American nights entertainment
the Outward Bound Edition: Scribner).
Charles Scribner’s Sons publish works on architecture; historical
and biographical books and memoirs; letters; belles lettres; books
dealing with problems of race and society; sociological works; poetry;
plays; books on sports; works on art and decoration, philosophy and
religion; many books illustrated in colour; and fiction. In a long
career the house has had the distinction of publishing the works of J.
M. Barrie, Thomas Carlyle, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, Maurice Hewlett,
James Huneker, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, George Meredith, Theodore
Roosevelt, George Santayana, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc.
All four houses publish books for boys and girls.
Fiction.
In addition to the fiction already discussed attention may be invited
to the following new and recent books (for new fiction by Galsworthy,
Conrad, V. Sackville West, Arthur Train, Harold Bell Wright, Ralph
Connor, Booth Tarkington, Zona Gale, Gene Stratton-Porter, Joseph C.
Lincoln, Edith Wharton, Christopher Morley see respective chapters on
these authors; also see Chapters 3, 15, and 18):
_Cross-Sections_, by JULIAN STREET. Short stories.
_Butterfly_, by KATHLEEN NORRIS.
_Rufus_, by GRACE S. RICHMOND.
_Miss Bracegirdle and Others_, by STACY AUMONIER. Short stories.
_The Motherless_, by BENGT BERG, translated by Charles Wharton Stork.
The story of a motherless boy and a motherless bear cub.
_The Shadowy Third_, by ELLEN GLASGOW. Short stories.
_The Middle Father_, by ANTHONY M. RUD. Norwegian settlers in the
Middle West.
_Conquistador_, by KATHARINE FULLERTON Gerould.
_The Orissers_, by L. H. MYERS.
_Four of a Kind_, by J. P. MARQUAND. Four little novels.
_The Love Legend_, by WOODWARD BOYD.
_The Marriage Verdict_, by FRANK H. SPEARMAN.
_The Really Romantic Age_, by L. ALLEN HARKER.
_Broken Barriers_, by MEREDITH NICHOLSON.
_Timber Wolf_, by JACKSON GREGORY.
_Colin_, by E. F. BENSON.
_Eris_, by ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.
_Pandora Lifts the Lid_, by CHRISTOPHER MORLEY and DON MARQUIS.
_The House of Helen_, by CORRA HARRIS.
_The Gay Year_, by DOROTHY SPEARE.
_The Middle of the Road_, by SIR PHILIP GIBBS.
_La Parcelle 32_, by ERNEST PEROCHON.
_North of 36_, by EMERSON HOUGH.
_Fires of Ambition_, by GEORGE GIBBS.
_Madame Claire_, by SUSAN ERTZ.
_Corduroy_, by RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL.
_The Public Square_, by WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT.
_The Ground Swell_, by ALFRED B. STANFORD.
_The Song of the Dragon_, by JOHN TAINTOR FOOTE. Short stories.
_12. Totalling Mr. Tarkington_
i
In the interesting procession of his work, Booth Tarkington has pretty
well paralleled the somewhat vacillating development of popular
literary taste in his country. This, there is every reason to believe,
has resulted from no conscious intention. The fashion, in considering
Mr. Tarkington, has usually been to contrast what are called his
two natures--the romanticist who wrote _Monsieur Beaucaire_ and the
realist (more or less) who wrote _The Gentleman From Indiana_ and _The
Turmoil_. Very sensibly has it been pointed out that the two strains
are manifest side by side in a number of his novels, such as _The
Conquest of Canaan_, where the realism of character is sadly impaled on
the rocks of plot. But, if I may advance the idea with due diffidence,
such as Tarkington always shows in any discussion of his work, the much
more instructive comparison lies deeper in the man and is the result of
an unrelenting pressure of environment on a personality endowed with
most exceptional talent and even unmistakable genius. One can say, I
think, although with a great deal of hesitation over its unavoidable
crudeness, that Mr. Tarkington in some sense repeats what Mr. Van Wyck
Brooks conceives to be the tragedy of Mark Twain, only in Tarkington’s
case it has no air of tragedy. The common view of the author of _Alice
Adams_ is that he is a lucky fellow who deserves all his luck. Only
in a narrow, godlike perspective would he appear tragic. And such
a conclusion might easily be premature. When _Monsieur Beaucaire_
appeared Mr. Frederic Taber Cooper declared it certain that we knew the
extent of the author’s capabilities, adding that it was unthinkable
that he should ever again essay the realism of _The Gentleman From
Indiana_. A couple of years ago plenty of persons qualified to have and
to express an opinion asserted that Tarkington would never overcome
his propensity toward a pulled-together and “happy” ending in a novel;
and in the same year appeared _Alice Adams_. As Mr. Tarkington is only
fifty-four, and may easily have a dozen years and a half a dozen prime
novels directly in front of him, to be dogmatic is to run a perfectly
unreasonable risk of stultification. I shall try to avoid that.
ii
“An unrelenting pressure of environment on a personality endowed with
most exceptional talent....”
Newton Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, 29 July 1869,
the son of John Stevenson Tarkington (died 1922, aged ninety) and
Elizabeth (Booth) Tarkington. The father, a Civil War soldier and a
lawyer, was for some years in politics; the son was a member of the
Indiana Legislature in 1902-3. The mother’s family is not traceably
connected with those Booths celebrated as actors. In his study of
_Booth Tarkington_ which is and will for a long time remain the chief
resource and delight of those considering the novelist, Robert Cortes
Holliday points out that the Indianapolis of Booth Tarkington’s youth
was a town, and that B. T. is neither a city nor a country boy, but a
town boy. For a while in his childhood the boy was affected by nervous
disorders resembling St. Vitus attacks. At about the age of eleven,
he became a friend of James Whitcomb Riley, who was a neighbour.
In his teens, Tarkington had the behaviour of a normal boy and a
spirit of deviltry showed itself that was to last him until he was
thirty. He went to Phillips Exeter, then to Purdue University, and
finally to Princeton, where he “made” Ivy, than which, in the way of
social success, Princeton offers nothing more beautiful. Much on the
sentimental side is made to this day of Tarkington’s singing of “Danny
Deever” at class gatherings and reunions. After leaving Princeton,
Tarkington returned to Indianapolis and pursued the busy social life
possible to a young man of the town while at the same time he read a
good deal and tried various styles of writing. Mr. Holliday intimates
that, like Stevenson, Tarkington “played the sedulous ape” to a
succession of literary masters, to find out how the thing was done.
The interesting point is that the beginner kept this activity quite
strictly to himself. “It was probably a consciousness of the foolish
look which his unrewarded activities may have had outside that caused
Mr. Tarkington at that time modestly to describe the serious schooling
which he gave himself as ‘fussin’ with literachoor,’” Holliday tells
us. The fact that the young man earned only $22.50 gross, or $62.50,
or whatever it was, by his first five years of literary effort has
since been as widely published as Joseph Hergesheimer’s fourteen years
without a single acceptance.
The junior Tarkington was under no necessity of earning his living
and a notebook kept at that time by his father records the repeated
return by publishers of his first novel, _The Gentleman from Indiana_.
_Monsieur Beaucaire_ was a long time getting accepted. The whimsical
_Cherry_ was bought by Henry Mills Alden for Harper’s Magazine,
pigeon-holed as a mistake and then unearthed and printed when _Monsieur
Beaucaire_ had made Tarkington “valuable.” Forty thousand words of an
early draft of _The Gentleman from Indiana_ had had to be discarded
because, having got his hero out for a walk, Tarkington could carry
neither him nor the story any further. After an interruption of some
length, _The Two Vanrevels_ was resumed and wound up only with the
greatest difficulty.
Mr. Tarkington was married in 1902 and again in 1912. He lived for a
while in France and Italy (Capri). His summer home, at Kennebunkport,
Maine, is usually spoken of with some reference to the study, where
models of vessels of every rig, a valuable collection, are displayed.
This is sometimes spoken of as “the house that _Penrod_ built” and the
ship models are perhaps natural to a home overlooking a New England
harbour. It is also to be recollected that certain of Mr. Tarkington’s
ancestors hailed from Salem. Perhaps any other significance in those
ships is merely fanciful.
No one who meets Booth Tarkington is insensible to the personal charm
of the man. He is absolutely without affectation, and the perfect host,
the staunch friend, the sympathetic listener and the contained and
modest talker. Whatever the vicissitudes he has undergone, whatever the
pressures put upon him, he has weathered them all with a steady helm.
It seems an astonishing, unwarranted and probably an impudent thing to
suggest that this man has been to a deplorable extent the victim of
circumstances (largely comfortable circumstances); and that, with a
less winning personality--if some outward expression for the thing must
be sought--the chances are he would have been a much greater writer
than, on his record, he is today.
iii
You see, of course, how handicapped he was from the start by being
“a good fellow.” The extent of that handicap can only be realised, I
think, by knowing that to this day “nothing, apparently, so much gives
Mr. Tarkington the horrors as the idea of the ‘literary.’ He does
not want to be ‘caught,’ he declares, writing ‘prose.’” I quote Mr.
Holliday, who adds: “Some literary editor in New York told him that
some of the passages in _The Turmoil_, in particular (I think) the
cemetery scene, were noble English prose, worthy, I suppose, of the
author of _Urn Burial_. ‘He liked them,’ says Mr. Tarkington with a
wry face, as though, if he knew just how, he would cut those passages
out.” But why should Tarkington be horrified by the thought that he may
have written “literature”? What black curse lies upon “literature”?
The only one I know is the contempt of “good fellows” and other
philistines for an affair they know nothing of and self-defensively
profess to despise. And if Mr. Tarkington thinks, as perhaps he does,
that he spent painful years of reading and practise writing without the
secret hope that he would some day write a piece of literature, then,
I suspect, he is much mistaken. But what is it, this mental process?
Why should he be “very quick to insist” that none of his family have
been “offensively” literary? Who is offended by literature? “Good
fellows” have been known to be very much annoyed by the presence among
them of one whose possession of a taste they did not share seemed to
impugn their own completeness. There is more than a suspicion that
“Tark” has jekyllhyded others so long as to have concealed something
very precious to him from himself. There could be no greater contrast,
for example, than between Joseph Hergesheimer and Booth Tarkington (in
this matter). Both are persons of some taste and genius who follow the
profession of letters. I reveal nothing when I say that Hergesheimer,
of whom personally I am fond, is considered by many people to be
most conceited. Mr. Hergesheimer would be the first to uphold such a
statement. One of the universally-praised traits of Mr. Tarkington is
his utter lack of self-conceit. What is the explanation?
Nobody lacks self-conceit, least of all a person with Tarkington’s
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