Booth Tarkington, Great American Novelist

Preface

It is typical of the American arrogance that arose from our colonial sense of inferiority that we are always searching for the great American sport, the great American hero, and the great American national dish.  Once upon a time that was the hot dog, then it was the hamburger, and by the 1980s at least, pizza.  Now we can choose from a list that includes, in addition to the hamburger and pizza, Tex-Mex Tacos, Sushi, and Poke Bowls.

Inevitably, American writers and critics have been on the lookout for the Great American Novel.  The term was coined by a now unknown novelist, William De Forest.  Writing (1968) in the wake of  the destruction of the American republic in the War  Between the States, De Forest  defined this novel of the future  as a book that would express the American experience and the American dream.  This is the kind of exceptionalist thinking that would later impel Americans to enter World War I, making WW II inevitable, replace authentic local and national cultures with American  movies, TV, and fast food, and inspire the House Committee on Unamerican activities.

Has France or Spain or Britain ever dreamed of such a committee?  One might cite the French Jacobins and various Communist regimes reinvention of their nations as ideologies, which suggests that Americanism at heart is not an expression of any authentic sense of the American experience but only a tawdry nationalist ideology.

I have never much cared for lists of the best composers, best novelists, best poets, best hamburger joints.  Very good is good enough for me. A colleague, who resented On a few occasions I have expressed a  general contempt for literary criticism and second-hand scholarship, which I described as no fit business for a grown man.  When a colleague once asked me if there was some literary goal I would aspire to, I  answered: a single poem worthy of inclusion in an anthology of good verse.

One major problem with most list-makers is their insistence on seeing progress in literature and music and painting.  If they were less ignorant, they would reflect that the Iliad and Odyssey are still the two best narrative works we have, the tragedy has not improved since the days of Aeschylus and Sophocles, that the greatest national epic is Vergil's Aeneid, and that many of the greatest writers in the English language lived and died many centuries ago.  Can we really speak of a progress from Shakespeare and Jonson to Ibsen and Shaw to Edward Albee and Neil Simon?

So, setting aside such fantasies as the great American novel and the delusion of progress, one can appreciate the variety of fine American fiction writers that run a pretty wide gamut from Mark Twain and Bret Harte to Hawthorne and Henry James to Faulkner and Percy, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.   One very important writer usually omitted is Booth Tarkington.

Booth Tarkington

Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest.  Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the War between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats (from North Carolina by way of Tennessee), but his mother, Elizabeth Booth, had impeccable Yankee credentials (her grim ancestry stretched back to Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut).  The melding of the two races succeeded, in the Tarkington’s case, in producing a unionist Republican family, with a devotion to hard work that was tempered by the graciousness and open-mindedness of the Old South.  

Tarkington's family  were genteel in the old sense, though much of the family's wealth disappeared in the Panic of 1873.  After attending school in Indianapolis, his high school education was finished at Philips Exeter.   He initially went to Purdue in Indiana, but as the family fortunes improved, he moved to Princeton.   Booth was a popular young man at Princeton, where Scott Fitzgerald later heard fragments of the Tarkington legend.  Unfortunately, some of his amiability was fueled by drinking, and the party boy turned into a steady, if respectable alcoholic.  His drinking destroyed his marriage, cost him friends, and slowed down his work, but, as he tells the story, one day he woke up and realized he was not a drinker.  

His friends asked if  he meant that he had  decided to give up drinking.  No,  he explained, he simply was no longer a drinking man.

His early novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) was a success, and, while it remains a readable book, it  hardly gives a hint of the talents that he was developing.  His first real triumph was Penrod, a comic masterpiece that can be read and reread at every stage of life.  Penrod first emerged in a series of stories in the Saturday Evening Post in 1913.   His popular novel of adolescent life, Seventeen, was serialized in early 1915; followed by more Penrod stories, and Gentle Julia (Seventeen from the girl’s perspective).

His greatest work was a trilogy of novels Growth, which depicted the transformation of the United States in the decades between The War Between the States and The First World War:  The Turmoil written in 60 days of early 1914;  his masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersonsin 1917, and The  Midlander in 1923.

The sequence of major books is rounded out by Alice Adams (1921),  and The Plutocrat (1926)----not a bad accomplishment for an invalid, has-been, and recovering drunk!

Many of his letter works are eminently readable:  Ramsey Mulholland, Mirthful Haven, The Flirt, Presenting Lily Mars,  and one of my children’s favorites,  Little Orvie (1934), which was inspired by a visit to relatives and his dawning realization that the children of the 1930s were already spoiled brats.  --to say nothing of his short stories and Broadway hits.  By the 1920’s Tarkington was both America’s consistently best-selling writer but he also topped the lists of literary polls for the most important American writer.

Part of the success lies in the simple fact that Tarkington was a very good writer who worked quickly--Scott Fitzgerald regarded him as perhaps the most talented American novelist, but the gentleman from Indiana was also lucky enough to observe the transformation of America (the Midwest in particular) from a quintessentially American region of farms and quiet towns into a maelstrom of industrial cities swarming with immigrant workers.

Tarkington, as a gentleman of the old school, affable and well-mannered, was saddened by the vulgarization of an America he loved, but he refused to cry over spilt milk.  That, I think, is what sets him apart from the sentimentalists of an earlier generation--or, for that matter, from Henry James and Edith Wharton--and from the muckrakers and satirists who became so popular in the 20’s and 30’s.  Straddled between two worlds and with a novelist’s ability to enjoy life even when it came in unfamiliar or unpleasant forms, he was uniquely able to comment on the transformation of America that took place between the end of the Civil War and the start of WWII.  

Tarkington, despite his romantic portrayal of 19th century middle American life, was really a hard-headed pragmatist.  He ridiculed himself for his own dreams of gentility that had been nourished at Philips Exeter and Princeton, and especially his early pretensions to belong to the aesthetic avant-garde, which are roughly treated in The Plutocrat.  He paints his most enduring portrait of a spoiled young man coming to grips with the new realities of the 20th century in his undoubted masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons.

It could once be said that there was hardly any educated  American who had not read the novel (or at least seen the film), which traces the fall from glory of Indianapolis’ finest family, the Ambersons, and of old Major Amberson’s spoiled grandson, young Georgie Minafer.  To Georgie, anyone outside the tiny charmed circle of the best families is simply “riffraff”--his favorite word.  He first enters the scene when, after brawling with a strange boy and telling the Methodist minister to go to hell, he justifies his conduct by telling his mother he was right to despise the preacher:  “Grandpa wouldn’t wipe his shoe on that ole story-teller…I mean none of the Ambersons wouldn’t have anything to do with him…I bet if he wanted to see any of ‘em, he’d haf to go around to the side door…He’s just riffraff.”

The Amberson’s world is teetering on the edge of the precipice, though no one knows it except Eugene Morgan.  Morgan had failed to win the hand of Georgie’s mother and he has come back to revolutionize the city by building an automobile factory.  Morgan’s respectable family antecedents cannot alter the fact that he is the economic revolutionary who is destroying the graceful old order.  He is the capitalist serpent in the Midwestern Eden.

Georgie, on the other hand, despite his courage and charm, is simply a human waste who thinks only of his social position.  He is oblivious to the feelings of others--to their very existence.  George despises the idea of useful work: “I don’t expect to go into any business or profession,” he tells Morgan’s charming daughter Lucy, “lawyers, bankers, politicians!  What do they get out of life, I’d like to know!  What do they ever know about real things?  Where do they ever get?”  Well what does he want to be, asks Lucy.  “A Yachtsman.”

The Ambersons’ fall from glory is rapid and terrible.  Walking through the streets after the bankruptcy sale, George confronts a changed world in which his family counts for nothing.  He had never noticed the transformation because he had always traveled in a closed carriage but now he sees:

"The streets were thunderous; a vast energy heaved under the universal coating of dinginess.  George walked through the begrimed crowds of hurrying strangers and saw no face that he remembered.  Great numbers of the faces were even of a kind he did not remember ever to have seen…He saw German eyes with American wrinkles at their corners; he saw Irish eyes and Neapolitan eyes, Roman eyes, Tuscan eyes, eyes of Lombardy, of Savoy, Hungarian eyes, Balkan eyes, Scandinavian eyes--all with a queer American look in them…”  

Familiar landmarks in his native city have been turned into shops and cheap stores.  George is a fine looking young man and attracts the attention of not a few of the women.  One group of nouveaux riches kids, gaudily dressed, drive by in a red sports car, and while the girls admire George, wondering who he might be, one of the boys says he knows: “He thinks he’s the Grand Duke Cuthbert.”  The girls giggle and “George unconsciously put his emotion into a muttered word: ‘Riffraff.’”

 Ultimately, George hits rock bottom when, chancing upon a book with the city’s top 500 families, there are no Ambersons on the list.  “Georgie Minafer had got his come-uppance, but the people who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it.  Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.”

The chronicles of Indianapolis are continued in the previous novel of the series, which, while it  lacks some of the Ambersons' magnificence,  makes up for it by the pathos of the story.  

"There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke.  The stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him instantly….he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than cleanliness….The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches.  He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously.  He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: “Wealth! I will get wealth.  I will make wealth. I will sell wealth for more wealth.  My house shall be dirty, my garments shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean…but I will get wealth."

So begins The Turmoil, with an ode to the smoke, and the author goes on, ruefully, to say: “Not quite so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly people who had understanding of one another, being on the whole much of the same type.  It was a leisurely and kindly place--‘homelike’ it was called.”  

The smoke that invaded Indianapolis in The Magnificent Ambersons is  almost a primary character of the other two novels in Growth.  Here the cult of bigness and progress is exemplified in the person of old Sheridan, who is referred to repeatedly in Tarkington’s novels as the exemplar of the new industrialist.  The “Turmoil” of the title is not merely the birth pangs of the new industrial Indianapolis; it is also the social turmoil of two families--the Sheridans, who have reached the pinnacle of success without acquiring respectability or dignity, and the Vertrees, a respectable and dignified family who are facing economic ruin.  In such a novel, there must be a courtship between the two families, and there is--or rather are, since Mary Vertrees first sets her sights on Jim Sheridan, Jr., a chip off the old industrialist’s engine  block, but in the course of the novel she comes to love the frail and aesthetic youngest son Dibbs, who has spent the eight months previous to the novel’s beginning in a sanitarium, trying to recover the health that was broken almost completely by working in the factory’s machine shop to prove his mettle.

Mary is a practical, level-headed girl who has never been able to fall in love with any of the young men who have pursued her.  In one sense she is a modern liberated girl, cynical about false values and capable of thinking for herself--which distinguishes her sharply from her conventional and platitudinous parents who think their Landseer hunting prints are the pinnacle of fine art--but as much as her mother, she is a lady, and a virtuous lady.  She is experienced enough to recognize both the pretensions of the nouveaux riches and the viciousness of the decaying aristocracy.  After her first party at the Sheridans, Mary tells her mother that young Edith Sheridan is interested in a young aristocrat, who is after both Edith and her brother’s wife, and tells her mother, “He’s a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody’s always known that, but the Sheridans don’t know the everybodies that know.”

Dibbs Sheridan is one of Tarkington’s best characters, defying all stereotypes.  Yes, he is educated and refined beyond the understanding or appreciation of his family, but he loves his family nonetheless, though they appear to care very little for him.  He should be the melancholy scion of ancient aristocracy and young Lamhorn the cynical child of an industrialist--just as frank and virtuous Mary should be the child of decent country folk or the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.  In fact, they are both natural aristocrats, in a world that is alternating between vulgarity and degeneracy.

The degenerate young Lamhorn is at the center of the problem.  Coming from a world that Edith Sheridan and her sister-in-law Sibyl have only glimpsed, like the child putting its nose to the window of the toy store, he has fascinated the two women.  Taking advantage of Sibyl--who has all the moral restraint of a cat in  heat--he really wants to get his hands on Edith and the Sheridan money.  Quite apart from the moral dilemmas which the plot suggests is the question of class.  The old class may have degenerated into pathetically dignified people like Mary’s parents and the decadent Bobby Lamhorn, but the new class, as exemplified by the Sheridans, are vulgar, cold-hearted toward the ailing Dibbs, far more snobbish than the Ambersons, and completely spoiled.

In the end, of course, it is the poet Dibbs who saves the family.  However, the young man is a very unpromising future captain of industry.  When Dibbs is asked by his despairing father what he wants to do in life, he tells him that he wants to write poetry and essays.  The old man tells him with bitter contempt that that is work for girls not for men and points out to the pulsating life in the streets: “Look out o that window!  Look at the life and energy down there!  I should think any young man’s blood would tingle to get into it and be part of it.”

When the oldest son dies, Dibbs agrees to go back to the machine shop where he does so well that his father wants to promote him to an executive position.  Old Sheridan is particularly eager to bring his youngest son along, once he realizes that son Roscoe, unable to control his evil wife, has crawled into the bottle.  Dibbs, however, is obstinate; he has made his peace with the zinc-cutter, but he does not want to be responsible for spreading the ugliness of industrialism.  He relents, only when it appears that he might be able to help Mary and her family.  Even his father comes to realize that Dibbs will, in fact, kill himself with work if he does not have something better than growth and profits to dedicate himself to.  Mary is, of course, that ideal.

It is a fine novel, one that impressed me when I read it in early adolescence.  The problem with The Turmoil is the ending.  It is all very well to fall in love with a beautiful and pure woman, but as the complete ideal end of human existence, married love falls short.  Dibbs gives up poetry for business, but how will marriage become the be-all and end-all of his existence?  Despite the happy ending, Dibbs is actually a human sacrifice made to the god of noise and smoke.

The Midlander rounds out the trilogy. Dan Oliphaunt comes from a decent old family on National Avenue, with a rich (very rich as it turns out) grandmother but with a father who is too decent to know how to make money.  Dan is not an especially good student but he squeaks by.  What he really loves is making things out of junk and starting little businesses.  The key episode of his childhood concerns one such small business, making brackets, with his friend Sammy.  When Dan’s brother Harlan, something of a pantywaist, tells him to come in and send the dirty Jew home, Dan is furious, and a near fistfight breaks out at the dinner table, when the incident is brought up. The brothers never become enemies, but they cannot be friends either.

The boys go to an Ivy League college and after graduation spend too much time in New York, where Dan courts and marries a spoiled socialite who ends up ruining his life, but on a trip back home, he conceives of the project of spending his entire inheritance on a distant farm and turning it into a subdivision--expecting the city to grow out that far.  Dan is a visionary, and none of his father’s friends will help him, and jumping from one near-bankruptcy to near-bankruptcy, he turns out to have been right.  People are tired of the smoke and noise of all that growth and they are ready to flee to the new suburb.  Dan becomes a great man, with his finger in every new business, until he is caught in a squeeze and the old guard brings him down.  Only his Jewish friend stands by him.  (If you find this puzzling, then you have never learned that the prime secret of Jewish success in all walks of life is loyalty and patronage of friends, including even gentile friends.)

Dan’s brother Harlan is appalled but learns, in the end, to respect the brother whom everyone loves, even when they think he’s crazy.  Harlan sees nothing but the destruction of his world, as National Avenue is turned into a commercial street lined with car dealers and garages (the fault, originally, of Gene Morgan!), and when he marries Dan’s childhood sweetheart, he still cannot understand why his own mother and wife now insist on living in the restricted part of Dan’s subdivision, which is a sort of garden estate--“more beautiful”--his mother sighs, than National Avenue ever was.  It’s something, Harlan concedes, but it lacks the stately dignity.

In fact, Harlan is more than half right and Tarkington knows it.  It is not only houses and buildings that make a city but a way of life.  Booth himself was highly resentful when the smoke and noise drove him out of his family’s old neighborhood and into something more like Dan Oliphaunt’s garden development.

Tarkington took up the theme of progress in his best work of nonfiction, The World Does Move in which he moves back and forth, between nostalgic reminiscences about the good old days and a practical insistence that as the world changes, we must change with it.  Writing in 1929 and looking back to the turn of the century, he frankly acknowledges that “of the pleasant smallish city I lived in…there remains about as much as the Roman left of Punic Carthage when he drove his ploughs over its site before building his own city there.”

Unlike Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, Booth Tarkington is a gentleman of the old school.  He can live on comfortable terms in Europe without showing off or developing contempt for the folks back home.  He knows Babbitt all too well, knows how cheap and vulgar he is but he cannot despise him.   Some reviewers detected in Tarkington an insufficient degree of contempt for businessmen, and they accused him of actually admiring the plutocrats.  He took his revenge by writing his comic masterpiece,  The Plutocrat,  in which Earl Tinker--the Midwestern booster par excellence--ends up taking his place beside the Roman as one of the creators of civilization.  In his more prosaic essay, Tarkington describes this new species of American businessman:

“They are optimists to the point of belligerence, and on their marching banner they inscribe the words, “Boost! Don’t Knock!”  They are boosters out to sell their city to the world.  They believe that boosting pays and their boosting advertisements are of a new phrasing believed to be both vigorous and seductive.  The new type speaks too in a pretentious vocabulary apparently of the noblest altruism.  Nevertheless, these men are sincere and they believe that honesty pays.... The idealists constantly shout that their city shall be a better city and what they principally mean by better is bigger and more prosperous.  They seem to have one supreme theory: that the perfect happiness and beauty of cities and of human life are to be brought about by more factories..... As the city grows and grows, it grows dirtier and dirtier.  The idealists are putting up enormous business buildings that are repulsively begrimed before they are finished, but the idealists cannot see the dirt for the size, and boast grandly.  They boast of their monuments and rain soot on them.  Every year they boost a great Clean-Up Week when everybody is supposed to get rid of the empty cans in his backyard.....”

The Gentleman from Indiana is appalled by most of the new art and the new morals but he is at a loss to know how to combat them, even in principle, so he convinces himself that fast young girls in short skirts swilling cocktails are simply a new fashion, and a bracing one, that women are no longer willing to be subservient.  A Christian would know how to interpret these developments and how to oppose them without giving way to despair, but the fact is that the Midwest had ceased to be Christian sometime between the Civil War and WWI.  Oh, they went to church and sent their kids to Sunday School, but there were none like the Midlander’s puritanical grandmother to keep them in line.  Dan Oliphaunt was indeed forced to go to Sunday School, but he cannot impose the same duty on his own son who is spoiled to incorrigibility by his New York mother.  Mary Vertrees does go to church, but it is mostly to hear the organ, and when she takes Dibbs with her, he says that sitting beside her it is really church.  This displacement of love of God to love of woman is a sacrilege.

The truth is that people like Isabel Amberson Minafer and Mary Vertrees have disappeared from America, and they have been replaced not by bold piratical industrialists like Sheridan, Morgan, and Earl Tinker, but by spoiled grand-children who go to Harvard and Cornell and affect an Eastern accent without getting so much as their finger nails into American civilization; consumerists and hedonists who go through three or four divorces and watch their children grow up wearing jeans and listening to Michael Jackson and Ice Cube.  This aristocracy sets the tone for the vast middle class who as one more recent Indiana poet put it:

Work all day in some high rise

And vacation down on the Gulf of Mexico.

It is not just Dan Oliphaunt’s son who doesn’t go to Sunday School but Tarkington himself who never went to church, but how is he different in this from the masters of American literature?  Let me just name the leading lights: Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Emerson and Thoreau--to say nothing of virtually every major American writer of the 20th century except T.S. Eliot who went into exile.

The failure of American fiction and the failure of the Midwest itself is that in the pursuit of success, we turned away not just from religion but from God.  A pagan worshipping the false gods of his land could love the little spot on which he grew up.  A post-Christian can only see the chance to turn the family farm into a development.  It is not Christ who taught us that bigger is always better, that power and wealth, growth and profits, are the only good things worthy of a serious man’s attention.  It was someone else who has been whispering to us, since we have been human, that we ought to transcend our limitations and become as gods.  In reality the result has been--in Indianapolis as in Rockford--that we are making our little world unfit for human life.

We cannot blame Booth Tarkington for being American or Midwestern.  Even against his better judgment and settled opinion, he showed us the standards of decency and civility, of lives lived with joy as well as dignity, and in teaching us to mourn the passing of the old order, he gives us inspiration to do better with the time we have and in the world we have inherited from the Morgans and Sheridans.