Beasley’s Christmas Party by Booth Tarkington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I got interested in Booth Tarkington via the credit from Orson Welles at the end of his adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons. I assume that’s about the only way anyone becomes interested in Tarkington, except for academics seeking thoroughly eclipsed literary figures to investigate.
Even in its studio-truncated form, Welles’ Ambersons was, well, magnificent, and I wanted to understand the literary source of this masterpiece. It was visually stunning and as literary a film as I’d ever seen. That’s not always a comfortable combination, but it was Welles’ genius at work.
A good deal of Tarkington remained in the movie, particularly the way he uses bittersweet nostalgia to set up a cold-eyed assessment of advancing modernity. I proceeded to read dozens of his books. Between the famous Strand Books in New York and the not-so-famous but still wonderful Johnson’s Bookstore in Springfield, Mass., they were easy to find. It’s not like they were flying off the shelves.
Reading Tarkington was consistent with my growing taste for artistic discovery, and I was always proud to think I was one of the few non-academics (or non-Hoosiers) in the world who could pass the Booth Tarkington service area on the Indiana Tollway and know why it was there.
I appreciated the writing talent that made him an important author in his time. Even the more old-fashioned stories that contributed to his ultimate dismissal as a lightweight, like Seventeen and Penrod, were still charming enough to entertain as period pieces. And works like The Plutocrat and Ambersons were compelling without qualification.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read Tarkington, and the short fiction of Beasley’s Christmas Party falls on the lighter side of his work. But on returning to this author after 20 years I understand better how much appreciating Tarkington is like learning to appreciate your parents. They are bound to seem old fashioned when it comes to everything a 17-year-old really cares about and they don’t. Later, you discover that’s the extent of their naïveté. And on what mattered to him, Tarkington was as sophisticated as fellow two-time Pulitzer Prize winners like William Faulkner and John Updike.
Even in his lighter work, Tarkington’s craftsmanship creates a backdrop of verisimilitude that he and his readers undoubtedly took for granted, but that gives a 21st Century reader a direct line of sight to life in the early 20th, before World War I soured the happiest of novelists.