Road Work

BETHEL MERRIDAY -- Sinclair Lewis --Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Sinclair Lewis has never lost his ability to bat it out, but Sinclair Lewis' ability to think it through has been woefully intermittent. This intermittence is the kindest explanation of Novelist Lewis' great gallery of flops. Two years ago the last of these, The Prodigal Parents, took a beating even from reviewers who recognized Lewis as still the most important novelist in the U. S. It was a wayward, shallow, cantankerous mummery in which Lewis exalted the wisdom of a motor dealer at the expense of his stupidly pinko kids.

Bethel Merriday is a distinctly better book, and its comparative goodness may be instructive to historians of Sinclair Lewis' career. With a talent that has more hop on the ball than nine or ten ordinary writers, Lewis wrote his memorable novels not when he had a "good idea" but when parts of the U. S. social scene stirred him to sardonic, passionate--and first-hand--study. Arrowsmith is a classic example, and it is with Arrowsmith that Bethel Merriday may be fairly compared.

Before writing the earlier novel, Lewis spent months in the company of Dr. Paul de Kruif (Microbe Hunters) learning to respect the selflessness of medical science, to see human weakness and social bigotry through the struggles of its dedicated professionals. Background for Lewis' new novel is the author's five-year experience with the professional theatre, first as a collaborator (Jayhawker and It Can't Happen Here), later as an actor-playwright (Angela Is Twenty-Two), member of Equity and player in the summer theatre and on the road. What Lewis has found to respect this time is the art of the theatre, and again it is something he has been living with.

The feminine lead in Bethel Merriday is an earnest small girl from a middle-class New England household who takes college theatrics seriously, gets her pa to shell out $425 for ten weeks of apprenticeship at an arty summer theatre. The old Lewis ear for idiom goes to work on airy Director Roscoe Valentine ("So beautifully fallible!"); the old Lewis Saturday Evening Post touch appears in godlike, athletic Andy Deacon, Yale and Newport, amateur actor and angel to the company. Bethel Merriday learns the talk, the tricks, the hard-working realities of acting. She would agree with her creator that:

"In everything was the spirit of children's play--not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life."

The old Lewis love of extravaganza breaks out occasionally, as in his description of the suite occupied by Andy Deacon, the following winter, at a Park Avenue hotel: "Across the room was a Gothic stone fireplace composed of an entire castle transported from Normandy." Here Andy casts his company for a touring production of Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. Helpful Beth is taken on as a page and understudy to the star. On that famous lady and on the supporting cast Lewis lavishes his gift for satiric characterization and incident as the troupe journeys from one-night stand to one-night stand in the Midwest, as the blizzards blow, the fevers rise and the tempers explode one by one. By the time the show goes bust Bethel Merriday has proved herself a dependable actress, has fallen out of love with Andy, in love with a fiercer young actor from whose pillow she rises to make the coffee as ... the . . . curtain . . . falls.

The reader will note that Sinclair Lewis' mellowness sometimes goes maudlin, that his asides on the renaissance of the stage through college and summer theatre companies are more enthusiastic than thoughtful, that about half his characters are themselves straight out of stock, and that as a novel the education of Bethel Merriday is neither so close-knit nor so serious in import as was that of Martin Arrowsmith. But the reader must likewise note that this is not the sour and rickety work of an old self-imitator but a buoyant tale with neither claims nor pretensions to being a profound work of art.

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