Of all the 20th century American writers that wound up required reading by the time I reached high school, John Steinbeck held my interest the longest. It wasn't so much what he wrote about as his style of writing, his 'voice', that gripped me - descriptive without being too wordy, deliberate without being too sparse, profound without ever becoming tangential. From school, it is Of Mice and Men and The Pearl I remember most clearly. Years later, as a young man, I would read The Grapes of Wrath and The Winter of Our Discontent and be moved in the manner I'm sure the author intended. The Grapes of Wrath, especially, deserves its accolades.
But it was Travels with Charley - not required reading in English but recommended by my 12th grade Social Studies teacher - that really rocked my socks. Steinbeck's written account of the three months he spent driving across the United States in the fall of 1960 was a big deal, to say the very least, in the starry eyes of this acne-ridden teen. Since then, only The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux has had as much impact, in terms of stirring restlessness, although that was a different voice and a different style of travel in a different part of the world. Travels With Charley became the gold standard for the most seminal of travel - the American road trip. And it has remained so to this day.
Well, it has in my mind, at least. Unfortunately, the book's veracity has come under fire in recent years. It was fact-checked by writer Bill Steigerwald in 2011 and reportedly came up short in the truth department. Steinbeck's own son expressed skepticism as to whether Travels with Charley deserved to be considered non-fiction, and according to The New York Times, was quoted as saying, of his father, "He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit."
The charges, spelled out compellingly in Steigerwald's blog:
1) Many of the accounts of Steinbeck's time on the road, and some of the people he claimed to have met along the way, do not jibe with letters he sent home during the period, in terms of location and time frame; nor were some, speculatively speaking, likely to have been possible.
2) A close examination of his itinerary suggests that he rarely stayed in his much-ballyhooed camper, Rocinante, during the trip, opting instead to seek out luxury hotels and resorts - hard evidence that the image of the glad-handing scribe drifting with the wind, slipping in and out of the towns, lives and conversations of ordinary people across the fruited plain, set forth so convincingly in the book, might well have been Steinbeck's finest fiction.
3) Most damning of all is the notion that Steinbeck did not make the majority of the trip alone; his wife Elaine accompanied him for much of it, and other times he sought out the company of friends or acquaintances.
The alleged fabrications and high living are disillusioning, but the suggestion that the great author spent only a very small portion of his epic road trip by himself is the real offense, as far as I'm concerned. Why would Steinbeck have wanted someone along with him? No offense to anyone in my life I could choose to travel with, but taking someone along on 1/48/50 would turn my odyssey into just another vacation. My trip will not be about seeing landmarks...well, it will be that too, in some measure; but something else, something important, will also be in play. A large part of the mission of 1/48/50 will involve the marshaling of loneliness, facing solitude from the other side of distance. In other words, dealing with myself, sorting out the collected echoes in my head, reconciling my hopes for the future with all the memories that appear as distant points of light before closed eyes as I try to fall asleep.
I'm not entirely surprised to have learned these things about Travels... Steinbeck got away with it in 1962 because, I'd venture, society at large was less informed, less discerning, less savvy than today. In our post-A Million Little Pieces world, it should perhaps come as no surprise that even the loftiest literary voices of any era are not above scrutiny.
Nor should they be.
Truth is, I had my own suspicions back in the day, though I didn't realize it. I could never have imagined the caliber of accusations flying around currently, but I did think some of the dialogue in the book came across awkward and inorganic, and in some cases downright unlikely. Some things didn't seem to fit, surely.
But I was eighteen years old, and I didn't care. Travels with Charley was as dazzling a read as I had ever read, and made me want to take off. It was as much a clarion call to going and drifting as any song I have ever listened to, handily stirring my already churning restlessness, and inspiring me to plan 'the big trip', the trip I would one day write about, just like Steinbeck, the trip I now refer to as 1/48/50. For a short while, I even considered retracing his route, though I have since abandoned that notion.
As for Travels... itself, I read it again recently, for the first time in several years, and nothing is lost, even knowing what I now know. Really, who cares? The heart of the book still beats strongly. Maybe Steinbeck didn't make it the whole way alone. Maybe every conversation didn't take place exactly as he set it down, maybe some of them didn't take place at all...maybe he did 'sit in his camper and write all that shit'...but he took the trip, at least, in spite of failing health, and his descriptions of certain landscapes are first rate; his observations, as they paint a portrait of America at the dawn of the 60s, are spot on (and in more than a few passages prophetic); his homecoming to Salinas, California, especially the final moments he spends looking down on the long valley of his youth before turning away forever, is still quite moving.
It's all super concentrated in the first line of the book: When I was very young, and the urge to be someplace else was on me...
The elegance of that line floored me when I was a senior in high school, because I felt it. I very much felt that urge to be someplace else.
And I still do.
