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.
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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.
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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: