I'd like to welcome this week's guest reviewer — Catherine from Constance Reader's Guide.
************************* About a hundred and fifty years ago, when I was in high school, and dinosaurs roamed around amidst the Model T Fords, I was what you would call, in the parlance, a "theater geek." I spent half my day in my traditional high school setting, and then at noon I was bused over to the Governor's School for the Arts, where my classmates and I learned to dance, sing, "act," swordfight, smoke cigarettes, build flats, paint scenery, and gossip over the loudspeaker without being overheard.
(We all took ourselves so seriously, then. I remember sitting around and talking about the motivations behind the character of the dancehall prostitute in Sweet Charity: had she been abandoned by a father figure? Had she grown up poor, during the Depression--is that why she was so fixated on finding a Big Spender to provide her with financial security?)
I'm laughing about it, now, as I type, but back then it was a big deal. I lived, breathed, and ate theater. I murmured lines from Arthur Miller as I walked to the bus stop and wrote glowing reviews of myself as characters in various Broadway plays in my journal. I read Eugene Ionesco for fun.
I snapped to my senses during senior year, sometime after getting a letter of acceptance to a conservatory up north, and realized that a life of dramatics isn't very secure, and renounced My Craft in favor of an English degree from a state school (heaps more secure, duh). But there is a part of me that will always be a theater kid, even if I haven't been in front of an audience in over ten years.
So when I came across this first edition copy of Sinclair Lewis'sBethel Merriday, and read the first line, "That was the first time anyone ever called her an actress--June 1, 1922, Bethel's sixth birthday," I knew I had to have this book, despite the hefty-ish price tag, because I was going to love it. And oh... I did. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Bethel's fledgling career as an actress, from her days of college Dramatics Societies, through her summer stock experience, to her year-long stint as an understudy with a traveling company performing Romeo and Juliet. Plenty of greasepaint and floodlights and lots of 1930s finger waves and gin fizzes to boot. That sounds pretty much like heaven, to me.
This book was surprising, coming from Sinclair Lewis. My only other foray into his oevre so far has been Main Street, which I loved, but which I found rather cutting and sarcastic. Bethel, by contrast, is heartbreakingly earnest in tone, sort of like Anne of Green Gables, if Anne of Green Gables had been written by Edna Ferber. Lewis was active in the theater, when he attended Yale University in the nineteen-aughts, and this book isn't a satire or a drama or a sociological critique of modern government: it is a love story, pure and simple. It's a theater geek's love letter to the stage.
Bethel is enchanting, but the true stars of this story are her fellow actors in the stage company. Somehow a rag-tag bunch becomes like a family, and it's darling to watch. And Lewis manages to convey in such an authentic way the struggles of an undiscovered actor:
[Bethel] walked to the office of Equity, the actors' organization, and, with a milling of other girl crusaders, studied the bulletin board for notices of who was casting, who was organizing a road company. She was not a member and not supposed to intrude there, but as she couldn't join Equity until she had a contract, and as she probably never would get a contract till she was a member of Equity, such trespass as hers was tolerated. The paradox which ruled all young actresses was that you couldn't get a job if you hadn't the experience, and you certainly could not get experience till you had a job, and so you just weren't going toget a job.
Pages later, unlucky Bethel is forced to turn to other lines of work to support herself while she searches:
Bethel asked of the girl elevator runner, "How do you go about getting a job like yours?" "You got to have experience before you can run an elevator," said the operator, as the floors slipped downward past them. "How do you get experience running an elevator if you don't get a chance to run an elevator?" sighed Bethel. The young woman looked at her with dark suspicion. "I don't know. But that's the rule."
Main Street was acerbically funny, but this is the type of quiet humor you get in Bethel Merriday. It's sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes frustrating, although I rather like that Lewis doesn't have Bethel vaunt to sudden fame. She's not anything special--just a girl who loves the theater, who makes a life for herself on the stage, like thousands of other girls who have some talent, and don't give up on their dreams. It's real, and refreshing and better than it would have been the other way.
There's a love story aspect here, and it's perfectly charming, but by far the most wondrous thing about this book--even the kids who aren't theater geeks can appreciate it--are the glimpses of small town America that Lewis offers. He excels in small town America, and is just the best at pointing out its quirks and beauties:
Station platforms and cues and shirred eggs with little farm sausages and No. 17 purple lining salve and the 7:47 A.M. and the rhumba on a revolving floor under lights changing from green to fog to crocus... down and across the mighty prairies of the Mississippi Valley: Iowa and South Dakota and Nebraska, where, through today's cornfields and cement roads, move the ghosts of the Mormon pioneers... St. Joseph, only it's really "St. Joe," with its bright hills above the Missouri River that are shrines to Jesse James... when she reached Nebraska, the Bethel who had been coddled in Connecticut as in cotton batting was certain she was practically in California, only a step more from Hawaii and China and Australia--yes, and perhaps really going there. She loved her tight New England as much as ever. But she had had a bath of greatness, and she came out of all this not a Yankee but an American.
And an American who, born in 1916, might live to see the fabulous Great Land of the year 2000.
(This might be my new favorite book.)
Bethel Merriday is out-of-print, but you can read it here, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. ********************* What a fantastic review! I love how Catherine brought her own life into it! Thank you! Big thanks to Catherine for the great review! Please visit her at Constance Reader's Guide and read her original review. Thank you Catherine!