Tagged "steinbeck"

It’s the end of 2020, and when you’ve been stuck at home for a year, with only your dog as your constant companion, Travels with Charley is a good book to read.

But this book is a lot more about Steinbeck’s road trip than about the dog.

Steinbeck romanticises everything. If so much as a tree sheds a leaf in front of him, he bursts forth with pages of ideas, thoughts and memories. Scholars have mentioned that Travels with Charley is clearly not non-fiction. And Steinbeck himself doesn’t pretend that it is non-fiction. They say he knew he was dying, and was hit with an irresistible wanderlust. With almost everything he encounters - places, people and politics alike - he stresses that these were memories that were uniquely his. And he admits that any of his opinions could be cancelled out by a single counterpoint - and of those, as many could be found as there are travellers. He never took any notes. He let mulled his memories of the road trip over well before he wrote the book.

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In Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, Steinbeck wrote that reading books is like driving a wedge in your life. The larger the wedge, the harder it is for parts to come together once the wedge is removed. The longer the book, the harder it is to close the mental gap around it. Steinbeck wrote this for East of Eden - his magnum opus. Surprisingly, this happens even with Steinbeck’s much shorter books.

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I have a pretty good Steinbeck collection, but this wasn’t a book I was going to read anytime soon. But I recently came across the movie adaptation and decided that other Steinbeck titles could wait. James Franco and John Steinbeck is a very attractive combination.

First of all, this book is not about communism. The eponymous battle is not a battle of the classes. It’s more of a battle men fight with themselves. The Communist Party is just a minor device in the plot. A much bigger and apparent device is collectivism. After all, in East of Eden, Steinbeck has defended passionately the creative spirit of the individual mind, so a collectivist is perhaps the last thing he’d be.

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