The American Travelogue | Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

Hi everyone, welcome back to Pneumonosophy Academy, I'm Lewis. So I'm going to be taking a little bit of a hiatus from Mormonism and traveling down a different avenue of inquiry, namely American travelogues. And so in this vein I have just recently finished John Steinbeck's non-fiction book Travels with Charlie. So Travels with Charlie is John Steinbeck's account of a journey that he took across the United States, starting on Long Island where he lived on the east end, then going up to Maine and then traveling right across America and then right around through Texas and then back up the east coast back to Long Island. So I think it's interesting from a spiritual perspective because it's about the journey, it's about wandering out into the unknown, which is of course a recurring trope within spiritual literature. Just think of Jesus's wandering in the wilderness or Moses's wandering in the wilderness until he could find the promised land and of course in the Book of Mormon there is likewise wandering here and there. And why does Jesus do this? Somehow that period in the wilderness, that 40 days being tempted by the devil, is his way of psychologically preparing himself for his ministry. At least that's always been my reading of those passages. So somehow that journey into the unknown gives him something, gives him some kind of tool which allows him to more effectively do his mission. So within psychological parlance, within Jungian parlance, this is often called the hero's journey, which is a common trope that you find in much literature, in many films, in which the protagonist finds himself in a comfortable place in his home perhaps or within his town of origin and then he goes out on some epic journey, usually with some kind of stated purpose at the outset but not always, and through this journey he undergoes various trials and tribulations and through these trials he grows as a person and gains some reward for himself. Sometimes that's a kind of a literal physical reward but it's usually or it's more often a kind of, I don't know, insight or piece of knowledge or, you know, some kind of way of perceiving the world and reality which he can then, at the end of the movie or the book or the piece of literature, return back to his home and offer as a gift to, you know, whoever, his town people. And this book, Travels with Charlie, very much follows that pattern. He has this initial longing to travel America, you know, this is very much towards the latter half of his life or the latter few years of his life. So John Steinbeck, of course, probably most famously known for Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, but this falls into his supposedly into the non-fiction arena, and I'll say why I think only supposedly in a moment, but it's not really stated at the outset what his purpose is but there's just some kind of longing to be out on the road, to get out and explore America in particular. I think he feels like the America that he wrote about in his early literary life has changed so much now that we're in the early 1960s that he feels as a American writer, it is his duty and responsibility to familiarise himself once again with the American people and the American continent. But it's, I don't know, it is kind of stated that way but it feels like there's a unspoken reason, a kind of spiritual reason perhaps, or just something that cannot be articulated. There's some call within us to be on the road or to be walking and to travel out in search of something that we cannot know, and he says early on the book all these various people that he encounters, he articulates to them the fact that he's on this road trip, this journey, and they're jealous, right? They wish themselves that they could go exploring or out on a journey, and then he asks, well why are you unhappy? Do you hate your job? And they're like, no, you know, it's just the home and the settled life is a known life, it's a bland life, where the out there, whatever that means, is an unknown. So he does admit at one point in the book that he's not writing this as he goes along, right? Because when I kind of think of travel logs, I suppose I'm kind of envisioning someone that's perhaps on the road and, you know, as they go from town to town to town, they're going into coffee bars and they're sitting down with their laptop, or back then just a notepad, and writing down their day or their experiences that they're going to then later compile and edit down into what will be their complete travel log. John Steinbeck does not do that, he admits he does not do that. He says that he needs all the content to be absorbed into him in order that he can write the complete journey when he's back at home, and that raises questions about just how non-fiction this book is. So, you know, he's explaining these places as he goes across the United States, and he's encountering various people along the way, and so this book is punctuated with these conversations, almost always one-on-one conversations, that he has with strangers. And, you know, he makes a point of saying that it is his purpose in encountering strangers, and he talks about the best ways to communicate with strangers. So he talks about asking people for directions in order to begin a dialogue with something. Of course, that wouldn't really work today with sat-nav and everything. He talks about kind of absorbing ordinary conversation by going to bars, coffee shops, and on Sundays going to churches, just in order that he can kind of get the flavor of the people in these various places. So these dialogues are presented as if they are, you know, accounts of what actually happened. So, for example, very early on he's in New England, and he encounters a waitress who he describes as being, you know, a soul-sucking individual, a deadly boring individual, which seems to just suck all life and purpose and joy out of everything. And, well, I'm not convinced it really happened, basically. I think all of these dialogues that take place is all just his kind of exploration of what these people within these various states are like. It's his kind of musing about what these people are like, but they're not actual recordings of actual people. Maybe they're like composites of little snippets of conversations he has. So that conversation early on in New England stands out. At one point he's even looking up into the sky and sees the northern lights, and he fantasizes about getting this restaurant server to join him and look up at the sky in order that, you know, some kind of majesty of the universe can be injected into her in order that she can kind of, you know, see that the horizons of the universe are larger than she reckons. But then he goes into a pessimistic state and goes, no, probably even she, being such a glum and oppressive person, would suck the majesty even out of this moment. So that's one kind of encounter that really did stick out to me. A bit later on in the book, he drives through Montana, the state of Montana, and he gets kind of enraptured by the beauty of that state and, you know, talks about it as being the most beautiful state within the Union. That encounter or that part very much stuck out to me. When he arrives down in California, eventually, he has a dialogue with someone that used to know him, because he used to live in kind of central California, that kind of area, and that's another conversation that stuck out to me because, you know, the California that he knew when he was younger is not the California as it is now. And that's an interesting thing about the book, you know, he's writing this in the early 1960s, and so he's observing the changes that have happened from the 1940s and 1950s into the 1960s. And so he's commenting on things like the appearance of vending machines, which, you know, to him is a questionable technological marvel. He comments on the vast proliferation of plastic, for example, going into diners and everything being made out of plastic, you know, something that we would just kind of take as pretty commonplace today, but it obviously stands out to Steinbeck. He then, when he eventually gets through the Arizona desert region, which he doesn't say much about, I mean, that's kind of the odd thing about this book. It's a travel log, but he actually doesn't say that much about the various places that he visits. You know, he spends a lot more time, he travels with his dog, Charlie, who's a French poodle, and he spends much more time talking about his poodle than he does talking about the places he encounters, with the exception of places like Montana. You know, he very much does, anthropomorphise his dog. There's even a point in the book where he puts speech directly into the dog's mouth and he has a direct one-on-one dialogue with the dog. So he doesn't talk about places that much. It's more focused on these various dialogues, but as I said, I don't think these dialogues actually happen. So it's a weird kind of travel log in that respect. It's more kind of encapturing the spirit of travel, or the spirit of going out, rather than, I don't know, a faithful rendition of what going out would actually entail in practice. That's my kind of impression, anyway. So he eventually gets to the Arizona desert and he reluctantly arrives in Texas, and there's quite a bit about Texas which is quite interesting. You know, the extent to which Texas, the Lone Star State, is culturally very much set apart from the rest of the United States and the oddity of Texas, you know, he talks about it more or less being its own country in every respect, apart from the fact that it's of course not, and the kind of, I don't know, decadence of rich people in Texas and how that oddly contrasts with the rest of America. And then that's more or less it. He then makes his very quick journey back from Texas up to Long Island. No, there is one further notable happening, which is he passes through Louisiana, and as this is the early 1960s, segregation is very much in play, and he goes to one of these incidents in which whoever it was, the federal police or the federal guard or whoever it is, escorting black children into white schools in order to force the end of segregation. And that kind of leads on to a couple of conversations about race, which are quite interesting given that he's of course speaking in the 1960s, so it doesn't read in the way that we would kind of think about race today. Keep in mind also that I am speaking about this issue as an outsider. The way race is thought about in the United Kingdom and the way that it's thought about in the United States is very different. But how would I characterize it? I guess John Steinbeck is kind of appalled and disgusted by racism, as you would kind of expect, being a Yankee liberal, I suppose you could characterize him as, for that time, 1960s. However, he's not like a, you know, a zealot against racism. He doesn't really think that, I don't know, our deeper feelings are going to be resolved through the overcoming of this hurdle. And so he has one conversation during this period with a Greco-American who says, and you know, as I said, I don't think this is really an encounter. In a way, this Greco-Roman is kind of articulating something that John Steinbeck wants to be articulated, but he doesn't want it being articulated out of his mouth, if that makes sense. So in a way, you can kind of take this voice as being a voice within John Steinbeck. But this voice articulates this belief that this victory, the desegregation of schools, won't ultimately satisfy the Negro population of America, which I think is quite a prophetic statement. You know, we've obviously come a hell of a long way since Martin Luther King Jr. regarding the whole race issue, and yet the race issue today is still very much alive and beating in the United States. But of course, that kind of attitude can obviously lead to a kind of apathy in the face of the need for change. So, you know, in a way, the beauty of being an author of a book like this is you can have all these various opinions being voiced by different individuals, but you or your own ego or the front that you present to the world doesn't have to represent those particular positions, if that makes sense. You can kind of hold the complexity by recognizing that we contain multitudes, and we contain the Greco-Roman man, who is a bit more skeptical. We contain the oppressed black man or oppressed black girl trying to get into school. We contain the fuming at the mouth mother, who is full-on racist, and we contain the appalled man or woman crying out for justice, right? So we can contain that breadth, that complexity. Okay, so that's more or less it, and then he winds his way back to Long Island. The other thing which is recurring throughout the book is his irritation with rules, right? He occasionally runs into border police or police in other respects or other kind of arbitrary rules, and he does kind of articulate his kind of anarchic idealism in those moments. His wish that he could just be left alone to do his own thing, which for the most part he is, which I think is a large part of the appeal to traveling the breadth of America. It's part of that draw. It's something that definitely appeals to me, going out, I guess that's partly I can't fully articulate why I feel like that, and nor do I think John Steinbeck really articulates why he feels like that. It just feels like the thing that one should do. It feels like the done thing for some reason, partly I think because there is that freedom over a huge breadth. The United States is obviously very large, but also just something about the American spirit being a part of that. I don't know, it's difficult to say. Over the course of the book, although John Steinbeck, as I said, kind of sets out with no real purpose, he does kind of slowly move towards this idea that his purpose is to know the American people and to be able to characterize what an American is, which he recognizes as a futile task. Again, I'm not really convinced by that. I'm not really convinced that he had this question of who is the American and then came to the conclusion that the American, of course, is a great multitude of various characters and because it's so obvious a point, I feel that it's really just inserted as a kind of literary trope in order to create structure within the book, in order to suggest that there is movement, not just in terms of geographical movement, but in terms of the appreciation of the author as to the significance of his own journey. This is potentially the beginning of a series that I'm going to do on various travelogues. If that interests you, please do like this video and subscribe and I'll have another American travelogue book coming up in the next couple of weeks or so. Cheers for watching, thanks in particular to my Patreon supporters whose support is very much appreciated. Thanks again and I'll see you in the next one.