The Wayward Bus

I read this over the past couple of days – yes I know I said I would be reading George Eliot, but I’ve decided I want to get a print copy, so that’s on hold until it gets here. The one copy the library had is checked out. Who are you, fellow-Eliot-reader-in-Birmingham?)

Oh, where was I?

Yes, for some reason, this drifted into view, so I started it, didn’t hate it, and then finished it.

I’m not a huge Steinbeck fan. My favorite of his are The Pearl and Of Mice and Men. I don’t like Grapes of Wrath. I did read Tortilla Flats – somehow in conjunction with our trip to Monterey many moons ago – but I don’t remember what I thought of it. He can be a beautiful stylist, and his descriptions of California are rightfully iconic, but ultimately, it seems, the storytelling falls short.

That said, The Wayward Bus was not a bad way to spend 3-4 hours of my time (I know how long it was because I borrowed the book via the Internet Archive, and you could only borrow it for one hour at a time….), and far better than some waste of a Netflix binge.

I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I’ll try to use this as a starting point to think about some things out loud.

The Wayward Bus is of the genre in which a bunch of people are brought together, face a crisis, and through that crisis, we learn about them, and maybe a couple of them learn about themselves, and maybe some of us learn bigger lessons about life, and everyone’s humanity is explored. Think every disaster movie ever made, think Stagecoach, think The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Here’s what I enjoyed:

Steinbeck’s description of the landscape. When I think about California, I think about the current hellscape, and I think, who would want to live there…and then I go there (it’s been a while, but still) or I read someone like Steinbeck and…I get it.

It was a nice compact grouping of buildings, functional and pleasant. The Rebel Corners of the Blankens’ time had been a miserable, dirty, and suspicious place, but the Chicoys flourished here. There was money in the bank and a degree of security and happiness.

This island covered by the huge trees could be seen for miles. No one ever had to look for road signs to find Rebel Corners and the road to San Juan de la Cruz. In the great valley the grain fields flattened away toward the east, to the foothills and to the high mountains, and toward the west they ended nearer in the rounded hills where the live oaks sat in black splotches. In the summer the yellow heat shimmered and burned and glared on the baking hills, and the shade of the great trees over the Corners was a thing to look forward to and to remember. In the winter when the heavy rains fell, the restaurant was a warm place of coffee and chili beans and pie.

In the deep spring when the grass was green on fields and foothills, when the lupines and poppies made a splendid blue and gold earth, when the great trees awakened in yellow-green young leaves, then there was no more lovely place in the world. It was no beauty you could ignore by being used to it. It caught you in the throat in the morning and made a pain of pleasure in the pit of your stomach when the sun went down over it. The sweet smell of the lupines and of the grass set you breathing nervously, set you panting almost sexually. And it was in this season of flowering and growth, though it was still before daylight, that Juan Chicoy came out to the bus carrying an electric lantern. Pimples Carson, his apprentice-mechanic, stumbled sleepily behind him.

The lunchroom windows were still dark. Against the eastern hills not even a grayness had begun to form. It was so much night that the owls were still shrieking over the fields. Juan Chicoy came near to the bus which stood in front of the garage. It looked, in the light of the lantern, like a large, silver-windowed balloon. Pimples Carson, still not really awake, stood with his hands in his pockets, shivering, not because it was cold but because he was very sleepy.

A little wind blew in over the fields and brought the smell of lupine and the smell of a quickening earth, frantic with production.

The glimpse into the period and the lives of the characters in that period: lower middle-class, working class, businessmen, women who are independent or seeking to be so, Hispanics. It’s illuminating.

This paragraph, describing the thoughts of a family of three (parents and adult daughter) on the bus on their way to catch a plane for a vacation to Mexico:

Her body and her mind were sluggish and lazy, and deep down she fought a tired envy of the people who, so she thought, experienced good things while she went through life a gray cloud in a gray room. Having few actual perceptions, she lived by rules. Education is good. Self-control is necessary. Everything in its time and place. Travel is broadening. And it was this last axiom which had forced her finally on the vacation to Mexico.

How she reached her conclusions not even she knew. It was a long, slow process built up of hints, suggestions, accidents, thousands of them, until finally, in their numbers, they forced the issue. The truth was that she didn’t want to go to Mexico. She just wanted to come back to her friends having been to Mexico. Her husband didn’t want to go at all. He was doing it for his family and because he hoped it would do him good in a cultural way. And Mildred wanted to go, but not with her parents. She wanted to meet new and strange people and through such contacts to become new and strange herself. Mildred felt that she had great covered wells of emotion in her, and she probably had. Nearly everyone has.

She just wanted to come back to her friends having been to Mexico. Perfect.

Glimpses of religious faith. There’s not much, but par for the course, what there is – is Catholic.

And another. It was evening and a shining horse was rubbing his lovely neck on a fence and the quail were calling and there was a sound of dropping water somewhere. His breath came short with excitement just remembering it.

And another. He rode in an old cart with a girl cousin. She was older than he–he couldn’t remember what she looked like. The horse shied at a piece of paper and she fell against him, and to right herself she put out her hand and touched his leg, and delight bloomed in his stomach and his brain ached with delight.

And another. Standing at midnight in a great, dim cathedral with a sharp, barbaric smell of copal smarting his nose. He held a skinny little candle with a white silk bow tied about it halfway up. And like a dream, the sweet murmur of the mass came from far away at the high altar and the drowsy loveliness drew down over him.

Juan’s muscles relaxed and he slept in the straw of the deserted barn. And the timid mice sensed his sleep and came out from under the straw and played busily and the rain whispered quietly on the barn roof.

Finally.

They made a movie of The Wayward Bus. I took a quick look via the Internet Archive. It stars, among others, Joan Collins and Jayne Mansfield. It did not get good reviews and my quick run-through confirms it’s mostly terrible.

Shocking, I know, considering the poster.

But it prompted me to think, one more time, about the difference between print and film.

How many times have you read a book and then felt, Oh, I’d love to see these characters brought to life….and then…

…sometimes been pleased and satisfied…

…been disappointed?

It seems as if the print-to-film bridge is more successful with children’s literature than adult’s. Well, at least non-genre adults.

I wasn’t expecting to find a film adaptation of The Wayward Bus to meet any expectations, but it was startling to see how far off it was and how the plot and character dynamics were changed with, even just with my quick look, the result being a flattening and draining of nuance.

The point?

The imaginative reach of a very good writer doing middling work is, for me, more powerful than almost any screen adaptation.

The Wayward Bus wasn’t great literature, but even with its shortcomings, it was absorbing, and in the midst of the words, I had the freedom to imagine and to engage, and the images, sounds and human tensions Steinbeck’s words brought to life in my brain were far more expansive and interesting than the flat and formulaic images and situations in the film, the caricatures that weren’t even close to being real people.

I suppose that is why, when it comes to film and television, I respond far more strongly that original concepts that aren’t based on literature.

For me, books have always been a gift of freedom. The freedom to imagine, to engage, to explore.

But then, I have to say, even as a child, there was a desire to see these characters and situations “in real life.” I recall at times wondering if that could possibly be a part of the afterlife: you’d be there, your friends and family would be there, but then so would the Borrowers and Fawn, Charlotte and Wilbur, and Stuart Little and Harriet the Spy?

So no, I don’t condemn the attempt to translate page to screen, to see beloved or reviled fictional characters in the flesh, but the truth seems to be that with some exceptions, the less tied the film adaptation is to the original source, the better it is as a discrete work.

I say that, based on nothing, mind you.

Scarlett says “Fiddle-dee-dee” to my ramblings.