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A review by bittersweet_symphony
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
4.0
"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 that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked." So begins John Steinbeck's travelogue of mid-20th century America.
He is an amiable companion and steady narrator. Steinbeck doesn't bog us down with excessive details about the road, the landscapes, or the minutiae of living on the move, as many travel-writers tend to do. Although he avoids this pitfall, this few hundred page experience feels sparse, skipping over large swaths of the United States, failing to capture a complete picture of the many faces and voices of the American landscape. In Massachussets he has a brief encounter with a Ph.D. holding dairy-man who "liked what he was doing and didn't want to be somewhere else--one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey." He winters in New England, casting some light on the temperant of the old America. Upon getting lost he is cautioned not to ever ask directions of a Maine native because "somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people and we don't smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly."
His anti-government colors reveal themselves when he attempts to cross the Canadian border. "I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments, and nowhere is my natural anarchism more aroused than at national borders where patient and efficient public servants carry out their duties in matters on immigration and customs...I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men." Following some help from a nearby local, he remarks "he wasn't government, you see. But government can make you feel so small and mean that it takes some doing to build back a sense of self-importance." In short, the government is the worst.
En route to the Dakotas he converses with a mobile-trailer-living man who shatters the romantic notion of "having roots" or permanent settlement: "My father...grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived for maybe a thousand years. That's roots for you, no running water, no tiolet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings...Was that better? I bet if you gave my old man the choice he'd cut his roots and live like this." Steinbeck builds upon the refrain. This rootlessness is in the American DNA--literally. "Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home."
In Ohio, he laments the loss of local language, dialects largely erased from the rise of radio and television. "For speech is so much more than words and sentences. I did listen everywhere. Communications destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process...Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech."
His high praise of Wisconsin caught me off guard and would bring a smile to the face of my midwestern friends. Few states have more pride than Wisconsin. "There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I've seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece. 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 green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about."
Steinbeck shares my love affair with Montana: "I am in love with Montana. For other states, I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it's difficult to analyze love when you're in it...It seems to me that Montana is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans...Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a seacoast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love."
In Yellowstone, he foreshadows our Instagram culture of today. "Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland...Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward."
He sprinkles occasional life wisdom on the pages: "I had interfered in a matter that was none of my business. And while it is true that people rarely take action on advice of others unless they were going to do it anyway, there was the small chance that in my enthusiasm for my hairdressing thesis I might have raised up a monster."
In his hometown of Salinas, California he voices the frustration many an aged person feels these days. "Having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me...And it was true what I had said to Johnny Garcia--I was the ghost. My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it."
I most appreciate Steinbeck's book for offering a glimpse into the landscape of late 1950's America, a frozen frame in time. For a more thorough exploration of the United States, I'd recommend Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. For a real taste of the Rocky Mountain region, I suggest reading Gretel Ehrlich's "The Solace of Open Spaces." To gain a view of the vast midsection of the US, I'd recommend "Great Plains" by Ian Frazier. And, for the more reckless and adventurous, I will always refer people to "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer.
He is an amiable companion and steady narrator. Steinbeck doesn't bog us down with excessive details about the road, the landscapes, or the minutiae of living on the move, as many travel-writers tend to do. Although he avoids this pitfall, this few hundred page experience feels sparse, skipping over large swaths of the United States, failing to capture a complete picture of the many faces and voices of the American landscape. In Massachussets he has a brief encounter with a Ph.D. holding dairy-man who "liked what he was doing and didn't want to be somewhere else--one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey." He winters in New England, casting some light on the temperant of the old America. Upon getting lost he is cautioned not to ever ask directions of a Maine native because "somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people and we don't smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly."
His anti-government colors reveal themselves when he attempts to cross the Canadian border. "I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments, and nowhere is my natural anarchism more aroused than at national borders where patient and efficient public servants carry out their duties in matters on immigration and customs...I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men." Following some help from a nearby local, he remarks "he wasn't government, you see. But government can make you feel so small and mean that it takes some doing to build back a sense of self-importance." In short, the government is the worst.
En route to the Dakotas he converses with a mobile-trailer-living man who shatters the romantic notion of "having roots" or permanent settlement: "My father...grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived for maybe a thousand years. That's roots for you, no running water, no tiolet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings...Was that better? I bet if you gave my old man the choice he'd cut his roots and live like this." Steinbeck builds upon the refrain. This rootlessness is in the American DNA--literally. "Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home."
In Ohio, he laments the loss of local language, dialects largely erased from the rise of radio and television. "For speech is so much more than words and sentences. I did listen everywhere. Communications destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process...Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech."
His high praise of Wisconsin caught me off guard and would bring a smile to the face of my midwestern friends. Few states have more pride than Wisconsin. "There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I've seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece. 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 green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about."
Steinbeck shares my love affair with Montana: "I am in love with Montana. For other states, I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it's difficult to analyze love when you're in it...It seems to me that Montana is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans...Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a seacoast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love."
In Yellowstone, he foreshadows our Instagram culture of today. "Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland...Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward."
He sprinkles occasional life wisdom on the pages: "I had interfered in a matter that was none of my business. And while it is true that people rarely take action on advice of others unless they were going to do it anyway, there was the small chance that in my enthusiasm for my hairdressing thesis I might have raised up a monster."
In his hometown of Salinas, California he voices the frustration many an aged person feels these days. "Having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me...And it was true what I had said to Johnny Garcia--I was the ghost. My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it."
I most appreciate Steinbeck's book for offering a glimpse into the landscape of late 1950's America, a frozen frame in time. For a more thorough exploration of the United States, I'd recommend Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. For a real taste of the Rocky Mountain region, I suggest reading Gretel Ehrlich's "The Solace of Open Spaces." To gain a view of the vast midsection of the US, I'd recommend "Great Plains" by Ian Frazier. And, for the more reckless and adventurous, I will always refer people to "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer.