book report: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

Often we choose books, but sometimes they choose us. John Steinbeck's travelogue Travels with Charley: In Search of America emerged from a friend's basement as they packed to move and it ended up on our night-stand. Of course, it is a shame to throw anything of Steinbeck's in the trash. Sometimes we forget how a gifted writer can offer a stream of letters so intoxicating we feel like newly minted legal drinkers. How could we not have imbibed in something so delirious before? Yes Steinbeck is that good.

The premise of the book is a mid-life crisis. He has achieved his fame and fortune and has forgotten how real Americans talk and think in 1960. The cultural context for Steinbeck's journey was the nuclear threat from the USSR and the presidential election race between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. As he journeyed by ferry from the tip of Long Island through the port of my city, New London, up into the Northern tip of Maine he found few who would share their views on the political climate. Repeatedly he refers to the "taciturn" New Englanders. He did stop at a church in Vermont and was so impressed by the sermon that he never describes another church visit although mentioning it as a regular practice on his journey. I qoute in length one paragraph with a modern concern. The pleasure of reading a 50 year old book is the same as reading history, nothing changes. Steinbeck writes

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good. It had been long since I had heard such an approach. It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. There was no such nonsense in this church. The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was right. We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since. Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope. He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order. This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me. I began to feel good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn't been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it. pp.78-79

Even the unresponsive can appreciate the bad news before the good news. Without the bad news, the gospel is just news.

Charley is Steinbeck's dog. It's somewhat important to repeatedly read of Charley's visit with the bushes and trees as they drive around the country because Charley eventually suffers a couple bouts with a urinary tract infection which bring panic and distress to Steinbeck. The lightness of the story disappears as he rounds his home town in California and approaches the contentious New Orleans where desegregation is being enforced.

As he crosses the desert he stops to rest and notices 2 coyotes in the distance. His upbringing urges him to kill all such vermin when opportunity arises. But he no longer can rationalize it. As he lowers his gun he thinks

Then I remembered something I heard long ago that I hope is true. It was unwritten law in China, so my informant told me, that when one man saved another's life he became responsible for that life to the end of its existence. For, having interfered with a course of events, he savior could not escape his responsibility. And that has always made good sense to me.
Now I had a token responsibility for two live and healthy coyotes. In the delicate world of relationships, we are tied together for all time. I opened two cans of dog food and left them as a votive. p.214

This paragraph made me think of Christ's care for me. He saved me and he won't stop saving me.

As he records his impressions in New Orleans he doesn't mention Ruby Bridges by name but focuses his attention on the Cheerleaders, who twice daily screamed invectives at her.

The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school. And here he came along the guarded walk, a tall man dressed in light gray, leading his frightened child by the hand...
A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each [cheerleader] took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they [the crowd] had come to see and hear.
No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before...
Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women with their little hats and their [newspaper] clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired... These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience. pp. 257-258

He drove back to Long Island in a rush after this event. He was sick of the road. He wanted his home, his bed, his wife's company. But when he got into New York City he got lost. His humor shines through at the end, "Every evening is Pamplona in lower New York."

I am currently reading Ecclesiastes also. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, and the making of many books there is no end. But few write good books. This is one. Enjoy.

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