America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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Tarkington panels are organized at academic conferences. No journal is dedicated to Tarkingtoniana.
During Tarkington’s lifetime, the critical contest wasn’t so lopsided. Both The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921) won Pulitzer Prizes (in 1919 and 1922, respectively), and Tarkington is the only writer to have two novels win Pulitzers. In a 1921 Publisher’s Weekly poll of booksellers, Tarkington was named the most “significant” contemporary author (Wharton came in second, Dreiser fourteenth). In 1922, Literary Digest named him the greatest living American author, and in the same year he was the only native writer to appear on the New York Times’s list of the ten greatest living Americans. In 1933 he became just the third person to receive a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Twelve years later he received from the American Academy of Arts and Letters the William Dean Howells award, given just once every five years.
On top of all that, Tarkington moved product. From 1902 to 1932, nine Tarkington titles appeared in the top ten of Publisher’s Weekly’s year-end bestseller lists. Dreiser never had a bestseller.
It certainly isn’t Dreiser’s superior prose style that has endeared him to literary gatekeepers. Tarkington’s prose—still rewarding and enjoyable, as America Moved demonstrates—has aged as gracefully as Sophia Loren; Dreiser’s—clunky, verbose—more like Bea Arthur.
So what happened? The pages of these memoirs go a long way, I think, in explaining why Tarkington’s star faded so quickly after the end of his major period—let us say, circa 1930. In a word, Tarkington was uneasy with the literary, social, cultural, and political changes that transformed American life during the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of style, he wrote in the tradition of Howellsian realism, rejecting naturalism (a decision he defends in these pages) and remaining completely untouched by the advent of literary modernism. Politically, he might pass as an old-fashioned liberal, and he certainly manifested and even promoted the virtue of liberality in his life and writing, but he was not a Progressive and certainly no leftist. Culturally, he believed that there were real goods worth defending in the older, slower America of small towns, human-scale cities, and closely knit communities, whatever that America’s defects.
He was out of step, in other words, even with the au courant writers and critics of his own day, and laughably so with those of succeeding generations. Yet interestingly enough, many readers in the twenty-first century might find in him a remarkably kindred spirit. For those who have rediscovered the values of place, rootedness, and community; who have grown wary of the technologies and aspirations of giantism; and who are keenly alive to the environmental costs of mass transportation and industrialization,3 Tarkington looks wiser than he did to previous generations, for whom the narrative of individual liberation, even when drenched in Dreiser’s deterministic irony, trumped all else.
Thus, in the second part of America Moved, “The World Does Move,” Tarkington ponders the price of a frenetic commercial-industrial society, of the rise of mass culture, and of the ideology of American Progress. In this part, especially, his theme is the radical alteration in society’s mores since the fin de siècle. His reflections are often prophetic. Take Tarkington’s reportage on the changes wrought by the arrival of the “horseless carriage.” Recalling a dinner in Paris in 1903, he puts into the mouth of an unidentified companion a remarkable prophecy. The automobile, said this “elderly American,”
will obliterate the accepted distances that are part of our daily lives. It will alter our daily relations to time, and that is to say it will alter our lives. Perhaps everybody doesn’t comprehend how profoundly we are affected by such a change; but what alters our lives alters our thoughts; what alters our thoughts alters our characters; what alters our characters alters our ideals; and what alters our ideals alters our morals. . . . We are just entering the period when most of what we have regarded as permanently crystalline will become shockingly fluid—that is to say, we are already in the transition period between two epochs. . . . Restfulness will have entirely disappeared from your lives; the quiet of the world is ending forever.
The historian John Lukacs’s judgment that there was more profound social and technological change in the period between the Civil War and World War I than there has been since is amply attested to by Tarkington in these pages. In an era of such vertiginous change, some reflection on what it all means would seem warranted. Among the major American writers of his day, Tarkington undertakes this reflection with more care and nuance—whether we finally agree with his assessments or not—than nearly anyone else. The tone he takes is that of a hopeful lover—a lover of the world, of the good that has been lost, but also of the good that remains, and of the good that he is confident will yet be wrought.
There is a humanity in Tarkington that is absent in the all too self-consciously pitiless Dreiser. Dreiser was concerned with social justice, abstractly conceived, yet refused to offer any grounds for hope to his socially marginalized characters, for whom he simultaneously had both pity and contempt. He reduced men and women to little more than beasts and presented the universe as intrinsically meaningless. Free will, human dignity, and any immaterial reality were shams. Power relations were all that mattered. Tarkington probably had Dreiser in mind when he recalled, approvingly, his friend James Whitcomb Riley’s hatred of “the ponderous humorlessness of the French realism with which Zola was then beginning to stimulate the long succession of followers who still urge upon us the dismal dirtiest of life as the most of it.”4
Considered in conjunction with Tarkington’s great “Growth” trilogy—which consists of The Turmoil (1915), The Magnificent Ambersons, and The Midlander (1924)—and Alice Adams, these memoirs, long out of print and unread, make the case that Booth Tarkington matters. They show that he stands, if not among the first rank of American writers, squarely and securely among the second.
There have been those who believed that all along. John Lukacs, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Roger Ebert have shared appreciations of Tarkington’s achievement, Ebert going so far as to say that Tarkington’s Penrod volumes “earn full comparison with the somewhat later P. G. Wodehouse, whose style and word mastery resembles him.”5 And Tarkington’s fellow Indianapolis native, Kurt Vonnegut, in a 2007 lecture, could hardly contain himself, crediting “the example of the life and works of Booth Tarkington” for inspiring him to pursue a writing career. “His nickname in the literary world, one I would give anything to have, was ‘The Gentleman from Indiana.’ When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him. We never met. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I would have been gaga with hero worship.”6
Let Vonnegut have the last word. Read America Moved, and decide for yourself whether Booth Tarkington is worth reading—and his America worth remembering.
1. Carl Van Doren, “Contemporary American Novelists: Booth Tarkington,” The Nation, February 9, 1921, 233–35.
2. Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2004.
3. Thomas Mallon claims that “only general ignorance of his work has kept [Tarkington] from being pressed into contemporary service as a literary environmentalist—not just a ‘conservationist,’ in the TR mode, but an emerald-Green decrier of internal combustion.”
4. See pages 61 and 159 for this quote and the block quote above, respectively.
5. The chapter “1939” in Lukacs’s A Thread of Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) was inspired by Tarkington, according to Lukacs. For Frum, see http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjhkMjMyYTgxMjI1MmEzMzM4NWFkMWY2ODNmNzE4OGE=.