John Steinbeck's Sweetheart: the cosmic American bus.(Essays)(Essay)

It isn't going to take a little time to write but a long time and I don't care, for my bus is something large in my mind. It is a cosmic bus holding sparks and back firing into the Milky Way and turning the corner of Betelgeuse without a hand signal. And Juan Chicoy the driver is all the god [sic] the fathers you ever saw driving a six cylinder broken down, battered world through time and space. If I can do it well The Wayward Bus will be a pleasant thing. (John Steinbeck, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer)

I realized I was making a serious mistake. You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or--and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America--you cannot afford a car.... I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semiconscious sleep in which you incorporate in your dreams the things going on around you--the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamed of the bus plunging over a cliff face.... When I awoke there ... was a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank gray hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously.... The Indian man was still there, looking miserable.... I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. (Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)

Steinbeck's account of the book project that was to become The Wayward Bus surely offers the most sublime vision of buses, bus travel, and bus drivers ever to appear in English. The 1947 novel tells the tale of a socially diverse group of unhappy travelers, dreaming of Mexico and Los Angeles, who must confront each other and their selves when their bus--familiarly dubbed "Sweetheart"--bogs down on a muddy southern California back road. Steinbeck's correspondence shows how ambitious he was for The Wayward Bus, and the book was much anticipated. Contemporary reviews, however, were mostly lukewarm, and the novel has never attracted much interest since. Multiple factors contribute to a text's reception, but I wonder if at least some of the disappointment The Wayward Bus evokes is due simply to Steinbeck's choice of vehicle. The creator of one of American literature's most famous cars, the Joad family's jalopy in The Grapes of Wrath, went on to write about a bus, a plebeian mode of travel associated not only with poverty but also lack of agency. The Joads themselves control their custom-built Hudson, no matter how dilapidated and undependable it may be. Sweetheart's passengers, in contrast, have no choice but to put their faith in Juan, "all the god the fathers you ever saw."

In The Sixth Sense, that the psychiatrist played by Bruce Willis once takes the bus is an important clue that he is actually dead: to show a middle-class American on a bus is to signal that he or she is somehow out of place. While The Wayward Bus is rare in limning the transcendent potential of bus travel, its use of the bus as a staging ground for class contact is typical. Indeed, Steinbeck's book reprises John Ford's Stagecoach, a depiction of the earliest American "bus." (1) Throughout their short history, buses have been associated with the nation's working- and under-classes, with a wide and often disenfranchised motley crew. Both Steinbeck's ultimately hopeful presentation of travelers working in concert and Bryson's rueful account share a belief that the bus is a disruptive, potentially violent site that brings people of all sorts together. The hit movie Speed expressly figures the potential of a banal bus journey to erupt into a terrifying ride, as well as the forms of community that can ensue. (2) To ride the bus--an unruly, "wayward" vehicle that in both actual and social ways can stray off sanctioned tracks--is to be out of control.

Of course, real American bus journeys are generally innocuous in comparison to those in developing countries, which often entail treacherous roads, overcrowding, breakdowns, on-board livestock, and police or military checkpoints. In describing a voyage of belching seat companions, crying babies, and erratic driving, Bill Bryson itemizes not "misery" but mild discomfort. However, even discomfort can seem outrageous in such a wealthy nation. A cluster of factors makes Americans experience bus travel as pernicious: trips that can last for days and cover thousands of miles; Greyhound Lines' industry dominance coupled with its notoriously poor customer relations; the huge gap between the American underclass and middle class; a highly multicultural population; and perhaps most especially, the supremacy of the private automobile. Even for Americans who do not own one, the car makes public buses feel like an anomaly.

Doreen Massey, the British spatial theorist, uses the city bus to represent quotidian routine as opposed to postmodern dislocation: "Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes" (Massey 1994, 163). For Massey--and many of her first-world counterparts--although the bus may be frustrating and inconvenient, it is nothing if not dull. Yet in America, the bus is often represented as the quotidian's frightening opposite. Buses demand close and prolonged contact with a range of strangers, always an eclectic and often an eccentric group. Their lack of provisions for reserving seats especially lends buses to middle-class nightmare. Whereas trains are made up of cars once divided by race and still divided by class, it has always been hard to construct real boundaries on buses. The bus's alluring, menacing populist potential made bus integration a rallying civil rights issue, with a history reaching all the way back to Sojourner Truth's demand that she be allowed to board a Washington, D. C., streetcar. That disfranchised black and white individuals are brought together on a recently integrated city bus does much to account for the power of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything that Rises Must Converge." In this charged arena, an elderly white woman finds community in her approving observation, "I see we have the bus to ourselves" (2000, 410), while her son regrets that no black passengers are present so that he might stage his racial tolerance. An African American woman boards and, enraged by the mother's patronizing treatment of her own young son, physically assaults her.

Whereas road books and movies featuring car travel are legion, dedicated "bus books" like Steinbeck's are scarce. Yet although often only fleetingly, buses perpetually appear in American literature, music, and film, associated with urban and rural extremes; minutely mapped city spaces and unknowably vast (often western) open ones. The bus is a symbol of America, alluding to a nation huge in size but local in character, that at once evokes the mundane and the extraordinary. Its resonances are highly distinct. The bus, for example, is the vehicle of choice for the small-town boy moving to the city to make good. A cinematic staple: a bus rolls up to a rural crossroads and a single passenger embuses to set off for college or the military; life will never be the same. An equally familiar motif is that of the passenger whose presence on the bus attests to an uneasy confluence of different life stages. Having left behind a provincial site of origins for a more cosmopolitan future, she occasionally uses the bus to make troubled visits back to a home that is no longer experienced as such; the bus connotes a troubled nostalgia. The narrator of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here recounts, "I'd been to Wisconsin a million times, on slow Greyhound buses during college, where there was always one very young woman in back, her hair in a bandana, hitting her kid, saying 'Shit-up,' softly before each smack, her voice pure as resignation" (1987, 481). The film Frankie and Johnny opens with melancholy Frankie on a bus to Altoona, Pennsylvania, the bygone scene of an unhappy childhood that she fled for New York City and acting dreams. Grace Paley's "In the Bus" draws upon this recurring image of bus travel as junction in staging the end of girlhood on the bus: "Somewhere between Greenfield and Holyoke/snow became rain/ and a child passed through me.... / On the highway that lies/ across miles of stubble/ and tobacco barns our bus speeding/ speeding disordered the slanty rain" (1992, 124).