At the close of an introductory essay in the Penguin edition of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, the poet and novelist Jan Parini foregrounds the foreboding and prophetic nature of the book. Beneath the charm and humour there is ‘a sense of disenchantment that turns, eventually, into anger’. The interpretation is compounded by a quote from a letter Steinbeck himself sent to his editor, which reflects upon the trip:

In all my travels I saw very little real poverty, I mean the grinding terrifying poorness of the Thirties. That at least was real and tangible. No, it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but no wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gases in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result.

The force of Steinbeck’s concern, or disgust even, is palpable. Yet, going on something he says in the book itself, it is perhaps fairer to say this reading of the text comes out only after the trip, after having written the book, or even after it is read. From my reading, I find the trip itself much more ambiguous. I don’t think the anecdotal convincingly tallies with any attempt to offer a specific socio-political commentary. And I think Steinbeck himself is very aware of this. In the various conversations he recounts with people he meets along the way, it is generally quite explicit that as he prods for an analysis of the American way of life, whether at a local or national level, more often than not the dialogues end up in surprising places. He doesn’t get what he is initially looking for – his suspicions and opinions are often destabilised. At the very start of the trip, for example, as he crosses on the ferry from Orient Point to Connecticut, he talks with an off-duty submariner. Steinbeck is deeply sceptical of submarines (and their aggressive purposes), yet through the conversation he has to accept there is another point of view. ‘…could be he’s right and I’m wrong. It’s his world, not mine any more. There’s no anger in his delphinium eyes and no fear and no hatred either, so maybe it’s all right. It’s just a job with good pay and a future. I must not put my memories and fear on him’ (19).

Contradictory points of view abound in the book. Reflecting on his love of words and local accents, for example, Steinbeck seems to offer an overly nostalgic view, until, he admits ‘…that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance’. It is at this point he presents what might be described as his ‘thesis’ on the past and future:

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought 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 trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain (83)

The idea of knowledge being something you do not know is important to the book – it is what gives the whole journey (and its recounting) tremendous dignity. Yet, the book is of course extremely thoughtful, provocatively so at times. But these moments only arise as if unexpectedly – it is not knowledge as a possession that is presented, but rather what one didn’t quite know until it came up, until it surfaced through a certain travelling. Travelling thoughts, travelling places. Steinbeck gives a wonderful description of this (virtual) process, as it occurs whilst driving:

…a large area of the conscious mind is left free for thinking. And what do people think of when they drive? On short trips perhaps of arrival at a destination or memory of events at the place of departure. But there is left, particularly on very long trips, a large area for daydreaming or even, God help us, for thought. No one can know what another does in that area. I myself have planned houses I will never build, have made gardens I will never plant … I have created turtle traps in my mind, have written long, detailed letters never to be put to paper, much less sent. When the radio was on, music has stimulated memory of times and places, complete with characters and stage sets, memories so exact that every word of dialogue is recreated. And I have projected future scenes, just as complete and convincing – scenes that will never take place. I’ve written short stories in my mind, chuckling at my own humor, saddened or stimulated by structure or content (74).

At the close of the book, he explains how he ‘tried to explore the nature of journeys’, to say something about ‘how they are things in themselves, each one an individual and no two alike’. It is this openness to the singular and unique that I think offers the richer current in this book, which seems less about a country and its woes and much more about one’s personal survival as a human being. It is perhaps no real coincidence that Steinbeck embarks upon the trip as he thinks it might be the last time he really can undertake such a journey.

San Pablo con un Libro

Two important issues are at stake. Firstly the notion of the individual, of one’s space – a space of one’s own, whether physical space or mental space. It is a notion of the individual as humble and dignified, not the individual of consumerism, which in effect is an individual bound up in the crowd, in the multitude. Secondly, there is a question mark which hovers above the very writing up of the trip – how does one archive such a journey and its associated thoughts and possibilities? In place Steinbeck writes about writing – he suggests he does not write whilst on the road (so it must have been composed after the event) and he admits to editing scenes – he does not include his stopover in Chicago (when he meets his wife and has a break). These two issues combine, crystallise even in the following passage: 

Go to the Ufizzi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and you are so crushed with the numbers, once the might of greatness, that you go away distressed, with a feeling like constipation. And then when you are alone and remembering, the canvases sort themselves out; some are eliminated by your tastes or your limitations, but others stand up clear and clean. Then you can go back to look at one thing untroubled by the shouts of the multitude. After confusion I can go into the Prado in Madrid and pass unseeing the thousand pictures shouting for my attention and I can visit a friend – a not large Greco, San Pablo con un Libro. St Paul has just closed the book. His finger marks the last page read and on his face are the wonder and will to understand after the book is closed. Maybe understanding is possible only after. (84)

Perhaps then, Steinbeck can only think (and make us think) after he has been on this trip – not during it. Or at least that is how we need to come to understand the process of thinking, or travelling. Yet, equally it is only because of the trip that there is anything to think about – thinking is not outside of the event. And here, in the picture Steinbeck refers to, we can see this idea of thinking, of understanding occurring only afterwards. One closes the book gently and then ponders, collects one’s thoughts (an added dimension is that fact that this picture can now be so easily found because of the internet – how does this technology relate to the individual and the means of archiving thought/travelling?). We tend to think of the book as knowledge, yet here the picture depicts the moment after the book, in which the will to knowledge truly takes place. It is an ever-present occurring moment, pushing one thought on to the next, just as Steinbeck describes in our habits of thinking whilst driving. We travel, we recount our travels in thoughtful prose or conversation, which leads us to think on further, which in turn prompts more travelling. The book understood this way reveals a necessarily ambiguous portrait – not of a country as such, nor perhaps of specific individuals, but simply of the will to travel. It also helps to understand the depth of a delightful line about Charley, his canine travelling companion, who must be let out of the truck on regular occasions to relieve himself: ‘There Charley could with his delicate exploring nose read his own particular literature on bushes and tree trunks and leave his message there, perhaps as important in endless time as these pen scratches I put down on perishable paper (84).