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Friday, November 1, 2019

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.

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