Steinbeck once told an interviewer that The Wayward Bus contained “an indefinite number of echoes” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Heptameron, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. While not exactly a story cycle like those works, the novel is a multilayered series of interweaving tales told from multiple points of view. Some critics have tried to read the allegory by identifying individual characters with particular characters in the original Everyman (for example, Camille with Beauty) or with each of the seven deadly sins (for example, Pimples with gluttony). The scholar Peter Lisca divides the characters into the saved or elected, the damned, and those in purgatory. But such approaches tend to overdetermine Steinbeck’s meaning and intention. The story is not fundamentally theological; Juan (like Steinbeck) is no orthodox believer. All of these characters are flawed, though not necessarily sinful, and often they are flawed in similar ways. Most of them are guilty of avarice and lust, for example. None attains self-knowledge alone. They represent a cross-section of types, and Steinbeck is holding up a mirror to the reader.
First among equals on this allegorical pilgrimage is Juan Chicoy, a mechanic and bus driver, a deus ex machina. As he says, “I’m an engine to get them where they are going.” Like Al Joad, who is “one with the machine” in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or Gay, “The little mechanic of god, the St. Francis of all things that turn and twist and explode” who repairs the Model T in Cannery Row, Juan is “a magnificent mechanic.” His initials, like those of Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, underscore his role as an uncertain savior or Christ figure. In the first chapter of the novel, Juan scrapes his knuckles on the undercarriage of the dilapidated bus—once named “el Gran de Jesus” (the great power of Jesus), renamed “Sweetheart” in a more secular age—and anoints it with his blood as he repairs it. Juan suffers vicariously, if not to repair the sins of the world, then at least to repair the gears of its broken transmission. As he explains, “You can’t finish a job without blood. That’s what my old man used to say.” In effect, Juan/Jesus explains the doctrine of blood atonement, and Steinbeck hoped his readers would understand the joke. In chapter 3, Juan offers to wash Ernest Horton’s “artificial sore foot,” much as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, not to parody the sacrament but to question its efficacy. Juan’s “religion was practical” and the iconic Virgin of Guadalupe that rides on the dashboard of his bus is a personal indulgence, his “connection with eternity.” Juan is also, as Steinbeck notes in an aside, a genuine man: “There aren’t very many of them in the world, as everyone finds out sooner or later.” He “was not a man who fooled himself very much.” Capable of great tenderness, as in his exchanges with Norma and Mildred, he is also unique among the characters because he is equally competent in the kitchen as in the garage. He not only repairs the bus, he cooks and washes dishes. A mestizo, Juan is a child of two historically despised Catholic ethnicities, the Irish and the Latino, which frees him from middle-class custom and convention. He does not suffer fools like Van Brunt and Elliott Pritchard gladly, and he scorns banality and self-indulgence. According to Harrison Smith’s review, “He is the free man, the man who cannot be held in bonds of any sort, the man who will at any moment leave a woman.” Though half of the ring finger on his left hand has been amputated, he wears a gold wedding band on it for “decoration.” He is not flawless—he has struck Alice in the past, and he is tempted to abandon his passengers before the end of their journey and flee to Mexico. But Steinbeck’s admiration for him is palpable. As the novelist wrote Elizabeth Otis in 1954, “I feel related to Spanish people more than to Anglo-Saxons. Unusual with my blood line—whatever it is. But they have kept something we have lost.”
The gadget salesman Ernest Horton is at first glance a ludicrous character, a first cousin of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. But he takes his surname from the Latin root for “talk” or “ex hort” and the German root for “listen”; he is, as his entire name suggests, an “earnest speaker and listener.” In fact an admirable figure, he has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for military valor. When Camille recognizes the medal in his lapel, he allows that it was pinned on him by “the big boss” or the president of the United States, though he modestly adds that “It don’t buy any groceries.” (In contrast, Elliott Pritchard twice fails to recognize the medal because he never served in the military. He thinks it a lodge pin much like the one he wears. And whereas Bernice expects fresh eggs and room service, Ernest makes his bed “neatly, as though he had done it many times before.”) Ernest has been taught to trust in the efficacy of thrift and honesty, moreover; he twice invokes the standards of honest business in conversation with Elliott. He befriends Norma and defends her from the baseless allegations of Alice. In another age and place he would be a noble and heroic type, but in this time and place he is merely a traveling salesman struggling to make a living by selling trinkets, gadgets, and novelties like the “Little Wonder Artificial Sore Foot” and a whiskey dispenser that resembles a toilet.
Significantly, too, Camille Oaks constructs her identity and assumes a stage name for the occasion. As a professional stripper at stags or smokers, she takes her first name from an advertisement for Camel cigarettes on the wall of the lunchroom. In effect, the name acknowledges that as a sex object she is a mere commodity. In classical myth, however, Camille is a virgin queen, servant to Diana. The name echoes “camomile,” the herb whose flowers may be used as a tonic. And it is also an abbreviated form of “chameleon.” Neither a natural blonde nor the stereotyped dumb blonde, Camille is worldly wise. She has learned to blend into her environment, a strategy that enables her to survive. As she tells Norma, “everybody’s a tramp some time or other. Everybody. And the worst tramps of all are the ones that call it something else.” Significantly, she bonds with Norma (= Normal) and takes her under wing. She helps Norma with her make-up, the protective coloring that will “give her some confidence” and enable her to survive in Los Angeles. In the end, all Camille really wanted, Steinbeck adds, “was a nice house in a nice town, two children, and a stairway to stand on.” She is sufficiently self-reliant that a husband ranks low on her wish list and realistic enough to know she will never realize her dream.
Pimples, Juan’s seventeen-year-old apprentice, suffers from the worst case of pustulate acne recorded in American literature.
His face is “rivuleted and rotted and eroded” and his “mind and emotions were like his face.” Only a few paragraphs of the novel are told from his point of view because, “loaded with the concupiscent juices of adolescence,” he is the least sentient of all the characters. He mostly fantasizes about sex, as in his daydream of rescuing Camille from drowning in chapter 13. His real name is Edward, apparently a private joke at the expense of Steinbeck’s close friend and collaborator Ed Ricketts (1897-1948), and his nickname is Kit because he claims to be distantly related to the western scout Kit Carson. Juan even jokes at one point that he has “the real Kit Carson blood” in him, but he is obviously a degenerate heir of the pioneer tradition on this westward journey. His nickname emphasizes his adolescence, and his immature plan to study radar is similar to Connie Rivers’ vain ambition in The Grapes of Wrath to study radio repair by correspondence.
The Pritchards’ daughter, Mildred or “mild red,” (“She was playing around with dangerous companions in her college, professors and certain people considered Red”) is a spoiled rich girl like Mary Dalton in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Her name may also suggest “mill dread” to indicate her resistance to her father’s corporate standards (Elliott refers to returning vets as men who have “been out of the mill”). Or it may connote “mild dread” inasmuch as she does not “want to go to Mexico” with her parents and she “dreaded” her mother’s headaches “even more than her father did.” Yet Mildred is also “a girl of strong sexual potential,” an uninhibited rebel who may break with the past and build her own life on her own terms.
The other characters are also given emblematic names. Elliott Pritchard,
whose first name hints at the origins of his character in T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, is a type of devious lecher (Pritchard = prick-hard). He lost his virginity in a brothel at the age of twenty, likes to ogle naked women at his lodge meetings, and in the course of the novel betrays “his bestiality, his lust, his lack of self-control.” After he propositions Camille and she berates him, “his mind took her clothes off.” Bernice Pritchard’s name (= burn-nice bitch-hard) suggests her repressions, of which her psychosomatic headaches are the most obvious symptom. Though “a saint” to her friends—certainly she has taken a vow of semi-celibacy—she often speaks with “delicate malice.” Juan’s wife, Alice (“a lice” or “a louse,” a small parasitic insect that sucks the blood of mammals), is a slovenly masochist. Little wonder she hates houseflies. She must compete with them for her livelihood. She closely resembles the bus driver Louie (= Louis or “louse”), a sexual predator. Both Alice and Louie are racists, for example. The cynical misanthrope Van Brunt, whose first spoken words in the novel are “I don’t like it,” is literally named leader (van or vanguard) of the point of greatest stress. In Old English, his name is associated with fire, and indeed he is on the brink of death. In Middle English, his name is associated with sexual assault, and in the final days of his life he has lost control over his sexual impulses. An unredeemable “crabby old guy,” he wants neither to advance across the bridge, bypass it, nor return to Rebel Corners. According to the store-keeper Breed, Van Brunt “wouldn’t vote for the second coming of Christ if it was a popular measure.” Yet in chapter 19, narrated from his point of view, he becomes a sympathetic figure if only because he understands that he is dying.
Most of these characters embark on the bus trip of forty-nine miles (they are ironic forty-niners) across the Coastal Range to San Juan de la Cruz, named for the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and author of “Dark Night of the Soul.” Forced by flooding to detour along an abandoned stagecoach trail, Juan and his passengers leave the “high way” for an unfamiliar road. Juan ditches the bus in mud a few miles from their destination, leaves the eight passengers to fend for themselves, and hikes to an abandoned barn adjacent to a broken windmill where, like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, Mildred soon finds him. The myopic Mildred removes her glasses, symbolic shorthand that should be familiar to Steinbeck’s readers, and asks Juan to “force me a little.” Steinbeck illustrates both the rejuvenating and the destructive power of sex in simultaneous scenes: Juan’s consensual seduction of Mildred in the barn stands in stark contrast to Elliott’s rape of Bernice in the cave. Much as the novel virtually begins with Juan’s figurative “passion” or blood atonement in the garage while repairing the bus, it virtually ends with his literal passion in the barn with Mildred. Juan resolves to return to his duties rather than flee to Mexico, a decision foreshadowed by his parable in chapter 5 about the Indian who surrenders his old life in a mountain village “because he had seen the merry-go-round” in a distant town. After the sky has cleared and as they return to the bus, Mildred holds Juan’s hand with the amputated finger in a gesture of acceptance and conciliation. Back in the cave, however, Bernice scourges her body by rubbing dirt into her wounds. Juan returns to help the passengers free the bus from the mud—only the dying Van Brunt and the selfish Bernice sit inside the bus during this scene. The bus nears its destination as the novel ends, but it has not yet reached its bay. That is, Steinbeck offers the reader an open-ended conclusion, not a tidy ending. Camille has agreed to a tentative date with Ernest, and she has agreed to move temporarily into an apartment with Norma, but nothing is fixed or certain. She speaks virtually the last words in the tale: “we’ll see how it goes.” The Wayward Bus has movement and direction but no larger purpose or teleology. Steinbeck closes the novel on an ambiguous yet hopeful note, with neither empty platitudes nor easy affirmations.
Ironically, Hollywood studios were interested in adapting the novel to film almost as soon as it appeared. Nothing came of these expressions of interest, however, until William Inge’s critically acclaimed play Bus Stop (1955) was released as a popular movie starring Marilyn Monroe in 1956. To capitalize on its success, Steinbeck’s novel was loosely adapted by Twentieth-Century Fox in 1957 in a cheesy movie starring Jayne Mansfield (a Monroe wannabe) as Camille, Joan Collins as Alice, Dan Dailey as Ernest Horton, and Rick Jason as “Johnny” Chicoy. A decade after its publication, that is, Steinbeck’s novel was repackaged by Hollywood and turned into precisely the kind of lowbrow schlock the novel had satirized. It was a disaster movie in more ways than one. To his credit, Steinbeck had no part in the production. His novel deserves to be reread and reassessed on its own terms. It should be neither benignly neglected nor judged on the basis of its distortion through a movie lens.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Many of Steinbeck’s private letters, interviews, and journals have been published over the years. Of particular interest are Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking, 1975); Conversations with John Steinbeck, ed. Thomas Fensch ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988); Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, ed. Robert DeMott (New York: Viking, 1989); and Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (New York: Viking, 1969). Many of these letters and journals are excerpted along with other comments on the craft of authorship in John Steinbeck on Writing, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi (Muncie, Ind.: Steinbeck Research Institute, Ball State University, 1988).
The best collection of Steinbeck’s little-known nonfiction writings is America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, ed. Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson (New York: Viking, 2002).
The Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, founded in 1971, contains the largest Steinbeck archive in the world, with thousands of books, book manuscripts, manuscript letters, scrapbooks, photographs, and other biographical materials. The center also issues Steinbeck Studies and the Steinbeck News-letter , semiannual publications of the John Steinbeck Society. Tetsumaro Hayashi, one of the pioneers in Steinbeck scholarship, also established a special Steinbeck Collection at the Alexander Bracken Library, Ball State University.
Steinbeck has been particularly fortunate to have attracted the attention of skilled bibliographers. See John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, compiled by Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse S. Crisler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hayashi compiled both A New Steinbeck Bibliography, 1929-1971 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1973) and A New Steinbeck Bibliography, 1971-1981 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1983). These volumes have been supplemented by Michael J. Meyer’s The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography, 1982-1996 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1998).
OTHER MAJOR WORKS BY JOHN STEINBECK
Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1944.
East of Eden. New York: Viking, 1953.
The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939.
In Dubious Battle. New York: Viking, 1936.
Of Mice and Men. New York: Viking, 1937.
The Red Pony. New York: Viking, 1937.
Tortilla Flat. New York: Viking, 1935.
Travels with Charley. New York: Viking, 1962.
The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Viking, 1961.
WORKS ABOUT JOHN STEINBECK
Benson, Jackson J. Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
———. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984.
DeMott, Robert, ed. Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Art. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1996.
Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1963.
French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994.
Kiernan, Thomas. The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974.
Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature an
d Myth. New York: Crowell, 1978.
———. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut gers University Press, 1958.
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