According to a piece in last Saturday's Guardian, John Steinbeck's classic travelogue Travels With Charley is no factually accurate report of his famous road trip. (I'll remind you that, in this incredibly popular memoir from the early 1960s, Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley make a 10,000 mile odyssey round the US, romantically roughing it in a camper truck he names after Don Quixote's horse Rosinante.) It's now been shown that Steinbeck's narrative is completely unreliable. The van is driven on an artistic licence; the story is peppered with 'creative fictions'. Just one example: although Steinbeck makes out the trip was a solo voyage, it seems he was almost never alone. Indeed, half the time he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine, and for much of the trip stayed at luxury motels or parked up on friends' properties. He even spent one week on a cattle ranch owned by a Texan millionaire. Steinbeck spins such a good tale. You feel you're right there beside him and Charley, cooking your beans with them on a campfire under the stars. So do these embellishments, these omissions, these flirtations on the borderline between truth and fantasy, really matter?
This kind of authorial malleability is nothing new, of course. Writers have always been prone to embroider the truth in their autobiographies. Thoreau, for instance, somehow neglected to mention in Walden that his self-sufficient, hermit-style sojourn in the woods was enlivened by regular visitors, frequent excursions to the nearby village, boxes of food sent weekly by his mother or sister, and yet more emergency parcels regularly delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife. In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway led us to believe he was living in Paris almost as a down-and-out - but this was in fact far from the case. Lillian Hellman's memoirs are notorious for their cobweb of 'factual errors' (I put it politely). And, quite recently, James Frey was exposed as being 'economical with the truth', to say the very least, in his drug-addled memoir A Million Little Pieces. But should we care about any of this too much - as long as the account's a good one, and well written, and keeps us enthralled?
This kind of authorial malleability is nothing new, of course. Writers have always been prone to embroider the truth in their autobiographies. Thoreau, for instance, somehow neglected to mention in Walden that his self-sufficient, hermit-style sojourn in the woods was enlivened by regular visitors, frequent excursions to the nearby village, boxes of food sent weekly by his mother or sister, and yet more emergency parcels regularly delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife. In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway led us to believe he was living in Paris almost as a down-and-out - but this was in fact far from the case. Lillian Hellman's memoirs are notorious for their cobweb of 'factual errors' (I put it politely). And, quite recently, James Frey was exposed as being 'economical with the truth', to say the very least, in his drug-addled memoir A Million Little Pieces. But should we care about any of this too much - as long as the account's a good one, and well written, and keeps us enthralled?
