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.