In Travels With Charley, What Animal Is Charley?

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Travels With Charley, by John Steinbeck

A review by Edward Weeks Asouth his books reveal, John Steinbeck is a writer who is happiest when he gets downwardly to world. He is a rugged, broad-shouldered, vi-foot Californian, born in Salinas, and destined to write his first stories near the Valley. He has the gift of identifying himself passionately with other Americans, with migratory fruit pickers, as in his novel In Dubious Battle, and with the Okies, as in The Grapes of Wrath. He relishes doing things with his own two hands; in a swift self-portrait he writes, "I have e'er lived violently, boozer hugely, eaten besides much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked likewise hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a outcome, not every bit a punishment." Gradually his career drew him into the success and confinement of Manhattan and Long Island, and it came to him with a shock one day at the age of 50-eight to realize that not for twenty years had he seen at shut hand the country he had been writing about.

His new book, Travels with Charley (Viking, $4.95), is a one-human being, ane-dog account of the trek in which he recaptures his familiarity with America. He set out with some misgiving, not certain his health would stand up to the 10,000-mile journeying he envisioned; as he traveled, the years sloughed off him, and the eager, sensuous pages in which he writes nigh what he constitute and whom he encountered frame a moving-picture show of our human nature in the twentieth century which will not soon be surpassed.

For the trip Mr. Steinbeck wanted a three-quarter-ton truck, and on it a footling firm congenital similar the motel of a minor gunkhole. He tells in delightful item of the cabin and of the viands and equipment with which information technology was stocked. "I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of coincidental turtle carrying his business firm on his back." For companionship he took with him Charley, a middle-aged French poodle, and Charley, equally we come to know him, is one of the virtually civilized and attractive dogs in literature. They gear up off together in Rocinante, every bit the truck is called, in the early fall, and they collection north through Connecticut and on to Deerfield, where the author stopped to say good-bye to his teen-age son, i of "2 hundred teen-age prisoners of education simply settling downward to serve their winter sentence." The boys of Eaglebrook came down to visit the truck, and "they looked courteous curses at me because I could go on and they could not." This was the outcome that he and the little cabin were to have on hundreds of casual visitors. "Lord, I wish I could go with you!" was what they said or thought. And on he goes through the blazing leafage into Maine, pausing at Deer Isle, commenting on why he prefers climate to weather and wondering how a State-of-Mainer could ever find contentment in the sameness of Florida. And so, at our most northerly edge, he turns west, and camping now on a knoll, now beside a trout brook, now in his homo-made loneliness in the drumming rain, he and Charley find their style back to the understanding of this monster land.

This is a book to exist read slowly for its savour, and 1 which, similar Thoreau, will be quoted and measured by our own feel. It holds such happy passages as his love for Montana, his rediscovery of San Francisco, and his surprising new impressions of the Middle Due west; it holds such horror as he witnessed in the rancid race demonstrations in New Orleans. And as all good journeys must, this 1 suddenly went apartment equally he was returning through Virginia. Thereafter, his ane desire was to get home, and when a policeman forbade him to bulldoze through the Kingdom of the netherlands Tunnel with so much butane in the cabin, all the novelist could say was, "But I want to get home. How am I going to become home?" Incidentally, in his passage of over x,000 miles through xxx-eight states, he was not recognized fifty-fifty once.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/classrev/charley.htm

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