The Wayward Bus Read Online Free Page A

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