#1602 Highways, Byways, and Travels With Charley: A Road Report from Vermont

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Guest Host David Horton of Radford University in Virginia asks Clay for a progress report on his adventure retracing John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” journey. Clay was in Middlebury, Vermont, at the time of the interview, still aglow from his interview with Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini of Middlebury College. Topics include the clunky joys of rural AM radio; whether it matters that not everything in Travels with Charley happened precisely as Steinbeck reports; and what Clay is learning along the way. They discuss the changes in America’s highways between 1960 and today, including the Blue Highways far away from the Interstate Highway System. Clay talks about some of the other pilgrimages he has made so far in the journey: Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts; Thoreau’s Walden Pond; and Montauk Point at the end of Long Island where Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders quarantined after their heroics in Cuba.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone I'm sitting at the dinette the table in my airstream rig listening to America.
0:06.0	I'm at a campground just south of Middlebury, Vermont.
0:10.0	You know all your life you read about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys boy do I understand Green Mountains now I've seen more
0:17.0	Varieties of green than the last 72 hours than I thought existed astonishing Astonishing pastels of green, darker greens, probably 30 different
0:26.6	hues of green at probably at the most fertile moment of the entire calendar year.
0:33.0	Not too many people in this campground.
0:35.0	I've spent the second night here.
0:36.0	Last night I had extraordinary joy of spending the evening
0:40.0	with Jay Perini of Middlebury College
0:42.0	and his wife Devon, who is a psychotherapist.
0:45.4	He agreed to be interviewed in the rig, which is how Steinbeck would have wanted it.
0:49.2	We talked for about 75 minutes about all sorts of things. Just look him up on Wikipedia. He's written a biography of Jesus. He's written a historical novel about St Paul. He's written a historical novel about Herman Melville, another about Leo Tolstoy, who he says wrote the two greatest novels in history, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He's written a memoir on Borhese, the great South American writer, and he's
1:17.5	written a biography of Gorvidal, who was his friend. He's extremely well connected, has written more than 20 books more on the way he's a poet.
1:27.1	He is extraordinary. I really only knew his work on Steinbeck and when I began to look into it I realized how much more there is.
1:36.0	I'm reading the biography of Gore Vidal. Now, Vidal is one of the essayists that I most prize.
1:44.0	If you've never read a collection of Vidal's essays,
1:47.0	you owe it to yourself to do that.
1:49.0	Vidal had an acid wit, extraordinary capacity as a pro-stylist, and is drop dead funny.
1:59.0	He's really one of the amazing men of the 20th century and to think that Jay Perini knew him and they were close friends and they spent time together in Italy is amazing.
2:09.2	He knew Norman Mailer. He knows Salmone Rushty. This is a this is really an unusually interesting man of great
2:18.2	great achievement and his wife Devon cooked a beautiful meal of homemade pasta,
2:23.8	asparagus that they got from their neighbors
	...

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