But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.’
‘I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. And then consider this, from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: Consider Hemingway’s famous ballscratching machismo, as refracted through his obsession with fly-fishing. Steinbeck was a better novelist, a better pet owner, and a nicer man. Lots of people seem to like Hemingway, and I expect they have their reasons, but I refuse to entertain them. Like I said, this is based on nothing other than a hunch. My current favourite is this: just as you are either a cat person or a dog person, United or City, Italian or French food: you are either a Hemingway person or a Steinbeck person. It must be a hangover of studying English at university and being forced to provide evidence for all my reckless assertions - now I treat myself to the occasional assertion, the more reckless the better. ( Adapted from the publisher.I like forming theories about literature - particularly theories based on zero evidence. It was written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South-which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand-and is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. Originally published in 1962, Travels provides an intimate and personal look at one of America’s most beloved writers in the later years of his life-a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. And he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, on a particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and on the unexpected kindness of strangers that is also a very real part of our national identity. He dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature-to weather, geography, the cycle of the seasons. This chronicle of their trip, a picaresque tale, follows the two as they meander from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases.
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives through scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous super high-ways. To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light-these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, in September 1960, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. Travels with Charley: In Search of America
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