Steinbeck: his words and his America are as alive (and relevant) to me today as when they were first written, although of course in reality some areas as Steinbeck knew them don't exist whereas I now do. I won't ever in actuality see what he saw in his lifetime, not if I travelled to and across present-day America. My experiences would be different and far removed from his fiction or a painting by Hopper. I won't get the America of my old-fashioned dreams: the good and backward, but then neither did Steinbeck when he took a road trip in 1960, though his purpose was largely observational, more sociological, than a recapturing of youth or time. If he was disappointed (and there are subtle and obvious hints of that in Travels with Charley), he nonetheless tempered any real vehemence he felt about progress, and lack of, in the resultant account of his journey.
If I set out to find any of Steinbeck's America, from his early or later works, from rainy England, I'd too might be sore when the materialisation proved very different to what I had pictured through reading American novelists, even though I might have prepared myself for that inescapable fact, known that that America was a distant memory. The uninitiated can't visually magic up something that's long gone, and I also don't know if I could be as open and as generous as Steinbeck was to 1960 America to America in the 21st century. Though of course, I've seen some States, very little of but some, and yes, those small trips are filled with an emotion I won't soon forget, particularly one when I was like him a lone traveller, and yet in memory it still has a somewhat touristy vibe. Maybe true openness to change or the willingness to accept only occurs when it's your own country and your own peoples, when it's not somewhere, thousands of miles away, built up in your over-exercised imagination on a stereotypical scale as high as the Empire State building or as gaudy as Trump Tower.
A road trip of England's regions would be perhaps more comparable to Steinbeck's American travels and tales, because observationally I'd already be an insider. Some sights would be new and attitudes would vary, but they wouldn't be entirely foreign. Being of the country, if not of the county, I'd hold a common insight that would communicate itself to whomever I might come across. This was true in Steinbeck's journeying, which meant, as he documented, that people were more likely to speak or often assistance to an out-of-towner when it was required. I sincerely hope that would also be the case if I chose to go in search of the United Kingdom, but like Steinbeck I might wait until I'm well into my fifties to attempt it, as well as able to hire a driver and borrow a four-legged companion.
I'm sure, however, that I would find taciturn individuals for the English too can be a tight-lipped bunch until they've got your measure. Also, that what I might see may not be a true picture, representational of the region I so happened to be in, for that too would depend on my views and the attitudes of the people I'd meet on a given day. Some places, as Steinbeck said (to paraphrase) of the South, will stay troubled with people caught in a jam, and sometimes there's very little you can personally do for a change in attitude demands patience, which I like to call the 'drip effect', though you can of course record your experience and the impressions it made upon you, whatever they might be.
At the end, Steinbeck , his feet relieved of their itch, comes home again, as most travellers do at some point, and yet with a lot, as a friend of his might have said, to 'mule' over, which I've found I've also done with the close of this delightful book.
Picture credit: San Pablo, 1610-1614, El Greco
