As might be expected from someone who makes his living from writing, I was an English major in college. But what always seems to baffle people is when they learn that I only became that person with that job because I stopped going to class. My grades were never good, and I recall recoiling from books that seemed to be the same books everyone else was reading. So I commenced an education that was far afield from anything outlined in any syllabus, one that featured some of the best novels by Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), an author little read today, and who ought to be read more.
If you know Tarkington at all, it is most likely because you’ve seen Orson Welles’s 1942 adaptation of one of Tarkington’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918). But what I chose to focus on—and why I choose to celebrate Tarkington now—are the two fictional masterpieces of the literature of youth: Penrod (1914) and Seventeen, which was published exactly one hundred years ago.
Penrod is the saga of an 11-year-old boy in Middle America and his everyday world of dogs, enemies who become best friends, and family members bent on curbing dreams at once so large that the whole of the outdoors cannot contain them—but cannot be recalled the next morning. I also enjoy thinking of William Baxter, the tormented protagonist of Seventeen, as Penrod Schofield having arrived at that age in the form of another boy.
William is obsessed, over the course of an otherwise idle summer, with a visiting girl named Lola Pratt, whom he subsequently dubs, and serenades in doggerel as, “milady.” William has a phrase that he utters with great gravity, almost as if by some heraldic code of honor. Confronted with his latest embarrassment—that is, the annoyance of his younger sister Jane and what he presumes are actions that will thwart him of his romance—William opts for a mighty “Ye Gods!” It’s a refrain that becomes a comic leitmotif.
Poems to Miss Pratt are written, friendships fray in the way real friendships do, and there is Jane—inescapable, brilliant Jane, perpetually up to no good, and yet something else entirely in the best way of sisters. A young lover should arrange to be the only child of elderly parents; otherwise, his mother and sister are sure to know a great deal more about him than he knows they know. This was what made Jane’s eyes so disturbing to William during lunch one day: She ate quietly, but all the while he was conscious of her solemn, inscrutable gaze. And she never spoke. Jane could not have rendered herself more annoying, especially as William was trying to treat her with silent scorn, and there is nothing more irksome to the muscles of the face than silent scorn.
I have made a spectacle out of myself in cafés reading the passage in Seventeen where Jane attempts to apprise her mother of the remarks she overheard about her brother from Mr. Parcher, the put-upon fellow whose family is boarding the divine Lola Pratt during the summer.
Jane hits upon a plan to substitute “word” for “damn,” and we shift into a fugue of hilarity and Little Sisterness.
Penrod, meanwhile, features all of Seventeen‘s life and verve, so much so that those qualities spill over into two sequels, Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929).
The lad has a “wistful” dog, Duke, a best friend, Sam, an older sister, in this case, to thwart (or so he thinks) his most inventive plans, a gang of sorts with whom he rolls—and a friendship with two black kids from down the block who feature in some of the funniest scenes I have ever read.
The African-American brothers—Herman and Verman—are both beyond clever, little adults who act as a kind of two-man Greek chorus with more savvy than Penrod and his mates combined. They are also auteurs of trouble, sagacious, and rightly proud imps who back down from no one and put in motion a scene that typifies Tarkington’s ability to blend verbal and physical humor.
To pull off, in prose form, what someone like Buster Keaton was able to do visually is one of the hardest things a writer might achieve. To make someone laugh aloud from something they have read is beyond the ken of most authors. But to do so through visual hijinks—that is, through motion suggested by words—is comic genius. And Tarkington’s writing, in Penrod in particular, can be very physical in that sense.
One of Penrod’s friends, Georgie, declares, with some embarrassment, his ambition to become a preacher some day. Herman coolly responds, “How good kin you clim a pole?” Debate ensues. Preachers don’t have to climb poles, Georgie maintains. But Herman describes the best preacher he ever knew, a man who would climb up and down a pole, shouting that he was going to heaven when he got near the top but that old sin was dragging him down, and that he was going to hell as he slid towards the bottom, only to recover and make a surge to heaven again.
The gang eats this up, and before too long, Georgie is outside his parents’ house, where a minister happens to be visiting and looking out the back window, where Georgie is climbing up and down a tree branch, raving about lust and sin and hell.
Sure, Penrod and his crew are doubled over in laughter as all this goes on; but this is not the exclusive domain of children. Our adult selves find just as much commonality here, for what is an adult gambit but dreaming to be something one is not, and finding meaning in what one is and in the closest people in our lives? I’ve long counted Penrod and William among those people in my own life, and each time I visit with them, I’m still not sure if they don’t have as much to teach me as anyone else.
Colin Fleming is the author of Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories.
