American nights entertainment
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,