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Editor's Column: “I set this matter down … to inform myself”: Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America as Private Discourse

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/steinbeckreview.17.2.v

1754-6087

Barbara A. Heavilin, with Scott Pugh,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Will Ray's review of biographer William Souder's Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck asserts, As for Travels with Charley, Souder vindicates the investigative work of Bill Steigerwald, the newspaper reporter whose book DoggingSteinbeck showed where, when, and how Steinbeck fictionalized the record of his road trip with his wife's French poodle. Ignored or rejected by Steinbeck scholars when he wrote his book, “Steigerwald could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.” (357–58) Ray's assertion, Souder's approval, and Steigerwald's misdirected investigation seem to me misguided. I find that Steinbeck sets forth his intentions clearly from the onset. Early on in Charley, he states, “I set this matter down … to inform myself.” And this statement is reinforced numerous times in numerous ways throughout Charley, well establishing this book's status as private discourse. In discussing Cannery Row, Warren French states, “The artist … is not a reporter, but a magician who conjures up a new world and provides us with a perspective for examining ours” (19–20). This observation applies to Charley. By his careful delineation of his intentions to inform himself, Steinbeck leaves himself free to conjure, to imagine, to take poetic license as he sees fit.Travels with Charley in Search of America may well be classified as private discourse, leaving this work to stand alone among his other works of fiction and nonfiction. In the opening of Charley, Steinbeck elucidates his purpose for informing himself: “So I was 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 foundation of the larger truth” (5). He is a seeker on a quest to discover a “larger truth.” The emphasis on Steinbeck's own looking and seeing runs as a leitmotif throughout the book from his opening determination “to look again” to his final keen insights on his own and Charley's longing for New York City and home. He hopes to learn to “see” again, delving deep inside of things, to eternal verities. His journey, then, is not so much a travelogue as it is a quest in search of the essence not only of his country, but also of himself.He intentionally rejects any idea that he is a reporter or that he is reporting, quite purposefully distancing himself from journalism: “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…. In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself” (59–60). This is another version of Steinbeck's conviction that all reports, however “true,” are warped by the viewer's experience and heritage. Note the opening of Sea of Cortez: The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there…. We have a book to write about California…. We have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea; its duration a six weeks' charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits—our own without reservation. (1) So it is with Travels with Charley, a book shaped by the mind of the writer, its subject everything Steinbeck “could see and think and even imagine; its limits … [his] own without reservation.”In his introduction to Penguin's 1997 edition, Jay Parini observes, “Travels with Charley offered the reading public a fairly intimate acquaintance with John Steinbeck, one of its favorite writers. Indeed, after more than eleven weeks on the road with this curmudgeonly author and his sprightly poodle, one feels very much at home in his company and sorry that the journey is coming to an end” (xxi). In this tour of the American continent, then, Steinbeck develops a companionship with his readers.And readers learn a great deal about this writer. Running as a humorous thread throughout Charley, for example, is Steinbeck's dislike of heavy traffic and his tendency to panic and get lost when he encounters it. In an anecdote he tells how such traffic prevented him from seeing “the noble twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis”: First the traffic struck me like a tidal wave and carried me along, a bit of shiny flotsam bounded in front by a gasoline truck half a block long. Behind me was an enormous cement mixer on wheels, its big howitzer revolving as it proceeded. On my right was what I judged to be an atomic cannon. As usual I panicked and got lost. Like a weakening swimmer I edged to the right into a pleasant street only to be stopped by a policeman, who informed me that trucks and such vermin were not permitted there. He thrust me back into the ravening stream…. The air saturated with diesel fumes burned in my lungs. Charley got a coughing fit and I couldn't take time to pat him on the back. My head was spinning. I had lost all sense of direction. (128–29) At a roadside restaurant he later asks for directions, and both waitress and cook assure him, “Nobody can get lost in Minneapolis.” “I guess I brought some new talent to it,” Steinbeck responds. This joke and Steinbeck's amusement at his own foibles recur from beginning to journey's end back home in New York. He is a good companion, at ease with himself. And does he exaggerate about the amount of traffic he encounters? Perhaps. But big fish stories are as American as apple pie. And we're by his side anyway, for we trust the central thrust of the narrative and we remember our own dislike of jammed freeways—an American epidemic.Writing essentially for himself and for a tolerant, bemused, curious audience, Steinbeck writes informally and with a sense of immediacy in a first-person narrative. His major writing strategies are vignettes, brief character sketches, dialogues, anecdotes, rhetorical questions, and meditative pensées in which he expounds on a topic. The vignettes at times reveal Steinbeck as a Romantic or perhaps as a mystic who sees beyond the physical into the metaphysical, into the essence of things. His encounter with Wisconsin is such an occasion: I never saw a country that changed so rapidly, and because I had not expected it everything I saw brought a delight. I don't know how it is in other seasons, the summers may reek and rock with heat, the winters may groan with dismal cold, but when I first saw it for the first and only time in early October, the air was rich with butter-colored sunlight, not fuzzy but crisp and clear so that every frost-gay tree was set off, the rising hills were not compounded, but alone and separate. There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see all things, deep in…. I remembered now that I had been told Wisconsin is a lovely state, but the telling had not prepared me. It was a magic day. The land dripped with richness, the fat cows and pigs gleaming against the green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about. (126) Here the physical “butter-colored sunlight” becomes metaphysical insight into universal mysteries, “a penetration of light into solid substance” so that Steinbeck seems “to see into things, deep in” (126).Brief character sketches are masterful condensations capturing an essence tersely, sometimes almost epigrammatically. He brings to his nonfiction the skill of a novelist in the creation of vivid characters with deft strokes. To illustrate, consider his encounter with a waitress at an auto court near Bangor, Maine: “She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream” (46). After talking with her, however, he concludes, “Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. And then there are others, and this dame is one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them” (46–47). An epigrammatic sentence sums up his experiences with such people: “A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ” (48).He borrows other techniques from his fiction—reminiscent of the list of cities the Joads encounter on Route 66. In Charley, Steinbeck uses the catalog, or listing, as in the one designed to satisfy “the designs of the mapifiers”: “I can report that I moved north in Maine roughly parallel to U.S. Highway 1 through Houlton, Mars Hill, Presque Madawaska, Upper Frenchville, and Fort Kent, then went due south on State Highway 11 past Eagle Lake, Winterville, Portage, Squa Pan, Masardis, Knowles Corner, Patten, Sherman, Grindstone, and so to Millinocker” (71). But the effect of this listing goes beyond satisfying “the passions of the mapifiers”—and the reader senses a bit of sarcastic ridicule of the obsessions of reporters here. Steinbeck loves words, and these place names roll off the tongue and through the mind like music, a peculiarly American music. For surely such place names do not exist anywhere else in the world—they have an American flavor.Another catalog occurs in a dialogue describing “a touching reunion in Johnny Garcia's bar in Monterey” (199–200). In a conversation with Johnny, Steinbeck catalogs the dead, with echoing responses from his friend. His is a lament or an Old English ubi sunt, “Where are those who were before us?” “Where are the great ones? Tell me, where's Willie Trip?”“Dead,” Johnny said hollowly.“Where is Pilon, Johnny, Pom Pom, Miz Gragg, Stevie Field?” “Dead, dead, dead,” he echoed.“Ed Ricketts, Whitey's Number One and Two, where's Sonny Boy, Ankle Varney, Jesús María Corcoran, Joe Portage, Shorty Lee, Flora Wood, and that girl who kept spiders in her hat?”“Dead—all dead,” Johnny moaned. (203) Such catalogs lend a poetic quality to the book, serving also an organic purpose—the catalog of place names providing a sense of movement and the flavor of America and the catalog of the dead enumerating one name after another like a hammer pounding in Steinbeck's point that “the great ones” are dead.Literary, geographical, and historical allusions provide other creative dimensions to the immediate one of the journey, America, Steinbeck, and Charley. The most obvious literary allusion, of course, is the truck dubbed Rocinante, named after Don Quixote's horse. All kind of connotations stem from this association—that the journey is eccentric, like Don Quixote's quest; that it is visionary, a mystical quest; or simply that middle-aged men sometimes do things that appear crazy to those looking on.While setting up housekeeping for the evening beside a stream in New Hampshire, among the books he has brought along, this modern Don Quixote finds The Spectator by eighteenth-century writer Joseph Addison. Effusively, Steinbeck writes, “Very early I conceived a love for Joseph Addison which I have never lost. He plays the instrument of language as Casals plays a cello. I do not know whether he influenced my prose style, but I could hope he did” (38). And for the next two pages, he playfully molds his own observations into long, coruscating sentences, modeled after the style of Addison, as in his explanation for growing a beard: I cultivate this beard not for the usual given reasons of skin trouble or pain of shaving, nor for the secret purpose of covering a weak chin, but as pure, unblushing decoration, much as a peacock finds pleasure in his tail. And finally, in our times a beard is one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in the circus. (39–40) Here Steinbeck shows himself to be at ease among writers, playing a game of language.Steinbeck's use of rhetorical questions serves sometimes as a transitional device and sometimes to remind him of the purpose of his journey: “Am I learning anything?” (139, emphasis added). Note this question's centering on the self—this book is not didactic, not instructing others. At other times this device serves as a means of questioning what he has learned: “Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste?” (141). And he seeks answers to hard questions: “If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation?” (142). Note once more that the emphasis is on what he himself is learning on his own ability to see clearly, not on instructing anyone else. Rhetorical questions, therefore, lend Charley a tentative, searching tone. He does not claim to have final answers or solutions for himself or for anyone else.The organization of Travels with Charley is primarily based on the central persona of Steinbeck and his companion poodle Charley who get ready to go on a journey, go on a journey, and return home. In this sense the movement is essentially circular, unified by the journey motif and the main characters. But this is not just a physical journey. It is a psychic, metaphysical journey in which an artist seeks to inform himself and to see clearly. Or perhaps he is mining his early acquaintance with Joseph Campbell, and his is a hero's journey—to lose oneself in order to find oneself; to face challenges and overcome them, however minor. As such, it is, for the most part, a private discourse and a private search. Readers could justifiably, therefore, approach this companionable text in the same way they read Thoreau's journals—for the joy of what each writer says. There is, however, more artistic balance in this work than that. As a record of an artist's regaining the ability to see and understand—a motif running throughout the work—it has organic unity.Critical appraisal of Travels with Charley has been mixed. Thom Tammaro and Richard Astro are troubled because Steinbeck returns home and is immediately lost in traffic, but they have failed to connect the dots. Literally, Steinbeck is lost, but only in the sense that, caught in the press of New York City gridlock, he does not know where he is. His propensity for getting lost in heavy traffic is a recurring joke throughout the journey. Evidently, like some of the rest of us, Steinbeck does not have a good sense of direction and despises congestion. These instances are recorded here as elsewhere as humorous self-revelations. In the book's ending, he is not lost in a psychic sense, a loss of self. Rather, he is elated both at being home—paradoxically even though for the moment he is lost—and at having regained the ability “to see.” The literal concept of lostness in New York City, however, may not be sufficient in this interpretation. Typically, Steinbeck may have an underlying meaning for the thoughtful reader to decipher. Susan Shillinglaw observes, “But Steinbeck obviously choses to end with ‘being lost.’ Why? Not just the traffic, I think, but that being lost is precisely the point. How do you really sum up America, then or now? We are all lost when we try to do that, as was Crevecoeur. What conclusions can we reach that aren't contradictory?” (email).Like an Odysseus, Steinbeck is consumed with thoughts of home during the latter part of the journey, and the closer he gets, the more centered his goal becomes, a longing which Charley evidently shares because he “carried out his functions like a sleepwalker, ignored whole rows of garbage cans” (276). In the last two pages, Steinbeck uses the word “home” six times, the phrases “my own town” and “where I live” one time each. This home, however, is in lower New York, where “every evening is Pamplona” because of the crush of commuter traffic and where even a policeman can get lost on occasion. “Boxed in the middle of a crossing by a swirling rapids of turning people,” he pulls “to the curb in a no-parking area” (277). In a paroxysm of laughter over the irony of getting lost in “my own town,” he explains to a policeman, who grins “happily,” telling his own story of getting “lost in Brooklyn only Saturday” (277). Even a native can get lost in New York, and getting lost in this city for Steinbeck is a part of the flavor on this place, a part of returning home. The warm humor of this ending belies any notion that he is “a lost man.” He is at home, and he has found himself—fulfilling the journey's purpose, to inform himself. Having done so, he sees clearly and has a great deal to think about, to mull over. After he has had time to reflect on his experiences, the results will appear in America and Americans, and, as promised, he will then tell “the small diagnostic truths.”At the beginning of Charley, Steinbeck has made his purpose in going on this journey clear: “I set this matter down … to inform myself.” In one vignette in particular, he informs himself, while foreshadowing today's racial tensions and conflict. In New Orleans there are demonstrations and protests over the integration of public schools, and he wants “to catch a show of the Cheerleaders”—middle-aged women shouting obscenities as a tiny black girl, with two big marshals walking on either side of her on the way up the sidewalk to enter the schoolhouse. Steinbeck writes, “She was “the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round…. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed liked those of a frightened fawn” (257). Behind them comes a white man who “dared to bring his white child to school” (257). He was tall, dressed in a light gray suit, “leading his frightened child by the hand…. His body was tensed, … His face was grave and gray, … The muscles of his cheeks stood out from clenched jaws, a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check” (257). Informing himself, with empathy Steinbeck reads the scene with his heart as well as with his mind. He feels with a terrified tiny little girl, her eyes wide with fright. He feels with a tall man “in a light gray suit” who holds his little white daughter's hand as he walks with her up the sidewalk to the schoolhouse, cheeks and jaws clenched, willing himself to hold “his fears in check.” And sharing with readers, he enables us to feel the scene as well. Steinbeck's journey in search of himself is a thing of the heart.Steinbeck's depiction of the psychic atmosphere in New Orleans late in 1960 foreshadows the pervasive air of terror and desperation in the nation at the time of the May 29, 2020, death of a twenty-six-year-old black man named George Floyd, policeman's knee on his neck. Steinbeck asks one of his rhetorical questions, and this movement from outward situation to a quest for inner understanding of the state of affairs is private discourse, though shared with his readers. “What was I learning?” he asks himself, tentatively, searchingly: What was I learning? I had not felt one moment free from the tension, a weight of savage fear…. Everyone, white and black, lived in it, and breathed it—all ages, all trades, all classes. To them it was a fact of existence. And it was building pressure like a boil. Could there be no relief until it burst?I had seen so little of the whole. I didn't see a great deal of World War II—one landing out of a hundred, a few separated times of combat, a few thousand dead out of millions—but I saw enough and felt enough to believe war is no stranger. So here—a little episode, a few people, but the breath of fear was everywhere. (268) What he has learned is not the cause of and panacea for racial conflict; it is rather a felt terror that hangs over everyone: “The breath of fear was everywhere,” Steinbeck writes. And readers still breathe fear, waiting for the next atrocity and fearing its coming. And with Steinbeck, we may well ask ourselves, “What am I learning?”My own copy of Travels with Charley is tattered and worn—well thumbed through, paperclipped, penciled notes throughout on margins and covers, with light-faded sticky notes sticking out all over. Its binding is broken, and the book is held together with a rubber band when not in use. Like other readers, I'm grateful that Steinbeck shared his personal journey and took us all along for the ride. Largely private discourse, Charley is genuine, authentic, speaking to the human condition and of one writer's American experience. Like Parini, the careful reader “feels very much at home in his company and sorry” when the journey comes to an end.Viewing Steinbeck as an early ecologist, the lead article for this issue of Steinbeck Review features Kathleen Hicks's “Bringing Back Truth: Consilience and Ecological Vision in The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” Hicks brings to bear fresh contexts and thought-provoking juxtapositions with the work of sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. Examining The Log as both art and science, according to Hicks, provides “an example of how the artist can successfully draw on science to create a more holistic, fascinating, and creative vision of human nature that gets at core elements of the human psyche”—that is, at the consilience Wilson propounds.Next, William Sem Fure's lively and wide-ranging analysis of Steinbeckian humor begins with a theoretical overview of past views of the roles of humor, selectively covering writers as diverse as Mailer, Mann, Schiller, and Goethe, with an eye to revealing how Steinbeck's humor can adopt for its own purposes “the language of literary forms that have long since become obsolete” and create “a necessary boundary for the sublime.” With a further strong emphasis on the precedent of Cervantes, Sem Fure's analysis innovatively engages the novels of the Monterey cycle—Tortilla Flat (1935), Cannery Row (1945), and Sweet Thursday (1954).The third article is Ryan Slesinger's “To a God Unknown: The Clearing Cycle and Monterey Metaphysics of Ricketts, Steinbeck, and Campbell,” which explores the relationship among those individuals that leads to their philosophical approach to the world. In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck dubs their philosophy “speculative metaphysics,” with an emphasis on holism, spirituality, ecology, and psychology. In To a God Unknown Steinbeck draws on this concept, organizing around the recurring trope of “a pine glade embedded with spirit that lends an ebb-and-flow pattern to the characters' psychological behavior and physical actions.”The first intercalary piece features Susan Shillinglaw's “Reconsidering the Steinbeck-Ricketts Bond: Restored Western Flyer Sails Again in Winter 2021.” The Western Flyer—that fabled research vessel which carried Steinbeck and his close friend Ed Ricketts to the Sea of Cortez—has finally been resurrected (after three trips to the bottom!) and will finally set sail once again in the winter of next year. This fascinating and highly informative retrospective looks back lovingly and yet critically at the relationship between these two men, which so powerfully provoked creativity in both literature and ecological science. Shillinglaw asserts convincingly that the Flyer should be hailed as a “pilgrimage site” for the twenty-first century.Next, William James Connor's “Steinbeck's Phalanx Theory: Reflections on His Three Great Depression Novels and FDR's New Deal” examines three of Steinbeck's Depression-era works—In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath—analyzing them in light of Roosevelt's New Deal and Steinbeck's phalanx theory.William Ray's “Steinbeck Today” overviews all things current in the world of Steinbeck, beginning by acknowledging that the coronavirus contagion has put something of a damper on conferences and other gatherings. Ray points to discussions of Steinbeck's time held at Stanford and a new biography of Steinbeck, among other items of interest.Reviews include Linda Smith's most insightful discussion of John Marsh's The Emotional Life of the Great Depression. She finds that the work provides a highly useful resource for “examining the period from the viewpoint of politics, economics, popular culture, and literature—as well as social sciences.” Marsh's psychological history posits “six ‘quintessential’ emotions,” and maintains that in a study of the emotional life of an era, “the literature of the period plays a particularly important role.” Significantly, Smith finds that Marsh's analysis of the ethos of the thirties resonates with insights for our own times as well.Charles Etheridge's essay review, “Susan Shillinglaw's A Journey into Steinbeck's California, First, Second, and Third Editions,” opens with a brief laudatory introduction to the author, longtime director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University. A chapter-by-chapter summary of the latest edition (2019) of A Journey into Steinbeck's California follows, with an incisive comparative view of additions made to the second (2011) and third editions (2019).William Ray's review of William Souder's newly published biography, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, applauds the study for its “genial style,” its research, and its psychological analysis of the writer. Representative of Ray's esteem for this work is his high praise for Souder's depiction of the Salinas Valley: Souder's survey of the Salinas Valley at the beginning of the book offers the same blend of geological history and human drama that brought Steinbeck country to life for readers of Cannery Row and East of Eden.Following the reviews is Peter Van Coutren's new column, “Updates from the Steinbeck Archives.” It begins with this issue and will continue in each Fall issue hereafter. It is a treasure trove, providing readers of Steinbeck Review with an excellent guide to the Steinbeck archives both in the United States and Japan.We are pleased to announce the inclusion of Steinbeck Review in the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS), and we welcome Lowell Wyse as assistant editor of Steinbeck Review, alongside John Timmerman. Wyse is a scholar of modern American literature and the environmental humanities. His current book project, Site-Reading: Ecospatial Orientation and Twentieth-Century American Prose (University of Iowa Press 2021), explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the twin lenses of geographical awareness and environmental thought. Originally from the Maumee Watershed in southern Michigan, Wyse holds a Ph.D. in English from Loyola University Chicago and a master's in English from Wichita State University. He currently teaches English for Broward College (Florida) at the Center for Global Education in Lima, Peru.The Spring 2021 Steinbeck Review will feature Barbara A. Heavilin's review of the new Steinbeck biography, William Souder's Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck. She places this work within the context of two other major biographies: Jackson J. Benson's The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984; reprinted in 1990 as John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography) and Jay Parini's John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995). And Robert DeMott reviews Bill Steigerwald's Dogging Steinbeck and its sequel, Chasing Steinbeck's Ghost.