America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928

By Booth Tarkington

America Moved: Booth Tarkington's Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869-1928 brings together for the first time all of the autobiographical writings of Booth Tarkington, one of the most successful and best-loved writers in American history. These are the memoirs of one of America's greatest literary figures--and one of the keenest interpreters of American manners and mores.

During his lifetime, Tarkington was immensely popular. From 1902 to 1932, nine of his books were top ten bestsellers, The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams won Pulitzer Prizes, and Tarkington's Penrod stories became widely recognized as young-adult classics.

America Moved demonstrates that Tarkington's writing and powers of social observation stand the test of time. Written in a genial, easygoing style, America Moved gently but consistently interrogates the values of the new commercial-industrial age, especially its obsessions with speed, growth, and efficiency. The humane skepticism Tarkington directs in these pages toward the automobile, sprawl, and the cult of Progress identifies him as a voice quite at home in the twenty-first century.

America Moved will delight readers with an enjoyable eyewitness account of the vast social and cultural changes that transformed America between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Front Porch Republic Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781630878771

Booth Tarkington

Booth Tarkington (1869 - 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist, known for most of his career as “The Midwesterner.” Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Tarkington was a personable and charming student who studied at both Purdue and Princeton University. Earning no degrees, the young author cemented his memory and place in the society of higher education on his popularity alone—being familiar with several clubs, the college theater and voted “most popular” in the class of 1893. His writing career began just six years later with his debut novel, The Gentleman from Indiana and from there, Tarkington would enjoy two decades of critical and commercial acclaim. Coming to be known for his romanticized and picturesque depiction of the Midwest, he would become one of only four authors to win the Pulitzer Prize more than once for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921), at one point being considered America’s greatest living author, comparable only to Mark Twain. While in the later half of the twentieth century Tarkington’s work fell into obscurity, it is undeniable that at the height of his career, Tarkington’s literary work and reputation were untouchable.

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America Moved

Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928

edited by

Jeremy Beer

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AMERICA MOVED

Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928

Frontmatter and notes Copyright © 2015 Jeremy Beer. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Front Porch Republic Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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ISBN: 978-1-62564-843-3

EISBN: 978-1-63087-877-1

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Tarkington, Booth, 1869–1946

America moved : Booth Tarkington’s memoirs of time and place, 1869–1928 / Booth Tarkington ; edited by Jeremy Beer.

xiv + 270 p.; 23 cm

ISBN: 978-1-62564-843-3

1. Tarkington, Booth, 1869–1946—Biography. 2. United States—Social life and customs. I. Beer, Jeremy. II. Title.

PS2972 A45 2015

Manufactured in the USA

"As I Seem To Me articles © 1941 SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved. The World Does Move" is reprinted here by permission of the Newton Booth Tarkington Trust, which retains all right, title, and interest therein.

Editor’s Introduction

The template is familiar. Writer is widely praised and universally loved during his lifetime. Same writer is widely scorned and all but entirely forgotten less than a generation later—usually, one hastens to add, for good reason.

Newton Booth Tarkington—author of The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams, Seventeen, and the Penrod stories, and at one time perhaps America’s most beloved and popular author—certainly seems to fit the mold. By the time Tarkington died in 1946, the critics had already consigned him to irrelevance, and they have not yet seen fit to substantively alter that opinion.

As early as 1921, Carl Van Doren savaged him (mostly) in The Nation (rarely has so persistent a reputation been so insecurely founded; whenever he comes to a crisis in the building of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down to the level of Indiana sentimentality).¹ More than eighty years later, in a Tarkington retrospective published in The Atlantic, Thomas Mallon confirmed the establishment view: Tarkington wrote in the throes of nostalgia; he was (contra Paul Fussell) not just of his time but positively oafish on matters of race; and he was finally . . . intent on offering his readers a pleasant Sunday drive—along with the sociological reassurance that they weren’t really the Babbitts and boobs that Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken kept taking them for.²

But when it comes to whom is worth remembering and whom we ought to let molder away, unloved and unwanted, in one-dollar used-bookstore bins, the critics don’t always get it right. That’s why we have revivals. These memoirs make abundantly clear why Tarkington is someone with whom it is still very much worth spending time. More so, perhaps, than some of his celebrated contemporaries.

It is interesting to compare Tarkington to a fellow Hoosier author more highly thought of by the arbiters of literary greatness. The lives of Newton Booth Tarkington and Theodore Dreiser overlapped almost exactly. Tarkington was born in 1869 and died in 1946. Dreiser’s dates are 1871 and 1945.

And that, more or less, is where the similarities end. The differences are instructive. Start with their backgrounds.

Tarkington came from a happy, bourgeois home. His uncle Newton Booth, for whom he was named, served as California’s governor from 1871 to 1875. Tarkington’s father was a lawyer and judge, his mother proud of her old-American lineage. Although the Tarkington family—there were just four of them—was not always financially well off, they were never truly poor, and they were always respectable.

The Dreiser brood was decidedly not. They were poor, they were peripatetic, and, to be blunt, they were considered white trash. Two of Dreiser’s sisters may have at least occasionally engaged in prostitution. Dreiser’s father, John Paul, was a harsh and unforgiving man who rationalized his character flaws by grounding them in a twisted version of his Roman Catholic faith.

Dreiser left Indiana University after one year, having detested the experience, and eventually found his way onward and upward in the cutthroat world of turn-of-the-century journalism. Tarkington prepped at Exeter before matriculating first at Indiana’s rival state university, Purdue, then transferring to Princeton. Like Dreiser, he failed to leave with a degree, but he recalled his time on both campuses fondly, and at Princeton he was one of the leading figures in his class.

Tarkington was a Republican, a man of moderately conservative political opinions, which he did not try to conceal, and a surprisingly good-humored and tolerant cultural reactionary; he wrote war propaganda and stumped for Wendell Wilkie while maintaining profound respect for Eugene Debs. Raised a mainline Protestant, he eventually drifted toward a genial Unitarianism. Dreiser was a man of fashionably progressive views. Indeed, he was a fellow traveler who with stout intrepidity joined the Communist Party in 1945—six years after the Nazi-Soviet pact, when for most American progressives the bloom had rather come off the Red rose. He was an aggressive atheist.

Tarkington loved his home state without minimizing its Midwestern foibles, crudeness, and ridiculous bombast (his critics on this point read Tarkington with a marked lack of charity). He never decamped permanently from Indiana, instead living in Indianapolis for at least six months a year virtually his entire life. Dreiser left Indiana, for good, as soon as possible. His report of his automobile tour back to Indiana is recorded with the eye of a bemused and caustic anthropologist, not a loving son, in A Hoosier Holiday (1916).

Near the end of America Moved, Tarkington frets about what he sees as the avant-garde’s obsession with sex. Dreiser, of course, famously challenged contemporary sex mores. Sister Carrie had the good luck effectively to be banned for seven years after its initial publication—and thereby obtained the imprimatur of H. L. Mencken, among many others.

Tarkington was championed by such as Hamlin Garland and Barrett Wendell and James Whitcomb Riley, all of them today even more forgotten than he. Besides Mencken, Dreiser’s admirers have included Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Joseph Epstein, and Harvey Pekar, among myriad others.

Take it all in, and is it any wonder that where Tarkington found many more readers, Dreiser has been far more popular with the literary establishment?

In the major biographies competition, it’s 3–1 Dreiser (the most recent was published in 2005). Number of entries under criticism and interpretation in the Library of Congress catalog? 39–1, Dreiser. Number of books with a separate entry in that catalog? 4–0, Dreiser. Dreiser has two Library of America volumes. Tarkington, amazingly, has none. A journal titled Dreiser Studies was published from 1970 to 2006. Dreiser is recognized as a leading exponent, perhaps the leading exponent, of American naturalism.

No biography of Tarkington has been published since 1955. Tarkington is almost never anthologized or read in the schools, unlike Dreiser and others of his contemporaries, including Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, even Upton Sinclair. Tarkington is not remembered as the progenitor or exemplar of an influential genre or school, nor as the literary conscience of an important social movement. No Tarkington panels are organized at academic conferences. No journal is dedicated to Tarkingtoniana.

During Tarkington’s lifetime, the critical contest wasn’t so lopsided. Both The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921) won Pulitzer Prizes (in 1919 and 1922, respectively), and Tarkington is the only writer to have two novels win Pulitzers. In a 1921 Publisher’s Weekly poll of booksellers, Tarkington was named the most significant contemporary author (Wharton came in second, Dreiser fourteenth). In 1922, Literary Digest named him the greatest living American author, and in the same year he was the only native writer to appear on the New York Times’s list of the ten greatest living Americans. In 1933 he became just the third person to receive a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Twelve years later he received from the American Academy of Arts and Letters the William Dean Howells award, given just once every five years.

On top of all that, Tarkington moved product. From 1902 to 1932, nine Tarkington titles appeared in the top ten of Publisher’s Weekly’s year-end bestseller lists. Dreiser never had a bestseller.

It certainly isn’t Dreiser’s superior prose style that has endeared him to literary gatekeepers. Tarkington’s prose—still rewarding and enjoyable, as America Moved demonstrates—has aged as gracefully as Sophia Loren; Dreiser’s—clunky, verbose—more like Bea Arthur.

So what happened? The pages of these memoirs go a long way, I think, in explaining why Tarkington’s star faded so quickly after the end of his major period—let us say, circa 1930. In a word, Tarkington was uneasy with the literary, social, cultural, and political changes that transformed American life during the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of style, he wrote in the tradition of Howellsian realism, rejecting naturalism (a decision he defends in these pages) and remaining completely untouched by the advent of literary modernism. Politically, he might pass as an old-fashioned liberal, and he certainly manifested and even promoted the virtue of liberality in his life and writing, but he was not a Progressive and certainly no leftist. Culturally, he believed that there were real goods worth defending in the older, slower America of small towns, human-scale cities, and closely knit communities, whatever that America’s defects.

He was out of step, in other words, even with the au courant writers and critics of his own day, and laughably so with those of succeeding generations. Yet interestingly enough, many readers in the twenty-first century might find in him a remarkably kindred spirit. For those who have rediscovered the values of place, rootedness, and community; who have grown wary of the technologies and aspirations of giantism; and who are keenly alive to the environmental costs of mass transportation and industrialization,³ Tarkington looks wiser than he did to previous generations, for whom the narrative of individual liberation, even when drenched in Dreiser’s deterministic irony, trumped all else.

Thus, in the second part of America Moved, The World Does Move, Tarkington ponders the price of a frenetic commercial-industrial society, of the rise of mass culture, and of the ideology of American Progress. In this part, especially, his theme is the radical alteration in society’s mores since the fin de siècle. His reflections are often prophetic. Take Tarkington’s reportage on the changes wrought by the arrival of the horseless carriage. Recalling a dinner in Paris in 1903, he puts into the mouth of an unidentified companion a remarkable prophecy. The automobile, said this elderly American,

will obliterate the accepted distances that are part of our daily lives. It will alter our daily relations to time, and that is to say it will alter our lives. Perhaps everybody doesn’t comprehend how profoundly we are affected by such a change; but what alters our lives alters our thoughts; what alters our thoughts alters our characters; what alters our characters alters our ideals; and what alters our ideals alters our morals. . . . We are just entering the period when most of what we have regarded as permanently crystalline will become shockingly fluid—that is to say, we are already in the transition period between two epochs. . . . Restfulness will have entirely disappeared from your lives; the quiet of the world is ending forever.

The historian John Lukacs’s judgment that there was more profound social and technological change in the period between the Civil War and World War I than there has been since is amply attested to by Tarkington in these pages. In an era of such vertiginous change, some reflection on what it all means would seem warranted. Among the major American writers of his day, Tarkington undertakes this reflection with more care and nuance—whether we finally agree with his assessments or not—than nearly anyone else. The tone he takes is that of a hopeful lover—a lover of the world, of the good that has been lost, but also of the good that remains, and of the good that he is confident will yet be wrought.

There is a humanity in Tarkington that is absent in the all too self-consciously pitiless Dreiser. Dreiser was concerned with social justice, abstractly conceived, yet refused to offer any grounds for hope to his socially marginalized characters, for whom he simultaneously had both pity and contempt. He reduced men and women to little more than beasts and presented the universe as intrinsically meaningless. Free will, human dignity, and any immaterial reality were shams. Power relations were all that mattered. Tarkington probably had Dreiser in mind when he recalled, approvingly, his friend James Whitcomb Riley’s hatred of the ponderous humorlessness of the French realism with which Zola was then beginning to stimulate the long succession of followers who still urge upon us the dismal dirtiest of life as the most of it.⁴

Considered in conjunction with Tarkington’s great Growth trilogy—which consists of The Turmoil (1915), The Magnificent Ambersons, and The Midlander (1924)—and Alice Adams, these memoirs, long out of print and unread, make the case that Booth Tarkington matters. They show that he stands, if not among the first rank of American writers, squarely and securely among the second.

There have been those who believed that all along. John Lukacs, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Roger Ebert have shared appreciations of Tarkington’s achievement, Ebert going so far as to say that Tarkington’s Penrod volumes earn full comparison with the somewhat later P. G. Wodehouse, whose style and word mastery resembles him.⁵ And Tarkington’s fellow Indianapolis native, Kurt Vonnegut, in a 2007 lecture, could hardly contain himself, crediting the example of the life and works of Booth Tarkington for inspiring him to pursue a writing career. His nickname in the literary world, one I would give anything to have, was ‘The Gentleman from Indiana.’ When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him. We never met. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I would have been gaga with hero worship.⁶

Let Vonnegut have the last word. Read America Moved, and decide for yourself whether Booth Tarkington is worth reading—and his America worth remembering.

1. Carl Van Doren, Contemporary American Novelists: Booth Tarkington, The Nation, February 9, 1921, 233–35.

2. Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2004.

3. Thomas Mallon claims that only general ignorance of his work has kept [Tarkington] from being pressed into contemporary service as a literary environmentalist—not just a ‘conservationist,’ in the TR mode, but an emerald-Green decrier of internal combustion.

4. See pages 61 and 159 for this quote and the block quote above, respectively.

5. The chapter 1939 in Lukacs’s A Thread of Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) was inspired by Tarkington, according to Lukacs. For Frum, see http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjhkMjMyYTgxMjI1MmEzMzM4NWFkMWY2ODNmNzE4OGE=. For Noonan, see http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDQ5YTU3ZTZiMWQyYTg4NmM1OTE0NzExMzhmYzhlYTM=. For Ebert, see http://dramatic-insights.org/tarkington/index.php/2010/roger-ebert-penrod-fan. All accessed June 10, 2011.

6. Lecture at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007. See http://dointhegrownup.com/2011/02/24/3483887290/. Accessed January 9, 2014.

Acknowledgments

The text of America Moved consists of two works of memoir by Booth Tarkington that have never before appeared together in book form. Part One was never collected in book form at all. Under the title As I Seem to Me, it was serialized in seven issues of the Saturday Evening Post in July and August 1941, in the order presented here. Here Tarkington covers the period of his life from his birth in 1869 until 1899 (more or less), when his novel The Gentleman from Indiana was published. The titles of the individual chapters, as well as the subheads, appear here as they did in the Post.

Part Two of this volume, The World Does Move, was published in 1928 under the same title by Doubleday, Doran and Company, and is reproduced here by permission of the Booth Tarkington estate. Less conventionally autobiographical than As I Seem to Me, it covers the years from 1895, when Tarkington moved to New York to try to forge a career as a writer, until near the time of its publication, when Tarkington was well established in the literary world. Even more than in Part One, Tarkington in these pages often frustratingly declines to specify the men and women whom he discusses. I have provided identifications of as many of them as possible.

Nearly every chapter in The World Does Move was first run in the Saturday Evening Post between April 7 and July 7, 1928. The exceptions are chapter XX (first published in Red Book Magazine in May 1921, and later in The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories [1923], as Jeannette); chapter XXII (Collier’s, May 14, 1927, as When Is It Dirt?); and part of chapter XXV (The Forum, March 1926, as The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis).

The only editorial change I have made to the text, besides correcting occasional typographical errors, is to add the Oxford comma. All ellipses are in the original, and all footnotes are mine, not Tarkington’s.

This book has been some years in the making, and I am deeply grateful to a number of people for their assistance and encouragement. An earlier version of the editor’s introduction ran in the University Bookman (vol. 46, no. 3). I am grateful to editor Gerald Russello for permission to reuse some of that material here. Along the way, Cory Andrews, Keith Bice, Richard Brake, Montgomery Brown, Jeff Cain, Kate Dalton, Matt Dellinger, Joseph Epstein, Andrew Ferguson, Matthew Gerken, Darryl Hart, Mark Henrie, Bill Kauffman, Dennis Lager, John Lukacs, Mark Mitchell, Anne Neal, Peggy Noonan, Amie Peele-Carter, Jason Peters, Cris Piquinela, Jeff Polet, Scott Russell Sanders, Lee Slade, Whit Stillman, Howard Trivers, and the staff of the Indiana Historical Society, among many others not mentioned here, offered useful advice, assistance, and encouragement. I offer all of them my sincere gratitude.

Near the end of this project, I was thrilled to make contact with one of Booth Tarkington’s great-great-nephews, Booth Jameson, his wife Jennifer, and his parents, John and Elizabeth Jameson. They not only expressed enthusiasm for this project, but they freely shared information, stories, and memories about Tarkington, his family, and his literary estate. I was inspired by their loyalty to Tarkington’s legacy, and I hope to learn more from them in the years to come.

My wife, Kara, is always encouraging no matter how dimwitted my ideas. Every husband should be so lucky.

part one

As I Seem to Me

I. Vain Child

Counting by realistic time, astronomical time, I was born a very short while ago—less than a few minutes ago—and yet my mother’s father, Beebe Booth, who lived until I was a grown man, did some soldiering in the War of 1812. In his infancy, if he’d happened to be in France instead of Connecticut, he could have seen Marie Antoinette and Robespierre; and when Wellington died both of my grandfathers were past middle age. When I was born,¹ in a small but active Indianapolis, there was no German Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew was Emperor of the French, Queen Victoria had more than thirty years to reign over Britain, there weren’t any telephones or electric lights in the world; and our Union’s supreme war hero, General Grant, was President of the United States.

This is the long and the short of it; but just after my birth I was so busy getting used to having a body that for a while I wasn’t aware of even General Grant. I didn’t at once perceive that I’d come among beings of my own kind; I saw people as assistants only; though later, when I was a full year old, I took their principal function to be that of applause.

I’m explaining that at the age of one year I was a celebrity and regarded myself as such. Babies are like anybody else; they accept the wildest and most ill-founded adulation as deserved tribute; naturally, their self-conceit is egregious. Their minds are already busy and, though they can’t use distinct words as symbols of their thoughts, they draw conclusions. Long before they can add two to two they can put two and two together.

First Words

I was seldom approached without a kind of servility and professions of utter admiration. For almost half of my life I’d been entreated daily, and sometimes hourly, to enchant audiences with repetitions of the vocal performances that had made me famous. The outcries evoked by my talent were so inevitable that sometimes, bored, I declined to give a show. One year old, I knew as well as did the boastfulest of my kinsfolk that I was the star of the age because I’d begun to talk when I was only seven months old.

I knew the whole of this triumph, especially how I’d scored on two competitors—Marjorie Harrison, next door, who was a month older than I, and Victor Hendricks, up at the next corner, almost precisely my own age. It was thought singularly creditable that my first comprehended utterance wasn’t Mamma or Papa but Hyuh, Jock! Out of a clear sky I had called the dog. By the time I was a year old I was almost sated with the story: how my father, within the hour of my startling first performance—probably within the half hour—had gone next door to tell Marjorie Harrison’s parents all about it and how Mr. Harrison had angrily denied its plausibility; how he had been brought to me and the dog let in, and how I had not failed in this crisis, but had distinctly said Hyuh, Jock!—twice—in Mr. Harrison’s presence; and how he had then stalked out of the house without a single word, returning in fury to his extinguished Marjorie.

Having thus begun, at seven months, by calling the dog, I talked on, never saying a thing that wasn’t quotable. Behind the Infant Prodigy there still remain in memory—for background of my second year—a few faint pictures like pale old water colors: that pleasant bit of Meridian Street—sunshine on green lawns—our ample brick house and its brick stable in the shade of trees illimitably high; two lovely big ladies dancing about me in ballooning white dresses and indistinguishable from adults, though they were my sister Hautie and a friend of hers, both twelve years old.

How far back into childhood can we remember? I remember the first snow of my second winter, when probably I hadn’t reached the age of eighteen months; I remember how that snow disappointed me. I know it was the first snow of the winter because I’d been looking forward to it.

There’s much argument about rememberings. One of the younger members of a family claims to recall something; the others tell him he couldn’t; they say he only thinks he does because he’s heard it described by his elders, and of course it’s true that we not seldom find it difficult to discriminate between what we ourselves recollect and what’s been put into our minds by frequent hearsay. Nevertheless, having been born at the end of July, 1869, I remember the first snow of the winter of 1870–1871. If that snow fell in December of 1870 I was between sixteen and seventeen months old.

A novelist must make the exercising of his memory—as well as other self-searchings—a constant practice, or he will not understand and make real the creatures he puts into his books; but if other people did the inward delving that he professionally does, they would no doubt turn up as much from their own obscured infancies. My earliest recollection isn’t here recorded as a feat; it leads to a suggestion.

A Very Young Man Goes West

When, at probably less then eighteen months, I looked out of a window at the first snowflakes of that year, I was disappointed because of their smallness. I was disappointed because I then remembered snowflakes that had been as large as the palm of my hand, and these now weren’t half that size. Thus, though I don’t remember the larger snowflakes that fell when I was less than a year old, I remember that when I was less than eighteen months old I did remember them, and that at less than a year old I had observed their size as compared to the size of the palm of my then hand.

I didn’t tell anybody about this, hence nobody told me about it later; I remember it. The suggestion is that the youngest baby has more than what are called prenatal memories; that he’s not only thinking, he’s already recollecting, and that conscious memory is an activity within us at birth.

Two years old, I was complacently aware that I owed some of my importance to the achievements of another person, for whom I’d been named. Our family possessed, besides worthy ancestors, a living Great Man; and, like all other families that have this privilege, we borrowed greatness from our hero. He was my mother’s brother, Newton Booth. Physically delicate, just out of college, and beginning the practice of law in that agreeable town, Terre Haute, he’d suddenly swung his placid young life to Western roads of adventurous and sometimes tragic hardship. Now—generous, rich, still young, and still a bachelor—he’d become the governor of California. My mother and my sister and I went to spend a year with him in Sacramento.²

Uncle Newton made much of me; so did the circle of gay early Californians surrounding him. Toys almost glutted me; I heard tales loudly told of me, saw groups of expectant faces about me awaiting the delights of my wisdom; and bearded men, as well as hourglass-shaped ladies, professed themselves ravished by photographs of me in kilts and velvet jacket. The flatteries I received might easily have convinced me that I was a philosopher, or a wit, or a great beauty. They did. I thought I was all three.

Much was made, too, of some imagined companions of mine, a family I’d found in the air. Where I got the name of these ghostly people, the Hunchbergs, and the name of their dog, Simpledoria, nobody knew, nor did I; but Mr. and Mrs. Hunchberg, and their son and daughter, almost grown up, and Simpledoria, appear to have had reality for me. I talked with them at great length, when actual people were present as well as when I was alone. I quoted the Hunchbergs incessantly, played with Simpledoria on the carpet, spoke to him from my bed at night. Uncle Newton gave a dinner for the Hunchbergs, with chairs placed for the four of them and a plate on the floor for Simpledoria. Through me, the translator as it were, my uncle talked seriously with Mr. Hunchberg, had cigars passed to him and was regretful that he didn’t smoke. To my three-year-old eyes those empty chairs weren’t vacant; I saw the dear Hunchbergs there, and my uncle understood because in his own childhood he’d had an unseen companion—a boy braver and more dashing than himself and known to him as Bill Hammersly.³

The Way of a Transgressor

In that whole year in the golden land, my happiness was as unclouded as my self-esteem—except for two slight setbacks. These were caused by social errors on my part that evanescently dimmed me; and both are now known to me mostly through hearsay, though memory brings flickerings. The first of the two episodes reflects even less credit upon my innate character than does the second—which was, morally speaking, disgraceful—for the first seems to show that I deliberately tried to be funny. Humor isn’t accomplished in that way.

A lady, a stranger to me, was making an admiring to-do over me; and we two were the center of a group after lunch at my uncle’s. Conspicuous to me were her nose and a beautiful gold tassel at the end of a chain about her neck. In response to her courtesies, I asked, What do you wear that pretty gold tassel for? To dust your big ugly nose with?

Out of a startled hush my uncle for the first time spoke to me sharply. He said, dumfoundingly, Tut! Tut!

In a panic, I spoke hastily, I mean, do you wear that tassel to dust your little pretty nose with?

I was hustled away, crestfallen; but later in the day my vanity was again inflated. What I’d said to the lady I overheard repeated by several people—and not as a reproach to me. From all I could learn I had behaved excellently.

The second instance, somewhat grotesque, sheds out of the long ago a faint light upon the California of that period. Uncle Newton gave a great dinner for gentlemen important in the affairs of the state, and probably few tables in the country could have been surrounded by owners of more picturesque pasts; most of the banqueters, like my uncle, must have been men of the early gold rush.⁴ It had been arranged that the governor’s nephew and namesake should be presented to them, and, in evening clothes—white dress and blue satin sash—I was brought in, toasted noisily, and urged to remain.

Accustomed to tributes, I was anything but embarrassed, and readily occupied a chair—or the top of a dictionary upon a chair—among flushed new friends. Far away at the other end of the beflowered long table, my uncle didn’t observe what happened to me. Someone offered me a glass of champagne. I drank it, and seemed to perceive that in affording me this pleasure life was promising to consist entirely of exaltation. In fact, it’s all too significant that even so early I took to champagne, asked for more, got it, and became uninterruptedly talkative.⁵ The hardy forty-niners about me made merry; I may be said to have been plied with wine, and it was afterward hushedly related that I astonished the pliers by a precocious talent for absorption. Thus, in one particular line of accomplishment, I am now probably without a living colleague. I doubt that any other inhabitant of the year 1941 has the right, so to put it, of recording that he got howling drunk in the state of California in 1872.

There comes to me faintly, faintly a picture of results: wholly unexpected dreadful illness, expressions of indignant solicitude uttered by those who put me to bed. I suffered; and yet—and yet, as days passed, there stole into me from without—perhaps from heard whisperings—more than a suspicion that again I had done something remarkable; that once more, in a manner of speaking, I had distinguished myself.

The gilded year in California ended; my mother and my sister and I came back to my father and to Indianapolis—and to something near penury. Calamity was upon the country, for that was the first year of a great depression. The word depression wasn’t used; everyone talked of the panic, and the period became, historically, the Panic of ’73.

We didn’t return to our fine brick house on Meridian Street; it was lost to us—taken away by the panic. My father, whose commencement address at college had made him secretary to the governor of Indiana, was a rising young lawyer, when, unfortunately, he accepted a judgeship. Though for the rest of his long life his fellow citizens never spoke to him or of him except as Judge Tarkington, in our Hoosier way, the title was inadequate compensation for the clients he lost through his term on the bench. When he returned to the bar he’d begun to get some of them back; but the Panic of ’73 banished legal fees to the realm of illusion.

The Frown of Fortune

Suddenly we were poor, lived in a small wooden house; then moved to a side street, where we occupied only a lower floor, with another depleted lawyer and his family over our heads. We still owned our two loved horses, Gray and Fly—my father could never bear to sell a horse—but they were economically in the country, at pasture, and we were no longer carriage folk.

Present-day little children, born into this depression, the day of the New Deal, unemployment, and terrible wars, will have their memories of the bad period even if they live long enough to emerge into another Golden Age, as we did after the long pressure of the Panic of ’73. For these present-day children, too, there may come a time when the world again seems settled, responsible, and solid, when politicians and dictators will not be upsetting everything, threatening every hearthstone and every earned dollar; and when from that emergence into placidity—if it comes—they look back upon the pinched times of their childhood, I hope that their recollections may be as cheerful as are mine now of the days of the Great Panic.

Possibly I shouldn’t remember that disaster at all if we hadn’t lost our house and the sunny green yard where I’d played. No recollections of protests or wailings from my father, my plucky mother, and my sparklingly pretty fifteen-year-old sister recall it to me; their endurance of the change hadn’t a flinch, though the blows must have been heavy and many for all three of them. About me there seemed always the sound of laughter, and my father’s indomitable gaiety kept my world in place, made living in it an experience safely all of gusto and merriment.

An addition to my evening prayers, however, indicates that my mother had special hopes. After the customary conclusion, I pray the Lord my soul to take, I was instructed to append, and did: Please bless papa and mamma and Hautie and Boothie, and make Uncle Newton senator and papa county clerk. The governor’s term of office in California drew near its close, and the county clerkship, at home, was rewarded by fees that sometimes, I believe, approached thirty thousand dollars a year—probably about thirty times the income my father was then somehow wringing out of his legal practice.

It was at this period, when I was four and five and six, that my complacent view of myself began to be damaged. Explanation mayn’t be needed that the shocking vanity of children shocks nobody; mine was inside me and I have been told that I was regarded as a rather solemn little boy, quiet and given to ruminations. Nevertheless, my life, so far, had brought me no cause to look upon myself as imperfect in any detail. My conduct was sometimes directed, but never criticized, and I hadn’t yet begun to wonder what sort of person I was—or what sort of looking person I was. A complete content with myself and a subservient world prevailed—until I encountered the boy called Brick-top.

There was no lawn about the frame house where we lived in dusty New York Street—in summer all the streets not cobbled were mostly dust—but the sidewalk, close to the front door, was shady and became my playground. Children of the neighborhood joined me there, played with my toys, held converse with me, and thus I became acquainted with Brick-top, who was a head taller than I was and the son, as he often mentioned, of a professional fireman.

Whenever I had to wear my little light blue velvet breeches and Brick-top saw me in them, he would tell me again that his father was a fireman.

On a promising afternoon I had a dime and was on my way to the corner drugstore to buy candy.