The Wayward Bus (2 page)

The “lead” to which Steinbeck referred, of course, was the epigram to the fable from the late-fifteenth-century English morality play
Everyman
. “The Bus” is a moralizing book, even if its moral is neither obvious nor particularly reassuring. Like a medieval morality play or any drama constructed according to the classical “unities” (including Eugene O'Neill's
Long Day's Journey into Night
), Steinbeck's story transpires in the course of a single day, opening before dawn in the lunchroom at Rebel Corners and ending after dusk as the bus nears its destination of San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross). Moreover, just as the characters in
Everyman
are personifications (for example, Beauty, Strength, Fellowship, Good Deeds),
The Wayward Bus
is a type of allegory temporally set in spring, the traditional season of pilgrimages, with archetypal or representative figures whose names denote their roles. Though Steinbeck had originally set the story in Mexico, he transferred it to his familiar Salinas Valley, where he was born and lived the first eighteen years of his life. Still, none of the place names in the novel, with the notable exceptions of such southern cities as Los Angeles, Hollywood, and San Diego, refer to actual sites. There is a Santa Cruz, California, of course, but no San Juan de la Cruz, as in the novel; and there is a San Ysidro, California, but it is located in San Diego County, nowhere near the San Ysidro of the story. Put another way, Steinbeck moved his narrative from Mexico to an imaginary central California because the novel is, at its top or most literal level, a commentary on post-World War II America.

Steinbeck establishes the parameters of his topical satire in the opening pages of the novel. The crossroads of Rebel Corners, where Juan and Alice Chicoy run the garage and lunchroom, was established during the Civil War. After the war its founders, Confederate sympathizers named Blankens—ciphers destined to disappear, as their name implies—became “lazy and quarrelsome and full of hatred and complaints, as every defeated nation does.” The novel appeared early in the cold war, of course, in the midst of a national debate over policy toward the defeated Axis powers. Only weeks later Secretary of State George C. Marshall would propose the European Reconstruction Act, better known as the Marshall Plan, designed to help European nations recover from the ravages of World War II and to contain Soviet expansion. The novel also contains a number of incidental references to World War II—to the draft, to rationing, to wage and price controls, as well as a subtle allusion in the first chapter to “Atom ites,” a new race of people who live in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. As Steinbeck wrote in his last book
America and Americans
(1966), “Under the pressure of war we finally made the atom bomb, and for reasons which seemed justifiable at the time we dropped it on two Japanese cities—and I think we finally frightened ourselves.” In the dialogue between Elliott Pritchard and the army veteran Ernest Horton in chapter 9, Steinbeck also glosses the then-current debate over how to integrate the discharged soldiers into a domestic economy most Americans believed was doomed to plunge into recession with the end of the war. In this sense, Steinbeck's novel considers the predicament of the returning soldiers much like William Wyler's movie
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946).

Steinbeck also recognizes other major social changes endemic to the postwar period: increasing commercialization, especially the commercialization of sex, and the new roles available to women. The lunchroom at Rebel Corners is decorated with calendar girls and Coca-Cola posters picturing beautiful women. Despite their brand name, Mother Mahoney's home-baked pies are baked in a factory, and Mother Mahoney, like Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker, is a figment of an advertiser's imagination. With a sort of rugged realism, Steinbeck insists on specifying the brands of cola drinks, candy bars, and cigarettes and the names of upscale Hollywood restaurants and hotels. Elliott Pritchard's gold nail pick, watch, and key chain and his wife Bernice's “three-quarter-length black fox coat” perfectly illustrate the phenomenon Thorstein Veblen had termed “conspicuous consumption” in
The Theory of the Leisure Class
. Steinbeck even refers to Bernice's coat as “the badge of their position.” Not that the Pritchards are the only culpable consumers. Bernice is no different from the cab driver who “tied a raccoon's tail on his radiator cap” and set a fashion trend. Camille's gold-digging friend Loraine extorts a mink coat from her boyfriend. Pimples sports a gold collar pin on the journey. Even the waitress Norma owns a black coat with a rabbit collar.

But the bourgeois Pritchards are unique in other ways to this jeremiad or chronicle of cultural decline. They maintain the mere façade of a perfect marriage. Bernice epitomizes a certain type of traditional wife, mother, and homemaker; her husband repeatedly addresses her as “little girl” and she replies to him in baby talk. As Steinbeck writes, he “had no idea that the world had changed” with the war. Elliott is the “president of a medium-sized corporation”—the reader never learns exactly what his company produces, though he takes credit for winning the war: “I've had no vacation since the war started. I've been making the implements of war that gave us the victory.” While he may seem little more than a caricatured capitalist—the organization man in the gray flannel suit who has wandered into the novel from leftist agitprop of the 1930s—he serves to make the point, as Steinbeck had written in
Cannery Row
(1944), that “All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls.” Like Juan's apprentice Pimples, who borrows most of his ideas from movies and radio, and Louie (aka “meat-face”), whose ideas about women are drawn from advertisements in pulp magazines, Elliott's notions about the standards of American success are gleaned from self-help manuals. He explains to Ernest how he can patent his idea to sell accessories for men's suits and then sell the patent to clothing manufacturers who would buy it to keep it off the market. Ernest takes the exact measure of the scheme and refers to it as “very high-class blackmail.” On her part, Bernice spends much of her time on the trip composing imaginary letters to a friend bragging about how much fun she is having. If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted, meretricious travel is a “fool's paradise,” Bernice Pritchard is the consummate fool.

The other women characters, however, silhouette the changes in women's status after the war. The Pritchards' daughter, Mildred, is a liberated young woman (or what passes for one in 1947), a type of postwar feminist, an iconoclast and an athlete with a no-nonsense attitude toward sex. At the age of twenty-one, she has experienced “two consummated love affairs which gave her great satisfaction and a steady longing for a relationship that would be constant.” Her behavior presages the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Alice, though a slatternly drunk, is not a traditional wife. She manages the lunchroom, just as many American women were employed outside the home during and after the war. To be sure, Juan and Alice maintain “separate spheres”: “Just as Juan usually had a succession of young apprentices to help him in the garage, so Alice hired a succession of girls to help her in the lunchroom.” When Pimples tries to help out in the kitchen, significantly enough, he burns the eggs. This traditional division of labor explains why Alice does not accompany the pilgrims on the bus, but remains in the café. Initially a pathetic figure, Norma fantasizes about Clark Gable and dreams of starring in movies like Curley's wife in Steinbeck's short novel
Of Mice and Men
(1937). Still, she is not utterly self-deluded. She exhibits “dignity” and “courage,” and despite her fantasies she was “not stupid. . . . Her high, long-legged dreams were one thing, but she could take care of herself, too.” She plans to work in restaurants and take leftover food home to save on expenses. As Steinbeck notes, the “greatest and best and most beautiful part of Norma lay behind her eyes, sealed and protected.” She even has an epiphany during the bus trip: “I can only be a waitress, but . . . I could maybe get to be a dental nurse.” In the end, she is ennobled by her ambition and self-knowledge, especially when she fends off Pimples' advances. She harbors the modest dream of an apartment “with a nice davenport and a radio,” “a stove and an icebox.” Finally, whatever else may be said of her, Camille Oaks is an independent woman. She may suffer the gaze of men, but she does not submit to their lust. She may be a stripper, but she is not a prostitute. She will never again be a “kept woman,” as her rebuff of Elliott makes clear. She “knew she was different from other girls, but she didn't quite know how.” Nor does she understand why men “fought like terriers” over her. But she is as hardy and sturdy, tall and graceful as the hardwood trees from which she takes her surname.

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.