I CAN'T remember when I met Merton or the Duncan Sisters. All I know is that the American Studies Class of 2000 made me do it. That program, like other interdisciplinary ones, has a way of requiring instructors to learn as well as to teach.
Last spring the American Studies seminar focused on the 1920s, borrowing Sinclair Lewis' Leonard Smaltz's phrase "Travel Is Broadening," to do so. I knew the participants had read a Lewis novel, Allen's "Only Yesterday" and Marcus' "Dustbin of History" over the semester break. I also knew what the semester's reading would be like for the course, and that the participants would be taking Steve Railton's American Literature Since 1865 course and Joe Kett's Intellectual and Cultural History course covering the same time span. All this reading plus a paper and a Web project!
Having reread "Only Yesterday" and "Dustbin" over the break myself, I thought it might be a good idea to see if I could find an Allen-like phenomena and coax out a Marcus-like reading of it. If I could, I hoped to insert it in class discussions. I knew the "Radio Boys" kid series would work. It would lead to all kinds of places and questions. We could meet John Binns, the first to rescue people at sea using the wireless, later a radio editor for a major New York paper. The right assignment not only would bring students to a Binns column but also to Zelda's review of "The Beautiful and Dammed" in the same issue. We might even wonder whether or not Gatsby had a radio.
But I had been down that road before. I was looking for something different. Along came "Merton of the Movies." Harry Leon Wilson introduced Merton to readers of The Saturday Evening Post in 1923 in serial form. Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman took him to the stage in the next year. A silent film soon followed. In the early 1930s, Merton became a talkie; a decade later Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland introduced him to the audience of the Lux Radio Theater and Red Skelton brought him to the screen again. When the Guthrie Theater revived the play in the late 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein did the poster. Clearly, here was a story -- a story about a story through time. In the 1920s it would lead a reporter for The New York Times to revisit the Turner thesis; when it played in London, the Prince of Wales sparked rumors by attending nearly every night. Paramount saw "Merton" not as a critique of the film industry but as a love story. Whatever Wilson intended the story to mean, it clearly meant something else by the 1930s and '40s.
Then along came the Duncan Sisters, uncovered while looking for sheet music to illustrate a way of seeing the '20s. The Duncans, I soon learned, had played Topsy and Eva throughout much of the decade and beyond. Their musical version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" drew crowds in Chicago for a year and then went on to major cities in the East, and finally to Europe and Latin America. By 1927 they were back on stage with it. That same year, a silent film version appeared, one supposedly saved from disaster by D. W. Griffith.
Steve Railton's Web site on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" led to another way to see the Sister's performance in context. For me the search was on, turning up, among other things, a 78 recording of the Sisters singing "I Never Had A Mammy" from 1924, a record containing a verse not found in the sheet music, one with great cultural implications.
Well, Merton is no Gatsby; the Duncans are not a match for the Gish Sisters. They are, however, a part of the rest of the story of the decade and beyond. I'm sure they plagued the American Studies class of 2000 with their sudden appearances in Bryan Hall. Every week I seemed to bring in a playbill from the Cort Theater or a program from the silent film or an ad for "Merton of the Movies" in The Daily Progress or a photoplay edition of the book.
The students worked harder than I did and at least they finished their projects. Merton and the Duncans are still with me. I know that trying to learn their stories taught me some lessons I'd forgotten. They reminded me what enthusiasm for a project can do to one's work ethic and, at the same time, forced me to look in new ways for materials necessary to tell their stories. Their stories still are not finished. I'm still looking for what the American Studies students have learned to call "Sullivan's stuff."
(John Sullivan, an associate professor of English, taught the core seminars for the American Studies Class of 2000 last year.)
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