The Wayward Bus
Encyclopedia
The Wayward Bus is a novel by American
author John Steinbeck
, originally published in 1947. Steinbeck dedicated this novel to "Gwyn", presumably a reference to his second wife Gwyndolyn Conger. (They divorced less than a year after The Wayward Bus was published.) The novel's epigraph is a passage from Everyman
, with its archaic English intact; the quotation refers to the transitory nature of humanity.
Although considered one of Steinbeck's weaker novels at the time of its original publication, The Wayward Bus was financially more successful than any of his previous works.
This novel takes place firmly within "Steinbeck country": most of the narrative occurs at Rebel Corners, a crossroads 42 miles south of San Ysidro, California. Juan Chicoy (half-Mexican, half-Irish) maintains a small bus, nicknamed "Sweetheart". He earns his living as a mechanic, and by ferrying passengers between Rebel Corners and San Juan de la Cruz. The larger Greyhound Bus Company
serves both of those locations on separate routes, but does not have service connecting the two.
Juan and his wife Alice also own a small lunch counter at Rebel Corners. The Chicoys supplement their income by selling food, coffee and candy to people who pass through on the bus route. Rebel Corners is such an obscure place that nobody actually lives there except for the Chicoys and their employees of the moment. Alice is devoted to her marriage (the sex is good) but is in all other ways a deeply unhappy woman, who despises and distrusts all other women.
The Chicoys have two employees: one is a teenager named Ed Carson, who works as Juan's assistant mechanic and general helper. Carson claims to be descended from the famous frontiersman Kit Carson
, and he wants to be called "Kit", but he is usually called "Pimples" because of his extreme facial acne
. Pimples Carson (as he is identified through most of the novel) is constantly helping himself to cake or candy from the lunch counter, telling Alice to deduct it from his wages. Alice, deeply suspicious of everyone but her husband, asserts that Carson's "tab" for the food and sweets he consumes has exceeded what her husband is paying him; she also accuses Carson of stealing food.
The lunch counter's other employee is Norma, a young waitress. Because of Alice's bad temper and misogyny
, waitresses tend not to last long at Rebel Corners: Norma is merely the latest in a long series of waitresses. Norma is obsessed with film star Clark Gable
. She writes long fan letters to Gable which she mails to him at his studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
, but these are never answered. Norma maintains a semi-paranoid delusion that there is an employee at MGM who maliciously intercepts Norma's letters so that Gable will never find out she is in love with him. At one point, Norma claims to be Gable's cousin.
A family of three, on vacation, have been forced to spend the night at Rebel Corners because the bus, named 'Sweetheart', needed repair. Juan, Alice, Norma and Pimples gave up their beds to the travellers and spend the night sitting up in the diner. The family now hopes to travel to San Juan on Juan Chicoy's bus: these are self-important businessman Elliott Pritchard, his wife Bernice and their daughter Mildred, a college student. The novel's description of Mr. Pritchard is an example of Steinbeck's concise character delineation: "One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players."
Two more transients are waiting for the bus. One of these is Ernest Horton, a traveling salesman for a novelties company. Horton makes a very colorful entrance in this novel: he limps into the lunch counter, claiming to have injured his foot in a road accident. He then takes off his shoe, revealing a bloody sock. He removes the sock, exposing a badly maimed foot. As soon as this gets the desired response, Horton peels off the "injury": it's actually one of the gag novelties made by his company. Horton is a frustrated man who hopes to launch one or more of his many get-rich ideas, but lacks the funding to put them into practice. His favored project is a kit for men who cannot afford formal attire: a set of satin lapels and satin trouser stripes that can convert a black business suit into a tuxedo
.
The other transient is a young blonde woman whose face and curvaceous figure attracts male attention. This woman's real name is never disclosed: she is always passing through somewhere on the way to somewhere else, and so she uses a series of false names in her encounters with men she never expects to meet again. Shortly after she arrives at Rebel Corners, she sees an advertisement for Camel cigarettes near an oak tree, so she introduces herself as Camille Oaks. (She is identified by this alias through the rest of the novel.) Later, seeing an advertisement that reads "Chesterfields: They Satisfy", she claims to be a dental nurse employed by Dr. T.S. Chesterfield. In fact, she is a stripper
who earns her living performing at stag functions. Camille Oaks has a low opinion of men, possibly stemming from the type of men she meets. She respects the very few men who are honest enough to offer her a sexual proposition right away, but she has no patience for the men who more typically waste her time by trying to be "friends" with her, and who only gradually reveal their true intent.
One chapter of the novel is a sympathetic depiction of George, a low-paid Negro who works as a "swamper" at the Greyhound bus depot, cleaning the buses and retrieving lost property. George finds a wallet containing $100, a windfall by his standards. He schemes to keep the money, but is seen handling the wallet by another employee. Louie, a white bus driver, returns the wallet to its owner, promising to split any reward money evenly with George. Louie receives a decent reward but then cheats George, telling him that the owner's reward was only a dollar ... all of which Louie "generously" gives to George. As George never interacts with the characters at Rebel Corners, it is interesting that Steinbeck made room for this vignette which is irrelevant to the main narrative.
Very little actually happens in The Wayward Bus. Norma discovers Alice reading her letter to Clark Gable and after a lifetime of mistreatment she stands up for herself by quietly packing her cardboard suitcase ignoring Alice's defense, Norma collects some money from the register and walks out to embark Sweetheart for the next trip to San Juan.
Juan has made this bus run many times, and he is bored with the dull routine. This time, however, the heavy rain that has fallen makes a bridge unsafe, and so he asks the passengers to decide whether to return to Rebel Corners or attempt to reach their destination via an old dirt road. They choose the road. En route, he deliberately runs the bus into a ditch, telling the passengers it was an accident. The symbolism here is, by Steinbeck's standards, unusually heavy-handed: Juan, whose life is trapped in a figurative rut, escapes it by driving into a literal rut.
The "accident" has temporarily stranded Juan and his passengers in a remote area. While they are waiting for Juan to seek help on foot, a walk of four miles, Pritchard engages Camille in conversation and expresses interest in helping her in her "career": she recognizes this as the opening gambit a seduction, and she turns him down venomously. Pritchard assaults his own wife, partly in anger at her and partly to regain his self-importance after Camille's rejection.
Juan, who has no intention of returning to the bus, plans to escape his life and marriage by returning to Mexico. He soon walks off the road to seek shelter in a deserted farmhouse, where he falls asleep in a barn. Pritchard's daughter Mildred, strongly attracted to him already, follows him and they have sex, but it ends up lacking in fulfillment and pleasure for both characters. Their distant focus on the experience along with awkward and dismissive dialogue implies personal regret soon afterward. Eventually Juan and Mildred return, the bus is driven out of the rut, and everyone gets back on. The novel ends with San Juan de la Cruz visible in the distance.
was released in 1957, with a largely obscure cast. Much of the dramatic action in Steinbeck's novel consists of internal monologue; the film version is unable to match this.
The movie retains some minor interest because two actresses in the cast have modern cult followings: Jayne Mansfield
(Camille Oaks) and Joan Collins
(Alice Chicoy). The film was released in May 1957 at the height of Mansfield's popularity and enjoyed some box office success and good notices.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
, originally published in 1947. Steinbeck dedicated this novel to "Gwyn", presumably a reference to his second wife Gwyndolyn Conger. (They divorced less than a year after The Wayward Bus was published.) The novel's epigraph is a passage from Everyman
Everyman (play)
The Somonyng of Everyman , usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15th-century English morality play. Like John Bunyan's novel Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman examines the question of Christian salvation by use of allegorical characters, and what Man must do to attain it...
, with its archaic English intact; the quotation refers to the transitory nature of humanity.
Although considered one of Steinbeck's weaker novels at the time of its original publication, The Wayward Bus was financially more successful than any of his previous works.
Plot summary
No single character dominates The Wayward Bus. The viewpoint shifts frequently from one character to another, often taking the form of internal monologue so that we are experiencing a given character's thoughts. Much of the novel's length is simply devoted to establishing and delineating the various characters.This novel takes place firmly within "Steinbeck country": most of the narrative occurs at Rebel Corners, a crossroads 42 miles south of San Ysidro, California. Juan Chicoy (half-Mexican, half-Irish) maintains a small bus, nicknamed "Sweetheart". He earns his living as a mechanic, and by ferrying passengers between Rebel Corners and San Juan de la Cruz. The larger Greyhound Bus Company
Greyhound Lines
Greyhound Lines, Inc., based in Dallas, Texas, is an intercity common carrier of passengers by bus serving over 3,700 destinations in the United States, Canada and Mexico, operating under the well-known logo of a leaping greyhound. It was founded in Hibbing, Minnesota, USA, in 1914 and...
serves both of those locations on separate routes, but does not have service connecting the two.
Juan and his wife Alice also own a small lunch counter at Rebel Corners. The Chicoys supplement their income by selling food, coffee and candy to people who pass through on the bus route. Rebel Corners is such an obscure place that nobody actually lives there except for the Chicoys and their employees of the moment. Alice is devoted to her marriage (the sex is good) but is in all other ways a deeply unhappy woman, who despises and distrusts all other women.
The Chicoys have two employees: one is a teenager named Ed Carson, who works as Juan's assistant mechanic and general helper. Carson claims to be descended from the famous frontiersman Kit Carson
Kit Carson
Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson was an American frontiersman and Indian fighter. Carson left home in rural present-day Missouri at age 16 and became a Mountain man and trapper in the West. Carson explored the west to California, and north through the Rocky Mountains. He lived among and married...
, and he wants to be called "Kit", but he is usually called "Pimples" because of his extreme facial acne
Acne
Acne is a general term used for acneiform eruptions. It is usually used as a synonym for acne vulgaris, but may also refer to:*Acne aestivalis*Acne conglobata*Acne cosmetica*Acne fulminans*Acne keloidalis nuchae*Acne mechanica...
. Pimples Carson (as he is identified through most of the novel) is constantly helping himself to cake or candy from the lunch counter, telling Alice to deduct it from his wages. Alice, deeply suspicious of everyone but her husband, asserts that Carson's "tab" for the food and sweets he consumes has exceeded what her husband is paying him; she also accuses Carson of stealing food.
The lunch counter's other employee is Norma, a young waitress. Because of Alice's bad temper and misogyny
Misogyny
Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...
, waitresses tend not to last long at Rebel Corners: Norma is merely the latest in a long series of waitresses. Norma is obsessed with film star Clark Gable
Clark Gable
William Clark Gable , known as Clark Gable, was an American film actor most famous for his role as Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh...
. She writes long fan letters to Gable which she mails to him at his studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...
, but these are never answered. Norma maintains a semi-paranoid delusion that there is an employee at MGM who maliciously intercepts Norma's letters so that Gable will never find out she is in love with him. At one point, Norma claims to be Gable's cousin.
A family of three, on vacation, have been forced to spend the night at Rebel Corners because the bus, named 'Sweetheart', needed repair. Juan, Alice, Norma and Pimples gave up their beds to the travellers and spend the night sitting up in the diner. The family now hopes to travel to San Juan on Juan Chicoy's bus: these are self-important businessman Elliott Pritchard, his wife Bernice and their daughter Mildred, a college student. The novel's description of Mr. Pritchard is an example of Steinbeck's concise character delineation: "One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players."
Two more transients are waiting for the bus. One of these is Ernest Horton, a traveling salesman for a novelties company. Horton makes a very colorful entrance in this novel: he limps into the lunch counter, claiming to have injured his foot in a road accident. He then takes off his shoe, revealing a bloody sock. He removes the sock, exposing a badly maimed foot. As soon as this gets the desired response, Horton peels off the "injury": it's actually one of the gag novelties made by his company. Horton is a frustrated man who hopes to launch one or more of his many get-rich ideas, but lacks the funding to put them into practice. His favored project is a kit for men who cannot afford formal attire: a set of satin lapels and satin trouser stripes that can convert a black business suit into a tuxedo
Tuxedo
A tuxedo is a type of semi-formal dress for men.Tuxedo may also refer to:-Places:Canada* Tuxedo, Winnipeg, Manitoba, a city neighborhood** Tuxedo , a provincial electoral district in Manitoba...
.
The other transient is a young blonde woman whose face and curvaceous figure attracts male attention. This woman's real name is never disclosed: she is always passing through somewhere on the way to somewhere else, and so she uses a series of false names in her encounters with men she never expects to meet again. Shortly after she arrives at Rebel Corners, she sees an advertisement for Camel cigarettes near an oak tree, so she introduces herself as Camille Oaks. (She is identified by this alias through the rest of the novel.) Later, seeing an advertisement that reads "Chesterfields: They Satisfy", she claims to be a dental nurse employed by Dr. T.S. Chesterfield. In fact, she is a stripper
Stripper
A stripper is a professional erotic dancer who performs a contemporary form of striptease at strip club establishments, public exhibitions, and private engagements. Unlike in burlesque, the performer in the modern Americanized form of stripping minimizes the interaction of customer and dancer,...
who earns her living performing at stag functions. Camille Oaks has a low opinion of men, possibly stemming from the type of men she meets. She respects the very few men who are honest enough to offer her a sexual proposition right away, but she has no patience for the men who more typically waste her time by trying to be "friends" with her, and who only gradually reveal their true intent.
One chapter of the novel is a sympathetic depiction of George, a low-paid Negro who works as a "swamper" at the Greyhound bus depot, cleaning the buses and retrieving lost property. George finds a wallet containing $100, a windfall by his standards. He schemes to keep the money, but is seen handling the wallet by another employee. Louie, a white bus driver, returns the wallet to its owner, promising to split any reward money evenly with George. Louie receives a decent reward but then cheats George, telling him that the owner's reward was only a dollar ... all of which Louie "generously" gives to George. As George never interacts with the characters at Rebel Corners, it is interesting that Steinbeck made room for this vignette which is irrelevant to the main narrative.
Very little actually happens in The Wayward Bus. Norma discovers Alice reading her letter to Clark Gable and after a lifetime of mistreatment she stands up for herself by quietly packing her cardboard suitcase ignoring Alice's defense, Norma collects some money from the register and walks out to embark Sweetheart for the next trip to San Juan.
Juan has made this bus run many times, and he is bored with the dull routine. This time, however, the heavy rain that has fallen makes a bridge unsafe, and so he asks the passengers to decide whether to return to Rebel Corners or attempt to reach their destination via an old dirt road. They choose the road. En route, he deliberately runs the bus into a ditch, telling the passengers it was an accident. The symbolism here is, by Steinbeck's standards, unusually heavy-handed: Juan, whose life is trapped in a figurative rut, escapes it by driving into a literal rut.
The "accident" has temporarily stranded Juan and his passengers in a remote area. While they are waiting for Juan to seek help on foot, a walk of four miles, Pritchard engages Camille in conversation and expresses interest in helping her in her "career": she recognizes this as the opening gambit a seduction, and she turns him down venomously. Pritchard assaults his own wife, partly in anger at her and partly to regain his self-importance after Camille's rejection.
Juan, who has no intention of returning to the bus, plans to escape his life and marriage by returning to Mexico. He soon walks off the road to seek shelter in a deserted farmhouse, where he falls asleep in a barn. Pritchard's daughter Mildred, strongly attracted to him already, follows him and they have sex, but it ends up lacking in fulfillment and pleasure for both characters. Their distant focus on the experience along with awkward and dismissive dialogue implies personal regret soon afterward. Eventually Juan and Mildred return, the bus is driven out of the rut, and everyone gets back on. The novel ends with San Juan de la Cruz visible in the distance.
Adaptations
A film version of The Wayward BusThe Wayward Bus (film)
The Wayward Bus is a 1957 drama film released by 20th Century Fox that starred Jayne Mansfield, Joan Collins, Dan Dailey and Rick Jason. The film was based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck.-Production background:...
was released in 1957, with a largely obscure cast. Much of the dramatic action in Steinbeck's novel consists of internal monologue; the film version is unable to match this.
The movie retains some minor interest because two actresses in the cast have modern cult followings: Jayne Mansfield
Jayne Mansfield
Jayne Mansfield was an American actress working both in Hollywood and on the Broadway theatre...
(Camille Oaks) and Joan Collins
Joan Collins
Joan Henrietta Collins, OBE , is an English actress, author, and columnist. Born in Paddington and raised in Maida Vale, Collins grew up during the Second World War. At the age of nine, she made her stage debut in A Doll's House and after attending school, she was classically trained as an actress...
(Alice Chicoy). The film was released in May 1957 at the height of Mansfield's popularity and enjoyed some box office success and good notices.