endowment. It may not be detectable, but any psychologist will tell
you it exists. Hergesheimer was just as “conceited” in the days when
no editor would take his stuff as he is today; only the quality wasn’t
visible, there being (practically speaking) no one to observe it. And
the quality itself was fully engaged and enterprised in sustaining
Joseph Hergesheimer, until such time as a measurable success, some
rounds of applause, should sustain him. When that hour has struck in an
artist’s life, fortunate the artist if he can turn the “self-conceit”
(which is really self-sustention) into the direct channel of his work!
But to return to Booth Tarkington: The environment of the Indianapolis
of the 1880s (a pleasant town), was perhaps not the most favourable
for a boy of a specially nervous constitution and that excessive
sensitiveness so frequently found in company with a fine imagination.
It isn’t to be wondered at that he was “precocious” until about the age
of four, and “slow” after he began going to school. Phillips Exeter,
like all such places, is devoted to finding the highest common social
factor in the boy. What Purdue may have been when Tarkington went
there, I have no idea; but it cannot possibly have exceeded Princeton
as a place where self-disguise was imperative for self-preservation.
There are plenty to remember those Princeton days, when students wore
paint-stained corduroys and drank constructively, innocently mistaking
eccentricities of dress and conduct for the achievement of personality.
The real Tarkington underneath was forcing itself up at this time; he
was writing for the college magazine such stuff as college magazines
are made on. He went back to Indianapolis to continue writing; but the
long era of good fellowship had done its work, a certain “self-conceit”
and with it a decent open dignity had been put under battened hatches,
and the young man was preparing to pay the fairly serious penalty--the
penalty of an inability to take himself seriously enough, the penalty
of wasted time, vitiated effort, delayed arrival, deferred achievement.
iv
Little wonder, then, that Mr. Tarkington told Mr. Holliday in 1917 that
he was writing a book (_The Magnificent Ambersons_) that he didn’t
think anybody would read; and a year or so later he was talking in the
same strain about _Alice Adams_. The last remaining vestiges of an
attitude which has crippled him are perceptible in such utterances.
He was ready, in 1917, to admit that he couldn’t read Stevenson any
longer, to confess that the stories of American politics called _In the
Arena_ were about all of his early work he “could stand to re-read.”
Popularity and unpopularity, he thought, had always been an accident
with him; his idea seemed to be that “anybody can write a popular
story”--of course, anybody can’t--and, as for himself, he had never
“played the goat to entertain anybody.” And devices in his books that
might have the air of being bids for popular favour were there simply
because, when he wrote, he didn’t know any better. As for putting them
in to please an editor or reader: “Really, I’d as soon have forged a
check.”
Holliday quotes him further: “I’ve written things only as I thought
they ought to be written. I thought in my youth that life could be
got into books with prettier colours and more shaping than the models
actually had; and I fell in with a softer, more commonplace and more
popular notion of what a _story_ should be. Where that acceptance
definitely stopped in _me_ (though the book may not show it) was
_Beauty and the Jacobin_. It was at that time that I was painting with
my old ornamental picture framer. Until then, I thought they were the
‘cheese,’--not for sales, but the _right_ ‘cheese.’”
Perfectly honest! If there is anything else, and I think there is,
it is hidden from Mr. Tarkington himself, or was. We may look upon
the melodrama and sentimentalism of _The Gentleman from Indiana_, or
_The Conquest of Canaan_ and feel less distaste for them than does
Tarkington who, at their mention, looks pitifully unhappy. He is
suffering the acute reaction of the years after, whereas it is possible
for us to note the simple fact that what now seems conventional and
cheap in those novels was much less conventional, and not nearly so
cheap, in 1899 and 1905. The fact remains--doesn’t it?--of Tarkington
having written an essentially realistic novel, his first, when we were
all wild about _Richard Carvel_ and _Prisoners of Hope_ and _When
Knighthood Was in Flower_--that sort of thing. Although, to be sure,
there was _The Honorable Peter Sterling_, there had been the earlier
novels of William Dean Howells, and Theodore Dreiser was putting on
paper _Sister Carrie_. Another fact that remains is the co-existence
(1905) of _In the Arena_ and _The Conquest of Canaan_ and the fixed,
large achievement, in 1912-13, of the novel called _The Flirt_.
It is easy to agree with Mr. Holliday that the efforts at invention in
the story surrounding Cora Madison are “childlike,” but I am convinced
that _The Flirt_ is a novel for which a place must be reserved in
any list of twenty distinguished American novels. The portrayals of
Cora and her brother, the boy Hedrick, seem to me to settle that.
Thackeray’s picture of Becky Sharp is, I feel, no more biting than
Tarkington’s delineation of Cora; Hedrick has as much gusto as any
character of Dickens; and in both cases Mr. Tarkington has accomplished
the thing with less than half the effort Thackeray and Dickens brought
to bear. Of Tarkington, as they would say in golf, it is all in the
wrist. The same undemonstrative precision, skill and force which went
into the porcelain perfection of _Monsieur Beaucaire_, which fumbled
so badly in such a mixture (“the rough”) as _The Two Vanrevels_, is
felt on every page of _The Flirt_ where Cora or Hedrick are “in play.”
Unfortunately, the inspired suggestion of the present Mrs. Tarkington
which was responsible for the existence of Hedrick Madison is also
responsible indirectly for the boy Penrod. Those Penrod stories which,
Tarkington admits, cost no effort to write! Toward this variety of
work several attitudes are possible. The strictest condemns it, and
because of it rates down the author. Obviously, such a view is just
only where the author has held his writing throughout as a sacred
vocation. The severe, exalted standard of judgment cannot very well
be applied to anyone like Arnold Bennett or Booth Tarkington, both of
whom, for quite different reasons, have a lively sense of what I would
call the amenities of living. A more tolerant attitude holds the author
justified for one or several excuses--he may have his living to make,
he may have the thing in him and need to get it out of his system, the
demand for Penrodism may carry its vox-populi-vox-Dei conviction, there
may be nothing else to write.... Between the smashing drive and the
perfect strokes on the putting green, one is not allowed to intermit
the bad brassy or the futile iron shot; one is required to play.
_The Flirt_ appeared in 1913, _Penrod_ in 1914, _The Turmoil_ in 1915,
_Penrod and Sam_ in 1916, _Seventeen_, an outgrowth of _Penrod_,
in 1916 also; _The Magnificent Ambersons_ in 1918, and _Ramsey
Milholland_, the last wring-out of Tarkington’s Bad Boy in 1919. Even
those who declare the creation of Penrod and William Sylvanus Baxter,
Jr. (in _Seventeen_) to be “great work”--and they are numerous and
their opinion is respectable--will perhaps feel, as they contemplate
the prolonged attack of Penroditis, that this adolescent in literature
gave his fashioner a distinct setback. They may look with admiration at
a photograph of the study in The House That Penrod Built and witness
all those ships, and the thought may occur to them that these beautiful
toys took too long the place of ampler vessels, which, with rich
cargoes, with the help of the stars and in spite of weather, might have
been worked home.
v
One such fine vessel, richly-freighted, made port at last, in 1921, the
_Alice Adams_. To praise this novel, the first in which Mr. Tarkington
made an entirely successful passage, is easy; to discriminate in regard
to it is difficult, for the simple reason that Mr. Tarkington’s past
work has made such a performance incomparable. Here was a man who in
his greatest feats had always shown corresponding blemishes. _The
Flirt_ had been spotted with melodrama (as if the drama of Cora and the
mordancy of Hedrick did not serve to tarnish any artificial sheen).
_The Turmoil_, more skilfully constructed than _The Flirt_, suffered an
entire loss of the detachment which Tarkington preserved toward Cora
Madison; and instead of a pitiless portrayal we had a modern morality
play. _The Magnificent Ambersons_ was afflicted with a pulled-around
ending. But in _Alice Adams_ all of these defects were met and
adjusted; the movement was natural and not “plotted”; no moral underlay
the exposed incidents; Mr. Tarkington was impartial without being in
the least unsympathetic. Then why discriminate? Surely, _Alice Adams_
has everything! Not at all. No author’s one book ever has, I suppose;
and in finally achieving the symmetry and truth and grace of _Alice
Adams_ there was the sacrifice of a nervous force which animated, in
a varying extent, all three of the earlier novels. One must learn, in
criticism, to value above all else what can only be called “vitality,”
whether in painting, or sculpture, music or literature. This mysterious
but indispensable flame burns with a different intensity in individual
writers. In Mr. Galsworthy, for example, it is low in novels, somewhat
higher, at times, in plays; but relatively low throughout his work. In
Mr. Tarkington, I cannot help feeling, it is higher in _The Flirt_ than
in anything else he has written; for savage and powerful as are the
stories of _In the Arena_, the material is something that the author
touches with his foot, rather than shapes with his hands. Indeed, this
instinctive repugnance in Mr. Tarkington, as inveterate in him as in so
many American writers, is one of the strictest limitations on his art.
In older cultures than ours in America, where it is well understood
that admission to the human race cannot be denied by some to others, a
Balzac or a Conrad or even a Dickens can write with the same manifest
vitality of almost anybody, however inhumanly horrible--as, for
example, the “incorruptible” Professor and mad anarchist in Conrad’s
tale of _The Secret Agent_. In the case of Tarkington, Mr. Holliday has
cleverly observed the type of material in which our writer’s vitality
is most evident--the memorable procession of drunkards in his stories,
the unmatched darkeys of the stable alleys, the large number of
Tarkington characters vocal with song.
As to plays: the man doesn’t regard them as his “real trade.” All the
earlier ones were written in collaboration, usually with Harry Leon
Wilson; and Tarkington, with an engaging candour, admits at once that
the great cost of a theatrical production must be met, if possible, by
filling the house. Writing alone, he has given the stage such utter
ineptitude as _Poldekin_ and such delicious comedy as _Clarence_. He
now writes a play, usually, because a particular producer wants one
with a particular actor in mind. In his book-length fiction he is
unrestricted, unless the engagement in advance of the next couple of
novels for serial publication may have its oblique effect. After all,
it must be very difficult, knowing that your next two books are first
to be placed before a certain large constituency of women readers, not
to select your material “according” and not to mould it imperceptibly
somewhat nearer the--supposed, suspected, or ascertained--hearts’
desire of all those ladies.
vi
Booth Tarkington’s home in Indianapolis, at 1100 North Pennsylvania
Street, is a plain brick house, far from new. Business creeps into
the street, but there is some “lawn” still about the house, a hedge,
Virginia creeper on the brick walls. Six winter months are spent here,
the other six in the house at Kennebunkport, which, being newer, is
furnished with more simplicity and taste. Tarkington’s workshop is
upstairs--a tilted drawing board beside an east window, a flexible
electric lamp, plenty of large-size sheets of yellow paper, two dozen
pencils kept sharp by two pencil-sharpening machines. Tarkington has
never used a typewriter and dictates only letters and not all of
those. His sister-in-law, Miss Louise Keifer, copies his pencilled
yellow pages of manuscript on the typewriter. Spectacles of all sizes
and weights lie on a table. The man breakfasts between nine and ten,
works until 1.30, and then pauses to eat a slender lunch brought to
his study on a tray. He continues working until 3.30, and sometimes
writes in the evenings, although the habit of writing pretty regularly
at night has been abandoned. Even so it is a longer working day than
most writers can keep. Mrs. Tarkington intercepts all interruptions; no
telephone call can break in, nor any thought-distracting piece of news.
On evenings when there is no engagement and Tarkington is not writing,
he will play double-deck solitaire for an hour, read until about one
o’clock, then go to bed. In Maine the day’s programme is a half-hour
earlier throughout; work stops around noon; a short motor ride and a
quick dip in the ocean follow; and the afternoon is most likely to be
spent in a motorboat. The Maine evening frequently includes a walk
of a mile to and from the movies; this is mainly for the sake of the
walk, although the worse the picture is, the more restful Tarkington is
likely to find it.
Notes, sometimes covering several dozen pencilled pages and
undecipherable by anyone else, precede the composition of a play or
novel. They are vague ideas and suggestions, the writer endeavouring
not to crystallise his story too suddenly. When this occurs, it is
sometimes necessary to write the next to the last chapter or scene
and then go back to the general plan or the beginning. Work proceeds
every day, Sundays included, and averages about 1,400 words a day of
fresh output, preceded by correction of the previous day’s writing. In
addition to this day by day revision, Tarkington revises a story or
book as a whole; it is then typed, and after that is seldom altered.
“He has never resorted to neurotic realism or the much over-exploited
nastiness of high life to give zest to his fiction,” says a recent
utterance in praise of Mr. Tarkington. And the author is quoted as
himself saying: “The problems of youth had been interesting me for some
time, more than I realised”--when he turned to _Penrod_--“except the
one problem that most people who call themselves realists feel that
they must deal with--that is, in an untrammelled fashion--the problem
of sex, which I have never felt was a subject for exploitation.”
“Neurotic realism” is a phrase of wabbly connotation, but if a study of
neurotic characters and tendencies be meant, there are plenty of those
in Tarkington fiction. Most of the Tarkington drunkards are neurotic,
Cora Madison is a victim of the narcism complex, and, as Mr. Holliday
has pointed out, “_The Turmoil_ is remarkable as a book of nervous
diseases.” One of the most unlifelike things about Penrod (still more,
William Sylvanus Baxter, Jr., he of _Seventeen_) is the absolute
erasure of that contact with “the facts of life” which constitutes one
of the indubitable facts of boyhood. And though as many crimes have
been committed in the name of realism as in the name of liberty, the
painfully sincere purpose of some of our most “untrammelled” writers
in their treatment of sex cannot justly be called “exploitation.” One
thinks of Sherwood Anderson. The analysis of Holliday, in a final
quest for the secret of Tarkington’s popularity as an author (not
invariable, but abundant), is perhaps as good as we shall get:
“He is very much like most people. There is nothing, except its
energy, peculiar about his mind; it has no strong idiosyncratic bias,
no strange, abnormal quality. At first, as in _Cherry_, he may have
been excessively belletristic. That was not only not odd, but quite
natural in a well-educated, young writer. But, just for the joke of the
thing, think for an instant of Mr. Tarkington in connection with such
a writer as, let us say, George Moore. In this wearer of the literary
ermine you find laid bare a soul compacted of nearly everything that
is detestable to the mind of a plain citizen going about his business
in the marketplace. He has confessed consuming egotism, quivering
sensibility, fastidiousness, vanity, timidity coupled with calculating
shamelessness, sensuality, a streak of feline cruelty, and absolute
spiritual incontinence. Or try to think of Mr. Tarkington coming along
with some such perverse thinking (however shrewd) as Samuel Butler’s:
‘the worst misfortune that can happen to any person is to lose his
money; the second is to lose his health; and the loss of reputation
is a bad third.’ Mr. Tarkington admires all those things which every
decent, ordinary, simple-hearted person admires: dash, courage,
honesty, honour, feminine virtue and graciousness and beauty, and
so on. He hates precisely those things hated by all honest, healthy
‘American’ people: sham, egoism, conceit, cruelty, affectation, and
so forth. In short, though he is a red hot artist (and most Americans
‘don’t care a nickel for art’), he believes in all those things
which make up the creed of the average sane, wholesome person in
this country. He has infectious humour, and (though savage in attack
upon what he feels to be vicious) abounding ‘good humour.’ Added to
all this, he has a most winning and rich, though not at all complex,
personality. He is in his own person, indeed, what most of us would
like to be. In a word, doubtless his books are popular because of the
same qualities that made their author popular as an undergraduate.”
There are compensations of all kinds on this earth, and one of Mr.
Tarkington’s--the most enviable of all, I think--must be knowledge of
a certain occasion in which he was of the utmost possible service to
another American writer. The course he took at that time, the energy he
displayed, would have been very improbable in one whose natural vanity
of himself as an artist was in the least like George Moore’s. If it was
for too long a literary misfortune that Mr. Tarkington’s “self-conceit”
lay in the direction of being a good fellow, at least he made of good
fellowship, in this instance, the minted gold of personal greatness.
No! Now it can_not_ be told; but there will be those alive to tell it.
Books by Booth Tarkington
1899 _The Gentleman from Indiana_
1900 _Monsieur Beaucaire_
1902 _The Two Vanrevels_
1903 _Cherry_ earlier, in composition, than _The Gentleman
from Indiana_
1905 _In the Arena_
1905 _The Conquest of Canaan_
1905 _The Beautiful Lady_
1907 _His Own People_
1908 _The Guest of Quesnay_
1909 _Beasley’s Christmas Party_
1911 _Beauty and the Jacobin_
1913 _The Flirt_
1914 _Penrod_
1915 _The Turmoil_
1916 _Penrod and Sam_
1916 _Seventeen_
1918 _The Magnificent Ambersons_
1919 _Ramsey Milholland_
1921 _Alice Adams_
1922 _Gentle Julia_
1923 _The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories_
Plays by Booth Tarkington
1901 _Monsieur Beaucaire_ with E. G. SUTHERLAND
With HARRY LEON WILSON:
1906 _The Man from Home_
1907 _Cameo Kirby_
1908 _Your Humble Servant_
1908 _Springtime_
1909 _Getting a Polish_
1916 _Mister Antonio_
1917 _The Country Cousin_ with JULIAN STREET
With HARRY LEON WILSON:
1919 _The Gibson Upright_
1919 _Up from Nowhere_
1919 _Clarence_
1920 _Poldekin_
1921 _The Wren_
1921 _The Intimate Strangers_
Sources on Booth Tarkington
_Booth Tarkington_, by Robert Cortes Holliday. DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &
COMPANY. Authoritative, honest, delightful; especially sound in its
detailed criticism of the books up to and including _The Turmoil_
and _Seventeen_. When Holliday’s book was written, Tarkington was at
work on _The Magnificent Ambersons_, for an estimate of which see
Holliday’s _Broome Street Straws_.
_Contemporary American Novelists_, 1900-1920, by Carl Van Doren. THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY.
_Booth Tarkington at Home_, by John R. McMahon, LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL,
November, 1922 (page 15).
Private Information.
Articles, reviews, etc., are plentiful and the reader is advised to
consult the READERS’ GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since
1914.
_13. A Parody Outline of Stewart_
i
About two years ago, when Donald Ogden Stewart had just abandoned the
bond business for the pursuit of a literary career, he was asked to
write a brief account of his life, with the following result:
“Donald Ogden Stewart was born in Columbus, Ohio, on November 30, 1894.
In his early years he gave manifold evidences of his gift for humour,
and many of his bright childhood remarks are still related by his proud
mother upon the slightest provocation, or in fact, upon no provocation
at all. There were others, however--principally among the guests at the
hotel where Donald lived--who did not think that this child prodigy was
so funny. Mr. Stewart bears a long red scar on his head--such as might
be made by a brick or other missile--as mute evidence of one little
red-headed girl’s particular lack of appreciation of his early humorous
efforts.
“At the age of 14 he was sent to the Phillips Exeter Academy because
it was a good preparatory school for Harvard. In the fall of 1912, Mr.
Stewart entered Yale. While at New Haven, Mr. Stewart went out for all
the athletic teams possible, and was always among those of whom it was
said in the college paper at the end of the season, ‘And we also wish
to thank those members of the third and fourth teams who have worked so
faithfully without reward--and yet we cannot say without reward--for
they are rewarded with the knowledge that they have worked for old
Yale,’ etc.
“Mr. Stewart was graduated in 1916 and selected a certain large public
service corporation as the scene of his future success. It was his
desire to start at the bottom and work up; the first half of this wish
was readily granted him. After a brief, inspiring visit with the head
of the corporation, Mr. Stewart was sent to the Birmingham, Alabama,
office which was about as far away as the head of the corporation could
possibly send Mr. Stewart. While in Birmingham, Mr. Stewart took a keen
interest in his job and read the complete works of Anatole France,
George Moore, Fyodor Dostoievski, Henrik Ibsen, Gustav Flaubert and
many others. He also intended to read the Alexander Hamilton business
course, but did not quite get around to it before he was sent to the
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, office.
[Illustration: _Photo by Nickolas Muray_ DONALD OGDEN STEWART]
“In Pittsburgh, Mr. Stewart took a keen interest in his job and read
the works of Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, G. B. Shaw, Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad and others. He also started to take piano lessons
and got as far as ‘The Happy Farmers.’ He was just on the point of
reading the Alexander Hamilton business course when he was sent to
Chicago. After ten months in Chicago, Mr. Stewart joined the Navy.
Having never been on a ship or the ocean in his life, he was at once
appointed an instructor in Practical Navigation, Seamanship, Naval
Ordnance, and Signals. This experience was invaluable and Mr. Stewart
came out of the Great War a deepened man.
“His old position with the great corporation awaited him and Mr.
Stewart went back to the work of the world in the spring of 1918. He
was sent to the Minneapolis office, where he took a keen interest in
his job and read the works of H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, and H. L.
Mencken; met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and led two cotillions. He was also
preparing to take up the Alexander Hamilton business course when he
accepted an offer of employment in Dayton, Ohio, with a financial
organisation.