A Few Thoughts on Booth Tarkington's Legacy

Thomas M. Pryor's judgment on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons strikes me as about right--"an exceptionally well-made film, dealing with a subject scarcely worth the attention which has been lavished upon it."

That slightness of subject reflected not the film's departure from Booth Tarkington's novel, but rather its extreme faithfulness to "the spirit and text of the novel" as Robert Gottlieb observed, sufficiently slight stuff that after I read it even as I disagreed greatly with many of that list's all too conventional choices, I wondered just how it managed to make the number one hundred spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels produced in the English language during the 20th century. Here and there I found something of interest--in the tidbits about the early days of the auto industry, and how Aunt Fanny lost her money in what hucksterism-indulging business journalists today breathlessly call a "start-up" because she failed to grasp the difference between what works well in a workshop and what is actually a salable product. Still, such things were few within the book, and relatively minor details, and at any rate not the kind of thing that generally catches the interest of critics in our era.

Ultimately my guess was that it seemed to the list-makers that Tarkington rated a mention more on the basis of his extremely high standing for some decades earlier in the century than his actual literary accomplishment by any relevant measure, and that this most famous of his books benefited from association with Welles' film.* But that, too, seems to me worthy of some remark--a reminder of how writers have so often gone from the heights not just of bestsellerdom but critical adulation to near-oblivion within a short span of time, with Tarkington's slightness very much relevant to this. That slightness, in combination with his conservatism, helped make him safe, appealing, popular with the critical community, and the public at large--a Saturday Evening Post regular. But it meant that he offered little that would endure as tastes changed, as indeed they did--a bit of patrician snobbery and nostalgia as he looked back to his privileged youth, an aesthetic distaste for automobiles and suchlike, an assurance to the people that a Sinclair Lewis satirized as Babbitts that they were just fine, but no more than that, as he produced works that were genteel, sprightly, straightforward, provincial, in a period in which, in line with the ascendant Modernism and postmodernism, critics were looking for brutal, dark, oblique, difficult; for obscurantist pseudo-profundity, and cosmopolitan urbanity; to the point of worshipping reactionary edgelords like Nabokov and Burgess (both far ahead of Tarkington on that Modern Library list; Nabokov can actually be found in the #4 spot!).

The result was that in contrast with the way critics strove to bury a Sinclair Lewis they simply forgot about Tarkington, the more in as the critical sensibility of the twentieth century changed so much from what it had been in his time.

The result is also that where those who in spite of those critical efforts to bury Lewis, discover Sinclair Lewis often find him worth their time, far fewer of those who happen upon Tarkington's books seem to find him so.

* Interestingly both Gottlieb and Thomas Mallon in their twenty-first century glances at back at Tarkington cite Alice Adams as a much more impressive novel than Magnificent Ambersons--which even got made as a movie twice, with the second adaptation a George Stevens-helmed, Katharine Hepburn-starring production nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress. But the film, like the novel, would seem obscure today.