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Friday, November 1, 2019

Sincerity and the Other Virtues in Poetry



     One of the oldest clichés of rhetoric is the modesty topos, [1] a convention so familiar that it must constantly assume new forms, mutating to make a fresh impact. If the old classic exordium beginning “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” is rarely heard in quite that form, it flourishes in a good many other incarnations.
     Ordinarily, one would hardly attempt to impress an audience by denying one’s own ability at what one has set out to do. Yet the speaker quite often opens by claiming to be incompetent at speechmaking hoping to gain thereby his listeners’ conviction that he will say nothing but the unvarnished truth. Socrates’ address to the jury in Plato’s Apology is one example among a great many.

They have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in No indeed! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am certain that this is right, and that at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator - let no one expect this of me.
     Socrates characterizes his accusers not merely as liars but as accomplished speakers capable of delivering professionally smooth and richly figured orations while he himself will simply speak extemporaneously and thus more honestly. Though we cannot know except from his general reputation how skilled the philosopher was at public speaking, it is clear that he knew at least that the pose of modesty might be useful for his defense.
     In poetry one of the loci classici for this convention is the first poem in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

     The last line suggests that to this Muse pure self-expression is the sole end of poetry, a view which neglects other goals such as melodious beauty, didacticism, and entertainment while suggesting that the unselfconscious transcription of consciousness (what is “in thy heart”) is the route to poetry. This contention is patently indefensible in itself, but it may succeed in gaining the writer a reputation for direct and ingenuous self-expression.
     What can sincerity or honesty mean in a work of art? Whatever else it may be a poem is an artifice, a composed object. Sidney’s sonnet is black marks on a white page or certain patterns in sound. It is a play of fancy, framed by a story such as this: “Imagine that a person were one day to say these words . . .”
     There can be no question of facts. Art works through images and indirections, affect and associations in a manner entirely different from a scientist or a historian. It means nothing to ask whether Botticelli’s Primavera is sincere or insincere or, indeed, in some sense “true.” However, just as it is possible for a painter to depict a scene “realistically,’ though his product be but daubs on a canvas, a writer may create in the reader a sense that he is straightforward and sincere.
     In fact Sidney’s whole poem is steeped in the very sort of sophisticated rhetorical figures he claims to eschew. The sonnet form itself and the sonnet sequence this poem opens are highly conventional literary choices (though Sidney does use hexameters). The word invention bears a technical meaning in the world of oratory since the earliest manuals of rhetoric. The modesty topos is only one of a series of rhetorical pyrotechnics with antecedents going back to the ancients by which Sidney seeks to impress his readers. The anadiplosis of lines 3 and 4 and the references to allusion with its implication of art inspired by art rather than personal experience are among many other signs of the calculated design behind the poet’s pretense to simple sincerity.
     Still, many critics have valued what seems to be poetic honesty what seems to be poetic honesty. Matthew Arnold argued that “charlatanism” has no place in poetry and that the best poetry possesses a “high seriousness” that arises uniquely from “absolute sincerity.” [4] With his classical training he could not but be aware of the rhetorical sophistication of his favorite poets and he thus claimed that “the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.”
     The criterion of sincerity clearly has a lengthy history in European criticism associated with generally positive values. Its similitude at least may be shown to be inscribed within characteristics of the text itself. With far less theoretic ground but greater fervor some readers have considered moral characteristics that leave no trace whatever in the written word to be nonetheless relevant to its evaluation.
     In part as a testament to poetry’s role in transmitting culture from one generation to the next and a reaction to puritanical criticism from religion and philosophy, poetry has, since the earliest times, claimed to inculcate morality. Thus, an upright life or at any rate the inclusion of generally accepted morality in literary texts might seem to imply a good writer. The arts have repeatedly been condemned as immoral through the centuries, and their partisans have not been satisfied to deny that accusation; they have generally sought to maintain that the arts are a positive moral influence. [5]
     Often such discussion is sufficiently confused as to jumble the separate categories of an artist’s own personal morality and that represented in an artistic work. Politics, which in the aesthetic realm is presented primarily as moral questions, and religion, judged by the standards of beauty, provide ample territory for the erroneous judgement of art.
     This is obvious when dealing with comments from those who know nothing whatever of art. The Catholic Church had such great authors as on its Index librorum prohibitorum which was maintained from the sixteenth until past the middle of the twentieth century. When it was discontinued in 1966 Cardinal Ottaviani declared that its end was not due to liberalizing but rather to the fact that modern times had produced such a quantity of sacrilegious writing that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could not monitor it all. [6]
     When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)
     The very same erroneous standards appeared in Nazi Germany with the condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art and in the Stalinist Soviet Union after the imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932. Each of these represented an attempt by the state to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values.
    Nor are all such critics know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.
     Such criteria can create fans as well as critics. At one of his readings, archived now on tape, Charles Bukowski entered to great applause carrying a six-pack of beer. The excitement audibly heightened as he opened a can and proceeded to drain it. Waves of applause. Bukowski leaned toward the microphone confidentially, and emitted a loud belch. The hall went wild, not because of the poet’s very real verbal art, but because he was mocking bourgeois morality and decorum.
     The opponents of oppression may also rely on non-aesthetic standards. Recently, while visiting a museum in Warsaw, we saw a work by contemporary artist Zbigniew Libera titled "Lego Concentration Camp" [7] containing neat little Lego block constructions of the familiar watchtowers and barracks. In his image Nazi guards (slightly modified figures from the Lego Police Station set) stood among and grinning skeletal inmates some of whom were placing others in the oven. (The skeletons were from the Pirate set.) To me the picture was indeed jarring with its conflation of innocence and the deepest guilt. Such a work stirs some thoughts in most viewers, including regular calls for it not to be exhibited.
     Non-aesthetic criteria may intrude from any directions. A jazz fan might have a semi-conscious preferential option for musicians who are also junkies, while some readers of Orwell are put off by his late role as a government informant on those he considered Communists or fellow travelers. A parent may approve of Narnia books because their author is a good Christian. Those fascinated by suicide may become devotees or Sylvia Plath or Kurt Cobain. Though Sir Thomas Malory’s arrests for rape and theft are mere footnotes today, surely many people would find themselves unable to stomach Lolita, one of the most beautiful books of its era, were it known that Nabokov was in fact a pedophile. (He was, of course, not.)
     In modern times advocates of art for art’s sake have often cooperated with their foes by ostentatiously behaving in ways meant to épater les bourgeoisie. Since the Romantic era, the bohemian antics of those in particular who identified themselves with the avant-garde embodied the same standards as those bourgeoises who did not understand them.
     The examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but the phenomenon is sufficiently familiar that further illustration would be redundant. Clearly art must be judged as art. Poets are experts in the use of words, not in optimum social arrangements or morality. Just as history has its own standards (in which the aesthetic plays at best a secondary role) as does physics and every other field, literature must be granted its own standards. Justice and goodness and truth are all compelling qualities in certain arenas, but not when evaluating a work of art.




1. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “Affected Modesty,” p. 83-5 for a survey.

2. Jowett’s translation.

3. Astrophil and Stella 1

4. In “the Study of Poetry,” originally published as the introduction to T. H. Ward’s anthology, The English Poets (1880) and later in Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, Second Series. In Arnold’s time related views were espoused by John Ruskin and George Macdonald. Since that time, among the more significant critics who have sought to analyze the notion of literary sincerity are M. H. Abrams who in “Poetic Truth and Sincerity,” in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition argued that sincerity was “the primary criterion, if not the sine qua non, of excellence in poetry” during the nineteenth century. Later studies include Lionel Trilling’s Poetry and Sincerity and Susan B. Rosenbaum’s Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. On the other hand, critics such as T. S. Eliot made “impersonal” a word of praise.

5. Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry is one prominent example.

6. L'Osservatore della Domenica, April 24, 1966. The Index had included such authors as Montaigne, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, de Beauvoir and Sartre.

7. The Lego company, unaware of the artist’s design, had originally cooperated, donating the blocks, but, when they learned Libera’s theme, they tried to block him from showing it, but eventually conceded. Hence each box in the installation bears the line "This work of Zbigniew Libera has been sponsored by Lego." The work was banned by bureaucrats from the Polish of the Venice Bienniale in 1997. Lego later refused a request for their blocks from Ai Weiwei.

Euphemism as Metaphor


This piece is neither scholarly nor exhaustive. It aims rather to be familiar and recreational after the fashion of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature.



     As the name suggests, the point of a euphemism to substitute a more safe or decorous word for one too charged with anxiety or desire. Inevitably, every euphemism is a sort of figure of speech, a variety of allegory in the broader etymological sense of “saying something other” than what is meant. Thus euphemisms share with other figures the pleasure of wit and surprise that accompanies all such doublings as well as their semantic extension. The euphemistic expression does not merely occlude or replace the avoided one; it adds new elements of meaning as well, beginning with the charge of energy that accompanies entering a restricted zone of language or approaching taboos. Each example provides a model, often simple, of how poetic language in colloquial usage enriches and condenses meaning.
     Euphemisms, like jokes, collect about nodes of human insecurity such as the divine, the ego, death, intoxication, sex, and scatology. Every euphemism by its very nature bears the nervous energy of treading in a no man’s land in inadequate disguise. Even empty sounds like “blankety-blank” or television’s bleep that masks improper language make all listeners ears prick up the with the conviction that what is being said must be of unusual interest. The visual cue of a series of symbols in a comic strip indicating profanity (called a grawlix [1]) draws attention to the utterance and intensifies it. The effect of substituting a harmless term for one in some way emotionally charged is, in fact, always paradoxical. While avoiding a tabooed usage the euphemism inevitably draws attention to the altered word, introducing a tone suggesting nervousness or a wink and a nod which in fact highlights the usage dramatically. [2]
     The most ancient use of euphemisms may have arisen from wariness over using god’s name or the names of dead ancestors, or, indeed, one’s own name. The archaic identification of signifier and signified suggested that naming the supernatural might attract unwelcome attention from the divine and the deceased, unless strict ritual rules were observed. In many cultures a conjuring may be regarded as effective if the magician knows the name of person at whom a charm is directed.
     The Cretan king Rhadamanthus was said to have forbidden swearing by the gods, mandating that people swear instead by animals. [3] To avoid exciting their unwanted attention, the chthonic deities governing vengeance retribution, the Erinyes (Furies) were called Eumenides (or the Benevolent Ones). They often were invoked in association with oath-taking, for they punished those who swore to a lie. Aeschylus tells in The Eumenides how they were tamed by Athena and called thereafter the Venerable Ones or Semnai.
      Jews, Muslims, and Christians are well aware of the ancient Hebrew use of bynames to substitute for the deity’s name. Thus in the secular love poetry of the Song of Songs the repeated phrases by the roes, and by the hinds of the field are euphemistic forms of Hebrew oaths. God’s bynames are chosen with the greatest care. Phonically each resembles a conventional divine appellation. [4] Further, worship of animals (such as the golden calf) was common in the ancient Near East. One scholar at least thinks that these expressions are genuine pagan oaths to nature deities. [5]
     The Orthodox today avoid writing or saying God’s proper name, the tetragrammaton, using a wide variety of euphemisms, most of which specify god’s nature, such as Almighty (El Shaddai) or Lord of Hosts (Adonai Tzva'ot, suggesting military leadership). At times they simply write G-d, a curious example of writing a word while simultaneously canceling it.
     Of course, the most common euphemisms for God today, called minced oaths, arise from phonetic similarity and contribute no semantic information: gee, gosh, and the like. Even in the twenty-first century the magical belief that hearing oaths is somehow deleterious to children remains all but universal. Vestiges linger of the notion that women, too, must never hear such expressions.
     The anxiety produced by thoughts of mortality is ameliorated sometimes by euphemisms expressing religious faith and the confident expectation of an afterlife: meeting one’s maker, to go to one’s reward. Some churches call funerals a homecoming. Other expressions by their levity represent a kind of whistling in the dark: kick the bucket, bite the dust, [6], buy the farm, and the like. Cockney rhyming slang is, as usual, more oblique, offering the mildly comforting brown bread for dead.
     In modern times we associate euphemisms with sexual and excretory activities. A word directly naming the place we excrete (such as defecation room) almost never appears, nor does the term describing the apparatus most commonly used today, the water closet. Though today it may seem an unpleasant word because of its association, the word toilet was in origin a diminutive of toile and referred to a small cloth on which grooming tools were laid out. Powder room likewise suggests primping rather than peeing. [7] Similarly, latrine may bring to mind a reeking hole in the dirt, but it at first (like lavatory or, of course, washroom or bathroom) signified a place to clean oneself. Such terms reinforce the sense of purgation and purity that may follow excretion. In rest room the semantic element of relaxation following what might be called doing one’s business has become so generalized as to retain little force. Others, such as privy and the Spanish necessario, are even more oblique. More concrete are the associations of the British term bog referring at first to an open cess-pit.
     The delicate education of children about reproductive activities may be simply called the facts of life, which washes the topic of social hazard, or the birds and the bees, suggesting the continuity of all life. Since France is considered sexually naughty, saying au naturel clothes nakedness in the discreet tones of another language while genteelly retaining its sauciness.
     Vague words such as thing, stuff, or it and nonsense words can serve as general, all-purpose euphemisms. In a curious example of a euphemism recrossing into proscribed language a drug user who might refer to his stash as his shit, while an artist might use the same term to refer to his recent works. Presumably the high, whether aesthetically or chemically induced, is particularly charged for the junkie or the painter, both of whom are likely to be contemptuous of bourgeois standards. A bumper sticker reading stuff happens is understood as meaning shit happens, in which shit represents all possible undesirable events. Clara Bow was the It Girl whose film It appeared in 1927, and a teenager today might ask a friend, “Did you do it?” The 1928 song “Makin’ Whoopee” popularized by Eddie Cantor and “My Dingaling,” a hit for Chuck Berry in 1972 are examples of the use of neologisms to suggest sexual meanings, though they are not quite arbitrary. Whoopee with its insistent doubled vowels, certainly suggests the rush of joy that might accompany sex, while the jocular dingaling is comically associated with the dangling male genitalia.
     The socially dangerous condition of intoxication is likewise hedged about by a rich growth of euphemism. Blasted and bombed acknowledge the destructive loss of function that accompanies drunkenness, while buzzed suggests the quickened hum in the inner ear associated with a lesser chemical alteration of consciousness. Cockneys nod ironically to high culture with Brahms and Liszt, which rhymes with pissed. Many other areas of life, money, for instance, disability, and aging, also attract euphemistic usages.
     Steven Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill [8] to describe the succession of terms that result when a once proper term has come to seem inadequate or offensive. Americans of a certain age saw the polite usage turn from colored to Negro, and then to black (sometimes Black), and finally African-American. Notoriously, terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile were once clinical terms designating degrees of cognitive limitation more scientifically (it seemed) than the generic feeble-minded of an earlier era only to be replaced in the middle of the twentieth century by retarded, then developmentally disabled. The DSM-5 uses intellectual disability. The hospital psychiatric department where my wife worked changed from Mental Health Unit to Behavioral Health Unit as though behavior defined the problem for depressive and psychotic alike. It must have sounded more polite to somebody.
     In their most efficient uses, euphemisms have a spark of wit and a flowering of suggestive imagery. For instance, an American might tell a man whose trouser fly is unzipped, “Uh-oh, the barn door is open.” This form communicates the information while adding the amusement of a sort of riddle, the levity of humor, to defuse the topic’s awkwardness while retaining an implication of the power of Eros which, it suggests, is bestial and only in part controllable.
     It may seem a rebuke to the pretentions of language itself that among the ancient Greek meanings of the word euphemism, along with the use of words of good omen and abstention from those of bad and praise-singing, is the solemn silence during religious rites, as though stillness might well displace our endless flow of verbiage. Euphemism, though, far from simply blocking verbal signification, heightens meaning and increases semantic precision, transmitting values and entertaining at the same time.



1. The term was coined by Beetle Bailey artist Mort Walker in 1964. They are also called jams and nittles. Such symbols had been used, however, at least since December 14, 1902 in Rudolf Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids strip. In the grawlixes of sailors Uncle Heinle and John Silver, anchors are featured.
Walker named a number of other comic conventions as well in his book Lexicon of Comicana (1980). For instance, he called the visible cloud of dust generated by a character’s departure a briffit and plewds for the nimbus of sweat around an anxious character.

2. Words that do bear specific meanings may be eroded through vulgar usage to the same status or even less. With occasional use the word “fucking” may function as an intensifier, but in the discourse of a person whose every sentence includes several uses of the word even that is lost and the word, originally so potent, comes to mean nothing more than a pause during which “uh” escapes from the throat.

3. Porphyry, De Abstinentia III.16. For Porphyry this law suggests arguments in favor of vegetarianism. Divine animals and semi-bestial deities are, of course, common in archaic times. Rhadamanthus became proverbial for wisdom and later was described as one of the judges of the dead.

4. This occurs first in verses 2.7 and 3.5. The sound of the Hebrew for “roes” is similar to either (’elohey) ṣᵉba’ot '(God of) Hosts' or (YHWH) ṣᵉba’ot '(Jehovah is) Armies' and that for “hinds” to ’el šadday 'El Shaddai'. The association is explicit in the Targum.

5. See David McLain Carr’s “Rethinking Sex and Spirituality: The Song of Songs and Its Readings,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 81, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998), pp. 413-435.

6. This idiom, with its American Old West associations, is curiously similar to the Homeric expression that might be translated as “bite the earth.”

7. Pee itself is a euphemism to avoid saying piss.

8. “The Name of the Game,” in the New York Times for April 4, 2005.

Tarkington’s Vulgarian Hero [The Plutocrat]



I would perhaps never have read this had I not come upon a copy of the 1927 Doubleday first edition in a Salvation Army store. The title (with “The” alone oddly italicized) is pasted with a graphic of travel decals to the front and the spine and the endpapers are marbled. A discreet label in the back identifies it as having been originally purchased at the Washington, D. C. Brentano’s. Successive penciled used bookstore notations record prices of two dollars and one dollar before the volume ended up as a donation.

The few page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition. Numbers in brackets are endnotes.


I. a philistine paragon

     Virtually all those who have commented on Tarkington during the last few decades have begun by noting the extraordinary decline in his literary reputation since his death and I shall be no different. In the early twentieth century Tarkington was immensely popular. His books regularly lingered on the best-seller lists, and many were made into films, including the Welles classic The Magnificent Ambersons. The film version of The Plutocrat (called Business for Pleasure) starred the beloved Will Rogers as Tinker. Tarkington received the Pulitzer Prize twice. His Penrod was once as popular as Huckleberry Finn. In his youth he successfully sought election to the Indiana legislature considering such service part of a wealthy family’s responsibilities. Curiously, the author who had once been so thoroughly mainstream as to be celebrated by critics and a mass audience alike now appears as something of an outlier.
     Were one to see a novel titled The Plutocrat by Jack London or George Norris or Upton Sinclair, one would expect a muckraking expose of the fat cats’ misdeeds. Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald would be expected to satirize the subject more or less broadly. Who but Booth Tarkington, though, would have actually made the vulgar rich man his hero, and this on the cusp of the Great Depression? In politics he was staunchly conservative, not to say reactionary. He not only supported Prohibition and opposed the New Deal; he never could quite accept the advent of the automobile.
     Tarkington was by no means unconscious of the conundrum of artistic success in the early twentieth century; he was defensively anxious to secure his place in the spectrum of American literature. The issue of artistic prominence is a central theme of The Plutocrat. To Ogle’s artistic associates Jones and Macklyn the playwright’s appeal to the “Many” as opposed to the “Few” is a mark of aesthetic mediocrity. The poet and the painter who consider popularity a sign the artist has given in to “the mob” are portrayed with a kind of explicit brittle snobbery every bit as much a caricature as that of the Midwestern businessman. The thematic thrust of the novel, though, is not symmetrical. The satire of the artists is validated while the philistine turns out to be in fact admirable. The reader is brought around to the position of the mediating figure of his daughter Olivia who appreciates her father’s heroic qualities while remaining quite aware of his absurdity.
     There can be no suspicion of ambiguity or irony in the book’s theme. It was published shortly after Babbitt and looked very much like a riposte, though Tarkington (perhaps looking down his nose) claimed he had never read Lewis’s novel. The comparison was not lost on the New York Times reviewer whose article was headlined “Booth Tarkington Draws A Heroic Babbitt.” [1]
     Much of the book is less about Tinker’s greatness than about Ogle’s shortcoming in being unable to perceive it. When Ogle finds himself “the only person of the whole ship’s company who went about Gibraltar alone,” he questions his own standards. “He could almost have wished that nature had made him a little less exclusive.” Tarkington suggests that this fault of character had been produced by Ogle’s “lonely and satiric father” who believed in a small band of elect distinguished by superior culture. Thus he had no fellow-feeling with others, seeing them rather as caricatures while he could not see himself in that light. (182-183) After a couple of hundred pages of shallow but merciless satire of all characters, including Olivia, who proves ultimately insightful, the reader might be forgiven for taking Tarkington’s description of Ogle as a self-portrait.
     Ogle is obliged to question his own habitual value judgements in the face of Mme. Momoro’s apparent fondness for the loud Mr. Tinker, and then by Dr. Medjila’s apparently more disinterested appreciation. From that latter scholar comes the suggestion that this man whom he had instantly despised was in fact “the new Roman.” (473) [2] He comes to accept this and the reader can hardly disagree when the narrator informs the reader explicitly that Ogle by story’s end “had suffered some enlightenments and improved his knowledge of himself.” (534)
     Ogle, of course, had the inducement of the allure of Tinker’s daughter Olivia to persuade him that there may be more to her father than he had at first expected. It is true that the businessman is idealistically depicted as fascinated by urban planning, water systems and the like associated with general social improvement rather than projects valued for their money-making potential. If one is to admire Tinker, one must assume that advancing the interests of the plutocrats is equivalent to advancing society itself, a conviction that ignores that brutality of capitalism, more nakedly undeniable in those days before the New Deal. Working people and the poor make no appearance in the story, except in the nameless North Africans, portrayed as sulking and silent except when uncontrollably animated. Olivia twits Ogle about his resemblance to these less-than-human figures, but, as we know, he recovers his cordiality when he learns to admire the rich.
     Vernon L. Parrington, a few years before the publication of The Plutocrat, called Tarkington “the great failure in contemporary literature.” “His art,” wrote Parrington, was “destroyed by love of popularity.” Tarkington for him is “a perennial sophomore” who sought only to gratify his “middle-class” readers at whom Parrington looked down his nose and called “lovers of comfortable literature.” [3] Is this the voice of the supercilious snobs Jones and Macklyn? If so, it is also my voice and not so different from the voices of most knowledgeable critics. Though it is generally more enlightening and lively as well to overturn expectations and to move against the current, when the aesthetes and the philistines are choosing up sides, it is difficult to be a contrarian.


1. New York Times, January 9, 1927. The piece went on to define the novel’s theme in confusing if semi-Tarkingtonian terms: “Mr. Tarkington has put his pen at the service of an ideal -- the ideal of an American cosmopolitanism as opposed to a parochial sophistication.”

2. It would have been considerably more difficult to pass off Mr. Tinker as a “new Greek,” of course.

3. Vernon L. Parrington, Maincurrents in American Thought, "Addenda 1917-1924." P. 375.




II. a Tarkington fan

I quote here from Smith’s remarks as recorded in volume 25 of the Proceedings of the Indiana Bar Association, p. 65.

     That final paragraph suggests that my own notions and those of the academy (and whatever other literati might be said to exist in this belated period) were as much in peril of being caricatures as those of Jones, Macklyn, and the brittle Ogle that preceded his enlightenment. Like it or not, we were enacting the role of elitist aesthetes. Given pause, we might then wonder, if Tarkington did not write for literary specialists, to whom would Tinker seem appealing? Surely working people are an unlikely audience. The current president is a genuine crass businessman, but his ego is too colossal to admit any object but itself. We have, however, the recorded comments of a somewhat lesser Midwest grandee. Perhaps the praise of one who appreciates Tarkington will reveal something of the source of his appeal.
    Consider whether the encomium of Tarkington from a prominent judge whose very name sounds like a fictional creation does not sound very much like Earl Tinker. F. Dumont Smith addressed the Joint Illinois and Indiana Bar Associations:

Undoubtedly, today, the consensus of opinion in the literary world of America, is that Booth Tarkington is the dean of American letters, and unquestionably he is the greatest fiction writer in America, today. I think that would be conceded by almost anyone. But I go further than that – I say he is the greatest fiction writer that America has ever produced.

     Smith is here complimenting his hosts on a native son, but the tone of boosterism is evident in his extravagant final statement. Should anyone doubt Smith’s ability to make such grand literary judgements, he offers his bona fides:

I have written a couple of books, myself, and many magazine articles, and when they built the great Kansas City Club, at an expenditure of one and a half million dollars, they came out to Hutchinson, Kansas, and selected me as chairman of the Library Committee.

     His claim to himself an author is quite true, but what is revealing is that he uses that as a mere prelude to the real source of his pride, his role in a very expensive businessman’s club. He boasted as well of being a Knight Templar Mason, a member of the Mystic Shrine, as well as of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and the Woodmen of the World.
     After these pleasantries, Smith went on to his more serious business, praising recent Kansas legislation outlawing strikes.