Murray Ellison

About Murray Ellison

Murray Ellison is an educator in Richmond, Virginia, where he teaches American literature in the Osher Institute at the University of Richmond and serves as docent, board member, and website columnist for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. He earned an MEd from Temple University, an MA from Virginia Commonwealth, and an EdD from Virginia Tech and served as Director of Community Corrections for the Virginia Department of Correctional Education before retiring in 2009 to organize community book clubs and teach adult classes on John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe. He blogs about books at LitChatte.com and can be reached at ellisonms2@vcu.edu.

Lifelong Learning Through Travels with Charley

Image of lifelong learning class at the University of Richmond

Like most of the middle age-plus pupils in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute classes I teach at the University of Richmond, I first read John Steinbeck’s fiction as a young adult. But I chose a work of nonfiction written by Steinbeck in middle age—Travels with Charley In Search of America—to open the course I teach in American literary classics. Before we begin, I advise those who read Travels with Charley when they were young, as I did, to disregard first impressions and read it again with fresh eyes. As Steinbeck observes at the outset of the journey, what we see is determined by how we view: So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world. You don’t even know where I’m going. I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

As Steinbeck observes at the outset of the journey, what we see is determined by how we view.

Later, discussing the book’s significance in middle age, we recall how we explored Steinbeck’s America in our teens and twenties—driving, and riding trains, buses, and planes; experimenting with ideas; testing the patience of people who were our parents’ and Steinbeck’s age during the turbulent decade of the sixties. For many of us, the need to experience our parents’ world through the “morning eyes of youth” was the reason we read Travels with Charley the first time around. Even in middle age, Steinbeck understood the impulse to escape: 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 . . . I fear this disease incurable.

Even in middle age, Steinbeck understood the impulse to escape.

Reading Travels with Charley in maturity gives my students renewed respect for Steinbeck’s courage in answering the call of the road by driving a fitted-up camper solo from one coast to the other, with his wife’s poodle as companion and a deep understanding that “after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” Steinbeck’s itinerary in 1960 included destinations he visited on book tours years before—places he visited without fully experiencing them—and avoided high-speed super-highways, which were spreading like cancer across the map of post-war America. Steinbeck’s recognition that “When we get these thruways across the whole country . . . it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing” resonates with us as we recall the places we passed through along the way and reflect on the influence Travels with Charley continues to exert on how Americans think America is or was or ought to be.

We reflect on the influence Steinbeck continues to exert on how Americans think America is or was or ought to be.

All of us are amazed that Steinbeck could travel cross-country incognito until he came to Salinas, the home town he abandoned in 1925, and some identify with the sense of rejection he felt from family members and friends who failed to understand the values and ideas he expressed in the books he wrote in the 1930s. Like Thomas Wolfe, he became a stranger among his own people, though he knew better than to blame them. “Through my own efforts,” he notes, “I am lost most of the time without any help from anyone,” and he recognizes lost-ness in the people and places he encounters in Travels with Charley. A waitress has “vacant eyes” which could “drain the energy and excitement” from a room. “Some American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash . . . surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles [and] smothered in rubbish.” Observed firsthand, the anger of housewives protesting school desegregation in New Orleans seems inhuman and insane. “I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes,” he concludes, “a quick and vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically, dogs think humans are nuts.”

Like Thomas Wolfe, he became a stranger among his own people, though he knew better than to blame them.

We try to avoid issues of race in class (though everyone recognizes that they still exist). As Steinbeck notes, “A dog is a bond between strangers,” and because many of us are empty-nesters, we focus instead on Steinbeck’s feelings for his dog Charley, who “loved deeply and tried dogfully,” and on the improved status of pets in his writing after Of Mice and Men. Reading or rereading Travels with Charley opens middle-aged eyes to the need for connection and companionship Steinbeck felt at a time of life when sudden loss or change—in a family or a country or a culture—can lead to alienation, loneliness, and depression. Those who think and feel after 50 will recognize the danger of despair. John Steinbeck, who made lifelong learning a creative enterprise, responded by creating an adventure for himself and us that makes Travels with Charley rewarding reading at any age.

Photo of Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning class courtesy University of Richmond.

Picturing Edgar Allan Poe

Image of Edgar Allan PoeAs I was planning a trip from Virginia to California to visit my family in late February, I decided to add a two-day excursion to Salinas and the Steinbeck National Center. Shortly before I left, my eye was caught by a poetic tribute to Edgar Allan Poe at Steinbeck Now.com, an author website that had only recently come to my attention. Poe initially sparked my interest in closely examining great American authors. Now John Steinbeck has reignited my torch.

Poe sparked my interest in closely examining great American authors. Steinbeck reignited my torch.

At my website LitChatte.com I have identified Poe as the first of a line of great American literary writers who portray American history imaginatively. While acknowledging that John Steinbeck continued the tradition, I was surprised to find a poem about Poe on an author website devoted to a writer best known for fiction. Though I can’t say that Roy Bentley’s poem is a fair portrayal of Poe—a pioneer who contributed to the advancement of American literature and the vocation of John Steinbeck—reading it reminded me that both writers were trashed by misinformed critics when their works first appeared and again when they died. Steinbeck was called a communist and a liar and his characters were deemed two-dimensional when The Grapes of Wrath was published. At the National Steinbeck Center I learned that copies were burned in Salinas and banned from schools and libraries around America, despite Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize.

I was surprised to find a poem about Poe on an author website devoted to a writer best known for fiction.

Similarly, Poe’s character and work were maligned by critics in his day, most harshly by Rufus Griswold—a contemporary who served as one of Poe’s principal editors—in The Poets and Poetry of America, an anthology edited by Griswold, and in an unsympathetic obituary of Poe that Griswold wrote under a pseudonym. The existing tension between the two men was exacerbated when Poe took exception to Griswold’s inclusion and omission of certain poets after the anthology appeared in 1842. Griswold retaliated by trashing Poe’s personal life in the October 9, 1849 New York Daily Tribune obituary he signed “Ludwig.”

Like Steinbeck, Poe’s character and work were maligned by critics in his day, most harshly by Rufus Griswold.

It didn’t take much detective work to determine that “Ludwig” was Griswold, a conniver who gained a stranglehold on future publication of Poe’s work (by usurping the role of Poe’s literary executor from Poe’s living relatives) and who damaged Poe’s reputation by falsely claiming that he “had few friends.” Halfheartedly conceding that “literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars,” Griswold’s obituary portrayed Poe as a vagabond who moved pointlessly between Baltimore, Richmond, New York, and Philadelphia, even though Griswold worked at different times in the same cities—the only literary centers where a struggling writer (or editor) could hope to make a living in the first half of the 19th century.

Griswold’s obituary portrayed Poe as a vagabond who moved pointlessly between the only literary centers where a struggling writer could hope to make a living.

With each move, Poe developed an essential pillar of his versatile career as a professional writer, one which became a vocational model for later authors, like Steinbeck and Twain, who used their journalism to inform and inspire their literary creations. Griswold’s “Ludwig” obituary also spread the myth that Poe was a hopeless alcoholic and a madman, and it predicted that neither he or his writing would be long remembered. Time has disproved Griswold’s prophecy, and Griswold’s claims about Poe’s character and behavior have been discredited by serious scholars, though unwitting writers continue to base their assumptions about Poe on Griswold’s intentional misdirection.

With each move, Poe developed an essential pillar of his versatile career as a professional writer who used journalism to inform literary creation.

Reliable information can be found at the author website founded by the Poe Society, which points the reader to The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Dwight Thomas and David Jackson. A comprehensive account of Poe’s professional and personal activities, it documents Poe’s friendships, and the position of respect he held in social circles where he was known. Though Poe wrote masterpieces of horror, he wasn’t mad, and the state of inebriation noted by others may well have been caused by acute sensitivity to alcohol, small amounts of which made him sick and appear drunk. Poe’s drinking was limited to social situations where gentlemen were expected to imbibe. A disciplined writer (there are no credible accounts of drinking while writing), Poe was devoted to his young wife Virginia, whose death a few years before his own contributed to his emotional and physical deterioration.

Though Poe wrote masterpieces of horror, he wasn’t mad, and the state of inebriation noted by others may have been caused by acute sensitivity to alcohol.

The true picture of Poe’s life explains why the poem at SteinbeckNow.com concerned me. It opens by suggesting that Poe could or would have downed “thirteen insipid whiskeys,” a preposterous proposition, despite the clever pun on “insipid.” (From what we know about his clinical condition, it’s likely he would become disoriented after the first drink and pass out after the second.) The elusive line “A joke is to say what its poets are to America” reflects a viewpoint advanced by Griswold in his anthology, and the reference to Poe’s strained relationship with his “foster father” John Allan, who “left him nothing,” repeats a misconception about Poe’s later behavior. Having dropped Allan’s name, he worked hard to provide for himself and his wife. He was prolific and his work sold well abroad. But lax copyright laws failed to protect writers’ interests in 19th century America, and Poe suffered the consequences.

Poe was prolific and his work sold well abroad. But lax copyright laws failed to protect writers’ interests in 19th century America, and Poe suffered the consequences.

Mark Twain learned from Poe’s experience and eventually self-published. Copyright laws improved in the 20th century, and writers like John Steinbeck (who also had a more supportive father) lived to achieve the financial security denied to Poe. Roy Bentley’s poem may have been intended as a tribute, but it fails to reflect the facts of Poe’s life, or Poe’s contribution to the progress of American literature. Instead of shedding new light on a sympathetic subject, it continues the slight to Poe’s reputation consciously created by Rufus Griswold, who knew that “a story will circulate” once it’s invented. Though eloquent, the last line of the poem (“If God exists, it isn’t to love poets”) regrettably reinforces that unfortunate conclusion.