BETHEL MERRIDAY
Sinclair Lewis
'Until the nineteenth century, actors were classed as Rogues & Vagrants. They were outside of respectable society--like Kings--and I am not sure but that this was better for their art and their happiness than to be classed as lecturers, tax-payers, tennis-players, suburban householders, and lovers of dogs.'
ARTHUR KULOSAS
NOTICE
No character in this novel is the portrait of an actual person, and if there is any resemblance to the name of a real person, it is accidental.
Such notices as this have become increasingly familiar because of an increasing habit among readers of finding themselves portrayed in every novel, and of being annoyed or unduly pleased. It is particularly necessary in this book because in recent years I have been acquainted with six summer theatres and with a touring play. I declare vigorously that the Nutmeg Players of Point Grampion, in my tale, are not drawn from the Stockbridge, Cohasset, Ogunquit, Provincetown, Clinton, or Skowhegan companies, and that the tour of a Romeo and Juliet company, here chronicled, is not the history of my Angela Is Twenty-Two. And Sladesbury is not Hartford, but the county seat of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
I hope that this signboard may have some effect. After the appearance of Arrowsmith I was informed that at least half my medical characters had been drawn from professors of whom I had never heard. With It Can't Happen Here, adherents of two editors, one in Vermont and one in Connecticut, gave rather convincing proof that each of these gentlemen was the model for Doremus Jessup. But the happy days were with Elmer Gantry when, on the same Sunday morning, in the same Western city, each of two clergymen announced from his pulpit that the Reverend Elmer had been drawn solely from him, but that the portrait was crooked.
I shall not explain to self-elected prototypes of my Bethel Merriday or Roscoe Valentine just how I probed their own lives; and if it shall prove that there really are persons so unfortunate as to be named Zed Wintergeist or Mrs. Lumley Boyle or Mrs. J. Goddard Deacon or Jerome Jordan O'Toole or Tudor Blackwall, I shall merely point out that there is a tradition that fiction characters have to be called something.
Of course writers might call them X76 -- 4 or Pi R Square.
But if we did, all the persons with automobile licences numbered X76 -- 4 and all the coolies named Pi Lung Squong would write to us, which heaven forbid.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
I
That was the first time that anyone ever called her an actress--June 1st, 1922, Bethel's sixth birthday. There was no spotlight, no incidental music, and her only audience were her mother and a small dog looking regretfully through the window of a boarding-house. But she was sensational.
Her mother and she were on their way to the A. & P. Store, and as usual Bethel had with the greatest violence been running in circles. She was slight and small and entirely feminine, but she was the best runner in her neighbourhood.
She stopped, then moved with a queer slow hitching. In front of them an old lady was scraping along, sunk forward from her shoulders as though she had given up all hope of ease and love. Her whole life seemed to be in her painfully sliding feet. Bethel tried to recreate that dejected walk, and she went at it so earnestly that the back of her neck ached with the weight of sagging shoulders, and every step was a frightened effort.
Her mother interrupted.
'Good gracious, don't copy folks that way, Bethel. You'll hurt their feelings.'
The small, black-eyed child halted, in protest.
'Oh! I'm not copying her. I'm trying to be her. I can be a lot of different people.'
'My, aren't we grown-up! I'm afraid that you like to show off, dear--the way you always say your text so loud in Sunday school.'
'I love to say texts! "I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart. I will show forth all thy marvellous works".'
'It all sounds like maybe you're going to be an actress. I guess that wouldn't be a bad text for an actress.'
'Look how the poor old lady's heels are run down,' said Bethel, too busy with her career for prophecies of glory.
Bethel was born in 1916, on the day after the Battle of Jutland. Her father, kneeling by the bed, had prayed, 'Dear Lord, please make this baby a child of peace and justice--yes, and happiness, Lord'.
Five months after the six-year-old Bethel gave her imitation of the old lady, the Black Shirts marched bravely into the maws of the movie cameras in Rome; and five months after that, Hitler bounded out of a Munich beer garden. But perhaps it was as important that at this time John Barrymore was playing Hamlet and Pauline Lord Anna Christie and the Theatre Guild producing Back to Methuselah. They were so much less stagy.
Herbert Merriday, Bethel's father, was a dealer in furniture, to which, later, he was importantly to add electric refrigerators and radios. They lived in Sladesbury, a city of 127,000, in central Connecticut, a fount of brassware, hardware, arms, precision instruments, clocks. Here is the renowned establishment of Lilydale & Duck, makers of machine-guns for killing policemen and revolvers for killing gangsters and the Duck Typewriter for joyfully chronicling both brands of killing.
Sladesbury is Yankee, not Colonial, and it envies and scorns the leisurely grace of Litchfield and Sharon. It proclaims itself constantly as 'modern', and is beginning to boast of being 'streamlined'.
Even for Sladesbury, the Merriday family stood high in modernity. They had been the first family to have a radio installed in their car, and Mrs. Merriday, though she was a solid Universalist, was so advanced as to belong to the Birth-Control League.
In May of 1931 Bethel was almost fifteen, and finishing sophomore year in high school. It was suitable to the neighbourhood modernity that her brother Benny, now twenty-one, should be working in the Dutton Aeroplane Works, and talking about designs for transatlantic clippers, talking about (though never actually reading) the Bible by Karl Marx, and that the girls she knew should be talking about careers. They wanted homes and babies as much as their mothers had, but none of them expected to be entirely supported by husbands. Most of them were, they asserted, going to be aeroplane hostesses, motion-picture stars or radio artists, though certain of the less studious sort confessed that they would not mind being 'hostesses' in the large dance halls.
Bethel could not look upon serving cold consommé at an altitude of a mile, or dancing the rumba, as having much meaning. She was learning touch typewriting in high school--that was her father's one insistence about her studies--and she could become a secretary, busy and important, receiving the boss's magnificent callers. But privately, ever since her sixth birthday, she had yearned to be an actress.
As she had never seen a play with professional actors, she was shaky as to just what being an actress implied, and certainly she never admitted to her companions so eccentric an ambition. She was one of a whole generation of youngsters under twenty who considered the London of Shakespeare and the Paris of Molière as barbaric and rather comic, who were familiar with radio broadcasts from Madrid and aeroplanes just landed from Alaska and two-million-dollar film dramas and the theory of the atom, but half of whom had never seen a real play or entered an art gallery or heard an orchestra play anything but dance music.
Bethel herself had seen only a high-school farce, in which a football player in a red wig kept kicking a fat boy; a Republican party pageant in Brewster Park, with Lawyer Wilkie as Lincoln, heavily accented as to shawl and beard; and the melodramas about gun-molls and sunken submarines which Alva Prindle and Bethel herself performed on the workbench in the Prindle garage. So altogether futile and babyish seemed the intention of acting that probably she would not have confessed it to her friends Alva Prindle and Charley Hatch on that evening in May 1931, had the newspapers not been hinting that, for the first time in ten years, Sladesbury was to have a professional stock company all summer long.