Merton of the Movies. Harry Leon Wilson
a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines and newspapers, and even the national press reported on his comings and goings. Stein said that Wilson’s 1923 novel Merton of the Movies was “the best book about twentieth-century American youth that has yet been done.” This perhaps came as a surprise to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Claude McKay, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Edith Glasgow, Anita Loos, Jean Toomer, Sinclair Lewis, Anzia Yezierska, Edna Ferber, and the other novelists famous for chronicling American youth in the 1920s. Better than all of them, according to Stein, was Wilson, especially in Merton of the Movies. “I always give it to every one to read who reads English,” she said, “and always have done ever since I first read it.”
The shock, for the literati of the day (“A Snub, a Snub, a Snub,” The San Francisco Examiner headline read, “Gertrude Stein Gives Carmel’s Highbrows the Go-By”), was due to the fact that Wilson’s was a popular reputation, not a literary one. But they should not have been surprised. As Karen Leick points out in Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity, Stein told anyone who would listen that her favorite books were the pulp paperbacks. A few years after her visit she wrote to Thornton Wilder, one of her many mentees:
And now Thornton about my literature not that I write but that I read. Could you instead of sending me books well thought of by historians could you go to a railway station or to the nearest drugstore and send me every few weeks or once a month four or five of the mystery stories that the man in charge recommends as the best, everybody when they send me reading matter consult not my tastes but my education, I suppose even when I give you the detail of the method of pleasing me you won’t because after all to a good American principles are more important than pleasure.
The idea that a writer famous for being difficult loved easy reading took some getting used to, and various reporters and commentators worried it out in their columns. As Leick writes, Stein’s tour of the United States transformed people’s sense of her, and the laughter that attended her readings was also, it seems, the laughter of recognition — Stein’s prose, some understood for the first time, was not difficult so much as it was playful, ludic. She wasn’t trying to sound fancy, she was trying to make her prose sound like speech, trying to sound, as she wrote, “Amurican.”
Not everyone had this realization. A. A. Van Duym, who had met Stein when he worked at the American Library in Paris in the early part of the century, told a New York paper that “strangest of all and a mystery to be solved by Stein devotees,” was that “she always reserved ahead of time the forthcoming novels of Harold Bell Wright, James Oliver Curwood, Rex Beach” — the pop fiction kings of the day. Wright, for instance, was reported to be the first author to sell a million copies of a book, and the first to make a million dollars from his novels. Van Duym couldn’t process this fact because he, like many literary folk, was a snob, and he makes that snobbery clear: “Whether this [buying of commercial fiction] was to get close to the real soul of the American people,” he speculated, “or merely to get books intended for the consumption of Alice or some other member of her household, I cannot tell.”
Van Duym hadn’t been paying attention. Stein spoke openly of her love for detective fiction. She had just written Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, which, however hard to detect with the naked eye, was her version of a murder mystery. And her relation to cultural levels went beyond literary taste. “I like ordinary people who don’t bore me,” she explained in turning down Mabel Dodge Luhan and her set. “Highbrows do, you know, always do.”
In the meantime, scholars — who of course can be snobs as well — have come to recognize what Michael North calls the “common cause” of modernist and pulp literature. Both the modernist and the pulp writers rejected Victorian propriety, flowery diction, and puritanical morality, and were instead interested in crossing borders that the more demure literary lights — think William Dean Howells or Hamlin Garland or Fauset or Cather or Lewis — would have tiptoed around. Harry Leon Wilson was not at all sensationalist and kept things much lighter than, say, Joyce or Eliot (or, for that matter, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose The Girl from Hollywood was published the same year), but he was thoroughly modern. You would be hard pressed to find a young female character as snappy and down-to-earth, as hip and post-Victorian as “Flips” Montague, our hero Merton’s Virgil, his guide to Hollywood, his protector, and, eventually, his wife. She is a flapper with a heart of gold (Wilson’s 1913 novel Bunker Bean is said to have been the first to popularize the term “flapper”), and she moves fluidly in the world, as irreverent with big directors as she is with cameramen and carpenters. Of all Wilson’s contemporaries, only McKay and Loos managed to get as close to representing the young women who rejected everything the 19th century and the Genteel Tradition had to offer in exchange for the brave, new, transformed world of the 20th. Flips is as clear-sighted as Merton is addle-headed: “Say!” she says to him, “you’re a real nut, aren’t you? How’d you ever get this way?” She enjoys his hapless innocence and, in fact — without giving away too much of the plot — at times encourages it, for professional reasons. “You’re so kind of ignorant and appealing,” she says, and he is, both.
Harry Leon Wilson was born in Illinois right after the Civil War, and so was 20 years older than the generation of Pound and Eliot and the American modernists, 30 years older than the famous Lost Generation writers also associated with Stein. He grew up in Illinois, where his father was a printer, and he set type as a boy. He learned stenography, left home at 16, and wandered out west, where he worked as a researcher for Hubert Howe Bancroft’s histories and a private secretary for Virgil Bogue, a major civil engineer. His first humor piece was published in Puck when he was 19, and by the time he was 25, he had moved to New York and become an assistant editor at the magazine, promoted to editor in chief just four years later. Puck was the country’s premier humor outlet and so this position was among the best jobs in the magazine world of the day. But Wilson was not happy with it.
Perhaps nothing spells the difference between Wilson’s literary culture and ours more than the fact that when he sold his first book, his advance enabled him to quit that plum job and become a full-time novelist. He was thrilled to return to the West — as his Associated Press obituary quotes him:
I had to live ten years in New York. It was then a simple town, with few street lights north of Forty-second street. Now the place is pretty terrible to me, perhaps the ugliest city in the world. I decided that the only way to get out of New York was to write a successful novel. So I tried with The Spenders and when I got a substantial advance from publishers, I quit my job and beat it for the high hills of Colorado.
He supported himself with novels and plays for the rest of his life.
Wilson is best known now as the author of Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), in which an English valet is won in a poker game by a crude new millionaire in the American West. Ruggles had an extensive afterlife, first as a stage musical that same year, then as a film in 1918, another in 1923 (with Edward Everett Horton as Ruggles), and an award-winning 1935 version with Charles Laughton. Later there was another film, several radio plays, and a television musical in 1957. Merton of the Movies was also adapted for film in 1924, in 1932 (with Joan Blondell and Zazu Pitts), and again in in 1947 with Red Skelton in the lead.
In 1923, though, the film industry was still new and so, of course, was its role as the engine of celebrity. Hollywood’s location as the center of that industry was newer still. The movie often cited as the first true feature, The Great Train Robbery (1903), arrived only 20 years earlier; the first film shot in Hollywood, D. W. Griffith’s 17-minute In Old California, was made in 1910 for New Jersey’s Biograph Company, and the first Hollywood studio film was made the next year, less than a dozen years before Merton. Wilson was briefly part of the business, having done “a stint in Hollywood” in the years before Merton, and so he writes of the industry with an insider’s eye.
According to John Parris Springer, who first introduced me to Merton when he was writing Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature (2000), the Hollywood novel as a genre centers on the “confusion of illusion and reality.” Springer sees Merton as Exhibit A. When the novel opens, we are introduced to “beautiful New York society girl” Estelle St. Clair, who has wandered off the ranch