Arthur Anderson (1922-2016)

Though I couldn’t call the late Arthur Anderson a friend, we certainly knew and liked one-another.  I had been meeting him on-and-off since the early 1980s, when I was on the board that organized a yearly seminar on vintage radio, The Friends of Old Time Radio convention (FOTR). 

FOTR, run from its inception till its end just a few years ago (in 2009) by Jay Hickerson, was unlike other conventions.  The three-day event would have multiple recreations of vintage radio shows starring the very people who starred in them during the 30s, 40s and 50s, and the event was small enough to create a feeling of family among regular attendees.  I was in college when I went to my first FOTR convention, and well into my 40s for my last.  If that doesn’t say something about Hickerson, vintage radio fans, and the event, then nothing does.

The most important names in radio drama attended FOTR at one time or another, and several were regulars every year.  Anderson was in that latter category, and I actually had the pleasure of appearing with him in several radio recreations.  (One of the great joys of FOTR was that fans and attendees were often part of the recreations; better still, there was a dinner event two nights of the three, and often you were seated next to the likes of Jackson Beck or Burgess Meredith.  How cool was that?)

Anderson was a fixture on Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater (1938 – where you can hear Anderson in Treasure Island and Life With Father), and a regular on the classic children’s program, Let’s Pretend (1928-1954).  His story – in a highly fictionalized form – is told in the film Me and Orson Welles (2009), where the handsome Zac Efron played young Anderson.  (Anderson was actually much younger than Efron in the film, which allowed filmmakers to incorporate romance into the story.)

Anderson can be seen in the Woody Allen film  Zelig (1983), and in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) and on television in Car 54 Where Are You, as well as the more sober Law and Order.  And he worked till the end, doing voices for commercials (his is the voice of the Lucky Charms leprechaun from 1963 till 1992), cartoons and the like, and being the best spokesman vintage radio could ever have.  As Anderson said: I never got the girl, not in 19 seasons. I was never starred, I was never featured. But I always worked.

Anderson was unfailingly friendly and one of that rare vanishing breed: the jobbing New York actor.  He and his late wife, Alice, were always a pleasure to see and both always had terrific stories to tell.  He was really the last of the great voices from the classic era of radio drama, and we won’t see his like again.  He will be missed.

Alarms and Discursions, by G. K. Chesterton (1910)

Over the past many months we have been reading quite a bit of that brilliant author, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (1874 – 1936), creator of the delightful Father Brown detective stories.  Though little-remembered today, Chesterton was one of the outstanding critics and thinkers of his age.  There are many reasons to admire GKC, but perhaps the most sensible is that he had never lost his childlike sense of wonder.  It was his innocence and clarity, mixed with a prodigious erudition, that resulted in his gargantuan influence as a writer and thinker.  He is simply the finest critic of Dickens and Stevenson I have ever read, and his take on Shakespeare is enthralling.  To read Chesterton is to see these writers anew, as if some profound truth were staring us in the face and it took a little boy to point it out.

The Falstaffian figure of GKC was familiar to all literate people in the US and UK for decades.  Tall and fat, he wore a broad-brimmed slouch hat and cape, and often carried a sword cane.  Of such figures legends are made, and Chesterton, the man himself, influenced writers who converted the easily recognizable figure into a string of fictional characters.  (His influence on detective fiction is vast – and the man himself served as the model for the fictional Dr. Gideon Fell, who appeared in mysteries by John Dickson Carr.)  The most contemporary figure similar to GKC would be Orson Welles; but though brilliant, Welles did not have his deep and profound depth of learning, his purity of soul, nor his sense of fun.  Welles was old before his time; GKC was forever young.

Chesterton earned his bread and cheese as a journalist, writing for the London Daily News.  His 1910 book Alarms and Discursions features dozens of columns on a variety of different subjects.  Paging through this book, the reader would learn his thoughts on everything from democracy, to cheese to the failure of the English upper classes.   Anyone interested in learning more about this fascinating man should look at his newspaper columns while also reading his many novels and books of sustained criticism.

Here are some quotes:  When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid, there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The most obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the nose. But if you have scruples (moral or physical) about this course, you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this case has all the savage solidity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say that "most people" are stupid. It is like saying "most people are tall," when it is obvious that "tall" can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.

Isn’t that grand?  And here is GKC writing in 1910 something that is even more pertinent to 2014:  In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples; most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of ordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed because they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely; sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the unmistakable round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to the abnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back of the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists in being poor.

GKC had a remarkably Christian point of view – and by that, I don’t necessarily mean he wore his Catholicism on his sleeve.  He was a Christian humanist – someone who, seemingly against all odds, genuinely loved people.  This is a rare quality among those who live in the mind, but GKC was a rare man. 

The charm of a book like Alarms and Discursions is that it can be read through in one sitting, or can be dipped into almost indiscriminately.  There is not a page without gold of some kind, and, in addition, even his most interesting observations are presented with a puckish insouciance.  Read this, and savor, especially, the last line:  Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.

Alarms and Discursions is available at Project Gutenberg, and the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  It makes for wonderful reading.

My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Edited and With an Introduction by Peter Biskind

The outsized genius of Orson Welles (1915-1985) has become the stuff of legend.  Child prodigy, stage star and radio star and Oscar-winning film-maker at a stage in life when most young men are just learning to navigate the subway system on their own, Welles was both lionized and victimized by his designation as a “Boy Genius.”  The tragedy of most any prodigy is a suitable second act, and that was a dilemma beyond even Welles’ capabilities.  For what is a prodigy but someone who simply gets there first? 

And got there first, he did.  Welles went from star and celebrated director to television huckster and buffoon in record time.  It is hard for the generation who grew up watching Welles as pitchman for Paul Masson wines to realize that here was one of the most celebrated artists and intellects of his generation.  From Hamlet to Falstaff in just a few short years, Welles started isolating himself from the disappointments in life with layers of fat the way grit acquires layers of calcium carbonate to become pearls.

Later in life, Welles became the darling of the independent filmmaker set, who saw a kindred spirit in the maverick who so often bit the Hollywood hand that fed him.  And in this orbit of satellites was director Henry Jaglom (born 1938), who enticed a truculent Welles to appear in his film, A Safe Place (1971).  It was the start of a long friendship that would find Jaglom acting as friend, benefactor, baby-sitter and sometime agent to the fading genius.

Welles and Jaglom would meet regularly for lunch at Ma Maison, where the older auteur would hold court and entertain Jaglom with bits of wisdom gained in the artistic trenches, and with anecdotes from his amazing career.  Also in attendance was Welles’ toy poodle Kiki, who Welles used as another prop.

Jaglom taped their conversations from 1983 to 1985, when Welles died of a heart attack with a typewriter on his lap while writing a script.  He kept the tapes in a shoe box for years, until film historian Peter Biskind asked to have them transcribed.  The result is the book My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, and a tasty tidbit it is, too.

The array of interests displayed here by Welles is captivating – it would be hard indeed to find better table talk.  Gifted with an actor’s memory, he could quote long passages from the classics; look at art in a new and refreshing way; and think through aesthetic problems with a speed and lucidity that was simply amazing.

He was also full of balloon juice.  That no one seemed to question Welles on many of his anecdotes is, frankly, a demonstration that hero worship is a very dangerous thing indeed.  For example, Welles tells Jaglom how he and Lionel and Ethel Barrymore once scoured town, looking for missing brother John Barrymore.  They would, Welles says, eventually find him in a whorehouse.  Great story, but, somehow… I’m not quite sure that Lionel and Ethel, both in their 60s at that time, would engage a 20-something youth in the search, no matter what a wunderkind he was.  Also amusing (though not included in this book), is Welles’ story that he understood the novel Dracula so well because he had tea with Bram Stoker as a boy – no small feat, considering Stoker died three years before Welles was born.

In the first line quoted below we catch Welles in another howler: that he spoke with Katherine Hepburn while in make-up for the film Bill of Divorcement while he was in makeup for Citizen Kane – the films were made nine years apart. 

Somehow, though, none of it seems to matter; I am reminded of what James Russell Lowell wrote of author Edgar Allan Poe:

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,

The genius is real, but so is the fudge.  Here is a sample of Wellesian table-talk from My Lunches With Orson:

H.J.: By the way, I was just reading ­Garson Kanin’s book on Tracy and Hepburn.

O.W.: Hoo boy! I sat in makeup during Kane, and she was next to me, being made up for A Bill of Divorcement. And she was describing how she was fucked by Howard Hughes, using all the four-letter words. Most people didn’t talk like that then. Except Carole Lombard. It came naturally to her. She couldn’t talk any other way. With Katie, though, who spoke in this high-class, girl’s-finishing-school accent, you thought that she had made a decision to talk that way. Grace Kelly also slept around, in the dressing room when nobody was looking, but she never said anything. Katie was different. She was a free woman when she was young. Very much what the girls are now. I was never a fan of Tracy.

H.J.: You didn’t find him charming as hell?

O.W.: No, no charm. To me, he was just a hateful, hateful man. I think Katie just doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like the way I look. Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m ­profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. ­Bosnians have short necks.

H.J.: Orson, that’s ridiculous.

O.W.: Measure them. Measure them! I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don’t want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

H.J.: I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?

O.W.: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

H.J.: He’s not arrogant; he’s shy.

O.W.: He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is ­unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably ­arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

Waiter: Gentlemen, bon appétit. How is everything?

O.W.: We’re talking, thank you. [Waiter leaves.] I wish they wouldn’t do that. If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they’re talking.

H.J.: What is wrong with your food?

O.W.: It’s not what I had yesterday.

H.J.: You want to try to explain this to the waiter?

O.W.: No, no, no. One complaint per table is all, unless you want them to spit in the food. Let me tell you a story about George Jean Nathan, America’s great drama critic. Nathan was the tightest man who ever lived, even tighter than Charles Chaplin. And he lived for 40 years in the Hotel Royalton, which is across from the Algonquin. He never tipped anybody in the Royalton, not even when they brought the breakfast, and not at Christmastime. After about ten years of never getting tipped, the room-service waiter peed slightly in his tea. Everybody in New York knew it but him. The waiters hurried across the street and told the waiters at Algonquin, who were waiting to see when it would finally dawn on him what he was drinking! And as the years went by, there got to be more and more urine and less and less tea. And it was a great pleasure for us in the theater to look at a leading critic and know that he was full of piss. And I, with my own ears, heard him at the ‘21’ complaining, saying, “Why can’t I get tea here as good as it is at the Royalton?” That’s when I fell on the floor, you know.

H.J.: They keep writing in the papers that, ever since Wolfgang Puck left, this place has gone downhill.

O.W.: I don’t like Wolfgang. He’s a little shit. I think he’s a terrible little man.

H.J.: Warren Beatty was just saying that TV has changed movies, because for most of us, once you’re in a movie theater, you commit, whether you like it or not. You want to see what they’ve done, while at home …

O.W.: I’m the opposite. It’s a question of age. In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn’t stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater.

H.J.: You didn’t feel you had to see a movie from the start?

O.W.: No. We’d leave when we’d realize, “This is where we came in.” Everybody said that. I loved movies for that reason. They didn’t cost that much, so if you didn’t like one, it was, “Let’s do something else. Go to another movie.” And that’s what made it habitual to such an extent that walking out of a movie was what for people now is like turning off the television set.

H.J.: Were things really better in the old days?

O.W.: It’s terrible for older people to say that, because they always say things were better, but they really were. What was so good about it was just the quantity of movies that were made. If you were Darryl Zanuck, and you were producing 80 moving pictures under your direct supervision, how much attention could you pay to any one picture? Somebody was gonna slip something in that’s good.

I got along well with even the worst of the old moguls. They were all easier to deal with than these college-­educated, market-conscious people. I never really suffered from the “bad old boys.” I’ve only suffered from lawyers and agents. Wasn’t it Norman Mailer who said that the great new art form in ­Hollywood is the deal? Everybody’s energy goes into the deal. Forty-five years I have been doing business with agents, as a performer and a director. As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I’ve never heard one say, “No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.” They will always say, “You don’t like him? I’ve got somebody else.” They’re totally spineless.

H.J.: In the old days, all those big deals were made on a handshake. With no contract. And they were all honored.

O.W.: In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, ’cause it was lawless. A man’s word had to mean something. My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn’t be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You’re a lawbreaker. It’s just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society. You see?

Richard Burton comes to the table.

Richard Burton: Orson, how good to see you. It’s been too long. You’re looking fine. Elizabeth is with me. She so much wants to meet you. Can I bring her over to your table?

O.W.: No. As you can see, I’m in the middle of my lunch. I’ll stop by on my way out.

Burton exits.

H.J.: Orson, you’re behaving like an asshole. That was so rude.

O.W.: Do not kick me under the table. I hate that. I don’t need you as my ­conscience, my Jewish Jiminy Cricket. Especially do not kick my boots. You know they protect my ankles. Richard Burton had great talent. He’s ruined his great gifts. He’s become a joke with a celebrity wife. Now he just works for money, does the worst shit. And I wasn’t rude. To quote Carl Laemmle, “I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”

The Jade Sphinx Gets Letters

The mailbox at The Jade Sphinx has, if nothing else, the charm of variety.  Here are excerpts from some of the missives that have recently made their way into our mailbox.

You like all of this old stuff.  Don’t you like anything that isn’t campy?

This, simply, knocked us for a loop.  Campy?  I believe this person should have their literacy surgically removed.  Camp is a word used by people who have no reality beyond their kitchen sink.

Are grand opera, Victorian novels, the paintings of Gerome campy?  No … but they often dwell in the realm of high emotion.  Emotion unprotected by irony terrifies modernists.  You might say our feet are planted in separate … camps.

I read your thoughts on Shelley and his poetry, as well as his political activism, and enjoyed them a lot.  I also saw your criticism of the entertainment at the White House in 2011.  I can’t get it – are you a liberal or a conservative?

I am an aesthete.  I cannot really align myself, then, with either party; the right has destroyed our Hellenistic political model, and the left, our culture.  Rather like the choice between burnt toast and burnt fingers – neither is satisfying.

You always seem so sure.  Do you ever have second thoughts?  Or have you reevaluated some of your opinions and changed your mind?

Good Lord, yes.  But first, a word on opinions.  Everyone has opinions; they are the most easily had and most disposable commodity in the world.  However, what is rare is an informed opinion.  Without that informed cultural background, an opinion is about as useful as the reader’s comments on Amazon.

That said, I often reevaluate and realize I’m off the mark, most frequently when I am writing about pop culture.  There are particular tropes, settings and ideas which gratify certain deep-seated longings and prejudices on my part; if a work of art touches on one of these things, I admit I am more disposed to like it.  For instance, most anything set in the 1930s will run a positive electrical current through what is laughingly called my brain; work set during the Victorian Era will do the same.  And I will meet any Western more than halfway.  And my mind is crammed with tons of lumber from my boyhood – gothic sensibilities, elegant or dramatic costume, grand gestures, romantic balderdash of all sorts find a happy home in my brain.  I do try, however, to be as clear-headed in my judgments as my natural prejudices allow.

A case in point is Orson Welles’ Black Magic, reviewed in these pages.  I am quite sure that it is an unjustly overlooked masterpiece… except when I’m not.

As long as we are making admissions, I also confess that there are several things that will never get a fair hearing in these pages, including popular music from the rock era onwards, irony, digital and electronic amusements, most television, surrealism and a host of other modernist ills.  I don’t understand these things, I don’t like them, and I don’t invest my time in them.

Though not a question, this comment was in our mailbox a few months ago:  You write about Oscar Wilde a lot and about cowboys a lot.  It’s weird.

Well, the writer has something there.  I might change the name of this blog to The Wilde, Wilde West and leave it at that.  No, scratch that.  I don’t understand, fully, why the art of the American West is not considered as “canonical” as European art.  I believe the West is the central American myth – more so than the Founding Fathers – and to truly understand contemporary America, one must first understand the settling of the West.  America is the core story of the 20^th Century, and American aesthetes who disregard that fact in favor of Eurocentrism, do so at their peril.

Do you have any questions you would like answered?  Let me know and we’ll run your letters in upcoming columns.

The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington

Not many people read Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) these days, and that is a great shame.  Tarkington was, at one time, one of the nation’s most popular writers, and he was known for the gentle lyricism of his prose as well as the faintly wistful and nostalgic tone of his worldview.

Tarkington is only one of three novelists (the others being William Faulkner and John Updike) who won the Pulitzer Prize for literature more than once.  He won the prize, most significantly, for what has now become his most famous novel, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; won the Pulitzer in 1919).

Many would argue that it is his nostalgia for a vanished America that has hurt Tarkington’s cultural currency, but I doubt that.  No, I believe that Tarkington’s literary reputation was glossed over because he saw both the positives and negatives of the encroaching Modern World, and was very clear-eyed in his assessment of it.

This came to me quite distinctly while recently rereading Ambersons.  It is the second novel in his Growth trilogy, which included the now-forgotten The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923; retitled National Avenue in 1927).  Ambersons was famously made into a film by Orson Welles in 1942, but the film, fine as it is, was but a pale reflection of the novel.

The novel tells the story of George Amberson Minafer.  He is born into the wealthy and socially-connected Amberson family and is, for want of a better term, a spoiled brat.  Shallow, snobbish, uninterested (and uninteresting), his bad-boy behavior has a certain energy and dash, but he is a thoroughly selfish and wretched human being.

George behaves as a young prince in his Midwestern town, and, for all practical purposes, he is.  When Eugene Morgan, who courted his mother, Isabel, back in the day, returns to town, George meets and falls in love with Morgan’s daughter, Lucy.  When George’s father dies, it seems as if Morgan and Isabel will finally reunite; however, George’s selfishness and high-handed behavior ruins their chance of happiness.

When George leaves with his mother for Europe, the Amberson fortune slowly crumbles while Morgan, who makes automobiles, grows richer and richer.  George and Isabel return to the town, where Isabel dies.  When his grandfather dies almost immediately after, George learns that the family is now completely destitute.

Throughout the novel, the townsfolk grow to hate George, and pray that he will get his ‘comeuppance.’  This he receives in spades, losing his family, his home, his fortune, his reputation and his self-respect.  He is relegated to living with, and caring for, his maiden Aunt Fanny and working for a chemical plant.  Worse yet, George loses his hometown, as well.  As auto-manufacturing grows more important, the town grows into a city, and then into a metropolis.  The landmarks of the Gilded Age created by the Ambersons are gently erased by time, leaving the world he knew and his family name little more than a dim memory.

However, in Tarkington’s world, nothing is ever so simple.  While George certainly gets everything he deserves, and then some, we cannot help but feel sorry for him.  His crimes seem to be no more than the arrogance of youth and the stupidity of entitlement.  In fact, in adversity George rises to the occasion handsomely.

More tellingly – and here is where Tarkington loses credibility with Modernists – he makes clear exactly what was lost by a world changing so much.  Though George’s world was class-conscious, insular and snobbish, the new democratic age is chaotic, uncertain and vulgar.  Where George’s world was parochial, self-centered and precious, the modern world hopelessly diffuse, avaricious and filthy.  Tarkington saw it all – the failure of multiculturism, the rubble of our cities, the noise of our “culture,” our obsession with hucksterism and our deluded sense of social mobility.  He knew that the gains were real, but the losses irrevocable and possibly fatal.

The engine of change here, for Tarkington and the town, was the advent of the automobile.  Life got faster, noisier and dirtier.  Yes, opportunities and horizons expanded, but at what cost?

Our recent rereading hit a significant chord because, all too often, we see ourselves as a (hopefully much nicer) later version of George.  Most of the time, I no longer recognize my city, my country or my world.  Here, for example, is George walking around what was once a beautiful, turn-of-the century town:

On Sunday mornings Fanny went to church and George took long walks. He explored the new city, and found it hideous, especially in the early spring, before the leaves of the shade trees were out. Then the town was fagged with the long winter and blacked with the heavier smoke that had been held close to the earth by the smoke-fog it bred. Every-thing was damply streaked with the soot: the walls of the houses, inside and out, the gray curtains at the windows, the windows themselves, the dirty cement and unswept asphalt underfoot, the very sky overhead. Throughout this murky season he continued his explorations, never seeing a face he knew—for, on Sunday, those whom he remembered, or who might remember him, were not apt to be found within the limits of the town, but were congenially occupied with the new outdoor life which had come to be the mode since his boyhood. He and Fanny were pretty thoroughly buried away within the bigness of the city.

One of his Sunday walks, that spring, he made into a sour pilgrimage. It was a misty morning of belated snow slush, and suited him to a perfection of miserableness, as he stood before the great dripping department store which now occupied the big plot of ground where once had stood both the Amberson Hotel and the Amberson Opera House. From there he drifted to the old "Amberson Block," but this was fallen into a back-water; business had stagnated here. The old structure had not been replaced, but a cavernous entryway for trucks had been torn in its front, and upon the cornice, where the old separate metal letters had spelt "Amberson Block," there was a long billboard sign: "Doogan Storage."

To spare himself nothing, he went out National Avenue and saw the piles of slush-covered wreckage where the Mansion and his mother's house had been, and where the Major's ill-fated five "new" houses had stood; for these were down, too, to make room for the great tenement already shaped in unending lines of foundation. But the Fountain of Neptune was gone at last—and George was glad that it was!

He turned away from the devastated site, thinking bitterly that the only Amberson mark still left upon the town was the name of the boulevard—Amberson Boulevard. But he had reckoned without the city council of the new order, and by an unpleasant coincidence, while the thought was still in his mind, his eye fell upon a metal oblong sign upon the lamppost at the corner. There were two of these little signs upon the lamp-post, at an obtuse angle to each other, one to give passers-by the name of National Avenue, the other to acquaint them with Amberson Boulevard. But the one upon which should have been stenciled "Amberson Boulevard" exhibited the words "Tenth Street."

George stared at it hard. Then he walked quickly along the boulevard to the next corner and looked at the little sign there. "Tenth Street."

It had begun to rain, but George stood unheeding, staring at the little sign. "Damn them!" he said finally, and, turning up his coat-collar, plodded back through the soggy streets toward "home."

Our cities, our countries, our very lives are all dynamic things.  They are supposed to change.  But all too often change is heralded as a great and good thing simply because it is a change, because it is new.  We think of what we gain but are seldom very conscious of what we lose.  While most critics and academics embraced writers who sang of the emerging American Century, Tarkington told us all what it would cost.  He was the Poet Laureate of Loss; no wonder his cultural currency is low.

Beasley’s Christmas Party, by Booth Tarkington

 

It is both amazing and sad to your correspondent that American novelist Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) is so little read (and regarded!) today.  Tarkington had a distinctly American voice – a distinctly Midwestern voice – that resonated with turn-of-the-century America in a deep and profound way.  He is one of only three novelists (the others being William Faulkner and John Updike) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once – but today he is remembered chiefly for The Magnificent Ambersons, which was turned into a now-highly regarded film in 1942 by Orson Welles.

Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and would eventually graduate from the prestigious Exeter Academy, Purdue University and, ultimately, Princeton.  He came from extremely well-to-do people, but the family lost money during the Panic of 1873 – though eventually they would recoup much of their fortune.  It was this up-and-down experience that would later influence his 1918 novel Ambersons.

It is amazing that a man called “the most significant contemporary American author” by Publisher’s Weekly in 1921 should be so little remembered today.  Perhaps his reputation was usurped by fellow Princeton graduate F. Scott Fitzgerald, a critical assessment that baffles your correspondent as Tarkington is the better writer with the more distinctive voice.  Perhaps it is the sense of wistful nostalgia, a sense of sweetness that makes Tarkington so unpalatable today; his lack of irony and cynicism is distinctly unfashionable in academic circles.

Christmas, and its ability to transform a diverse spectrum of men, was of particular interest to Tarkington, and he wrote of the holiday more than once.  He wrote the novella Beasley’s Christmas Party in 1909, and it was later dramatized by C. W. Munger.  It is available for free at Project Gutenberg or ManyBooks.net, and is heartily recommended for holiday reading.

The story concerns a journalist who moves to the all-American town of Wainwright, where he befriends Mr. Beasley, a local politician who is sure to run for governor and win.  However, Beasley has taken to talking with imaginary people, and when his political enemies learn this, they dragoon the reporter to witness this eccentricity and report upon it.  The resolution provides wonderful satisfaction, and perhaps not a little envy at political malice so easily erased.

Here is a taste of Tarkington’s prose: It might be difficult to say why I thought it was the “finest” house in Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain, set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a fair spread of flat lawn.  But it gave back a great deal for your glance, just as some people do.  It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in it.  Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old fashioned people living there, who would welcome you merrily.

It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and grandmother; where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would return from no matter what distances; a house where big turkeys would be on the table often; where on called “the hired man” (and named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his keens on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful – and that is about as near as I can come to my reason for thinking it is the finest house in Wainwright.

It is a perfect house, in fact, in which to spend some reading time this Christmas.