I’m not sure why I got it in my head that I wanted to read John Steinbeck’s nonfiction book Travels with Charley in Search of America this summer since I have only read two only other small works of his and that was many years ago. I guess I thought it would help me get to know the man whose books I wanted to read in the future.
It is true I have not read Steinbeck’s “big works” — East of Eden or Grapes of Wrath but I did read Of Mice and Men and The Pearl in high school…or college. I can’t remember which now. High school was Of Mice and Men and The Pearl was college.
I think.
I don’t know!
I’m old.
Leave me alone!
Anyhow, because I didn’t read a lot of him, in my head I always thought of him as the guy I had to read in high school who had all those run-on sentences. In reality, I realized recently, it was William Faulkner who had all the run-on sentences and I don’t remember minding them when I had to read excerpts of his work.
I did get to know about Steinbeck during this book and learn what an amazing writer he is.
When I finished this book, I was actually a bit sad because I missed curling up in bed at night and reading a chapter or two before I went to sleep, which is something I did for about a month; reading and adding annotation tabs on quotes I wanted to read one again later or share with others.
Steinbeck had a special camper made for him and his dog Charley for a 1960 road trip that he wrote about in the book released in 1962. He named the camper Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse and traveled from Long Island, N.Y., along the outer border of the United States from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down to Salina Valley in California (where he grew up), across Texas, through the deep South and back to New York.
There were stops in Chicago, California, and Texas, where he met up with his wife (his final and third) and/or family/friends. He didn’t go into a ton of details about those visits, other than the one in Texas where his use of the word “orgy” had me looking up the various definitions of the word. It was not the definition I thought it was. It just meant a several-day party with friends and booze.
In my opinion, the last few chapters of the book were among the most impactful with him learning first hand about Americans and what makes them tick when he drove to New Orleans and decided to watch the circus that surrounded US marshals walking young black girls into white schools.
Before that much of the book was more like a history and geography lesson with some interesting tidbits thrown in about Steinbeck and the relationship to his dog Charley.
Don’t get me wrong, all of the early stories were good as well. Steinbeck had very serious and deep observations about people, places and other events throughout his journey, but he became the most descriptive when he wrote about the nausea that overcame him while watching racist, demonic women scream at small black children, as the children were walked into schools that the states made them go to during desegregation.
He wanted to see a group of women called “the cheerleaders.” These white women would gather with other whites from town and scream obscenities at the little black children being ushered into the schools the state was requiring them to attend to end the racism of segregation. Most in the town, the state of Lousiana, and the country, seemed to see these women as some kind of heroes.
Steinbeck saw them as something much more evil.
“ No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television, the soundtrack was made to blur or had crowd noises cut to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. And along and unprotected life I’ve have seen and heard the vomiting of demonic humans before why then these screams fill me with a shocked and sick sorrow?
The words written down are dirty, carefully and selected filthy. But there was something far worse here than dirt, a kind of frightening witches’ Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage. Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction.
These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.”
Steinbeck said he had a hard time understanding racism because when he grew up he lived in a town where the most talented, prominent, and kindest people was an African-American family that the entire town, white and black, looked up to.
Before this part of the book, Steinbeck wrote a lot about how unfriendly the country had become and that struck me because I thought this disconnect Americans had started developing with their fellow man had started much later, like the late 1990s and early 2000s.
There were so many well written passages and quotable sentences in this book, many focusing on the desire of Steinbeck, and he believed, most members of mankind, especially Americans, to love the idea of traveling, progressing, going somewhere new.
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”
I’m glad I read this book before I read Steinbeck’s deeper or more acclaimed works. I was able to learn more about what Steinbeck felt was important in life – what virtues and morals he grew up with (even if he didn’t always practice them) and how they shaped his thinking about how the world should be even when it wasn’t.
“We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”
Let me know if you have read this book or other Steinbeck works and I’ll leave you with a few more quotes from the book that I enjoyed or that made me think because they made me so uncomfortable.
“ I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.”
***
“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
***
“Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.”
