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Anthony Gardner on Irma Kurtz, The Great American Bus Ride

Hound Dogs

When I was 18 I travelled around America by Greyhound bus. I still have the Hagstrom folding map I took with me, my gap-year odyssey marked out in black felt-tip pen: west from New York, skirting the Great Lakes; across the vast prairies of Minnesota and North Dakota; over the Rockies to Salt Lake City and San Francisco; back through Arizona, Texas and the Deep South. It was the first great adventure of my life – one that has yet to be surpassed.

My perception of Greyhounds was a romantic one, based on the song that inspired my journey: Paul Simon’s ‘America’. But in the years that followed I found surprisingly few references to them in popular culture. And not until I was asked to review Irma Kurtz’s The Great American Bus Ride (1993) did I come across a book that did justice to the extraordinary experience they offered.

Because Irma Kurtz was best known as the agony aunt for Cosmopolitan, I snootily assumed that she couldn’t be much of a writer. I soon realized my mistake. From the outset she proved the most engaging of companions: wise, compassionate and witty, with a beautiful turn of phrase, an excellent ear for dialogue, and a fine line in self-deprecation: ‘The truth is, I am a hussy of low appetites who always yearns shamelessly for rough travel, and I grab the chance whenever I can to arrive at my destination exhausted, knowing I’ve earned my goal the hard way. Greyhound and I were made for each other.’

To European eyes, Greyhound’s Americruisers with their red, white and blue livery look glamorous, even luxurious. But as Kurtz makes clear, no one in the automobile-obsessed USA takes the bus if they can help it. It is the preserve of the young, those down on their luck, and the mad; Greyhound depots, generally in the dodgiest part of town, are modern-day last-chance saloons. Yet for anyone keen to understand the country’s immensity and variety, there is no better form of transport.

Though Kurtz trav

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When I was 18 I travelled around America by Greyhound bus. I still have the Hagstrom folding map I took with me, my gap-year odyssey marked out in black felt-tip pen: west from New York, skirting the Great Lakes; across the vast prairies of Minnesota and North Dakota; over the Rockies to Salt Lake City and San Francisco; back through Arizona, Texas and the Deep South. It was the first great adventure of my life – one that has yet to be surpassed.

My perception of Greyhounds was a romantic one, based on the song that inspired my journey: Paul Simon’s ‘America’. But in the years that followed I found surprisingly few references to them in popular culture. And not until I was asked to review Irma Kurtz’s The Great American Bus Ride (1993) did I come across a book that did justice to the extraordinary experience they offered. Because Irma Kurtz was best known as the agony aunt for Cosmopolitan, I snootily assumed that she couldn’t be much of a writer. I soon realized my mistake. From the outset she proved the most engaging of companions: wise, compassionate and witty, with a beautiful turn of phrase, an excellent ear for dialogue, and a fine line in self-deprecation: ‘The truth is, I am a hussy of low appetites who always yearns shamelessly for rough travel, and I grab the chance whenever I can to arrive at my destination exhausted, knowing I’ve earned my goal the hard way. Greyhound and I were made for each other.’ To European eyes, Greyhound’s Americruisers with their red, white and blue livery look glamorous, even luxurious. But as Kurtz makes clear, no one in the automobile-obsessed USA takes the bus if they can help it. It is the preserve of the young, those down on their luck, and the mad; Greyhound depots, generally in the dodgiest part of town, are modern-day last-chance saloons. Yet for anyone keen to understand the country’s immensity and variety, there is no better form of transport. Though Kurtz travelled, as I did, from New York to California and back, her journey had a very different impetus to mine. Americanborn, she had lived as an expatriate for more than thirty years when she decided in her mid-fifties to explore ‘that most baffling of all places, my unknown homeland’. The stopping-points were chosen partly in homage to family history – her mother’s childhood home in Indiana; a favourite holiday resort in Florida – and partly on a whim. Fargo in North Dakota seemed a must ‘simply because I thought it was one of the least likely places in which I could ever find myself’. As both a native and a stranger, she is able to sketch the continent’s cities and landscape with a rare degree of understanding and objectivity. Imagining New York through the eyes of the Russian babushka next to her, she sees ‘Words, words, words, everywhere high and low. Words in neon waiting to blaze, words embossed, hand-painted . . . warnings, descriptions, names, jokes, enticements, profanities. In Moscow there is stone-gray visual silence everywhere; she must have been deafened by Manhattan.’ Crossing the plains of Oklahoma, Kurtz finds an epic quality in their flatness, such as the first pioneers must have wondered at:
It was bewitching and wild. Set anything rolling out there on the flat – a barrel of beer, a wagon wheel, an idea – and it’ll be bound to travel all the way around the world and come back from behind you. The way that state is made, when a Kansas mother sees her child off into adventures, she has to stand at her front door waving goodbye until nightfall. They say when the twisters blow over Kansas, with nothing in their way to stop them, they pick their way as daintily as geisha girls.
At the heart of the book, however, are the buses themselves: ‘the state without a zip code, the great moving community that is Greyhound USA’. The onboard geography never varies: the coveted front seats go to the old and infirm, or those so cantankerous that no one dares argue with them; the next dozen rows accommodate the more genteel passengers; the back is where the bad boys congregate. Men instinctively sit next to men, women next to women, whites next to whites, and so on. But each Greyhound has its own identity, determined by its driver, route and passengers. The bus Kurtz joins in St Louis is a party, noisy with gleeful running jokes; LA to Las Vegas is the gamblers’ express, on which a 10-year-old fleeces her grandmother at gin rummy. Footloose though Kurtz’s fellow-travellers are, few of them have any sense of the world beyond their homeland. ‘Are you a missionary?’ asks one on learning that Kurtz lives in England – and in some respects she is. While she only once confesses to being an agony aunt, her book could have been entitled Busman’s Holiday, so anxious are strangers to pour out their hearts to her. The parade of garrulous oddballs whose conversations she records becomes addictively fascinating. No sooner has she shaken off Vera – a troubled, oversized nurse from ‘an age when doorways were cast out of boulders’ – than she is buttonholed by a reformed alcoholic whose girlfriend has just drunk herself to death. Exhausted, Kurtz places herself next to someone she is quite sure will spare her his confidences, a quiet young Vietnamese. But no: she only has to glance at him to set him off.
‘My mom kicked me out last night in Seattle,’ he said. ‘I’m 23 years old and we’ve been in this country since I was seven, and she still treats me like a baby. Is that right? It is not the American way. Well, I’ve had all I can take . . .’
Among these glimpses of other lives are moments of deep pathos and despair. A little Amish girl brightens at the sight of a red ball, only to be re-enveloped by her solemn family; a beautiful, abused dancer becomes a ghost of herself as a sinister older man steps forward to meet her. But other encounters are life-affirming: a Japanese boy tends his frail grandfather with touching devotion; an apparently mismatched hobo couple prove on closer acquaintance to be ‘great and true lovers’. And Kurtz never loses her good humour for long, for at every stop there is the thrill of boarding a bus for a new destination: ‘a moment of the pure delight that gulls must feel when they trust their wings to the prevailing breeze’. The book is littered with wonderful throw-away lines, engaging metaphors and polished aphorisms. Of a needy divorcée: ‘She was entering the time of life when friends, and enemies, start to say what a fine-looking woman she used to be.’ Of Spanish-speaking passengers in California: ‘their rapid exchanges flew like freshly milled pepper, and spiced the air for our entry into San Francisco’. A Mormon film about the Nativity is so preposterous that ‘even the sheep cast incredulous looks at the camera’; a cemetery in New England is inhabited by feral cats, ‘descended perhaps from familiars that fled north three hundred years ago when things got too hot for them in Salem’. Kurtz’s narrative barely touches on her upbringing in America, but central to her quest is a grandfather she never knew. Behind a shopping centre in Denver she finds the remains of the sanatorium where he died of tuberculosis seventy-five years before, and to which her grandmother gave his beautifully bound set of the Jewish Encyclopaedia. The building is now a cancer research centre; the old library has long since been dismantled. But a sympathetic stranger suggests that she try the administrator’s office.
Behind a dignified desk, shelves reached nearly to the ceiling, and distributed on them were old books, all substantially bound. End to end, on the very top shelf, was a set of volumes in dark blue, lettered in gold. My guide fetched down the first in the row and gave it to me; it fell open in my hands. Ornately scrolled and bordered in front of me was my grandfather’s ex libris . . . [I] looked at my friend. His eyes were glowing; he’d shed years. My grandfather had entered his history too, and would ever be a part of him, as he was of me.
From time to time over the past three decades I have thought of retracing my journey through the States. Now that I have reached the age at which Irma Kurtz set out, I am filled with new admiration for her enterprise, and wonder whether I too would still have the resilience to face eight-hour bus rides and deserted midnight depots. But if anything could persuade me to reach for my rucksack again, it would be this book, with its unflagging sense of adventure and delight in the open road.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Anthony Gardner 2014


About the contributor

Anthony Gardner is often to be found on the No.52 bus to Notting Hill, though he wishes that its route didn’t include that irritating detour to the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s. He edits the Royal Society of Literature’s Review and is working on a novel which may include a journey by Greyhound.

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