An Imperfect Novel Worth Reading

 

Thomas Nast

 

     What better time to have a look at The Gilded Age than when the American president seeks to gild everything about him while exhibiting unprecedented greed, fraud, and corruption?

 

     The collaborative authorship of The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain and his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner [1], is doubtless responsible for the narrative’s uneven plot line and style.  The shift between Twain’s colorful characters and vigorous dialect and Warner’s smooth and bland sentiments makes the reader feel the work is two different novels, braided together in a way that is never quite integrated. 

     The cast of characters is largely familiar from the melodramas of the day: a distressed woman, a cad, the virtuous and the avaricious.  Critics judge that the authors were satirizing popular plot-lines, but it seems more accurate to say that they were reproducing popular stories in part to ensure themselves a market while reserving the right to make a bit of fun now and then.  For the first two-thirds of the novel the emphasis is on comedy and a devastating attack on the government and the economic system with the love interests kept in the background, though romance does eventually emerge, a concession to the taste of the masses like Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones in Night at the Opera.  Laura’s murder of Col. Selby (which to many readers comes as a surprise) alters the tone, adding notes of pathos and tragedy while the satiric onslaught continues unabated.

     Though he had published travel sketches and short stories, The Gilded Age is Twain’s first attempt at a full-length novel which may in part explain his willingness to work with a co-author.  The combination of his and Warner’s inexperience in the form (Warner was a distinguished editor but he had written only books on travel and gardening) makes it unsurprising that they produced a formally imperfect volume.  This factor and their shared authorship were not lost on the book’s earliest reviewers, one of whom wrote that “Neither of them has yet given evidence that he could command an interesting plot, the conduct of which would develop interesting characters.”  Another found the narration “jerky and jolty” exhibiting an “abruptness and unexpectedness” in the development as a result of the fact that “two hands did fashion the work,” while a third concluded more severely, “The Gilded Age is a failure.  It is rather a simply incoherent series of sketches.” [2]

     Further, though each wrote an initial section, they later came to do alternate chapters and to rewrite each other’s contributions.  Their wives, who had originally challenged them to attempt the work, may have offered opinions on its progress as well, and the result is inevitably uneven.

     Whatever its faults, The Gilded Age presents an uncompromising, even devastating critique of America.  The government is portrayed not as simply harboring corruption but as being altogether rotten.  When one senator exposes the bribe another has offered him, there are calls to investigate not the miscreant but the whistle-blower.  A politician who refuses to buy votes is considered the unethical one.  The public good cannot survive in an environment where everyone is looking out for the main chance.  And the legislators’ rapacity is only a special case of the general greed that reigns under capitalism.  While Philip’s Ilium coal mine does finally deliver on its early promise, virtually every other investment scheme mentioned is wholly fraudulent. 

     For a contemporary American reader, this picture of crooked profiteering in public life will seem only slightly exaggerated.  The current president is openly selling pardons and appointments, making subservience (and its material form of donations) far more important than expertise for influence in his administration.  And we have seen speculative bubbles in technology stocks as well as the birth of explicitly fraudulent investments like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, encouraged by politicians more interested in advancing their own wealth than the good of the country.  The present day has at least matched the single-minded pursuit of money in the nineteenth century, when American presidents would at least never have considered hawking trashy merchandise while in office. 

     Apart from this general critique of the political and economic system, The Gilded Age makes significant comment on the role of women.  Laura and Ruth are arguably the most important characters, as most of the others are either caricatures or very thinly portrayed.  Furthermore, the book is clear about the unfairness of the limited life choices available to women and goes so far as to suggest that women’s suffrage might bring reform to the legislative halls. 

     Yet a feminist today would surely complain that both of these women, who possess unusual ambition and initiative, not only fail, they fail because of the very female characteristics typically cited by male chauvinists.  Laura is clever and effective in her machinations, but comes to grief after being deceitfully betrayed by a lover.  She becomes very close at least to legally insane before killing Selby, highlighting the double sexual standard and women’s dependance on men, but also suggesting that she is overemotional, the victim, perhaps of hormones.  Though Twain referred to her as the “heroine” [3] of the book, she is as well a villain, a femme fatale, in her lobbying in which her trading on her good looks is yet another gender stereotype.  Ruth, while guilty only of the laudable desire to practiced medicine, proves not quite up the demands the profession placed on her, nearly dying from overwork, thus implying that those who wished to bar women from the professions for their own good did so for good reason. 

     The novel contains numerous loose ends.  The appended note with its ironic apology for raising curiosity about Laura’s father without satisfying it, is itself sufficient evidence that the story had not been thoroughly planned.  The epigraphs, selected not just from European languages, but also from Hawaiian, Quiché, Sanskrit, Yoruba, and the like, may be a good enough gag the first time, but rapidly becomes annoying before the reader simply ignores them.  The fact that the first edition left them untranslated proves that readers were not expected to understand them.

     Yet, for all its shortcomings, the book hits its mark squarely with its depiction of most politicians and businessmen as self-interested and capable of any deceit.  At the same time it shows the hopeful optimism of Americans in general, never sufficiently disillusioned to turn away the next sure thing when pitched by a glib salesman.  One finds in The Gilded Age only sparks of Mark Twain’s brilliance and a few sonorous if platitudinous lines of Charles Dudley Warner, but, considered as a whole, it is an important American political novel and a well-observed portrait of the United States revealing the national faults: an obsession with money-making, the dialectic of hucksterism and naivete, the oppression of women, but also allowing room for a saving remnant of ambitious individuals whose dreams, unavailable in some other nations, may in the United States, at least in part, come true.   

 

  

 

1.  Twain later said that both authors’ wives also contributed to the book.  It was not Twain’s only attempt at collaboration.  He wrote Ah Sin with Bret Harte, a play that ran for five weeks and the unperformed Colonel Sellers as a Scientist with William Dean Howells but withdrawn before its first performance.  He later contemplated two collaborations with the Austrian playwright Siegmund Schlesinger.

2. Quotations are, in order, from “American Satire,” New York Herald, Dec. 22, 1873; “The New Book by ‘Twain” and Warner,” Hartford Times, December 23, 1873; and “Literary Notes,” The New York Graphic, December 23, 1873.

3.  April 16, 1873 letter to Mary Fairbanks.

W. M. Spackman’s Fantasyland of Fine Words

 

 

     Perhaps like a good number of others, I had not read W. M. Spackman a month ago.   The welcome reprinting of his work which required support from state and federal arts agencies, a private foundation, and a state university illustrates the need for liberal funding outside the marketplace if the arts are to flourish. 

     Page numbers in parentheses are references to The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  I follow Spackman in not italicizing foreign words.  (He had other uses for italics.)

 

     

     Perhaps I am influenced by having read all of Spackman’s fiction, first novel to posthumous publication, without pause, but I find very little to distinguish one of his characters from another.  Likewise, apart from a few jarring incidents such as the murders in A Presence with Secrets, there is virtually nothing in the way of plot.   Characters end as they began.  Everyone is trying to “be a gent” and go by the rules, but this never impedes their “headlong” hedonism. 

     W. M. Spackman’s readership is limited by the nature of his work.  Both the themes of his stories and the manner of their telling are out of step with current taste, and the reader is fortunate that the Dalkey Archive Press which has the luxury of privileging literary values over those of the marketplace, has reissued his novels.  His unvarying topic is his personas’ enthrallment to their sexuality, yet their subjugation is a sweet one in plots transparently based on wish-fulfillment in which intellectuals or artists, even in middle age, find delectable young things constantly seeking to climb into their beds.  The challenge is to juggle these affairs.  Even apart from their routine adulteries, his heroes (and their ladies) are so sophisticated as to believe in nothing at all.  Far from despairing, they simply sigh and make the best of it while the sun shines.  It seems they all like their creator must have gone to Princeton (he to Oxford as well) and thus know better than the less fortunate. 

     Furthermore, Spackman is a stylist in an age when even poetry is often flatly prosaic.  He developed a unique rhetoric which, while sometimes capable of old-fashioned Ciceronian flights, often takes the form of an extended monologue by one of his many virtually identical characters.  Far from hesitating at what might put off his less learned readers, Spackman liberally sprinkles his text with French, Italian, and Latin. [1]  Ovid in particular returns again and again as an authority on love.  Just as a Renaissance sonneteer employ a few Classical references in the praise of his lady, Spackman’s learning magnifies his homages to the power of love.  He would not, I think, mind my impression that his heroes would likely consider the use of Latin to be highly decorative in itself and a learned lover surely a better one.    

     Spackman delights in epigrams and in parodies recalling the adept use of these forms by Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm not so very long before his own time.  He loves out-of-the-way words, some of which are found in no lexicon but his own.  In general one would consider this sheer delight in language Spackman’s primary appeal were it not that his erotic fascination is so pronounced.  The combination of these factors has set limits to his reputation in spite of high praise from critics and novelists like Edmund Wilson, Stanley Elkin, and John Updike. 

     I can imagine in some future age Spackman scholars discussing his mores rather in the manner of medievalists puzzling over courtly love, “Did anyone ever actually live like this?”  Spackman’s narratives, though, are best considered not as realistic narratives, but as dreams.   More recent psychologists may rightly question Freud’s notion that dreams represent the encoded fulfilment of frustrated desire, yet in the case of this literary dream the principle is quite accurate.  

     In these days the first impediment to appreciating Spackman must surely be is his characters’ attitudes toward sexual morality, though such censure is, of course, entirely non-literary.  The ethics of fictional personae or indeed of their creators can have no place whatever in artistic judgments.  Could one object to the Iliad at the outset because the story concerns heroes disputing over possession of a female slave?  Or, to take a closer analogue, can the masterful Lolita be denied a secular imprimatur due to its central figure’s obsessive pedophilia?  Garbled as the issue may have become in recent years in some academic settings, it can only lead instantly astray.  It is also true as well that for all Spackman’s fascination and expertise with style, any reader of his books is likely to doubt that to the author content is a matter of no significance.

     In fact his stories seem little short of obsessive.  Spackman emphasizes amoral sexuality to the exclusion of most of the rest of human experience and the dominance of the erotic in his sensibility lends a great deal to his characteristic tone, contributing to his themes  and to the beauty, ven, of his work.  Those who might find the values of Spackman’s predatory professors unacceptable even in a work of fiction will have little more to say of him, leaving it to others to examine the uses to which Spackman has put the these dubious mores.  In the flippant tones of Spackman’s characters, “Man’s and his own individuated rut” is neither more nor less than “after all how we had all behaved.” (275)

     Spackman’s erotomania, though, unlike that of others enthusiasts such as Norman Mailer, does not seem to center on orgasm.  He is quite simply lost in utter astonishment at the sight of a naked woman.  The only sexual acts he describes are caresses, physically tracing the same wondrous territory that so enthralls his sight.  Repeatedly he depicts scenes of lovers in bed, the man gazing raptly at the female body in quasi-religious devotion.  Whether such grace descends from the le bon dieu, Bona Dea or the more frequently invoked iddio, it always transfixes the lover.     

     When Johnnie Coates (just the age of Spackman’s son) encounters such an experience in As I Sauntered Out, One Midcentury Morning language nearly fails him.  “How to describe an epiphany! – I felt I had never, till now, even imagined what woman’s loveliness could be – and not just could be, but holy god there before my eyes was!”   “ I adored her with a mixture of wonder and exaltation that amounted to innocence.” (539)

    Yet, though this initiation is in that case displaced onto the next generation, the innocence seems in a way durable indeed.  Spackman’s personae never get over being flabbergasted and instantly subjugated at the sight of a naked woman.  He wishes to relish the wonder.  Reveling in “the sheer physical thereness of you” (519), he can desire nothing more.  ”Let me contemplate you.” (364)   The lover is “dazzled” (429), “stunned,” “transfixed” (395).  He is “ensorcelée,” “spellbound” (411), and the lady’s “sorcery” exercises “its absolute dominion “ (566)  “To see a girl’s body in memory was one thing, and you could endure it, but the dazzling reality of it, tangible and there, and past belief temporarily yours, reduced you to idiocy.” (408)  In bed one can only marvel at “the total sensuality of it” (366), all tingly nerve endings and no ratiocination.  They lay there in great comfort, and they might simply have been mindless.” (367)

     Just as Spackman’s men are always on the lookout for the next lovely “girl,” the women are peering around in search of a “bel homme.”  Given that lasciviousness is entirely mutual, of course, elides the pain and power relationships that ordinarily play an ugly role in sexual adventuring.  The female voice in the middle section of A Presence with Secrets is as taken with Hugh as he eventually comes to be with her.  His first appearance to her is like a vision, “an epiphany, my first-ever sense of Man after Woman, and understanding it!” and feels, as a consequence, “sexy-wild, out of my mind” herself, with “alarm bells going off all through me” to be with her cousin (253-4), though this does not impede her from thinking also of their ill-fated host Alain “Mon Dieu qu’il est beau, the skin of his neck is so white I feel as if I could taste it, and I wondered  what he did for love.” (257)  In A Difference of Design Maria Gostrey says with a bit of annoyance to Sather, “Goodness, I only made love with him two or three times, you can’t be jealous about that!” (406)  Two-thirds of A Difference of Design are narrated by Fabienne, la Comtesse, who reflects on “my lightminded ancestresses and I” skirting the edge, afraid that perhaps the playacting of love may be nothing but “marivaudage.” (343) 

     This sexual enthusiasm is no generational matter.  When Eve in “Declarations of Intent” consults her mother about her love life, the parent is so wrapped up in her own liaison she can scarcely pay any attention to her daughter’s. (524)     In As I Sauntered Out One Midcentury Morning . . . Francesca’s godmother and her friends have no difficulty accepting the younger generation’s amours as to be expected.  

     The lover’s relationship remains, however, ambiguous.  In “Dialogue at the End of a Pursuit” a woman’s convoluted description of her motive for love indicates in its qualifications and back-turnings a tension that would be absent in purely sybaritic frolics: “Oh sweet but where but in bed am I likely to find out how much I’ve perhaps decided that want to have you discover all the things I can be? Or do I ever?”  

     Of course, among the painful complications ordinarily associated with love affairs is the jealousy of spouses, yet in Spackman as in Andreas Capellanus, adultery is favored.    In A Difference of Design Lewis Bingham’s uncle is said to have remarked over a new prospect, “Absolute dish of a girl.  Married, too,  which is always convenient.”  This may, Bingham admits, “sound a bit lazy – competition only from a husband.”  Yet his uncle had “an entirely humane position . . . even if it looked like a dilemma of egotism . . .it was really an act of humanity.” (381)  The husband, after all, is simply “a character in the unchanging comedy of manners that marriage has been from Classical Antiquity on.” (583)  Adultery is “Women’s happiest birthright and perquisite” (425) and a civilized person can only wonder about “all the fuss there can be about infidelity.” (528) 

     The affairs for all their compulsive energy and all-but-numinous glow are in a way simply passing the time.  Most if his characters seem utterly concerned with careers or children; they find themselves born into the caste of the idle rich and find no more reason to question their destiny than any dhobi wallah.  Even if they hold a lucrative position in a bank, it is less a job than a perquisite of privilege.  Eve’s mother’s lover “doesn’t even go downtown unless a case comes in they think will interest him.” (524)  When asked what he “did,” Bingham responds diffidently.  “He said oh he was pretty much standard fare.  Made money.  Spent it.  Made more.  Tended to spend that too.”  When pressed, he adds that he has a sloop and plays squash. (380)  Of the notorious Uncle John, Sather notes that, though he held a law degree he lived on unearned income. (563)  “Philadelphia rentiers weren’t expected to ‘do’ much of anything.  Except, naturally, behave well in a well-fixed way.  If they saw fit to.” (563)  Though the Wobblies would have called them parasites, they can be disarmingly straightforward.  “What was the use of being born into the privileged classes if one couldn’t have it both ways?” (153)  When in Spackman’s posthumous last book, a few hints seep in suggesting that somewhere some people are concerned with feminism and social justice, his hero, a political commentator, reacts not so much with reactionary attitudes as with total cynicism.   “Political blundering is constant, because an electorate of simpletons cannot elect politicians smart enough to deal with the simpletons who elect them.” (550)  He later writes a provocative essay “Love Makes You Go Whee!” (not a bad text to fit Spackman on a bumper sticker) provoking “an instant feminist outrage” “as good as a contract” in spite of the fact that “I, naturally, hadn’t a drop of anti-Lib blood in my body.  God knows, from kindergarten on I’ve liked girls.”      

     Spackman’s indifference about politics extends to the social structure.  Again and again he concedes the undeserved privilege which his characters enjoy, regarding it as a fact of nature, an order he accepts the way the world works.  Thus they all would claim to be “Properly brought up, is all.  Did as I thought I was being told.  Thought I was supposed to.” (394)  For women as well love is not a “passion,” but rather “a part of the good manners of being a woman,” further explained in the most evasive terms “a way if behaving,” “a style, a procedure, even.” (396)  

     Everyone, of course, learns his or her own “generation’s ground rules,” (566) making sex a simple matter of good manners.  “What kind of cock-eyed heartlessness was this, to girls who’d at least had the good manner to behave as if they wanted me as much as I said I wanted them.” (551)  A second go-round after a “gentlemanly interval” would be right for “any man of sense.” (238)“  Ike Trimmingham summarizes an affair by saying, in poetic form,

  

“Must you go?  As I was brought up one should say,

And as you were brought up to (fuming) expect me to.

                                                                                            (559)

 

The reader will notice that parenthetical word which is all that suggests the strains that often accompany what is meant to be free love.  On the one hand, both man and woman are party to the game, constrained not by traditional morality, but rather by the stronger social code of their set whose members can afford to dedicate themselves to pleasure.  “In the immemorial tribal way, Uncle John left me the essential traditions of tribal comportment, and the tribal opinions and perquisites that established them to start with, as well as more money to maintain them,” and yet, in pursuit of such selfish ends, it is all the more important that the codes be observed.  “In usage there are no substitutions!” (546) 

      In what looks a bit like a defensive maneuver Spackman regularly maintained that content (and the themes it implies) played little role in his work.  He complained about critics who reduced a work of art to “its ‘content’ – the thing’s theme, its ‘ideas,’ its everlasting Meaning.” “Content is not what any decently gifted novelist is chiefly concerned with.”  To him “style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are a lot of hogwash.” [3]  This principle is illustrated in practice by the writers to whom Spackman pays homage: Marivaux, Henry James [4], Wallace Stevens. 

     These claims are surely disingenuous considering the fascination with which Spackman, over the course of his entire career as a writer, explored the joys of lust and the shadows cast on the paradise of the bed by chance, jealousy, even by romance.  He could hardly be indifferent to content having spent his entire career constructing a series of dreams of his own libido’s ego, but his reticence is part of his etiquette.  The jouissance he offers is not really confined to a baroque style, but those with good manners will know not to inquire further. Surely Cicero was a mentor for style, though, apart from being a tiresome moralist, Spackman found his prose like Caesar's far too pedestrian..  Ovid is an explicit influence, both for painstaking art and for erotic enthusiasm.  

     And it is most emphatically true that Spackman delivers style for those who have a taste for it.  From antique rhetoric to Nichols-and-May dialogue he offers verbal goodies for a variety of tastes.  His specific gift is the construction of lengthy branching monologues that are nonetheless architectural for seeming colloquial.

 

      They might meet somewhere like (say) the Closerie des Lilas, a visit of piety, purely classical in feeling, to that monument of so many humane generations, including even Henry James.  And, meeting there, Arabella and he might feel once more the happy weight of the hours, the sheer total days they must in all have spent on the breathless scheduling of when they’d manage to see each other next, be in each other’s arms, what with that insufferable French husband’s comings and goings!  The very Closerie where (ah me) that madcap Celt   of his had once murmured, dreamily sucking a fingertip, “If we had it all to live over again darling Nicholas d’you suppose we’d really go to all this trouble?” and collapsed upon him in helpless laughter, in Arcadian innocence and joy.

     So why not?                                                                                                                       (171)

 

Notice here a characteristic mannerism, the use of italics to indicate an arch tone.  A passage like this, while in fact planned with demanding precision gives the impression of being spontaneous and formless.  A bit after this excerpt, the reader marvels at a sentence that runs very nearly a full page (192-193) and presumably feels at the end like applauding as though for a jazz solo or a singer holding a sustained note. 

     One further example must serve for a great many.

  

-- Though at dinner, and this, again, they had on that terasse of his hotel, the summer dusk already deepening into night over the fading gardens off into the black leaves of the lindens beyond, so that the massed flaming of a hundred candles, table by damask’d table, made it as if a low pavilion of light without walls had been built out under those vaults of darkness; or again, it could have been a lighted proscenium stood out there, set for the staging of a play, and the actors there, and in that sift brilliance, above the crystal and silver of the tables, the eyes of actresses would be like jewels as they looked at you – at dinner then Maria was exploring consequences. 

                                                                                                           (405-406)

 

 The sentence picks up with the accelerating chugs of phrases set off with commas before launching in to a set-piece description of a restaurant as a theater stage, most appropriate for characters to whom all that they do is play-acting.  Marriage is, after all, in Spackman’s world an “unchanging comedy of manners” (583) and love in general a “Restoration comedy.” (396)

 

     In phrases and shorter passages as well, showy cadenced, often periodic, rhetoric fills every page of Spackman’s work and provides surely the basis for the admiration of those among his readers who enjoy the play of language.  Contrary to the recent trends in literature favoring the vernacular, Spackman likes his English rhythmic to the point of self-consciousness with the syntax twisting and halting and weaving about like tropical vines. 

     Just as his characters savor even the most casual affairs (as well as more profound fleshly revelations), Spackman’s pleasure in words embraces mere pastimes and he is drawn to what others might shun as affectation.  Thus the prolonged three-syllable pronunciation of Malachi or the two syllable “dar ling”in Heyday and the idiosyncratic apostrophe in “damn’” for “damned” can only be called mannerisms.  Even odder, Nicholas’ in Armful of Warm Girl says “dammy” for “damn me” which sounds positively seventeenth century.  The flowers of French, Italian, and Latin often ornament his prose with Ovid the most frequent visitor to his novels.  Hugh Tatnall’s use of iddio for god vitiates the term, its foreignness suggesting ironic unbelief and the less-used form of the word his fondness for the subtly odd.  His classicism extends to the somewhat silly, as in his characters’ use of Boeotian to mean stupid or boorish.  He loves out-of-the-way words and sometimes introduces those which occur in no dictionary but his own such as psychagonist (275) and anulnerous (209).  At least these like their author come from good families, from good classical roots. 

     There is indeed something of the smart-aleck undergraduate intellectual about him, in verbal taste as well as in the pursuit of love.  Spackman is sufficiently lavish in his use of epigrams that his characters remark on it.  “He’s just constantly tossing off these wildly unexpected sardonic epigrams off Lisa, he just impromptu made up that phrase ‘as un-American as good apple pie.’” (205)  Discussing the end of an affair, after quoting Catullus and then Ovid, Jock suggests they “call for an over-priced Clos de Bèze and be done with it. “  The Comtesse responds “’But men recover,’ I said.  ‘All you need is someone to indulge you if you’re simple-minded.  Or over-indulge you, if you’re not,’ and he said lightly, ‘Oh, epigrams,’ and signaled the sommelier.” (360-361)

     Spackman’s characters often share with their author a Quaker background, useful as a piquant contrast to their current way of life.  The sudden introduction of a quaint saying using thee and thou throws their revels into high contrast.  The primary meaning of this heritage is that it constitutes, like an ancestral estate, ironic bona fides for membership in Philadelphia’s elite.

     He delights in a broad variety of witty parodies: of Ovid (193), of a cantata libretto (190), a madrigal (168), and, a special favorite, blues in dialect (32, 105, 146). [5]  If he is not titillating the brain with a display of the most refined cleverness or his erogenous zones with a willing partner, he rouses the taste buds (in imagination at least) with the most extravagant menus.  Fond of cooking rather elaborate meals myself, I have difficulty believing a twentieth century American ever ate such lavish spreads, even when provided with a cook.  Here is what Spackman is pleased to call “a minor meal.”  Note how he begins slowly with plates indeed simple, though dignified with French names, but then he mounts like fireworks when he reaches the crêpes.  “A crème de concombre soup, suprême  de volaille,  and a salad to glisten in the noon light, with a little farcie to keep body and soul together, glazed crêpes actually and very pretty with their glossy little crests of sliced and lozenged truffles” and for dessert a “bavarois with kirsch-soaked strawberries piled round in crimson dunes,” and “a Montrachet flashing green and gold in its ice.” (176)  Those dunes of liqueur-laden berries are not simply the end of a nice dinner; they are part of the topography of an appetitive world.  [6]

     What Spackman’s characters want they call “catnip.”  [7]  The use of this term suggests at once the instinctual basis of their desire and its superficiality.  Catnip, after all, may cause a pet to perform entertaining antics, but it is not associated with long-lasting pleasure or deep feelings.  In the same way, the people in these novels make a habit of snickering, particularly when contemplating their sexual adventures. [8]  “The sheer libertine faithlessness of all this had so amused him that he opened his eyes snickering.” (246)

    Perhaps the shallowness of the experience implied by these words is illuminated by another of Spackman’s verbal leitmotifs, the word “marauder.”  His characters are always worried that they may stray into bad taste by presuming too much of their lovers.  Yet they can say that love is finally self-love and the fact is universal and no less desirable for that fact.  “Wasn’t it a matter of amour propre? – if you weren’t in love what was wrong with you!” (396)   When everyone readily admits that they are simply seeking amusement, their aestheticism will often tend toward a supercilious edge – it is no wonder that readers are reminded of Ronald Firbank as well as Henry James and Nabokov – that reveals a solipsistic absorption, a core self-interest about which no one need feel guilty since it is shared with everyone, or, at least, everyone who counts, doubtless mostly Princetonians.  There is a sort of existential bravery, even heroism, in those who carry on with such honest fervor in a world where they are in the end alone and helpless, whose culture offers only hypocrisy for values.  Spackman in fact confounded some of his fans with his claim in a postscript to Heyday that the book is basically “an elegy upon the immemorial loneliness of man.”  He sounds almost existential. 

     The “paravent” that makes the hotelier in Arles “much relieved” serves only the interest of propriety (389).  While it is unnecessary as a physical screen, it is useful as an improvisation to preserve a façade of decency that all parties know is pretense.   Thus, while no one involved really believes in the wickedness of non-marital sexuality, all maintain their respectability by acting as if they do, that is, embracing the dissimulation of an outworn moral code in the interest of social harmony.  The elaborate dance of interests between man and woman in Spackman is complicated by this tension between human behavior and the social codes that allow people to live in large groups.  The fact that his characters seem to have no responsibilities allows him to focus entirely on the management of libido. 

     Spackman boasts the considerable virtue of being highly entertaining.  His effervescent wit and his musical rhetoric guarantee rewards on every page.  His themes and characters might annoy some readers and even incense a few, but they are on the mark for everyone who has been struck dumb with desire or who has had the fortune to see a theophany in a lover.  One might dream with Spackman and Hugh Tatnall of a place where “The air was full of angels.” (281)  The cult of self-interest among his women and men alike is recognizable even to those who may have felt a stirring of altruism now and then, and his cynicism in general is a useful corrosive against idées reçues.  His style is a delight, plotted out to the sound of every syllable in a way that is rare in recent years, though it may be de trop for those like his Quaker forebears, suspicious of luxury.  For the rest of us his work is a rare and delightful  confection.

  

 

 

1. Spackman studied French and Italian literature at Princeton and read the classics at Oxford’s Balliol College.

2.  Given Spackman’s fondness for Marivaux, it may be that he in fact favors “marivaudage,” even defined as the quality of being precious or affected in writing.

3.  Quoted by Steven Moore in his Afterword, p. 632 from Spackman’s essays “An Ex Parte for Comedy,” “Undeath of the Novel,” and “A Time Was Had by All.”   For Nabokov, one of his favorite writers, obsessive content is likewise paired with a gorgeously elaborate prose style. 

4.  Indeed A Difference of Design is (for one thing) a rewriting of James’s The Ambassadors.  

5.  The whimsical painting title (284) is in the same mood.   

6.  They are sufficiently potent in Spackman’s imagination that they reappear in the next novel, still crimson.  This meal consists of “a fresh-caught Loire salmon flown in from Nantes,” “cool cheeses, the crimson dunes of wild strawberries on their paillasses of bright leaves, the torrone mole they left untouched.”  (224-225)

7.  On 408, 433, 517, 530.

8.  See pages 342, 408, 433, 517, 530.

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.

The Man with the Golden Arm and a Friend with Six Seeds

Page references to The Man with the Golden Arm are from the 1964 Crest paperback with the Saul Bass arm design on the cover.


1.
     In the late sixties I had a filmmaker friend who lived in a broken-down place on N. Paulina in that section of Mayor Daley’s Chicago which was also Nelson Algren’s Chicago. This apartment was decidedly low-rent, with no lock on the building’s side entrance, a pie pan of water on the space heater, and heavy bars over the window that looked out on the alley. Every evening as midnight approached, my friend would head into the forbidding darkness of the neighborhood tavern on the corner and buy himself a six-pack of beer by the promising Christmas-like glow of hypnotic Budweiser lights. He could have paid half the price during the day at a store, but that would have required forethought. Not for him the beaded curtains that were popular among the psychedelic crowd. The filmmaker had painstakingly constructed ceiling to floor chains of thousands of linked beer can pop-tops. The neighborhood is the setting of much of Algren’s work, including the great stories of Neon Wilderness and his best-selling novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. My pleasure in reading Algren’s work is always mingled with thoughts of my friend and his scene.

     And I did enjoy visiting there, but I am glad I was not present the morning after my friend bought some pot from the wrong guy and found himself awakened before daylight by the cops who proceeded to tear his place apart, looking for the goods their informer had told them would be there. But they found nothing. They berated my friend, calling him a lazy hippie and scornfully advising him to get a job. He was hip enough at least to know that it would only harm his position to point out to the arresting officers that he would in fact be getting ready for work at that very moment had they not called on him. They tore the stove from the wall and tipped the refrigerator in their irritated zeal, but remained unrewarded until, just before they put Plan B into operation, they came upon a few seeds folded into a paper napkin which had months earlier been placed in the back of a filing cabinet to sprout. The experiment proved a dead end for their own botanical interests, as they were instantly forgotten and had dried by the time the law encountered them, but the half dozen seeds were, in 1969, more than enough for the Chicago Police Department to make a bust.

     The jig was up. He asked if he could use the toilet before being taken to the station. The lid of dope he had copped the night before was still in the pocket of the pants he had been wearing since answering the early morning banging on the door. Knowing he was a perfectly harmless citizen, they had never searched him, even for weapons. He flushed his stuff down the drain and emerged from the bathroom to meet a pair of handcuffs.

     Once he had been released on bail, he contacted a dope lawyer who knew how to deal with the local authorities. This man, after shrewdly assessing his client’s financial viability, told him just how much was necessary to put in the fix. The accused agreed to pay up and was glad he had done so when he turned up in court and found a plentiful heap of better quality pot than his budget could afford was to be exhibit A against him. He had no way to know whether the cops had borrowed it from their evidence locker or from one of their own personal stashes.

     Moments before the proceedings began, his lawyer turned to him. “This morning they told me it’ll take $1500 more to make this deal work. I can’t do anything about it. Sorry.” “But,” said my hapless friend, “I gave you all I have.” “Nah – you can sign over the bond,” his counselor assured him. It was not for nothing that he had gone to law school. The victim signed and was quite properly exonerated. Another case of Chicago justice, settled to most everybody’s satisfaction, even if the man on the bottom might find himself squeezed just a bit uncomfortably. As Algren puts it in the introduction to Chicago: City on the Make: “and the old earth sighs, heigh-o, the wind and the rain, having made this scene before.” [1]


2.
     So I was thinking of my friend the filmmaker and his markedly funky corner of a great city when I reread The Man with the Golden Arm, charmed as always by Algren’s vision of the lower depths. Even after living there for years, my friend might have been considered “slumming” [2] as he had arrived from an affluent suburb by way of university. (As a matter of fact, even Algren lived as a child further out in the considerably more respectable Albany Park neighborhood after his family had moved from the South Side.) And the cast of The Man with the Golden Arm is uniformly demimondaine, lumpen or criminal. They are decidedly low-mimetic, always behaving in ways even more selfish and short-sighted than the reader. Algren has been rightly criticized for repeating the lines he likes. Quite apart from his cannibalizing Somebody in Boots for Walk on the Wild Side, he repeats formulae, phrases, and personalities from one text to another. Often the characters are flat, yet they retain their power because that very hopeless sameness is his own individual brand of the stuff of despair that characterizes his vision. In hell everyone keeps going through the same useless motions. There is no escape.

     Algren’s stock has suffered since he won the National Book Award for the novel in 1950. Leslie Fiedler attacked him as the Last of the Proletarian Writers retailing vulgar leftist conventions long after their vogue had ended. [3] In fact, a disciple of Zhdanov would, of course, have shrunk from portraying such degraded types as petty con men, shoplifters, and junkies at all. In Algren’s book, there is never the slightest doubt that everything is rigged for the benefit of those on top, but there is also no glimmer of a way out from under for characters who offer little indeed that seems remotely redemptive. The human dilemma of absurd and helpless actors in a circular script suggests far more of Existentialism than of Marxism.

     There is certainly an economic critique in his sweeping accusation “All had gone stale for these disinherited.” He locates their deficiency precisely in “the great, secret, and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the land where ownership and virtue are one.” (22) Still, the fault seems more human than class-based when Frankie Machine laments that “all you businessmen [are] cheatin’ the people so fast ‘n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal.” (114) In his private musings Bednar the police captain considers himself as guilty as the criminals and strives not to feel sympathy for them. (314-5) The greed and self-deception of the down-and-out illustrate not deviance and pathology but common humanity. In the end, as Frankie muses “Everybody’s a habitual in his heart. I’m no worse’n anyone else.” (293) This commonality, however, is based on a blind self-interest in a world where “Ain’t nobody on anyone’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side, and I’m the oney one on mine.” So bleak is the prospect that “under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.” (305) A “half-crazed” priest in a police lineup declares a contrary line, “we are all members of one another,” but no one can even make any sense of his words. (314) In a temporary fit of anxiety or insight Antek may say “I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble. . . I’m cryin’ for everybody’s,” but Frankie knows the mood will pass. “He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.” (171) Moral responsibility can never be fruitfully traced in this tragic world. How can an individual be guilty when “we all got caught in it, one way or another”? (342) There can be no distinctions when “everyone’s chickens would be coming home to roost soon enough.” (114)

     To Algren we are all in the same spot as the “single gander” who stood gawking between its legs at a cord that forever held it fast” in front of Piechota’s Poultry (246), clueless and waiting for slaughter. Algren is eloquent with his animal images, but always with the same implication. Among others one might count Rumdum the drunken dog, the deaf-and-dumb cat (248), the cockroach overturned in the water bucket, (26) and the caged monkeys who can only cast baleful glances from the imprisonment above the bar and yearn for their lost Congo (321). [4] But even their lost eyes cannot compare with the fierce intimacy of the monkey on Frankie’s back.

     Human life is reflected in the “lonely beat” of “the last fly of autumn” who is trapped “in hustlers’ territory with one conviction to go.” (105) By the end of the novel such insects reappear in Sophie’s madhouse vision. “The wind is blowing the flies away. God had forgotten us all.” (354) Ego washes away: “They don’t remember people around here any more.” (25)

     The world is a “neon carnival” (104) in which dope or drink or the illusion of love can sustain one for a time. In desperation people strive to avoid feeling through intoxication; the New Years Eve party at Antek’s is wild and diverting (170 ff.), but only for a time could the denizens of Division Street avoid the sobering conviction that 1947 would be “a long, long year.” (175) The world is a game of cards and the best option is to get into the game and play a hand with spirit because there is no opting out, and no one winds in the end except the house. “The cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away.” (130)

     Every incident of human life might be entered into Sophie’s Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. (39, 254) We are indeed in a vale of tears, and Algren invokes religious imagery repeatedly, ironic usages finally coalescing with straightforward ones. In prison Frankie attends mass regularly and identifies with Christ’s suffering showing particular devotion to the Station of the Cross depicting Christ’s falling. (224) Later on the street he sees the wind stirring a lost kite and notes that “the frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung.” (263) Heroin is “God’s medicine,” (30, 90) and the police interrogation room is “the only house of true worship.” (290)

     So I would say Algren’s concerns are philosophical or spiritual rather than social or psychological. His low-life characters simply find themselves in an environment where it is hard to avoid looking reality in the face. Lacking the comforts of bourgeois life, they must work harder to maintain any illusion at all. Frankie may imagine himself the next Gene Krupa and Sophie picture herself singing with an all-girl band (255), but these are last pathetic wisps of straw at which they clutch as they daily confront their own ignominy, powerlessness, and mortality. The reader is drawn to their portraits by the uncompromising power of that bleak vision. Perhaps my friend on N. Paulina and I were seeking the scent of a world where simply to survive is heroic. Even if we occupied just such a world already ineluctably, we may have needed a whiff or two of stench to make the point.

     When I attended the University of Iowa in 1971 where Algren had taught in the middle sixties, I heard that he was more attentive to poker games than to the Writers Workshop, but that, for all his enthusiasm and presumed street smarts, he invariably lost. Perhaps he had to teach himself the same old lesson he never tired of teaching the rest of us losers: we’re all in the same boat and the water in the hold is only getting deeper. Though it is patently untrue that “just junkies know how everything is,” (278) [5] they may in fact hold fewer illusions. And the same may be true for their chroniclers.


1. p. 10.

2. Use of the word slumming to describe visiting poor neighborhoods as a recreation dates from 1884 according to the OED. The phenomenon deserves attention as one of the distinctly modern forms of ironic aesthetic appreciation along with kitsch and camp.

3. Leslie Fiedler, “The Noble Savages of Skid Row,” The Reporter. July 12, 1956. Fiedler also called Algren the “bard of the stumblebums.” Around the same time, Algren was also publicly attacked by a young Norman Podhoretz in a June 2, 1956 article for the The New Yorker entitled “The Man with the Golden Beef.” Both critics were responding to the publication of Walk on the Wild Side.

4. On the same page is a reference to the “Negro streets.” Is this the source of Ginsberg’s line in the opening of Howl?

5. In fact, according to his Paris Review interview, Frankie Machine had not originally been a junkie. Algren’s agent admired the book but said it needed a “peg.” Algren claims in the same interview that the lives of ordinary people without “big scenes” would make “an awfully good book.” However, he notes that these typical citizens might hustle a bit on the street and use just a bit of heroin “to keep from getting sick.” They don’t sound so different from the cast he used.