Writers Read – Travels With Charley – an essay by Leila

Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

By John Steinbeck

In late September 1960 John Steinbeck and a French Poodle named Charley loaded a vehicle called “Rocinante” with a sizable amount of liquor and went on a road trip to discover America. Two years later the account was published to wild success. I happened to find a copy (which I later gave to a friend) of a first edition of the book at the local St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store about twenty-five years ago.

Steinbeck kindly informed the reader that Rocinante (a custom built green GMC camper, a handsome thing) was the name of Don Quixote’s horse by saying “as you know, Rocinante is…” But if you have just learned that, do not feel bad. I didn’t know, either–but it did get me to finally read that masterpiece a year later at the age of forty-something (which is a far better age to meet a classic than is, say, fourteen).

Charley was ten and one of those gregarious, highly intelligent Standard Poodles who was as big as a moderately sized Gazelle. Charley was also from France and did not understand much English (or so was his excuse).

Steinbeck was closing in on sixty and had recently faced his mortality via heart problems. He died at the age of sixty-six (my age today), not long after receiving the Nobel Prize, about eight years after the road trip. Instead of removing the things in life that pleased him (a high fat diet, smoking, the liquor store, etc), he decided that his wife had married a man and not an elderly baby. So he chose chancing going out doing stuff he’d rather do than staying home waiting for death to come for him in a civilized manner. Steinbeck didn’t say how his wife felt about him vanishing for a few months, but she didn’t stop him, either.

There was something about starting the trip in early autumn in New England that gives it a fairie like quality that I cannot explain, but I can tell of it. It was like the start of a quest and although I am certain that Mr. Stenbeck intended it to feel that way, I must congratulate his ghost on both the choice and execution.

It is not my objective to pad this with materials culled from Wikipedia (except such used to confirm forgotten facts). But I will say that Steinbeck was a hell of a great writer and I sometimes get angry at people who accuse him of being a Hemingway clone. He had the spare style, but, damn it, he had his own voice and I find that as more time goes by that the critical aristocracy that often damned him with faint praise has not been able to push their germ forward on the subject.

Regardless, this is a good book and his look at America just prior to the election of JFK is a historical document worth reading.

Leila