Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck is one of the great authors of the American Canon. Having recently read Winter of our Discontent I continued to dig deeper into his books by reading his 1962 travelog Travels With Charley.

In this non fiction book Steinbeck departs from his normal fare and provides us with details about his cross country trip ( and back again ) with his dog Charley. In the fall of 1960 Steinbeck with a truck set up with a camper the author departed from his home on Long Island with the goal of visiting states across the country and meeting people along the way.

The book is uneven. As Steinbeck starts his trip he travels through New Hampshire and Maine. Being from Maine it is certainly interesting to see him travel to Deer Isle and up around the rim of Maine to see the potato harvest in Aroostook county. Along the way he spends an evening visiting with some of the French Canadiens that come across the border for the potato harvest.

There are moments of profound beauty in the book. For me, being a dog lover, Steinbeck's relationship with his dog makes him much more relatable to me personally. The dog, something called a blue poodle, is quite old and suffers from prostate problems and the care that the author takes with the dog and his various ailments is a strong demonstration of his attitude toward animals.

Steinbeck surely seems to relate more with the everyman that he meets along the way than any of the larger people in society. If you have a job driving a truck or train, or making something Steinbeck wants to meet you.

The book is enjoyable for the interactions he has, and his wonderful descriptions of nature. A section on his visit to the Badlands is especially enjoyable and a visit to Yellowstone is quite funny.

The second half of the book has him visiting his home state of California and then moving through Texas and the American South. The tone of the book changes at this point. Steinbeck speaks of his youth in Salinas but also admittedly struggles to write about his home state, though his talk of the giant redwoods is very enjoyable.

In writing about Texas the author talks about visiting some friends and the orgy of food they share. His major talking point on the subject of Texas is in how the people of Texas are different, are larger than life. This has certainly not changed in the last fifty years and the polarizing nature of all things Texas that he speaks of continues to be the same.

As he moves into the South, remember his travels are in 1960, he advises that he feels ambivalent about this part of the journey. He of course is from New York and thus is an outsider to the virulent racism he sees. On hearing of a school desegregating in New Orleans and about a group of middle aged women called the " Cheerleaders' who gather each day to spew hatred and venom Steinbeck decides he has to see it for himself. Seeing it for himself makes him feel no better about the state of things and leads him to a stronger belief in an earlier assertion " that change will come to the South, it just is a matter of how it comes, peacefully or violently." In this he was more prescient than he perhaps would have wished to be.

This section of the book is a bit of a sharp contrast to the rest of the book and in that way does not work. It is very valuable to read, but it might well have been better placed in another book or article and is quite jarring.

All in all the book has wonderful moments but much more of a sense of waiting for something to happen. It is not a book I would recommend but for the author was most likely a nice diversion away from his normal practice. Steinbeck was a man interested in many social causes and certainly his viewpoints and outlook expressed was well worth hearing, perhaps more so at the time, than now viewing from fifty years hence.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

This 1961 was the last novel Steinbeck completed before his death. In 1962 Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature, not for this book but as was stated by the Nobel Committee at the time this book made clear that his greatness had not diminished and cast a bright light on his great works of the late thirties and early forties.

As to the reviews at the time of it's publication they were not their kind. Over time this book has been reassessed and now is considered along with the Steinbeck classics East of Eden, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath as one of his best.

For me, personally, this book was one of, if not the most affecting, of the Steinbeck books. The conflict between ethics and money, contentment and coveting, the internal heart and the external desires was so well portrayed in this book that if one allows it they feel this story to their bones.

Ethan Allen Hawley lives in a fictional Long Island town. Ethan's family goes back centuries, his grandfathers and great grandfathers were sea captains, captaining whaling ships and owning much of the town of New Baytown. While Ethan was away serving his country in World War II Ethan's father made some poor investments and lost everything except the family home. When Ethan came home he was reduced to becoming a clerk in the grocery store that the family previously owned.

Ethan is a rare man however. He would like more things, to have wealth, but he is a content man. He understands what is important and holds onto his pride in his family and family history. He conducts himself with kindness and a sense of ethic that he feels, he knows is rare in the world.

Still Ethan has troubles and his heart is aching. His wife whom he loves aches to " hold her head up", she is tired of being poor and in moments of sharp pointed jesting refers to him as a grocery clerk. His teenage children would like more money, his son Allen consistently pointing out all the things they do not have, first and foremost a television. Ethan feels the pull of wanting to be more if only to try to settle his family. Every man wants to feel like a provider and Ethan is no different.

Still Ethan persists. He runs the store for the owner, an Italian immigrant named Alfie Marullo. Working next to the bank he is consistently badgered by the banks owner Mr. Baker to put the money in his bank account, received by his wife upon her brothers death. Ethan suspects that Baker feels guilty over whatever transpired during the war years when he was away and his father was losing all the family assets, he does not know how Baker was complicit but feels he was. Even more assuredly Ethan believes a family rumor that his Grandfather and Baker's forebears had a falling out when partnering on a whaling ship. The ship burned to the hulls in the bay, deemed an accident the insurance company paid but Ethan's grandad always suspected the Baker forebear of arson.

Ethan talks to the cans and vegetables on the shelf in the store. He visits daily with Joey Morphy the bank teller next door and Ethan begins to wonder if he should not suspend his ethics for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, so that he can jump ahead in the town. He assures himself that in the war he killed people without being a killer, so could he not be unethical for a short time to get ahead and then resume to his natural bent.

Ethan concocts a plan and while it does not go as planned eventually his fortunes do change. He is not thrilled so much as glad to be able to resume his ethical course, his anger at Baker is given a tangible release, and all seems well. His son, the materialist, however has had his own ethical crisis and the fruits of that are coming home. Unlike Ethan however he feels no remorse or need to justify, he just wants to look out for number one. This causes a crisis of faith Ethan felt he had long ago resolved.

A couple of quotes in this book are for the books. Speaking about a house with teenagers in it who are being quiet Ethan advises that being in a house with teenagers not physically present is much quieter than being in a house with teenagers in it that are being silent. Why? Because teenagers even being quiet roil the air in a way that can be deafening. It is so true.

More perceptive even is the claim that people never want advice, they only want corroboration and I will tell you from a lifetime of experience both professionally and personally that nothing truer has ever been said. When you find someone who asks your advice and truly wants it embrace that person, he is rarer than a buffalo nickel.

I cannot speak highly enough of this book but I will caution that it is not a book to just read for the story, be prepared to have your mind and reason challenged. Steinbeck wanted to right a book about the struggle to maintain personal morality in a materialistic world. For ones sleep patterns he might have accomplished his goal all too well.

Huck Finn by Mark Twain

This book is called The Great American Novel by many literary critics. It is a very good book. Still in reading this book, as good as it was, there is no way it can be called a great novel. Twain to me was as much as a satirist as a literary writer.

Huck Finn is often at the top of the list of books banned by libraries and schools across the country. Why? Well like Faulkner in the early twentieth century Twain in the nineteenth used some very racially colorful language. Other concerns were about references to Huck and the Slave Jim going naked on the raft.

These complaints are silly to us in the modern world. The story of Huck Finn is very strong. Still this material is dated. Dated in a way that does not mean it should be controversial but that simply the story is a bit contrived. To me, when Tom appears and he and Huck are making efforts to free Jim the repeated efforts to make the plot more complicated and dangerous do not age well. It is understood that Tom was raised on adventure stories and wants to live out his imagination but the plot and things they have Jim do seem a bit silly and unrealistic.

Of course Twain was writing about a time when Black people were kept in bondage and slavery so perhaps this was just one more layer of ridiculousness he was trying to exhibit to prove the point of how a society could claim to be all beneovelent and gracious as the Southern culture claimed and yet keep slaves. Huck struggles with this too. When he comments on how he thinks less of Tom for Tom saying he would help him free a slave and when he admits he will be going straight to Hell if helps Jim escapes he shows the conflict of the South.

This is a good book. I am glad I read it. Perhaps like much literature it is a matter of style, taste, and personal preference but to me putting Twain in the echelon of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck is something that requires a stretch of the nature of the whoppers told by Tom Sawyer.

Read it. Enjoy it. It is, however, overrated.

The Ghost of Tom Joad

A few months ago we watched the Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 movie. It was well done. I read the book back in high school and more recently in the last year. It ages well or i have. I have read recently that the book upon publication was a banned book. During the depression the book was concerning to many of those in power. The book certainly did nothing to instill confidence in those that were downtrodden that their government would do anything to help them.

In 1995 Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called The Ghost of Tom Joad. This was a quiet song told during the Bush I & early Clinton years and it was not a pretty picture. A few years later a metal band called Rage Against the Machine covered the song in a much different way.

All of these stories of Tom Joad trace back to the wonderful book that I hope high schools are still making their students read. I want my children to read this.

In the meantime I will sit my boys down and let them watch Tom Morello ( of Rage Against the Machine) join Bruce onstage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert on HBO. These two tore this song up. And if after hearing the song the boys ask " Who is Tom Joad?" I have just the book for them to read.