Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  Until I stumbled onto the truth and spoiled everyone’s fun, the “Travels With Charley” Myth had fooled a lot of smart people. For 50 years it got a pass from scholars. It’s not, but it should be especially embarrassing to the Steinbeck Studies establishment that it never exposed the book for masquerading as nonfiction. On every other page it screams “I’m a work of fiction.”

  I don’t pretend to have read every back issue of the Steinbeck Review to see if anyone heard those cries of fiction from “Charley’s” pages. But scholars who liked Steinbeck apparently were too busy looking for deeper meaning in the conversations of a French poodle or trying to prove Steinbeck was a great writer or a prescient environmentalist. If they had been more critical, more skeptical, more scholarly, they might have saved me a lot of work.

  A victim of the “Charley” Myth

  One journalist who quickly saw through a large part of the “Travels With Charley” Myth in recent years was the aforementioned Bill Barich, the author of “Long Way Home.” In a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Barich hit the bull’s-eye when he said, “I'm fairly certain that he made up most of the book.”

  Reading the book again as an adult, Barich had no trouble recognizing fictional characters when he met a coast-to-coast parade of them. Any veteran reporter/writer like Barich who’s worked on the road alone for weeks at a time knows how improbable/unbelievable it was that Steinbeck – a shy man, not an aggressive journalist – could have run into all those perfect people/characters he packed into his book.

  But Barich was another unwitting victim of the “Travels With Charley” Myth. He told the L.A. Times he thought the source of Steinbeck’s gloominess about America and its future was because he spent too much time sitting alone in his camper with only a dog and a cache of booze. Barich was totally wrong, but he had a good excuse. He was working under the mistaken assumption that the book was an accurate account of Steinbeck's travels. He believed Steinbeck spent most of his time alone, camping out and poking across the hinterland, too shy to interact with his fellow Americans and depressed by thoughts of his own looming mortality.

  Stacy Innerst

  Steinbeck being alone all the time is the most laughable part of the “Charley” Myth. A complete day-by-day accounting of where he was on his entire trip is not possible, but enough is known to discredit the idea. A more honest title for the book would have been “Travels With Elaine.” Based on basic TV-detective logic and clues I found in his book, his road letters, Jackson Benson's biography and several newspaper articles, Steinbeck traveled with and slept with his beloved wife on about 43 days of his 75-day trip. They stayed together in hotels, motels, resorts, family homes, Adlai Stevenson’s house and a fancy Texas cattle ranch.

  The handful of times when Steinbeck did sleep in Rocinante, it was usually near other people. He slept in the camper for two nights on a dairy farm near his son’s Massachusetts school and two nights at Eleanor Brace’s house on Deer Isle, Maine. He slept in it at two busy truck stops in the Midwest and at trailer courts in New Hampshire, Upstate New York and Montana. That’s nine more un-lonely nights, for a total of 52.

  In “Charley” or in his road letters, Steinbeck said he stayed by himself at 10 motels. Don’t forget, he also had another passenger he forgot to mention in the book. His boyhood pal Toby Street joined him aboard Rocinante for four days from Monterey to Flagstaff, Arizona. That adds up to roughly 66 of 75 nights when Steinbeck was definitely not parked alone in the starry outback, drunk and feeling blue.

  The idea that Steinbeck was depressed during his trip is impossible to prove or disprove. But when he was on the road, he exhibited no signs of being bummed out or sick. His published letters to Elaine are playful and filled with humor, not misery. And based on Jackson Benson’s biography and columnist Herb Caen's description of Steinbeck dolled up and hanging out at Enrico's Café, he seemed to have had a pretty good time in San Francisco.

  Kind of a quiet grump in his natural state, Steinbeck had a suitcase full of legitimate reasons to be glum. His poor health. His troubled kids. The realization that he wasn't getting much material or discovering great truths about the “decaying” country he loved. But no way was he depressed on his trip because he was spending too much time drinking alone. Steinbeck did a lot of drinking in the fall of 1960, but hardly ever by himself.

  The real question should be, “Was Steinbeck ever alone?” He spent probably 250 hours by himself in his truck, but it was when he was driving his 10,000 miles of two-lane highway. He traveled solo for a week or more at a stretch when he was slogging through New England to Chicago and then again when he was speed balling from Chicago to Seattle.

  He was alone, but it wasn’t like he was at sea. He was on busy highways and passing in and out of cities and towns. Averaging more than 300 miles a day, he was constantly stopping for gas, stopping to talk to locals in coffee shops and bars, stopping at motels, stopping at post offices, stopping to buy hats and guns, stopping to see the Custer Monument and Yellowstone Park. He may not have met the “great” characters he put in his book, but he bumped into dozens of ordinary Americans every day.

  Of his estimated 75 nights away from New York, about nine are unaccounted for. Three or four of them occurred on his final non-stop marathon from New Orleans to New York City. Four other mystery nights were spent in Maine on the coast near Calais, in northern Ohio or Indiana on the way to Chicago, in eastern Washington on the way to Seattle and on Route 66 on the way to Amarillo.

  It’s possible Steinbeck stopped and did a leisurely and lonely campout on one or several of those mystery nights. It’s just highly unlikely, or he would have written about it. Plus, since he was usually hurrying to rejoin his wife, he probably either made motel stops or no stops at all.

  So how often did Steinbeck live up to the “Travels With Charley” Myth and actually sleep in his camper under the stars in the middle of the American nowhere? Not very often – if ever. He wrote in the book that he did it five times.

  But the overnight campout on a farm in the mountains of New Hampshire and the two in the wilds of North Dakota were pure inventions. He also wrote that he camped on a farm near a private lake between Toledo and Chicago and in New Mexico by the Continental Divide. Maybe he did. But both times he was hustling to meet his wife and all we have is his word for it.

  That leaves one desolate, forlorn “camping” scene described in “Charley.” It’s the one in the deep, motel-less backwoods of Maine’s interior, when he parked by the roadside near a concrete bridge with the heavy rain drumming on his metal roof. Unless he lied to his wife, that night really happened.

  In a letter to Elaine dated Thursday, Sept. 29, 1960, Steinbeck wrote, “night caught us and rain so we are bedded down behind a bridge and it is still raining.” Though it was only six days after leaving Sag Harbor, he told her he was “terrible lonesome tonight.” If he was drunk, depressed and worrying about his rotting country, he didn’t mention it.

  An Overrated ‘Vision of America’

  The young, the gullible and the romantic read “Travels With Charley” and believe it’s true, usually because they’re young, gullible and romantic. But it was not true. It was not reality. It was not how a 10,000-mile road trip works in the real world – Steinbeck’s world or anyone else’s. It was not about real people or real events. It was not nonfiction. Not good journalism, not incisive commentary. Not even a good novel.

  The “vision of America” Steinbeck presents in his book is invariably praised by his fans and defenders. But it was not a prescient look at America’s future or even a useful snapshot of America in 1960. Steinbeck missed too much of the country, as he realized.

  He avoided the dirty overcrowded cities. He never mentions the word “suburbs,” which were exploding into the countryside from Long Island to Marin County and providing affordable new homes with backyards for millions of young middle-class families. He spent barely 24 hours in the Jim Crow South. He worried about the disappearance o
f localism and regional dialects, yet went to only a few of the places they thrived then and now.

  Steinbeck was badly out of touch with America and its people and changing culture and it showed. He was a decade late in “discovering” the mobile home culture. He goes on at length about trailer homes, which he called “new things under the sun” but which were already home to about 4 million Americans. He insisted he wasn’t against change. Yet he didn’t like most of what was still new in 1960 – the interstates, affordable motels, rock n’ roll, TV, mass produced products, even cellophane and sanitary wrap.

  His political soul mates today venerate him for being ahead-of-the-curve on important issues like the environment, integration and sprawl. Voicing his concerns about pollution and racism are held up by his defenders/protectors in academe as “the greater truths” he told with his fictions. In the upside-down world of higher education, these alleged “greater truths” are supposed to excuse or justify the myriad liberties he took with facts in a professed nonfiction book.

  But what Steinbeck “discovered” in 1960 about the ills of the country is vastly over-rated. His brief warnings about pollution and sprawl didn’t come from any real reporting or thorough observation or study. They weren’t groundbreaking or prophetic. They were opinions you’d find in 1960 in the New Yorker magazine. His disgust for segregation and legalized racism was genuine and obviously admirable. But his moral outrage wasn’t unique or pioneering or particularly brave, since he lived in Manhattan and on the far end of lily-white Long Island, not in racist hotspots like Jackson or Birmingham.

  Meanwhile, Steinbeck’s fans don’t seem to notice how politically incorrect he was in “Travels With Charley” by today’s liberal standards. He was a gun nut and a hunting nut who considered coyotes vermin to be exterminated. He smoked and drank to excess.

  More than a few commentators at Amazon.com and elsewhere have accused Steinbeck of misogyny. With one or two exceptions women are portrayed as miserable, unattractive, fat or stupid. The white mothers in New Orleans were not only shown to be vulgar racists, they were described as “stout” and trashy looking. Steinbeck also could be two-faced about what he thought of the common folk.

  In one of his dialogues in the book he describes the residents of a trailer home as “good, thoughtful, intelligent people.” But in a letter from the road to Elaine he said what he really thought. After eating dinner in a mobile home on his way out of New England he derided their disposable plywood and aluminum “homes” and their lifestyle. “These are Martians,” he wrote. “I wanted to ask them to take me to their leader. They have no humor, no past, and their future is new models” of trailer homes.

  Lastly, Steinbeck’s environmental sainthood was not earned. He’s been given a posthumous green card for hyperbolizing in “Travels With Charley” that “all” cities were ringed with rubbish and junked cars (then the best source of affordable used car parts). He has also won points for mourning the pollution of the country’s air and waterways by the chemical, metal and atomic wastes of industry. But some of the things he wrote would get him in serious trouble with today’s religious environmentalists.

  For example, when he was rhapsodizing about the redwoods Steinbeck told a story about the time a “newcomer” to Monterey bought a local grove of the trees and cut them down for lumber. He said the man was widely and forever hated for the sacrilege he had committed. But Steinbeck also pointed out that as the property owner, the man had every right to slaughter his trees and turn them into a chain of Curly Redwood Motels if he wanted.

  Steinbeck’s automatic defense of an individual’s right to do what he wants with his own property is endearing to strict constitutionalists, but today it would get him kicked out of the Sierra Club. And though few of his fans seem to notice, his concern for what industrial man was doing to the environment apparently didn’t affect his own behavior. He thought it was pretty neat that he could use disposable aluminum cookware to fry a fish on his boat, and then, as he said, “throw the pan overboard.”

  24 – The Media & Me

  What can I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap. In many cases it is the only history we have and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and because it is the product of so many men, it is perhaps the purest thing we have. Honesty has a way of creeping in even when it was not intended.

  – John Steinbeck, in a letter to John P. McKnight of

  the U.S. Information Service in Rome, circa 1956

  I thought the hardest part of my long ride with John Steinbeck was over when my wheels stopped turning. All I had to do next, I figured, was write a big piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette summing up all the juicy “Charley” stuff I had learned, plus add my impressions of 11,276 miles of America.

  Then it wouldn’t be long before I’d be written up in the mighty New York Times, get signed by a Madison Avenue literary agent and land a six-figure publishing deal. Michael Keaton would play me in the movie. But getting the attention of the New York Times book team was not easy. It took five months, a lot of help, some lucky timing and a well-placed friend inside America’s Paper of Record.

  Meanwhile, I hadn’t been hiding anything important about “Travels With Charley” except the exact wording of his paragraph of filth. As I traveled, everything I had found out on and off the road was posted for the whole world to enjoy on my Post-Gazette blog “Travels Without Charley.” Trouble was, fewer than 3,000 people had been enjoying it. And no one in the national media or the world of Steinbeck studies seemed to notice or care about my discoveries.

  One person in the important mainstream media was following my road blog, however. It was Rachel Dry, the cheerful Washington Post staffer who ambushed me in Chicago in the lobby of the Ambassador East Hotel. On Nov. 12, 2010, a week after I got back to Pittsburgh, she whipped up a fine travel feature about how she had fulfilled her dream to retrace part of Steinbeck’s “Charley” trip from Vermont to North Dakota.

  “Following Steinbeck to Fargo” appeared in the Post and was spread around the USA via the paper’s wire service. When it appeared in the Bismarck Tribune the inoffensive piece somehow managed to really tick off college professor Clay Jenkinson, a North Dakota cultural commentator and nationally renowned Thomas Jefferson scholar and historical impersonator.

  Jenkinson was offended by what he deemed Dry’s casual, sacrilegious disregard for what he called the “True Steinbeck Spirit.” He wrote a stern column for the Bismarck Tribune on Nov. 21 bearing the headline “Post reporter followed the itinerary but she missed the journey.” Professor Jenkinson, the avowed “road trip purist,” summed up the prevailing cultural myths about “Travels With Charley” in a single embarrassing paragraph.

  If you want to invoke the great Steinbeck, several essential criteria must be observed. First, you have to make the whole journey – New York to Maine, Seattle, southern California (sic), Texas, New Orleans, New York. 10,000 miles. You cannot ditch the rental car in Fargo and fly home. Second, you have to sleep and cook in a camper. You get none of the "on the road" effect in hotels. There has to be a droll, slightly vulnerable, "roughing it" feel to the accommodations. Third, you cannot take your mother. I love my mother dearly and have traveled the West extensively with her. She's a great companion. But she's no Charlie (sic). You cannot be Steinbeck unless you are essentially alone with your thoughts and your observations in the heart of America. If Steinbeck had taken another human being, including his wife Elaine, he could not have written an American classic.

  Just about everything Jenkinson assumed was true about Steinbeck’s trip was false. After Google alerted me to his pompous column, I fired off an email to Bismarck Tribune editor Ken Rogers. I offered to write a freelance column pointing out the professor’s errors. I hoped to make $50. That’s a pathetic figure, but it’s the standard insult paid to freelancers by all but
the biggest newspapers.

  Rogers took the cheap way out. He turned my hasty email to him into a Dec. 4 letter to the editor. It shamed Jenkinson for his delusions and broke the news to the lonely people of central North Dakota that Steinbeck never camped overnight on their soil and that his classic American road book was “somewhere between a fiction and a fraud.”

  Using the F-word

  My first major debunking of “Travels With Charley” in print came just a day later in a full-page article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Sunday opinion section. When I wrote “Sorry, Charley” for the P-G I hadn’t dared to use the loaded word “fraud” to describe the book. But John Allison, the editor who wrote the headlines, neatly summed up my adventures with Steinbeck and deftly dropped the f-word into the subhead.

  Atop my article Allison wrote: “After crisscrossing America in the tracks of John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley,’ Bill Steigerwald came to a conclusion: The esteemed work is something of a fraud.” I loved the restrained yet unlawful sound of “something of a fraud” and have used it ever since.