Eight years before a lifelong smoking habit finally killed his heart, John Steinbeck embarked on one last road trip across the United States. SteinbecEight years before a lifelong smoking habit finally killed his heart, John Steinbeck embarked on one last road trip across the United States. Steinbeck desired to see the country he described all his life with his own eyes - "to look again, rediscover this monster land", become reacquainted with its people. His sole companion would be Charley, a French standard poodle. Together they would board the Rocinante - Steinbeck's truck named after the horse of Don Quixote - and go and try to understand what America and Americans are like now.
My plan was clear, concise, and reasonable, I think. For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.
[image] Steinbeck and Charley at their home in Sag Harbor in 1962, the year the book was published.
In 1960 John Steinbeck was 58 years old, and has already published all of his best known works - Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), East of Eden (1952). Thom Steinbeck, John's oldest son, believes that his father was aware that he was dying from his heart condition, and that he took the trip to say goodbye to his country. "The whole book is a big goodbye", he says, "he just wanted to go and see it all one last time. I don't know how my stepmother let him go, because she knew his condition. He could have died at any time. But he just went out, he just wanted to see it, be a kid again, one more time. Go out and say goodbye. And I tought that's a fascinating aspect of the book - if you go back and read it and realize that Steinbeck knows he's never going to see any of this again".
[image] Rocinante on display at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.
Travels with Charley was a a significant success - published in the 27th of July in 1962, it reached the number one slot on the New York Times Best Seller list on the 21st of October, swinging the Nobel judges in his favor - Steinbeck would be awarded the prize just four days later. After 50 years the Nobel Academy made its record public, revealing that Steinbeck was in fact a compromise choice; it was felt that he had his best work behind him, and Steinbeck himself felt that he had not deserved the Nobel - click here to read an article from the Guardian which describes this in more detail.
Steinbeck's trip took him from his home in Sag Harbor north to Maine, where he attempted to cross into Canada - where the kind Canadian custom guards inform him that they can let him in, but the U.S. won't take him back as his dog is not sterilized. After a short rant about the opressive government (wonder what he would have to say now?) Steinbeck went west. He stuck to the outer border of the country and marveled at the beauty and tranquility of the state of Montanta ( declaring it his favorite of all), before going all the way to the Pacific Northwest and down to his home state of California.
[image] Map of Steinbeck's journey as presented in the book.
The first sections of the memoir are humorous in tone, full of witty interactions with quirky characters that Steinbeck encounters on the road - among them a family of French-Canadians in Maine, who worked the season as potato pickers; a travelling Shakespearean actor in the small town of Alice, in North Dakota badlands; friends from his youth in San Francisco.
The tone shifts significantly after Steinbeck reaches Seattle, and is amazed at how much it has changed - he muses how progress looks like destruction, as the little town he remembered became a bustling metropolis, killing a great deal of natural beauty. He goes back east, wanting to go down and grab a bite of the Deep South. He is shocked at the racism that he encounters in New Orleans - and a share of anti-semitism as well, as he is accused of being a New York Jew, one of those "who cause all the trouble" and "stirs up the Negroes". He sees a group of "cheerleaders" - women protesting the school desegregation act, and witnesses Ruby Bridges entering the William Frantz Elementary School to their "bestial and filthy" insults. The applause that the women receive left Steinbeck depressed that the beautiful city of New Orleans was "misrepresented to the world". His enthusiasm for travel evaporates, faced with harsh reality, and he leaves for home - feeling tired of travel and wanting it to be over.
Steinbeck's travelogue entered the canon of classic American travel writing, and while his position as an American man of letters remains unchallenged, dark clouds have set over this particular entry in his canon. In 2010, a Pennsylvanian named Bill Steigerwald followed the route described by Steinbeck, and traveled for over 10,000 miles. He found a number of significant inaccuracies between reality and Steinbeck's account, and wrote an article titled Sorry, Charley which appeared in the April issue of Reason magazine in 2011 and which he later expanded into a book titled Dogging Steinbeck. By following the route and checking places which Steinbeck wrote about, Steigerwald discovered that Steinbeck's actual journey was vastly different than the one he described in Travels. Steigerwald states that Steinbeck's wife, Elaine, accompanied him on 45 days out of the 75 that the trip took; that he didn't camp in the open as he described, but instead stayed in luxurious motels, hotels and resorts, including an exclusive Spalding Inn where he had to borrow a tie and jacket to be allowed to eat in the dining room.
"From what I can gather, Steinbeck didn’t fictionalize in the guise of nonfiction because he wanted to mislead readers or grind some political point. He was desperate", says Steigerwald. "He had a book to make up about a failed road trip, and he had taken virtually no notes. The finely drawn characters he created in Charley are believable; it’s just not believable that he met them under anything like the conditions he describes. At crunch time, as he struggled to write Charley, his journalistic failures forced him to be a novelist again. Then his publisher, The Viking Press, marketed the book as nonfiction, and the gullible reviewers of the day—from The New York Times to The Atlantic—bought every word."
Bill Barich, an American writer who also took the Steinbeck trip and published his account as Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America came to a similar conclusion. "I’m fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book", he says. "The dialogue is so wooden". He goes on to add:
"Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson."
Even Jay Parini, the author of a biography of Steinbeck and the man who wrote the introduction to Travels admits that he doesn't consider it to be an accurate travelogue: "I have always assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them". But for him the discovery of the book's inaccuracy doesn't diminish its value: "Does this shake my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the techniques of a fiction writer." Parini has updated his introduction for the latest printing of the book, openly stating its romance with fiction: "It should be kept in mind, when reading this travelogue, that Steinbeck took liberties with the facts, inventing freely when it served his purposes, using everything in the arsenal of the novelist to make this book a readable, vivid narrative."
This explains the more adventurous and picturesque scenes of the book and its cast of interesting and quirky personalities that Steinbeck meets on the road, like the Shakespearian actor or the romanticized potato pickers from Quebec who resemble a bit the Okies from The Grapes of Wrath. The conversations he has with them do often feel scripted, as if the characters were given cue cards to respond in an appropriate way, such as a farmer not failing to mention that Kruschev was visiting the United Nations in New York (the day of the famous Shoe-banging incident) weeks before it actually happened, and why Steinbeck happened to be in New Orleans to witness Ruby Ridge entering the desegregated school. Steinbeck's own son John is even more blunt than both Steigerwald and Barich in doubting his father: "Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people....He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit."
The shift in tone - from enthusiastic, humorous and sarcastic to melancholic and even grim - could be explained by Steinbeck reliving his trip as he was writing it, employing his wit and talent, wanting to recapture the idealism he sought but did not find and put it on paper, but failing to do so, with his enthusiasm evaporating near the end. "There’s no denying Steinbeck got away with writing a dishonest book", says Steigerwald. "Not only did he fudge the details of his road trip, but he pulled his punches about what he really thought about the America he found. In Charley he fretted about the things he didn’t like about American society: pollution, early signs of sprawl, the rise of national chains, the increasing prevalence of plastic. But in private he complained directly about the failings of his 180 million fellow Americans: They were materialistic, morally flabby, and headed down the road to national decline."
Perhaps the failure of reality to meet his memories and idea of America depressed Steinbeck, and made him tinker with his account of the journey to fit his vision; the fact that he kept the original manuscript of the book - now kept at the Morgan Library & Museum and available for scrutiny - shows that he wasn't overly concerned with being exposed as a fraud. Perhaps at that point of his life he simply did not care - which would also explain his shrugging of the Nobel. Steinbeck did take a trip through the country, but it's not the one he described here - it doesn't invalidate his insights and concern about the destruction of environment and observations on American society in the mid 20th-century. Steinbeck was not using a tape recorder and a camera to record his trip, and was retelling it subjectively; from memory, and being an estabilished writer he could not help but improve it when he saw fit. His purpose was less to write actual journalism and more to see his country for one last time, as his son claimed; as he admits in the book it didn't meet his expectations. There is a sense of disappointment hanging over the book, as if the the entire trip was too bitter an experience to be put on paper; Parini notices that Steinbeck seemed to be "never quite able to bring himself to say that he was often disgusted by what he saw". And indeed it seems that he was not. One might imagine Steinbeck writing an account of all that bothered him. Who would have thought that a book written by a man who went on a trip with his poodle could have been so bleak?...more
Tony Horwitz's grandfather was an immigrant - like many before him he left his country and went to look for a new life in America. Although he could nTony Horwitz's grandfather was an immigrant - like many before him he left his country and went to look for a new life in America. Although he could neither speak nor read English when he arrived from Russia, Horwitz the elder nonetheless purchased a book - a tome on the Civil War, which he continued to pore over until his death at 102. When young Tony was growing up, his father read him stories about the war instead of fairytales, which inspired him to paint a mural of the war in the attic of their house. Years later, after he became a journalist and spent some time abroad, Horowitz returned to the U.S. and to the question which has rekindled in his mind - why was his grandfather so interested in the Civil War in a land that he barely knew, making great effort to read a book on it in a language that he could barely understand? Why is the Civil War still an important element in the lives of many Americans? Is the conflict really over and are the states really united?
Horwitz reported from places where he was exposed to conflict - Bosnia, Iraq, Northern Ireland - and received the Pulitzer Prize for National Journalism in 1994 for his articles about low wage workers in America. When a group of Civil War reenactors were passing near his house on their way to a battlefield, he couldn't resist and had to join them - that's how Horowitz met Robert Lee Hodge, a great reenactment fan and participant and a "true hardcore". It is his picture on the book cover - Hodge's attention to the Confederate look and mannerism included devotion to minute details, and made him virtually undistinguishable from an actual Confederate soldier.
After spending a day with Hodge and being impressed by their passion for the subject, Horowitz's interest in the Civil War has rekindled; he decided to spend a year touring the states where the war took place, searching for the places and people who kept the memory of the conflict into the present day. His travels will took him from the Carolinas, where he attended the Lee-Jackson Day and visited the Fort Sumter - where the first bullet was shot; through Kentuck, where he investigated the murder of Michael Westerman, a man shot by black teenagers for displaying the Confederate flag on his car - and was almost beaten up in a shady saloon; he visits the famous Shelby Foote, author of The Civil War: A Narrative - probably the best known narrative history of the war; he engages in a "Civil WarGasm" - a week long journey through various battle sites in Maryland and Virginia, in authentic Civil War gear and sleeping under the open skies; in Georgia he looks for memories of Gone With the Wind and visits a former Confederate Prison; in Alabama he meets Alberta Martin, who was believed at the time to be the last Confederate widow.
Horowitz didn't receive the Pulitzer for nothing. He is a great storyteller, who is passionate about the subject and has a great ability of finding interesting people to talk to - and actually lets them speak. The book is not a comprehensive social study, and doesn't pretend to be - it's a collection of interesting encounters and events that happened to its author. It's not biases to any particular side - Horwitz doesn't engage in stereotyping and bashing of the region and its people, and is genuinely interested in what they think about the war and why they think that. Stories of hardcore reenactors who sneer at "farbs" - reenactors who are perceived to not care about historical authenticity - and are willing to take extreme measures to ensure that they are as authencic as possible, paying attention to the tiniest seams of their uniforms and deliberately starving themselves to keep the weight of the average starved soldier in that period. It's disturbing to see individuals speaking of a "Lost Cause" lost in the "War Between The States", and trying to minimize the issue of slavery in the war, refusing to recognize it as an obvious evil and focusing instead on romanticizing the war and the Confederate leaders, who fought for states' rights - and passing this view onto their children. Will the relevance of the war to society diminish with the passing of generations, or are the differences irreconcilable?
Although Confederates in the Attic is just a collection of snapshots into the lives of people and the war - as Horowitz himself acknowledges, since he did not manage to squeeze in Louisiana, Florida and Texas - it is a book definitely worth reading, and is bound to get its readers interested in learning more about this fascinating and diversive topic. It's a riveting excursion into the nation that never was, and whose ghost still haunts within the borders of America.