One of my earliest memories is of lying on the couch and watching the movie version of “The Egg And I” on a black-and-white TV. Even as a kid I loved the dumbfounded look on Claudette Colbert's face when she first sees the dumpy chicken farm that's her new home.
Betty MacDonald, the zestily brilliant comic author behind “The Egg And I,” grew up in a genteel but highly eccentric Montana family. Her first husband, a jerk, dragged her to Washington's Olympic Peninsula because he wanted to be a chicken farmer. Betty did not want to be a chicken farmer, but she went along with the gag. She cooked and canned and kept house and had kids, and was (as you might imagine) pretty unhappy there. She broke up with Mr. Chicken Farmer at last, lived with her mother and sister for a while, got tuberculosis, got better, remarried, and moved to an island in Puget Sound with her new husband and her two chicken-farm daughters.
She transformed that peculiar life into amazing hilarity.
“The Egg And I,” in which she describes her childhood and her first marriage, is her classic. Among other things, it gave the world Ma and Pa Kettle. Far from being the clodhoppers they became in the movies, the Kettles were pretty interesting; they had too many kids and not enough money, but they were also smart and endearing. (I'm partial to the scene in which Ma receives a Christmas gift from her citified sister: an oil painting of herself in a low-cut gown. “Look at us!” Ma sneers. “With our dinners as bare as a whore!” She hangs the painting in the outhouse. That scene didn't make it into the movie.)
Later, Betty wrote up her stay in a Northwestern tuberculosis sanatorium. It's a chilling book, which recounts the medieval methods being used to treat TB in the 1930s, but Betty manages to make it funny.
And that was her genius, really. She describes misfortune and illness in great detail, but she makes it funny. She's like a mother making a bee-stung child laugh, to take the pain away.
Her last book, “Onions In The Stew,” about Marriage #2, is mellow and sweet. (My friend Apollonia, a big MacDonald fan, is especially fond of the handyman in “Onions” who misses work because he has “back door trouble.”)
Betty died a month before her fiftieth birthday, in 1958.
She is one of the pillars of Cascadian literature.
Children: find her books where you can. Ebay, used bookstores, whatever.
And someday soon I'll tell you all about Peg Bracken.
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