Travels with Charley: In Search of America

The journey with Charley: In Search of America ( in the original English Travels with Charley: In Search of America ) is a 1962 published travelogue by American author John Steinbeck, in which he tells of a road trip through the United States, which he did in autumn had made in 1960 in a dedicated custom built pickup campers alone with his French poodle Charley. As the subtitle suggests Looking for America, it's not just in it for the journey, but also a reflection of the author about his relationship with America.

Content

After Steinbeck had, after a long stay in England, where he wanted to write a reworking of the Arthurian legend, suffered in the fall of 1959 for the second time a mild stroke ( which, however, was a bit more serious than that of 1954), he felt in the spring of 1960, an increasingly urgent need to explore his own country all over again: "For too long I had not heard the language of America, its grass, its trees, its drainage ditches no longer smelled, not seen its hills and waters, its colors and the nature of his light, "he writes at the beginning of his book. At the same time he wanted in that presidential election year - it was the year of election between Kennedy and Nixon - his nation in a sense feel the pulse. Of course, behind it was also the desire to prove to himself that he was still able to such a company, both as a man and as a writer.

So he allowed himself to set up a robust pickup truck with a camper attachment to a kind of caravan, which he with a hint of self -irony in the name " Rocinante " baptized (after the horse of the glorious knight Don Quixote of La Mancha ) in the summer of 1960. For weeks he equipped the vehicle on his estate in Sag Harbor on the inner bay of Long Iceland with all the necessities of, as if it were an expedition into the wilderness. His only companion should be its ten- year-old French poodle Charley. Actually Steinbeck wanted to leave early September on Labor Day, but keep the Hurricane Donna, who pounced on that very day on the eastern tip of Long Iceland and " Rocinante " slightly damaged. The portrayal of his struggle against this tornado, which Steinbeck has prefixed to the travel report is paradigmatic for the whole trip, as his biographer Jay Parini writes: The hero is at the same time Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the fearless knight and the ironic observer.

His plan was, once circling the United States entirely, as it abzufahren their limits, as if he wanted his "Search for America " operate in that he enlisted the external integrity of his country (probably realizing that it with the inside not so good standing ). On September 23, 1960, he drove off: start slowly through New England all the way up to the northern tip of Maine, always as far as possible while avoiding the big cities, then in larger daily stages at the Canadian border along westward to the Pacific and from Seattle down the coast to his old home on Salinas and Monterey. There, however, he was so shocked by the tourist track and the other changes since his childhood, that he almost hastily drove through the Mojave Desert and Arizona to Texas, a few days to come until there again in his wife's relatives to rest. Actually, he wanted his journey now to continue on the southern and south-eastern edge of the United States, but in New Orleans, he witnessed a racist demonstration of white women against black school children who shocked him so deeply that he broke the trip and drove back the quickest way home. - Twice he had taken traveling with his wife, even in Chicago, where he treated himself to a multi-day break, and once in the West (which he conceals in the book). Overall, he had traveled nearly 10,000 miles and had been eleven weeks on the road.

Style

Stylistically, the travelogue is a mixture of loosely strung together episodes, encounters and conversations with various people, sometimes scarce, and in-depth with dialogues, often portrayed so vivid that they make regular short stories, with in between as well loosely scattered reflections on landscape and history, literature and politics. Narrative Highlights are, for example, the encounter with French-Canadian migrant workers in northern Maine, who came to the potato harvest across the border, or the story of the vain attempt to take the unvaccinated dog a shortcut through Canada, or the canceled visit with the bears in Yellowstone National Park or the story of Lonesome Harry in a luxury hotel in Chicago. Initially we have mostly cheerful, wohlgemute or (self- ) ironic tone is always skeptical, critical and towards the end, after the bad experience in New Orleans, even bitter with time. An increasing disappointment, even despair is not to be missed as a subtext of the book.

What Steinbeck's "Search for America " is concerned, it has remained inconclusive: he has found no definitive judgment. He had, writes his biographer Parini, in his letters written on the road much more critical than in the whole america travel report expressed. He had probably " want to become a doomsday prophet " but " have preferred to have hinted a slightly patriotic note" - which he had gone the chance to write a really great book about America. But at least testifies to a sentence like this: "If I found something to criticize and complain, then there were tendencies that can be found just in myself " for a deep insight which should take to heart every critic. With America and his soul Steinbeck had occupied for three decades. What did he think after this trip over them, comes well in a letter to his editor Pascal Covici expressed, written in July 1961 in the middle of working on Travels with Charley:

Base and motor such criticism, however - and the author John Steinbeck raises far above the vast majority of his writing contemporaries addition - a keen sense and profound interest in ecological relationships and their political consequences, long before the advent of a "green " movement. This is evident in Travels with Charley particularly evident in the chapters on landscapes and natural phenomena such as the Sequoia forests in California or the Mojave Desert, which may be regarded as an essayistic highlights of this book. He writes, for example, about the function of the desert as a potentially -saving bank and place of rebirth of life after a man-made disaster final:

Comments

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 Journey 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. Looking for America, new trans. and with an epilogue v. Burkhart Kroeber, Zsolnay, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-552-05190-2; dtv, München 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-13565-8