newspaper reporter, I had spent three decades crashing other people’s private parties, whether it was a roomful of federal transportation experts or a Saturday night KKK cross burning on a hilltop in the backwoods of southwestern Pennsylvania.

  Compared to the amateur and professional Steinbeckies, I knew nothing about their hero or the literary nuances of his many important and famous works. But by then, just seven weeks before the start of my road trip, I knew a few things they didn’t. In an attempt to accurately track Steinbeck’s trail, I had put together a fairly detailed time-and-place line of his actual “Travels With Charley” route. For example, I knew where Steinbeck slept on Oct. 12, 1960. That piece of trivia wasn’t exactly a reason to alert the Pulitzer Prize committee. But I also already knew there were some yawning discrepancies between what Steinbeck wrote in his nonfiction book and what he actually did or did not do on his trip.

  At times during the festival it was hard to keep from screaming out that Emperor Steinbeck didn’t have on all of his nonfiction clothes. I bit my tongue at what one headline speaker said. Ted Conover is a major-league journalist, a writer with a social conscience like Steinbeck’s who’s ridden the rails with hobos and crossed the U.S.-Mexican border with illegal farm workers for his nonfiction books. He told his rapt audience how much Steinbeck and “Travels With Charley” had inspired and influenced his participatory style of journalism. He loved Steinbeck’s book because “it was nonfiction” and because it “let me see how a great writer in search of a story could meet people.” It was what a journalist does, he said, and “Steinbeck showed me how to do it.” Conover should have known better. He should have smelled the fiction. But he wasn’t the only one at the festival who assumed “Travels With Charley” told the true story of Steinbeck’s trip and the people he really met. It was a given.

  One of the featured Steinbeck experts and speakers was Susan Shillinglaw, a San Jose State English professor and scholar in residence at the Steinbeck Center. She’d written introductions to new editions of Steinbeck books and was an expert on his journalism and nonfiction. In her talk about how Steinbeck’s restlessness, curiosity and interest in the common man fueled his many world travels, Shillinglaw called “Travels With Charley” a quintessential road book and discussed how he carefully and holistically studied the America he found.

  Shillinglaw or no one else questioned the book. No one mentioned its gaping holes in time and place. No one wondered how Steinbeck, known to be a shy man, could have been so lucky to have bumped into so many colorful Americans who spoke like actors in a bad movie. No one wondered – or cared – how he managed to capture all those pages of “great” dialogue without a tape recorder or even a notebook. No scholar explained the tricky academic bylaws governing the use of “creative nonfiction” in a true book.

  No one cautioned that Steinbeck’s book, though considered a work of nonfiction for half a century, was a lot like the Bible and shouldn’t be taken literally. “Travels With Charley” was treated as it had always been – as true. When I asked Steinbeck biographer Jackson Benson if he thought "Charley" really deserved to be called the true story of Steinbeck's road trip, he said, "Yeah, it's a true story. It's abstracted and deleted and outlined, as all true stories are. I don't think there's anything in there that's made up.... The only thing fiction about it is that he left out a lot."

  Midway through the festival, something strange happened. I was asking Shillinglaw and Benson trivia questions. I asked if they knew whether Steinbeck’s wife Elaine rode with him in Rocinante from Seattle to San Francisco. Benson had said she did in his biography. But Shillinglaw was sure Elaine hadn’t. She had gotten to know Elaine pretty well, she said, and was certain Steinbeck’s refined wife would never have traveled in the cab of a pickup truck.

  Shillinglaw and Benson were the reigning Steinbeck gurus. Yet they didn’t seem to know much about how he actually traveled on his “Travels With Charley” journey and didn’t seem particularly interested in finding out more. Holy shit, I suddenly realized. I know much more about Steinbeck’s road trip than they do. It was a terrifying feeling. For the first time in my life, I was the expert in something – albeit a very minor, esoteric, inside-baseball something no one else cared about. In August of 2010, I had already become the global authority on John Steinbeck’s iconic road trip – completely by accident. And I still hadn’t read the first draft of “Travels With Charley” or driven a single mile down the Old Steinbeck Highway.

  'Discovering' 'Charley's' First Draft

  My pre-trip research ended with a bang three weeks later in New York City when I did something no one in the world had done in four years. I went to the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan and read the first draft of “Travels With Charley in Search of America.”

  The handwritten manuscript – along with a typed and edited copy – had been stored at the Morgan like a holy relic for almost half a century. Few scholars, graduate students and critics had bothered to study it. If they had, the “‘Travels With Charley’ Myth” might have been debunked decades ago. To be fair, the manuscript is not something anybody can just pop into the Morgan Library and paw over. John Pierpont Morgan's gift to posterity holds one of the world's greatest collections of art, books and music. Security is Pentagon-tight, inside and out. You’ve got to first establish that you are a legitimate researcher or writer and make an appointment. Once you make it past the security checkpoint, you’re escorted to the reading room. You have to wash your hands, use pencils only and handle research material like it’s sacred nitroglycerin. You can’t take photos or make photocopies because of copyright restrictions.

  For three days in late summer I sat in the Morgan’s reading room like a monk. The “Charley” manuscript, kept there since Steinbeck donated it in 1962, is broken up into five or six handwritten chunks. Written entirely in his barely decipherable scribble, with hardly a word crossed out or changed, each page is filled from top-to-bottom and edge-to-edge. It’s mostl
y in pencil on carefully numbered yellow or white legal pads. Taking notes in longhand, I compared the first draft of what Steinbeck had given the working title “In Quest of America” with the copy of “Travels With Charley” stored on my smart-phone’s Kindle app. According to Declan Kiely, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, fewer than six people had looked at the manuscript since 2000. I was the first since 2006.

  I learned important clues that helped me fill in some blank spots about Steinbeck’s actual trip. I also saw how much the manuscript had been edited. There were dozens of minor and major edits. The most important ones entirely removed his wife Elaine’s presence from the West Coast and stripped out 99 percent of his partisan political commentary. Given what I was learning, the most ironic edit deleted Steinbeck’s thoughts about what is really real and the writer’s struggle/duty to straighten out the “chaos” of reality and make it understandable and “reasonably real” for a reader. The most justifiable edit removed a paragraph of filth and racial hatred that would have given “Travels With Charley” an X-rating, outraged the public and crippled its sales.

  The manuscript was the big smoking gun – the smoking artillery piece. Reading it was shocking and exhilarating. I couldn’t believe what I had found – or that it had been just sitting there in Manhattan for 50 years waiting to be discovered. It confirmed and reinforced my suspicions about the dubious veracity of much of “Travels With Charley.”

  The first draft also explained the book’s persistent vagueness about time and place. It was not due solely to Steinbeck’s aversion to writing a travelogue or his lack of note taking. It was a result of wily editing by Viking’s editors, which hid the frequently luxurious and leisurely nature of Steinbeck’s road trip and made it seem like he spent most of his time alone.

  After my last day of deciphering Steinbeck’s handwriting, I left the cool quiet of the Morgan Library and popped back onto the baked streets of Manhattan. It was 4:05. I set out for Penn Station to catch a train back to Secaucus, where my car was parked and ready to take me home. New York had so much pure city packed into a small space it was hard for someone from Pittsburgh to believe. I’d never want to live in NYC. It was 40 years too late for that adventure. But it was amazing to see the crazy energy and throbbing humanity of a real city at work and play. It was nothing like the open street markets and anarchic traffic of Lima or Guatemala City, the only teeming Third World madhouses I’d ever seen. But the sidewalks were thick with commerce and hurrying streams of people of every lifestyle and color.

  Near the corner of Madison Avenue and East 33rd Street, two miles from the apartment Steinbeck died in, a prim matron with a plastic bag in one hand and a leash in the other waited for her toy poodle to take a dump at the base of a baby tree. On 34th Street a homeless man with a wild beard and dirty white shirt suddenly lunged out of the passing throng and rammed his bony shoulder hard into mine. It was no accident, it hurt, and it taught me a lesson to keep my eye out for trouble in the oncoming flow of humanity.

  Closing in on Madison Square Garden and its basement of train tracks, I began tail-gaiting a hotshot in a blue blazer with a cell phone to his ear as he weaved through the crowd. He was young but had gray hair and carried a man bag swelling with paperwork. I didn’t know it, but like me he was hustling to Penn Station's Track 11 to catch the 4:32 to Secaucus. On the un-crowded train I deliberately sat across the aisle from the hotshot so I could eavesdrop on his end of the conversation, which he made no effort to suppress. “At two billion dollars,” he said, as if he were talking about the price of eggs, “we’re going to make 800 k. I’m OK with one basis point…. We’d still be above two billion. Do me a favor. Check my math and fire me an email.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but it wasn’t how tough it was to make a living on Wall Street in the Great Recession. During my brief ride to Secaucus I scrawled what I had learned from reading the Steinbeck manuscript in my Professional Reporter’s Notebook: “Charley’s a fraud. Steinbeck himself provided the details of his trip – the real ones – and betrays ‘C’ for the fraud it is.” It was the first time I had used the f-word to describe his beloved travel book. It wouldn’t be the last.

  3 – On the Road

  On the long journey doubts were often my companions. I’ve always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  In a last-ditch effort to attract national media attention, a few hours before I left my house I blasted a self-promotional email to nearly everyone I had ever known, worked for or pitched freelance articles to in journalism. It was as over-the-top as I could make it and as far as I can tell it did me and what was left of my career no good at all.

  September 21, 2010

  Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald to chase

  John Steinbeck’s ghost for 10,000 miles.

  To go everywhere Steinbeck and dog Charley

  went in “Travels With Charley.”

  Will follow great author’s exact route half a century later.

  Desperate act of drive-by journalism by former

  Pittsburgh/LA paperboy, columnist, editor.

  Will take no federal stimulus money.

  Will take no dog.

  Hello friends, former co-workers, fellow libertarians, people who have no idea why they’re getting this email blast.

  On Thursday, Sept. 23, I’ll leave John Steinbeck’s former seaside home in Sag Harbor, New York, a place I could never afford to live or visit for more than two hours, and begin chasing his ghost around America’s blue highways for 10,000 miles.

  I’m going to retrace the iconic road trip Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960 and turned into his 1962 nonfiction bestseller “Travels With Charley.” I’m not taking an iconic dog and I’m not driving an iconic pickup truck/camper. I do hope to write a book hooked around following the exact route Steinbeck took and telling the whole story of what he did or did not do on his journey exactly 50 years ago....

  Cruising to Sag Harbor

  The hardest part of starting my road trip was just getting to Sag Harbor, which hides way out on the expensive, European end of Long Island, beyond the many Hamptons. Steinbeck, who lived in Manhattan starting in the early 1940s but loved the sea, bought a second home in the mid-1950s in Sag Harbor on a point of land poking out into Morris Cove.

  I had never been to Sag Harbor. All I knew was that it was a historic old whaling port, thanks to its great harbor. Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper used to hang there. So did a fleet of whaling ships until Big Oil killed off Big Whaling, thereby saving the sperm whale from extinction and allowing Sag Harbor to evolve into a quaint working-class fishing village where rich & famous folks from Manhattan like Steinbeck could hide and live in peace.

  From my old house in the woods 20 miles south of Pittsburgh to Steinbeck’s summerhouse was 489 miles – straight east, right through the core of the Big Apple. My Tuesday night drive to a motel in Somerset, New Jersey, went the way it was drawn up in the playbook – quick and uneventful. All the way on the PA Turnpike to I-81 and into North Jersey the traffic was light to nonexistent. It was as if the country were in a Great Recession or something.

  Smooth road, perfect weather, well-behaved trucks. No tailgaters. No construction zones. It was how interstate travel was supposed to be – fast, safe and automatic. I had little to do, driving-wise, but put two fingers on the wheel, set the cruise control to 70, crank up the satellite radio and relax in the dark coziness of my personal earthbound space capsule.

  Steinbeck would have killed for such high-speed comfort. He also would have envied my peace of mind about the reliability of my n
ew red Toyota RAV4. He carried tools and spare parts for his truck in case he broke down in the middle of Montana. I never worried for a second about repairs or breakdowns. There were Toyota dealers everywhere. I had the AAA for backup. Plus I knew from experience that unless you’re the unluckiest man in North America, nothing bad happens to a Toyota for the first 60,000 miles.

  I had checked out renting a small RV – too pricy. And I tried to get the CEO of Roadtrek Motorhomes to lend me a Sprint Agile, which would have been like steering a 20-foot cushy condo around America. He laughed off the promotional benefits to his company of my idea, which was just as well. The RAV4 turned out to be the perfect choice. At the Toyota showroom, the first thing I had the salesman do was put down the rear seats. After crawling in back and seeing I could stretch out with six inches to spare, I was sold. The back of the RAV4 was virtually flat. Six old This End Up foam sofa cushions fit tightly on the floor like pieces of a puzzle. Then came a mattress pad, a bottom sheet, my favorite blanket, my pillow, an open sleeping bag and blackout curtains with Velcro strips to attach above the windows. All I needed for a good night’s sleep was nerve and a level place to park.

 

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