"Yay, Penrod"

THE SHOW PIECE (212 pp.]--Booth Tarkington--Doubleday ($2).

Booth Tarkington was trying to finish this novel when he died last May, aged 76. He had about a third of it still to write. It is now published, unfinished, with an introduction by his widow. She recalls how her husband distinguished what he called "the investigatory novel" from the "escapist" one--and declares that "the truth and mystery of human nature, and how most clearly to tell about that truth and that mystery" were the concern of his mature writing.

Tarkington's Alice Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. In that year appeared the first printed copies of a mountainous adventure in English prose, called Ulysses, written by an Irishman in exile. In that year also a young man from Illinois began writing in Paris short stories in a new style, hard and lucid, that were published in a book called In Our Time; another young man, from Missouri, had published, in London, a strange, rich, deathly poem called The Waste Land. Between World Wars I and II the work of these men and a few others made the most vigorous literature in English. Neither Alice Adams nor any other Tarkington book belonged to that class any more than he belonged to that company.

Ear for Speech, Eye for Plot. Alice Adams was a Midwest neighborhood story. It presented a girl in a town like Indianapolis, a daydreaming flirt, in a struggle with family failure, local snobbery and a doomed love affair. Nothing more; but anyone could see that it was "well written," meaning that the writer had a pleased ear for U.S. speech; an effortless way of evoking familiar things "[the milkman's horse] casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season"; and the ability to spin out at his sardonic leisure a plot that became just sufficiently painful.

Alice Adams, besides, was probably Tarkington's best effort to tell "the truth and mystery of human nature." His account of Alice's emotions and behavior during a saunter down a street in spring, of her exhausting stratagems to avoid seeming snubbed at a dance, had a precision and pathos more than worthy of the writer whom Tarkington regarded as his master, William Dean Howells--almost worthy of Henry James. But why was this novel as a whole inferior to Howells, James or Edith Wharton, and why has Tarkington never been thought a strong figure among U.S. writers of fiction? The simplest answer is that for all his abilities he was incurably sentimental.

His sentimentality was not to be confused with his tenderness; Tarkington's affection for Penrod and Willy Baxter, for Alice Adams and Claire Ambler and all his young people, gave life to his novels. Sentimentality is itself a confusion, a failure to discriminate in feeling; and Tarkington even at his best failed in that way. Nothing in Alice Adams is more pathetic than the author's own willingness to let the Adams family be salvaged by a golden-hearted businessman and Alice herself by gallant enrollment in a business college. One such piece of symbolism might pass, but not both.

Tarkington's touchstones, in fact, were always a set of innocent values which he conceived to be "true blue American." In Alice Adams he matched his gifts against new and younger writers who questioned those values. Winesburg, Ohio, had been published in 1919; Main Street had been published in 1920, so had This Side of Paradise. The jazz age--which was also a self-critical and troubled age--had begun. But Booth Tarkington was 51. After his young success with costume romance (Monsieur Beaucaire) and carefree playwriting abroad with Harry Leon Wilson (The Man from Home), he had gone back to Indiana in 1911, there to come to his prime, and make his fortune, in one of the freshest and most crassly confident decades in U.S. history. It was as a reassuring revivalist of that decade that people went on reading Tarkington's annual stories.

Blessings, Spelled Out. His last book, The Show Piece, introduces an egoistic boy who is still yelling "Yay" as Penrod Schofield did over 30 years ago, and whose father remarks (as Mr. Schofield would not have felt impelled to) on the blessings of being "a good American citizen living up to his highest principles in a good American community." That kind of thing would be enough to rejoice the shade of George Horace Lorimer, from whose Saturday Evening Post Tarkington earned riches for years. But it is not "investigatory" of anything that had not been investigated before and better.

As a popular professional, Booth Tarkington belonged, with his friend Harry Leon Wilson, and Joseph Hergesheimer and a few others, to a class whose flair and craftsmanship in the 'teens and '20s of this century is worth another look, though serious critics have generally ignored them. Their trade was to please the public for a living. But while they worked the mine of the U.S.'s more comfortable legends about itself, they worked it sometimes with real honesty and beauty. The literary data on life in the U.S. since 1900 would be as incomplete without Penrod and Alice Adams as it would be without Nick Adams and Jay Gatsby, Jennie Gerhardt and The Good Anna.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.