American nights entertainment
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.
“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