Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck, Book Review Example

John Steinbeck’s Failed Journey of Rediscovery

Shortly after John Steinbeck embarked on the cross-country journey he chronicled in Travels with Charleyin Search of America,a young man serving on an atomic submarine explained to Steinbeck that living submerged for extended periods of time was no problem. After listening to the sailor reassure him about life beneath the waves, Steinbeck mused, “could be he’s right and I’m wrong. It’s his world, not mine anymore” (Steinbeck, 19).

It’s a strikingly abrupt admission for a man setting out to rediscover his America; ominous, even prophetic. When he set out with his poodle, Charley, to traverse the United States, much of what he discovered proved alienating and disenchanting rather than familiar and rejuvenating.  One thinks of Odysseus, returning home to find Penelope not only happily remarried but discovering that she wasn’t really the woman he thought he knew after all.

By 1960, John Steinbeck had lived in New York for nearly 20 years, having spent considerable time in Europeas well.  His agent, Elizabeth Otis, had for years urged him to get out of New York, to travel around the countryfrom which he had become detached and among the people he’d written about in The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row and other works of fiction that placed him at the forefront of American letters.Steinbeck acknowledged that he had been observing the changes taking place in the country through “books and newspapers,” and that he had “not felt the country” for decades (Lisca, 232).

Christening his specially designed truck “Rocinante,” a nod to friends who labeled his plan “quixotic,” Steinbeck set out with Charley by his side.  He intended to travel America’s back roads, to find people “in place.”  Peter Lisca wrote that Steinbeck was “motivated by a Whitmanesque compulsion to identify with and speak for the whole country” (Lisca, 232).  Or was he seeking to penetrate a personal barrier he had erected between himself and a too-rapidly changing world?

“Ironically, there is very little in the 245 pages of Travels that Steinbeck could not have written without ever leaving New York.  For he had not really lost touch with his country, but had purposefully insulated himself from a reality with which he felt increasingly uncomfortable, in which he could no longer immerse himself…” (Lisca, 232).

In Travels with a Donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson recounts his journey through France’s wild and mountainous Cevennes region.  Stevenson’s essentially romantic journal, though different from Steinbeck’s, has in it a notion of disillusionment.  Stevenson expecteda pastoral experience in which he would absorb the beautiful countryside and rustic charm of an obscure and unspoiled part of Europe.  But it doesn’t unfold quite as planned.

There are unexpected incidents and confrontations with inhospitable denizens of the Cevennes who, in modern parlance, could best be described as “backward.”  Both Stevenson and Steinbeck encounter situations that end in frustration and righteous displays of anger (witness Steinbeck’s outrage at the border guard who wouldn’t allow him into Canada).  Differences aside, it is appropriate that Steinbeck based the name of his adventure on this book by Stevenson, one of his favorite authors.

Did Steinbeck entertain, perhaps subconsciously, an expectation that he might not like what he found?  His comment after chatting with the young submariner in Connecticut may well have offered a telling glance into his thoughts at the time.  Presumably, he saw himself in the role of journalist/social commentator, but it’s almost as if he believed he would need to frame the story rather than allowing events to unfold without intruding upon them.

“Perhaps it was over even before he left, for in addition to his alienation he took with him all the baggage of the third-rate journalist who sees only the stereotype and the cliché.  We are never presented with the way it really was, but rather with manipulated ‘set-ups,’ experiences and conversations upon which he can lecture Charley or us about one of his two favorite topics – how Americans are all different and yet unique and homogeneous, or how everything seems to be going to hell but it isn’t really” (Lisca, 234).

Loneliness is there, hovering just above his narrative almost from the beginning. Steinbeck heads almost directly into desolation. He’d heard about northern Maine’s Arostook County from others who’d never been there, and he found its landscape attractive.  But as darkness descended, so did his doubts.

“The temperature lifted and it rained endlessly and the forests wept. Charley never gotdry, and smelled as though he were mildewed…the darkness crept down and the rain drummed down on the steel roof of the cab and the windshield wipers sobbed their arcs.  Tall dark trees lined the road, crowding the gravel. It seemed hours since I had passed a car or a house or a store, for this was the country gone back to forest. A desolate loneliness settled on me – almost a frightening loneliness” (Steinbeck, 47).

The dark, vast forests of Maine and their effect on Steinbeck’s psyche offer a sense of what’s to come.  The great, disconnected expanse of 1960 America was, in retrospect, a dubious place to rediscover values that he’d written about in his other great works of fiction; of rugged individualism, determination and the simple virtues of personal integrity.

The most poignant discovery from Travels unfolds when Steinbeck returns home to California, to Monterey and to his “Long Valley.”  Here, perhaps, wasground zero for his personal grail quest. Home was where he truly expected to find, or not find, the America he had known. “Steinbeck’s real search – like that of Don Quixote – is not for present reality but for an idealized past” (Lisca, 234).

With an acknowledgment that Thomas Wolfe had it right, Steinbeck laments that the  SalinasValley of his past was gone and that he felt more at odds with his world than ever.  Things change monumentally over the course of 20 years, the people you knew change…you can’t go home again.  Warren French mused that Steinbeck might have done well to follow J.D. Salinger’s example and remain in a self-imposed literary exile.

Salinger, French says, “having written himself into a restful stasis, retired.” Steinbeck, on the other hand, “lured himself into making the most disastrous mistake of a career marked by many happy accidents but also marred by many missteps” (French, 106). Feeling that he become irrelevant and lost touch, Steinbeck set out on a trip he hoped would somehow restore his past, both personally and professionally. His miscalculation, and that of his agent, was that his art, the timeless themes of which he wrote so powerfully, could never become irrelevant, could never be lost.

ButSteinbeck could lose himself and, by the time he hit California,he was feeling terribly at odds with his surroundings.  Old friends insisted that he stay with them, but Steinbeck “feels that he is now more of a ghost there than those who have actually died.The town has changed and Steinbeck has changed, and the changes have had the effect of alienating them” (French, 103).After taking one more panoramic look at the valley of his youth, he leaves California, sped on his way by what must have been the crowning disappointment of his odyssey.

“Just sixty pages later he is back in New York, having discovered what he already knew, that he was caught between two Americas, one dead and the other a stranger” (Lisca, 234).

Steinbeck’s decision to travel counterclockwise from New York meant that his return trek would take him through the South, a region he was reluctant to visit. A fierce supporter of integration and civil rights, Steinbeck visited New Orleans during the segregationist protests by a group of women known as “The Cheerleaders.”  In spite of a pleasant interlude with his in-laws in Texas, his journey had taken a decided downward spiral and his experiences in the

Crescent City did little to improve his outlook.  One senses thatSteinbeck had nearly had enough, and that New Orleans sealed the deal.

Steinbeck was mortified by what he saw.  Watching “The Cheerleaders” in action, Steinbeck was struck by a woman who unloaded a barrage of racial epithets on a young, black girl.  A sincere and honest emotional reaction would have been one thing, Steinbeck says, but it was “not a spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage but the deliberate tactics of blowzy women who hungered for attention, wanted to be admired” (Travels, 256).

New Orleans acts as a kind of coup de grace. In his New York Times Book Review, Eric F. Goldman wrote what amounted to an epitaph for Steinbeck’s journey: “This is a book about Steinbeck’s America and for all the fascination of the volume, that America is hardly coincident with the United States in the Sixties” (Goldman, 5).

John Ditsky took a somewhat more sympathetic viewpoint.  In his 1975 critique, “The Quest That Failed,” he wrote, “it is the monster America that wins in the end sending the potentially comic adventurers home in full retreat.  It is not really laughable after all; it comes closest to unintended pathos” (Hayashi).

Nevertheless, many reviewers praised Travels With Charley in Search of Americafor its honesty.  It turned out to be his best-selling book ever.  But it’s infused with an underlying feeling of elegy, of melancholic nostalgia.  The book’s success may have shown that Steinbeck still had relevance, but his America did not.

Works Cited

Ditsky, John. “The Quest that Failed,” Steinbeck’s Travel Literature: Essays in Criticism, ed.

TetsumaroHayashi. Muncie, Ind.: Steinbeck Society of America (1980)

French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Nonfiction Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers (1996).

Goldman, Eric F. “Review of Travels With Charley in Search of America,” New York Times Book Review. New York: July 26, 1962.

Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Co. (1978)

Steinbeck, John. Travels With Charley in Search of America. New York: Penguin. (1980)

A Fool’s Errand: John Steinbeck’s Failed Journey of Rediscovery