When I read that John Steinbeck had made up much of the material that appears in Travels with Charley my first thought was: Why didn't he make up more?
I reread the book a few years ago, when the Florida Center for the Book asked me to give a talk on it, and was appalled by how few people the novelist talked to in his drive from New York to California and back. It was not a journey around America but a journey around Steinbeck's head.
Now it comes to light that he talked to even fewer people than I had imagined, inventing characters to give the book "color" (or to get at, as protective, pusillanimous academics are saying, "a greater truth").
This makes the book even more of a failure. Granted, some great travel books resort to invention; Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana comes immediately to mind. But at least Byron did it not only artfully but hilariously - two adverbs that cannot be used when talking about Steinbeck's "classic."
Still, the greatest travel books are brilliant depictions and interpretations of reality. I asked Colin Thubron once, in an interview, about invention, and he said he doesn't need to do it because the things he comes across in his journeys are more startling than anything he could dream up. But then he doesn't travel with a spouse and stay in a luxury hotels.
