74 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
understands that the Ambersons have
reaped what they sowed.
Its central character, George Min-
afer—the grandson of the most mag-
nificent of the Ambersons—is a thor-
oughly dislikable boy and young man:
selfish, indulged, unkind. Only after
he has cruelly destroyed the possible
happiness of his adoring mother while
the family fortunes are melting away
does he begin to find redemption, in
hard labor and newly assumed respon-
sibility. Does this happen far too neatly?
Unquestionably. But George is the
most fully realized of Tarkington’s char-
acters to date, and the warped dynam-
ics of the Amberson family are relent-
lessly exposed.
Our view of this deeply considered
novel can’t help but be conditioned by
the fame of the film that Orson Welles
made of it, in 1942—the follow-up to
“Citizen Kane.” Notoriously disfigured
by RKO before its release, the movie
is nevertheless remarkably true to both
the spirit and the text of the novel. (I’m
sorry to have to acknowledge that I’m
not as enamored of the heavy-handed
Wellesian cinematic vocabulary as so
many others are.)
In “Alice Adams” (1921), Tarking-
ton actually succeeded in creating a
complex and convincing adult charac-
ter, as he charts the tragicomic failure
of a young woman to penetrate the
city’s social upper crust. Her
originality and quick mind
and spirit are almost enough
to get her there through a
romance with a suitable
young man—almost, but not
quite. Her family’s preten-
sions to gentility, exposed at
a nightmare dinner party
held to impress her beau,
lead to disaster, and, at the
end of the novel, Alice, fac-
ing reality, is seen mounting the steps
to a dreaded secretarial school—a very
different kind of heroine from the gen-
erally insipid or idealized Tarkington
leading lady.
Alice has enough self-knowledge to
make her not merely an effective her-
oine but a really interesting one, al-
though if you know Katharine Hep-
burn’s performance as Alice—to my
mind, her finest work—it’s hard to dis-
entangle what she accomplished from
what Tarkington did. Hepburn, in fact,
with her brash charm and unyielding
determination, can be thought of as an
Alice Adams who prevailed. (In the
movie version, Fred MacMurray, de-
fying plausibility, comes back to the
rescue, so that clever, forceful Alice,
who undoubtedly would have gone on
to become a successful businesswoman,
will not have to go to work.)
“Alice Adams” is by far Tarkington’s
most accomplished novel—worthy of
being compared to Wharton’s “The
House of Mirth.” And he knew what
he had written, describing it as “my most
actual & ‘life-like’ work ... about as hu-
morous as tuberculosis.” But its unsen-
timental realism must have frightened
him: it stands as the high-water mark
of his career, before he slowly backs off
to more comfortable scenarios.T
he year before “Alice Adams,” 1920,
was the year of “Main Street,” the
crucial turning point in Sinclair Lew-
is’s enormous career—one that imme-
diately put Tarkington in the shade.
“Babbitt” followed, and then “Ar-
rowsmith,” in 1925, an annus mirabilis.
That was the year of Hemingway’s “In
Our Time”; Dos Passos’s “Manhattan
Transfer”; Cather’s “The Professor’s
House”; Dreiser’s “An American Trag-
edy”; Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”—
to say nothing of Gertrude Stein’s “The
Making of Americans” and
Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes.” And Faulk-
ner’s first novel, “Soldiers’
Pay,” was coming off the
presses. Neither in that year
nor in any year to come did
Tarkington write anything
remotely of their conse-
quence. But remember: back
in 1900, when he was pub-
lishing “Monsieur Beau-
caire,” Dreiser—that other writer (but
not gentleman) from Indiana—was
publishing “Sister Carrie.”
Meanwhile, after this watershed
moment, Tarkington went on writing
novel after novel, series after series,
story after story: a quarter of a cen-
tury of fluent and polished work. Sev-
eral of the novels are especially engag-
ing: “The Plutocrat,” in which a crass
but enthusiastic Midwestern million-
aire sweeps through the Mediterra-nean world like a benign Roman con-
queror, and “Kate Fennigate,” the life
of a superbly confident woman who
overreaches in helping her husband
fulfill his potential; but even these two
novels are an unmistakable retreat from
what he had achieved at his best. His
work, most of it running in magazines
like The Saturday Evening Post and La-
dies’ Home Journal, was received with
respect if not seriousness. And he al-
ways retained his readership—a best-
seller until the very end. The harsh re-
ality, though, is that the candidate for
the Great American Novelist had
dwindled into America’s most distin-
guished hack.
His life, however, remained com-
fortable and satisfying, except for a ter-
rible period in his sixties after his eye-
sight gave way and he had to undergo
a series of five operations before it was
more or less restored. During that time,
he was totally blind for five months.
But even the calamity of blindness did
not keep him from writing—the only
thing he not only knew how to do but
needed to do. He had found the ideal
secretary in a close friend, Betty Trot-
ter, and he dictated at least eight hun-
dred words a day to her, as well as deal-
ing through her with his always
teeming correspondence. Betty became
part of the Tarkington household—al-
ready a household of women. Not only
Susanah but Susanah’s difficult sister
lived with him. So there were now three
women at home devoting themselves
to him.
Through these later years, he never
relaxed his interest in public affairs, al-
though his politics were hardly consis-
tent. He was an ardent international-
ist, as passionate about the creation of
the United Nations after the Second
World War as he had been earlier about
the League of Nations. He was an out-
spoken crusader for Roosevelt’s crucial
and embattled Lend-Lease policy in
the face of Midwestern isolationism.
And yet he loathed Roosevelt and the
New Deal. It was a family joke. He had
trained his beloved poodle, Figaro, to
participate in the following dialogue
at dinner:
Booth: Are you a miserable sinner?
Figaro: A low whine.
Booth: ARE YOU A MISERABLE
SINNER?