Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland. for it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilisation. Perhaps this is because they enclose the unique, the spectacular, the astounding - the greatest waterfall, the deepest canyon, the highest cliff.
Steinbeck’s journey does not particularly concern itself with the grand, for he feels that the more ostentatious avatars of American life aren’t representative:
And so he does, with exquisite, loving detail, in a book that became - over the course of a lazy afternoon in a hammock - one of my all-time favourites. What he doesn’t mention in the book is that this trip was undertaken in the knowledge that he was dying, and this was his final opportunity to survey the country that had been the subject and the muse of his life’s work. It seems that Steinbeck did go on a road trip to rediscover America, and he did take his poodle, Charley, as his companion. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is, according to historians, not factual enough to be considered nonfiction. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.’ ‘I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. And then consider this, from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: Consider Hemingway’s famous ballscratching machismo, as refracted through his obsession with fly-fishing. Steinbeck was a better novelist, a better pet owner, and a nicer man. Lots of people seem to like Hemingway, and I expect they have their reasons, but I refuse to entertain them. Like I said, this is based on nothing other than a hunch. My current favourite is this: just as you are either a cat person or a dog person, United or City, Italian or French food: you are either a Hemingway person or a Steinbeck person.
It must be a hangover of studying English at university and being forced to provide evidence for all my reckless assertions - now I treat myself to the occasional assertion, the more reckless the better. I like forming theories about literature - particularly theories based on zero evidence.
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