The Wayward Bus (3 page)

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).

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.

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 and Myth
. New York: Crowell, 1978.

 

———.
The Wide World of John Steinbeck
. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut gers University Press, 1958.

 

Marks, Lester Jay.
Thematic Design in the Novels of John Steinbeck
. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.

 

McCarthy, Paul.
John Steinbeck
. New York: Unger, 1980.

 

Millichap, Joseph R.
Steinbeck and Film
. New York: Unger, 1983.

Owens, Louis.
John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America
. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

 

Parini, Jay.
John Steinbeck: A Biography
. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995.

 

Timmerman, John H.
John Steinbeck's Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken
. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

Astro, Richard. “Steinbeck's Postwar Trilogy: A Return to Nature and the Natural Man,”
Twentieth Century Literature
16 (April 1970), 109- 22.

Busch, Christopher S. “Steinbeck's
The Wayward Bus
: An Affirmation of the Frontier Myth,”
Steinbeck Quarterly
25 (Summer-Fall 1992), 98-108.

 

Ditsky, John. “Some Second Thoughts About the Ending of
The Wayward Bus
: A Note,”
University of Windsor Review
20 (Fall-Winter 1987), 85-88.

 

———. “
The Wayward Bus
: Love and Time in America,”
San Jose Studies
1 (November 1975), 89-101.

———. “Work, Blood, and
The Wayward Bus
,” in
After The Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck
, ed. Donald V. Coers, Paul D. Ruffin, and Robert J. DeMott. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994, 136 -47.

 

Gonzales, Bobbi, and Mimi Gladstein. “
The Wayward Bus
: Steinbeck's Misogynistic Manifesto?” in
Rediscovering Steinbeck: Revisionist Views of His Art, Politics, and Intellect
, ed. Cliff Lewis and Carroll Britch. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1989, 157-73.