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

  Unfortunately, I made a foolish mistake at the end of my Post-Gazette article. Though I had caught Steinbeck red-handed in his fictions & lies, I wussed out and let him off the hook. "So what if he did a lot of fictionalizing?" I asked, unconsciously impersonating an English professor with an advanced degree:

  “Travels With Charley” has always been classified as a work of nonfiction, but no one ever claimed it was a “Frontline” documentary. Does it really matter if Steinbeck made up a lot of stuff he didn't do on his trip or left out a lot of stuff he did do? Should we care that “Charley” could never be certified as “nonfiction” today…?

  All nonfiction is part fiction, and vice versa. It's not like Steinbeck wrote a phony Holocaust memoir that sullies the memories and souls of millions of victims…. It doesn't matter if it's not the true or full or honest story of Steinbeck's quixotic road trip. It was never meant to be. It's a metaphor, a work of art, not a AAA travelogue.

  At that time I was satisfied merely exposing his trickery and deceit. I had been a literary detective. I didn’t feel qualified to be the prosecutor or the judge. That was a job for people with PhDs in literature. “My work is done,” I wrote. “I'll let the scholars sort out whether Steinbeck's ghost deserves to be hauled on to Oprah's stage to defend himself for his 50-year-old crimes against nonfiction.”

  Boy, was I naïve. I actually thought Steinbeck scholars would be disappointed to learn that a great American author had been caught in a major lie. They weren’t. I thought they’d care. They didn’t. I thought they’d thank me for my hard work, or maybe give me an honorary degree in something. Hah.

  In a few weeks I returned to my senses. I clearly wasn’t thinking straight when I wrote that it didn’t really matter what Steinbeck and Viking Press had done to twist and hide the truth. Of course it mattered. I was a journalist. Finding out the truth about “Travels With Charley” – or anything else – did matter to me. It had been my career to seek truth and report facts. Truth – big or small – should always matter to any honest journalist, no matter what their politics or biases were.

  Speaking of which, the only national journalist to show an early interest in my findings was Bob Garfield, the host of NPR’s “On the Media.” Garfield’s show, which I listened to regularly, is devoted to explaining "how the media 'sausage' is made" and criticizing the news media from a liberal point-of-view. Our political biases were more contradictory than congruent. But in the eternal war between fiction and fact in nonfiction, Garfield was my first ally. He has a bias for nonfiction that is true – albeit with a liberal spin.

  About a week before Christmas I got a call from “On the Media” producer P.J. Vogt. We talked for an hour, then Garfield called a few days later and interviewed me on tape for almost another hour. On Christmas weekend 200 NPR stations around the USA carried 5 minutes and 27 seconds of my rant about John Steinbeck and his book of BS and fibs.

  Unlike a certain NPR Saturday morning show starring Scott Simon that shall remain nameless, the “On the Media” gang did a great job all around. I managed to sound credible and almost sane and the links to my web site functioned. Immediately following my appearance, “On the Media” presented an interview with Lawrence Weschler, a professor at New York University.

  Weschler was billed as a master of “narrative nonfiction,” which is a slippery form of writing similar to creative nonfiction that employs fictional techniques to tell true stories. Think composite characters and telescoped time and blurred and stretched facts. Think lots of subjectivity and inventing and shaping and spinning of reality by the writer. Think TV docudrama tricks done in print.

  Weschler didn't critique me by name for too strenuously or too literally fact-checking Steinbeck’s non-nonfiction. But he told Garfield and his radio audience that readers are expected to be “adults.” When they read nonfiction they should be able to see when the writer’s flights of fiction take off – or land, or circle, or crash.

  To Garfield and other old-fashioned journalists who prefer their nonfiction to stick to facts, Weschler proclaimed in mock disbelief, “This was news to you that a novelist was making stuff up in ‘Travels With Charley’? Come on! And he wasn't exactly making stuff up. He was telling it in a certain kind of register. It was a different sort of activity than daily journalism and needs to be read that way.”

  Weschler was smart, persuasive, funny. He made good points about the importance of maintaining high standards of fairness, accuracy and “creating something that is true to life.” He acknowledged the obvious but seldom uttered dirty truth that Steinbeck knew from experience – all journalism and nonfiction is by its nature unavoidably subjective and selective.

  But Weschler put too much trust in writers to always do the right thing. Plus he expected readers to have the sophisticated radar gear they needed to detect “flights of fiction” in nonfiction like the ones Greg Mortenson took his trusting readers on in “Three Cups of Tea.” And he had some scary ideas about how much fictionalizing and reality fudging a journalist can do without being arrested for fraud.

  Speaking of which, Steinbeck proved at an early age that he was too creative to be a totally trustworthy journalist, if there is such a thing. In 1926, at 24, he worked for the New York American, a Hearst paper. Not surprisingly, he had trouble being an objective observer/reporter. Jay Parini says in his biography that when Steinbeck was sent into the streets of New York to look for stories his reporting style “was much too florid – full of metaphors and images – to satisfy his editors.”

  He was assigned to cover federal court, a beat that could quickly squeeze the life and color and style out of any cub reporter’s prose. But apparently Young Steinbeck was unable to adhere to the strict, dry and often arbitrary rules of city-desk journalism. He was ultimately fired from the American – which, if you know anything about the way newspapers can ruin creative writers, was not necessarily a bad sign. He was already better at re-arranging reality than dryly recording it.

  It’s not that Steinbeck didn’t appreciate journalists, but he knew their limitations. He writes in “Travels With Charley” that he “always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.”

  Steinbeck does a good job of explaining this general theory of subjectivity in “Travels With Charley.” He tells a story about the time he was flying out of Prague and met the great journalist Joseph Alsop. They both had been in the city the previous week. But as Steinbeck noted, Alsop had been talking to officials and ambassadors while he had been roving “about with actors, gypsies, vagabonds.”

  On the flight home, Steinbeck writes, Alsop told him about Prague, “and his Prague had no relation to the city I had seen and heard. It just wasn’t the same place, and yet each of us was honest, neither one a liar, both pretty good observers by any standard, and we brought home two cities, two truths. For this reason I cannot commend this account (“Travels With Charley”) as an America that you will find.”

  In the subjective universe we all live in, facts are often arguable and unknowable. They are distorted and abused and invented all the time. But facts and truth also really do exist and they are worth honestly pursing. Fact and fiction are not interchangeable or equals – and should never be. Readers shouldn’t have to guess or deduce whether what a writer of nonfiction writes is really real or fake or somewhere in between. Whether it’s Greg Mortenson or John Steinbeck.

  The Road to the New York Times

  In mid-January of 2011 I got my big break. It happened in the beautiful heart of California’s “Steinbeck Country” when the Monterey County Weekly put a Steinbeck story on its cover that included me in a supporting role as the mini-bad guy.

 
; The alternative paper’s article, “Travels With Steinbeck,” was hooked around the 2008 cross-country trip made by Bill Barich for his Steinbeck-inspired on-the-road book, “Long Way Home.” Written by Paul Wilner, the article focused mostly on Barich’s opinions about the travels, writings and dispirited psyche of local hero John Steinbeck.

  Eventually, Wilner brought me on stage for a stoning by the elusive Professor Susan Shillinglaw. He wrote that my “mini-jihad” had uncovered what I believed “were major falsehoods” in “Travels With Charley.” Then he said there were questions from Professor Shillinglaw about the documentation for my “‘scoop.’”

  “None of the photos [in his blog] seem to be documented, which is peculiar for someone who prides himself as a stickler for accuracy,” says Susan Shillinglaw, scholar in residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

  “He missed the forest for the trees – it’s like that ‘controversy’ over whether George Orwell really shot an elephant. Yes, it’s nonfiction, but [Steinbeck] really did take the trip! He doesn’t say he spent every night in the trailer.

  “What’s more important are how he addresses issues like the race issue,” the attempted integration of a New Orleans school which took place despite racist heckling from a group of white mothers who called themselves the Cheerleaders. He spent a lot of time with his publisher about the importance of using the language of the Cheerleaders, not watering it down. “They took out one or two words but for the most part retained it, which was courageous at the time. That’s far more important than where he slept,” Shillinglaw adds.

  When I whined to the Monterey County Weekly’s editors, they kindly gave me a chance to respond to Shillinglaw and bitch-slap Wilner for being a shoddy journalist. The paper ran my edited letter on Jan. 27, 2011:

  Travels with Steigerwald

  It was an honor to be included in your Steinbeck cover story this week…. I only wish your editors had asked writer Paul Wilner to give me a quick call before he let Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw discredit me as a journalist….

  I also would have asked Wilner to be a teeny bit skeptical about the dismissive reaction of a Steinbeck scholar when she is faced with evidence that much of what Americans have thought about the truth and accuracy of Steinbeck’s iconic “nonfiction” book has been a myth bordering on fraud.

  Shillinglaw pooh-poohs what I did with my research, which shows in numbing detail that Steinbeck’s actual trip is not accurately or honestly represented in “Charley.”

  She also makes silly/fallacious points to try to make me seem like I cared more about where Steinbeck slept than what he wrote about the issue of racism.

  I understand Steinbeck is your local hero. And Shillinglaw, whom I’ve met and exchanged emails with, is your local Steinbeck expert. But you unfairly let her do a disservice to me and my hard, honest work.

  Bill Steigerwald | Pittsburgh

  For eight months Shillinglaw had been a pain. She couldn’t have been less helpful or more evasive. Now she was trying to discredit the messenger, me. She had absolutely no idea what she was talking about when she told the Monterey paper that only one or two words of the Cheerleaders’ filthy language was taken out of the first draft. She had never read the first draft. The real total was 77 words.

  Shillinglaw was understandably unhappy to learn about the discrepancies between Steinbeck’s book and his real trip. It kind of made her and the whole West Coast Steinbeck Studies Industrial Complex look bad when an ex-newspaperman from Pittsburgh proved “Travels With Charley” was “something of a fraud” by using information that had been gathering dust in the Steinbeck books and archives for 35 years.

  Ironically, Shillinglaw’s public attack on my credibility was Heaven-sent. It would turn out to be just the element of controversy I’d need to get my Steinbeck findings discussed in the hallowed pages of the New York Times.

  Attack of the Steinbeck Scholars

  My national breakthrough began with the magazine Reason. I had done half a dozen articles for the libertarian monthly over the years and knew the editors but never thought to pitch my Steinbeck story to them. The magazine of “Free Markets & Free Minds” focused on politics and economics and modern culture, not exposes about famous dead authors.

  But one day out of the blue Reason called and said it wanted to reprint my Post-Gazette article and pay me $500. That sounded like a lot of free money to me and in April of 2011 Reason ran “Sorry, Charley: Was John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley’ a fraud?” A longer version of my Post-Gazette piece, it repeated my charges of literary fraud and dishonesty to a small national audience.

  I used the Reason article to try to get Atlantic Monthly, Slate and the New York Times and L.A. Times book sections interested in what I had discovered, but had no luck and no responses from their editors or book bloggers. It seemed there was nobody left in journalism who knew how to return a phone call or reply to an email.

  Things were looking bleak when a chance email exchange with some fellow libertarians resulted in a New York Times staffer showing my Reason piece to a Times arts & entertainment editor. In less than a week, out came “A Reality Check for Steinbeck and Charley.” Written by Charles McGrath, it "broke” my 50-year-old Steinbeck “scoop” in the Book section of the New York Times on April 3, 2011 – five months after it was in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  Interviewing me, author Bill Barich and professors Shillinglaw and Jay Parini, Mr. McGrath played it fair and balanced. But the clout and credibility of the Times was tilted to my side. My favorite paragraph:

  “This is just grunt journalism,” Mr. Steigerwald said of his research methods. “Anyone with a library card and a skeptical gene in his body could do what I did.” He added that he was a little surprised that his findings hadn’t made more of a ripple among Steinbeck scholars: “ ‘Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you?” He added, “If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?”

  Professor Shillinglaw pooh-poohed my charges in the Times article, demonstrating she still had no idea how little the book resembled the actual trip or the extent to which it was fictionalized or edited to mislead readers. “Any writer has the right to shape materials, and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out,” she said. “That doesn’t make the book a lie.”

  As for the authenticity of the cast of unbelievable characters in “Travels With Charley,” said Shillinglaw, tightening the noose around her neck, “Whether or not Steinbeck met that actor where he says he did, he could have met such a figure at some point in his life. And perhaps he enhanced some of the anecdotes with the waitress. Does it really matter that much?”

  What Shillinglaw said about the veracity or believability of “Travels With Charley” echoed what she had said nearly a year earlier in an interview with Duke University radio documentarian John Biewen. Biewen had gone to six places Steinbeck stopped on his 1960 journey for his NPR series “Travels with Mike.” He asked Shillinglaw if she agreed with him that some of the book’s characters were, um, a little too good to be true.

  Biewen specifically questioned the reality of the actor in Alice, North Dakota, where he had visited and taken suspicious note of the desolation. Shillinglaw agreed with him that the Shakespearean actor “does seem too much of an unusual character,” but she suggested it was common to meet unusual people on the road. She described “Travels With Charley” as "an honest book," a model of participatory journalism that reflected Steinbeck’s curious, engaged personality.

  Shillinglaw admitted it was unlikely Steinbeck actually met the full spectrum of civil rights characters he said he did in New Orleans. But she excused these rearrangements of reality as harmle
ss acts of “creative nonfiction,” something she said he also did in his World War II journalism.

  Professor Parini was just as forgiving and equally uninformed. In 1995, when he wrote an authorized bio of Steinbeck, Parini spent a lot of time with his widow Elaine. He admitted to the Times that he was surprised to learn from my discoveries that Elaine was with her husband for more than half of his trip. Elaine had misled him, Parini said.

  Parini wasn’t the only one Elaine misinformed about the extent of her presence on her husband’s trip. In “Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,” a massive collection of 850 letters she and Robert Wallsten edited and published in 1975, she protected the myth that Steinbeck was alone most of the time. After running most of the letters Steinbeck wrote to her as he traveled from Chicago to Montana, this editor’s note appears in the book of letters: “Because Elaine Steinbeck joined him for a few days at a time along the way, the letters to her stopped. After coming down the West Coast he crossed the country through Texas and Louisiana and returned to New York.”

  Let’s see: “Elaine Steinbeck joined him for a few days at a time,” did she? It was actually 28 straight days, from Seattle to Monterey, and then another 10 or so in Texas. Elaine had to know that the “a few days at a time” line was not true. She also had to know she had been cut out of the first draft of “Travels With Charley.” She was covering for her hubby. It might be of interest to scholars to see what she deleted from those road letters before she published them.