America Moved. Booth Tarkington

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      America Moved

      Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928

      edited by

      Jeremy Beer

      AMERICA MOVED

      Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928

      Frontmatter and notes Copyright © 2015 Jeremy Beer. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Front Porch Republic Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      ISBN: 978-1-62564-843-3

      EISBN: 978-1-63087-877-1

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      Tarkington, Booth, 1869–1946

      America moved : Booth Tarkington’s memoirs of time and place, 1869–1928 / Booth Tarkington ; edited by Jeremy Beer.

      xiv + 270 p.; 23 cm

      ISBN: 978-1-62564-843-3

      1. Tarkington, Booth, 1869–1946—Biography. 2. United States—Social life and customs. I. Beer, Jeremy. II. Title.

      PS2972 A45 2015

      Manufactured in the USA

      “As I Seem To Me” articles © 1941 SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved. “The World Does Move” is reprinted here by permission of the Newton Booth Tarkington Trust, which retains all right, title, and interest therein.

      Editor’s Introduction

      The template is familiar. Writer is widely praised and universally loved during his lifetime. Same writer is widely scorned and all but entirely forgotten less than a generation later—usually, one hastens to add, for good reason.

      Newton Booth Tarkington—author of The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams, Seventeen, and the Penrod stories, and at one time perhaps America’s most beloved and popular author—certainly seems to fit the mold. By the time Tarkington died in 1946, the critics had already consigned him to irrelevance, and they have not yet seen fit to substantively alter that opinion.

As early as 1921, Carl Van Doren savaged him (mostly) in The Nation (“rarely has so persistent a reputation been so insecurely founded”; “whenever he comes to a crisis in the building of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down to the level of Indiana sentimentality”).1 More than eighty years later, in a Tarkington retrospective published in The Atlantic, Thomas Mallon confirmed the establishment view: Tarkington wrote “in the throes of nostalgia”; he was (contra Paul Fussell) not just of his time but positively “oafish” on matters of race; and he was “finally . . . intent on offering his readers a pleasant Sunday drive—along with the sociological reassurance that they weren’t really the Babbitts and boobs that Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken kept taking them for.”2

      But when it comes to whom is worth remembering and whom we ought to let molder away, unloved and unwanted, in one-dollar used-bookstore bins, the critics don’t always get it right. That’s why we have revivals. These memoirs make abundantly clear why Tarkington is someone with whom it is still very much worth spending time. More so, perhaps, than some of his celebrated contemporaries.

      It is interesting to compare Tarkington to a fellow Hoosier author more highly thought of by the arbiters of literary greatness. The lives of Newton Booth Tarkington and Theodore Dreiser overlapped almost exactly. Tarkington was born in 1869 and died in 1946. Dreiser’s dates are 1871 and 1945.

      And that, more or less, is where the similarities end. The differences are instructive. Start with their backgrounds.

      Tarkington came from a happy, bourgeois home. His uncle Newton Booth, for whom he was named, served as California’s governor from 1871 to 1875. Tarkington’s father was a lawyer and judge, his mother proud of her old-American lineage. Although the Tarkington family—there were just four of them—was not always financially well off, they were never truly poor, and they were always respectable.

      The Dreiser brood was decidedly not. They were poor, they were peripatetic, and, to be blunt, they were considered white trash. Two of Dreiser’s sisters may have at least occasionally engaged in prostitution. Dreiser’s father, John Paul, was a harsh and unforgiving man who rationalized his character flaws by grounding them in a twisted version of his Roman Catholic faith.

      Dreiser left Indiana University after one year, having detested the experience, and eventually found his way onward and upward in the cutthroat world of turn-of-the-century journalism. Tarkington prepped at Exeter before matriculating first at Indiana’s rival state university, Purdue, then transferring to Princeton. Like Dreiser, he failed to leave with a degree, but he recalled his time on both campuses fondly, and at Princeton he was one of the leading figures in his class.

      Tarkington was a Republican, a man of moderately conservative political opinions, which he did not try to conceal, and a surprisingly good-humored and tolerant cultural reactionary; he wrote war propaganda and stumped for Wendell Wilkie while maintaining profound respect for Eugene Debs. Raised a mainline Protestant, he eventually drifted toward a genial Unitarianism. Dreiser was a man of fashionably progressive views. Indeed, he was a fellow traveler who with stout intrepidity joined the Communist Party in 1945—six years after the Nazi-Soviet pact, when for most American progressives the bloom had rather come off the Red rose. He was an aggressive atheist.

      Tarkington loved his home state without minimizing its Midwestern foibles, crudeness, and ridiculous bombast (his critics on this point read Tarkington with a marked lack of charity). He never decamped permanently from Indiana, instead living in Indianapolis for at least six months a year virtually his entire life. Dreiser left Indiana, for good, as soon as possible. His report of his automobile tour back to Indiana is recorded with the eye of a bemused and caustic anthropologist, not a loving son, in A Hoosier Holiday (1916).

      Near the end of America Moved, Tarkington frets about what he sees as the avant-garde’s obsession with sex. Dreiser, of course, famously challenged contemporary sex mores. Sister Carrie had the good luck effectively to be banned for seven years after its initial publication—and thereby obtained the imprimatur of H. L. Mencken, among many others.

      Tarkington was championed by such as Hamlin Garland and Barrett Wendell and James Whitcomb Riley, all of them today even more forgotten than he. Besides Mencken, Dreiser’s admirers have included Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Joseph Epstein, and Harvey Pekar, among myriad others.

      Take it all in, and is it any wonder that where Tarkington found many more readers, Dreiser has been far more popular with the literary establishment?

      In the major biographies competition, it’s 3–1 Dreiser (the most recent was published in 2005). Number of entries under “criticism and interpretation” in the Library of Congress catalog? 39–1, Dreiser. Number of books with a separate entry in that catalog? 4–0, Dreiser. Dreiser has two Library of America volumes. Tarkington, amazingly, has none. A journal titled Dreiser Studies was published from 1970 to 2006. Dreiser is recognized as a leading exponent, perhaps the leading exponent, of American naturalism.

      No biography of Tarkington has been published since 1955. Tarkington is almost never anthologized or read in the schools, unlike Dreiser and others of his contemporaries, including Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, even Upton Sinclair. Tarkington is not remembered