When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me. The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.Īccompany Travels with Charley with Steinbeck's Working Days, a much earlier but equally gritty and relentless journey of self.
Like George Orwell, who lived among the poor anonymously in Paris and London, Steinbeck knew "I must travel alone" and "incognito." Modern artist Francis Bacon drew on a restless, boundless energy in order to focus on the one central truth portrayed or implied.Īlso of interest to you might be this look at how we expense ourselves through time, "Pace, Breaks, and the True Nature of Play." Look into Graham Greene's memoirs, a man who did much to avoid boredom, or van Gogh's letters where he often projects the energy of a man unable to settle. Perhaps you are feeling some restlessness, now that I mention it, and want to find some companions. An urgency saddled Steinbeck his entire life, a tension to move yet a need-as a writer-to remain still. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?Ī man who once let the rhythms of America run through his fingers like a handful of water admitted he was removed, even homesick. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. Steinbeck found his beloved pet the most suitable companion. Doris Lessing once said, "No doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth." Even fictionalized, his journals give us insight into this man and into America as he saw it. Steinbeck was always a fan of large mythological figures and language like "the night was full of omens" it's no surprise he mythologizes himself. (Read more here.) In reality, his wife accompanied him, and he stayed at more than one high-priced hotel, apart from the people he sought to know.
Recent exploration of Steinbeck's journals and the journey itself suggest that many encounters were fictionalized. In 1962, towards the end of his life and the year he won the Nobel Prize, John Steinbeck (Febru– December 20, 1968) drove around the United States with his French poodle, Charley, and wrote of the experience in Travels with Charley.
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