In Defense of Steinbeck

I’m not sure I quite understand the controversy surrounding Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and the blatant accusations criticizing the author for lying about the content in his book.  I felt entirely comfortable with the fact that so much of the account stems from creation rather than reality, particularly considering Steinbeck’s own ambitions for undertaking his journey across American and back and writing about his experiences. Multiple times he declares his intentions as attempting to learn something about America, recognizing 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” (a hint, perhaps, towards the “inaccuracies” at play throughout the account); further, the subtitle to his book even reads “in Search of America.” His reasoning for traversing the back roads of America is, of course, self-serving, and it is precisely this individualistic regard that makes his book not so much an exact record of America from the point of view of an objective journalist, but rather a musing on the current state of the country and its people as he perceives it; thus any and all accounts are subject to authorial discretion and creativity, no matter the label of the genre within which it is published. Indeed, many fiction authors incorporate autobiographical accounts into their work, a move that is met with praise and analysis, not derision for straddling the line between reality and imagination in a fictional account. One could even make the argument that writing accurate nonfiction is nearly impossible given that the text as product is only an imitation of reality—an imagining of that reality through the medium of language as interpreted by the author.

In setting out to discover America, Steinbeck glorifies travel as a means of learning; however, travel seems to function as a metaphor for contemplation—a virtue deeply admired by the author as indicated by the solitary and somewhat scholarly nature of his journey. The metaphor here seems more important than the means by which he traveled, for a journey of the mind is not as interesting to tell bluntly as is a romanticized vision made physical through a distinct act (i.e. a road trip). By including details of his choosing (whether true or not), Steinbeck also offers extended commentary on what has come to be the controversy surrounding his book: a reader’s need to know more about the author than the work the author produced. A response he makes to a quote from Joseph Addison sums up his point locally in the book and also weighs heavily on the current cultural discussion surrounding the inaccuracies of which he has written:

“Yes Joseph Addison, I hear you and I will obey within Reason, for it appears that the Curiosity you speak of has in no way abated. I have found many Readers more interested in what I wear than in what I think, more avid to know how I do it than in what I do. In regarding my Work, some Readers profess greater Feeling for what it makes than for what it says. Since a suggestion for the Master is a Command not unlike Holy Writ, I shall digress and comply at the same Time.”

Steinbeck then goes on to mock this idea by including very detailed prose describing physical attributes of himself, demonstrating that fulfilling such curiosity as posed by Readers is both silly and unnecessary.

I know I’ve been a little heavy with the quotes in this blog entry, but Steinbeck offers so many quips that subtlety acknowledge his own position toward truth and accuracies in order to defend his rights as author, storyteller, and human, and I find it necessary to include one more. Thus: I end with a quote about a story Steinbeck references from a man who knew Steinbeck as a child:

“The story could not be true, but this old gentleman so loved it that I could never convince him of its falsity, so I didn’t try.”

Perhaps this is how we should approach reading Travels with Charley.