by Anne Wellman
Sydney had taught her children strong values and how to feel good about themselves, despite the family having so little after Darsie’s death. Her stated philosophy was to enjoy each day of living as it came along. She knew how to create an elegant environment, and how little things like lighting candles at dinner and a touch of lipstick could make all the difference. Her artistic talent and warmth was her legacy to her family; her love of good literature and intense interest in her fellow human beings was her particular legacy to Betty.
Betty used the word ‘spiritual’ to describe what she and Don had felt watching the sunset, an unusual choice of word for her. Her grief at Sydney’s death can be imagined.
Illness
Betty may have been planning to write a book about her life on the ranch in California and had possibly handwritten a one-page outline (maybe at her writing spot, the lively bunk house on the ranch), but if so, it got no further. Her own health now began to suffer. She had smoked heavily all her adult life, with the exception of her time at Firland, and her well-being had of course been affected when she contracted tuberculosis. In September 1956 she underwent an unidentified operation back in Seattle, recuperating at Mary’s afterwards while keeping herself busy scanning the proofs of another Mrs Piggle-Wiggle book. This operation may well have been the first treatment for the illness she was now suffering from: uterine cancer.
For Americans in the 1950s there was no diagnosis of illness more dreaded than cancer. Heart disease killed twice as many people annually, but malignant tumors were more greatly feared. In the late fifties sixteen thousand women a year were dying from uterine cancer and, in a sad harbinger, the actual phrase ‘horrible as uterine cancer’ appeared in a book Betty’s sister Mary had written in 1949, The Doctor Wears Three Faces. In September 1957 Betty was back for treatment in Seattle, where Mary’s doctor husband Clyde Jensen was able to ensure she received first-rate medical care. In 1954, when Clyde was a member of the American Cancer Society’s state executive board and chairman of the Washington State Medical Society’s neoplastic committee (neoplasm meaning the growth of abnormal tissue), he had been one of a number of doctors in Seattle’s King County who became concerned about the need for early cancer detection. Together these medics developed a nine-point cancer check-up program for local doctors to sign up to, which they did in their hundreds. By 1957 the benefits of smear (pap) testing were also becoming more widely known. With her brother-in-law’s expertise to call on Betty may well have received an early diagnosis.
In the 1950s both radiation and chemotherapy were already in use for cancer treatment. In the case of uterine cancer, then, as now, surgery to remove the uterus was generally the first step. Other hormone-related treatments included the removal of the ovaries to reduce the effect of estrogen, accompanied by the prescription of male hormone; the removal of the adrenal glands; the removal or destruction of the pituitary gland at the base of the brain; and the use of drugs such as cortisone and thyroid. By 1958 the American Cancer Society also thought the use of radioactive isotopes to be promising, as one gram of radioactive gold could deliver many times the power of conventional X-ray and at far less cost. Snips of radioactive gold wire, less than 1/100th of an inch thick, were encased in slender gold tubes and then placed inside hollow nylon threads. These were then sewn directly into the types of tumors that could not be removed without endangering the life of the patient.
When not in the hospital Betty stayed at Mary’s and Blanche went to see her there for the first time after the diagnosis. The household was busy as Mary got her three daughters off to school and, practically for the first time in her life, Blanche found Betty feeling sorry for herself and unable to make a joke of her problems in her usual way. Wrenched from her happy new life in the Carmel Valley, she was once again facing a potentially fatal disease. She told Blanche she was a big saddo and that Mary and her family were all so busy she wondered if they even knew she was in the house. She and Blanche chatted and tried to be ‘old be-happies’ but it rang hollow. (Betty’s old friend, the painter William Cumming, commented in his memoir that he had heard Betty was bitter about her illness because she believed the danger of uterine cancer could have been picked up at the time of her gynecological surgery in the 1940s.)
A couple of weeks later the phone rang at Blanche’s. It was Betty – she was at the Maynard Hospital on Summit Avenue, where her brother-in-law Clyde was an attending physician (and where her daughter Joan’s first child had been born in 1951). She wanted Blanche to bring her a bologna sandwich with lots of mustard. Blanche rushed to make the sandwich and take it to Betty, whom she found in fine fettle and delighted to get her snack. During the visit a nurse came in to announce that a couple from Chile were downstairs and that the wife wanted to meet Betty, who was her favorite author. Betty cheerfully complied and chatted happily to her fan, first introducing Blanche as her best friend. Blanche was flattered. She felt the woman’s visit was joyful and touching, and all three ended by exchanging addresses.
A Christmas card arrived for Blanche from the woman in Chile some weeks later and Blanche called Betty to check if she had received one too. But Betty was not as alert and sparkly as usual; it was obvious that she was under sedation. She said, ‘Blanchie, shame on you. Here I am on my deathbed, and you’re out there stealing my friends!’ They both laughed and said good-bye. It was to be the last time that Blanche joked with her old friend.
Betty must have known that the end was near. Her condition worsened and, late at night at the Maynard on 7 February 1958, after periods in a coma, she died at the age of only fifty. Don and her daughters and all three of her sisters were at her bedside. The official cause of death was listed as ‘Carcinomotosis’, meaning there were multiple sites of cancer in her body.
Betty had requested no funeral service. Funerals were ‘outmoded and barbaric rites’, she once wrote. Her family asked that donations be sent to the American Cancer Society in lieu of flowers. She has no grave. She was cremated and her ashes probably sent to Don in California.
A few days later Blanche was at a symphony and met Mary in an elevator. The elevator was crowded but they made their way across to each other and hugged. No words were necessary.
Legacy
BETTY would have been the very last person in the world to put herself on a list of great writers. Her work might even be described as just enjoyably witty, an unusual mix of good descriptive writing and extreme sarcasm. She tends to be viewed as just one among a number of self-deprecating female humorists typical of the era. Arguably none of them, however, can match Betty’s earthiness or acute wit, and none have married humor with her deeper insights into human joy and grief. The universality of her take on family life and on the pleasures and struggles of existence appeals to so many because she might be describing the life of each and every one of us, whatever our nationality: her books have enjoyed success all over the world. The sardonic amusement and hope for the future that Betty was able to find in even the hardest of times had particular resonance for Eastern European readers, for instance, who had suffered so many bitter times themselves. Her ability to take hardship and misfortune and transform them into something laughable certainly found an avid audience in Czechoslovakia. In 1988 a Czech fan wrote that Betty’s books were beloved in her country because Betty looked at life with hope and faith that things would turn out for the best: her innate wisdom and sense of humor overcame all obstacles.
Betty also found enthusiastic fans in the UK. In 2008, the BBC broadcast a tribute program to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth, and a year later there was a BBC reading of Anybody Can Do Anything. Bookselling websites continue to reverberate with enthusiastic comments from fans in New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Australia and elsewhere, and over the years there have been successive waves of demand for Betty’s books to be reprinted. More than a few readers mention that their parents or grandparents loved the books and had introduced them to the next generation.
Betty’s w
riting was a critical success at the time but later there were attacks on her negative portrayal of Native Americans, and the accusation that she ‘spawned a perception of Washington as a land of eccentric country bumpkins like Ma and Pa Kettle’. Betty’s defenders point out that in the context of the 1940s such stereotyping was ubiquitous and indeed acceptable. She was probably also concerned to represent Native Americans in a more realistic way than they had been depicted in many of the too reverential back-to-nature books which, in writing Egg, she was seeking to refute. It’s true that modern readers will wince at her depiction of Native Americans as dirty, drunken and leering. These views also emerged a little in private correspondence (a letter whilst on her 1946 publicity tour referred to Native Americans making jewelry souvenirs to fit ‘their big fat selves’). She even goes so far as to say in print that she is glad that the Native Americans’ beautiful country has been taken away from them. It’s difficult to read this now and hard to believe that Betty could ever have voiced such opinions, even if written in an era when such observations were commonplace. However, if episodes such as the invasion of the ranch during Bob’s absence were rooted in reality, then it is at least understandable that Betty’s fear may have translated into antipathy. In the Forward to a much later edition of The Egg and I her daughters wrote that they were certain that if their mother were still alive she would address the plight of the Native American very differently, and that they knew she only meant to extract humor from what seemed to her to be frightening situations.
Similarly, Betty’s attitude towards her Japanese fellow patient ‘Kimi’ in The Plague and I may sometimes smack of Orientalism – she wrote that whatever ‘Kimi’ said always sounded as if it should be written on parchment with a spray of cherry blossoms – and she occasionally represented ‘Kimi’ as speaking with a heavy accent (‘hahrible’ for ‘horrible’), even though her friend is well educated. But this, and some other racial stereotyping glimpsed in Onions in the Stew, are again aspects of common attitudes from the decades she was writing in. It was the 1940s and ‘50s and Betty was of her time and culture.
What is surely more telling is the way Betty steps beyond those boundaries. In Anybody Can Do Anything, Betty makes a point of observing sadly that the very capable young Japanese girls in her shorthand class will never be hired, no matter how proficient. Not just because of the Depression, she goes on, but because of the then common practice of seldom hiring any non-white office workers. Betty had no such prejudices. Whilst at the Firland sanatorium she became good friends with the young Japanese girl Monica Sone, the model for ‘Kimi’ in Plague, at a time when people routinely objected to sharing rooms with non-whites. Betty was more than happy to have Monica room with her, and in the book mentions how frequently she muses on her good fortune in having such an intelligent and considerate person as a fellow patient. When Betty is moved from a four-bed ward into a two-bed cubicle she delightedly agrees to have ‘Kimi’ moved in with her – she has grown to love her and wants her companionship. The nurse supervising the move is surprised and remarks that some people would object to sharing a room with an ‘Oriental’. In real life Monica herself was also surprised, having expected only a white person to be chosen to share with Betty. When both had left the sanatorium, the friendship continued. Monica wanted to go to university and begged Betty to come to her home and help her convince her parents, which Betty gladly did, and succeeded. She disagreed with the policy of internment and supported Monica and her family during their wartime internment, at a time when the Japanese in the US were held to be deeply suspect. When other Japanese internees were being released at the end of the war she felt very sorry for those who could not find anywhere to stay and, through the United States Relocation Center, offered her house on Vashon to a returning family for six months while she and Don were on a trip to New York. After the war and her own publishing success Betty took Monica’s extensive letters from the camps, which she had been keeping unbeknownst to her friend, to an editor from The Atlantic Monthly. This led to Monica’s publication of her own successful memoir, Nisei Daughter, about growing up Japanese in America.
There is further evidence to counter those who cry racism. In The Plague and I Betty described sharing a bathroom at the sanatorium with an African American woman she called ‘Evalee’. It’s indicative that Betty sympathetically includes ‘Evalee’s’ remarks on the difficulties she encounters in the institute as a non-white. Her bed has been put outside on a porch because it solves the ‘room-mate problem’. White patients would object to sharing a room with her, ‘Evalee’ tells Betty, and even on the porch, where the beds are quite far apart, there are complaints. Using a racial epithet, another patient remarks to Betty that ‘Evalee’ won’t last long because her race has no resistance to tuberculosis. Betty sharply tells the patient not to call ‘Evalee’ by that word. Later, ‘Evalee’ is a welcome member of Betty’s close band of friends in the Ambulant Hospital who gather together in the bedrooms to drink tea and commiserate with each other about their woes.
Betty’s pluses and minuses on this particular scoresheet must be judged by posterity. Meanwhile, she merits more of a niche than she currently holds in the pantheon of 20th-century American women writers, most particularly for her regionalism – her acute talent for capturing local color in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle Times book critic Michael Upchurch declared that had Betty been born in New York her reputation would have been as assured as Dorothy Parker’s, while the award-winning writer Jonathan Raban placed Betty on his list of essential reading about his adopted city of Seattle (observing also that his grandmother used to have a copy of The Egg and I on her bookshelf in England).
But Betty has never been ranked with classic regional writers such as Harper Lee or Willa Cather, perhaps because her works are humorous ‘memoirs’ rather than serious novels. Nevertheless, Professor Beth Kraig in her 2005 study, It’s About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote The Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North/Western Regionalism, argues that Betty is indeed a regionalist, but not in the classic mold; rather, she is a modern, mid-20th-century regional writer anxious to paint a true picture of her beloved country but at the same time to dispel over-romantic perceptions. Mary points out to Betty in Anybody that the world needs to know the real Northwest, to understand that salmon no longer leap in at the front door and snap at their ankles. In a timely reversal of mythic notions of heroic pioneering, Betty duly reveals a country with big cities as well as wide-open spaces, a land scarred from mining and logging and sometimes strained by racial tensions; a Northwest of dock towns, ferry strikes, mountains, and rain-washed city lights. And a part of her message, Professor Kraig’s study posits, is that beautiful scenery and magnificent mountains cannot always compensate for hardship and loneliness.
Other academic works have viewed The Egg and I through the prism of gender politics. Professor Nancy Walker, for example, lumps Betty with the ‘domestic humorists’ of postwar American suburbia such as Jean Kerr (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) or Phyllis McGinley, who shared with Betty the use of self-deprecation as a major source of their humor and as a subversive device. Walker suggests that underlying the cheerful surface of this sort of writing is a sense of uneasiness with the isolation of the housewife and with male remoteness and domination, and that confessions of inability and inefficiency in the role of housewife are a subtle way of subverting societal norms. A classic pattern is presented of a husband who enjoys the challenges of his work while the wife is left to cope with the routine tasks of household and children; the contrast between the two points up the staggering difference between gender roles and the wife’s discontent.
Another insightful analysis of The Egg and I by Jane F. Levey likewise considers the work primarily an expression of postwar dissatisfaction with the role of housewife and mother. This study argues that books often become popular because they address a pressing cultural issue or anxiety; according to Levey, Egg was primarily an account of Betty’s resistance to her wifely role a
nd, as such, spoke to specific contemporary concerns in the 1940s. As their husbands in the military returned from the war and needed their jobs back, women who had been in the armed forces or who had worked in factories and offices were encouraged to return to the home, and many were unhappy with this reappearance of traditional gender divisions. Levey attributes the book’s phenomenal success, which came as a huge surprise to the publishing industry, to this capturing of the gender zeitgeist. Aalthough set in the past, she argues that Egg voiced women’s postwar concerns. She, too, sees Betty’s acid observations on a wife’s ‘bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work’ as sharply probing the husband-wife relationship, and as a questioning of women’s assignment to household duties and the isolation of domesticity. Levey points out that Betty reserved her greatest affection for the slovenly Ma Kettle, while expressing disdain and pity for the model housewife character Mrs Hicks. Other critiques of housework and the confines of motherhood appearing at the time did not of course attain Egg’s popularity because they lacked its humorous delivery, which in Jane Levey’s view deflected many from what she saw as its serious feminist message.