NYPL Bans Cell Phones at JD Salinger Exhibit; Rare Artifacts on Display - The Jewish Voice
NYPL Bans Cell Phones at JD Salinger Exhibit; Rare Artifacts on Display - The Jewish Voice |
| NYPL Bans Cell Phones at JD Salinger Exhibit; Rare Artifacts on Display - The Jewish Voice Posted: 26 Nov 2019 04:13 AM PST  An exhibit, titled "JD Salinger," is running through January 19th at the historic Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. The iconic writer died in 2010 and avoided publicity and media most of his life, A.P reported. By: Harvey Wassenstein The N.Y Post reported, all cell phones will be banned at this exhibit so nobody can capture any pictures of these rarely seen Salinger artifacts. Library workers are stationed outside the gallery where more than 200 of Salinger's artifacts are on display, telling patrons they have to check their coats and bags — and tuck their phones inside. His literary estate approved new print editions for the first time in decades of the four books he allowed to come out in his lifetime — "The Catcher in the Rye," ″Franny and Zooey," ″Nine Stories" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction." And for the first time ever, the literary estate authorized e-book editions. Visitors can se an actual manuscript of "Catcher In The Rye". Salinger's estate is overseen in part by his son, Matt Salinger, who has also said that readers will, at some point, see the books his father worked on after he stopped publishing in the 1960s. In announcing the exhibit last week, the younger Salinger cited the public's lasting curiosity, A.P reported. "When my father's longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Co., first approached me with plans for his centennial year, my immediate reaction was that he would not like the attention," Matt Salinger wrote. "He was a famously private man who shared his work with millions, but his life and nonpublished thoughts with less than a handful of people, including me. But I've learned that while he may have only fathered two children there are a great, great many readers out there who have their own rather profound relationships with him, through his work, and who have long wanted an opportunity to get to know him better." Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which became home to much of his later work. The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 and became an immediate popular success. Salinger's depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel was widely read and controversial. In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye "had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools" The book remains widely read; in 2004, the novel was selling about 250,000 copies per year, "with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies, Washington Post explained.  |
| The Rise and Fall of Booth Tarkington - The New Yorker Posted: 11 Nov 2019 12:00 AM PST  A trick question: Can you name the only three writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice? Faulkner, yes; Updike. And? Hats off if you came up with Booth Tarkington. And yet his two prize-winners—"The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Alice Adams," just reissued in one volume by the Library of America—are not even the most commercially successful novels of his extraordinarily successful career. Nine of his books were ranked among the top ten sellers of their year (up there, pre-Stephen King, with Zane Grey and Mary Roberts Rinehart), and the outlandishly dissimilar "The Turmoil" and "Seventeen" were the No. 1 sellers in consecutive years. And then there's "Penrod," probably the most beloved boys' book since Tom and Huck, though I can't recommend a stroll down that particular memory lane. There are thirty or so novels, countless short stories and serials, a string of hit plays. And there were countless honors: Tarkington was not only commercial but literary—not just the Pulitzers but in 1933 the gold medal for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells had won previously. As early as 1922, the Times had placed him twelfth (and the only writer) on a list of the twelve greatest contemporary American men. "Yes, I got in as last on the Times list," Tarkington commented. "What darn silliness! You can demonstrate who are the 10 fattest people in a country and who are the 27 tallest . . . but you can't say who are the 10 greatest with any more authority than you can say who are the 13 damndest fools." As for booksellers, in 1921 they voted him the most significant contemporary American writer. (Wharton came in second. Robert Frost? Thirteenth. Theodore Dreiser? Fourteenth. Eugene O'Neill? Twenty-sixth.) Nothing ever changes. Some forty years earlier, a comparable poll ranked E. P. Roe and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth at Nos. 1 and 2, with scores of votes each. At the bottom of the list—with two votes—came Herman Melville. How to explain this remarkable career—the meteoric ascent to fame, the impregnable reputation over several decades, and then the pronounced plunge into obscurity? If you read all his fiction (which I strongly advise not attempting), you find a steady if uninspired hand at the helm. Slowly, painstakingly, Tarkington had taught himself to write reliable prose and construct appealing fictions; he was unpretentious—always literate but never showy. You could count on him to catch your interest even if he failed to grip your imagination or your heart. And he was always a gentleman. Newton Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis in 1869, his father a prosperous lawyer. But it was his mother who was the dominant figure in the family—she and her brother, Newton Booth, a flourishing merchant who became the governor of California and then a United States senator. Another powerful figure in the family was Tarkington's sister, Hauté, a decade his senior and a force of nature. A superficially conventional Midwestern family, the Tarkingtons didn't always behave conventionally. When young Booth, halfway through high school, was discovered to have been playing truant for nine weeks, his parents didn't remonstrate or punish, they simply shipped him East to the Phillips Exeter Academy. Back in Indianapolis, he had been a fairly successful student, unathletic and bookish but also boyish and well liked. (He was always well liked.) He was fussed over at home by his adoring mother and sister, and he was at ease with family friends like President Benjamin Harrison and James Whitcomb Riley—"the Hoosier Poet"—who was an encouraging presence in his life. (Riley had once paid court to Hauté.) It was a comfortable world. Booth thrived at Phillips Exeter, where the young men (he was eighteen when he arrived there) were more or less on their own. According to his biographer James Woodress, "Tarkington fancied himself a gay blade during his senior year, but his notions of deviltry stopped at practical jokes, loud clothes, incessant smoking, and occasional champagne suppers. He was shocked by the sexual license of some of his classmates." To a friend back home, he wrote, "What a hot-bed of foulness and muck! Portsmouth houses are full of them every night—Boston ones, every holiday." Indiana, Woodress points out, "was not more saintly than the East in 1889, but to Tarkington and his friends in Indianapolis brothels existed only in books." He thrived yet again when he moved on to Indiana's Purdue University, in pursuit of a young woman who happened to live in Lafayette. But his mother was determined that he go to Princeton, and there he went after a year at Purdue, despite his sense that it was time for him to start doing something. At Princeton, he more than thrived, he blossomed. He was an editor for three university publications; he was a star—writing, directing, and acting—of the Dramatic Association, which turned into the famous Triangle Club; he was an outstanding soloist in the touring Princeton glee club (famous for his rendition of Kipling's "Danny Deever" set to music). He was also a prize orator; he was dashing off derivative verse and sketches; and he was forever drawing—he thought he might find a career in art. And he was more or less the most popular man on campus, obviously special yet one of the boys. Everyone liked him because there was nothing not to like, and because he was so gregarious, so generous, and so much fun. No wonder that years later he wrote about these college years, "It never rained! It was always sunshine—then!" By the time he left Princeton, he had determined to become a writer, and thanks to a modest bequest from Uncle Newton he was able to spend most of the next four or five years living comfortably at home and more or less paying his own way. As always, he was formidably industrious—churning out stories and drawings and launching them to potential venues. They came hurtling back as quickly as he could send them off. This apprenticeship went on and on with little encouragement except from the family, while neighbors and friends made it clear they thought he was loafing. The family, however, remained staunch, and it was sister Hauté who masterminded the eventual breakthrough. In 1898, on a trip to New York, she took with her (without his knowledge) a manuscript of a short novel he had written—a historical romance called "Monsieur Beaucaire"—and an introduction to the magazine and book publisher S. S. McClure. In his memoirs, Tarkington recounts what happened. Hauté left off the manuscript at the publisher's office, and when she returned to hear the verdict she encountered one of McClure's colleagues:
McClure appeared, agreed to read "Beaucaire" himself, hesitated over it, but, when Hauté mentioned that her brother was just finishing a long novel set in Indiana, asked to see that one, too. Booth sent off the manuscript, and two weeks later received a letter from the esteemed writer and literary adviser Hamlin Garland. "Mr. McClure has given me your manuscript, The Gentleman from Indiana, to read," it began. "You are a novelist." "I couldn't imagine anybody's saying such a thing," Tarkington would write years later. He always recalled Garland's letter as the thing "that changed everything for me." He was just short of thirty years old. Summoned by McClure to New York to reduce his novel sufficiently to make it practical for serialization, Tarkington was suddenly immersed in the literary/publishing world, meeting celebrities (Kipling, for one), being touted by the hyperbolic McClure to America's foremost muckraking journalist, Ida Tarbell: "This is to be the most famous young man in America." (Reporting to his parents, he wrote, "I felt like a large gray Ass!—and looked like it.") "The Gentleman from Indiana" was published in late 1899, and was an instant success. "Monsieur Beaucaire" followed soon after (and equally successfully), and the contrast between the two books can stand for the two veins of Tarkington's early career as a novelist. "The Gentleman," despite its somewhat melodramatic plot about a crusading young journalist triumphing over vicious opposition in a small town, is an early venture into descriptive realism. "Beaucaire"—written at the height of the fashion for historical romance—is a clever pastiche of eighteenth-century derring-do: "The Duke's mouth foamed over with chaotic revilement." (Surprise! Beaucaire, posing as a barber, is in reality the prince Louis-Philippe de Valois, Duke of Orléans! He will be the only character ever to be played on the screen by both Rudolph Valentino and Bob Hope.) Then, in 1902, everything happens at once. A new novel, "The Two Vanrevels," is published—another historical romance and another best-seller. Two friends and partners are in love with the same girl, there's a big fire, one of the young men is shot by the girl's father, there's the Mexican-American War of 1846, there's a genial old "negro" and a robust older woman full of wisdom—in other words, there's plot, plot, plot, although Tarkington, a passionate admirer of Howells and Henry James, has already grasped that plot is not the road to distinguished fiction. He can't help himself, though; he's conditioned by the plays he keeps turning out—plays that required either comic plots or melodramatic plots. Somehow he finds himself (without campaigning) a candidate for the Indiana state legislature, and (barely campaigning) wins the seat: politics run in the family. More important, he finds himself a married man. There have been several misfires, but now he woos and wins Louisa Fletcher, the daughter of an Indianapolis banking family, a graduate of Smith College, and ten years his junior. Although he's morbidly terrified of public speaking ("I would as soon be sent to jail as to have to make a speech"), he's active in the legislature, enthusiastically supporting a proposed law legalizing Sunday baseball. It lost by one vote, undone by what Woodress calls a "barrage of pulpit oratory," and wouldn't be enacted for half a dozen years. The most significant result of his time as a legislator was a group of six well-observed and convincing political stories that were published in 1905, in a collection called "In the Arena" (generously included in the new Library of America volume). These stories attracted a great deal of attention, including a summons to the White House from President Theodore Roosevelt. At lunch, Tarkington wrote to his father, the President made "a long & generally favorable comment" about the stories. ("Of course, I just sat & purred—too pleased to eat.") In 1903, Tarkington fell desperately ill with typhoid fever. To help him recover, his doctor prescribed "the healthiest place in the United States," Kennebunkport, Maine—a prescription that would change his life. Eventually, he would spend half of every year there. Meanwhile, to further his recuperation, he set out for Europe on an extended version of the Grand Tour. For eleven months, he and Louisa—together with his parents!—explored the Continent, particularly attracted to Paris, Capri, and Rome, where he could indulge himself in his lifelong passion for acquiring paintings and objets d'art. One consequence of this marathon of travel was the stream of letters he composed (and illustrated) for Hauté's three boys back in Indiana. Published as "Your Amiable Uncle" in 1949, three years after his death, the letters reveal him at his most winning, jocular and loving, especially when he's tormenting the nephews with descriptions of the Christmas gifts they will soon be receiving: "We have bought you each a lovely, calfbound hymnal. You will be mad with joy," and embroideries with mottoes like "Home, Sweet Home," "Virtue Is Its Own Reward,"and "Honor Thy Uncle." A less happy aspect of this time abroad was what Woodress tactfully refers to as "marital storm warnings." Eleven months spent with her formidable mother-in-law cannot have been amusing for young and fun-loving Louisa, and the prospect of returning to the Indianapolis of her close-knit in-laws—especially the daunting Hauté—clearly did not appeal. The Tarkingtons took up residence in New York, where Booth relished his immersion in the literary scene. New York, of course, was also the heart of the American theatre world, and in the years to come he was more engaged in writing plays than novels. In fact, he loved everything about the theatre—casting, rehearsing, directing, costuming. Perhaps Louisa didn't. In 1905, the Tarkingtons returned to Europe, where their only child, Laurel, was born early the following year in Rome. They then moved to Paris, eventually taking a long lease on an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens. And there they settled. Even so, the marriage deteriorated further, until in 1911, after some initial bitterness, an amicable divorce was granted. During these years, his mother had died, his father had quickly remarried, and he and his frequent collaborator, Harry Leon Wilson, had enjoyed a record-breaking triumph with the play "The Man from Home," which ran for five years—in Chicago, in New York, and on tour—earning him a substantial fortune. (In one season, he had four plays running.) He also, however, had to face the fact that he had become an alcoholic. He had always drunk (and eaten) copiously, but after surviving a heart attack early in 1912 "I suddenly decided I preferred to die sober." Knowing that he had to stop drinking, he just stopped. He put himself to bed for well over a week, and when he emerged he was through drinking forever. Helping him to this resolution was the encouragement of a woman he had met years earlier and whom he now married. Susanah Robinson was a mature woman who had had some business success and was well equipped to create a cushioned environment in which her writer husband could flourish. She had no difficulties with his overprotective and interfering family, or with smoothly running the Tarkington homes in Indianapolis and Maine. In other words, she was every writer's dream of a wife/nurse/manager/mother. The couple were blissfully happy from first to last. Susanah was also the one who suggested that he write stories for boys: thus Penrod, Tarkington's most famous (and lucrative) creation. A likable rapscallion, he's always getting into trouble—disrupting the school pageant, eating himself sick at the county fair, driving his big sister and her beau crazy, sparking the Great Tar Fight. From the moment the first of the Penrod stories appeared, in 1913, they were overwhelmingly popular, and when the first batch was published in book form it was a big best-seller, and went on selling into the thirties and forties. The material was close at hand—not only in Tarkington's memories of his own happy boyhood but in the exploits of his three nephews as he lovingly observed them. He was paid thousands of dollars for each story as it appeared: the grand house that he and Susanah built in Kennebunkport was often fondly referred to as "the house that Penrod built." Tarkington also enjoyed the countless letters he received as whole classrooms across the country were assigned to write to him. His favorite: "Teacher told us we must each write you a letter and she will send the best one. Well, how are you? Yours truly." 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!") Verman, it should be noted, has a severe speech impediment, and Herman lacks a forefinger because one day he idly held out his hand and said to his brother, "Verman, chop 'er off," so Verman chopped it off. How ironic all this is, given that from the start of his career Tarkington was singled out and praised for his affectionate interest in, and sympathy for, what he carefully called "Negroes." No matter: this material is utterly unbearable today. The gently comic carryings on of youngsters would be a constant vein in Tarkington's fiction throughout the rest of his career, not only in two later Penrod collections but most spectacularly in "Seventeen," centered on a Penrod-like seventeen-year-old named Willie Baxter, who falls hard for a visiting belle from out of town—the ultrafeminine Lola Pratt, with her maddening baby talk and adorable little dog, Flopit. Here is love-struck adolescence in all its embarrassing self-consciousness, and its tremendous sale made "Seventeen" the best-selling fiction of 1916. Sensible and appealing boys and girls as well as bratty younger brothers and sisters populate Tarkington's later books, often stealing center stage from the purported leading characters. Tragically, his own child, Laurel, never a stable personality, grew increasingly disturbed as she got older. Her condition, diagnosed as dementia praecox (schizophrenia), worsened and she became violent, until one day in 1923 she threw herself from a second-floor window. She survived the fall but died of the pneumonia that followed—at the age of seventeen. "Penrod" and "Seventeen" were collections of popular sketches masquerading as novels. Tarkington's first serious novel—written as he was approaching fifty—was "The Turmoil" (1915). Ambitious and often impressive, it was greeted in some quarters as a candidate for that elusive grail the Great American Novel. For the first time, Tarkington addresses head on his major preoccupation, the relentless transformation of American small-town life (seen through rose-tinted glasses) into the ferocious and ugly world of Progress, dominated by ruthless businessmen who are supplanting the "best" families (like his own). The old stable town is lost to uncontrollable growth; the horse is replaced by the automobile; and omnipresent coal dust settles over, and soils, everything. The great mansions crumble and are replaced by squalid (to Tarkington) boarding houses, apartment buildings, "machine-shops." The well-to-do are forced to move farther away from the center of things. In "The Turmoil," the irrepressible entrepreneur James Sheridan sees his two older sons destroyed by his ambition, his daughter lost to an unfortunate marriage, and his youngest son, the sensitive, poetic, and bizarrely named Bibbs, compelled to abandon the literary life for which he is suited in order to learn the family business and sacrifice himself by turning into a benign version of his father. An obligatory romance between Bibbs and a young woman from a First Family now so financially diminished that they even have to sell her piano (!) is no more convincing than any other Tarkington romance. What is convincing, beyond his consistently fine rendering of the details of time and place, is a new understanding and sympathy for his central characters, as father and son struggle to come to terms with who they are and what they have made of themselves and of each other. This is the first Tarkington novel to acknowledge and respect the fact that human beings not only have roles to play in a story but have developing inner lives. The Sheridans of "The Turmoil" are interlopers. "The Magnificent Ambersons," which followed in 1918, approaches the same phenomenon of a changing society from a different point of view—that of a great family that not only has seen better days but has been routed by the forces of progress. The novel is suffused with nostalgia, but it understands that the Ambersons have reaped what they sowed. Its central character, George Minafer—the grandson of the most magnificent of the Ambersons—is a thoroughly dislikable boy and young man: selfish, indulged, unkind. Only after he has cruelly destroyed the possible happiness of his adoring mother while the family fortunes are melting away does he begin to find redemption, in hard labor and newly assumed responsibility. Does this happen far too neatly? Unquestionably. But George is the most fully realized of Tarkington's characters to date, and the warped dynamics of the Amberson family are relentlessly exposed. Our view of this deeply considered novel can't help but be conditioned by the fame of the film that Orson Welles made of it, in 1942—the follow-up to "Citizen Kane." Notoriously disfigured by RKO before its release, the movie is nevertheless remarkably true to both the spirit and the text of the novel. (I'm sorry to have to acknowledge that I'm not as enamored of the heavy-handed Wellesian cinematic vocabulary as so many others are.) 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. The year before "Alice Adams," 1920, was the year of "Main Street," the crucial turning point in Sinclair Lewis's enormous career—one that immediately put Tarkington in the shade. "Babbitt" followed, and then "Arrowsmith," in 1925, an annus mirabilis. That was the year of Hemingway's "In Our Time"; Dos Passos's "Manhattan Transfer"; Cather's "The Professor's House"; Dreiser's "An American Tragedy"; Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"—to say nothing of Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans" and Anita Loos's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." And Faulkner's first novel, "Soldiers' Pay," was coming off the presses. Neither in that year nor in any year to come did Tarkington write anything remotely of their consequence. But remember: back in 1900, when he was publishing "Monsieur Beaucaire," Dreiser—that other writer (but not gentleman) from Indiana—was publishing "Sister Carrie." Meanwhile, after this watershed moment, Tarkington went on writing novel after novel, series after series, story after story: a quarter of a century of fluent and polished work. Several of the novels are especially engaging: "The Plutocrat," in which a crass but enthusiastic Midwestern millionaire sweeps through the Mediterranean world like a benign Roman conqueror, and "Kate Fennigate," the life of a superbly confident woman who overreaches in helping her husband fulfill his potential; but even these two novels are an unmistakable retreat from what he had achieved at his best. His work, most of it running in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, was received with respect if not seriousness. And he always retained his readership—a best-seller until the very end. The harsh reality, though, is that the candidate for the Great American Novelist had dwindled into America's most distinguished hack. His life, however, remained comfortable and satisfying, except for a terrible period in his sixties after his eyesight gave way and he had to undergo a series of five operations before it was more or less restored. During that time, he was totally blind for five months. But even the calamity of blindness did not keep him from writing—the only thing he not only knew how to do but needed to do. He had found the ideal secretary in a close friend, Betty Trotter, and he dictated at least eight hundred words a day to her, as well as dealing through her with his always teeming correspondence. Betty became part of the Tarkington household—already a household of women. Not only Susanah but Susanah's difficult sister lived with him. So there were now three women at home devoting themselves to him. Through these later years, he never relaxed his interest in public affairs, although his politics were hardly consistent. He was an ardent internationalist, as passionate about the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War as he had been earlier about the League of Nations. He was an outspoken crusader for Roosevelt's crucial and embattled Lend-Lease policy in the face of Midwestern isolationism. And yet he loathed Roosevelt and the New Deal. It was a family joke. He had trained his beloved poodle, Figaro, to participate in the following dialogue at dinner:
At which Figaro would be rewarded with the dog biscuit he knew was coming. Tarkington's conservative politics were echoed in his attitude toward art, of which he was by now a substantial collector, especially of eighteenth-century English portraits: Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Romney. His experiences acquiring these works led to one of his most entertaining later books, a series of stories called "Rumbin Galleries," about a roguish but honest art dealer. (There's also, of course, the diffident, well-bred young assistant who, like all such Tarkington heroes, addresses all older men as "Sir" and is so shy of the sparkling young woman who is his colleague in the gallery that he can barely bring himself to address her at all.) Unfortunately, Tarkington's views on art begin seeping into his novels, where he is relentlessly scornful of anything "modern"—he had fought a (losing) battle to keep a Picasso out of the Indianapolis art institute, of which he was a trustee. In book after book, modern art and modern music are dragged into the story as an excuse to air these crotchety views. We are, however, offered an alternative to the lure of the modern in a short novel called "Young Mrs. Greeley." Young Mr. G. is on the fast track at work and Mrs. G. has to learn the hard way, and almost too late, that it's not enough to be very pretty and charmingly dressed. You have to know more than what she's learned in cheap magazines to fit in with the cultured atmosphere at a dinner party where the big boss's gracious wife says to you things like "I'll show you those missals my husband spoke of having collected . . . and those old loose sheets of Gregorian chants." Tarkington even manages to slip his anti-modern-art crusade into his particularly puerile novel about Maine, "Mary's Neck." The nice, conventional—and rich—Midwestern Masseys come East for a vacation and try to figure out the social hierarchy of the snobbish summer colony. Not only are they exposed to some slick, pretentious "artists" on the make but they come to know and appreciate local "characters" with names like Zebias Flick and Ananias Prinsh Sweetmus, who specialize in monologues crammed with Maine ruminations: "Once the goodness gits gone out o' fertilizer, why, the best you can say for it is it ain't hardly got no goodness left in it." There are pages and pages of this. What was it, finally, that kept so capable a writer as Tarkington from producing so little of real substance? Yes, he lacked the fierceness and conviction of a Dreiser or a Lewis; his talent was descriptive rather than penetrating; and he was almost pathologically nonconfrontational. But ultimately what stands between him and any large achievement is his deeply rooted, unappeasable need to look longingly backward, an impulse that goes beyond nostalgia. He tries conscientiously to identify benefits that can be ascribed to the march of progress, but what he registers and mourns is the loss of tradition and civility. He also tries to celebrate the virtues of emotional maturity, but where he really wants to live is in his boyhood, with all its harmless escapades under the protective eye of a benevolent mother. If he could not transcend these limitations in his art, he managed to live his life joyously within them. To the last, he was the most popular man on campus. In 1983, his grandniece Susanah Mayberry published a loving yet clear-eyed memoir of him called "My Amiable Uncle." (Her father, John, was the oldest of the "Your Amiable Uncle" nephews.) From her we get a convincing sense of his never-failing humor and tolerance, his joie de vivre. And of the effect he had on the people around him. Her father, she tells us, once said, "We have so much fun with Uncle Booth that we forget he's a famous man." On the day after Uncle Booth died, another of the nephews said, "This is the first day I can remember when I didn't think after I woke up, 'I wonder whether I'll get to see Uncle Booth today.' " And his grandniece herself tells us that Uncle Booth "was the best entertainment, the most fun that I have ever known." Who could ask for a happier epitaph? ♦  |
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