Arts and Letters

The popularity of Booth Tarkington as a novelist began with the twentieth century. Two very delightful books, The Gentleman from Indiana and Monsieur Beaucaire, marked his appearance. In 1901, within a few months of its publication, one hundred thousand copies of the first of these, The Gentleman from Indiana, had been sold, and Monsieur Beaucaire was in its eightieth thousand. As one of the most popular novelists in America, the choice was now before him whether to continue with what was termed "fine, strong, stirring" stories of Indiana life (and so, like Whitcomb Riley, to be classed as interpreting a given locality) or to produce roseate romantic fiction, also "strong and stirring," but drawing its inspiration from the picturesque past. That he was capable of development along either line was proved by his success with the Conquest of Canaan (another Indiana story) and two highly colored historical stories, The Two Vanrevels, 1902, and Cherry, 1903. (The dates are important, for they made readers aware that Tarkington was to be a very prolific author.) It was not long before they came to know him also as a writer for the stage.

His election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters occurred in 1908, when he was thirty-nine years old. It marked no special climax in his work, but it had now become clear that, for one thing, he was not to be a historical novelist, but was to take a certain part in the trend towards American realism. An intermittent revelation of the harsher aspects of Mid-Western life may be detected by any reader of his earlier stories. At last in 1921, he put forth his most important realistic study, a novel of considerable power, Alice Adams, which many readers incline to consider his masterpiece.

If it be the function of realism to "secure its effects by the simplest and most direct means," Alice Adams is a brilliant specimen of the realistic method; if it be the aim to break the reader's heart, Alice Adams is a success. It is the story of a Mid-Western family, the four members of which form a quartet of discontent with their middle-class poverty—a nagging wife driving her second-rate and exhausted husband to the exercise of an ability which he does not possess, his hopeless and at last unscrupulous venture in establishing a glue factory; a wayward and selfish son going rapidly to the devil, and the lovely daughter Alice, affectionate and sunny, plucky and lovable, but eager to shine in the new and sophisticated society of the town. The events, paltry and even amusing at first, pass to an ever-deepening pathos, dark with the hints of inevitable disaster, and end in the ruin of the family and the extinction of Alice's dreams of love and a happier lot. Out of the tawdry life of every day, Tarkington wove the strands of his domestic tragedy.

It was while Alice Adams was in press that Tarkington entered this Academy; so that he had the pleasant experience of publishing one of the most valuable of his works soon after his election to this body.

But he had had for years another string to his bow, another subject in which he shone, and, indeed, may be said to have surpassed all his contemporaries—the amusing yet essentially truthful account of boyhood in Penrod Schofield, and of adolescence in William Sylvanus Baxter, the "hero" of his novel entitled Seventeen. These two are perhaps Tarkington's best-known characters. The same presentation of childhood and youth, but growing ever more satiric, is to be found in many of his later novels.

It was inevitable that Penrod and Sam should remind readers of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. There is of course no proper comparison between them, but it may be permissible to point out one very noticeable difference. In the adventures of Tom and Huck, there is already the appeal of the far away and the long ago. In the Penrod books, on the other hand, there is depicted the kind of life that many of us can recall; but there is no romantic glow. I can yield with pleasure to the dream of floating down the Mississippi with Huck Finn; but I should hesitate to be a boy again if I had to play and fight with Penrod and Sam and Herman and Verman in the Schofield's deserted barn. Perhaps this is because the life described in the Penrod books is too close to that which I knew myself. I was very like Penrod in his less attractive moods, very unlike him in his noisy successes and general lovableness. But the book holds one by its depiction of a boy's indifference to dirt, his strange interest in "queerness" or deformity of any kind, his amusing mendacity, uproarious mischief, and boisterous fun. Such was the staple of the Penrod books.

Penrod is a boy's book, but not so Seventeen. Surely no boy of that age ever read Seventeen for fun. It is a book for grown-ups looking back on youth as it emerges from boyhood. Here is amusing and slightly satiric realism—the long mortification of adolescence, calf love, the grim determination to assume the toga virilis, the sudden relapses into boyhood, the resentment at being watched, especially by one's parents, the sickening realization that one has made a spectacle of himself in his poor assumption of dignity. It is all very funny to the reader. None, I think, has surpassed Tarkington in this kind of thing.

Nor did Tarkington in his study of youth neglect the other sex. I must pass by the amusing satire of young girlhood in Gentle Julia, in order to speak briefly of Claire Ambler in the novel of that title. One mistakes the novel at first for a satire on the American girl. But it is more than that. Claire is shown in three different periods of her young life; first at the age of sixteen, when beautiful but selfish, she is as empty-headed as the adolescent boys whom she enjoys driving to distraction. In a later phase, when her nonchalant beauty is at its height, she is in Sicily, where her selfishness and folly are shown against a background of ancient culture, and produce agony and even a touch of tragedy in lives which she is incapable of understanding. But at last and incomprehensibly she loses herself in her admiration and love of a sick and dying Englishman. Here for a moment life is more than pleasure and self-indulgence. For once she forgets herself; but she leaves Sicily before her contact with misery and death is fully made. In her last phase we see her at the age of twenty-five; she is still pretty and moves easily in fashionable society, but now realizes that it is time to get married lest one be an old maid. To the reader's surprise, he discovers that she is still fascinating, and, for my part I think that Walter Rackbridge was lucky to get her. He was not so sure, but Tarkington must have thought so, for the last sentence in the book reads: "She was uplifted with the happiness of a great reassurance; once more she knew that she had forgotten herself and remembered him."

Many of our author's characters have this "reassurance," this saving trait. In spite of his unsparing representation of the selfishness and superficiality of youth, there is often in his young folk a core of solid worth, which is revealed in their suffering or failure. They have a fortitude at the heart of them which may redeem. Thus Alice Adams, at the end of the story, mounting the dismal stairway to the Business School, where she must study stenography and typing, and become the sort of creature that she has despised, reveals something fine as she surrenders to her fate. When the sunlight suddenly falls on her countenance we perceive the author's symbolism at once.

George Amberson Minafer, once the wealthy scion of the magnificent Ambersons, polished and college-bred, a handsome but detestable cad, is brought down to utter misery. Bankrupt, smashed by a motor-car, and lying helpless in a hospital ward, he "can take it," we feel confident. He is the sort who, some thirty years later, might have become a soldier in Patton's army, and been killed in action at the Rhine. Of such things man is capable. Layers of pretense and selfishness do not forever hide the worth that lies far below the surface.

It is because of this faith in the American character that Tarkington has been charged with an exclusive concern with the "genteel" and a "cheerful belief in the happy ending." Well, he does, in truth believe in his fellow men. Independence and resolution, if they have such qualities, will see them through. As for an "exclusive concern with the genteel," the assertion is simply false, as a reading of his vast contribution to American fiction may show. Even if it were true, one might humbly submit that gentility has its place in a nation's literature. One would hesitate to discard Thackeray, for such a limitation. Some of our contemporary critics seem not unaware of this truth. One of the more acute of them, Mr. Hamilton Basso, has remarked,

In his books as nowhere else, we get an understanding of how that earlier, more stable world of clipped lawns, gabled houses, and long summer holidays seemed from the inside to those who, like Tarkington himself, looked upon it as the best of all possible environments in a none too perfect world.

In that happy environment of which Mr. Basso writes he had many blessings. Experience of a sadly different kind in later life he bore with fortitude, and remained undefeated to the end. He was a gallant gentleman.