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

by Bill Steigerwald

  Barich was more hopeful about the country’s long-term future than Steinbeck was in 1960. That was a refreshing twist on the usual New York-centric gloom and doom. But you get the sense that Barich’s optimism had more to do with the victory of Barack Obama than what he found on his solo tour of America’s midsection, which he described as “alternately grand and awful, sublime and stomach-turning, both a riddle and a paradox.”

  America Unchained

  Like all stereotypes, the Hollywood/Manhattan stereotype of America and its Flyover People is based on reality. But its main ingredient – besides its premise of moral, cultural and intellectual superiority – is exaggeration. Take over-population. Sure, big cities are densely populated. That’s kind of what great, dynamic, productive urban centers are supposed to be. That’s how they generate economic wealth and new ideas.

  But anyone who drives 50 miles in any direction in an empty state like Maine or North Dakota – or even in north-central Ohio or Upstate New York – can see America’s problem is not overpopulation. More often it’s under-population. Cities like Butte and Buffalo and Gary have been virtually abandoned. Huge hunks of America on both sides of the Mississippi have never been settled. From Calais to Pelahatchie, I passed down the main streets of comatose small towns whose mayors would have been thrilled to have to deal with the problems of population growth and sprawl. In a dozen states, I cruised two- and four-lane highways so desolate I could have picnicked on them.

  If anyone thinks that rural Minnesota, northwestern Montana, the Oregon Coast, the Texas Panhandle or New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward have been homogenized, taken over by chains or destroyed by suburban sprawl and too much commercial development, it’s because they haven’t been there. It’s a 50-year-old myth that America has been conquered and homogenized by national chains. It wasn’t close to being true in 1960, when Steinbeck was worrying about corner groceries being wiped out by A&P, the largest restaurant chain in the country was Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inn of America was three years old.

  Today restaurant and motel chains cling to interstate exits, where the heavy traffic is, and they clone themselves in the upscale suburbs. But try to find a Bob Evans, a Holiday Inn Express or a burger joint with a familiar name in a small town or in the sticks. You better like McDonald’s or Subway, because in most of the Zip Codes I was in those were your only choices – if you were lucky.

  The America I traveled was unchained from sea to sea. I had no problem eating breakfast, sleeping or shopping for road snacks at mom & pop establishments in every state. The motels along the Oregon and Maine coasts are virtually all independents that have been there for decades. Here’s a post-trip stat I saw from the American Hotel & Lodging Association that didn’t surprise me a bit: Of the country’s 52,215 motels and hotels with 15 units or more, 22,200 are independent – i.e., not affiliated with a chain. You can go the length of old Route 66 and never sleep or eat in a chain unless you choose to. Same for U.S. Route 101 in Oregon and Northern California.

  Steinbeck, like many others have since, lamented the loss of regional customs. (I don’t think he meant the local “customs” of the Jim Crow South or the marital mores of the Jerry Lee Lewis clan.) Pockets of regional culture are not as concentrated and isolated as they once were, which is a blessing for the median national IQ and the English language, but they’re not extinct and there are many new pockets.

  I didn’t go looking for Native Americans, Amish, Iraqis in Detroit, Peruvians in northern New Jersey or the French-Canadians who have colonized the top edge of Maine. But I had no trouble spotting local flavor in Wisconsin’s dairy lands, in fishing towns along Oregon’s coast, in the redwood-marijuana belt of Northern California, in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the cattle country of Texas.

  As for the demise of local dialects, it too is exaggerated by those who find such culturally backward things quaint and worth preserving. In Maine, Texas and Louisiana I met white Anglo-Saxon Americans whose accents were so heavy I wasn’t always sure they were speaking English. I’ll never forget Duke Shepard of Deer Isle.

  In the last 10 years, I’ve had the same experience in the Mississippi Delta, southern West Virginia and the hollers of eastern Kentucky, where I met a proud hillbilly who’d be debunked as a cruel 1930s stereotype if he appeared in a movie. (He kept his ex-wife in a converted chicken coop and had two sons in prison, one for murder.) Pittsburgh’s steelmaking jobs may have disappeared but its distinct working-class accent hasn’t. Just listen to a C-SPAN call-in show for a random hour and you’ll hear hard American accents that half a century of TV have done nothing to soften.

  Again, not to generalize, but the New York-Hollywood elites believe in a cultural caricature. They think the average Flyover Person lives in a double-wide or a Plasticville suburb, eats only at McDonald’s, votes only Republican, shops only at Wal-Mart and the Dollar Store, hates anyone not whiter than they are, speaks in tongues on Sunday and worships pickup trucks, guns and NASCAR the rest of the week.

  Those stereotypes and caricatures are alive and well in Flyover Country. But though I held radical beliefs about government, immigration and drugs that could have gotten me lynched in many places, I never felt I was in a country I didn’t like or didn’t belong in. Maybe I just didn’t go to enough sports bars, churches and political rallies.

  .

  Yes, Americans were materialistic as hell. They could afford to be, thanks to the incredible democratization of wealth and luxury that’s occurred in the last 50 years. Hundreds of millions of Americans were enjoying the kind of lifestyle that only 1-Per-Centers like Steinbeck could afford in 1960. Steinbeck – and ex-pats like Barich living like lords in Ireland – have a lot of nerve complaining about the greedy materialism of America’s commoners when they themselves already have every material goodie they need or want.

  The hundreds of ordinary Americans I bumped into were real, not made up and not composites. They were unique, hard-working people who were living longer, better, richer lives than Steinbeck could have dreamed. Unlike Steinbeck, who met one unlikable, sour, grammatically challenged person after another (or said he did), I met a procession of happy, friendly saints. I’m not a touchy-feely guy. And I know that as an old white guy by myself I was a threat to no one. But I was treated so well, I fell in love with every other American I met. For five minutes, anyway.

  22 – The Truths About ‘Charley’

  It would be pleasant to be able to say of my travels with Charley, “I went out to find the truth about my country and I found it.” And then it would be such a simple matter to set down my findings and lean back comfortably with a fine sense of having discovered truths and taught them to my readers. I wish it were that easy.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  A Good Trip Gone Bad

  A stranger passing like a bullet through his own heartland, Steinbeck spent twice as much time relaxing on his 11-week journey than driving. He discovered no new facts or insights about the USA or its citizens, mainly because he did no real journalism and spent relatively little time with ordinary people. Yet he deserved a lot of credit just for taking the road trip.

  Despite his shaky health and age, not to mention his princely lifestyle and celebrity social circle, he had the balls to roll up his sleeves and take on what was essentially a major journalism project. What other great American writer would have even considered traveling the rough way he did?

  Initially, he fully intended to do his trip the right way and the only way it would work – solo and at the grassroots level. His ambitious plan – going alone, taking photos, writing dispatches to newspapers or magazines from the road, going to a different church every Sunday, spending quality time in the Jim Crow South – was basic, sound journalism and a perfect vehicle for his talents.

  A nonfiction book based on his original plan wouldn’t have been as popular with readers or kept its romantic appeal for 50 years, but it would have made a better, more substantive book. It would have slowed him dow
n, forced him to meet hundreds of other real people and given him a chance to discover more of the America he went searching for.

  But Steinbeck’s great exploration never materialized. He never learned to use a camera, didn’t take notes or keep a journal and never wrote a word for publication during his 75 days away from New York. His grand plan was unraveled by the reality of his lifestyle, health and the punishment of the open road. He quickly got lonely and tired and no doubt bored.

  Ironically, in one sense he may have been lucky he lost heart so early. The daily pressure and logistical nightmares of trying to do real journalism on the back roads of America in 1960 could have killed him. What’s more, in the Analog Age it was an unrealistic mission even for a man in good health to circumnavigate America alone. Transcontinental car travel was still an adventure, not the smooth ride it is today. As Steinbeck learned, just finding a public pay phone so he could call his wife every three days was a major accomplishment.

  Before he left Maine he had already realized the obvious – the country was too damn big and diverse to pin down or sum up. No one person, not even a Steinbeck, could discover the real America in 11 weeks or 11 months. Anyway, as he wisely said, there was no single “real” America. As he knew and advised his readers, every traveler must take his own trip and find his own version of America. Trouble was, his was largely a 50 mph blur interrupted by luxurious vacations with his wife. And when his journey ended, he had to sit down and make up a nonfiction book about a real country he never found, never really looked for and didn’t really like much.

  The Final Chapter That Wasn’t

  Six weeks after Steinbeck returned to New York he was invited to JFK’s inauguration day festivities in DC. His adventure in Washington, a city paralyzed by a huge snowstorm, was meant to be the final chapter of “Travels With Charley” but was cut from his first draft.

  Titled “L’Envoi” (envoi being the name for concluding remarks to a poem, essay or book), it had nothing to do with his cross-country road trip. It was basically a short piece about him and Elaine enjoying JFK’s outdoor swearing-in ceremony despite 22-degree temperatures. It’s redundant evidence of how desperate Steinbeck was to pad out his thin material. While decently written, “L’Envoi” added nothing important or exciting.

  While decently written, “L’Envoi” added nothing important or exciting. The Steinbecks shared a limo ride to the inauguration ceremony with John’s pal and JFK-insider John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife. ABC TV, which was following the Galbraiths around for a broadcast that aired two nights later, had a camera crew crammed into the limo’s front seat. Two minutes of the ABC’s limo footage, shot by a film crew working for Robert Drew, the great pioneer documentarian, can be seen in Drew’s “Adventures on the New Frontier.”

  The Steinbecks and Galbraiths were a witty and clever bunch. They were impressed by the high ideals and fine phrases of JFK’s brilliant speech, which was written by Ted Sorensen and included some of Galbraith’s suggestions. Steinbeck joked about the president’s proper syntax, noting that no participles were dangled and no infinitives were split. He also quipped to Galbraith that his support for the Kennedy administration would evaporate after 24 hours, which turned out to be a laugh, since he quickly became chummy with Kennedy and even chummier with LBJ. Seeing Steinbeck on film just six weeks after coming home from his “Charley” trip was especially interesting to me – and shocking. He was not yet 59 but looked 75. And he had a very strange, pinched way of speaking. Elaine was seen unflatteringly firing up a cigarette.

  You won’t find Steinbeck mentioning a word about that superstar tag-team of witty New Deal liberals in “L’Envoi.” It’s too bad. It would have been much more interesting than what he wrote. It also would have provided readers of “Travels With Charley” with a rare glimpse of his real personal life, which included Washington power-people like Galbraith and Adlai Stevenson and small dinner parties with Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller and his bride Marilyn Monroe.

  Steinbeck stretched hard in “L’Envoi” to connect the inauguration trip to his road journey, which had ended six weeks earlier. Saying his "travels with Charley were a simple, almost humble undertaking” that “piled up a limited heap of information,” he writes that “Thinking back, I don’t know what, if anything, I learned.”

  The final lines of the chapter follow a long passage about John and Elaine opting to skip the inauguration ball and watching it on TV in their pajamas:

  And in the morning the snow was past and so was the journey.

  And I do know this – the big and mysterious America is bigger than I thought. And more mysterious.

  The end. That was it. In three sentences his great road trip was finally finally over.

  The “L’Envoi” chapter, kept at the Morgan Library with the rest of his first draft and only made public in 2002, was an extraneous fizzle that didn't work. Perhaps that’s why Steinbeck’s agent Elizabeth Otis persuaded him not to include it in the final version of the book. As published and read by millions, “Travels With Charley” concludes with Steinbeck road weary, confused and lost in his own backyard in Manhattan. It too was an abrupt, unsatisfying dead end to what started out as a brave quest for America. But at least there was some literary/symbolic/metaphorical meaning hidden in it.

  Making up ‘Charley’

  Working on and off, Steinbeck took about 10 months to finish “Travels With Charley in Search of America.” In the late summer of 1961, virtually without notes and nine months after his trip ended, he was still struggling to complete the last third of the book.

  In an August 17 letter to his editor Pascal Covici, he wrote, “I’m glad you like the second part of ‘Travels.’ To me it came very hard. So much confusion in my mind and the distance. I should have finished the whole thing last spring.” Though he thought there were “some pretty good essays on various subjects,” Steinbeck was worried it was “really dragging.”

  Meanwhile, Steinbeck's friends at Holiday magazine had already begun serializing “Charley” before it was completely written. “In Quest of America,” as it was called, was an abridged version of the book. Part 1 had become the travel monthly’s cover article for July of 1961. Parts 2 and 3 would run in December 1961 and February 1962. Described as Steinbeck's “firsthand report on the nation,” Holiday’s series was a big hit with its 500,000 upscale readers.

  In early September of 1961 Steinbeck turned his completed manuscript over to his publisher, Viking Press. He immediately left for a nine-month tour of Western Europe with his wife Elaine, teen-age sons Thom and John IV and the tutor he hired for them.

  On Sept. 24, from England, Steinbeck – still shocked by the death of his friend UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in a plane crash a week earlier – again expressed doubts about “Travels With Charley” to Covici. “I imagine you must have read the third part of Charlie (sic) by now. Do you like it at all? I am so confused about this book that I have no ideas about it. It was written under strain and I don’t remember it very well. I don’t know whether it has any information or not.”

  Covici loved just about every line in “Charley,” especially the last third of the book. In a long letter to Steinbeck he called the New Orleans episode “hair-raising” and hoped Viking Press founder and president Harold Guinzburg “will not want to cut any of it.” He told Steinbeck his meeting and conversation with the “enlightened Southerner” was “a masterpiece of subtle analysis.” He mentioned a few personal reservations – “maybe too many generalities, too much Texas, a little too long here and there.” But Covici said, “You have a fresh, newly conceived book of keen observations, wise deductions, informative, with the smell of the earth and its colors, humorous, witty, gay, and it all makes delightful reading.”

  In the same letter Covici tells Steinbeck he has a “genius” for travel writing and quotes W.H. Auden’s thoughts on why it’s so much harder for a great artist like Steinbeck to write about travel than a mere journalist. It’s a paragraph heavy wit
h irony, now that we know how much fictionalizing and inventing Steinbeck did in “Charley”: “Of all possible subjects,” Auden wrote in the introduction to Henry James’s “The American Scene” (1946), “travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist. For the latter, the interesting event is the new, the extraordinary, the comic, the shocking, and all that the peripatetic journalist requires is a flair for being on the spot where and when such events happen — the rest is merely passive typewriter thumping: meaning, relation, importance, are not his quarry. The artist, on the other hand, is deprived of his most treasured liberty, the freedom to invent; successfully to extract importance from historical personal events without ever departing from them, free only to select and never to modify or to add, calls for imagination of a very high order.”