Exposing John Steinbeck

Every September since 2011 I remember fondly my 11,276-mile road trip around the USA in search of our great country and the untruths in Steinbeck's highly fictionalized classic 'Travels with Charley.'

In a last-ditch effort to attract national media attention, a few hours before I left my house, I blasted a self-promotional email to nearly everyone I had ever known, worked for or pitched freelance articles to in journalism.

It was as over-the-top as I could make it and as far as I can tell it did me and what was left of my career no good at all.

September 21, 2010

Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald to chase John Steinbeck’s ghost for 10,000 miles.

To go everywhere Steinbeck and dog Charley went in Travels with Charley.

Will follow great author’s exact route half a century later.

Desperate act of drive-by journalism by former Pittsburgh/LA paperboy, columnist, editor.

Will take no federal stimulus money.

Will take no dog.

Hello friends, former co-workers, fellow libertarians, people who have no idea why they’re getting this email blast.

On Thursday, Sept. 23, I’ll leave John Steinbeck’s former seaside home in Sag Harbor, New York, a place I could never afford to live or visit for more than two hours, and begin chasing his ghost around America’s blue highways for 10,000 miles.

I’m going to retrace the iconic road trip Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960 and turned into his 1962 nonfiction bestseller Travels with Charley. I’m not taking an iconic dog and I’m not driving an iconic pickup truck/camper. I do hope to write a book hooked around following the exact route Steinbeck took and telling the whole story of what he did or did not do on his journey exactly 50 years ago....

The chase begins

Fourteen Septembers ago, after lots of library research, I set out to retrace the 10,000-mile road trip around the USA that John Steinbeck made in 1960 for what became his 1962 nonfiction best-seller Travels With Charley.

I left his former ocean-side house in Long Island exactly 50 years after he and his poodle companion Charley did in his pickup/camper Rocinante. I wrote up everything I learned and did on my trip in Dogging Steinbeck, which is a lot of fun if you aren’t afraid of finding out what a fictionalizing, lying bastard our hero John Steinbeck was.

It turned out, as I easily proved half a century later by simply practicing honest and dogged journalism in libraries and on the “Steinbeck Highway,” that the great Steinbeck and his publisher Viking Press pulled a fast one on the American public.

Much of Charley was fictionalized or written and edited to mislead readers about how Steinbeck traveled (fast and not rough), whom he met (not many real people), whom he traveled with (his wife Elaine for more than half of his trip) and what he really thought was wrong with 1960 America (lots).

For the whole sorry story — for the whole unflattering truth about Travels With Charley and how the Steinbeck scholars never bothered to research or tell us about it — you’ll have to buy Dogging Steinbeck. For some video treats, there’s YouTube. For other ‘Charley’ related rants, there’s my sybstack.

Meanwhile, here is a snippet of my trip that zooms in on Sept. 22, 2010, when I visited Steinbeck’s former home on Long Island. For links to other Steinbeck items, go to my substack.

Dogging Steinbeck, an excerpt

… my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home. I had to be peripatetic eyes and ears, a kind of moving gelatin plate. I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. Furthermore, two or more people disturb the ecologic complex of an area. I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.

– Travels With Charley, 1962

Steinbeck Timeline

Friday, Sept. 23, 1960 — Sag Harbor, New York

Early in the morning John Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley leave his summer home in his overloaded pickup truck-camper combo Rocinante. He takes three ferries to New London, Connecticut, and drives north toward his son’s boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His cargo includes spare parts for his truck, dozens of books, two rifles and a shotgun.

Me and Steinbeck’s Ghost

Before sunset I went out to Steinbeck’s summer home on Bluff Point Lane. It was only a five-minute drive from downtown Sag Harbor. But because it was at the dead-end of a narrow private gravel road at the tip of a peninsula, the house was hard to find — exactly as the reclusive and publicity-shy author wanted.

I didn’t use the driveway because John Stefanik’s car was there. Stefanik has been taking care of the house since 1982, when Elaine Steinbeck hired him to do the job. The wood-sided house and its outer buildings, shallow swimming pool and shaggy lawn were looking pretty good beneath the heavy shade of tall oaks. The trees were much taller and fatter than when Steinbeck lived there, of course, especially the one that he playfully planted three feet from the front door and now nearly blocks it.

Stefanik usually required appointments for media pests like me. But when I explained why I was there he let me wander around the 2-acre lot. Stefanik couldn’t have been friendlier. While he and his son did their buzzing yard work, I walked out on the dock where Steinbeck used to park his 22-foot cabin boat. I also checked out “Joyous Garde,” Steinbeck’s restored writing shack. Overlooking Morris Cove, it’s hardly bigger than the British phone box Dr. Who flies around in.

I didn’t ask for a peek inside the gray-painted house, which is still owned by Elaine Steinbeck’s heirs. But earlier in the week a New York Times reporter and photographer came to do a feature story about the place to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley trip. Based on the Times’ pictures, the interior is homey, airy, simply decorated and hung with Steinbeck photos. Steinbeck was loaded, but frugal. It apparently still looked pretty much as it did when he lived in it.

By the time the Stefaniks drove off and left me standing in the driveway, the last sunset of summer was over and fall was arriving with a rare astronomical splash. The full moon was climbing through the trees like a gigantic yellow balloon. I thought its extra plumpness and brightness were due to my tired eyes. But according to NASA’s sky-watchers, for the first time since 1991 northern autumn was beginning on a night with a “Super Harvest Moon.”

Scientists don’t quite understand why, but somehow the light from the sun and the moon combine to create a 360-degree glow that makes the full moon look wider and brighter than usual. I knew none of this “moon illusion” stuff as I stood there alone with my notebook, cameras and, I guess, the ghosts of Steinbeck and Charley, who was buried somewhere in the yard.

Steinbeck’s ‘Act of Courage’

John Steinbeck was especially brave to embark on his solo road trek in 1960 — and it had nothing to do with not having radial tires, GPS or air bags. Given his lousy health, his biographer Jackson Benson said the Travels With Charley trip could be best appreciated “as an act of courage.” As Steinbeck’s son Thom told The New York Times, “The book was his farewell. My dad knew he was dying, and he had been accused of having lost touch with the rest of the country. Travels With Charley was his attempt to rediscover America.”

Steinbeck’s agent, doctor and everyone who loved him tried to talk him out of his trip, which he had been thinking about taking for at least six years. What if he had a heart attack and collapsed in the middle of nowhere? He’d die for sure and he might never be found. He refused to hear such cautionary crap. He was the contemporary rival and equal of Hemingway. He was the World War II correspondent who went on daring midnight raids in PT boats off the Italian coast with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was a future Nobel Prize-winner. He may have been born with a heart too small for his big body, as a European doctor once told him. But he was not a famous dead author yet, literally or figuratively. He was still a man — and not an old man. He still had balls. He still had stuff to say and write and prove.

Steinbeck wrote in letters to his agent and others that he was tired of being fussed over like a sick baby or an invalid who had to be “protected” and “hospitalized.” He had to go on his great land-voyage of rediscovery — and go by himself, even though at the last minute he would ask his wife if he could take her 10-year-old standard French poodle Charley with him for company. Defending his solo project in a letter to his agent Elizabeth Otis, he said what he was proposing was not “a little trip of reporting, but a frantic last attempt to save my life and the integrity of my creative pulse.”

The thing that came closest to thwarting Steinbeck’s big trip was a random act of violence by Mother Nature. In early September 1960, Hurricane Donna, one of the 20th century’s nastiest storms, hit Florida and wouldn’t let go of the Eastern Seaboard until it got to the eastern tip of Long Island. Donna’s oversized Category 3 eye passed directly over Steinbeck’s summerhouse, wrecking his plans for leaving soon after Labor Day and almost killing him. As he described dramatically in the opening of Travels With Charley, he braved Donna’s 95-mph winds to save his boat after it became tangled with other boats anchored in the middle of Morris Cove and broke free of its anchor.

As “the trees plunged and bent like grasses” and the “whipped water raised a cream of foam,” Steinbeck said he waded through chest-high water to his boat, which was pinned against a neighbor’s pier. He started its 100 horsepower engine, moved it back to the middle of the cove, re-anchored it, jumped into the water and rode a wind-blown log to shore. If he really did all those heroics — and if he wasn’t slyly creating a dramatic metaphor for the risky trip he was about to take around the USA — it was an impressive feat. Especially with a bum knee and a bad ticker.

Steinbeck also went in search of America and Americans for practical reasons. For 20 years he had been living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and traveling around Western Europe like an archduke. As he explained in letters written before his trip, he constantly was expected to write and comment about America, to represent its values and culture. Yet he no longer knew his own country or people except from memory or by reading. He understood New York City was not really America. It was a political and cultural terrarium — an “island” he called it. The high-end celebrities and power-people he loafed with — Elia Kazan, John Huston, Arthur Miller, Adlai Stevenson — were not representative of real Americans and he knew it.

Steinbeck hoped his road trip, undertaken discreetly, would put him back in touch with Real America. His plan was to get out into the sticks and meet regular people face-to-face. Anonymously. Alone. Not on tour buses or in motels, but where they lived and worked and drank and prayed. He wanted to see for himself what Americans were up to and what they were thinking and arguing about during a historic presidential election. It was Journalism 101 — a grassroots observing and reporting mission by one of the world’s most popular writers. He and his agent, editor and publisher knew the great author’s quest for America would make another successful Steinbeck book, which it did, in spades. It’s just a shame that the ambitious trip he planned so carefully never really happened.