America Moved - Booth Tarkington

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All accessed June 10, 2011.

      Acknowledgments

      The text of America Moved consists of two works of memoir by Booth Tarkington that have never before appeared together in book form. Part One was never collected in book form at all. Under the title “As I Seem to Me,” it was serialized in seven issues of the Saturday Evening Post in July and August 1941, in the order presented here. Here Tarkington covers the period of his life from his birth in 1869 until 1899 (more or less), when his novel The Gentleman from Indiana was published. The titles of the individual chapters, as well as the subheads, appear here as they did in the Post.

      Part Two of this volume, “The World Does Move,” was published in 1928 under the same title by Doubleday, Doran and Company, and is reproduced here by permission of the Booth Tarkington estate. Less conventionally autobiographical than “As I Seem to Me,” it covers the years from 1895, when Tarkington moved to New York to try to forge a career as a writer, until near the time of its publication, when Tarkington was well established in the literary world. Even more than in Part One, Tarkington in these pages often frustratingly declines to specify the men and women whom he discusses. I have provided identifications of as many of them as possible.

      Nearly every chapter in “The World Does Move” was first run in the Saturday Evening Post between April 7 and July 7, 1928. The exceptions are chapter XX (first published in Red Book Magazine in May 1921, and later in The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories [1923], as “Jeannette”); chapter XXII (Collier’s, May 14, 1927, as “When Is It Dirt?”); and part of chapter XXV (The Forum, March 1926, as “The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis”).

      The only editorial change I have made to the text, besides correcting occasional typographical errors, is to add the Oxford comma. All ellipses are in the original, and all footnotes are mine, not Tarkington’s.

      This book has been some years in the making, and I am deeply grateful to a number of people for their assistance and encouragement. An earlier version of the editor’s introduction ran in the University Bookman (vol. 46, no. 3). I am grateful to editor Gerald Russello for permission to reuse some of that material here. Along the way, Cory Andrews, Keith Bice, Richard Brake, Montgomery Brown, Jeff Cain, Kate Dalton, Matt Dellinger, Joseph Epstein, Andrew Ferguson, Matthew Gerken, Darryl Hart, Mark Henrie, Bill Kauffman, Dennis Lager, John Lukacs, Mark Mitchell, Anne Neal, Peggy Noonan, Amie Peele-Carter, Jason Peters, Cris Piquinela, Jeff Polet, Scott Russell Sanders, Lee Slade, Whit Stillman, Howard Trivers, and the staff of the Indiana Historical Society, among many others not mentioned here, offered useful advice, assistance, and encouragement. I offer all of them my sincere gratitude.

      Near the end of this project, I was thrilled to make contact with one of Booth Tarkington’s great-great-nephews, Booth Jameson, his wife Jennifer, and his parents, John and Elizabeth Jameson. They not only expressed enthusiasm for this project, but they freely shared information, stories, and memories about Tarkington, his family, and his literary estate. I was inspired by their loyalty to Tarkington’s legacy, and I hope to learn more from them in the years to come.

      My wife, Kara, is always encouraging no matter how dimwitted my ideas. Every husband should be so lucky.

      part one

As I Seem to Me

      I. Vain Child

      This is the long and the short of it; but just after my birth I was so busy getting used to having a body that for a while I wasn’t aware of even General Grant. I didn’t at once perceive that I’d come among beings of my own kind; I saw people as assistants only; though later, when I was a full year old, I took their principal function to be that of applause.

      I’m explaining that at the age of one year I was a celebrity and regarded myself as such. Babies are like anybody else; they accept the wildest and most ill-founded adulation as deserved tribute; naturally, their self-conceit is egregious. Their minds are already busy and, though they can’t use distinct words as symbols of their thoughts, they draw conclusions. Long before they can add two to two they can put two and two together.

      First Words

      I was seldom approached without a kind of servility and professions of utter admiration. For almost half of my life I’d been entreated daily, and sometimes hourly, to enchant audiences with repetitions of the vocal performances that had made me famous. The outcries evoked by my talent were so inevitable that sometimes, bored, I declined to give a show. One year old, I knew as well as did the boastfulest of my kinsfolk that I was the star of the age because I’d begun to talk when I was only seven months old.

      I knew the whole of this triumph, especially how I’d scored on two competitors—Marjorie Harrison, next door, who was a month older than I, and Victor Hendricks, up at the next corner, almost precisely my own age. It was thought singularly creditable that my first comprehended utterance wasn’t “Mamma” or “Papa” but “Hyuh, Jock!” Out of a clear sky I had called the dog. By the time I was a year old I was almost sated with the story: how my father, within the hour of my startling first performance—probably within the half hour—had gone next door to tell Marjorie Harrison’s parents all about it and how Mr. Harrison had angrily denied its plausibility; how he had been brought to me and the dog let in, and how I had not failed in this crisis, but had distinctly said “Hyuh, Jock!”—twice—in Mr. Harrison’s presence; and how he had then stalked out of the house without a single word, returning in fury to his extinguished Marjorie.

      Having thus begun, at seven months, by calling the dog, I talked on, never saying a thing that wasn’t quotable. Behind the Infant Prodigy there still remain in memory—for background of my second year—a few faint pictures like pale old water colors: that pleasant bit of Meridian Street—sunshine on green lawns—our ample brick house and its brick stable in the shade of trees illimitably high; two lovely big ladies dancing about me in ballooning white dresses and indistinguishable from adults, though they were my sister Hautie and a friend of hers, both twelve years old.

      How far back into childhood can we remember? I remember the first snow of my second winter, when probably I hadn’t reached the age of eighteen months; I remember how that snow disappointed me. I know it was the first snow of the winter because I’d been looking forward to it.

      There’s much argument about rememberings. One of the younger members of a family claims to recall something; the others tell him he couldn’t; they say he only thinks he does because he’s heard it described by his elders, and of course it’s true that we not seldom find it difficult to discriminate between what we ourselves recollect and what’s been put into our minds by frequent hearsay. Nevertheless, having been born at the end of July, 1869, I remember the first snow of the winter of 1870–1871. If that snow fell in December of 1870 I was between sixteen and seventeen months old.

      A novelist must make the exercising of his memory—as well as other self-searchings—a constant practice, or he will not understand and make real the creatures he puts into his books; but if other people did the inward delving that he professionally does, they would no doubt turn up as much from their

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