Tag Archives: Fiction

John Steinbeck

Published: 1962

Read: June 4, 2021

So I set off to read a travelogue by a novelist dead for 52 years in the year 2021.  The year where many across the world are longing to get to a new locale apart from their own work at home tombs.  Perhaps that opinion is only from just those of us who are sick of staring at the same four walls in this time of the pandemic, no matter.  John Steinbeck is a man from a different age.  He wrote Travels with Charley as a road trip memoir of a man, his dog, and his converted pickup camper.  And so, Casual drinking with strangers, lamenting the changing country and prevalence of freeways ensues.  Even with the salt of the earth topics, Steinbeck polishes his words to be profound and literary, but to my eye this is the voice of man long dead and who seems familiar.  While reading this book I kept thinking whether my grandfather as a younger man would have had the Steinbeck sensibility.  As described in Travels with Charley, Steinbeck was a veteran of World War II who was struggling to finish The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. For days after, I wondered if he ever managed to finish the book or if that even mattered.

I should point out, the Charley in the title refers to Steinbeck’s pet poodle who accompanied Steinbeck throughout a traversal of the country. The travels, were a pleasant sepia-tone of a time a surprising long time ago told by a man who wasn’t engaged in the summer of love but was looking over his middle age and pushing into his own end. A man who styles himself as Don Quixote with his pickup truck christened the Rocinante.  This book is a time capsule who parallels today are uncanny and Steinbeck was a man who talked seriously and then took him self to be a fool clearly.  When lamenting on pasteurization he ends the argument with this

 
“The lines of change are down. we or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thoughts in a hundred years or fifty years.  Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know.  The sad ones are those who waste their energy in try to hold it back for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain”

Steinbeck also comments on the nature of vaccine mandates which gave me a chuckle from here in 2021. Once he is trying to travel across the border into Canada he gets interrogated by the official at the border for charlies rabies shot. In this instance, Steinbeck shows me at least he is a rugged individual who is smart enough to know when to draw the line.

  
“And it is usually so with governments- not a fact but a small slip of paper”

” For this reason I cannot commend this account as an America that you will find. 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” 

There is some controversy (I googled) on this book of whether the events are true. I’m not entirely sure that this matters to my reading of the book or me as I got at least one mans view of the country in an older time and got some beautiful prose.  In any case as Steinbeck admits, the journey was a bit more of an idea than an actual experience held to plan.  As i look back through my highlights i find again no events that are worth pointing out but more the internal monologues of the man with the vision of a sleeping bag and a bottle of whiskey in the back of a pickup truck sleeping next to a dog.  

Many quotes nicely sit with as i read them and look back now, I hope I can keep it handy in the future for a sounding board on life. A book I thoroughly enjoyed reading in these times as a teleportation to a time and prose that felt warm and comforting if not a bit alien.

“I find this interesting, but it does make for suspicion of history as a record of reality”