J.F. McKenna

About J.F. McKenna

J.F. McKenna is a veteran business journalist and marketing-communications consultant and a former staff editor for magazines including Industry Week and Northern Ohio Live. A native of Cleveland, he now lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Carol and their dogs, Duchess Holly and Lord Max. Contact him at jfmckwriter23@yahoo.com or through LinkedIn at Jos. F. McKenna.

Summering with Steinbeck, Who Traveled with Charley: Pack The Portable John Steinbeck for Your Trip

July 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of John Steinbeck with the dog made famous by Travels with Charley

John Steinbeck’s dog Charles le Chien remains a creature to be envied, having been squired across mid-20th century America by his restless owner, the author who transformed their journey together into Travels with Charley, a lyrical paean rich in social commentary that became a favorite of Steinbeck readers then and now.

As if a 10,000-mile, tree-filled experience weren’t heavenly enough reward, Elaine and John Steinbeck’s big blue Poodle also gained literary immortality, taking a star-turn in the book that records a road trip taken more than 50 years ago and continues to be read and debated. The appellation lucky dog comes to mind, but Charley was ready for his role as the author’s celebrated sidekick. Steinbeck wanted to see America on his own, but needed a companion who listened well. Charley did.

Wartime Portable Steinbeck Published BC (Before Charley)

Cover image of John Steinbeck's The Portable SteinbeckNo fan of John Steinbeck will ever be quite as lucky as Charley-dog. But may I suggest a second-best experience for two-legged vacationers half a century after Travels with Charley became a national bestseller? Take along your own copy of Viking’s The Portable Steinbeck when you travel this summer. Like John Steinbeck’s polite, attentive Poodle, this popular anthology of the author’s work travels well and fits any space.

A compact book designed for stuffing into suitcases and knapsacks, The Portable John Steinbeck remains an unsurpassed introduction for newcomers to John Steinbeck’s writing and a continuing delight for long-time lovers of The Red Pony, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath.  With apologies to a fellow author Steinbeck admired deeply, allow me to call The Portable Steinbeck a moveable feast for readers on the run who favor timeless prose and strong ideas over mindless literary escapism.

The Portable Steinbeck was first published in 1943 at the height of World War II as part of the Viking Portable Series—a literary brainstorm attributed to the writer-broadcaster and soldiers’ champion Alexander Woollcott. As noted at the website AbeBooks.com, “The physical characteristics of the wartime Portables owed more to practicality than anything else. The books were meant to be ‘built like a Jeep: compact, efficient, and marvelously versatile.’”

Idea by Alexander Woollcott, Introduction by Pascal Covici

Woollcott wanted the Portables produced for “the convenience of men who are mostly on the move and must travel light”—soldiers far from home fighting in both theaters of an uncertain war. John Steinbeck shared Woollcott’s belief in the democracy of books and the heroism of young soldiers, some as young as 17. The  editors at Viking echoed Woollcott’s words on the jacket of the original Portable Steinbeck, the second book they published in the series.

The Portables, they explained, were produced to present “a considerable quantity of widely popular reading in a volume so small that it can conveniently be carried and read in places where a book of ordinary format would be a hindrance.” Domestic resources were scarce, and the wartime Portables featured “light paper, small margins, and other production economies” while offering a “well and legibly printed and sturdily bound” book designed as much for durability as for literary quality and content.

Like Travels with Charley, Portable Steinbeck Still Popular

Sturdy indeed. The John Steinbeck anthology has gone through numerous editions since 1943, although this Baby Boomer patriot particularly cherishes a pair of copies published in the 1980s, each with an elegant introduction by Pascal Covici Jr., the literary son of Steinbeck’s loyal editor and friend from the prewar 1930s.

The younger Covici’s introduction to John Steinbeck’s long-lived anthology is a model of to-the-point prose:

The gusto of Homer and of Whitman is indeed here, along with the thoughtfulness of Emerson, that philosophical presence which more and more readers have been finding woven into the sturdiest standards of American literature. A humor sometimes sly and often carelessly robust finds its way onto Steinbeck’s pages too.

Contemporary cynics might anticipate a lawyerly disclaimer at this point: Individual reader’s results may vary. But the book’s content lives up to its billing as an introduction to the variety of works written by John Steinbeck, including in its pages the complete version of The Red Pony and a self-contained segment from Cannery Row, along with excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath and (in later editions) the full text of John Steinbeck’s inspired Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Portable Steinbeck—Beach Reading for the Eternal Ocean

I can think of no better way to make the inner light shine brighter for modern readers than this brilliant passage from The Grapes of Wrath:

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “We.”

Or read the sunny lines spoken in passionate hope for the future by John Steinbeck in Stockholm in 1962:

And this I believe: That the free exploring mind of the indivdiual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is I what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

The Portable Steinbeck is a summer book for any season, but it’s far from shallow—a beach read, if you will, that plumbs that ocean of eternal wisdom. Covici in his introduction describes the progression and profundity of the excerpts selected:  “a focus of interest more implicit than realized in the very early works, then gradually emerging into sharpened consciousness until it becomes a matter of articulated intention.”

As a child of icy winters spent on the Great Lakes, I embrace summer days. Like John Steinbeck with Charley, I relish them with my favorite fellow-traveler, The Portable Steinbeck, in tow.

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Tips from John Steinbeck on How to Write Well

May 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of John Steinbeck at his typewriterHow to write well? Some writing tips enter our consciousness formally, through the classroom door. Others arrive surreptitiously, as editors unseen hover over our hands on the keyboard. But writing tips also slip through a half-open window of the struggling writer’s mind, appearing as a bright passage in a book or needed words of encouragement from a colleague that learning how to write well is a craft worth pursuing for yet another day. John Steinbeck’s writing tips took the second and third forms.

For writers like me, Steinbeck’s books and letters are a window on how to write better that never closes.

For writers like me, Steinbeck’s books and letters are a window on how to write better that never closes. Like us, he understood that every lesson on how to write more effectively, however small, is a gift for today and for tomorrow. As Jay Parini notes in John Steinbeck: A Biography, “[John Steinbeck’s] didacticism would become an integral part of his profile as a man and writer . . . .” His lessons on how to write, whatever the context or occasion, remain a source of inspiration, instruction, and delight in my life as a writer.

The Steinbeck Model in Writing Tips from Roy Peter Clark

In the opening pages of Writing Tools, a book of writing tips by Roy Peter Clark that I highly recommend, John Steinbeck appears as a model of how to write well. Clark quotes this passage from Cannery Row as an example of the way master writers like Steinbeck “can craft page after page of sentences” by relying on simple constructions of subject and verb:

He didn’t need a clock. He had been working in a tidal pattern . . . . In the dawn he had awakened . . . . He drank some hot coffee, ate three sandwiches, and had a quart of beer.

Clark notes that “Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence” in the example offered:

Clarity and narrative energy flow through the passage, as one sentence builds on another. He avoids monotony by including the brief introductory phrase  . . .  and by varying the lengths of sentences, a writing tool we will consider later.

Clark notes that ‘Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence’ . . . .

A respected resource at The Poynter Institute on how to write better journalism, Clark returns to John Steinbeck in his list of writing tips, noting that in Travels With Charley Steinbeck uses passive verbs “to call attention to the receiver of the action” at just the right time.

“The best writers make the best choices between active and passive,” explains Clark:

Steinbeck wrote, “The night was loaded with omens.” Steinbeck could have written, “Omens loaded the night,” but in that case the active would have been unfair to both the night and the omens, the meaning and the music of the sentence.

John Steinbeck’s Advice to Hugh Mulligan on How to Write

A journalist for much of his life, Steinbeck sometimes applied sideways humor to prop open the how-to-write window, a trait noted by the late Hugh Mulligan, a veteran reporter covering the war in Vietnam when Steinbeck was there. In his book The Journalist’s Craft, Mulligan states that he is writing “a nuts-and-bolts book about writing, but before I attempt to get down to the basic hardware, I should note that history is rife with confusion on this subject.” Enter Steinbeck, laughing.

Later in his collection of writing tips Mulligan quotes Somerset Maugham, the English writer who was born 28 years before John Steinbeck but died only 12 months earlier than his celebrated American counterpart:

[T]hat elegant master of the Queen’s English . . . told a BBC interviewer: “There are three basic rules to good writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are” . . . . I mentioned this to John Steinbeck one night in Saigon during the Vietnam War . . . . The Nobel laureate took a stab at filling in the blanks for Maugham: “Never make excuses. Never let them see you bleed. Never get separated from your luggage.” He then added a fourth: “Find out when the bar opens and when the laundry comes back.”

Speaking as a writer who has lost his notes, a bit of his virtue, and a sport coat or two on reporting assignments, I find practical wisdom woven into Steinbeck’s mordant wit. If you write for a living and don’t find yourself grinning at this advice, you might consider taking up another profession. Your absence may be missed, but not by other writers.

Maria Povova’s “6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck”

Fifty years after their conversation, the Internet has expedited and amplified the writing tips shared by John Steinbeck with Hugh Mulligan in Saigon. While roaming the digital byways recently, I came across Maria Povova’s “6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck,” a set of principles on how to write well gleaned from her reading of a 1975 Paris Review article and recent Atlantic magazine blog.

Call my online discovery software-supported serendipity if you like. But Steinbeck’s advice has outlasted the manual typewriter and will no doubt survive smartphones as well.

Steinbeck’s advice has outlasted the manual typewriter and will no doubt survive smartphones as well.

Here are my favorite writing tips from Povova’s piece:

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one.

When he talked about how to write, John Steinbeck always addressed other writers—even if he was the imagined writer he had in mind.

When he talked about how to write, John Steinbeck always addressed other writers—even if he was the imagined writer he had in mind. The process could be painful, and Steinbeck sometimes had to remind himself to follow his own advice. After the announcement in 1962 that he had won the Nobel Prize, he admitted how hard it was to write his acceptance speech in a letter to Dook Sheffield, a college friend and fellow writer:

I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times . . . .  Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me.

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His Greatest Generation: The Lessons of John Steinbeck’s World War II Reporting

January 17, 2014 by 5 Comments

Image from cover of Roy Simmonds' World War II John Steinbeck biographyIn staid Victorian England, Matthew Arnold, the author of Dover Beach, described journalism as “literature in a hurry.” Six decades and two world wars later, John Steinbeck confirmed Arnold’s lofty assessment of the correspondent’s craft, creating an enduring account of what he saw in Europe and Africa during the darkest days of World War II.

The Greatest Generation Goes to War

A member of the Greatest Generation who wrote and read poetry throughout his life, Steinbeck understood Arnold’s image of “a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.” In his Steinbeck biography, the poet-novelist Jay Parini points out the acknowledgment by Newsweek magazine that the famous novelist was also a capable journalist, that his “cold grey eyes didn’t miss a trick, that with scarcely any note-taking he soaked up information like a sponge, wrote very fast on a portable typewriter, and became haywire if interrupted.”

Steinbeck understood Arnold’s image of ‘a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

More than a decade after World War II, Viking Press released Once There Was a War, a collection of Steinbeck’s war reporting from June to December 1943—reporting that inserted the 41-year-old author of The Grapes of Wrath into the global madness that began when France and England declared war on Nazi Germany in 1938 and ended seven years later with the surrender of Japan, Germany’s chief ally.

Filing human interest stories in the gritty, humorous style of the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle, Steinbeck was stationed in London before shipping off to North Africa, where he experienced first hand the immediate aftermath of the Allied liberation of southern Italy. By that time Italy, the third element in the Axis triangle, had formally surrendered, although the battle for Nazi-occupied northern Italy would continue into 1944, costing literally countless British, American, and European lives.

Writing Steinbeck Biography in the World War II Years

Although considered by some a minor component of the Steinbeck canon, Once There Was a War nonetheless illustrates how John Steinbeck, working under the most difficult and dangerous professional conditions, was always conscious of leveraging his strengths as a writer engaged with the world. Steinbeck biography written since World War II acknowledges this facet of the author’s diverse career in varied ways.

In The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer—the Bible of Steinbeck biography—Jackson Benson notes of Steinbeck’s World War II reporting that the author “would not try to compete for the hard news but would work to see things that had been overlooked or to see differently things that had already been reported.” Benson convincingly connects Steinbeck’s qualities as a fiction writer to his journalism: “He would become a correspondent of perspective, just as he had been a novelist of perspective—not telling us new, but seeing it new. In his concern for the commonplace and in his preference for the ordinary soldier, he became in many ways a correspondent much like the war journalist he admired the most, Ernie Pyle.”

‘He became in many ways a correspondent much like the war journalist he admired the most, Ernie Pyle.’

Focusing on a perturbed period of Steinbeck biography in John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939-1944, Roy Simmonds speculates about the aging author’s ulterior motive in signing on as a front line correspondent at the height of World War II: “There is little doubt that within defined parameters he seized the opportunity to use the dispatches—through the mouths of the servicemen he met, or sometimes writing on their general behalf—to draw attention to many matters he felt needed publicity and urgent rectification.”

‘There is little doubt that within defined parameters he seized the opportunity to use the dispatches—through the mouths of the servicemen he met, or sometimes writing on their general behalf—to draw attention to many matters he felt needed publicity and urgent rectification.’

Whatever his motivation, however, John Steinbeck knew how to enfold moments of simple human existence in a lyricism that rises above the horror of modern slaughter, as almost any sample of his World War II dispatches demonstrates:

“LONDON, July 10, 1943—People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them.

“’It’s the glass,’ says one man, ‘the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle. . . . My dog broke a window the other day and my wife swept up the glass and a cold shiver went over me. It was a moment before I could trace the reason for it.’

“The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.”

. . . .

“On the imaginary line the children stand and watch the cargo come out. . . . How they cluster about an American soldier who has come off the ship! They want gum. Much as the British may deplore the gum-chewing habit, their children find it delightful. There are semi-professional gum beggars among the children.

“’Penny, mister?’ has given way to ‘Goom, mister?’

“When you have gum you have something permanent, something you can use day after day and even trade when you are tired of it. Candy is ephemeral. One moment you have candy, and the next moment you haven’t. But gum is real property.

“The grubby little hands are held up to the soldier and the chorus swells.’Goom, mister?’”

. . . .

“MEDITERRANEAN THEATER, October 6, 1943—You can’t see much of a battle. Those paintings reproduced in history books which show long lines of advancing troops are either idealized or else times and battles have changed. The account in the morning papers of the battle of yesterday was not seen by the correspondent, but was put together from reports.

“What the correspondent really saw was dust and the nasty burst of shells, low bushes and slit trenches. He lay on his stomach, if he had any sense, and watched ants crawling among the little sticks on the sand dune, and his nose was so close to the ants that their progress was interfered by it.”

John Steinbeck and Dad: Why World War III is Unthinkable

As John Steinbeck noted in his introduction, his World War II dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune record events as they occurred. “But on reading this reportage,” Steinbeck adds, “my memory becomes alive to the other things, which also did happen and were not reported. That they were not reported was partly a matter of orders, partly traditional, and largely because there was a huge and gassy thing called the War Effort.”

Roy Simmonds, the author of the only Steinbeck biography by an Englishman and a survivor of the Blitz, notes that Steinbeck understood but resented the “huge and gassy thing” produced by the fog of war: “Talking to [enlisted] men, Steinbeck discovers that what also troubles many of them are the lies, both of commission and omission, being fed to the folks back home.”

Steinbeck understood but resented the ‘huge and gassy thing’ produced by the fog of war.

From the body of the writer’s World War II reporting, one thing can be said for certain: John Steinbeck chronicled and explored humanity’s most destructive behavior with the same honesty and intensity that he invested in mankind’s most noble pursuits. Despite his reluctance to revisit his war reporting for publication in 1958—a reticence confirmed by every Steinbeck biography of note—the dispatches he produced for immediate domestic consumption stand as an enduring testament, not only for the Greatest Generation but for every generation that followed.

The dispatches he produced for immediate domestic consumption stand as an enduring testament, not only for the Greatest Generation but for every generation that followed.

My father-in-law, a proud World War II naval veteran named Jerry Hollingsworth, believes that another global war is simply unthinkable. In a recent message he echoed John Steinbeck, who explained this belief in 1958, in the introduction to Viking’s collection of his World War II dispatches:

“The next war, if we are so stupid as to let it happen, will be the last of any kind. There will be no one left to remember anything. And if that is how stupid we are, we do not, in a biologic sense, deserve to survive.”

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“At Least It’s Me”: Steinbeck’s Nobel Speech Still Inspires Writers Today

November 2, 2013 by 1 Comment

As any good writer knows, the intended audience shapes the message even before a word touches the paper or emerges on the computer screen. When the entire world is the audience, as John Steinbeck discovered when he won the Nobel Prize in 1962, the writer’s task is particularly challenging.

The Nobel Prize “is a monster in some ways,” Steinbeck wrote shortly after learning he had won the honor for literature. “I have always been afraid of it. Now I must handle it.”

Handle it he did, taking the recognition of his art and reshaping it to share his vision of the writer’s obligations to the world. What remains today is more than a historical document addressing the hair-trigger tension between Cold War super-powers. It is a call to each of us to continue to embrace literature as a reflection of humankind’s threatened condition, what Steinbeck calls “our greatest hazard and our only hope.”

The pages of Steinbeck’s Nobel speech are well marked in my copy of The Portable Steinbeck, and the writer’s words resonate as deeply today as they did when they were delivered before an international audience in Sweden on December 8, 1962. As an occasional speech writer myself, I recommend Steinbeck’s relatively brief comments as a model of form, content, and tone.

Like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address a century earlier, Steinbeck’s Nobel speech is the creation of an enlightened mind informed by a profoundly moral imagination:

Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
The present universal fear has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledge and manipulation of certain dangerous factors in the physical world. It is true that other phases of understanding have not yet caught up with this great step, but there is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast. Indeed it is a part of the writer’s responsibility to make sure that they do.

With humanity’s long proud history of standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory.

Steinbeck’s literary fingerprint is particularly discernible in his description of Alfred Nobel at the end of his address:

Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may even have foreseen the end result of his probing – access to ultimate violence – to final destruction. Some say that he became cynical, but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a control, a safety valve. I think he found it finally only in the human mind and the human spirit. To me, his thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these awards.

They are offered for increased and continuing knowledge of man and of his world – for understanding and communication, which are the functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstrations of the capacity for peace – the culmination of all the others.

For writers like Alice Munro, this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, as well as for simple scribblers like me, there is an instructive back story to Steinbeck’s speech worth remembering in any era. As the biographer Jackson Benson notes in The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck understood that “the English sentence is just as difficult to write as it ever was,” even when the effort is linked to a well-deserved honor for literary merit. Just do your best, Steinbeck would still advise us.

“I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times,” Steinbeck wrote his college friend Carlton Sheffield shortly before leaving with his wife Elaine for Stockholm 51 years ago. “I, being a foreigner in Sweden, tried to make it suave and diplomatic and it was a bunch of crap. Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me.”

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A Most Pointed Fetish: John Steinbeck on Pencils

October 17, 2013 by 10 Comments

John Steinbeck shown with images of pencilsJohn Steinbeck always had a good word for the pencil.

Among modern authors, Steinbeck probably best understood the intimate dynamic between the writer and that reliable, albeit low-tech, tool of the trade. The author of The Grapes of Wrath could look at his favored Blackwing itself and see instead a lightning rod.

“It occurs to me,” he wrote a generation ago, “that everyone likes or wants to be an eccentric and this is my eccentricity, my pencil trifling.” At the same time, though, the habitual tinkerer with things mechanical knew his was no mere crotchet, insisting that “just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.” For John Steinbeck, there was no better tool for writing. As he explains to editor Pascal Covici in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters: “I am ready and the words are beginning to well up and come crawling down my pencil and drip on the paper. And I am filled with excitement as though this were a real birth.”

The author of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ could look at his favored Blackwing itself and see instead a lightning rod.

These letters, written as Steinbeck drafted “the story of my country and the story of me,” contain an embedded paean to the pencil and its singular role in the author’s manner of creation. No better example of this love affair with lead-and-wood is his letter of March 22, 1951. “And now, Pat, I am going into the fourth chapter,” he writes. “You know, I just looked up and saw how different my handwriting is from day to day. I think I am writing much faster today than I did yesterday. This gives a sharpness to the letter. And also I have found a new kind of pencil—the best I have ever had. Of course it costs three times as much too but it is black and soft but doesn’t break off. I think I will always use these. They are called Blackwings and they really glide over the paper. And brother, they have some gliding to do before I am finished. Now to the work.”

‘You know, I just looked up and saw how different my handwriting is from day to day. I think I am writing much faster today than I did yesterday. This gives a sharpness to the letter. And also I have found a new kind of pencil—the best I have ever had.’

Given the worldwide embrace of John Steinbeck’s work over recent decades, it is reasonable to conclude that the Nobel Prize winner has done as much for the pencil’s reputation as Mark Twain did for the cigar’s popularity in an earlier era.

Consider this 2009 entry from the online site Palimpsest: “During his life he wrote 16 novels, eight works of non-fiction, one short-story collection, two film scripts and thousands of letters. He did use the typewriter at some point but his pencils remained his preferred writing instruments. His right ring finger had a great callus—‘sometimes very rough . . . other times . . . shiny as glass’ from using the pencil for hours on end. . . . The use of the electric sharpener was part of the daily routine…as he started the day with 24 sharpened pencils which needed sharpening again and again before the day was through. The electric sharpener must have worked full-time especially during the process of writing East of Eden, for which he used some 300 pencils.”

It is reasonable to conclude that the Nobel Prize winner has done as much for the pencil’s reputation as Mark Twain did for the cigar’s popularity in an earlier era.

Even today the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University pays unintentional homage to the author’s favorite writing instrument. On its homepage the center proudly notes “its non-circulating archive” of “items . . . unique, rare, or hard to replace.” Accordingly, it advises visiting scholars: “Pencils, not pens, must be used in taking notes.”

Archival best practices aside, is there a contemporary lesson to draw from John Steinbeck’s pencil fetish?  Most certainly. Good writing, at its core, arises from the solitary, single-minded dedication to bringing forth the sharp words, the best words, words that etch readers’ consciousness with the force of inevitability. No fallback on the latest apps, no handy distractions from IM—just the age-old wrestling for one’s right words in one’s true voice. The simple pencil, it seems, is the perfect equipment for that kind of contest.

When he was completing his East of Eden draft, Steinbeck observed that writing “is a very silly business at best. There is a certain ridiculousness about putting down a picture of life. And add to the joke—one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.”

Good writing, at its core, arises from the solitary, single-minded dedication to bringing forth the sharp words, the best words, words that etch readers’ consciousness with the force of inevitability.

As John Steinbeck might say, it all comes down to the writer and his pencil.

Then again, Steinbeck might well repeat something he also wrote to Covici: “You know I am really stupid. For years I have looked for the perfect pencil. I have found very good ones but never the perfect one. And all the time it was not the pencils but me.”

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Autumn Is Steinbeck Country

October 4, 2013 by 8 Comments

Joseph McKenna shown at computer pondering Travels with CharleyAs 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.

Holly, Joseph McKenna's beagle, shown before reliving Travels with CharleyFor 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.”

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