Travels With Charley

Part 2 of Travels With Charley covers the first half of Steinbeck’s journey as he slowly moves through New England and on to the Midwest. In this section, the book becomes a classic Steinbeck story, full of rich descriptions of landscapes and the people that inhabit them. Compared to later in the book, when the author becomes somewhat disillusioned and ready for his trip to end, the first chapters of travel description show an eagerness for discovery. Steinbeck seeks out people to interact with, and he explores the nooks and crannies of each state he passes through, highlighting the theme The Journey.

He enters New England shortly after Labor Day, having been delayed by the hurricane. Because of this timing, the region is past its summer tourist season, and fall tourists haven’t yet arrived. Steinbeck times his departure intentionally; he wants to avoid popular areas when they’ll be crowded. Consequently, his depictions of New England characterize it as a somewhat lonely place with many closed businesses and only shy locals. The introverted New England personality stands out to Steinbeck, and he’s somewhat frustrated by it because he hopes to have real conversations with people everywhere he goes. Instead of learning about New Englanders directly, he often infers whole personalities and backstories from short interactions. The waitress in the Maine auto-court restaurant exemplifies this: She seems bored even when Steinbeck tries to engage her in a conversation about her upcoming trip to Florida. He tries to imagine her life outside the restaurant:

Such people spread a grayness in the air about them. I’d been driving a long time, and perhaps my energy was low and my resistance down. She got me. I felt so blue and so miserable I wanted to crawl into a plastic cover and die. What a date she must be, what a lover! I tried to imagine the last and couldn’t (34).

As with many people he encounters in Travels With Charley, he extrapolates the woman’s personality entirely from her behavior within the context where he meets her as well as from the context itself. She works at a restaurant with almost no customers, a setting where even the most outgoing person might struggle to project excitement. Adding to this impression are Steinbeck’s descriptions of the restaurant and attached motel as sterile places, where everything is covered in plastic. The generic, plastic atmosphere heightens Steinbeck’s assumption that the woman lacks personality too.

The author goes even further in depicting a character from scant information when he analyzes the detritus, he finds in his temporary hotel room in Chicago. His room isn’t ready when he arrives, so the hotel proprietors let him rest and shower in a room a previous guest just left. It hasn’t yet been cleaned, and the items left behind include a discarded letter addressed to “Darling,” a glass with lipstick on the rim, an empty whiskey bottle, and laundry tickets with a man’s name and address. From these items, Steinbeck envisions a lonely married man who hired a sex worker for an unsatisfying night while on a business trip. He admits that this may not be accurate, but the array of materials neatly guides his assumptions. This scene is one that has garnered skepticism by some who analyzed the book closely; they believe that Steinbeck created parts of the story for narrative effect, rather than reporting actual things he encountered. (The Background section discusses such critiques in more depth.)

Throughout the book, Steinbeck laments how homogenous the US has become. Many of his observations, such as the same songs playing on the radio no matter where he is, foreshadow the technological advances that made the country even more closely connected in later decades. He’s conflicted about the changes, which foregrounds the theme Fear and Acceptance of Change. Although he dislikes the bland, packaged food he eats during the trip, he recognizes that home-cooked meals were often prepared by bad cooks, his own mother included. He mourns the loss of regional dialects yet sees them as “the child of illiteracy and ignorance” (79). Eventually, he deems his sentimentality another symptom of getting old and notes that accepting change, even if one doesn’t like it, is better than desperately trying to hold onto the past.

He’s particularly intrigued by mobile homes, a relatively new invention in the early 1960s. He views them as the dawn of a new, mobile lifestyle: The owners can simply hook their house up to a truck to move somewhere with better opportunities. As in his other observations, his feelings are somewhat conflicted: While he appreciates the convenience and practicality of the homes, he worries about an interconnected, transient society destroying the sense of community inherent in a stable home base. In reality, mobile home usage didn’t play out as Steinbeck anticipated. Mobile homes are often owned by low-income individuals, and the cost of moving these homes can be prohibitively high. Additionally, many communities establish restrictions surrounding them, and they often must have a permanent foundation to pass building codes and be eligible for insurance. Therefore, most mobile home owners who choose to move simply find a new home rather than moving their mobile home. Instead of being at the forefront of a major change in how Americans view home, mobile homes became simply a lower-cost alternative to traditional homes.