Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

American Memoir

Source – Personal copy

When I read the list of books I could read for the club 1962, I looked at one book that leapt of the page to read, and that was this one another reread. Unlike Kerouac, this is a road trip like his books are but this is from one of my all-time favourite writers, Steinbeck he just stood for so much his books we social commentaries on time and covered the tougher side of life. He captured an America that is now gone, and in this book he tries to do that. I do think he picks his tales here and it is, in a way, a modern tale. I love the idea of van Life is something that appeals to me the ability to go here and there every day, and this is what he did he took out his camper he’d called Rocinante after Quixotes horse. Now the companion for his trip was his blue French poodle Charley as he turns sixty, Steinbeck wants to see the small villages and towns of America before they go.

We didn’t give George any trouble because for two nights we stayed in Rocinante, but I am told that when guests sleep in the house George goes into the pine woods and watches from afar, grumbling his dissatisfaction and pouring out his dis-like. Miss Brace admits that for the purposes of a cat, whatever they are, George is worthless. He isn’t good company, he is not sympathetic, and he has little aesthetic value.

“Perhaps he catches mice and rats,” I suggested helpfully.

“Never,” said Miss Brace. “Wouldn’t think of it.

And do you want to know something? George is a girl.”

I had to restrain Charley because the unseen presence of George was everywhere. In a more enlightened day when witches and familiars were better understood, George would have found his, or rather her, end in a bonfire, because if ever there was a familiar, an envoy of the devil, a consorter with evil spirits, George is it.

George the Cat from his friends at Deer Island

The book starts with him explaining why he decided to make this trip a last chance to capture a world slowly going in fact, at the time, it maybe was nearly gone when he did the trip. He shows how he got Rocinate ready. His family wanted to go, but ultimately, he chose the dog as his companion and set off around the States. Nearly losing the camper and his boat in a storm on the eve of the trip, he sets off. He says he is just a guy, not Steinbeck, the famous writer but some ordinary Joe on a road trip with his dog. he notes how he uses the dinners and radio to get the feel of the places in Maine as he drives through this has one of my favourite parts of the book he visit someone he knows on Deer island that is the owner of a grey cat that is the least cat like cat he has ever meet harte people and dogs and make any guest at the house feel unwelcome even when he isn’t in the room. He meets migrant workers from Canada and compares how they pack the farm up to what English families did in Kent every summer when they went hop-picking. He likes to blend with the common man at truckstops, nearly getting shot, then having a coffee with a game warden on an estate. s he winds around the country, retreading ground in his old home of  Salinas, lamenting the changing country and the way it has become upper class no more fish guts on the beach from the canneries; he also laments the way this is the way the country ad a whole is changing as the freeways disconnect towns and everything becomes the same like the way people speak till he gets to  Texas where he notes how separate all Texans still are and how individual they can be. He laments what has gone from the America of his youth.

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”

His thoughts on Texas.

Well, I could go on I love this writer and this book so much. I think he has rose-coloured glasses in a way and has picked maybe the best tales of this trip, but he has also caught what has gone the lament of the loss of language accents and identity between towns is all something we see more and more, and since his day every town is the same with the same shops and restaurants etc. What he also captures is migrant workers from those from Quebec to those he used to know in Monterey who have now moved on from when he wrote Cannery row (my favourite novel by him) . I must try Geert Mak’s book, where a few years ago he retraced this trip and saw how the country was now. This captured America before Vietnam, but post-Korea, that golden glow of the post-war years is fading. This is like a Norman Rockwell painting of a book, but you can see just at the edges of the images he paints the world he loved, and we get corporate America. I even forgot to mention the visits to the vet well that is for you to find out. Have you read this?

Winstons score A I love steinbeck and lament the loss of his world even if it is a bit overly romantic.

Conversation of Three wayfarers by Peter Weiss

Conversation of the three wayfarers

German fiction

Original title – Das Gespräch der drei Gehenden

Translator –  E B Garside

Source – Personal copy

A big dig into the books that came out in 1962, and I found this it is a writer I had heard a little about but hadn’t gotten to, and this book seemed perfect it is just 90 pages long. Peter Weiss was a member of the post-war gruppe 47 Writers in Germany, but he left Germany in 1939 and lived in Sweden with his family he was one of the most avant-garde writers of his generation he wrote for the stage and novels. He is maybe one of the writers in his generation who should have been better known to the English-speaking world.In the post-war years, he was a critical voice in a lot of the events of the sixties, Cuba and Vietnam being two of them. He is a writer that was hard to pigeonhole. He had been compared at times to Roman Noveau writers and absurdist writers like Beckett.

That ring res big did nothing bus ily walk

leather caps and long raincoats, they called themselves Abel, Babel and Cabel, and while they walked they talked to each other. They walked and looked around and saw what there was to see, and they talked about it and about other things that had happened. When one was talking the two others kept still and listened or looked around and listened to something else, and when one of them had finished saying what he had to say, the second one spoke up, and then the third, and the others listened or thought about something else.

They had stout boots for walking, but they carried only as much with them as would fit into the pockets of their clothes, as much as they could quickly lay their hands on and put away again. Since they looked alike they were taken for brothers by passersby, but they were not brothers at all, they were only men who walked walked walked, having met each other by chance, Abel and Babel, and then Abel, Babel and Cabel. Abel and Babel had met each other on the bridge,

The opening lines of the book and you see how the brothers merge into one at times.

The book is a strange one it is about three brothers called Abel, Babel and Cabel. We spend time as they tell tales of the wanderings. But we never quite know who is talking to us and that we seem to drift in time over the years. As three men recount events. We see a bridge, but even before the bridge is there, the brothers are talking to the Ferryman about his son, his life and the world he lives in. Then a tale of crossing to marry his bride he got pregnant. Then other odd tales of men wandering with just a slipper to fix something. These are odd snippets of everyday life told in a way that makes you, as a reader drawn into the book. The book has no real plot it has sections narrated by different narrators, be we never know which of the brothers it is telling the tale.

Once, in the summertime, a party of guests came running down to the shore, many threw off their clothes, others jumped into the water with their clothes on, and some of them swam out, one of them coming toward him. The ferryman sat still in his boat and saw how the head in the water was drawing nearer, with the mouth making soft blowing sounds. The swimmer came up to the side of the boat, the ferryman already could see the whites of his eyes shining, and the swimmer’s hands stretched out, and the body came after them, and Jym was standing in the boat, bolt upright, naked, dripping.

He stood there for some seconds, or minutes, the ferryman did not tell me just how long, then he again dived into the water, headfirst, swam back to the shore.

The Ferryman one of the main characters in the tales they tell.

This is a book that needs to be short as it makes your mind spin the way it drifts, but it all seems to flow and not jar, which is a wonderful job of the writer and the translator to keep it feeling like that. I was imagining the time traveller in H G Wellls Time traveller as he drifts through time and things appear and disappear. I loved the passage with the ferryman, a job long gone, a man who saw people across a river daily. We see his world and his sons, who he feels will follow him to be ferrymen. But then there is a bridge that is new than old. Time flows forward and back in the book. He also has a clever way of seeing little details like the sound of the ferry, those little trinkets we can all recount that noise and smell we remember of a mundane event. This is a flat book but with these little gems scattered through it. An odd book and a little gem Have you read Peter Weiss.

Winston’s score – A He should be better known a writer who is unique in his style.

 

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

America fiction

Source – personal copy

I had looked down the list of books from 1962, and I had quite a few on my shelves, so I decided rather than buy in books I had before for some other clubs. So this is a reread, a rare reread, but I read it in my teens, and I think I may have reread it when I got the current copy I have of this book it. I was a hge fan of Kerouac, but I tried last year to read a copy of On the Road I had been sent. Honestly, I just couldn’t get into it. I often hear people talking about books feeling different at various readings and ages, but I wonder if we grow out of writers. I think Kerouac is a writer a lot of males in their late teens fall in love with his sense of adventure and rule-breaking appeals at that age. His books are largely autobiographical, and this is the same with this book which followed three visits he had made to a cabin in Big Sur. He maybe managed to catch him as a writer with drug issues as, over the three visits to the cabin in the woods, he seems to have become more drug-addicted, and his sanity is drifting.

“And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I’ll do in three weeks only) ‘no more dissipation, it’s time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that’s it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony…it’s time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time…Yay, for this, more aloneness

I like this description of Big sur and the effect on him.

Jack Duluoz, who is basically Kerouac himself, is a beat writer starting to gain success as a writer and the pressure that follows that so much. He decides he needs to escape the city, and his friend Lorenzo (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) has a cabin in Big Sur, so he heads up there. He is trying to capture the sense of solitude and nature (I felt he was trying to do a  Walden in a way back to nature and clear his mind after the first visit we follow him back to the city, but this is a man who is starting to fray at the edges his drinking is increasing and mental health is suffering as he deals with his friend Cody and his wife Bily who is struggling with her own mental health issues. As his mind starts to drift, he goes back, but the other visit, the sense he got on the first visit is gone in fact, they make him worse this is a man struggling with the bottle and the pressure of fame. In a way, this may be one of the first novels that deals with celebrity, as Kerouac is writing about his struggles with the bottle and his own sanity at times.

Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night’s drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there’ll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you’re chemically overloaded and you’ll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in ― Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)… well, there’s more of that up later.

This quote aout drinkers remind me of my 20s I drank to much and now rarely drink but had times like these.

Like most of his novels, he wrote this book in a few days on a roll of paper like he did On The road. He wrote this book in ten days, and there is a sense of a man struggling with fame and addiction. This is maybe the start of his downfall. He died seven years after writing this book in the early sixties, but this was maybe his last great novel, although I do love his later novellas. Now I found this okay I wasn’t as connected as I was in my twenties. I feel now it is a great portrait of fame and the price of fame but also about escaping to nature to recharge all ring true these days. I had watched the film of this a few years ago, but I remember it being a middling film as there seemed to have been a few films around the beat writer in a few years. Have you read This Kerouac or any of the others he wrote?

Winston score – B the price of fame and its effects on your mental health captured in the early days of celebrity.