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Dear Betty MacDonald fan club,
i am a huge fan of Betty's; I read "The Egg and I" when
I was a teenager and have always loved her books. I am glad you have
taken the time and made the effort to promote her memory through your
society, such a personality as Betty was should not be forgotten.
I'm
sure there are very many of her fans worldwide who like me, have many
questions and are very curious about what happened to her family in the
years after Betty's death.
I did receive Wolfgang Hampel's books 'The Kettles' Million Dollar Egg', 'The Egg and Betty' and 'The Tragic End
of Robert Heskett' and found them very funny and so interesting.
I think
Betty was caught between a rock and a hard place at the trial. Writers
are allowed a certain "creative license" and she may have embellished
her characters a bit to make a good story, but of course she didn't want
to lose the case, either. So she claimed some of her story was
fictional. But I still believe she drew those characters from her life;
good writers write about what they know and experience and it is obvious
to me that her richly drawn characterizations of the Kettles and other
families while she lived on the chicken farm were true for the most
part. Even if parts of the story were fictionalized, I will always be
grateful to her for writing some of the funniest and most unforgettable
books I have ever read. She will always be my favorite humorist and I
only wish she could have lived longer so she could have given the world
more opportunities to enjoy her unique talent. Thank you for the second
installments of the story.
I'm so happy to gain more knowledge about
Betty's life and her experiences during the trial. Now I understand why
the Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce said there were still some hard
feelings toward Betty by some of the people in the area. You would think
that after all this time, though, it really wouldn't matter anymore. I
guess some people can hold a grudge forever! I don't think Betty ever
intended to malign anyone. She wrote from her experiences, and if she
embellished a bit, that is her right as a creative artist. Her
characterizations were indeed devastating, weren't they? And so very
funny.
A hundred years from now her books will still be uniquely
humorous. What a personality she was.
When my husband and I took the
trip to Port Townsend last summer in search of "The Egg and I Road" I
wondered why there was no marker. The letter from the nice gentleman who
lives on the old homestead in Chimacum partly answered that question. I
wondered why the descriptions of the mountains in "The Egg and I"
didn't match what I saw on Egg and I Road, and that question too was
answered by Betty's testimony in the trial.
I believe that Port Ludlow,
Chimacum and Port Townsend were exactly as she described them. She may
have had to stretch the truth a bit in the trial, but what else could
she have done. It's indeed ironic that the Kettles were forced to live
on EGG AND I Road. http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM43RE_EGG_I_ROAD
Another funny anecdote to her story. I especially enjoyed Kimi's defense of Betty in her letter.
In this age of "political correctness" which I find very tiresome,
Kimi's letter was well thought out and well written. Betty was certainly
not a racist. In "The Plague and I" Betty stands up for black people,
and Kimi, who was Japanese, was her best friend. It was very different 70+ years ago but some people forget that.
It is so nice that so many
people remember and care about Betty and try to keep her memory alive.
Thank you for all your good works in her behalf. I agree that there
should be more to commemorate Betty's life and her accomplishments, at
least some kind of marker or memorial. At least they did name the "Egg
and I Road" after her book.
I hope you can visit Washington state
someday and take the ferry over to Vashon Island. It really is a
beautiful, lushly green island with marvelous views in every direction.
I
don't think Betty gets the recognition she deserves in this country
partly because of the unfortunate atmosphere of "political correctness"
(p.c.) that pervades the U.S.A. right now. Betty was critical of native
Americans (Indians) in her book and that is a "no no" in the minds of
many of the powers that be. They don't stop to consider that she was
writing from the perspective of over 50 years ago or give her credit for
her uniquely talented style and the marvelous, timeless humor of her
writing.
She really is one of America's best humorists and fortunately
many people all over the world do recognize this. I think her books will
be read and re-read through the ages. There are so many young people
that are becoming aware of her books now, and that really encourages
me...they will keep her memory going.
I agree with you that "The Egg
& I" is one of the funniest books ever written. I remember laughing
so hard I was gasping for breath and almost fell off the couch the first
time I read it! I was about fourteen years old then. I have re-read it
many times and never tire of it, I believe it is timeless.
Perhaps
you have heard of the town of Leavenworth? It is at the foothills of the
Cascades, and is a world famous Bavarian style village, very
picturesque. They have Autumn Fest, Maifest, and Christmas lighting
celebrations and people come from all over the world to visit. They have
many German craftsman living in the area, contributing their talents to
the many shops in town. They have dancers, complete with lederhosen and
full old-world Bavarian dress, performing in the open square during the
summertime celebrations. Wonderful food of every description; I love
their bratwurst and sauerkraut, bought from the street vendors. If you
are interested in learning more about the village, you can reach the
site at http://www.leavenworth.org/ It is well worth an online visit!
Betty MacDonald February 1951
"I
have had letters from people all over the world - from England and from
Bavaria - telling me that the Kettles lived next door to them.
I am
looking forward to reading more of your society's publications about
Betty and her life. She was such an unique personality, I will always
love her and her books, they have given me so much pleasure and laughter
over the years.
It is so good to know she has fans worldwide!
Keep up the good work and stay in touch.
Yours in Betty's memory,
Connie
you can join
on Facebook
Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen
Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel -
Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia ( English / German )
Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )
Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )
Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)
Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
Betty MacDonald fan club items
Betty MacDonald fan club items - comments
Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
Betty MacDonald fan club groups
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Greta Larson
Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
Ma and Pa Kettle were comic characters who first appeared in the novel
The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. She based them on farming neighbors in
Washington state, U.S.A.
In 1996 Betty MacDonald's Family had been
interviewed by journalist Wolfgang Hampel who is the author of The Kettles' Million Dollar Egg.
Betty MacDonald's youngest sister Alison Bard Burnett knew the real 'Kettles' very well and told the most interesting
stories about Betty's exciting experiences with them.
The Kettles' Million Dollar Egg and the interview are as funny as a Ma and Pa Kettle Movie.
This interview has been published on CD/DVD by Betty MacDonald
Fan Club.
Ma and Pa Kettle became the featured characters in a
series of popular, light comedic movies in the 1940s and 1950s. The
movies revolved around the absurd misadventures of the Kettle clan.
Pa (Franklin Kettle) (played by Percy Kilbride) is a gentle,
slow-speaking, slow-thinking and lazy man. His only talents appear to be
avoiding work and winning contests. Ma (Phoebe Kettle) (played by
Marjorie Main) is larger, raucous, more ambitious and smarter than Pa,
but not by much, and can easily be fooled. She is content with her role
as mother to a small army of children on their ramshackle farm. At the
end of the first film in the series, Pa Kettle wins a modern home that
the family moves into. As the series continued, various reasons were
devised to have the family relocate to the "old place", sometimes for
extended periods of time.
Much of the humor comes from the preposterous situations the Kettles
find themselves in, such as Pa being mistaken for a wealthy
industrialist or being jailed after he accidentally causes race horses
to eat feed laced with concrete. The Kettles first appeared in
supporting roles in The Egg and I, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette
Colbert. After that they starred in a series of their own movies. Main
was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1948 for her role in The Egg and I.
Main and Kilbride also appeared together
in the 1948 Universal film Feudin', Fussin' And A-Fightin'. The movie
also starred Donald O'Connor and Joe Besser. Many have mistaken this
movie to be a Kettle film. Main played Maribel Matthews and Kilbride
played Billy Caswell.
Kilbride retired after making Ma and Pa Kettle at
Waikiki. The Pa Kettle character did not appear in The Kettles in the
Ozarks. Arthur Hunnicutt played Pa's brother Sedgewick Kettle in that
movie and in The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm, the last Kettle movie,
Parker Fennelly played Pa Kettle.
Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty
MacDonald interviews have fans in 40 countries. I'm one of their many devoted fans.
Many Betty MacDonald - and Wolfgang Hampel fans are very interested in a Wolfgang Hampel CD and DVD with his
very funny poems and stories.
Mr. Tigerli is very busy around the World because of so many serious problems.
I totally agree that our unique Betty MacDonald fan club honor members are brillinat artists and writers.
Let's talk about great writers and poets Letizia Mancino, Hilde Domin and Betty MacDonald.
Betty
MacDonald fan Club honor member, artist and writer Letizia Mancino
shares her delightful story THE SECOND PARADISE.
Enjoy the brilliant translation by Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mary Holmes, please.
Thanks a million dearest Mary Holmes!
I'm one of Letizia's and Mary's many devoted fans.
Letizia Mancino sent this connecting piece to " The Second Paradise".
DEFIANT AS A COCK
Copyright 2011/2015 by Letizia Mancino
translated by Mary Holmes
All rights reserved
That
was how my friend Hilde Domin was, dear Betty! You would have liked her
so much. She had also been in America. At that time you were a famous
author but she was still unknown.
-Did she love cats like you do?
-Yes Betty, she sure did!! Otherwise how do you think she could have been a friend of mine?
-Oh Letizia, don’t boast! Hilde was famous!
-It’s all the same to me, Betty, whether a person is famous or not but that person must love animals
-Why was she as defiant as a cock?
-Well Betty, she was simply so!
-Like a pregnant woman in my “Egg and I”?
-No not so! Betty, Hilde was a whole farm!
- A farm, how was that?
- No Betty, Hilde was more! Almost a zoo! Even more. She was all the animals in the world!
-You loved her very much.
-As I love all animals.
You Betty, if I had known you, I would have loved you exactly so because you loved animals.
-But as defiant as a cock from my Bob-farm!
-Yes
and no! (Hilde really loved this double form of answer). Listen Betty ,
I’ll tell you a story about how Hilde was. You would certainly have
loved her.
I’ll call my story “The Second Paradise”.
THE SECOND PARADISE
Copyright 2011/2015 by Letizia Mancino
translated by Mary Holmes
All rights reserved
The Lord God, one day, met Adam in Paradise and saw him lying under a palm.
And God spoke to him: Adam, my son, are you happy, are you content with Paradise ?
Adam answered: Oh Lord, it is wonderful!
And God said: But I will create a second Paradise and give you a wife.
Adam answered: Oh Lord, that is wonderful!
And God said: I will create the wife according to your wishes.
And Adam stood under the palm and thought hard.
And God said: Adam, are you ready?
Adam
answered: My wife should be as lively as a bird but she should not fly.
She should swim like a goldfish but not be a fish….. She should be as
playful as a cat but not catch mice….. She should be as busy as an ant
but not so small.
And God said: So shall she be: Like a bird, a goldfish, a cat, an ant…
Adam answered: Oh Lord, that is wonderful, but she should be as faithful as a dog.
And God asked: Adam, have you finished?
Oh Lord, cried Adam. She should also be as delightful and gentle as a lamb and as defiant as a cock!
….She should be as curious as a monkey and as pampered as a lapdog.
And God said: So shall she be.
And Adam said: My wife should be as courageous as a lion and as headstrong as a goat…
And
God said: So, like a bird, a goldfish, a cat, an ant, a dog, a lamb, a
cock, a monkey, a lapdog, a lion, a goat… and slowly and surely he
wished to begin creating…
But Adam stretched himself under the palm and called:
Lord, Lord, she should be as adaptable as a chameleon but not creep on four feet.
She should have sparkling eyes like, like… real diamonds. She should be as fiery as a volcano
But … she should have crystal-clear thoughts like a mountain spring.
God, the Almighty, was speechless…
And Adam spoke: Also she should be as quick as lightening…
And God said: Man, have you finished????
No, said Adam! She should be as strong as a horse, as long living as an elephant but as light as a butterfly!
God
found Adam’s thoughts were good and said: So, bird, goldfish, cat, ant,
dog, lamb, cock, monkey, lapdog, lion, goat, chameleon, genuine
diamonds, volcano, mountain spring, lightening, horse, elephant….
butterfly…
God wished at last to begin creating her…
Lord, called Adam… she should be as stable as steel, but as sweet as three graceful women in one…
And God asked: Should she also be a poet?
Yes, called Adam from under the palm…
And God said: Adam have you finished?
Lord, I wish that, in the second Paradise I shall be one and doubled:
So God according to Adams last words created:
HILDE PALM DOMIN
Very best wishes
Letizia Mancino
Letizia Mancino is an outstanding writer and artist.
I know you will enjoy this very charming and witty story the same way I did!
Thanks a Million, dear Letiza Mancino! You made my day!
As you know I'm very interested in pets and excellent literature.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club founder Wolfgang Hampel is working on an Eva Vargas
biography. I'd love to know: Did Eva Vargas like pets and cats?
You can read my new story in Betty MacDonald Newsletter September.
Letizia Mancino is part of Wolfgang Hampel's 'Vita Magica'.
We got so many requests from fans from all over the world and have great info for you.
Wolfgang Hampel's stories and satirical poems will be published in several languages for his many fans from all over the world.
Wishing you a great Wednesday,
Pieter
you can join
on Facebook
Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen
Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel -
Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia ( English / German )
Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )
Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )
Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)
Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
Betty MacDonald fan club items
Betty MacDonald fan club items - comments
Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
Betty MacDonald fan club groups
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Greta Larson
Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
I did receive the Betty MacDonald fan club CD.
It sounds like the
interviewer, Wolfgang Hampel, Alison Bard Burnett and daughter Alison Beck were having a
hilarious time.
It was wonderful to hear them talking and it gives me an
idea of what talking to the entire Bard family must've been like.
Betty's voice was very feminine and she sounded like she would've been a
fun person to know.
I LOVE Betty's word pictures and how she
describes a setting or situation. The Kettles were certainly among the
funniest parts for me. I loved her description of Paw Kettle coming to
the table wearing a coatdress and manure-covered boots. I also loved her
description of Bob's conversation with Maw Kettle while Maw was
comfortably seated in the outhouse, reading the Sears, Roebuck
catalog. Betty is able to find humor in adversity. Also, I do think that
people can see their own families and people they know in her
characterizations.
My favorites are The Egg & I because her
writing was so excellent and fresh and Onions In the Stew because she
was happy then. I've just seen The Egg & I and 2 of the Kettle
movies. My mom has all of them and I borrowed hers. The Egg & I was
too idealized by Hollywood. Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray were
lovely actors, but way too perfect looking to be real life chicken
farmers. It was a fun family movie though. The Kettle movies are funny
but again, they are pretty sanitized by Hollywood. I watched the one
where Paw Kettle wins a brand new house for the family. It was
entertaining.
Thank you for inviting me to comment and for reading
through my ramblings.
Best wishes to you in your continued study of
Betty MacDonald and her writings.
You have done a fantastic job in
putting together all this information and I had a lot of fun reading it.
Now I will read it again and catch some of the parts I didn't retain
the first time!
Regards,
Lorinda
Betty MacDonald loved in Germany
Axel Schappei The Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber June 16, 1983
Go
into any ordinary German bookstore and ask for former Islander, Betty
MacDonald's paperbacks and you'll be handed - at least - three books:
Die Insel und ich ( Onions in the Stew ), Das Ei und ich ( The egg and I
) Betty kann alles (Anybody can do anything).
Scholars in the Pegasus
German courses on the Island may notice that the German titles of Betty
MacDonald's famous autobiographical novels have been translated
appropriatley.
Betty would like them. Betty MacDonald, who lived on Vashon Island, is tremendously popular in Germany. She once was one of
the most well known and widely read novelists in the United States. But
would you guess that more than two million paperbacks and hard-cover
books of Betty MacDonald have been published and sold in Germany during
the last 30 years?
Her bestseller The Egg and I reached about half a
million in July 1981. From March 1964 until October 1980, 107000 copies
of Anybody can do anything were sold in 12 editions. Onions in the Stew -
her novel about living on the Rock - sold 103000 copies from May 1964
until September 1980, also in 12 editions. "She is incredibly
successful, really, not only her novels. Her books for children like
Nancy and Plum or the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle-Stories still belong to the
most successful childrens' books after all those years," says Wolfgang Hampel, who is so convinced about Betty MacDonald.
He simply loves Betty
MacDonald and her books: "She's so homorous, her stories about
everyday-life's and awkward situations are just incomparable. It's like a
good friend taking you be the hand and leading through her life."
That's why Wolfgang Hampel and four other German Betty Fans plan to
launch an extensive exhibition about Betty MacDonald, her life and her
work.
Originally they wanted to open the exhibit on February 7, 1983,
25th anniversary of Betty MacDonald's death. But the five friends didn't
manage to get enough exhibits together. "We're still looking for
pictures, photographs, letters - in short all sorts of personal
mementoes about Betty. Our exhibition has been planned for the last few
years and we have written zillions of letters and bought hundreds of
books, here in Germany, Europe and from the States," explains Wolfgang Hampel.They tried to get further information about their preferred
author from American publishing companies. "Some didn't answer and
others know less than we did already! It was like finding the different
pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle without knowing what it will look like in the
end."
Why all this activity?"We think that Betty MacDonald is such a
fascinating person that many people here should know more about her .
Apart from our endeavors to our exhibition together we've also been in
contact with publishers to convince them that a new edition of Nancy and
Plum would find its readers still today.
Betty MacDonald's readers come
from all ages and social groups," says Wolfgang Hampel. Of course he
and his friends know that Vashon is the Onions in the Stew Island and
they also know that Vashon is part of the Pacific Northwest and - more
specifically - of Puget Sound. So imagine their amusement when some
publishing firms told them that Vashon is somewhere up to Alaska.
Actually, Wolfgang Hampel knows quiete a lot about the Rock, though he's
never been here. All his information comes from Betty MacDonald's
Onions in the Stew. So he's got the idea of the terrific view of Mount Rainier, and he also knows about her coyness.
Wolfgang Hampel has a
pretty good impression about the house where Betty lived with her folks.
"What we dearly need for our exhibition are pictures of the Island,
books all sort of visuals to show people here in what a beautiful
scenery Betty lived. So people can understand that she simply had to
write books like that in such a fascinating rural enviroment.
Wolfgang
would be grateful for any help he could get from the Island. "Really,
the most substantial help came from Vashon so far. We got some great
personal impressions about Betty from Islanders who knew her."Wolfgang
is amazed about the friendliness and amount of help and encouragement
that reached him from the Rock. Still it's a long way until the
exhibition is ready.
Anyone with anything they'd like to send for the
planned exhibition can write to Wolfgang Hampel.
you can join
on Facebook
Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen
Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel -
Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia ( English / German )
Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )
Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )
Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)
Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
Betty MacDonald fan club items
Betty MacDonald fan club items - comments
Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
Betty MacDonald fan club groups
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Greta Larson
Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
don't miss Wolfgang Hampel's Vita Magica on August 29, please.
It will be a great event with famous writer Wolfgang Vater and outstanding Friedrich von Hoheneichen.
You'll enjoy Claire Dederer's excellent essay very much.
Thank you so much for sharing it with us dear Claire Dederer!
Greetings,
Beat
you can join
on Facebook
Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen
Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel -
Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia ( English / German )
Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )
Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )
Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)
Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
Betty MacDonald fan club items
Betty MacDonald fan club items - comments
Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
Betty MacDonald fan club groups
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Greta Larson
Claire
Dederer, Author of Poser : My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses lives
in Seattle and writes about books and culture for the New York Times,
Vogue, Newsday, and many other publications.
Dear Betty MacDonald Fans,
I knew of the Betty MacDonald Fan Club but didn't know its activities were so extensive.
That's wonderful.
I
checked in with the magazine and they said please feel free to reprint
or repost.
I will keep you updated if I do any more pieces on Betty.
Thanks so much for all you are doing!
All the best,
Claire Dederer
Second Read — January / February 2011 Her Great Depression
Re-reading Betty MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest’s bust years
By Claire Dederer
From
the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with
me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a
writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking
for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle,
someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a
book. A book that got published.
I was always on the lookout for
a message, something that would tell me that this thing could be done. I
realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a
message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to
another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a
child, the message I sought was simple: This place is worth writing
about.
Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a
non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. There were few nationally
published authors from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at
all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read
anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the
names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken
Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, though I didn’t even pretend to enjoy
it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer
newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins
and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy’s first memoir, but
she seemed to hate the place.
And, eventually, I read Betty
MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form
of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my
mother’s shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by
MacDonald: Anybody Can Do Anything.
I had seen it before but
assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had
mushroomed on my mother’s shelves over the past few years. Bored enough,
I picked it up—and found therein an enchanted world. Enchanted because
it was exactly real. Anybody Can Do Anything is Betty MacDonald’s story
of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame
house (not unlike my family’s) in the University District (just a mile
or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were
very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me
feel that I was seeing my life reflected in her pages.
It’s funny
to think of a time when Betty MacDonald’s books were new to me. Over
the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own
neighborhood—with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the
end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with
her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island
in Puget Sound. Her first book was The Egg and I, set in the 1920s. This
chronicle of MacDonald’s life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with
her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a
fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This,
putting aside her books for children, was followed by The Plague and I, a
surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis
sanitarium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of
lying in bed for a year is one of life’s mysteries. Next came Anybody
Can Do Anything, which I held in my hands. Finally she wrote Onions in
the Stew, about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three
years before she succumbed to cancer at the age of forty-nine.
But
it was Anybody Can Do Anything, with its Seattle locale and its
scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me.
As
the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on
the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at
twenty, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he
could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point
with the rain, the chickens, the monomaniacal husband, the whole affair.
“Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this,” she recounts, “I
wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and
I seemed to have married the wrong man.” She snatches up her little
daughters and makes her long, rainy, difficult way back to the city by
foot, bus, and ferry.
There she and her girls are folded happily
back into her large family’s bosom. Her mother’s “eight-room
brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest
dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate
for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house
with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room
plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living
room, four elastic bedrooms…represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and
luxury.”
The book describes life in that teeming, cozy household
with her mother, her three sisters, her brother, and her two little
girls, plus whoever else might be sleeping over in one of those elastic
bedrooms. It also details the literally dozens of weird and
none-too-wonderful jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression:
hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo
retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas tree decorator,
baby sitter, receptionist to a gangster.
The author jumps from
job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves,
like Tom Cruise running from an exploding warehouse. She’s hustled along
in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister Mary, who considers
herself an “executive thinker.”
Mary has a job ready for Betty
as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm, never mind that Betty
is utterly unqualified. Mary won’t hear of such talk. She is quick to
admonish her sister: “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most
people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is
that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting
for some employer to come creeping in looking for them.”
The
truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were
certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle
that emerges is definitively—though quietly—desperate. But on my first
read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of
my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, “There was nothing in
sight but wet pavement and wet sky.” MacDonald describes places that
still existed, that I myself knew—the I. Magnin’s at the corner of Sixth
and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on
the Pike Place Market:
The Public Market, about three blocks
long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting
peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds,
yellows and greens of fresh succulent fruits and vegetables. From the
hundreds of farmer’s stalls that lined both sides of the street and
extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks,
Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares. The
Italians were the most voluble but the Japanese had the most beautiful
vegetables.
Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my
brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a
deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food
they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of
buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did.
I
saw, illustrated perfectly, and in the cold light of nonfiction, the
possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be
struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature
until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s.
My mother
told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece
lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it
with a true feeling of awe: the niece of an author lived therein! Of
course I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more
than real; she was tangible. She was prima facie evidence that the
materials I had at hand—those trees, that rain—were enough.
Other
writers came and went; Betty MacDonald was among those who endured for
me. This was because she was funny. No, that’s not quite right. Though I
didn’t have the language for it when I first read her, Betty MacDonald
was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure
out just how she did it.
She wrote long, ridiculous set pieces
about her various jobs. She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who
in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly
of her family’s eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging
self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one’s own
ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example of her rueful tone:
Until
I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity.
While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being
labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner,
highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player,
most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most
efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to
learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red
hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and
curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so
coarse is what makes it look so thick.”
It almost goes without saying that she distinguishes herself in night school by being the absolute worst student in every class.
MacDonald
was master of the comic memoirist’s first art: self-deprecation. Other
types of memoirists value lyricism, or shock tactics. Comic memoirists
are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest
people in any given room.
I know whereof I speak—I am this year
publishing a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists
like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called “nobody”
memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such
memoirists are “neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their
kin.”
How, then, to proceed? You’re nobody. You want to write a
memoir. Your first order of business is to let readers know that you
know that they know you’re a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance
as quickly as possible, and never, ever stop. By means of that simple
dynamic, the memoirist makes a friend rather than an enemy of her
reader.
In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald fails again and
again. It’s an entire book about failure: her own, and the economy’s.
It’s also about persisting in the face of one’s own admitted
shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills,
which she presents as nil: “I wanted some sort of very steady job with a
salary, and duties mediocre enough to be congruent with my mediocre
ability. I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and
file clerk.”
Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of
government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National
Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency started in 1933 and charged
with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. There she felt
right at home, surrounded by federal-level incompetence: “There were
thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it
in ten copies.”
MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone.
When she’s remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation,
but that of the big-screen version of The Egg and I, starring Claudette
Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable. In the
film, Ma and Pa Kettle—neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in
the book—have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting
caricatures. And the public loved them. On the movie poster, the faces
of these two crackers loom huge; Colbert and MacMurray cower tinily in
the corner. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were
made about them and their fictional fifteen children, and Betty
MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer.
Many
years after all of this, I was having dinner with a British writer who
had undertaken to write about the Northwest. “You have to be careful
about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty
MacDonald: housewife humor,” he said, finishing in scathing (if posh)
tones. MacDonald has been trapped in this role of domestic lightweight.
But her writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with,
say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a mid-century
housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what’s so bad
about Erma Bombeck?)
What MacDonald models in her writing is
actually very freeing—self-deprecation as a kind of passport to the
ordinary. With it, you can take your reader into the most mundane
details of your life, and they will often go.
I teach adult
writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces
about what they’ve achieved. About their good marriages. About their
sterling qualities. “Nobody wants to hear about that except your
mother!” I tell them. Which is never very popular. Even so, I try to
explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: what people want to see
in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If
you can show readers that you have those same failures, those same
smallnesses, and make them laugh about it, they will love you. Or at
least like you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody.
These
simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told
with self-deprecating humor. But what MacDonald achieves in Anybody Can
Do Anything is something more than that: a finely observed journalistic
record of her time.
The ridiculous set pieces, the fond portraits of
her family, and what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the
“earthy tang” of her writing do not seem like indicators of a work of
serious journalism. But MacDonald is getting down on paper what she sees
happening all across Seattle, and ultimately providing us with a rough
draft of history. The details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes
pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in
the West during the 1930s. This is a cheerful, unassuming way of
documenting a socially and economically turbulent period. But it’s
documentation nonetheless.
Take, for example, MacDonald’s
account of one of her earliest jobs. This chapter encapsulates the
uneasiness of the early part of the Depression, eerily suggestive of the
economic tenterhooks we’ve been on since 2007. She’s been summarily
fired from her first job as executive secretary to a miner, so the
ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she
works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn’t any of
the qualifications the lumberman is looking for in a secretary, Mary
tells her not to fret. “‘You thought you couldn’t learn mining,’ Mary
told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the
street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to
divide everything by twelve.’?”
As she makes her way to work each
morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: “Now I grew more
and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the
streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of
businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the
battlefield and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread.”
Her employer’s business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she
shouldn’t leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to
stay until the end. “And I did,” we read, “in spite of Mr. Chalmers’
telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct
result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking
they were as good as people like him.” Again, this blame-the-victim
language recalls some of the rhetoric of today’s subprime mortgage
crisis. But despite the boss’s efforts to draw a sociological line in
the sand, he too is laid low by the economic downturn, and the chapter
comes to an abrupt end: “Lumber was over.”
The author and her
family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat.
Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of
endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she
complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: “There
is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to.
You have to adjust to the fact that it’s no longer a question of what
you eat but if you eat.”
But sometimes the details tell the story
that the tone masks. When the heat and the electricity have been turned
off, the family relies upon old Christmas candles for light and firewood
for heat: “When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw
and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took
turns sawing up fallen logs.” Here, despite the characteristic pluck,
you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire.
This isn’t an overlay of
social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative. Instead, such
commentary is tightly knitted to MacDonald’s own experience. When she
notices that “[e]very day found a little better class of people selling
apples on street corners,” she’s not making an idle observation—she’s
wondering if she’s next.
When I came to write my own memoir, I
was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the
millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had
observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect
parenting. In Betty MacDonald’s writing, I once again found just the
model I needed. It was possible to connect the larger story around me to
my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical.
In fact, the more I focused on the details of my own very particular
experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam
in.
The message that Betty Macdonald sent me, through this book,
is one of sufficiency: Your small life is enough. Other writers might
be looking for a message that will feed their huge ambitions. From
books, they learn how far they might go with their own writing. For me,
the question has always been: How close to home might I stay?
MacDonald’s
qualities as a writer—the focus on the very local, the self-deprecating
humor, the careful and personal observation of social changes—are
modest qualities. They inspire through their very humility. The homely,
says Betty MacDonald, is more than enough. This was the message I needed
to hear. There’s a clue, of course, right there in the title. It’s been
telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a
writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you.
Such
lack of pretension doesn’t necessarily come with great rewards. There
are no monuments to Betty MacDonald. No endowed chairs, no scholarships,
not even a public library conference room named after her. But in the
shallow green bowl of Chimacum Valley, a two-lane road leads to the
chicken farm where MacDonald lived for four tough years. It’s been
renamed “The Egg and I Road.” It veers west from Route 19, cutting
through farmland before heading up a hill into some evergreens. It’s
nothing special. It’s just ordinary. It’s just a county road.
