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 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 cannot be told; but there will be those alive to tell it.

Books by Booth Tarkington

Plays by Booth Tarkington

Sources on Booth Tarkington

Articles, reviews, etc., are plentiful and the reader is advised to consult the READERS’ GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1914.