America Moved. Booth Tarkington

Very Young Man Goes West

      When, at probably less then eighteen months, I looked out of a window at the first snowflakes of that year, I was disappointed because of their smallness. I was disappointed because I then remembered snowflakes that had been as large as the palm of my hand, and these now weren’t half that size. Thus, though I don’t remember the larger snowflakes that fell when I was less than a year old, I remember that when I was less than eighteen months old I did remember them, and that at less than a year old I had observed their size as compared to the size of the palm of my then hand.

      I didn’t tell anybody about this, hence nobody told me about it later; I remember it. The suggestion is that the youngest baby has more than what are called “prenatal memories”; that he’s not only thinking, he’s already recollecting, and that conscious memory is an activity within us at birth.

Two years old, I was complacently aware that I owed some of my importance to the achievements of another person, for whom I’d been named. Our family possessed, besides worthy ancestors, a living Great Man; and, like all other families that have this privilege, we borrowed greatness from our hero. He was my mother’s brother, Newton Booth. Physically delicate, just out of college, and beginning the practice of law in that agreeable town, Terre Haute, he’d suddenly swung his placid young life to Western roads of adventurous and sometimes tragic hardship. Now—generous, rich, still young, and still a bachelor—he’d become the governor of California. My mother and my sister and I went to spend a year with him in Sacramento.2

      Uncle Newton made much of me; so did the circle of gay early Californians surrounding him. Toys almost glutted me; I heard tales loudly told of me, saw groups of expectant faces about me awaiting the delights of my wisdom; and bearded men, as well as hourglass-shaped ladies, professed themselves ravished by photographs of me in kilts and velvet jacket. The flatteries I received might easily have convinced me that I was a philosopher, or a wit, or a great beauty. They did. I thought I was all three.

Much was made, too, of some imagined companions of mine, a family I’d found in the air. Where I got the name of these ghostly people, the “Hunchbergs,” and the name of their dog, “Simpledoria,” nobody knew, nor did I; but Mr. and Mrs. Hunchberg, and their son and daughter, almost grown up, and Simpledoria, appear to have had reality for me. I talked with them at great length, when actual people were present as well as when I was alone. I quoted the Hunchbergs incessantly, played with Simpledoria on the carpet, spoke to him from my bed at night. Uncle Newton gave a dinner for the Hunchbergs, with chairs placed for the four of them and a plate on the floor for Simpledoria. Through me, the translator as it were, my uncle talked seriously with Mr. Hunchberg, had cigars passed to him and was regretful that he didn’t smoke. To my three-year-old eyes those empty chairs weren’t vacant; I saw the dear Hunchbergs there, and my uncle understood because in his own childhood he’d had an unseen companion—a boy braver and more dashing than himself and known to him as “Bill Hammersly.”3

      The Way of a Transgressor

      In that whole year in the golden land, my happiness was as unclouded as my self-esteem—except for two slight setbacks. These were caused by social errors on my part that evanescently dimmed me; and both are now known to me mostly through hearsay, though memory brings flickerings. The first of the two episodes reflects even less credit upon my innate character than does the second—which was, morally speaking, disgraceful—for the first seems to show that I deliberately tried to be funny. Humor isn’t accomplished in that way.

      A lady, a stranger to me, was making an admiring to-do over me; and we two were the center of a group after lunch at my uncle’s. Conspicuous to me were her nose and a beautiful gold tassel at the end of a chain about her neck. In response to her courtesies, I asked, “What do you wear that pretty gold tassel for? To dust your big ugly nose with?”

      Out of a startled hush my uncle for the first time spoke to me sharply. He said, dumfoundingly, “Tut! Tut!”

      In a panic, I spoke hastily, “I mean, do you wear that tassel to dust your little pretty nose with?”

      I was hustled away, crestfallen; but later in the day my vanity was again inflated. What I’d said to the lady I overheard repeated by several people—and not as a reproach to me. From all I could learn I had behaved excellently.

The second instance, somewhat grotesque, sheds out of the long ago a faint light upon the California of that period. Uncle Newton gave a great dinner for gentlemen important in the affairs of the state, and probably few tables in the country could have been surrounded by owners of more picturesque pasts; most of the banqueters, like my uncle, must have been men of the early gold rush.4 It had been arranged that the governor’s nephew and namesake should be presented to them, and, in evening clothes—white dress and blue satin sash—I was brought in, toasted noisily, and urged to remain.

Accustomed to tributes, I was anything but embarrassed, and readily occupied a chair—or the top of a dictionary upon a chair—among flushed new friends. Far away at the other end of the beflowered long table, my uncle didn’t observe what happened to me. Someone offered me a glass of champagne. I drank it, and seemed to perceive that in affording me this pleasure life was promising to consist entirely of exaltation. In fact, it’s all too significant that even so early I took to champagne, asked for more, got it, and became uninterruptedly talkative.5 The hardy forty-niners about me made merry; I may be said to have been plied with wine, and it was afterward hushedly related that I astonished the pliers by a precocious talent for absorption. Thus, in one particular line of accomplishment, I am now probably without a living colleague. I doubt that any other inhabitant of the year 1941 has the right, so to put it, of recording that he got howling drunk in the state of California in 1872.

      There comes to me faintly, faintly a picture of results: wholly unexpected dreadful illness, expressions of indignant solicitude uttered by those who put me to bed. I suffered; and yet—and yet, as days passed, there stole into me from without—perhaps from heard whisperings—more than a suspicion that again I had done something remarkable; that once more, in a manner of speaking, I had distinguished myself.

      The gilded year in California ended; my mother and my sister and I came back to my father and to Indianapolis—and to something near penury. Calamity was upon the country, for that was the first year of a great depression. The word “depression” wasn’t used; everyone talked of the “panic,” and the period became, historically, the Panic of ’73.

      We didn’t return to our fine brick house on Meridian Street; it was lost to us—taken away by the panic. My father, whose commencement address at college had made him secretary to the governor of Indiana, was a “rising young lawyer,” when, unfortunately, he accepted a judgeship. Though for the rest of his long life his fellow citizens never spoke to him or of him except as Judge Tarkington, in our Hoosier way, the title was inadequate compensation for the clients he lost through his term on the bench. When he returned to the bar he’d begun to get some of them back; but the Panic of ’73 banished legal fees to the realm of illusion.

      The Frown of Fortune

      Suddenly we were poor, lived in a small wooden house; then moved to a side street, where we occupied only a lower floor, with another depleted lawyer and his family over our heads. We still owned our two loved horses, Gray and Fly—my father could never bear to sell a horse—but they were economically in the country, at pasture, and we were no longer carriage folk.

      Present-day little children, born into this depression, the day of the New Deal, unemployment, and terrible wars, will have their memories of the bad period even if they live long enough to emerge into another Golden Age, as we did after the long pressure of the Panic of ’73. For these present-day children, too, there may come a time when the world again seems settled, responsible, and solid, when politicians and dictators will not be upsetting everything, threatening every hearthstone and