John Steinbeck says he was born lost and takes no pleasure in being found. It feels good to be lost with Mr.Steinbeck, one of the greatest story tellers America has ever produced.
I took a road trip with Steinbeck last week. He was in his 'tricked out' truck camper -Rocinante, with his dog Charley, cruising along the sixties streets of change, on a coast to coast journey to catch an America that was fast making itself scarce. Travels with Charley is a simple travelogue, a journey of discovery with a strong undercurrent of philosophical rumination, penned later in life by a wise and experienced writer.
At some point in the 2000s Bill Steigerwald, a journalist tried to retrace the path taken by Steinbeck across America and found many factual and temporal discrepancies and came out with a verifiable conclusion that many meetings and events in the travelogue were figments of the great writer's imagination. I knew this before I had started reading and I had approached the book as a sort of part travelogue - part memoir - part a mirror held onto sixties America by one of the most deserving and critical mirror-holders available in this country at that time, with some liberties of finessing taken by the author. Which published author does not?
There are several passages and statements of reflection and insight in this little travelogue. Here are a selected few. Remember these are the first years of the sixties, the book actually ends with Steinbeck describing the Kennedy inauguration which took place in a snowed-in Washington D.C in January of '61, although much of it could be true even now.
"....the big towns are getting bigger and the villages smaller. The hamlet store, whether frocery, general, hardware, clothing, cannot compete with the supermarket and the chain organization..."
".... for all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners... The American identity is an exact and provable thing...."
If you like road-trips, which is the only way of real way to get a feel of this modern nation state built upon its network of highways, freeways, arterials and local streets, you surely must have felt what Steinbeck describes below,
"...I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation -- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move...."
“..You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory...”
Steinbeck's prose also does not fail elicit chuckles as we tag along with him.
“And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.”
“But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know how.”
“Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully.”
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| John & Charley. Pic courtesy: NY Times Bettman/Corbis |
There are several passages and statements of reflection and insight in this little travelogue. Here are a selected few. Remember these are the first years of the sixties, the book actually ends with Steinbeck describing the Kennedy inauguration which took place in a snowed-in Washington D.C in January of '61, although much of it could be true even now.
"....the big towns are getting bigger and the villages smaller. The hamlet store, whether frocery, general, hardware, clothing, cannot compete with the supermarket and the chain organization..."
".... for all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners... The American identity is an exact and provable thing...."
If you like road-trips, which is the only way of real way to get a feel of this modern nation state built upon its network of highways, freeways, arterials and local streets, you surely must have felt what Steinbeck describes below,
"...I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation -- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move...."
“..You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory...”
Steinbeck's prose also does not fail elicit chuckles as we tag along with him.
“And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.”
“But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know how.”
“Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully.”
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