BETTY: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I

by Anne Wellman

  There was very strict separation of the sexes at the hospital. At the time, tuberculosis was popularly supposed to be accompanied by a frenetic sex drive; at Firland any thoughts or activities relating to sex were forbidden, and Director Stith guarded against any possibility of assignation by enforcing a deliberate isolation. He placed older, more mature nurses to care for the male patients while the only men regularly seen on the women’s bedrest floor were the doctors and several trusted older ambulant patients who cranked the heads of the beds up for meals. Ambulant patients joined separate cafeteria lines for men and women, ate on opposite sides of the dining room, and sat on opposite sides of the aisle at the monthly movie shows.

  In the Ambulant Hospital there was far less nurse supervision and the patients could talk freely. Within two weeks Betty is no longer taken in a wheelchair to the dining-room but is going to and fro under her own steam. Heaven. In Plague Betty’s family are of course delighted with her progress, although taken aback by her staggering change in weight when they come to visit her in the Ambulant Hospital and see her out of bed for the first time in months. Betty wrote that the insidious piling up of superfluous flesh was the penalty she had paid for her well-contained tuberculosis germs.

  She is doing well, and after a month in the Ambulant Hospital another chest examination shows she is ready for eight hours up and can start wearing her own clothes. In June she becomes eligible for a Town leave, a chance to make a longed-for visit home. The leave is finally granted by the Medical Director but with a special addendum: Betty’s attitude does not warrant a Town leave, she is told, and if she does not materially change her behavior the only Town leave granted again might be a permanent one. Presumably Betty’s irrepressible sense of humor and sociability were still getting her into trouble. In Plague, after a wonderful, emotional time at home with Anne and Joan and the family, during which the ‘very foreign atmosphere of loving kindness’ makes her weep, and she is also horrified to find herself tatting as a family quarrel rages around her, Betty returns on time to the sanatorium with her pulse and temperature perfectly normal but feeling very tired. She is worried that her family won’t understand the concept of rest and quiet and staying up for only eight hours each day, the regimen she will have to maintain for a while if released. She looks healthier than any of them and much stronger than she actually is; although well on the road to recovery, she feels bewildered and unhappy.

  Release

  Those who successfully proved that their tuberculosis was arrested and that they had regained their strength were ready for discharge, again at the discretion of the Medical Director. Patients leaving Firland were instructed to continue getting as much rest as possible, to return regularly to the Firland Clinic for check-ups, to consult with their doctor when considering what type of employment to take up, and to remain alert to the reappearance of any tuberculosis symptoms. Women were advised against becoming pregnant. Both the Firland regime and these later strictures seemed to work: the National Tuberculosis Association found that Firland had a higher incidence of patients living a normal life five years following discharge than any other sanatorium in the country.

  Discharges were announced on Mondays directly after rest hours and were given only to patients with eight or more hours up (except in the rare cases of those sent home to die). In Plague Betty comments that because nothing is ever revealed to patients about their progress, those in the eight-hours-and-more-up category never have any idea whether they might be nearing discharge and spend Monday rest hours rigid with hope. The lucky patients who actually do receive a discharge receive an ovation at their next meal in the dining-room, while the others droop with disappointment and resign themselves to yet more time as an inmate.

  It was very unusual to be discharged in under a year and although by June 1938 she is feeling quite well, in Plague Betty more or less gives up hope as Monday follows Monday. Her longing for home is so overwhelming that in spirit she has already left. Then it happens. The Director tells her that her sputum has been negative since October and that she is in fine condition and can go home at once, but that she will have to continue pneumothorax for three to five years. Betty has made an unusually rapid and impressive recovery from a cavity in her left lung and a shadow on the right. She is no longer contagious and can be with her children.

  Betty tries to thank him but the Director brushes it aside. Dr. Stith was personally responsible for all the admissions and discharges and ruled the sanatorium and the patients with a rod of iron, Betty wrote later. He would always say that people with tuberculosis were ungrateful, stupid, uncooperative, and unworthy. But at the same time he would accept no money from those who could not afford to pay and would buy bathrobes and pyjamas for his uncooperative and stupid patients, take care of their families, listen to their problems and help them get work after their discharge. He shakes Betty by the hand and tells her to take care of herself.

  Betty’s happiness was so intense that she simply glowed, her fellow patient Monica Sone was to note in her own memoir. Betty herself wrote that on reaching home, and climbing into bed in a back room that no-one had gotten around to cleaning, she was happier than she had ever been in her life.

  In Plague it takes Betty a long time to feel normal again. She had had to adjust to the regimen in Firland and now she has to readjust to real life. The prison pallor disappears fairly quickly (although the scars of her surgeries are never to fade). Other marks of sanatorium life need concentrated effort to erase. At first she awakes early every day at about the time she had been awoken at Firland; making a pot of deliciously strong coffee she luxuriates over the morning paper until the others get up around seven. After about a month, though, she can wake up, realize she’s at home, and be able to go back to sleep. She still needs to follow Firland’s explicit instructions for care at home, which include frequent checks with her doctor; sleeping at least nine hours every night and taking a two-hour rest period during the day; sleeping in a bed alone, preferably in a room alone; and engaging in only moderate recreation and entertainment. If she doesn’t play the game according to these rules there is the possibility of relapse.

  Betty at first has no inclination to resume old friendships, preferring to maintain close contact with other discharged patients like Monica Sone, who has also been discharged and comes to the house for lunch. Together they take frequent walks in the park discussing Firland. Betty knows she is going through an adjustment period but feels ‘big and fat and whiny’. One way to come to terms with the whole experience was to write about it. When Blanche dropped by at the brown shingled house to welcome Betty back to the real world she found her friend perched on the built-in bench in the breakfast nook, pounding away on an old L.C. Smith typewriter. Casually dressed in frayed white pants, tattered white sweat shirt and tennis shoes spotted with paint, Betty was completely absorbed. Stacks of typewritten sheets covered the table. Betty laughingly told Blanche she was writing a book about her experiences at Firland (work she presumably polished up later for The Plague and I); she said she could never forget it.

  She is nervous on going for her first pneumothorax after her discharge but the doctor tells her she is in fine condition and can now stay up for twelve hours a day. Spells of depression continue, however, as does the tendency to huddle with her former fellow patients rather than re-enter the normal world. Monica still comes to the house almost every day and Betty confides to her friend her spells of black depression and her new obsession with housework, and how she bores Anne and Joan with too much attention and unskilled participation in their play. Added to her problems is the attitude of some people towards Betty as a former tuberculosis patient; many assume she is still contagious. Betty secretly dreads looking for a job and is worried that people in offices will react in the same way. Other people are kind and invite her round, but react with screams when they see her, telling her she looks ten years younger ‘BUT SO MUCH FATTER!’

  In the end Betty returned to government service, findi
ng a post at the National Youth Administration (a division of the Works Progress Administration where she had worked before) and remaining there for the next three years. She appears to have totally regained her health, including feeling well enough to resume her heavy smoking habit. She wrote later that when Firland’s Medical Director Dr. Stith accepted her as a non-paying patient at Firland he had told her that one day, when she had money, she could pay for someone else to get well. Incredibly, given that Betty was so poor at the time, she did end up making money when she became a best-selling author. There can be little doubt that giving to Firland was exactly what she did.

  When The Plague and I was published in 1948 it was dedicated to Dr. Stith.

  Betty and the Island

  THE NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION where Betty had found a job was another New Deal agency set up to provide work and education for young people. The Depression had brought special hardship to young Americans, preventing many from finishing school or entering the labor market, and denying them the opportunity to attain or improve skills. The NYA was a pet project of President Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor, who had greatly feared losing the younger generation through lack of education and unemployment. Some 2.8 million young people were on relief in the mid 1930s and the organization was dedicated to helping those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five either to stay in school or to obtain training and work experience. There were two streams at the NYA: the student work program enabling young people to remain in school or college, and the out-of-school employment program for those over sixteen. Participants in the programs received on-the-job training in construction, metal and woodworking, office work, recreation, and health care. Young NYA workers also performed useful work in parks, national forests, and other outdoor recreational areas.

  Betty had a variety of tasks at the NYA and was ultimately appointed head of its Division of Information in Seattle. She seems to have loved what she did there. She worked on brochures, publicity releases and in-house magazines and read young writers’ manuscripts – an outlet at last for her creativity and writing skills. At any one time Betty had between forty and ninety-five youth workers to supervise on projects as various as silkscreen printing and Youth Orchestra try-outs (during which she met, and cooked lunch for, conductor Leopold Stokowski). She stayed there for the next three years and only left when the NYA was eventually dissolved in 1943.

  It was during this period that Betty met the well-known painter William Cumming through her friendship with the writer and journalist Margaret Bundy Callahan, the former editor of Town Crier magazine which had published Betty’s short story in 1933. Margaret was at the center of a coterie of artists and writers and it was at Margaret’s one evening that Betty was introduced to Bill Cummings. Bill was a member of what became known as the Northwest School, painters interested in exploring the light and color of the Puget Sound area with an aesthetic much influenced by Japanese art. He was a significant voice in the development of the School, which was the first widely recognized artistic movement of the region. Always an eccentric, Bill would later call himself the ‘Willie Nelson of Northwest Painting’. He too had written for the Town Crier and had an interesting way with words. In the inimitable style of his memoir he gives us a very vivid portrait of Betty at this period of her life:

  One Callahan evening in particular was rendered riotous by the febrile chatter and staccato laugh of a frenetic young woman whose hair stands in memory as being on fire, a manifest absurdity occasioned by its hue of reddish gold. Beneath her hair her face played madly, the face of a gleeful fox. Round sallow cheeks set with greenish shadow sloped sharp to a pointy chin, her muzzle slit by a smallish mouth with a hint of asymmetric cupid’s bow, prominent teeth bared in perpetual laughter setting off blue-green (or were they green?) eyes sparkling with unremitting malice towards the follies and witlessness of the race.

  Bill described Betty keeping the party roaring with her oft-told stories of life as a chicken farmer, her voice ‘crackling with excitement’ as each story culminated in gales of wild, infectious laughter. Bill felt that Betty’s humor wasn’t kindly or homey or even friendly. ‘It had the malicious edge of a scalpel, and it could cut,’ was his verdict. Betty saw the deep flaws of the human race all too clearly, Bill thought, and she turned her acid humor on the stupidities of mankind because they enraged her. In his opinion her humor was also a deadly serious shield against a world which frightened her, although he described her sandpaper laugh as always joyous as she tore into pomposity and ignorance.

  There are few contemporary descriptions of Betty and our view of her is for the most part informed by her own writing. Bill’s depiction of her as manic and malicious is startling, to say the least. These are not qualities that emerge through her autobiographical writing, where the self she describes (retrospectively) is kinder, milder, more diffident. By this time of course Betty had survived an abusive marriage, hard times in the Depression and a brush with a fatal illness. She was no longer a shy young woman existing in her sister’s shadow, but a maturing personality in her own right.

  Bill at the time was working as a photographer and sketcher for the Federal Art Project, another part of the Works Progress Administration recovery program. Bill lost this employment in 1940 and his mentor Margaret Callahan suggested that perhaps he could work for Betty, who according to his memoir has just got her appointment as head of NYA Division of Information. Betty would have been happy to take him on as her assistant but the budget didn’t allow for one, and so Bill had to join as a regular youth worker at $25 a month. Once enrolled he found he had no actual duties, so Betty suggested he paint pictures from the many sketches he had made of youth workers engaged on the various projects. This he did, but the pictures came to the attention of what Bill called the ‘political hacks’ in charge of the youth programs; these individuals then accused Betty of using the program to produce propaganda for ‘subversion and overthrow of established law and order’. According to Bill this threw Betty into a furious rage in which she lost all sense of humor and threatened to walk out if Bill was dismissed. His version of events has Betty storming out of a meeting, still screaming, and leaving the cowed bureaucrats huddled mutely around the table before sheepishly approving a motion to keep Bill on. However, at the same time as giving this account Bill seems to say he wasn’t actually at the meeting himself, so it’s hard to judge the veracity of his description. He carried on painting his pictures, helping Betty with paperwork which he said neither of them understood (a doubtful statement in Betty’s case) and watching idly as she typed up the manuscript of The Egg and I.

  This is not the only mention of Betty working on her writing while at the NYA. Another member of her staff recalled helping her type out what was to become The Plague and I during the lunch hour, and in 1978 the former State Head of the NYA himself claimed that Betty had told him that she had ‘incubated’ Egg while working at the agency. (If so, Betty may have stretched the truth a little when she wrote later that she only created Egg after Mary unexpectedly made an appointment for her with a publisher’s agent.)

  Betty underwent an operation for the removal of ovarian cysts or polyps in possibly 1940. Visiting her in hospital, Bill gave her an enormous brush and ink drawing of a brown bear. She lay in her bed looking a bit wasted after her surgery, her ‘fox face sharpened to a point’, laughing as he pinned the drawing up for her. But Betty did not return the courtesy of Bill’s visit when he, like Betty, was stricken with TB and consigned to Firland. Betty accompanied him there for his first admittance in April 1942, repeating some of the funny stories she had already told him about the place and trying to buoy him up, but although she promised to visit she never did. Bill eventually understood why, once he was discharged: he realized that old hands never liked to go back, even for a visit, in case they never got out again.

  In 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The attack came as a profound shock to Americans and led directly to the US entry into World War II. Betty
called her close Japanese friend from the sanatorium, Monica Sone, to assure her that the war made no difference to their relationship. The NYA Information Division in Seattle was moved to a huge loft building at Twelfth and Madison and ordered to begin preparing for war by printing silkscreen armbands for Civilian Defense workers. A number of young Japanese Americans were transferred to the work, apparently in the belief that after Pearl Harbor they might be liable to attack from the populace and would be safer if engaged on defense work. Luckily no such attacks ever came, at least for the workers assigned to Betty’s department. The young people made an efficient job of producing the armbands under what Bill called his and Betty’s ‘silly guardianship’. Betty’s grasp was no doubt greater than Bill appreciated.

  The mass internment of Japanese Americans ordered by President Roosevelt began in 1942. Monica’s family were among their number and before they were taken away Monica asked Betty to look after a valuable Japanese doll: she knew Betty loved and appreciated beautiful things and that the doll would be safe, and enjoyed, in her keeping. During the Sones’ internment Betty stayed in touch. When Monica sent her a letter begging her to send galoshes badly needed by the family to wade through their muddy camp, Betty combed Seattle and did everything she could to track some down for her old friend.