“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
1899 The Gentleman from Indiana
1900 Monsieur Beaucaire
1902 The Two Vanrevels
1903 Cherry earlier, in composition, than
The Gentleman from Indiana
1905 In the Arena
1905 The Conquest of Canaan
1905 The Beautiful Lady
1907 His Own People
1908 The Guest of Quesnay
1909 Beasley’s Christmas Party
1911 Beauty and the Jacobin
1913 The Flirt
1914 Penrod
1915 The Turmoil
1916 Penrod and Sam
1916 Seventeen
1918 The Magnificent Ambersons
1919 Ramsey Milholland
1921 Alice Adams
1922 Gentle Julia
1923 The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories
Plays by Booth Tarkington
1901 Monsieur Beaucaire with E. G. SUTHERLAND
With HARRY LEON WILSON:
The Man from Home
Cameo Kirby
Your Humble Servant
Springtime
Getting a Polish
Mister Antonio
1917 The Country Cousin with JULIAN STREET
With HARRY LEON WILSON:
The Gibson Upright
Up from Nowhere
1919 Clarence
1920 Poldekin
1921 The Wren
1921 The Intimate Strangers
Sources on Booth Tarkington
Booth Tarkington, by Robert Cortes Holliday. DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY. Authoritative, honest, delightful; especially sound in its detailed criticism of the books up to and including The Turmoil and Seventeen. When Holliday’s book was written, Tarkington was at work on The Magnificent Ambersons, for an estimate of which see Holliday’s Broome Street Straws.
Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920, by Carl Van Doren. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Booth Tarkington at Home, by John R. McMahon, LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL, November, 1922 (page 15).