By Jon Swaine, New York -10 Apr 2011
The Telegreaph - Author photo by Corbis.
The 1962 book, subtitled In Search of America, finds the ageing author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men attempting to recapture his youth and survey the state of the nation for a final time.
But serious doubts about the veracity of Steinbeck's story have now been raised. A writer who retraced the author's steps claims to have discovered a string of inaccuracies, half-truths and fabricated events.
Nights that Steinbeck supposedly endured in his truck were in fact spent in luxurious hotels, including one so fancy that the author had to borrow a jacket for dinner, claims the writer, Bill Steigerwald.
Far from leading a primal journey of man and dog, Steinbeck was "almost never alone", Steigerwald says. For 45 days of his 75-day trip, he was even accompanied by his loving wife, Elaine.
In addition to following Steinbeck's supposed 10,000-mile itinerary in a 4X4 – in which he really did sleep – Steigerwald examined the author's archives and scoured local newspaper reports from the time.
His research calls into question an evening Steinbeck claimed to have spent at a campsite near Alice, a tiny town in North Dakota, with a Shakespearean actor who spoke at length about Sir John Gielgud.
In fact, Steinbeck spent that night in the town of Beach, 326 miles away, in a motel with an agreeably hot bath, Steigerwald has discovered, thanks to a dated letter the author wrote to Elaine.
Many other discrepancies emerge from a thorough examination of the trip, which supposedly took in Maine, Chicago, Seattle, California, Texas and New Orleans between September and December 1960.
"Steinbeck's non-meeting with the actor is not an honest slip-up or a one-off case of poetic licence," Steigerwald writes in Reason magazine. "Travels With Charley is loaded with such creative fictions." It was discovered, for instance, that a farm near Lancaster, New Hampshire, where Steinbeck claimed to have stayed, never even existed.
Full story at The Telegraph.
3 comments:
Fascinating -- but who cares whether he misremembered, deliberately or not? It is one of my favourite Steinbeck books, and a pleasure to re-read, because of its pungent observations. A literary genius is allowed literary fictions, even when they are paraded as fact!
I agree, Joan. I love that book, and I don't care if it's a literary fiction or not. I don't really think anyone should care - did Steinbeck ever claim it was the whole truth and nothing but?
Steinbeck was a novelist — his truths were poetic truths, not the literal ones of a newspaperman bent on iconoclasm. As an American, I can say that what Steinbeck got spot on were his observations of where the U.S. was headed spiritually. In this, he was both accurate and prescient.
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