Stepping back in time with ‘Merton’

“Merton of the Movies” by Harry Leon Wilson is one of the earliest Hollywood novels. It’s the story of an innocent who is betrayed by the movie business -- but don’t worry, it turns out OK for him. Merton first appeared in 1919 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post and was published as a novel in 1922. That same year it was the basis of a Broadway comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. It was still breathing in 1947 when it became a Red Skelton movie. Reissued recently by Heyday Books, its value is as a view of Hollywood during the silent era.

Merton Gill reads a lot of movie magazines and believes everything they dish out. He’s a hick, a type that was once common in American fiction but has now gone the way of flivvers and bargain prices for the Brooklyn Bridge. While working as a clerk at Gashwiler’s store (“Everything For The Home -- Our Prices Always Right”) in Simsbury, Ill., Merton gets in trouble with Mr. Gashwiler when he sharpens his lasso skills on Dexter, the store’s delivery horse. Merton dreams of movies and particularly of Beulah Baxter, a star who in her purity is his ideal of womanhood. Eventually he lands in Hollywood as Clifford Armytage, determined to perform in serious artistic ventures. He’ll have nothing to do with cheap comedies.

Merton doesn’t make friends easily but a perky young thing called “Flips” helps him out. She’s the daughter of a classical ham who has fallen on rough times. Flips comes to admire Merton even after she’s played him for a dope, which wasn’t hard to do.

Almost everyone in this story is having trouble making the rent or their mark. Beulah Baxter, however, who isn’t quite the ideal woman Merton had believed her to be, is doing fine, thank you.

All this is moderately amusing, though I was ready to say goodbye to Simsbury long before Merton does. Wilson spends 56 pages establishing that the village is dull. The most effective and surprisingly serious sequence has Merton living secretly on the studio lot and edging toward delirium from hunger. He’s afraid to leave, for fear he won’t be allowed back.

The story’s core -- the naif who accidentally, and despite himself, succeeds -- suggests Voltaire’s “Candide.” I can’t think of anything earlier than this book that uses that trope for an actor. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus” (1928) and Harold Lloyd’s “Movie Crazy” (1932) are later film examples.

David Fine, in his introduction, calls “Merton” the “prototype, the model for what was to come.” Certainly many of its themes and metaphors will later dominate Hollywood fiction: the rube versus the sharpies; the vanity of actors; the tyranny of directors; and the all-time favorites, tough women who become tender-hearted in the end, and the gullibility of the public.

The best satire of the silent era, though it was written later, is by F. Scott Fitzgerald. His “Pat Hobby” stories deal with the transition from silent to sound films and center on a bumbling scenario writer who was doing fine when there was none of that pesky dialogue to write. Pat would have recognized Merton’s world. When sound arrived, playwrights, novelists and newspaper reporters headed west, which spelled the end of people like Pat and, I think, novels like “Merton of the Movies.” In time, they were replaced by darker stories written by the new breed of screenwriters who weren’t spooked by the challenge of dialogue. “The Day of the Locust” is one example.

“Merton” belongs to a world that no longer exists. Its occasional faint racism and anti-Semitism reflect its era. The past always looks naive to the present -- after all, we know what comes next. If you’re interested in what people once thought was funny or the way they talked (“Say, is everything jake with you?”), you may enjoy Merton’s antiquarian charm.

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David Freeman is a screenwriter and the author, most recently, of “It’s All True.”