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

  Mak and his wife left Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor house the same morning I did, on Sept. 23, 2010, but since they didn’t travel at Steinbeck Speed they quickly fell behind my pace. His handsome, footnoted, nearly 600-page book was primarily devoted to inspecting and critiquing the politics and culture of the United States from a European point of view. That of course means Steinbeck, Bill Barich and the entire staff of New Yorker magazine would agree with most of Mak’s opinions, but not me.

  Unfortunately, I honestly can’t say for certain what Mak said was right or wrong about America because 99.2 percent of “Reizen zonder John: Op zoek naar Amerika” was written in Dutch. I do know that throughout “Traveling Without John in Search of America” he sprinkled 10 references to me and my discoveries about the fraudulent nature of “Charley.” He even published Steinbeck’s paragraph of filth, in raw English. He was the first to put the paragraph into print, but I had given it its world debut on Reason magazine's web site in July of 2012.

  The emailer who tipped me off about Mak’s book, Kees van de Bovenkamp, kindly offered to translate the paragraphs in which I was mentioned. Mak, who first heard about me, my road blog and my discoveries while in Lancaster, New Hampshire, wrote many nice things about my “tenacious” and “skilled” drive-by journalism. He agreed with my findings and drew conclusions of his own about the impossibility of Steinbeck doing some of the things he said he did in the book.

  Mak and I soon were exchanging emails. We found we had some things in common, including, thank God, English. We are both career journalists and virtually the same age. Though Mak is obviously far more successful and better educated than I am, and though our politics are a North Atlantic apart, we are kind of like journalistic brothers separated at birth.

  We both had the same idea about using Steinbeck’s trip as a way to document half a century of change in America. And in 1999, he did something that sounds like something I would have done – if I had his brains and fame.

  As a way of telling the tragic history of Europe in the 20th century and trying to discover whether Europe really deserved to be defined as a union, Mak spent the entire year of 1999 driving around the continent. From Paris to Vienna to Chernobyl, he filed a front-page dispatch each day for the Dutch national daily paper, NRC Handelsblad.

  Later Mak turned this newsprint version of a road blog into “In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century.” A nicely written history book/travelogue/memoir, the 900-page epic was a critical and commercial success and was translated into English and a dozen other foreign tongues.

  Mak couldn’t have been nicer to me. He sent me a copy of “Reizen zonder John,” “so you can at least see how your name is printed with honor in this small, windy European country.” He was a bigger fan of Steinbeck’s work than I was. And he was simpatico with his New Deal politics, which as a Ron Paul libertarian I sure wasn’t. But Mak and I were on the same page when it came to the untruthfulness of “Charley.”

  As he wrote to me, “although we are in politics very different – I am a typical latte-drinking Citroën-driving half-socialist European journalist and historian – I agree totally with your final conclusions: that ‘Travels with Charley’ is more fiction than nonfiction and that Steinbeck's son, John Steinbeck IV – who was often around when Steinbeck wrote the book – was right when he made the remark that his father 'just sat down in his camper' and made up most of the stories he wrote.”

  Unless Mak’s book is translated into English, I’ll never fully know what he thought about the America he saw in 2010. Mak didn’t trash America, but he apparently found a lot not to like. Based on a long interview with him I read online (awkwardly translated from Dutch by Google’s computers), it was the standard New York/Euro critique: the USA was politically polarized (i.e. too many non liberals), neglecting its public infrastructure, losing its middle class, losing its small towns, too cocky about its greatness and held back by a conservative ideology that considers taxes a form of legal theft. Etc. Etc.

  In one of his emails to me Mak said his book was more balanced and his conclusions about America were not as pessimistic as they appeared in the interview. He wrote: “We in Europe have always idealized the American way of life, and that is one of the reasons, I think, that I was sometimes shocked by what I saw on the road.” He added that “the USA has still an enormous amount of resources and possibilities; it has a flexible, rather young and hard working population, but somehow the political system is blocked and more and more corrupted, and that worries me.”

  It’s hard to argue with that assessment. But it was clear Mak and I had plenty of room for disagreement. Someday, we’ve promised each other, we’ll meet in Holland over a Heineken and have a friendly debate about the totally different Americas we found along the same stretch of Steinbeck Highway.

  25 – The Truth Gets Told

  I am, as ever, fascinated by people who write about trips they did not take, or ones who falsify their trips – and Steinbeck's is a lulu.

  – Email from Paul Theroux, author of

  “The Tao of Travel,” Dec. 5, 2011

  Triumph of the Greater Truth

  Despite a lot of media publicity and the support of the New York Times editorial page, my charges that the book was “something of a fraud” had no immediate effect on the Penguin Group, Viking Press’ corporate parent since 1975. Penguin didn’t challenge my charges. And its marketing people continued to describe its various editions of “Travels With Charley” as though it was a true and honest account.

  In October of 2012 the company’s web site was still describing “Charley” as “a picaresque tale,” with “picaresque” perhaps being a subtle attempt to intimate that it might be a little less than realistic or factual. Penguin called the book a chronicle of his road trip that “is animated by Steinbeck's attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature – to weather, geography, the cycle of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.”

  In an email to its publicity department, I asked if the Penguin Group had “an official response to my discovery that ‘Charley,’ though marketed and reviewed and taught as a nonfiction account of Steinbeck's 1960 trip, is heavily fictionalized?” (I didn’t ask how he could have had such a “keen ear” for the preoccupations of Americans when most of the book’s Americans were fictions.)

  The company’s spokesperson in New York said it had no comment. Penguin’s PR department, which for obvious reasons was not interested in helping me find more smoking guns, also told me that the company did not have Viking Press’ old “Travels With Charley” files “on site” and that they were probably with Steinbeck’s estate. Perhaps future scholars will want to dig them out and study them for further evidence, but it no longer matters.

  On Oct. 2, 2012, Penguin confessed – grudgingly, secretly, and as quietly as possible. The company finally admitted the truth about “Travels With Charley” when it published a $16 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition to mark the book’s 50th birthday and to co-celebrate the 50th anniversary of Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize.

  The official synopsis on Penguin.com still gave no warning “Charley” was not meant to be a work of nonfiction. But the lengthy introduction of the book, first written in 1997 for a paperback edition by Middlebury College English professor, author and Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini, had been surgically edited in several places to tip off readers that what they were about to read was not to be taken literally.

  In his original 1997 intro, Parini had pointed out Steinbeck’s heavy use of fictional elements, especially dialogue. But otherwise he had treated “Charley” the same way he had done in his 1995 Steinbeck biography – as if it was essentially a true account of the author’s trip and an authentic snapshot of 1960 America. Into the introduction to the special 2012 edition, however, Parin
i – at the behest of Penguin – had inserted a few new sentences and several parenthetical disclaimers:

  Indeed, it would be a mistake to take this travelogue too literally, as Steinbeck was at heart a novelist, and he added countless touches – changing the sequence of events, elaborating on scenes, inventing dialogue – that one associates more with fiction than nonfiction. (A mild controversy erupted, in the spring of 2011, when a former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did some fact-checking and noticed that Steinbeck's itinerary didn't exactly fit that described in the book, and that some of the people he supposedly interviewed, such as an actor at a campsite in North Dakota, never existed.)

  It should be kept in mind, when reading this travelogue, that Steinbeck took liberties with the facts, inventing freely when it served his purposes, using everything in the arsenal of the novelist to make this book a readable, vivid narrative. The book remains "true" in the way all good novels or narratives are true. That is, it provides an aesthetic vision of America at a certain time. The evocation of its people and places stay forever in the mind, and Steinbeck’s understanding of his country at this tipping point in its history was nothing short of extraordinary. It reflects his decades of observation and the years spent in honing his craft.

  Though Professor Parini was still using academic "logic" to defend Steinbeck's travel fantasy as quote-unquote "true," I was naturally very pleased to see Penguin had decided to tell the truth about “Charley” – after half a century. But I was amazed – and disappointed – that though Parini obviously had relied on my discoveries, he never credited me by name.

  “The mild controversy” Parini mentioned was my expose – certified as credible by the New York Times – that “Charley” was a literary fraud. And the controversy erupted not because of “some fact-checking” at the local library but because of some exhaustive journalism. I was also annoyed to see that in the new edition's existing list of further readings Parini had not inserted my Post-Gazette writings or Reason magazine article. He had inserted the article Charles McGrath wrote about me and my conclusions for the Times.

  What chicken crap. I sent a snippy email of complaint to Parini, sarcastically thanking him for using my hard-won discoveries to cover his rear end while not seeing fit to mention my name. Impugning his scholarship, I said it was especially “laughable” to see McGrath and the New York Times in the list of further readings when it took the Times five months to get around to covering what I had published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  Barely exaggerating, I also told Parini that despite his “vague disclaimers and caveats” he still wildly understated the level of fiction in "Charley." I told him he came nowhere close to addressing the level of fraud and dishonesty that went into the writing, editing and marketing of Steinbeck's multi-flawed "nonfiction" book.

  Ignoring my serial insults, Parini took the classy road. In an email he said he had always seen “Charley” as a work of fiction. It had never worried him that Steinbeck “rearranged some of the events or stayed at a fancy hotel or created dialogue.” Then he apologized profusely, graciously, abjectly, acknowledging my hard work and admitting he should have credited me. Oddly, he wrote, “I am startled in fact that I didn't credit you. Again, apologies.”

  I forgave him, though I really don't know why. Two years of journalism grunt work discovering, digging up, proving and then publicizing a major literary cover-up – and that’s all I got from a top Steinbeck scholar? I didn’t expect a book deal or a thank-you note from the CEO of Penguin. But no credit? Was it Penguin’s editorial sloppiness or spite?

  In the long run, it didn’t matter. Truth is its own reward, right? At least Wikipedia, the New York Times and my mom will always know who uncovered “Charleygate” and blew the whistle on Steinbeck and his accomplices. And at least the story of my travels with Steinbeck had a happy ending. Truth had triumphed. No one who buys a new copy of "Travels With Charley" will ever be fooled again.

  Trip’s End

  Trips often take unexpected twists and turns. Steinbeck knew this to be true. As he wrote, every trip is unique and subjective – just like the individuals that take them and write about them. Every journey has its own personality, magic, logic, motives, politics, beginning and end. Steinbeck also famously said in “Travels With Charley” that no matter how well you plan, “You don’t take a trip; a trip takes you.”

  I grew to really hate that quote. But now I know exactly what he meant. I spent almost three years with John Steinbeck’s ghost, on the road and off. I’m not complaining. It was a priceless adventure made possible only because I was a journalist. It couldn’t have gone better, unless I had met Steinbeck’s ghost on Fremont Peak or been abducted by aliens.

  My solo dash around my homeland was as I expected it to be – easy, safe and fun. It took me to scores of little Americas I’d never have visited otherwise. It introduced me to hundreds of decent people who reaffirmed my faith in the country to survive the never-ending train of abuses the Washington-Wall Street Axis of Evil throws at it.

  Journalistically, I struck gold. I had set out with the modest goal of comparing the America I found in 2010 with the America he found in 1960. But I got unbelievably lucky. By the time I was done, I had uncovered the myths and lies of “Travels With Charley,” embarrassed the country’s top Steinbeck scholars for failing to notice or expose his deceit and earned a pat on the back for truth finding from the New York Times.

  I didn’t learn a blessed thing about myself on my ride with Steinbeck. It was several decades too late for that. But I learned a ton about how a great American writer thought and wrote and lived. I grew to like him in many ways. But I also saw the ethical corners he and his accomplices at Viking were willing to cut to make up a book and pretend it was true.

  For half a century “Travels With Charley” was marketed, reviewed and taught as a work of nonfiction. It wasn’t. People say “So what? There are no victims.” What Steinbeck did obviously was not as serious or calculatedly self-serving as Greg Mortenson, who used “Three Cups of Tea” to raise tens of millions of dollars.

  Sorry. But there were many victims of Steinbeck’s deceit. Two and half generations of trusting readers of all ages were duped – including smart people like Susan Shillinglaw, Jay Parini, Ted Conover and Bill Barich. And Viking Press made tens of millions of dollars selling a “true” book by one of the world’s best writers under false pretenses. I’d call that consumer fraud. No famous writer could get away with that today. No one would even try.

  Early on, it became clear my discoveries were going to disappoint a lot of “Charley” fans. "Leave 'Charley' alone, you old crank," they said in emails or on their blogs. "You're ruining everyone's fun. ‘Charley’ is a wonderful book about wanderlust and hitting the road to find your country or yourself. So what if it's not the true story of Steinbeck’s road trip? It's a metaphor, a work of art, not a Lonely Planet travelogue. Who except for a cynical old newspaper hack like you cares where he slept or if he made up a few characters and stuck them in his little travel book? Who does it hurt? No harm, no fraud.”

  To tell the truth, I didn’t feel their pain. In any case, I had zero interest in apologizing for what I had done. I had never intended to unmask Steinbeck as a serial fabricator or wreck the romance for readers who love “Travels With Charley.” I thought and acted like a journalist. I merely followed the facts where they led me – and learned that Steinbeck, his wife, his agent, his editors and his publishing company Viking pulled a fast one on American readers in 1962.

  It wasn’t Steinbeck’s fault entirely. In the first draft of the book there’s clear evidence he initially was more honest about his real trip. It was the sly editing at Viking that disguised its true nature and created the “Travels With Charley” Myth. Now it’s up to scholars to decide whether Steinbeck’s trashing of the truth in “Charley” constitutes a serious literary crime that diminishes the credibility of his other nonfiction.

  A lot of people still don’t w
ant to hear that “Charley” was a literary fraud – and a multi-flawed book. But it is everything the critics and reviewers said in 1962 and more. Timeless in many ways, dated in others, it’s entertaining in spots, excruciatingly dopey in others. One friendly responder to my revelations called the book “disheveled,” a perfect description. It’s suspiciously short, ends with a clunk and leaves gaping geographical and chronological holes in his trip, yet at the same time it’s stuffed with blatant filler and things Steinbeck clearly made up.

  Despite its literary shortcomings and Steinbeck’s lapses in the truth & honesty department, the book flashes with his great prose and wise humor. It’s not a confessional, but it exposes some of his personality, which until 1962 he had hidden with his career-long aversion to publicity and interviews. Absent the edits made to its first draft, “Charley” also would have revealed his partisan political opinions and his and his wife’s upscale lifestyle.