When an author is living, he is apt to be judged by his last works,” Washington Irving wrote. “When an author is dead, he is judged by his best works.”
Except, that is, in the case of John Steinbeck, whose best works (“The Grapes of Wrath,” “Tortilla Flat”) often have been judged as less than good, and whose last works as proof of just how bad he was. This Library of America volume, the final of four collecting Steinbeck’s oeuvre, contains those last works, the novels “The Wayward Bus,” “Burning Bright,” Sweet Thursday” and “The Winter of Our Discontent,” and the nonfiction “Travels With Charley in Search of America.”
Like Irving, Steinbeck has suffered from perverse detractors. Irving was even trashed by his first biographer, Stanley T. Williams.
Critics started giving Steinbeck a drubbing when “Grapes of Wrath” was published in 1939 and didn’t let up with his death 29 years later, but his reputation was burnished in a 1995 biography by Jay Parini, himself a novelist.
The indignant critics’ question can be summed up: “How can intelligent people keep reading this stuff?” The question Parini asked, on the other hand, was “how this particular writer sustained the imaginative energy to create a shelf of books worth reading decades after his death.” Part of the answer Parini came to was that the things critics have seen as flaws – Steinbeck’s romanticism and occasional sentimentality – are at times the books’ strengths.
With the exception of the admittedly weak “Burning Bright,” the books here confirm Parini’s assessment, especially the unfairly underrated “Winter” and, to a greater extent, the perennial favorite “Travels With Charley.”
In the fall of 1960 and at the age of 58, Steinbeck, realizing that he “had not felt the country for twenty-five years” and the “virus of restlessness” having infected him, took a trip around the United States. He traveled in a pickup truck with specially constructed living quarters atop its bed, a little rig that was a constant object of curiosity in that age before RVs.
As a companion he took along Charley, his standard poodle, a dog among dogs. Much of the book’s charm derives from his relationship with Charley (“In establishing contact with strange people, Charley is my ambassador”), a relationship that thankfully falls well short of anthropomorphism (a topic, by the way, that he addresses in deploring baby talk to dogs).
The book is a marvelously written joy to read, a trip back in time as well as a geographic and literary ramble. Of course it has faults – moments of bathos, stories that are too good to be true and conversations that sound suspiciously embellished – but all in all there is little for an intelligent reader to complain about in “Travels With Charley.”
They start out from Steinbeck’s home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, head toward New England and go in a counterclockwise circle, across the northern United States, down through Washington state and Steinbeck’s native ground near Monterey, Calif., down through Texas, and across the South. Eleven weeks later they are back in Sag Harbor.
It’s not really a search for America in the detailed, inquisitive way of William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” of 1982 or Alistair Cooke’s wartime journey chronicled in “The American Home Front: 1941-1942.”
To be sure, there are countless sharp observations and insights. “I do wonder,” he says, long before the environmental movement got into full swing, “whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness.”
But “Travels” is more of a conversation with himself (and Charley) on subjects sparked by various happenings in his journey. The chief subject, though vaguely expressed, is concern over the country’s growing materialism, as he sees it.
It shares this concern, incidentally, with his previous book, “The Winter of Our Discontent.” There are other similarities between “Winter” and “Travels,” his last two major published works (in 1961 and 1962, respectively), despite one being fiction and the other nonfiction. Both are told in the first person, and Steinbeck in his travels feels vaguely threatened by the modern world he encounters, as does Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of “Winter.”
Indeed, as he moves westward, Steinbeck seems to lose interest in the putative goal of searching for America, to the extent that on the return leg he races across the South in his fever to get home. Once there, the book ends abruptly – the only seriously jarring bump, for the reader, in an otherwise delightful journey.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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Travels with Charley and Later Novels, 1947-1962
By John Steinbeck; Edited by Robert DeMott and Brian Railsback
Library of America, 990 pages, $40
