Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

“Having too many THINGS,” he says, “[Americans] spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”

“You talk like a Communist,” cried one of his sisters. “Well, you sound suspiciously like Genghis Khan,” he fired back.

“This monster of a land,” he writes, “this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.”

It was somehow incomprehensible to him that human beings could act like this.

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

I don’t think he ever gave up until I drove away without him. He had the dream I’ve had all my life, and there is no cure.

I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living.

Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

The natural New England taciturnity reaches its glorious perfection at breakfast.

The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns.

For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

I can’t even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. “It is a glory,” she said, “and can’t be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise.”

I began to formulate a new law describing the relationship of protection to despondency. A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found,

If there had been room in Rocinante I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them.

In terms of reason, it was strange only because I found it so.

To my certain knowledge, many people conceal experiences for fear of ridicule. How many people have seen or heard or felt something which so outraged their sense of what should be that the whole thing was brushed quickly away like dirt under a rug?

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it?

To the sequoias everyone is a stranger, a barbarian.

I said sadly, “I live in New York now.” “I don’t like New York,” Johnny said. “You’ve never been there.” “I know. That’s why I don’t like it. You have to come back. You belong here.”

If this were my home, would I get lost in it? If this were my home could I walk the streets and hear no blessing?”

“No. They’re not true ghosts. We’re the ghosts.”

When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness.

Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance—and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

The desert has mothered magic things before this.

Like most Americans I am no lover of cops, and the consistent investigation of city forces for bribery, brutality, and a long and picturesque list of malfeasances is not designed to reassure me.

When I started this narrative, I knew that sooner or later I would have to have a go at Texas, and I dreaded it.

Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it.

Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception.

Texas is the only state that came into the Union by treaty. It retains the right to secede at will. We have heard them threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization— The American Friends for Texas Secession. This stops the subject cold. They want to be able to secede but they don’t want anyone to want them to.

The tradition of the land is deep fixed in the Texas psyche. Businessmen wear heeled boots that never feel a stirrup, and men of great wealth who have houses in Paris and regularly shoot grouse in Scotland refer to themselves as little old country boys.

There’s absolutely nothing to take the place of a good man.

But no account of Texas would be complete without a Texas orgy, showing men of great wealth squandering their millions on tasteless and impassioned exhibitionism.

I faced the South with dread. Here, I knew, were pain and confusion and all the manic results of bewilderment and fear. And the South being a limb of the nation, its pain spreads out to all America.

Beyond my failings as a racist, I knew I was not wanted in the South. When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.

I felt all the amusement of the improbable abnormal, but also a kind of horror that it could be so.

Only yesterday a reporter had been beaten and his camera smashed, for even convinced voters are reluctant to have their moment of history recorded and preserved.

In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?

Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.

Anyone who has been near the theater would know that these speeches were not spontaneous. They were tried and memorized and carefully rehearsed. This was theater. I watched the intent faces of the listening crowd and they were the faces of an audience. When there was applause, it was for a performer.

The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world, unchallenged by the other things I know are there.

I came out to learn. What was I learning?

I guess when they’re drafting peacemakers they’d better pass me by.

It’s the means—the dreadful uncertainty of the means.