America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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purest realism and also tragedy unmitigatedly. It dealt with the rise of its hero to great heights of ill fame, detailed not only his deeds of thievery but several accompanying murders; and it reached its climax and last curtain with his assassination—shot in the back as he stood on a chair hanging a picture, his destroyer being inexorably one of his own followers who, like most people, wanted to make some money. This play, I firmly recall, was a very model of austere playwriting; it conveyed no moral, had no bias, petted none of the “characters,” and, with the icy Olympian detachment that is the mark of the highest type of authorship, sought only to reveal its people by their own uncompelled acts and utterances. Its title had the esthetic starkness of the rest of it—Jesse James.
The cast was all male. In the last act only two appeared, the hero and his assassin; and both the action and the dialogue here stood forth in sharp relief against nothing—a masterpiece of that elimination of nonessentials now so favored in all the arts. Space permits me to quote the entire act. This was it:
Act 14
Enter Jesse James and Bob Ford.
Jesse: Well it is a nice day so I believe I will get on this chair and hang this picture up on the wall.
Bob: All right do.
Jesse gets up on the chair so Bob shoots him in the back with his revolver. Jesse falls off of the chair and dies down on the floor.
Curtain
Our stable being vacant for the time, except of vehicles, I directed, rehearsed, and produced Jesse James in the empty hayloft, coming thus into competition with another active theater two blocks up the alley. This other theater, also in a hayloft, was pretentious; and I visited it in a purely critical spirit. Its great boast was that it had a Gallery, a dangerous structure holding four, admission to the Gallery being five cents instead of the three cents charged for a safer and more comfortable seat nearer the stage.
Wearing an intendedly scornful expression, I paid the higher price, sat in the Gallery, and soon became aware of something familiar in the play enacted before me. I seemed to perceive certain resemblances—especially when one of the boys, wrapped in a previously white tablecloth, said to another: “Listen here; you listen now. You’re my son and I used to be your father; but now I’m his ghost and you got to do something because, listen, I was lying down somewheres taking a nap, and—well, your uncle came sneaking around and he poured some kind of stuff in my ear, and so—well, so it killed me, so now I’m a ghost, and after that he and your mother got married, so now you got to get after him.”
Mingling with the audience, and also with the actors, after the play, I made myself offensive, telling everybody that plagiarism had taken place. What we’d seen was nothing but Hamlet, I declared. However, nobody knew what I was talking about, not even the manager-author-actor, Johnny Geiger, the fattest boy in Indianapolis, who’d played the avenging son of the ghost. It was openly said that I was jealous: and I openly was, not yet having learned to conceal my viler emotions and knowing myself too clumsy a carpenter to attempt a five-cent Gallery for my own theater.
Box-Office Publicity
A few days later, however, while Jesse James was still in rehearsal, we had a triumph, one that our whole cast felt scored all over Johnny Geiger’s theater. We found ourselves in a newspaper. On the face of it, the item was wholly laudatory. Its writer praised the inspirational seizure upon a recent happy event in the Western border town of St. Jo, Mo., for a drama theme, promised the audience “many a thrill,” gave the cast of characters, and declared that just the scenery, let alone the acting, would be worth anybody’s three cents. Members of our company of players, seeing their names in print for the first time in their lives, glowed with enthusiasm for themselves; and so did I for me—until I read the last sentence for the third or fourth time: “The author of this dramatic chef-d’oeuvre, himself of course to appear in the title role as Jesse James, is Master Newton Booth Tarkington, whose hairs have been whitened by the snows of some thirteen summers.”
Thinking this over, I somehow didn’t quite like it. There appeared to be a covert meaning in that bit about my hairs having been whitened by the snows of thirteen summers, and I didn’t altogether believe in the newspaper’s sincerity. My colleagues, on the contrary, felt that the unexampled publicity assured us a vast audience. Bright boyish souls, they weren’t disappointed when the great afternoon of the single performance arrived and our “box office” amounted to twenty-one cents, all paid by little girls, since every boy of the neighborhood not included in the cast proudly stayed away.
After Page Chapman, as Bob Ford, had shot me in the back with a cap pistol and I’d fallen from the chair and died thumpingly on the floor, the audience remained seated, stupidly expectant of something more, and maybe better, until I had to step forth and ask them if they didn’t have sense enough to know when a play was over, so why on earth didn’t they go home.
First Poem
I had a sense of anticlimax, a feeling that remained with me for some time after the production of this, my first play, which was also my first literary work to be completed. The second, a month or two afterward, had a success that astonished me. I mean a success with other people; I wasn’t astonished when what I did was a success with myself.
I wrote and illustrated something I conceived to be a poem. The two illustrations, in subconscious imitation of most illustrators, weren’t closely related to the text. One was the drawing of a capped-and-belled jester—a popular theme at the time—and he was depicted on a bare hilltop in a tragic posture, careless of the adjacent lightning of a thunderstorm. The other drawing showed him sitting under a tree, quiet, but looking as sad as I could make him look. I bound the two pictures into a little pamphlet, and between them I placed a page of my rhymed meditation:
The Trees
When the soul knows but sadness
No hope and no gladness
Then the soul in its sighing
Finds rest in leaves dying
And shadows of leaves at play.
When the soul knows but sorrow
And the birth of tomorrow
Will bring but the death of today
Turns the soul to the trees
Moving cool in the breeze
Keeping time to the summer’s sigh
Finds rest and finds sadness
But no hope and no gladness
For the Trees answer not
Passion’s cry.
I left this output, as if inadvertently, upon the library center table, and withdrew modestly to the yard, where, lingering beneath an open window of the library, I heard ’ere long a favorable commotion within the house—the two ladies of my family in a state of exclamation. Then my mother came rushing forth, calling me loudly. When I appeared unto her, walking slowly and asking with odious affectation, “Now what’s all the matter?” she fairly shouted over me, embraced me effusively, and took me into the house to read my “poem” to me, and to my congratulatory sister, over and over.
My mother was convinced that it was a poem and that I was a poet and an artist. Never in her fond life had she made such an enraptured fuss over me; her delight was so exorbitant, indeed, that I had almost the grace to blush and to feel the rightful guilt of a person who knows himself overpraised. Her joy of me didn’t end with the moment or the day. She sent copies of my “poem” to kinsfolk near and far, and altogether was so triumphant that now, in retrospect, I wonder! Her sudden and uplifted excitement over “The Trees” seems to indicate a previous lengthy depression during which she must have been fearing that she’d brought something pretty flat into the world.
From that day, I think, she was always a little different with me, and always, even when I brought her grief, treated me as if I contained something precious that must be cherished. I’d just had my thirteenth birthday when I composed the verses that so moved her, and now I had no more opposition to the discarding of knee breeches.