The journey with Charley: In search of America

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Steinbeck's route in autumn 1960

The journey with Charley: In Search of America (in the English original Travels with Charley: In Search of America ) is a 1962 travelogue by the American writer John Steinbeck , in which he tells of a three-month tour of the United States that he of New York began in the fall of 1960 in a specially built pickup camper alone with his French poodle Charley. As the subtitle In Search of America suggests, it is not about a tourist trip to the landmarks of the country, but rather about. & Nbsp; a. about an encounter with the people of individual regions and about the author's reflection on his relationship to America.

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After Steinbeck had suffered a minor stroke for the second time in the fall of 1959, after a long stay in England, where he wanted to write a revision of the Arthurian legend (which, however, was a bit more serious than the one in 1954), he felt an increasing stroke in the spring of 1960 urgent need to rediscover his own country: “I hadn't heard the language of America for too long, hadn't smelled its grass, its trees, its sewers, hadn't seen its hills and water, its colors and the character of its own Light, ”he writes at the beginning of his book. At the same time, in that presidential election year - it was the year of the election between Kennedy and Nixon - he wanted to feel his nation's pulse. Of course, there was also the desire to prove to himself that he was still capable of such an undertaking, both as a person and as an author.

Steinbeck's "Rosinante", exhibited at the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas

In the summer of 1960, for example, he had a sturdy pickup truck with a camper attachment set up as a kind of mobile home, which he christened "Rosinante" (after the horse of the glorious knight Don Quixote from La Mancha) with fine self-irony . For weeks he fitted the vehicle on his estate in Sag Harbor on the inner bay of Long Island with everything it needed, as if it were an expedition into the wilderness. His only companion would be his ten year old French poodle Charley (first part). Steinbeck actually wanted to leave on Labor Day at the beginning of September, but that was prevented by Hurricane Donna , which hit the eastern tip of Long Island on that very day and slightly damaged "Rosinante". The description of his struggle against this hurricane, which Steinbeck put before the travelogue, is paradigmatic for the whole trip, as his biographer Jay Parini writes: The hero is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the same time , the fearless knight and the ironic observer.

His plan was to completely circle the United States once, to drive around its borders as it were, as if he wanted to pursue his "search for America" ​​by assuring himself of the external intactness of his country (probably suspecting that the internal one was not stood well). He set off on September 23, 1960 : at first leisurely through New England to the northern tip of Maine , always avoiding the highways with the overland transporter columns and the big cities as far as possible, then in larger daily stages along the Canadian border to the west Chicago (Part Two). After meeting his wife, he continued his journey through the Badlands in North Dakota and through his favorite landscape, Montana, to the Pacific , and then from Seattle down the coast to his old home in Salinas and Monterey . There, however, he was so shocked by the tourist hype in the port area and the changes since childhood that he drove on almost immediately through the Mojave Desert and Arizona to Texas (third part). He rested for a few days on a friend's ranch, met his wife for the second time during his trip, and they celebrated Thanksgiving together . In the fourth part, Steinbeck describes the last section of the journey and focuses on a shocking experience in New Orleans and on three controversial conversations about the race problem in the southern states. He witnessed a racist demonstration by white women, the "pre-screamers" against the common schooling of white and black children, which shook him so deeply that he drove back to New York as quickly as possible. In total he had covered nearly 10,000 miles and had been on the road for eleven weeks.

Steinbeck did not want to be recognized as the famous writer on his journey and appeared everywhere as a stranger in transit in order to be able to overhear the people: he often invited people to his truck for a drink, e.g. B. French-Canadian migrant workers (Canucken) who camped near his resting place, and learned that their families come to Maine every year from their small farms in the province of Québec to supplement their potato harvest in Maine . After carefully establishing contact, many people gave him an insight into their lives. So he got to know families on a parking lot with mobile aluminum and wooden houses, who flexibly traveled after their jobs across the country. In street restaurants and hygienic plastic rest stops with vending machines and vending machines for drinks and soup, the “high points of our civilization”, he talked to other guests, to the wait staff and to long-distance drivers. Occasionally he experiences strange appearances for him or he met outsiders, e.g. For example, on a Sunday morning in a Vermont town, he heard the "fire and brimstone" sermon about sinful people and the hellfire that awaits them. In the West he met a traveling actor who performed Shakespeare monologues imitated by John Gielgud in front of a small audience . On the way through the vast country he respected the idioms, accents and linguistic rhythms of the people and noticed that the local dialects were dwindling. A comparison of the radio broadcasts showed him the loss of local colors, including songs and language. The standardization of the forms of life, the food in the rest stops and their furniture also reached the forms of language.

style

Stylistically, the travelogue is a mixture of loosely strung together episodes, encounters and conversations with different people, sometimes more briefly, sometimes more extensively with dialogues, often portrayed so vividly that they result in real short stories , with occasionally just as loosely interspersed reflections on landscape and history, literature and politics. Narrative highlights are e.g. For example, the encounter with French-Canadian migrant workers in northern Maine who have come across the border to harvest potatoes, or the story of the unsuccessful attempt to drive the unvaccinated dog a shortcut through Canada , or the aborted visit to the bears in Yellowstone National Park or the story of Lonesome Harry in the luxury hotel in Chicago. The initially mostly cheerful, cheerful or (even) ironic tone becomes more and more skeptical, critical and towards the end, after the bad experience in New Orleans, also bitter. An increasing disappointment, even despair, cannot be ignored as a subtext of the book.

As far as Steinbeck's “Search for America” is concerned, it remained without any concrete result: he did not come to a definitive judgment. His biographer Parini wrote that he was much more critical of America in the letters he wrote en route than in the entire travel report. He probably “did not want to appear as a doomsday prophet”, but “preferred to have a slightly patriotic note” - giving him the chance to write a really big book about America. At least a sentence like this one: "If I found something to criticize and complain about, then there were tendencies that are also found in myself" for a deep insight that every critic should take to heart. Steinbeck had occupied himself with America and its soul for three decades. What he thought of her after this trip is well expressed in a letter to his editor Pascal Covici, which he wrote in July 1961 in the middle of his work on Travels with Charley :

“In all of my travels I have seen little real poverty, I mean the depressing, terrible poverty of the 1930s. At least it was real and tangible. No, what I saw was an illness, a kind of consuming weakness. There were desires but no need. And subliminally the urgent energy, like gases in a corpse. Once that explodes - I tremble at the thought of the result. Again and again it crossed my mind: We lack the pressure that makes people strong and the suffering that makes them great. What weighs us down are our debts, what we want are more material toys, and what torments us is boredom. Over time, this nation is a miss hilarious ( discontented become) country. "

The basis and engine of such criticism, however, is - and with this the author John Steinbeck stands out well above most of his writing contemporaries - a keen sense and well-founded interest in ecological relationships and their political consequences, long before the emergence of a "green" movement. This is particularly evident in Travels with Charley in the chapters on landscapes and natural phenomena such as the Sequoia Forests in California or the Mojave Desert , which can be regarded as the essayistic highlights of this book. So he writes z. B. on the function of the desert as a possibly saving shore and place of the rebirth of life after a man-made final catastrophe:

The Mojave Desert in Southern California
“The desert, an inhospitable region, could very well be life's last nest of resistance against non-life. Because in the rich and humid and warm regions of the world, life speculates with ever greater commitment against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life. And what the burning, scorching, freezing and poisoning weapons of non-life have not yet achieved, the perverted survival tactics will perhaps drive to final destruction and annihilation. If the most adaptable form of life, man, continues to struggle for survival as it has so far, it can wipe out not only itself but all other life as well. And if that were to become apparent, inhospitable areas like the desert could become the strict mother of repopulation. Because the desert inhabitants are well trained and well equipped against desertification. Even our own misguided species could emerge from the desert. The lonely man and his sun-tanned wife, huddled in the shadows in a barren, inhospitable place, could train all of them with their brothers in arms - the coyote, the jackrabbit, the iguana, the rattlesnake, and an army of armored insects - and tried fragments of life could very well be life's last hope against non-life. The desert has already produced other miracles. "

Remarks

  1. ↑ His son Thom Steinbeck claimed in an interview in 2006 that his father knew that he would soon die and wanted to say goodbye to his country, see p. u. under web links.
  2. ↑ To be more precise: at the Upper Sag Harbor Cove in front of Noyac Bay in the fork of the two "crab pincers" or "tail fins" of Long Island, one of the best hidden hideaways for artists seeking tranquility.
  3. ↑ A picture of Steinbeck and Charley in Sag Harbor can be found here .
  4. ↑ Jay Parini, John Steinbeck. A Biography , Henry Holt & Co., New York 1995, p. 422.
  5. ↑ This is what his two biographers report, cf. Jay Parini 1995, p. 426, and more fully Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer. A Biography , Penguin, New York 1990, pp. 886 ff.
  6. ↑ He succeeded in doing this with a beard and economical costumes. He explains it like this: “I think people only recognize someone in context. Even those who might have identified me against a background that awaited me did not recognize me at the wheel of Rosinante. "
  7. ↑ P. 70–77 of the new German edition.
  8. ↑ pp. 93–97 of the new German edition.
  9. ↑ pp. 172–176 of the new German edition.
  10. ↑ P. 126–131 of the new German edition.
  11. ↑ Jay Parini 1995, p. 424 ff.
  12. ↑ p. 221 of the new German edition.
  13. ↑ Steinbeck. A Life in Letters , edited by Elaine A. Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, New York 1975, pp. 702 f.
  14. ↑ p. 230 f. the new German edition.

expenditure

  • Original: Travels with Charley. In Search of America , The Curtis Publishing Co., New York 1961; Viking Press, New York 1962; Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1980, ISBN 0-14-005320-4
  • German edition: My trip with Charley. Looking for America , trans. v. Iris and Rolf Hellmut Foerster , Diana, Zurich 1963; Zsolnay , Vienna 1992 (out of print)
  • New German edition: The journey with Charley. In search of America , new over. and with an afterword v. Burkhart Kroeber , Zsolnay , Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-552-05190-2 ; dtv, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-13565-8

documentary

  • The great literary tour. John Steinbecks USA. Documentary, Germany, 2016, 59 min., Book: Hartmut Kasper , director: Jascha Hannover, André Schäfer, production: Florianfilm, MDR , RB , rbb , SWR , WDR , arte , series: Die große Literatour , first broadcast: April 5th 2017 at arte, summary of arte with short videos.

Web links