Booth Tarkington - Essential Novelists - Booth Tarkington

But Mr. Tarkington had something new to say about it. "What effect," I asked, "is the war likely to have on American literature?"

"None of consequence," he answered. "The poet will find the subject, war or no war. The sculptor doesn't depend upon epaulets."40

Mr. Tarkington is so inveterate a writer of serials, and his work is so familiar to the readers of the American magazines, that I desired to get his expert opinion as to whether or not the American magazines, with their remarkably high prices, had harmed or benefited fiction. His reply was somewhat non-committal.

"They have induced many people to look upon the production of fiction as a profitable business," he said. "But those people would merely not have 'tried fiction' at all otherwise. Prices have nothing to do with art."

Mr. Tarkington had some interesting things to say about that venerable mirage, the Great American Novel. I asked him if that longed-for work would ever be written; if, for example, there would ever be a work of fiction reflecting American life as Vanity Fair reflects English life. He replied:

"If Thackeray had been an American he would not have written a novel reflecting American life as Vanity Fair reflected the English life of its time. He would have written of New York; his young men would have come there after Harvard. The only safe thing to say of the Great American Novel is that the author will never know he wrote it."41

Mr. Charles Belmont Davis had told me that a writer who had some means of making a living other than writing would do better work than one who devoted himself exclusively to literature. I asked Mr. Tarkington what he thought about this.

"I think," he said, "that it would be very well for a writer to have some means of making a living other than writing. There are likely to be times in his career when it would give him a sense of security concerning food. But I doubt if it would much affect his writing, unless he considered writing to be a business."

Mr. Tarkington's answer to my next question is hereby commended to the attention of all those feminine revolutionists who believe that they are engaged in the pleasant task of changing the whole current of modern thought.

"How has literature been affected," I asked, "by the suffrage movement and feminism?"

Mr. Tarkington looked up in some surprise. "I haven't heard of any change," he said.

The author of The Turmoil could never be accused of jingoism. But he is far from agreeing with those critics who believe that American literature is merely "a phase of English literature."42 I asked him if he believed that there was such a thing as a distinctively American literature.

"Certainly," he replied. "Is Huckleberry Finn a phase? It's a monument; not an English one. English happens to be the language largely used."

The allusion in Mr. Tarkington's last reply suggested—what every reader of Penrod must know—that this novelist is an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain. So I told him that Mr. T. A. Daly had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B., and had said that these men wrote nothing of real merit and were "the Charlie Chaplins of their time."

Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Get Mr. T. A. Daly to talk some more," he said. "We'd like to hear something about Voltaire and Flo Ziegfeld. Second thoughts indicate that 'T. A. Daly' is the pen name of Mr. Charlie Chaplin. Of course! And that makes it all right and natural. I thought at first that it was a joke."

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