Travels with Charley—and God

Kelly Soifer

Reflections on an unresolved life

I have worked my entire adult life with teenagers, so even after nearly twenty-five years I still look forward to summer vacation, where I can luxuriate with a book or two. One year I went to Stonington, Maine as part of a trip to Acadia National Park. During a lazy afternoon I wandered into a store perched tenuously over the hahbah. Hidden among the lobster-themed tchotchkes was a delightful selection of books where I happened upon the classic Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck. The book traces Steinbeck’s 1960 journey with his dog Charley from Maine to Monterey in a camper he named Rocinante after Don Quixote’s famous steed.

I have read a fair amount of Steinbeck’s work, being the good English major that I am—but I find him an enigma. The majority of his writing is dispassionate and dark. He claims simply to describe with a neutral tone what the narrator is observing. This approach emerged out of his deep friendship with Ed Ricketts, a scientist on whom Steinbeck based the character Doc in Cannery Row and with whom he shared a belief in a “non-teleological” view of life. This is the dour assessment that life ultimately has no goal or meaning—it just is.

We see this worldview permeate much of Steinbeck’s work—it is what makes so many of his characters unsympathetic and, frankly, unlikable. His plots often resolve unsatisfactorily. More than once I have finished a Steinbeck novel with a sour taste in my mouth. While I cannot deny that life is full of tragedy, I do not find it utterly bereft of redemptive qualities.

This materialistic, mechanistic view of life is intriguing when you contrast it with Steinbeck’s ancestry and influences. His grandparents were devout German missionaries in Israel. His second major novel is titled To a God Unknown, and his arguably greatest work, East of Eden, is an adaptation of the Bible’s Cain and Abel story from Genesis 4—a psychologically loaded story with many layers of meaning. He even told another aspiring writer that the Bible was “the source material for all stories. You’ll have no problems after this” in terms of inspiration.1

Can you see my dilemma? If life simply is, why is it worth the time to observe and describe it? If life truly is meaningless, why are there so many spiritual themes in Steinbeck’s writing? I think the answer comes through in a remark of Steinbeck’s recorded by a fellow writer:

a man’s a writer because there’s a craving inside him that makes him write. A man writes to get at the bottom of some basic fact of life.2

I believe this paradox boiled inside of Steinbeck. His unrelenting portrayal of life’s ugliness conceals a search for understanding. Think about it. These bleak stories that focus almost solely on the hopelessness and injustice of life, usually with no resolution, are now part of the American canon. Most Americans have had to read The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, or East of Eden in high-school English, and Steinbeck’s captive audience is faced with the horrors of life, whether we want to or not. Yet in all of that, he seems silently to scream “Why?”

Travels with Charley, though, is a striking contrast. Steinbeck did generate a couple of other happy, easygoing books like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. But he was primarily known for his intense fiction, and it was for such works he soon after received the Nobel Prize for Literature. But at the point in his life when he wrote Travels, Steinbeck realized he had lost his writing edge after nearly three decades of fame and fortune:

For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir . . . I had not felt the country for twenty-five years.

He could have rested on his laurels. Yet Steinbeck was restless, and I believe in part that was due to the unresolved questions that had always haunted him.

According to his biographer, Jackson Benson, Steinbeck became very lonely as he charted his travels with Charley the dog. He looked for opinions from people about life but found they had little to say. He realized he liked people better in his mind, as memory or anticipation, than he did in person. He came home early and wrote a pleasant book that did not unsettle his readers as earlier writings had.

Benson notes something that offers insight into Steinbeck’s plight:

Man, Steinbeck declared on several occasions in his writing, is basically a lonely animal that spends its life looking for love, in one form or another.3

More than once, Steinbeck withdrew from everyone he knew and loved in order to write. Each time he did this, however, he would end up returning. He wanted to be alone and not be bothered while he was writing, but he wanted to be alone in company.4 He needed solitude to write, yet hated being alone; he wanted to capture the pulse of America, but struggled to keep up conversation with actual people. Ah, the Steinbeck paradox!

Lest I seem to vilify him, I must admit that I connect with him in several ways. I too am insatiably curious, filled with questions, ideas, and opinions, and wishing to solve all the world’s problems. And I agree with him heartily that the Bible is indeed the source material for all good stories.

But I part with him after that. As much as Steinbeck insisted on it, I do not believe life is mechanistic and without ultimate cause or design. God is hardly my personal vending machine spewing out candy-coated solutions to my personal problems, and I recognize that God does not promise a life free of pain and sorrow. To the contrary. But rather than withdraw from the world and paint its horrors in broad and declamatory strokes, I have chosen to engage personally and to wrestle with those horrors. My work with young people has fostered more hope than hopelessness. Their idealism and energy are winsome and keep me from getting jaded.

Our tears and anger and rebellion may blind us at times to God’s presence, but he is there. I am still far from understanding the whys of death, disease, and war. But I talk to God regularly about it all, sometimes with a fist in the air. As the great journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once said, “Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”

Simply put, in all such struggles there can be dialogue. After three decades of prayerful relationship with God, I know he is there. He is good for what he has said he would do—he has stood with me. Life is indeed a parable, though we rarely sit still enough to listen for its nuances.

On that deck in Stonington I read a large chunk of Travels with Charley, and finished it in bed the next night. It was satisfying—just the kind of book I like to read on vacations. But I also felt a bit sorry for Steinbeck. I wonder if he ever found rest from his evident sorrow.  

Kelly Soifer has over twenty-five years’ experience working with youth in vocational ministry. She is a bicycle commuter and proud scooter owner living in Santa Barbara, CA. She blogs at kellysoifer.blogspot.com.

7 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Arts and Culture, Being Human, Wed 06 May 2009