Robert Gottlieb is a serious high muckety-muck in the New York literary scene, formerly editor in chief, no less, of, successively, Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and the New Yorker. So why is he pissing on poor old Booth Tarkington?
In fact, much of Bob’s take on Booth over at the New Yorker, “The Rise and Fall of Booth Tarkington”, subtitled “How a candidate for the Great American Novelist dwindled into America’s most distinguished hack” is a chatty, enjoyable take on the vie littéraire as it flourished back in the day before even Bob was even born, which was in 1931. Tarkington was an enormous figure in his time, Gottlieb reminds us—although surely today few people have ever heard of him—winning two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction—The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918 and Alice Adams in 1921—his only equals, in quantity, at least— being William Faulkner and John Updike,
Sic transit gloria mundi, eh! Because, as Bob points out, Tarkington, for all his industry and success, was a trivial writer, a hack, and all the people who praised him, basically, didn’t know what they were talking about. The American cultural establishment of the day—the people who gave out the Pulitzers and generally decided who was out and who was in—was genteel and banal—and Tarkington spoke to them in a language they could understand, and which the public would buy.
Gottlieb tells us a great deal about Tarkington, whose life, at least to other writers, does have some interest, because he struggled for years, suffering and largely overcoming a series of personal tragedies while eventually achieving overwhelming success before being, in effect, “discarded” by history. It’s more than we need to know, really, in order to get to Gottlieb’s moral, that the New York literary scene was once stunningly vapid and conventional—though he never seems to wonder if the future will ever cast a similarly jaundiced eye on us. Surely not!
I read Gottlieb’s piece in full only because I have a “Tarkington” connection of sorts, thanks to the “Penrod” books—there were three of them, Penrod, Penrod and Sam, and Penrod Jashber, Penrod Schofield being a fairly obvious reworking of Tom Sawyer circa 1910. As Gottlieb tells it
The naïve charm and the fun of the Penrod stories are still palpable, but they are ruined for us today by the argot that spills from the mouths of the two African-American brothers who are pals of Penrod and the other boys who play in the back yards and alleyways and sheds behind the white boys’ homes. The names of the brothers, I’m afraid, are Herman and Verman, and although they are on terms of total equality with the other boys, their language sounds like the worst kind of vaudeville blackface impersonation. (“I guess I uz dess talkin’ whens I said ’at! Reckon he thought I meant it, f’m de way he tuck an’ run. Hiyi! Reckon he thought ole Herman bad man! No, suh, I uz dess talkin’, ’cause I nev’ would cut nobody! I ain’ tryin’ git in no jail—no, suh!”)
Well, not really, or not entirely. I made the acquaintance of Penrod in the summer of 1957, when I had just turned 12, in the tiny library of Rowe, Massachusetts. I brought the news of my discovery back with me to Falls Church and shared it with my one literary friend, Chris Thompson. Chris was an inch taller and quite a bit smarter than me, far more sophisticated, and was already starting to think of himself as an intellectual, which I surely was not. I gave him Penrod to read and after about five minutes he pronounced “Booth Tarkington does try awfully hard to be funny.”1
In fact, I myself thought I was “lucky” to have found Penrod when I was still 12. Even though “growing up” was the furthest thing from my mind, I somehow felt that in a year or two I would have found the books “juvenile”. The Penrod books don’t picture a society the way Tom Sawyer does and lack entirely the depths of Huckleberry Finn, which was still my touchstone for literary excellence and in fact the only great book I had read at that age.
But I must protest Gottlieb’s claim that the characters and speech of Herman and Verman make the books unreadable, at least for those who have yet to take up permanent residence in the woke fainting couches now so much in fashion. In the first place, the black boys’ talk is not really “the worst kind of vaudeville blackface impersonation,” which tends to rely on the “comic” mispronunciation and misuse of “high falutin’” words. If we are going to object to a book simply because the black characters’ language is rendered phonetically while the white characters’ is not, one would have to object to Huckleberry Finn itself, because even though Huck often uses “substandard” words like “ain’t” and “warn’t”, his speech isn’t rendered phonetically.
Furthermore, though he acknowledges that Herman and Verman are presented in terms of “total equality” with the white boys, Gottlieb ignores one of Tarkington’s “points”—that Penrod and Sam find Herman and Verman’s way of life fascinating. “Our new friends are so cool!” Tarkington was a thorough-going racist—he took it for granted that only the white race was capable of “civilization”—but he also felt that blacks were capable of achievements of real value of which whites, thanks to the burdens of civilization, were not.
In the sample of Hermann’s speech that Gottlieb provides, Herman is in fact explaining how he bested a brutal bully who was terrorizing his white friends. It is an “interesting” episode, the one time in the Penrod series—and the only time in any of the handful of Tarkington’s books that I have read2—that “evil” appears. Tarkington carefully depicts the bully as remorselessly vicious and cruel—“He was afraid of no one on earth except his father”—the opposite of the sort of stage bully fancied by Ronald Reagan who runs away the minute you stand up to him, who can be defeated by moral courage rather than physical violence.
For a page or two, Penrod and Sam are taken out of their utterly safe middle-class world where nothing really bad will ever happen to them, and Herman ups the ante considerably by playing the cannibal card—threatening to cut out the bully’s liver with a scythe and eat it—causing the bully to flee. But then we’re brought back to safety: the bully’s gone and Herman was only kidding! “Reckon he thought ole Herman bad man!” Nothing to worry about!
There is another “interesting” episode in the series involving Herman [TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING!], Penrod suffering a mauvais quart d’heure when his mother demands to know why he and his friends lured the son of a prominent minister (of course) into their clubhouse and had him BEATEN BY NEGROES! Well, of course it sounds bad when you say it that way, but, see, the boy called Herman a “nigger”, and, well “Herman really hates being called a nigger,” so, naturally, the initiation (Herman was a member) was conducted with unusual though understandable vigor.
Penrod Jashber, the third in the series, is a curious book, not as entertaining as its predecessors, and my first encounter with what one might call “writers on writing,” because at least half the book is a parody of bad writing, a thriller Penrod is writing starring a detective named “Jashber”. Even at the time, I felt Tarkington was being a little self-indulgent, but it worked enough for me to finish the book, though I can’t imagine that it could have been as popular as the first two.
My other big contact point with Tarkington was his 1921 Pulitzer winner, Alice Adams, discussed in significant detail by Gottlieb as well, although this time our roles are reversed, and Bob is the cheerleader and I the naysayer, regarding both the book and the 1935 movie starring Katherine Hepburn as Alice. Says Bob.
In “Alice Adams” (1921), Tarkington actually succeeded in creating a complex and convincing adult character, as he charts the tragicomic failure of a young woman to penetrate the city’s social upper crust. Her originality and quick mind and spirit are almost enough to get her there through a romance with a suitable young man—almost, but not quite. Her family’s pretensions to gentility, exposed at a nightmare dinner party held to impress her beau, lead to disaster, and, at the end of the novel, Alice, facing reality, is seen mounting the steps to a dreaded secretarial school—a very different kind of heroine from the generally insipid or idealized Tarkington leading lady.
Alice has enough self-knowledge to make her not merely an effective heroine but a really interesting one, although if you know Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Alice—to my mind, her finest work—it’s hard to disentangle what she accomplished from what Tarkington did. Hepburn, in fact, with her brash charm and unyielding determination, can be thought of as an Alice Adams who prevailed. (In the movie version, Fred MacMurray, defying plausibility, comes back to the rescue, so that clever, forceful Alice, who undoubtedly would have gone on to become a successful businesswoman, will not have to go to work.)
“Alice Adams” is by far Tarkington’s most accomplished novel—worthy of being compared to Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” And he knew what he had written, describing it as “my most actual & ‘life-like’ work . . . about as humorous as tuberculosis.” But its unsentimental realism must have frightened him: it stands as the high-water mark of his career, before he slowly backs off to more comfortable scenarios.
Virtually every word of this gush leaves me gobsmacked, because all my reactions are precisely the opposite. My awareness of Alice Adams comes entirely from my semi-fascination with my semi-bête noire Pauline Kael, about whom I wrote a long semi-takedown, The Pearls of Pauline (Kael, That Is). Kael, in turn, was semi-obsessed with the 1935 film, repeatedly finding ways to compare herself to her beloved Kate in that role.3
Kael identified completely with Hepburn in the film, telling us (somewhere) that the first time she saw it she was so upset at the “nightmare dinner party” that she ran from her seat and stood trembling in the lobby until she could be sure it was over. Later, in several pieces written years apart, she compares herself to Alice, sweet and beautiful and innocent and noble, and scorned, because she had to wear “last year’s dress” to a major social event.
I must have planned to write something on the film, because I rented both the book and the movie, but couldn’t get through either. If you’ve seen the film (the odds are awfully good that you haven’t read the book), rest assured that the ridiculously melodramatic plot regarding the “superglue” formula that will somehow miraculously restore the Adams family fortune comes straight from the book, as does everything else.
What amazes me is that Gottlieb feels that Tarkington’s portrayal of Alice is sympathetic—her “originality and quick mind and spirit”? Rather a shallow social climber who is deservedly punished and humiliated for trying get above herself. She and her whole family are thoroughly lower middle class and damned well deserve to stay that way! As for becoming a “successful businesswoman”, okay, it’s not absolutely impossible, but in 1921, starting out as a secretary, in a small city (at best), with a limited education, the opportunities are, shall we say, limited. A Becky Sharp she isn’t, and Becky, after all, put her intelligence at the service of her charm.
I suspect that Bob is relying on his memories of the film as the basis for his woefully incorrect summation of Alice’s character because Tarkington goes out of his way to picture Alice as not merely a snob but a racist as well, utterly disgusted when her brother, at the social event of the year, rather than talking to people who count, insists on amusing himself by gambling with the servants—the black servants!
And the film also contains a racist episode, because the main reason the “nightmare dinner party” is such a disaster is that the maid they’ve hired for the occasion, is vulgar, ignorant, and incompetent—and black!4 Here’s where I want to hit the fainting couch! Move over, Bob!
In his conclusion, Gottlieb notes that Alice was published the year after Main Street, Sinclair Lewis’s once legendary wholesale demolition of, effectively, Booth Tarkington’s America, whose values Tarkington gently satirized but ultimately never doubted. It’s “interesting” that Lewis, whose enormous success virtually initiated “modern”, “sophisticated” literary America, is probably more unreadable today than Tarkington’s best, the “light” fiction of Penrod contrasting favorably with the leaden, one-note satire of Main Street and Babbitt and all the rest.5 Sic transit gloria mundi indeed!6
Afterwords
I didn’t know, until I started writing this, that Bob is 88, way older than even I am, so maybe I should have taken it easy on him, but what the hell. Literary criticism isn’t beanbag, after all. No one asked him to write this article!
1. This was not the first time my naïveté embarrassed Chris. A year earlier, I seemed to have particular difficulty decoding words that started with “M”—pronouncing the title of “The Coming of the Mormons” as “The Coming of the Morons” while stumbling over both the pronunciation and meaning of “memoirs” in “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” and also rendering the name of Holmes’ great nemesis, Professor Moriarty, as “Morty”.
2. That is to say, the Penrod books, Seventeen (which Gottlieb accurately describes as “Penrod as a teenager”) and portions of Alice Adams.
3. Kael hated the ending of the film. To her mind, the only “happy” ending would be for Alice to find her true destiny by traveling to New York and becoming Katherine Hepburn. In the conclusion of my essay on five foot nothing Pauline, I heavily referenced Alice, explaining why Pauline relied on film not as an enrichment to life but rather as a substitute: “Because what, after all, does life give us? It gives us nothing. Does life give you an inch? No, it does not. You might want to be an inch taller — just one inch! — but life won’t give it to you. But the movies give you everything. For two hours, at least, you don’t have to be short and dumpy. You can be impossibly tall and elegant, like Katherine Hepburn in Alice Adams, so beautiful and perfect in last year’s dress, but alone at the party, because she isn’t rich. So alone and ignored, even though she’s so special and so much better than everyone else, just like you! You know how she feels! You know exactly how she feels! Because you’re just like her. That’s you there, up on the screen.”
4. This is probably in the book as well, but I didn’t get that far while reading it. Slovenly black maids were considered funny back in the day. Hattie McDaniel, who plays the maid, had an identical role in the film version of The Male Animal, about which I complained in my little book on co-author James Thurber, James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide. Kael makes no mention of the rampant racism in the scene. Before she became famous, Kael was not all that excited about the whole integration thing, though she later presented herself as a champion of “black culture”, about which she, of course, knew very little (though she did like jazz).
5. Lewis had been done “better” 20 years before by Theodore Dreiser, who was not exactly unknown, and whose novels generally fit well with the muckraking era, but the U.S. wasn’t ready for serious, “total” disillusionment until the years following World War I.
6. Word wants to capitalize “gloria”! What’s the deal with that? Is Microsoft a Catholic plot? I smell Jesuits!
