The Ground Swell, by ALFRED B. STANFORD.
The Song of the Dragon, by JOHN TAINTOR FOOTE. Short stories.
12. Totalling Mr. Tarkington
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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.
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BOOTH TARKINGTON
“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.