Source of book: I own this
Quick trivia question: who are the four writers to have won the Pulitzer for fiction more than once?
If you answered “William Faulkner,” or “John Updike,” good work. If you answered “Colson Whitehead,” congratulations - you know your modern literature. (And if you didn’t know that, go read some Whitehead already!)
I would imagine, however, that most of us - me included - would have no idea that the fourth author was Newton Booth Tarkington.
Unless you, like me, read Tarkington’s classics of children’s literature, the Penrod books, you may well have never heard of him. My wife, though, has read a whole bunch of his books, because she is unusual.
The fact of the matter is that Tarkington had the opposite career arc of many great artists. During his lifetime, he was considered one of America’s greatest authors. He was celebrated, awarded, and beloved.
And then, after his death, he fell into obscurity, and these days is rarely mentioned at all.
So what happened? It isn’t entirely clear. One factor was probably simply changing tastes. Tarkington wrote more about the past than the present or future. Although he did satirize the upper classes, some modern critics claim that he didn’t really challenge the social structures of his time. It is also probable that two world wars changed the world so much that the American interest in pre-war society faded away, in a way it did not in, say, Great Britain.
In any case, Tarkington had his moment, and then was largely forgotten.
Tarkington lived a fascinating life, though, and I found his writing to be quite good.
Born in 1869, Tarkington came from a wealthy, connected family. He was named after his uncle, Newton Booth, who was at the time the governor of California. He attended Princeton, although he missed graduation by one class. He hobnobbed with Woodrow Wilson and other young luminaries of the time.
His family lost much of its wealth in the Panic of 1873, although they recovered enough to afford education, unlike the Ambersons of this book. Tarkington himself would eventually be elected to the Indiana legislature, act in his own plays, and have a string of best selling novels for both adults and children.
And, as I noted, during his lifetime, he was a celebrated author, much loved and much purchased.
The Magnificent Ambersons is technically the middle book of a trilogy about the family, although it is by far the best known.
I found this book at a used book store during our most recent Utah Shakespeare Festival visit. I was surprised to find it in the edition I did. Back when I was a teen, I started collecting hardbacks from the Readers Digest World’s Best Reading series. Do not confuse these with the condensed books - these are middlebrow unabridged hardbacks that are durable and sit well in the hand, even if they are not the real fancy boxed set quality. I have nearly 100 of these, all purchased used, often from thrift stores, but had not seen a title I didn’t already own in years. This was published in 2005, which is pretty late in the series.
The book deals with the slow, then rapid decline of a prominent Midwestern family. The Ambersons came by their money during the Panic, prospering where others lost money. But, as the generations went on, they squandered and spent their wealth, at the same time that their town (modeled on Indianapolis) grew and changed.
As much as the decline of the Ambersons, the book is about what the author perceived as the decline of the city. From a beautiful small town centered around estates like the Amberson estate, the coming of the automobile led to suburban sprawl, pollution, and perhaps worst of all, lots of new and newly rich people (and immigrants) who all had no idea of taste or history and thus forgot all about the old rich like the Ambersons.
Tarkington loathed the automobile - largely on environmental grounds, and he wasn’t exactly wrong, in retrospect. This is evident not merely in this book, but in his other writings.
The pollution today is actually less than when the book was written, when coal-fired factories blackened houses and lungs throughout the Rust Belt. Tarkington definitely brings out this negative change of early 20th Century urban life.
The central protagonist of the book, young Georgie Amberson Minafer, has to be one of the least likeable in literature. He is kind of an anti-hero, but rather than being actively bad, he is merely an entitled, spoiled, clueless rich fuck. At least until the end, when circumstances finally force him to grow up.
My wife and I had the discussion about whether he is a narcissist, like the Dear Orange Leader, who similarly is who he is because of obscene wealth and privilege as a child. I tend to think that Georgie is not a narcissist, because while he is entitled, he doesn’t really need to be the center of the universe. And, he is able to become self-aware eventually, and can choose to live less selfishly, something narcissists are not really able to do.
Georgie’s grandfather, a Union Major during the Civil War, is the one who established the family fortune, and built a magnificent mansion in the new town. His three children have taken different paths. George never married. Amelia married Sydney, but they are childless and have taken their share of the estate and moved to France.
It was left to the gorgeous and charming Isabell to carry on the family name.
She had the pick of two eligible young men. For a time, it seemed she would choose the ambitious and dashing Eugene Morgan, but after an episode where he drank too much and accidentally broke a string bass at a party, she dumped him and chose the boring but steady Wilber Minafer.
Their child, Georgie, grew up with a largely absent and uninvolved father, and a smothering, spoiling mother. With predictable results.
Later, as an adult, Georgie still hasn’t improved, and many who know the family secretly hope he gets his comeuppance.
At this point, age and ill health start catching up with the older generations. Eugene Morgan’s wife dies, leaving him with the beautiful and sharp witted Lucy, who falls in love with Georgie.
Wilber Minafer dies, leaving his business affairs in shambles. Isabell generously leaves the life insurance to Wilber’s spinster sister Fanny, who otherwise would have nothing.
With the Major in ill health, and the wealth of the Ambersons looking ever more questionable, Georgie and Isabell remain oblivious.
What sparks the central conflict of the story is that Eugene has never stopped loving Isabell, and, a decent time after Wilber’s death, comes courting.
Georgie is furious for reasons he cannot entirely articulate. But what he can speak out loud is that the town gossips are claiming that Isabell was cheating on Wilber with Eugene before she was a widow. This infuriates Georgie, and, of course, he makes everything worse and worse and worse with his foolish actions.
From there, everything slowly, then rapidly goes to hell. I won’t spoil anything further if I can help it.
As I noted, the writing is excellent throughout. The characters are believable, the descriptions evocative, and the story compelling. The satire of both old money and new money is spot on. The class obsessions we Americans claim not to have but in fact spend far too much time reinforcing are pointedly skewered. It really is a shame that Tarkington fell out of fashion, because this was a quite enjoyable and interesting book.
I wrote down some lines to share, of course.
Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture: dressmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power, found means of making new clothes old.
That’s gold right there. As one who still wears largely the same style as I did 25 years ago, I am with the author here. And also with this one, the antithesis of the McMansion style.
At the beginning of the Ambersons’ great period most of the houses of the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style, but also lacked pretentiousness, and whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.
One thing I was not at all expecting in this book was to run across what I had thought was a modern term. As with many books of this era, there are offensive racial terms that would have been in common use. For example, most of the book, the black staff are referred to as “darkies.”
But there is one spot, during the first chapter, when the author describes the usual few servants the rich family had, he notes that a female servant was usually Irish or German or Scandinavian - a recently arrived immigrant. But in a few cases, the servant might be “a person of color.” How about that?
Georgie, like all the Ambersons, fails to understand the changes of the times. In particular, he believes that automobiles are a fad that will soon fade away. He even tells Lucy Morgan that her father had better not waste his time making them in his factory. Fortunately for him, Eugene continues making them, and eventually becomes filthy rich as a result.
There are a number of passages that illuminate Georgie’s character, and his inability to see any future different from the present. One of the most poignant is where he explains that he has zero intention of ever working for a living. He assumes he can and will be a gentleman of leisure. As he puts it, he has no intention of “doing anything.” He wants to “be something, not do something.” He sees himself as having family pride to uphold - “what it means to be an Amberson in this town.”
Later, he would expound on this to Lucy.
“I never have been able to see any occasion for a man’s going into trade, or being a lawyer, or any of those things if his position and family were such that he didn’t need to.”
I am reminded a lot of a modern version of this, the woman (and her family) who sees no need to have a career, because she will simply be a stay-at-home mom. Like Georgie, I have seen all too many who found out too late that they did not in fact have the position and family to avoid the need to support themselves.
I also found a fun connection with another author of a similar era, Sinclair Lewis.
In his bitterness, George uttered a significant monosyllable.
Cue Elmer Gantry and the “nine Saxon physiological monosyllables.”
Another one comes from Lucy, who is both in love with Georgie and frustrated at his immaturity.
“He does anything he likes to, without any regard for what people think. Then why should he mind so furiously when the least little thing reflects upon him, or on anything or anybody connected with him?”
As her father tells her, “That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity…”
There is a line about Wilber’s lack of involvement in Georgie’s life that I also thought was perceptive and well written.
It needed only the sight of that forever inert semblance of the quiet man who had been always so quiet a part of his son’s life - so quiet a part that George had seldom been consciously aware that his father was indeed a part of his life.
Eugene would later note something else about Georgie, this time to Uncle George.
Eugene laughed. “You need only three things to explain all that’s good and bad about Georgie.”
“Three?”
“He’s Isabell’s only child. He’s an Amberson. He’s a boy.”
“Well, Mister Bones, of these three things which are the good ones and which are the bad ones.”
“All of them,” said Eugene.
One of the most significant mistakes that Georgie makes is in how he chooses to deal with gossip. In this, he is a lot like the Orange Dear Leader in that he lashes out in an attempt to control and exert power and privilege. Which is, of course, the worst way to deal with gossip. As Uncle George tells him:
“Gossip is never fatal, Georgie, until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip’s a nasty thing, but it’s sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
The last one that I noted was a line about psychics and spiritualists, which I think is pretty accurate.
Mrs. Horner spoke of herself as a “psychic”; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came to the conclusion that if any credulity were played upon by Mrs. Horner’s exhibitions, it was her own.
As I said, I enjoyed the book, and think it was well written. It is a shame that Tarkington somehow fell into obscurity. One wonders if he had lived a generation earlier if he would still be widely read and discussed today. Maybe sometimes timing and luck make more difference than we think.
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