Autumn Is Steinbeck Country

As I sit at my computer, a single sentence from Travels with Charley perfectly frames autumn in my mind: “It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.”

Over the years I’ve marveled at Steinbeck’s description of autumn light, as well as other lyrical and poignant passages of Travels with Charley in Search of America. Words, Steinbeck writes, “should be wind or water or thunder.” So it’s no surprise that this particular book, written in the autumn of the author’s life, is a wonderfully colorful and welcome recasting of our seasonal landscape. Travels with Charley is the compline of an exceptional American wordsmith.

Without question, autumn is Steinbeck Country.

It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.

The moment I sense the season sidestepping toward center stage, I fetch my copy of Steinbeck’s travelogue and hitch a ride. Mine is an irresistible ritual that goes back more than a few autumns; the trip never gets old, which speaks well of our country and its core character and says much about the enduring influence of Steinbeck himself. As The Saturday Review noted in 1962, Travels with Charley is “a book to be read slowly for its savor, and one which, like Thoreau, will be quoted and measured by our own experience”:

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

And so begin my travels, again, with Steinbeck and Charles le Chien, “a very big poodle, of a color called bleu.”  Once more I relish the notion of keeping company with such knights of the road, even if only vicariously. I suspect I have not been alone with my two peripatetic companions these many decades. Admitting guilt to having “at best a faulty, warpy reservoir” of a memory, the mature and celebrated author decided to visit his nation afresh in 1960. The journey covered almost 10,000 miles and aimed to ferret out “the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth.” For today’s aspiring and established writers alike, there can be no better standard of integrity than that set by the ailing author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden:

“I stayed as much as possible on secondary roads where there was much to see and hear and smell, and avoided the great wide traffic slashes which promote the self by fostering daydreams. I drove this wide eventless way called U.S. 90 which bypassed Buffalo and Erie to Madison, Ohio, and then found the equally wide fast U.S. 20 past Cleveland and Toledo, and so on into Michigan.”

I stayed as much as possible on secondary roads where there was much to see and hear and smell.

Folks ask why Travels with Charley remains my favorite book. To read it carefully, I respond, is to learn—and relearn—that the so-called American character has not been transformed wholesale by faster fast food or personal high-tech hardware, only disguised. Midway, Steinbeck talks aloud to Charley and makes my point with conviction:

“In the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, tasteless, colorless, and of a complete sameness. It is almost as though the customers had no interest in what they ate as long as it had no character to embarrass them….We’ve listened to local radio all across the country. And apart from a few reportings of football games, the mental fare has been as generalized, as packaged, and as undistinguished as the food.”

In the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, tasteless, colorless, and of a complete sameness.

During this analysis Steinbeck acknowledges that he has to use his foot to keep Charley awake. Unlike my own unimpressed canine companion, I eagerly take in Steinbeck’s every word and observation:

“In the bathroom two water tumblers were sealed in cellophane sacks with the words: ‘These glasses are sterilized for your protection.’ Across the toilet seat a strip of paper bore the message: “This seat has been sterilized with ultraviolet light for your protection.” Everyone was protecting me and it was horrible.”

“It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.”

“They refused seconds and I insisted. And the division of thirds was put on the basis that there wasn’t enough to save. And with the few divided drops of that third there came into Rocinante a triumphant human magic that can bless a house, or a truck for that matter– nine people gathered in complete silence and the nine parts making a whole as surely as my arms and legs are a part of me, separate and inseparable.”

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

At the risk of revealing my bias for the author and his book, I am not surprised that Travels with Charley was and remains a commercial publishing success. Nor am I overly concerned with recent reports that Steinbeck took liberties with fact in a book categorized as non-fiction. As Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini noted in Steinbeck’s defense, “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. 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.”

Be it resolved, therefore, that Steinbeck never claimed to be recreating the Congressional Record: his is just one man’s astute perceptions of his country, and his country-to-be.

For this scribbler, Travels with Charley has been a lucky charm and a writing model. In 1989, a Penton Publishing executive who was handling the final phase of my job interview process at Industry Week magazine asked me to tell him about my favorite book. Within a week I was passing my fellow Steinbeckian on the corporate floor. Two years ago Travels with Charley was my inspiration for an article I wrote about regular turnpike shuttles between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. The hook of this human-interest feature was our family’s loud and loveable Beagle, Holly, aka The Duchess of Hollingsworth.

Upon her arrival on Route 22 in Pennsylvania, Holly prepares for days of adulation lavished upon her by family and strangers alike. As Steinbeck relates in his tales,“many conversations en route began with ‘What degree of a dog is that?” In 2011 America, the Duchess of Hollingsworth cocks her head at all she meets and elicits,‘”My, what a sweet dog! Do you live around here?”

“No, we’re just visiting from Cleveland,” Carol explains. “We’re here to visit family. Aren’t we, Holly?”

The typical response goes something like this: “So you’re part of the Browns’ Dawg Pound, eh? You’re a real cutie. Enjoy your visit, Holly.”

And the ancient animosity between Cleveland and Pittsburgh is momentarily forgotten.

Many conversations en route began with ‘What degree of a dog is that?’

For readers everywhere, Travels with Charley is a keystone of what another Steinbeck biographer, Jackson Benson, has called the moral trilogy comprised by Travels with Charley, The Winter of Our Discontent, and America and Americans. From his three-book literary bully pulpit in the 1960s, Steinbeck warned that “it is historically true that a nation whose people take out more than they put in will collapse and disappear.” Steinbeck could have written that just this morning.

It is historically true that a nation whose people take out more than they put in will collapse and disappear.

Here’s a final, timely observation shared by Charley’s owner with this reader in the early autumn of 2013:

“In the beginning of this record I tried to explore the nature of journeys, how they are things in themselves. . . .  I speculated with a kind of wonder on the strength of the individuality of journeys and stopped on the postulate that people don’t take trips—trips take people. That discussion, however, did not go into the life span of journeys. This seems to be variable and unpredictable. Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space has ceased.”