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.