Steinbeck’s journey does not particularly concern itself with the grand, for he feels that the more ostentatious avatars of American life aren’t representative: And so he does, with exquisite, loving detail, in a book that became - over the course of a lazy afternoon in a hammock - one of my all-time favourites. What he doesn’t mention in the book is that this trip was undertaken in the knowledge that he was dying, and this was his final opportunity to survey the country that had been the subject and the muse of his life’s work. It seems that Steinbeck did go on a road trip to rediscover America, and he did take his poodle, Charley, as his companion. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is, according to historians, not factual enough to be considered nonfiction. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.’
‘I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. And then consider this, from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: Consider Hemingway’s famous ballscratching machismo, as refracted through his obsession with fly-fishing. Steinbeck was a better novelist, a better pet owner, and a nicer man. Lots of people seem to like Hemingway, and I expect they have their reasons, but I refuse to entertain them.
Like I said, this is based on nothing other than a hunch. My current favourite is this: just as you are either a cat person or a dog person, United or City, Italian or French food: you are either a Hemingway person or a Steinbeck person. It must be a hangover of studying English at university and being forced to provide evidence for all my reckless assertions - now I treat myself to the occasional assertion, the more reckless the better. It is a unique American travelogue and brings John Steinbeck into close relationship with his readers.I like forming theories about literature - particularly theories based on zero evidence. And at last after the long trek, in the specially built truck with a miniature ship's cabin aboard and with Charley, his French, he came home to New York only to lose himself in his own city. He the melodrama that distorted the South in the desegregation crisis. He sensed the state of mind that is Texas. He learned that there were still areas that held their character and fell in love with Montana. He found to his sorrow that folk ways and folk speech were lost in the uniformity imposed by today's channels of communication. But most of all he learned a good many of the basic values that make Americans American. Something as well of the wealth of its agricultural reaches, and the mystery of its deserts. But in the quest through 40 states, John Steinberg learned something of the vast changes that have come over his country, something of its, its variety, its magic and the ugliness of its towns and cities.
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