Archive for the The Magnificent Ambersons Category

Alice Adams: Booth Tarkington, Small-Town Snob

Posted in Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons on May 9, 2008 by Diablevert

I’ve been moping around for days, trying to think of something one could say about Alice Adams. And I haven’t figured it out yet, mostly, I think, because I disliked it. (Also I probably read it too fast—did you every do that? Get stuck somewhere—an airport, a train station—and read a book in a gulp? You can’t do it with everything, the book has to be a bit glib for it to work. They never stick, later, you’re left with just a foggy impression of the contents, but if you re-read you still remember enough for the plot to be unsurprising. Rather like bolting down some Micky D’s in similar circs. — it’s enough to ruin your appetite for dinner, yet you still feel unsatisfied.)

In fact, the most confounding and intriguing thing to me about Alice Adams, is what it says about Booth Tarkington, now we’ve read two of his books. (What it says about the Pulitzer peeps, that they gave the prize twice to Tarkington, I leave for Dread. P. to explicate.)

Tarkington was born in Indiana, and lived most of his life in Indianapolis, the son of apparently mildly prosperous middle-class parents. He got into Princeton — but never graduated, apparently because his parent couldn’t afford for him to go back for his last year. He was voted most popular in his class, editor of the literary review — and then found himself shipped back to Indianapolis, where he spent the next seven years living in his parent’s house and papering his bedroom walls with rejection slips, until hitting it big with a book called The Gentleman from Indiana.

Having finally achieved success, he got married, ran for state rep, served one term and then moved to Europe. He spent the next ten years writing some and drinking a lot, before getting a divorce, heading back home to Indianapolis, getting married again, and putting his nose to the grindstone. He soon came out with some of his most successful stuff, including Ambersons and Alice Adams and especially, apparently, a series of novels on the harmless boyish adventures of a character called Penrod, which were huge at the time but don’t seem to be read any more. He spent the next twenty years or so wintering in Indy, summering in Kennebunkport, ME and regularly jaunting off to Europe to collect art.

The more I read of the above bio, the more it appears to explain to me about Tarkington’s attitude toward his characters. Reading Ambersons, I thought his wry authorial distance helped make bearable the insufferable George; reading Alice Adams, what I initially took for sympathy turned out to be snobbery incredibly well-disguised. Having read both, I’m now inclined to think that what they share is condescension. Tarkington’s the too-cool-for-school kid, capable of sneering at both the squares and the greasers, who gets stuck in his hometown running his pop’s insurance office just the same. Like James Joyce if he’d never been able to leave Ireland. (Well, a Joyce with about 1/5 of Joyce’s talent.)

Then again, not Joyce, perhaps; with Joyce you often feel an underlying anger, a sense that he wants to reach through the page and shake his characters. In Dubliners he takes as his theme the crippling paralysis of Irish society: again and again are characters trapped into lifelong unhappiness because they are unwilling to break themselves free, to risk censure, to take a chance; their fear disapproval and damnation is too great. (See, for example, “A Little Cloud,” “Eveline,” “The Boarding House,” “A Painful Case.”) And that pisses Joyce off. He is describing something he wishes were otherwise. (He himself, of course, bolted the first chance he got.)

Tarkington, on the other hand, is content to sit back and judge his characters from on high. He has an intense nostalgia for the past, the terms and conditions of his own late 19th-century youth, and even as he catalogues the depredations the 20th century is wreaking on his idyll—coal blackening the streets, immigrants flooding the city, mansions turned to boarding houses, the streets overrun with the cars that run down George Amberson Minifer and the back alleys with the bars that Walter Adams shoots dice in—he seems to blandly regard them as inevitable, and the pitiable fates of people so grasping and commerce-driven no more than to be expected. He holds himself above the people he writes about, even as he so minutely describes the circumscribed world he and they share. Flaubert said of his own pretentious, ambitious, over-reaching bourgeois heroine, “I am Madame Bovary.” But Tarkington ain’t Alice, noway nohow.

Which leave the rather interesting question of who he might be — and if pressed I’d say he’s Russell, Alice’s bland beau. Russell, after all, is fond of Alice, enchanted by her, likes her even more for lying to him because she’s so good at it, so much so that all that she says and does retains a slight air of mystery and thus of flirtation. But when he sees the real Alice, comes to comprehend the actual social status and position of Alice and her family—well, then it’s curtains. The book itself does something similar—presents Alice in the beginning as sympathetic, charming, if a bit bubble-headed—and then as it draws to a climax, allows her to become ridiculous, foolish, her pretensions merely that, her fate sealed. After reading about him, it’s easy for me to imagine Tarkington, too, as a besotted youth, enchanted by an unsuitable girl and then ditching her with a fair amount of smooth self-congratulation when it became clear she’d be a hindrence to his ambitions…

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The Magnificent Ambersons: The Title of This Recital Is “Ladies First”

Posted in Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons with tags , on April 4, 2008 by Dreadful Penny

Diablevert has made some particularly convincing arguments for the merits of what I find to be a thoroughly mediocre book. And I’d like to thank her for that, because I definitely appreciate this book better for her comments on it. But I still do not think that it holds up ninety years later and probably did not deserve the Pulitzer (more on what did later, in a post on… drum-roll… Pulitzer history! Please, try to contain your excitement.)

Having gone through my English literature initiation at college in the late 90s, I think it’s nigh on impossible for me to write about a book without thinking how various schools of literary criticism would have a field day ripping it up. (This is probably why I stopped writing about books for a good long while.) Looking at this thing like you were a Marxist critic or a feminist critic… well, something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. (HA! Again, Hamlet references bring the flava.) Thinking about MagAm from a feminist perspective, in particular, gets my back up.

All of the women in the novel are shallowly drawn. You could say the same thing for the male characters too, but the boys are lucky enough to die quietly, off-stage, with a measure of solemnity or leave with a bit of worldly success intact. (Overlooking, as, alas, we may have to do right up through Gone with the Wind, anyone who is not white, for they haven’t been afforded success or dignity in any of these books to date.) The women of MagAmb are constellations and primary victims of George’s raging ego.

The three main female characters—George’s mother, Lucy, and Aunt Fanny—are all creatures governed by emotion and the men around them. George’s mother takes the “angel in the house” stereotype to the extreme, with her nearly erotic devotion to her son, following his every word as law to the point of ridiculousness. Aunt Fanny is often played for comic relief, until she’s retired on a spinster’s allotment and we are comforted with the fact that she was probably “better suited” to this meager life all along. Lucy, the spunky ingénue, starts off less blatantly typecast, but is stuck pining away for George at the end of the book for no good reason—maybe because she’s the only marriageable female in the book. One could say that the only impediment to their marriage was George’s lack of ambition, which is remedied by his new job as an explosions expert. But I’m gonna assume that the medicine of the time was not so great and Lucy was really signing up to be the lifelong caretaker of an invalid at the book’s glowing close. I agree that Tarkington has a strange affection for George, but I think his failings go way past callow youth, when you look at the amount of suffering he caused.

These are obvious points, and I would probably overlook them in a book that wowed me in another way—its wit, its poetry, its vividness. But I don’t get that from The Magnificent Ambersons, so what I’m left with leaves me cold. I just can’t see how it won both a Pulitzer prize and squeaked onto the list of the greatest novels of our time—Modern Library, that’s you I’m pointing a finger at.

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The Magnificent Ambersons: The Unheralded Pleasures of Smugness

Posted in Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons on March 31, 2008 by Diablevert

As I mentioned in my comment on the last post, I think maybe I give Tarkington more credit that Penny does. Indeed, reading The Magnificent Ambersons actually got me thinking about some of the advantages of the old-fashioned third-person omniscient style that Tarkington uses.
The vast majority of current novels of any genre are written in either first person or a very close third person. First person puts the reader behind the eyes of the main character; close third person leaves you sitting on his shoulder, near enough to get some sense of his thoughts but retaining a view of his world which is a bit broader and more capacious. The closeness is dead useful in evoking the reader’s sympathy, in giving them something big and bright and immediate, a whole personality, to be interested in as soon as they turn the first page. Writing in the old way, the 19th-century, distant, omniscient third, forces you to swoop down on the characters from above, as it were, and get to know them from the outside in. For instance, in an omniscient novel a character is generally introduced with a physical description — here’s Dickens, Chapter Four of A Tale of Two Cities:

“[A] gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets….Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat…”

Whereas in first or close third, you get their voice, their mind, first thing, and may well never learn what they’re wearing. Here’s Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye, satirizing the old way even as he embodies the new:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

All the David Copperfield kind of crap is exactly the crap Tarkington starts off with. Page one: “Major Ambseron had made a fortune in 1873….” and then for the rest of the chapter we get 13 closely-printed pages on the family, their town, their house, its decor, and the accordance of all of the above with the fashions of their times. We have to go four pages or so into the next chapter before George, our main character, is even born.

But that distant third does have one big advantage — it intersperses a full-fledged Narrator between reader and character. The Narrator may be as smart as he likes, may comment on politics or human nature or the foibles of his characters just as he wishes. (Dickens again: “Old Marley was dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadliest piece of ironmongery in the trade.” — A Christmas Carol.) In a close third you can’t do that — the narrator hews so closely to her character there that to have her observe something utterly unknowable to the character or declare something in opposition to the character’s beliefs and views would shock the reader right out of their suspension of disbelief — precisely because it means that the narrator has a personality quite distinct from that of the character, and thus creates distance between them.

So when you’re using first or close third you run into a technical problem: If, as a writer, you want a) to write in first person or close third and b) to use all your little writerly tricks, your grandest metaphors, your subtlest sarcasm, your freshest imagery, then c) your character must be just about as smart as you. You can’t create a character with an eight-grade education in close third and then write, say “the pause stretched into an Beckettian awkwardness.” Of course, that example is merely pompous; it’s entirely possible to restrict yourself to, say a child protagonist and still come up with fresh imagery and even subtle sarcasm. But it is a helluva lot more difficult — with every line you risk slipping into diction which will strike the reader as too high or too low. And so many writers don’t attempt it — instead they “write what they know,” and create characters much like themselves, who can plausibly be made to say all the things they would like to say. And this is why so many literary novels have writers and editors and college professors as protagonists, and in part why they are, frequently, so damn boring.

With that bit of distance that omniscience gives you, you can let the Narrator do all the fancy footwork while the characters stay wholly themselves; you’re free to be as grand or allusive as you want in order to bring across your meaning even if the character wouldn’t have used those exact words themselves.

Tarkington’s narrator, for instance, is just a little bit smarter than his characters — and Tarkington uses that to involve the reader in a little conspiracy with the narrator. For instance, George is, as bears frequent mentioning, a self-absorbed twat so wrapped up in his own little love affair he doesn’t notice the deep attraction between his mother and Eugene Morgan, his girlfriend’s father. But it’s pretty damn obvious to the reader. And so as this plot thread nears its climax the reader shares in the narrator’s godlike perspective on it all, sees that Morgan’s winding up to ask George’s mother to marry him, that George’s Aunt Fanny being slowly consumed by jealousy and frustration, that George’s loathing for Morgan growing more fixed — and thus perceives the coming crisis before the characters do. It’s quite fun, that feeling; it makes the reader feel wise and sorrowful, to watch a fate hurtle down upon the doomed.

That distance also allows you to have a truly unsympathetic main character, and still bear reading the book. Well, I’m saying that all declaratively as if it we a maxim of literature, when probably it’s a lot closer to a personal quirk. Most of the novels I’ve truly hated —hated enough to fling the book down in the middle of reading it, never to pick it up again — have been books where I couldn’t stand the main character. There’s plenty of books I love with flawed main characters, but this is an entirely different feeling than thinking the main character is a schmuck who probably deserves more than what’s likely to come to him. Yet while I certainly thought George was a schmuck, I never wanted to hurl Ambersons across the room, and that’s because I was neither in George’s head nor his vest pocket; I was watching him from afar, hanging out with a narrator who saw that he was a schmuck just as clearly as I did.

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The Magnificent Ambersons: Here We Go, With the Hamlet.

Posted in Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons with tags , on March 29, 2008 by Dreadful Penny

I think we’ve both firmly established how much of a dick George Amberson Minafer is, probably one of the most annoying petty tyrants in American literature. So is he a character or a caricature? If any character in this book should be a fully realized person, I should hope it would be the central figure, but I can’t quite figure out if Tarkington is being satirical in his descriptions of George or attempting to paint a very real picture of the ultimate spoiled brat.

The best evidence I have to support the theory that Tarkington is being completely satirical in his descriptions of George is the Hamlet bit. Oh dear Lord, the Hamlet bit. After G. Amb starts to crush his mother’s hopes and dreams of finally reuniting with her long-lost love, we’re treated to this description of his reaction to himself:

… A little while after she had gone, George rose and began solemnly to dress for dinner. At one stage of these conscientious proceedings he put on, temporarily, his long black velvet dressing-gown, and, happening to catch sight in his pier glass of the picturesque and mediaeval figure thus presented he paused to regard it; and something profoundly theatrical in his nature came to the surface.

His lips moved; he whispered, half-aloud, some famous fragments:

“ ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black….”

For, in truth, the mirrored princely image, with hair disheveled on the white brow, and the long tragic fall of black velvet from the shoulders, had brought about (in his thoughts, at least) some comparisons of his own times, so out of joint, with those of that other gentle prince and heir whose widowed mother was minded to marry again.

“But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of Woe.”

Not less like Hamlet did he feel and look as he sat gauntly at the dinner table with Fanny to partake of a meal throughout which neither spoke….

And I’ll spare you the rest. Now we’ve got a clue in here that Tarkington can’t possibly be serious with all this tripe—the parenthetical “in his thoughts, at least”—but other than that these seems like a straightforward allusion for the reader’s benefit. But I can’t imagine a reader’s response to this that takes it seriously; my personal experience of reading this passage may have involved actual eye-rolling.

This dovetails with diablevert’s questions about tragedy vs. pathos: can you have a tragic novel in which the main character is completely ridiculous, a caricature of a human being? I don’t think The Magnificent Ambersons is a comic novel. Tarkington’s descriptions of the landscape going to pot are too heartfelt and his many deathbed scenes are straightforward and serious. We have to conclude that Tarkington had one of two objectives in his mind: either to create a satire of the American upper class and the self-fulfilling prophecy of its hubris and decline or to make a tragic portrait of the fall of the glittering society in America under populist coarseness and industrialization. What he actually produced is a bizarre hybrid of the two.

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The Magnificant Ambersons: George, you dumb bastard.

Posted in Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons on March 25, 2008 by Diablevert

The Magnificent Ambersons, oddly, has got me thinking about the difference between tragedy and pathos. Wait, where are you all going? Come back!

Okay, so maybe it’s a pompous question. Let me rephrase: I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to feel bad for George. What I’m not sure about is whether I’m supposed to like him.

Ambersons was, as Penny mentioned, included on the Modern Library’s list of great novels of the century (squeaking in at the bottom, No. 100). And it concerns grand themes, as she said — the decline of a single wealthy family and an entire way of life. Normally that’d be the recipe for tragedy — the suffering and decline of the great and grand.

But George doesn’t seem very great at all. He seems like a jerk. When we’re first introduced to him, he’s a nine-year-old brat in ringlets, disrespectful, rude, and convinced the world revolves around him. The town hates him; so do we. The town longs for his come-uppance; so do we. By the end of the book, when he does get his, I did feel a bit sorry for the poor old bastard because Tarkington has him take in on the chin so stoically. (Which, in retrospect, I’m not quite sure is believable.) But we never really like him.

The thing is, I think Tarkington likes him the whole time. George hates the “riff raff” and modernity, and revels in his family’s stately manner and nouveau-feudal relationship to the rest of the town. At the same time, Tarkington’s own nostalgia for horses and quietude and small town life is amply on display throughout the book, along with its counterpoint, a distaste for the dirty, destructive, grasping city (filled to brimming with dirty, destructive, grasping immigrants). You see it in his objective, third person descriptions of the scenery —  Take this paragraph as a sample, from Chapter 28:

“These were bad times for Amberson Addition. This quarter, already old, lay within a mile of the centre of the town, but business moved in other directions; and the Addition’s share of Prosperity was only the smoke and dirt, with the bank credit left out. The owners of the original big houses sold them, or rented them to boarding-house keepers, and the tenants of the multitude of small houses moved “farther out” (where the smoke was thinner) or into apartment houses, which were built by dozens now. Cheaper tenants took their places, and the rents were lower and lower, and the houses shabbier and shabbier—for all these shabby houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get “farther out” where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, “farther out” was now as close to business as the addition had been in the days of its prosperity. Distances had ceased to matter.”

That’s all dry, third person omniscience, which is to say it’s all Tarkington, not George. Yet by planting these same repugnance toward the new in the arrogant and privileged personage of G. “Magnificant” Amberson. as snot-nosed a little punk as ever lived, Tarkington gets to have his cake and eat it too, indulging a bit revanchist nostalgia while at the same time acknowledging and tut-tutting the blinkered, hidebound attitude that led to the extinction of Georgie and his ilk. He wants to turn the tables on the reader, and I think largely succeeds — we, like the townsfolk, despise George for the douche his is, but by the time George gets what’s coming to him he has become irrelevant to the town, and the irrelevance makes him pathetic to the reader. You can’t have a tragic catharsis without tragedy, and George is so small-time that he can’t be tragic — that is, deliberately, his flaw, his inability to recognize the degradation of his circumstances, his insistence on behaving as if he were a prince and this his kingdom, when really he’s clinging by the skin of his teeth to a position in the respectable middle class.

And that, I have decided, is the difference for me between pathos and tragedy. The tragic figure and his flaw stands in for all humanity, for all our weakness and pride and foolishness; he embodies us, and so when we see him destroyed we feel compassion, literally; we feel with him. But the pathetic figure stands only for himself; his flaw is his own and we do not share it, we are repulsed by it. And so when see him destroyed we feel bad for him, we pity him, but we don’t feel like what happened to him could happen to us. Even though in both cases, strictly speaking, the misfortune that befalls the character is their own fault.

The thing about this is, for a writer pathos is a weird thing to opt for. As Arthur Miller strove to prove, you don’t have to write about the epic to evoke the tragic; your characters don’t have to be high and mighty to bring forth profound emotion. But sometimes I got the feeling reading this book that Tarkington wasn’t really going for profound emotion. The vast majority of authors — especially when you’re writing the Great American Novel, the Big Picture, the Sprawling Canvas, the Titanic Yarn — are going for that. Hell, even if you’re writing a small, drawing-room novel, few days, a few characters, 60,000 words, most writers are hoping to leave the reader profoundly moved. (Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, is the supreme example of the opposite sublimation: he writes about the pathetic so well, with such clarity and precision, that it becomes tragic.)

But George never works like that: we don’t long to see him destroyed the way you want to see a great villan take it on the chin — dragged off stage in chains, howling. Rather, you want to see him pranked, humiliated, embarrassed, made to grow up, like some friend’s pest of a little brother. It is a petulant pleasure that we want to take, not a grim one. And so when he finally does take it on the chin — is forced to realize that he unjustly deprived his mother of happiness and love in the last years of her life, contributing to her early death, in order merely to serve his own pride —- you don’t feel particularly gratified. It’s learning that the neighbor kid, the one who egged your car every Halloween and seemed to throw a kegger every time his parents left the house for two hours together, got drunk and wrapped his dad’s car around a tree. You can’t say you’re surprised but you can’t say that that’s what you wanted, either; it’s a fate too grim to gloat over.

What do you think, Penny? Is George pathetic or tragic? Is the book? And which are they each meant to be?

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Summary: The Magnificent Ambersons

Posted in Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons with tags , , on March 21, 2008 by Dreadful Penny

George Amberson Minafer is the “little tin god on wheels” who presides over The Magnificent Ambersons, the living embodiment of pride that goeth before the fall. Reversing the thrust of the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger narrative, we take part in the decline of the Amberson fortunes into poverty and obscurity. Booth Tarkington’s authorial claim to fame here should be creating the biggest twit in world literature, a Mona Lisa of a portrait in asshat-itude.

The plot of the story is relatively simple: we follow the fortunate son of a mighty Midwestern family (their location always described as a “Midland town”) from his pampered youth through his callow college days. At a lavish ball thrown in his honor, he meets Lucy Morgan, the daughter of his mother’s old flame, Eugene Morgan, an inventor and innovator of the automobile. Tarkington gets a lot of mileage (ha!) out of this character, as George takes many opportunities to drive around in various horse-drawn carriage and deride the automobile as it, y’know, speeds past him. As he and Lucy court to the brink of marriage, the Amberson family is slowly being dragged into the muck: relatives preemptively withdrawing their share of the estate and running off to Italy, the death of George’s ineffectual father, the sale of Amberson land, and the growing shabbiness of the physical estate.

Throughout the general decline, George remains steadfastly oblivious until his spinster aunt Fanny alerts him to the rekindled romance between his mother, Isabel, and Eugene. He flies into a rage disproportionate to his former condescension toward his father, forbids the chance of marriage between his mother and Eugene or Lucy and himself, and takes his mother off to Europe, where she weakens from a mysterious and hereditary “complaint.” They return home just in time for a deathbed scene at Amberson Manor and then the death of Major Amberson, George’s grandfather. There’s nothing left to the family fortune after that—all is sold off and George and Fanny are stuck with each other, essentially penniless. George takes a job as an explosives expert to support their frail household, considering that the more dangerous the job, the higher the pay. Both of his legs are broken in a freak automobile accident, which sends Lucy back to his bedside, her love undiminished through their separation.

A happy ending? Did he get the comeuppance so longed-for throughout the book? A cautionary tale? A nostalgic portrait of a kinder, gentler time, when everyone knew their neighbors and there was only one set of rich holier-than-thou bastards to revile and we all did that together? Let’s discuss!

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