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

  Being misled by Elaine and learning what I had proved about Steinbeck’s trip didn’t change Parini’s mind. According to McGrath, when Parini was asked about the book’s accuracy he said, “I have always assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. He probably wasn’t using a tape recorder. But I still feel there’s an authenticity there.”

  Talking about my discoveries, Parini asked himself: “Does this shake my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the techniques of a fiction writer. Why has this book stayed in the American imagination, unlike, for example, Michael Harrington’s ‘The Other America,’ which came out at the same time?”

  In other words, in the world of Steinbeck scholarship, two of the top people knew all along that “Travels With Charley” was fictionalized but didn’t want to spoil anyone’s fun by saying it publicly. Or they didn’t care how much Steinbeck made up in a nonfiction book because he still captured the authentic spirit of the country – or at least the spirit of the country the professors agreed with.

  This “So-what?” response to news that Steinbeck had been caught lying didn’t go over too well with the truth-tellers at the New York Times editorial page. On April 9, 2011 the editorial “The Truth About Charley” began with “Bill Steigerwald has made an intriguing, if disheartening, discovery that seems to have eluded admirers and scholars of John Steinbeck for decades. Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley in Search of America’ is shot through with dubious anecdotes and impossible encounters.”

  The Times’ editorial ended with a paragraph on the importance of telling the truth in a nonfiction book, a principle people unburdened by Ph. Ds in literature tend to know intuitively:

  It is irritating that some Steinbeck scholars seem not to care. "Does it really matter that much?" one of them asked a Times reporter. Steinbeck insisted his book was reality-based. He aimed to "tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth." Books labeled "nonfiction" should not break faith with readers. Not now, and not in 1962, the year "Travels With Charley" came out and Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature.

  Professor Shillinglaw sent a letter responding to the Times’ editorial. They didn’t print it, but she allowed it to be run in the Steinbeck Gazette, a small Internet newsletter for Steinbeck collectors and experts. Here is what she wrote:

  The title of Sunday’s editorial, “The Truth about Charley,” suggests a certainty that Steinbeck himself lacked. He knew that truth was a slippery notion, that any supposed truth was “warped” by human consciousness. As he noted in Sea of Cortez (1941), “Let us ... not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes.”

  Neither Sea of Cortez nor Travels With Charley is “true” in the sense that the Times editorial and journalist Bill Steigerwald demand. Journalists and scholars have long recognized the fictive quality of Charley, something that Orville Prescott’s 1962 review for the Times makes clear: “Relaxed, informal and chatty, [Steinbeck] indulges in whopping exaggerations, tells tall stories, sketches odd characters he met and tosses off a series of capsule essays on scores of subjects.”

  Henry David Thoreau, living by Walden Pond, entertained visitors more often than he reports in his account of that year, fails to mention the tasty pies he consumed. Does knowing those “facts” undercut the power of Walden? Does being told that Steinbeck spent nights in “deluxe hotels” or met his wife more often than he admits “break the faith of readers,” as the Times editorial asserts? True, Steigerwald’s accusations dip into the current debate about the ethical boundaries of creative non-fiction, and that is a critical discussion for any newspaper to consider. The simplistic and reactionary tone of the Times editorial on Steinbeck’s “truth” is not, however, the thoughtful response one might expect from this paper.

  As he pulled his truck out of Sag Harbor, Steinbeck himself was simply “In Search of America,” the subtitle of this admittedly highly personal, idiosyncratic, funny and playful narrative. His America. Not a “true” account, simply his own.

  My 93-year-old mother, who dropped out of the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1940s after three years as an English major on a journalism track, had a different reaction to the Times’ editorial. In an email to me she wrote:

  That's great. The tone of the editorial seems to reflect your attitude and it agrees with your assessment. It really is disillusioning when the contents of the book prove to be so at odds with reality. Especially when the readers of the book have been gullible enough to believe it is truth, not fiction. And it is important enough for the Times to editorialize. Good job. Love Mom.

  The Steinbeckies React

  It was a bizarre thrill to find myself praised by the editorial page of a paper I had spent half my career criticizing for its liberal politics and slanted news coverage, but I was grateful. Being covered by the New York Times and then receiving the imprimatur of its editorial page instantly validated my findings as being newsworthy and credible.

  It also did wonders for my global obscurity. The Times’ feature article by Charles McGrath was reprinted, rewritten or used as fodder by columnists in papers from Brisbane to Toledo to Budapest. I was interviewed by CBC Radio’s evening program “As It Happens,” which was heard across Canada. And my findings were praised, damned and ridiculed throughout the blogosphere for about 15 minutes.

  Academic types who believe fact/fiction/truth/myth are impossible to ascertain, or are interchangeable, or don’t matter, thought I had wasted my time proving the obvious or the inconsequential. Likewise for folks whose politics were in synch with the “greater truths” Steinbeck allegedly told.

  Reaction was generally favorable from my fellow journalists. In California, the editor of the Daily Pilot newspaper, John Canalis, wrote how disappointed he was to learn that one of his favorite books was not nonfiction, but fiction, and that one of his favorite authors was, well, somewhere between a serial exaggerator and a liar.

  Canalis’ column, appearing in a chain of local papers in California, caught the ire of Gail Steinbeck, wife of Steinbeck’s son Thom. She lives in Santa Barbara and protects her husband’s time like he’s a movie star. Before and during my trip I had called and emailed her, hoping to arrange an interview with Thom either in person or over the phone, but she never allowed it to happen.

  Gail was cool when I first contacted her before I went on my road trip, but later she warmed up. During my layover in San Francisco she sent me two friendly emails, which she signed off by telling me my perspective and blog articles were “always interesting.” Six months later, however, she was obviously sick and tired of my international fame as a professional “Travels With Charley” debunker.

  Here’s her letter in response to John Canalis’ column, which appeared in the Daily Pilot and a few other California papers:

  Mailbag:

  Steinbeck's daughter-in-law says 'Travels' is true

  April 29, 2011

  Any educated scholar who has studied that journey knows that Bill Steigerwald simply hasn't enough facts to "debunk" that journey ("Sorry, Charley, Was Steinbeck's 'Travels with Charley' a fraud?" Reason magazine, April 2011).

  For some reason the press continues to give this guy way too much ink. As far as I'm concerned, and I know mountains about that journey, the author of that Reason article is just another individual who wants to build a career on rumor and innuendo. Please let his absurd story go away.

  If you were at all moved by "Travels With Charley," and have done as much research over the years as I have, and if you really even care, you should speak with Dr. Susan Shillinglaw, scholar in residence at The National Steinbeck Center, to get the true facts of the journey. After all, she has read all of the letters, while Steigerwald claims to have read the rathe
r limited collection of letters at the Mercantile Library.

  When we saw this guy's first article, we thought, "Well it's just another one trying to follow the journey and sell a book." That's something we deal with all the time and frankly, there is some wonderful work out there by others inspired by the original journey, e.g.: "Travels with Max," by Gregory Ziegler. But this fellow decided it was his duty as a "journalist" to invalidate the entire work, "Travels With Charley" and John Steinbeck, as an aside. It's one thing to do the proper research and quite another to simply look for a point of view that will "stir the pot," as it were.

  Normally, the Steinbeck family would step back and let the story run its course, but Steigerwald has managed to keep the story running ad nauseam. To tell you the truth, I would never have jumped into the fray, but he is so ill-informed and has managed to reach such a wide audience, that it has become a little creepy. He is misleading the public and the problem is that he is incorrect in the majority of his assumptions.

  My husband, Thomas Steinbeck, author of "Down to a Soundless Sea" and "In the Shadow of the Cypress," wrote a screenplay for HBO based upon "Travels With Charley" and the research we did for that project was voluminous. Thom was also a teenager at the time of the journey and he agrees that while his stepmother was on board for short segments of the trip, she would never have agreed to make that sort of a trip in a camper. She was used to a rather different sort of travel and lifestyle.

  Basically, the Reason story is bogus. There are some wonderful scholars out there who are more capable of giving you the facts than I am, or certainly more so than he. As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Susan Shillinglaw has read every letter and article ever written on the subject, while Thomas and I have been busy with our own life journey. Sadly, Steigerwald missed the entire purpose of the journey and of course the spirit of a nation to which John Steinbeck was bidding adieu.

  I only wrote to you because it made me sad to think that you were being duped.

  Gail Steinbeck

  Santa Barbara

  Editor's note: The author is the daughter-in-law of John Steinbeck. She wrote to Daily Pilot Editor John Canalis in response to his column about the controversy surrounding "Travels with Charley."

  It was one of the many great pleasures of my adventures in Steinbeck World to respond to Gail Steinbeck’s silly rant, which proved how little she and her husband knew about John Steinbeck’s trip. Here is my response, as printed in the Daily Pilot:

  Community commentary:

  'Travels Without Charley' takes another turn

  May 03, 2011 | By Bill Steigerwald

  Gail Steinbeck's Mailbag entry is full of too many mistakes, wild assumptions and misrepresentations about me, my motives and my research/reporting habits to address all of them here.

  But before she decided to accuse me of being a lousy journalist and some creepy sort of publicity hound who set out to debunk "Travels With Charley" to make a name for myself, she should have done a little more research. Here's what I wrote in my Reason article:

  "My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years"....

  I've consistently said the same thing on my web site TravelsWithoutCharley2010.com and when I was interviewed by the national news media outfits she thinks I control (NPR, the CBC in Canada, the New York Times): I never set out to debunk Steinbeck, his trip or his book.

  The truth is, I started doing research/reporting and merely followed the facts (which have been gathering dust in the Steinbeck archives for 35 years). Any "educated scholar" with a skeptical gene in her body could have found out what I did.

  And I don't know where Steinbeck got the idea that all I did was read a few letters at "the Mercantile Library" — whatever that is (there is a library by that name in Cincinnati, but I've never been there). I think she meant the Morgan Library, which is in New York City, and which is where I went last summer to read the original handwritten manuscript of "Charley."

  The specifics of my library research are scattered on my web site, but here they are in one place:

  In addition to the Morgan, I went to Stanford's Green Library twice, San Jose State's Steinbeck Center twice, the National Steinbeck Center, the Mudd Library at Princeton, the Monterey Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. Plus, I've gotten help from librarians in Austin, Butte, St. Johnsbury, Vt., Amarillo, Seattle and elsewhere.

  My several attempts to interview Gail's husband Thom Steinbeck never succeeded. But I've interviewed dozens of people, including Steinbeck biographer Jackson Benson and authors Curt Gentry and Barnaby Conrad, who interviewed or socialized with John and Elaine Steinbeck in San Francisco in 1960 during the "Charley" trip. Also, last fall I retraced most of John Steinbeck's route around America, racking up 11,276 miles in 43 days.

  Contrary to what Steinbeck assumes, I've read all the letters John Steinbeck wrote from the road that are in libraries or books. And while Steinbeck scholar Professor Susan Shillinglaw of San Jose State has read them all as well, I believe she has yet to do what I did – trek to Manhattan to compare the original handwritten manuscript of "Charley" with the final version.

  If Shillinglaw had done that, she'd have seen a handful of scenes cut from the first draft in which Steinbeck describes leisurely traveling from Seattle down the Pacific Coast with Elaine – in the pickup truck/camper – to downtown San Francisco, where they "camped out" at the St. Francis Hotel for about five days.

  Last fall, Gail Steinbeck apparently followed my road trip by reading the daily road blogs I posted to TravelsWithoutCharley2010.com. (She sent me two friendly and complimentary emails and said she found my articles interesting.)

  Seven months later she dismisses me as "this guy." And she accuses me — without offering any proof of her own to the contrary — of "misleading the public" and of "being incorrect in the majority" of my "assumptions" about the reality of her father-in-law's iconic road trip; trouble is, they're not assumptions, they are facts.

  Readers who want to judge for themselves which of us really knows what we are talking about are invited to read my web site, “Travels Without Charley.”

  Paul Theroux Joins the Fun

  My book and movie deals were slow in coming. But it was amazing to see how quickly and widely my discovery of Steinbeck’s untruthfulness spread and was accepted, at least among journalists. Wikipedia’s entry for “Travels With Charley” added my findings about the book, though it understated the degree to which I had proved it was fictionalized. And when travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux read my charges against Steinbeck in the New York Times he believed them immediately.

  Theroux, the patron guru of travel journalism, had suspected that Steinbeck’s actual trip and how he described it in “Travels With Charley” were not, shall we say, congruent. He wanted to include what I had learned in “The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road,” his 2011 collection of insights and observations about travel, travel writers and the lies travel writers tell. But it was already at the printer.

  In an email to me, Theroux wrote, “I compared his published letters with his travels and saw great discrepancies. These facts have been public for years, but no one cared to mention them. …I didn't see the piece (in the Times) until my book was in the press, and couldn't quote it (though I wanted to). I disagree with his biographer {Parini} and the Steinbeck scholar {Shillinglaw}. He falsified his trip. I am delighted that you went deep into this.”

  The kind support of Theroux made my summer of 2011. He has almost always traveled light and alone and is not one to excuse the fictions, falsities or “concealments” of nonfiction travel writers, especially famous ones who pretended they traveled solo. Speaking at the Hay Literary Festival in Britain, he used my findings to blast Steinbeck for playing fast and
loose with the truth. If they’re lying about the way they traveled, he asked, what else are they fabricating and concealing in their books?

  Good point, Paul, old buddy. And then he said to a Brit writer:

  “I think a lot of travel writers make it up. Travel books are a lot of fun but are maybe not the complete truth of what happened. I did travel alone, and it is hard to travel alone. When I was alone, I got shot at; people were angry, they threatened me and there was no one there. I didn’t have any backup. Certainly the more travel literature I read, the more I realized a lot of it is invented.”

  Good Dutchmen

  One travel journalist who doesn’t make things up is Geert Mak, a celebrated Dutch newspaperman, author and historian. I didn’t know Mak existed until late August of 2012 when I received an email from a guy in Holland telling me he had seen my name in Mak’s new book about America, which was based on Mak’s road trip retracing Steinbeck’s “Charley” route.