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Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Frank Moore Colby, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors of New York. Here is this group of desiccated Victorians, upholders of the ethics of Mr.
Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been repeated again and again in the later characters. In the Arena, fruit of Mr.
Tarkington went to the Indiana legislature to get material for short stories, or whether he has written these because of his experience as an assemblyman, is not a matter of literary interest. The narrations are not particularly convincing.
A queen of Old Testament history, who is reported to have sought an alliance with Solomon, King of Israel, in the tenth century B.C., bringing to him fabulous gifts of gold and jewels. Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1869. The author's love for and knowledge of his native state is revealed to us in several of his best novels.
Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in Alice Adams held himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears to be.
Booth Tarkington has written so searchingly the age of seventeen he had been in love with practically every female he met and with dozens whom he had only seen in the distance; but ripening years had mellowed his taste and robbed him of that fine romantic catholicity. During the last five years women had found him more or less cold.
We had a suite of eighty-nine rooms. We dined at Sherry's with Ethel and Jack, Ethel being host. Taft was there. Hottest night ever. I sat with Jack. In spite of weather, play went well. Bonsals, Ethel, Arthur Brisbane were in Cecil's box. Booth Tarkington in Irwin's. Surprise of performance was "Hello, Bill" which Raymond had learned only that morning. Helen Hale helped him greatly with dance.
He had been feeling poorly most of the summer, and continuous hard work induced a spell of nervous depression. Very wisely he went back to Indianapolis to rest. After a good lay-off he tackled the Tarkington book, which was written in Indianapolis the following winter and spring. And "Walking-Stick Papers" began to go the rounds. I have alluded more than once to Mr. Holliday's book on Tarkington.
The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in The Gentleman from Indiana, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, could not put up with failure in a hero.
To practise an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naïveté of a true folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place.
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