THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER11, 2019 75
“My gun’s in the shop. Let’s establish a dialogue.”• •
Figaro: A louder whine.
Booth: Did you vote for Franklin Delano
Roosevelt?
Figaro: A contrite groan.
Booth: Do you repent of your sin?
Figaro: A howl of misery.
Booth: Amen.
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 gal-
lery 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 any-
thing “modern”—he had fought a (los-
ing) battle to keep a Picasso out of the
Indianapolis art institute, of which he
was a trustee. In book after book, mod-
ern 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 cul-
tured 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 par-
ticularly puerile novel about Maine,
“Mary’s Neck.” The nice, conven-
tional—and rich—Midwestern Mas-
seys 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 Ana-
nias 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.W
hat was it, finally, that kept so
capable a writer as Tarkington
from producing so little of real sub-
stance? Yes, he lacked the fierceness
and conviction of a Dreiser or a Lewis;
his talent was descriptive rather than
penetrating; and he was almost patho-
logically nonconfrontational. But ul-
timately 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 con-
scientiously to identify benefits that
can be ascribed to the march of prog-
ress, 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 re-ally 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 lim-
itations 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 Su-
sanah 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 convinc-
ing 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 enter-
tainment, the most fun that I have ever
known.”
Who could ask for a happier epitaph?