Cornflower Book Group - Travels with Charley

    

    I loved this book. The lilting cadence and gentle rhythm of Steinbeck's voice is both soothing and stimulating to the ear, his smart, wise, respectful and far-sighted reflections make him the perfect observer, and it was pure pleasure to travel with him, to see America through his keen eyes and to see him, too, for this is no neutral, arm's-length, objective account, but a very personal narrative and a sharp self-portrait.

    But the title is crucial, for this is John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, and Charley the French (and indeed French-'speaking') poodle is the perfect companion and foil for Steinbeck. I loved their conversations, the accommodations made to suit both gentlemen's needs and temperaments, and though there was that anxious-making passage when Charley becomes ill, thankfully all is well later on.

     As the two travel the United States, the road and the miles unfold in characterful, considered prose. There are memorable encounters with people (including an appalling incident of racism) and scenes of deep engagement with the natural world; it's a compelling mix, and one which may well inspire the reader to go in search of America for themselves, or at least to discover or return to the novels of John Steinbeck.

      As I say, I loved it; how about you?

(By the way, the 'books and cakes' post can be found here).

Comments

[Susan in TX]

Oh, I have to say I really enjoyed it, too! I was really skeptical. My only Steinbeck experience came right before Christmas reading The Red Pony with my older two girls for school. None of us liked it. My SIL then told me that "all of Steinbeck is depressing". I'm so glad that she was wrong. I found Travels with Charley to be a delightful read. One of the most poignant moments to me was when he attended the church in Vermont, and his comment, "All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher. He forged a religion designed to last, not predigested obsolescence." It struck me after reading that that sadly not much has changed in American churches in the last 50 years - "predigested obsolescence" still seems to reign in many of them. The scene that you referred to as an "appalling incident of racism" was exactly that - the worse so because it was so indicative of that time period over here - to our great embarrassment and shame.
I have to say, he did make traveling across the country in a camper sound appealing - and THAT is saying a lot to someone who likes life to be very comfortable. :)

[Susie Vereker]

Sorry, Cornflower, I ordered the book then, on impulse, gave it as a present to a friend who has a large poodle. Am hoping to borrow it back after a polite interval. Meanwhile, I decided to re-read The Grapes of Wrath. Shows what a good influence you are.

[Dark Puss]

I too liked this book a great deal, but I'm not completely convinced that it isn't a novel. Of course I do not doubt that Steinbeck made the journeys he describes, but the way he chose to write about them is very much that of a writer of novels and this book stands as testament to a great imagination. The most powerful part of the book you rather rapidly skated over in your review. I think that the book changes character significantly when we reach New Orleans and the bitter fires of hatred (both racist and anti-Semitic) are stoked high. In some ways I felt this to be his finest writing and to contain a couple of sentences of the blackest humour that encapsulated eloquently the awful predicament that the oppressed and hated everywhere must daily feel. Writing about an incident when Steinbeck lived in Manhatten:

"I saw you duck. Why didn't you give that woman a hand?"
"Well sir, she's drunk and I'm a Negro. If I touched her she could easily scream rape, and then it's a crowd, and who believes me?"
"It took quick thinking to duck that fast."
"Oh no sir!" he said. "I've been practicing to be a Negro a long time."

I have only been twice to the USA, both occasions to the SF Bay area (SF and Stanford University in Palo Alto), but I have visited Monterey and walked in the Santa Cruz mountains. Steinbeck eloquently describes how his beloved mountain roads have become multi-lane highways and how lovely woods on the tops of hills have been shaved off to mount television masts (mobile phone masts today for sure). Throughout the book one gets a slightly melancholic view of a country rapidly changing, particularly change driven by the rapid rise of the motor car. He writes most beautifully about nature, both animate and physical and, unexpectedly I felt, didn't want to shoot any of it!

Do I want to now go back to the USA and read his novels again? I'm not sure on both counts; ask me again in a few months!

[Mike Faulkner]

I had a strong feeling I was going to enjoy Travels and in fact I don't know how I didn't get to it before - I love the novels (Cannery Row would be in my top ten). So it was no big surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed being in Steinbeck's company; and in particular, I so agree with Cornflower about the voice.

Rhythm greases the wheels of any narrative and Steinbeck makes it look easy. Obviously a sure eye and the wisdom that comes from a life lived to the full (which his most certainly was, perhaps to extremes!), both help - but for me it was the rhythm of the voice which kept the pages turning. In this respect it reminded me of another book and another silken voice: Alistair Cooke's American Journey from almost twenty years earlier. If you enjoyed Travels With Charley you might enjoy that too.

You could also try the wonderful Helene Hanff's Apple Of My Eye (1989). Like Steinbeck, Hanff discovered quite late in life, with some sadness, that she didn't really 'know' the place she had lived in all her life, and set off on a walking tour of New York City. Which brings me to one theme which seems to me to run unwritten through Travels With Charley. Steinbeck was only fifty-eight but he had just had a major health scare and we now know that he felt he didn't have much time (he died six years later). He was taking one last look, and the fact that much of what he saw didn't inspire optimism in him may have had something to do with the prism of subjectivity through which he freely admitted he was looking: 'This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be a macrocosm of microcosm me.'

I was moved by his encounter with two coyotes in the Mojave Desert, one of those little Steinbeckisms which may or may not, you feel, actually have occurred but which is no less the truth for that. He has both animals in the sights of his rifle but his maturity, and the mellowness which perhaps comes from confronting one's own mortality, makes him put the rifle down. He would not have done that in his youth. Given the condition of his heart, the image in his mind, should he choose to pull the trigger, was telling: 'The cross was steady on the breast just below the panting tongue. I could imagine the splash and jar of angry steel, the leap and struggle until the torn heart failed..'

Thank-you for putting me onto this excellent book!

[jodi]

The first Steinbeck book that I read was Of Mice and Men. It was in high school and it bothered me on so many levels. So when I saw that you had picked a Steinbeck book. . .

Travels With Charley is half finished on my nightstand. Not because I don't like it. Very much the opposite. I reread, underline, bend pages back. I savor each line. How he feels about travel is how I feel. I love that he instinctively knows how to meet others and put them at ease - the farmer and the potato harvesters. I can feel his unease when he parks at the motel that is open but no one is there. It has been a true joy to read.

[Lindsay]

I am pleased you enjoyed this so much. I haven't read it for the CBG, but I enjoyed it immensely when I read it a couple of years ago. Although its not typical, my favourite line is quoted by Dark Puss - "I've been practising to be a Negro a long time". But actually this is atypical, and he was his cadenced appreciation of the beauty and the horror of his own country that held me. Nice to see poodles get a decent write up too; they're intelligent dogs with great personalities until they're bred into pampered lap-dogs by owners with considerably fewer brains than their dog.

[Julie Fredericksen]

Here's my review from my book blog:
http://juliesbookshelf.blogspot.com/2010/02/travels-with-charley-in-search-of.html

Cornflower and Black Puss - If you do come in search of America, I would hope that you would often get off the Interstates and travel the blue highways - the back roads of America. I think you would get a way more accurate portrait of our country that way. And please come see me in ND!

Mike, thank you so much for mentioning the Helene Hanff book. I had read her superb "84 Charing Cross Road" about London. I did not know she had written about NYC.

[Sandy]

I had a very enjoyable time with this book and was hooked right from the beginning with his boat in a storm, through the organising of his camper and then his journey. I found his snapshots of vox populi in the USA believeable and easy to read. My spirits, momentarily dampened by Charley's illness, recovered again to buoyancy and so the section on racicism was the more shocking for its being preceded by gentler scenes.

His noting that his jouney had ended spiritually before it's geographical conclusion exacly mirrors my own feelings in such cases and helped cement my connection to this work.

Thanks for picking it Cornflower.

[Janice]

I read this wonderful book many years ago and had almost forgotten it, except for the terrible section about the 'cheerleaders' in New Orleans. This has always stayed with me. Now I'm enjoying it again by listening to the audiobook read by Roy McLarty. The vivid descriptions of life 'on the road' make me eager to get out there again.

Others here have mentioned great travel books - like William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways and Helene Hanff's Apple of my Eye. I'd like to add another small book you may not have heard about. Rosemary Neering wrote Down the Road Journeys through Small-Town British Columbia in 1991. She says, "I decide to avoid in my wanderings officials of any stripe - chiefs and mayors, members of parliament and designated spokespeople for any cause at all - and listen istead to people I find in coffee shops and at work, at home and in the hills. I will stay away from any place that has shopping malls or parking meters; I will spend as few miles as possible on main highways."

[MIke Faulkner]

Thank-you! I love BC, I'v ordered the book tho unfortunately it's coming from the US so I may have to wait, sounds like my kind of thing tho M

[anne]

I have not read any books by John Steinbeck and was a bit wary of beginning as I had the impression of Steinbeck being very much a "man's author" However once I got into the book, I enjoyed Travels with Charlie very much. Many episodes in the book made a big impact on me ,particularly the racism episode. So many of the characters he met are portrayed so vividly, the humans and of course Charlie. I have already recommmended this book to a friend and look forward to reading more by John Steinbeck. Thank you cornflower,this was a memorable book.

[Barbara MacLeod]

I read this book from what might be described as "the inside". The period and many of the places (i.e. types of places) are familiar to me (e.g. truck stops, trailer parks, hunting rifles mounted on the rear of the truck cab).

[1] He set off to try and learn about his country. He observes that many people who travel do not engage with the country. I agree with him on this one. So often people talk in terms of lists "and then we did Norway", or their trip is all about the number of airports or (in the case of a cruise) sea-ports visited.

[2] Myths: [a] He talks about stories that get told, e.g. in families, that are simply not true. His mother, who was fastidious about sewing on buttons, would never have sent him to school in a coat pinned with large safety pins.

And that leads me to: [b] He had a conversation with Charley on the subject of roots. "The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there."

I think that is a myth and it is still very strong. This rationalization often takes the form of "Yep! Anyone who had any get-up-and-go got up and went." I would like to point out that often the truth is elsewhere: many people ended up in (North) America for other, less honorable, reasons: land clearances; absconding with money; got the girl pregnant. Furthermore, it ties up with the myth of (North) America being the land of milk and honey. A lot of people who emigrated were sold worthless land by their own countrymen.

[Mike Faulkner]

Julie - Helene Hanff actually wrote a couple of books about New York, the first was Underfoot In Show Business, about her (main?) career as a playwrite, which I found as engaging as all her work. She's one of those people I wish I'd met..
M

[Julie Fredericksen]

I agree with you, Barbara. I doubt that my grandmother, her brother and her two sisters would have left Norway had it not been for the facts that their parents had recently died, there was a famine in Norway and they could no longer make a living on their hardscrabble farm. I know little about my Irish ancestors except their names and dates of birth, but their emigration certainly fit the timeline of the great Irish diaspora due to the potato famine. And while my Great Uncle Donald Munro from Scotland ran away from home, never to bee seen again, due to pure wanderlust, I think his two brothers (including my Grandfather Duncan) immigrated to Canada to make a better living for themselves.

[Dark Puss]

Julie, how kind of you! Actually I'm more of a railway (railroad?) kind of cat, do you still have trains that stop in your part of the USA?

[Dark Puss]

Anne, since I subscribe, passionately, to the concept that there are no "mens" or "womens" authors (just male and female readers with preconceptions), I'd be really interested to hear why you classify authors in such a way. Why did you feel that Steinbeck was not for you based purely on sex?

[Dark Puss]

Julie; "Immigrated to Canada" ? I'd have said "emmigrated to Canada". Is that a linguistic difference, or a difference of geography?

[Janice]

Three years ago I re-read a lot of John Steinbeck's novels - as well as Travels with Charley. Here is a link to my Reading Diary post about those

http://blogdelivre.blogspot.com/2007/04/john-steinbeck.html

Also, by way of "travel" stories is his Log from the Sea of Cortez wherein he relates the day-to-day story of a marine expedition in 1940 with his great friend, Ed Ricketts. Lewis Gannett, of the New York Herald Tribune, said, "the best of Steinbeck is in it - the mellowest and the crotchetiest."

[Delyn]

John Steinbeck is one of my favourite authors but I hadn't read this book. I'm so glad that you put me on to this one. I loved it.
I was interested to read Dark Puss's comment about not being convinced that it isn't a novel. That's given me something else to think about.

[Julie Fredericksen]

Dear Dark Puss,

There has not been any passenger service in Bismarck for years now. The beautiful Northern Pacific railroad depot has been turned into a quite nice restaurant with a patio for outdoor dining - very pleasant except for when the trains come through. (LOUD!) However, there is still (I believe) passenger service through the northern part of North Dakota. The nearest stop from Bismarck would be in Minot. This is the train my grandma, my aunt and I took out to Whitefish, Montana (in the Rocky Mountains) when I was about 9. I will never forget it. I had never seen a black person (porter) before.

My little brother was very much a train buff and became even more of one after an almost-disastrous plane flight. After that, he and his wife took the train from Sacramento, CA to Minot! I picked them up and delivered them back to Minot for the return trip. When I was a little girl my mom would take us four kids on a 21-mile train ride from Larson, ND to Crosby, ND. In later years I took the train from my college town of Grand Forks, ND to Winnipeg, Manitoba, and from Grand Forks to Williston, ND. While I cannot say I took any extended train trips, I always thoroughly enjoyed my rides on the rails!

As a North Dakotan, I am very interested in the settlement of ND by the pioneers. The Norwegian settlers tended to come into ND via the northern route (the Great Northern) while the Germans From Russia came in via the southern route (Northern Pacific).

[Julie Fredericksen]

Hi, Dark Puss,

A person emigrates FROM one's original country, and immigrates TO another country. I may not be a grammar expert, but I know that one! And BTW, I did not mean to spell be as bee as in "never to be seen again."

[Mr Cornflower]

I found this a very engaging book from many aspects: the distinctive and appealing voice, the perceptiveness, the heroic scale of the American stage on which the rolling drama plays out, the creative tension between rootedness and wanderlust, between an urgent desire for the new and the fresh and the regret for what is fading away (including, as Mike Faulkner pointed out, Steinbeck's own life).

[Nicola]

I liked this, but not as much as Steinbeck's fiction. I thought the 'conversations' with Charley were a little contrived and there was a touch of machismo throughout which I didn't care for. In his finest novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck portrays life as it is. However, I loved the coyote episode and I was interested in Steinbecks's writing methods - reflecting on episodes for a period of timing before recording them. Love the picture on the cover. Steinbeck looks exactly as I imagined him to look.

[Loretta]

I read Cannery Row about two years ago. The descriptions of Monterey, California were so vivid and I really enjoyed it. Shortly after reading the book I visited Monterey. As Cannery Row is now a tourist area, I thought about Steinbeck and imagined his attitude toward the area today. I was looking forward to Travels With Charley and it was not a disappointment. For me the strongest parts were his descriptions of the sameness along the highways and his urge to get off of those main blacktops to experience the uniqueness of the area. I hadn't realized that the sameness of the U.S. landscape had started so early!

I picked up The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck's last novel this weekend. I am wondering if anyone has read it?

[Bloomsburybell]

I haven't read any Steinbeck, as I am going to the States in April I should rectify this soon! My sister loves his books and I have heard so many good things about his writing - thanks for reminding me to put him on my list!

[Julie Fredericksen]

I have read it (years ago) and it remains high on my list of favorite books. Funny, when Cornflower first announced "Travels With Charley" I recommended some other Steinbooks I like, but forgot "The Winter of Our Discontent."

[Anne]

Sorry Dark Puss I have not required earlier as I have been away for a few days.
I think what I really mean is that I have had the impression that more males enjoy Steinbeck than females. I do agree with what you have said about"mens" and "womens" authors.
Do you know this has me thinking now.

[Oxslip]

I agree, that second part of the book seemed to belong on its own and was so heartfelt and serious in comparison to the slightly tongue-in-cheek air of the rest.
It's a month later - do you want to go back to the US and read more Steinbeck?

[Oxslip]

I'm well after the sell by date, so feel slightly shamefaced about commenting. But I have read it at last, so briefly:
I liked it, despite being poor at reading travel lit in general, I think because as DP notes some of it seems to a little fictional in style. And he does say that he writes after the event, not as he goes along, so a strong literary imagination has been at work, which is all to the good.
I enjoyed the observational style, particularly the passage where he wonders what a 'junk' 1960's toaster and car would be worth in 50 years. The reflectiveness and acceptance of the people and places reflects well on him too - generous at trying to accept differences, except where mean-spiritedness or pure racism are at work.
And he is realistic about his scope and the impossibility of his ambition to write about America or the American people. Too big a task, but this little book is charming about Steinbeck's discovery of himself, which ultimately is what most journeys and travel writing end up being about.

[Dark Puss]

I would like to go back to the USA, not sure about re-reading Steinbeck but that's just me not thinking about it!

[Dark Puss]

I'm off at the end of October to Knoxville in Tennessee! I'm going to a conference here.