72 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
boys back in Indiana. Published as “Your
Amiable Uncle” in 1949, three years
after his death, the letters reveal him
at his most winning, jocular and lov-
ing, especially when he’s tormenting
the nephews with descriptions of the
Christmas gifts they will soon be re-
ceiving: “We have bought you each a
lovely, calfbound hymnal. You will be
mad with joy,” and embroideries with
mottoes like “Home, Sweet Home,”
“Virtue Is Its Own Reward,”and
“Honor Thy Uncle.”
A less happy aspect of this time
abroad was what Woodress tactfully
refers to as “marital storm warnings.”
Eleven months spent with her formi-
dable mother-in-law cannot have been
amusing for young and fun-loving Lou-
isa, and the prospect of returning to
the Indianapolis of her close-knit in-
laws—especially the daunting Hauté—
clearly did not appeal. The Tarking-
tons took up residence in New York,
where Booth relished his immersion
in the literary scene. New York, of
course, was also the heart of the Amer-
ican theatre world, and in the years to
come he was more engaged in writing
plays than novels. In fact, he loved
everything about the theatre—casting,
rehearsing, directing, costuming.
Perhaps Louisa didn’t. In 1905, the
Tarkingtons returned to Europe, where
their only child, Laurel, was born early
the following year in Rome. They then
moved to Paris, eventually taking a long
lease on an apartment near the Luxem-
bourg Gardens. And there they settled.
Even so, the marriage deteriorated
further, until in 1911, after some initial
bitterness, an amicable divorce was
granted. During these years, his mother
had died, his father had quickly remar-
ried, and he and his frequent collabo-
rator, Harry Leon Wilson, had enjoyed
a record-breaking triumph with the
play “The Man from Home,” which
ran for five years—in Chicago, in New
York, and on tour—earning him a sub-
stantial fortune. (In one season, he had
four plays running.) He also, however,
had to face the fact that he had be-
come an alcoholic. He had always
drunk (and eaten) copiously, but after
surviving a heart attack early in 1912
“I suddenly decided I preferred to die
sober.” Knowing that he had to stop
drinking, he just stopped. He put him-
self to bed for well over a week, and
when he emerged he was through
drinking forever.H
elping him to this resolution was
the encouragement of a woman
he had met years earlier and whom he
now married. Susanah Robinson was
a mature woman who had had some
business success and was well equipped
to create a cushioned environment in
which her writer husband could flour-
ish. She had no difficulties with his
overprotective and interfering family,
or with smoothly running the Tar-
kington homes in Indianapolis and
Maine. In other words, she was every
writer’s dream of a wife/nurse/man-
ager/mother. The couple were bliss-
fully happy from first to last.
Susanah was also the one who sug-
gested that he write stories for boys:
thus Penrod, Tarkington’s most famous
(and lucrative) creation. A likable rap-
scallion, he’s always getting into trou-
ble—disrupting the school pageant,
eating himself sick at the county fair,
driving his big sister and her beau crazy,
sparking the Great Tar Fight. From the
moment the first of the Penrod stories
appeared, in 1913, they were overwhelm-
ingly popular, and when the first batch
was published in book form it was a
big best-seller, and went on selling into
the thirties and forties.
The material was close at hand—
not only in Tarkington’s memories of
his own happy boyhood but in the ex-
ploits of his three nephews as he lov-
ingly observed them. He was paid thou-
sands of dollars for each story as it
appeared: the grand house that he and
Susanah built in Kennebunkport was
often fondly referred to as “the house
that Penrod built.” Tarkington also en-
joyed the countless letters he received
as whole classrooms across the coun-
try were assigned to write to him. His
favorite: “Teacher told us we must each
write you a letter and she will send the
best one. Well, how are you? Yours truly.”
The naïve charm and the fun of the
Penrod stories are still palpable, but
they are ruined for us today by the argot
that spills from the mouths of the two
African-American brothers who are
pals of Penrod and the other boys who
play in the back yards and alleyways
and sheds behind the white boys’ homes.The names of the brothers, I’m afraid,
are Herman and Verman, and although
they are on terms of total equality with
the other boys, their language sounds
like the worst kind of vaudeville black-
face impersonation. (“I guess I uz dess
talkin’ whens I said ’at! Reckon he
thought I meant it, f ’m de way he tuck
an’ run. Hiyi! Reckon he thought ole
Herman bad man! No, suh, I uz dess
talkin’, ’cause I nev’ would cut nobody!
I ain’ tryin’ git in no jail—no, suh!”) Ver-
man, it should be noted, has a severe
speech impediment, and Herman lacks
a forefinger because one day he idly
held out his hand and said to his brother,
“Verman, chop ’er off,” so Verman
chopped it off. How ironic all this is,
given that from the start of his career
Tarkington was singled out and praised
for his affectionate interest in, and sym-
pathy for, what he carefully called “Ne-
groes.” No matter: this material is ut-
terly unbearable today.
The gently comic carryings on of
youngsters would be a constant vein in
Tarkington’s fiction throughout the rest
of his career, not only in two later Pen-
rod collections but most spectacularly
in “Seventeen,” centered on a Pen-
rod-like seventeen-year-old named
Willie Baxter, who falls hard for a vis-
iting belle from out of town—the ul-
trafeminine Lola Pratt, with her mad-
dening baby talk and adorable little dog,
Flopit. Here is love-struck adolescence
in all its embarrassing self-conscious-
ness, and its tremendous sale made “Sev-
enteen” the best-selling fiction of 1916.
Sensible and appealing boys and girls
as well as bratty younger brothers and
sisters populate Tarkington’s later books,
often stealing center stage from the pur-
ported leading characters. Tragically, his
own child, Laurel, never a stable per-
sonality, grew increasingly disturbed as
she got older. Her condition, diagnosed
as dementia praecox (schizophrenia),
worsened and she became violent, until
one day in 1923 she threw herself from
a second-floor window. She survived
the fall but died of the pneumonia that
followed—at the age of seventeen.“
P
enrod” and “Seventeen” were
collections of popular sketches
masquerading as novels. Tarkington’s
first serious novel—written as he was
approaching fifty—was “The Tur-