Questioning Steinbeck’s "Charley"

How disillusioning! An editorial in today’s (4/10/11) New York Times reports on Bill Steigerwald’s research showing that much of John Steinbeck’s ostensibly nonfiction travel memoir, “Travels with Charley in Search of America” (1962) (a book that I very much enjoyed many years ago), was more fiction than nonfiction. Steigerwald researched Steinbeck’s letters, itineraries, and other documents, and found that, according to the Times, the book was “shot through with dubious anecdotes and impossible encounters.” He also found that Steinbeck was NOT alone with his dog Charley most of the time on his trip across America, that his wife was with him much of the time, and that they often stayed in nice hotels and seldom actually camped. This discovery reminds us that the controversies of more recent years regarding James Frey’s "memoir" that turned out to be fiction, and regarding the nonexistent teenaged JT Leroy’s purported “memoir” that turned out to be fiction by a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert, were not new in the annals of literature. The big question, of course, is how much this matters. At least one Steinbeck scholar, according to the Times, felt it didn’t matter. And everyone understands that memoir cannot be perfectly factual and “true” because memory is fallible, and because the episodes and details the author selects to write about shape the “truth” of the piece. But despite this understanding, readers expect that nonfiction/memoir will be basically factually “true,” and feel that their trust has been violated if it turns out not to be so. The Times editorial agrees with this stance, stating that if a book is put forth as nonfiction, it should in fact be nonfiction.