A few weeks later, on Oct. 17, 1961, Covici wrote to Steinbeck telling him what the Viking Press editorial staff thought about “Charley.” If there were any doubts it was a truthful account, they aren’t apparent in Covici’s glowing report: “All of us have read your Journal book and all are enthusiastic. The consensus is that you have a good, fresh, personal view of America today, pleasantly readable with narrative interest in the trip’s continuity, and plenty of human interest in new adventures, your dog, and the people you meet and describe so vividly along the way. Not much cutting is to be done. The third part practically needs none. Most of us feel that it is the best and in a way gives the book its justification.”
Through the winter of 1961-62, the publishing industry worked at its normal tectonic pace to produce Steinbeck’s last major work. The editing process at Viking Press removed the Cheerleader’s paragraph of filth, 99 percent of Steinbeck’s political comments and all presence of Elaine on the West Coast. On Feb. 8, 1962, after Steinbeck had rewritten the Cheerleaders scene, Covici told him in a letter that though he preferred the original version, “the gamble was too great and not worth it.”
The edited version still had “all the bitterness and disappointment in people... ,” wrote Covici, who spent less time editing than holding his friend’s hand and patting him on the back. “It is a good book for so many reasons. Almost everything you ever thought, felt, smelled and expressed about people and things in your other books is here succinctly, trenchantly, vividly said, and with humor and infinite pain to yourself.”
Despite Covici’s high praise, “Charley” was badly flawed – as nonfiction or fiction. But Steinbeck had nothing to worry about. He could have written his grocery list and it would have been a bestseller. A Book of the Month Club choice for August, “Travels With Charley” hit stores on July 27, 1962. It sold like crazy, reaching Number One on the New York Times’ nonfiction list on Oct. 21, topping future classics like “Silent Spring” and “The Guns of August.” Steinbeck’s only No. 1 New York Times bestseller, it stayed on the nonfiction lists at the Times and Time magazine for over a year.
Viking Press did a smooth job of marketing it as a nonfiction book. The simple half-page ad in the New York Times on July 29, 1962, included a photo of Steinbeck sitting on the ground and facing the camera with Charley. The copy read: “Steinbeck – His enchanted journey across America with an irresistible gentleman poodle is the most warmly personal book he has ever written.”
The illustrations by Don Freeman on the front and back covers of the jacket and Freeman’s U.S. map showing Steinbeck and Charley’s route on the inside covers did their job perfectly. They reinforced the impression that the great author and his faithful dog spent almost three lonely months on the American road, roughing it and camping out like virtual hobos as they slowly studied the soul of a changing nation and its people.
The Critics Cheer
Steinbeck was never liked by the East Coast literary mafia, which alone is a good reason to friend him. The big critics dismissed him for snobbish intellectual reasons, according to his friendly biographer Jackson Benson: He was from out West. He had a sense of humor. He was too popular, too sentimental, too accessible and insufficiently political (i.e., he didn't keep writing "The Grapes of Wrath" over and over to please diehard lefties like Mary McCarthy at Nation magazine).
Yet when “Travels With Charley” was published, it generally got raves from reviewers in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Most of them embraced/swallowed the romantic man-and-dog-on-the-road storyline. Even critical reviews didn’t question the authenticity of Steinbeck’s supporting cast of cardboard characters. Harper’s, Saturday Review and a few other highbrow places were not particularly impressed by Steinbeck’s “predictable” observations. But the New York Times, Newsweek and the Atlantic loved the book.
The Times’ reviewer, Eric F. Goldman, lost his grip. The Princeton history professor and world authority on modern American culture blubbered in the Sunday Book Review on July 29 that it was “a pure delight, a pungent potpourri of places and people interspersed with bittersweet essays on everything from the emotional difficulties of growing old to the reasons why giant Sequoias arouse such awe.”
Goldman wasn’t 100 percent pleased, however. He pointed out, correctly, that the America Steinbeck saw was “hardly coincident” with the real American heartland because he had avoided the most significant new developments of the 1960s – the big cities and the growing suburbs. But Goldman, like other reviewers, bought completely into the myth of “Travels With Charley.”
Goldman assumed Steinbeck had exhausted himself on a grueling, undercover, three-month road trip in a truck. He wrote sentences like “To avoid hotel stays and certain recognition he had a manufacturer build for him a cabin body equipped for day-and-night living. He traveled accompanied only by his aged French poodle.”
Calling it “affecting and highly entertaining,” Newsweek praised Steinbeck for his “quick mind and honest heart” but damned him for “his self-indulgent loathing of every city he drove through.” The reviewer in Atlantic’s August issue predicted that it was a book “to be read slowly for its savor, and one which, like Thoreau, will be quoted and measured by our own experience.”
The Boston Herald enthused that “Travels With Charley” was one of "the best books John Steinbeck has ever written. Perceptive, revealing, and completely delightful." The San Francisco Examiner deemed it "profound, sympathetic, often angry . . . an honest and moving book by one of our great writers."
Only Time magazine, whose owner Henry Luce reportedly never forgave Steinbeck for “The Grapes of Wrath's” attacks on capitalism, broke from the slobbering mainstream pack. It ripped Steinbeck in a two-paragraph review in August 1962:
TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, by John Steinbeck (246 pp.; Viking; $4.95). Put a famous author behind the wheel of a three-quarter-ton truck called Rocinante (after Don Quixote's horse), equip him with everything from trenching tools to subzero underwear, send along a pedigreed French poodle named Charley with prostatitis, follow the man and dog on a three-month, 10,000-mile trip through 34 states, and what have you got? One of the dullest travelogues ever to acquire the respectability of a hard cover.
Vagabond Steinbeck's motive for making the long, lonely journey is admirable: ‘To try to rediscover this monster land’ after years of easy living in Manhattan and a country place in Sag Harbor, L.I. He meets some interesting people: migrant Canucks picking potatoes in Maine, an itinerant Shakespearean actor in North Dakota, his own literary ghost back home in California's Monterey Peninsula. But when the trip is done, Steinbeck's attempt at rediscovery reveals nothing more remarkable than a sure gift for the obvious observation.
Tough stuff.
Time’s hatchet job seemed unfair and unnecessarily mean-spirited when I first read it. But given what I’ve learned since, it looks about right. Yet even Time’s hard-hearted reviewer didn’t question the existence of that “interesting” Shakespearean actor from Central Casting.
As "Travels With Charley" rocketed to the top of the nonfiction bestseller list in the fall of 1962, shocking news came from Sweden. Steinbeck, who had been nominated eight times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, had finally won it. The Swedish Academy's choice was influenced in part by "Charley," which the selection committee clearly believed was the true account of Steinbeck's road trip in search of America. Steinbeck's triumph was a surprise that left many displeased. A Swedish paper called it one of the Academy's biggest mistakes. The New York Times wondered why the award was given to a has-been whose talent was "limited" and whose best books were "watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing."
Fifty years later Steinbeck's award would be further discredited. According to Academy archives opened in 2012 and released in January of 2013, though Steinbeck was as worthy of a Nobel as any American writer who ever wielded a pen, he was a compromise choice. Apparently, the other nominees -- including British writer Robert Graves and Denmark's "Out of
Africa" author Karen Blixen -- were considered so weak that Steinbeck took the prize.
Time magazine didn't care what Steinbeck had won. It kicked him and "Charley" around again with a nasty Nov. 2, 1962 article defaming the author and his entire body of work. The magazine sniped that the decision of the Nobel judges “was also reportedly influenced by Steinbeck's latest, bestselling ‘Travels with Charley,’ which manages to recapture the banality, mawkish sentiment and pseudo philosophy that have marked Steinbeck at his worst.”
Academics weren’t so rude. But in subsequent years some of their assessments found the book to be too subjective and too personal. Peter Lisca, a godfather of Steinbeck studies, said it represented "all the baggage of the third-rate journalist who sees only the stereotype and the cliché." Lisca apparently never realized, nor suspected, that Steinbeck didn’t actually “see” those stereotypes and clichés. He made up most if not all of them.
Robert Gottlieb, the book editor and former editor of the New Yorker, saw through the mask when he critiqued “Charley” and Steinbeck’s later works of fiction in the New York Review of Books in April of 2008. In “The Rescue of John Steinbeck” Gottlieb wrote that “Steinbeck’s heart, as always, is in the right place, but there’s something artificial about ‘Charley’: many of the encounters he reports sound like pure inventions.”
To be fair to Steinbeck, he said upfront that his book was never meant to be serious journalism or deep social commentary – and it wasn’t. It was nowhere near as deep, wide or historically important as Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” It was not as journalistically meticulous or prolonged or detailed or soul-searching as William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways.”
In "Travels With Charley" Steinbeck went out of his way, pre-emptively perhaps, to make it clear what his book actually was: the exceedingly subjective account of one man’s unique, unrepeatable trip around the USA. It was exactly that. He just didn’t bother also to point out that his account was so subjective it was no longer accurate or true.
‘Charley’ Doesn’t Go Hollywood
Despite its flaws, “Travels With Charley’s” romantic version of searching for America by car has never fallen from the culture’s consciousness. Along with Kerouac’s “On the Road” – its hipper, edgier, happier and openly fictional older brother – it has become a classic American road book. It gave Charles Kuralt his idea for his popular “On the Road” segments for “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” But so far, despite a lot of interest, it’s never been turned into a dumb sitcom or bad movie.
Not that Hollywood hasn’t tried. In 1963 no less than Sam Peckinpah wrote an unintentionally hilarious TV script for Warner Brothers’ television division dramatizing “Travels With Charley.” Not surprisingly, it included Steinbeck having two knockdown fistfights. Too horrible even for network TV’s standards, it was never made. Here's a hint why:
In the early 1990s, Kevin Costner’s production company had an option on “Travels With Charley” with plans to shoot an eight-part miniseries. It died a deserved death. Knowing Hollywood, it wasn’t because Costner’s project was an incredibly stupid idea. It was probably because they couldn’t get Sam Peckinpah to direct.
Finally, somewhere in a file cabinet at HBO sits a less-tortured screenplay of “Travels With Charley.” Written in the early 2000s by Steinbeck’s son Thom, it’s not likely to include any fistfights but it apparently was written as if the book was true.
Unfortunately, in 1968, shortly before John Steinbeck died, “Travels With Charley” did travel to TV Land. Producer Lee Mendelson of “Peanuts” fame turned it into an hour-long “documentary” for NBC. Narrated by Steinbeck’s buddy Hank Fonda, who played an unseen but amply quoted Steinbeck, it was watched by tens of millions of Americans who didn’t want to watch what was on CBS or ABC that night.
An early example of the “docudrama” genre at its worst, it was presented by Mendelson as the true story of Steinbeck’s lonely journey. Skipping the southern leg of Steinbeck’s trip, Mendelson sent out a Rocinante-lookalike to retrace the “Charley” route from Sag Harbor to the top of Fremont Peak.
The dumbest mistake Mendelson made was hiring 15 actors to look into the camera and pretend to be the characters Steinbeck pretended he had met on his trip. Many of the performances are painful, but arguably the worst fictional character was our friend the mythical itinerant Shakespearean actor of Alice, North Dakota.
To heap hokum on top of hokum, Mendelson threw in a few silly cartoon segments and a hideous Rod McCuen song, “Me & Charley,” which was sung over and over by Glen Yarbrough whenever Charley streaked across the grassy fields of America. Mendelson paid $1,000 to rent a stand-in for the dead poodle, who, in a rare and merciful concession to reality, wasn’t made to talk.
The show’s last stop was high atop Fremont Peak, where Fonda delivered Steinbeck’s great lines from the book as the camera swept up the spectacular view. The program ended with Fonda standing next to Rocinante, as Charley sat in the cab. Fonda explains that Steinbeck’s trip didn’t end on Fremont Peak, but continued on through the South where he saw the agony of school integration in New Orleans and talked with Negroes and whites about the violent changes that were occurring.
After Fonda mistakenly says the 11-week trip was “over four months long,” he asks what it was that Steinbeck had learned about America. In a tight close-up, the man who played Tom Joad in the movie of "The Grapes of Wrath" reads two spliced-together passages from “Travels With Charley”:
It would be pleasant to be able to say of my travels with Charley, “I went out to find the truth about my country and I found it.” And then it would be such a simple matter to set down my findings and lean back comfortably with a fine sense of having discovered truths and taught them to my readers. I wish it were that easy …. What I have set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.
Fonda then looks into the camera and says, “John Steinbeck saw it one way. Charley saw it another way. And now it’s your turn if you so choose to pass that way and rearrange the world as you see it. Goodnight.” Millions of viewers had no reason to doubt that they had just watched the true story of Steinbeck’s journey, which, if Mendelson and NBC were to be believed, was a lonely “four-month” ride around America with a dog in a truck.
Shortly before Steinbeck’s death in late 1968, Mendelson screened his awful rendition of “Travels With Charley” for Steinbeck and Elaine in New York City. “Steinbeck was crying when the lights came on,” Mendelson remembered in a 2003 interview. “I didn’t know if he was crying because he hated it, but he turned to me and said, ‘That’s just the way the trip was.’” Poor Steinbeck. He was probably crying from guilt.
23 – Debunking the Myths About ‘Charley’
Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people in Travels with Charley. He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit. He was too shy. He was really frightened of people who saw through him. He couldn't have handled that amount of interaction. So, the book is actually a great novel.
John Steinbeck’s late son, John IV, from the book
“The Other Side of Eden: Life With John Steinbeck”
Steinbeck’s Un-lonely Trip
John Steinbeck hid many large and small creative fictions among the facts of "Travels With Charley." Only his ghost knows where all of them are buried. In 2010, from coast to coast in libraries and on the highway, I discovered a few of his biggest whoppers. It wasn’t because I was some kind of a literary Woodward or Bernstein. Any decent journalist or skeptical scholar could have done what I did. All the important incriminating evidence had been sitting in plain view in the Steinbeck biographies and archives. In the last 35 years any high school kid with a library card could have proved “Travels With Charley” was a literary fraud.
I knew from Steinbeck’s letters or other sources that a few people he met were real. He saw the Cheerleaders in action that mornin
g in New Orleans. He met the young girl who sat on the floor at the Texas cattle ranch cleaning her .22 rifle. He met Eleanor Brace and her cat George on Deer Isle, Maine. But the reality of everyone else – from the submariner on the ferry to Connecticut and the New York cop in Manhattan to the vets in Spokane and Amarillo and the Canucks in Maine – is as suspect as the most implausible character in a crummy TV docudrama.
My rough guess is 90 percent of the humans in “Travels With Charley” were made up in whole or in part. It’s easy to spot some of the fakes – the actor in North Dakota, the quartet of civil rights characters in New Orleans, the father & son at the dumpy motel in Idaho, the mobile-home owners – because he makes up long chunks of dialogue for them.
I doubt it, but it’s possible his heroic rescue of his sailboat during Hurricane Donna, his troubles at the U.S.-Canada border and his adventures with the gas-station man in Oregon were real or at least honestly based on fact. Likewise for the little party he threw in his camper for the Canucks. Likewise for the “Lonesome Harry” character at the Ambassador East Hotel and nearly every other major or minor scene he spins.
Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 34
