This is another book that really carries us back into the lost past, in more than one sense in my case. Even to read the first page is to be suddenly dropped, in a manner reminiscent of Mr Rogers's television show, away from everything relevant to current life into the ever vanishing world that was our country in the early years of the 20th century. There is urbanization, there is industrialization and pollution, there is big business, or at least localized variations of it, there are even automobiles and trolleys. However we have not come yet to radios, air conditioning, movies (in this book at least), widespread high school completion, and a host of modern psychological refinements, with regard at least to people who actually aspire to respectability, in areas such as race, self-awareness and presentation, and socio-economic expectations and entitlement. It is also a world where Booth Tarkington is one of the most popular and acclaimed novelists in the country, considered wise and a cultural leader by many, the winner of two of the first four Pulitzer Prizes awarded, one of which was for this book, Alice, as everyone will know now, was published the year before the appearance of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and the year after Fitzgerald had heralded the arrival of the Lost Generation writers with his wildly succesful debut, compared to all of which people and work Tarkington's writings and concerns, as well as those of his readers, almost at once appeared hopelessly quaint and out of date by anybody with any literary sensibility, and his reputation gradually declined, though he remained a name that was accorded some respect among the second rank of authors and readers, which level was still of a fairly high quality, and does not really have a parallel, certainly in terms of mass, among the reading public in our day, up to the 50s. Here is the original cover for Alice Adams, which is set contemporaneously (one of the characters at least mentions that he was recently out of service after the war, though his war experience plays no role in his character, nor the war itself in the character of the book), The design is not exactly looking forward towards modernism or any other movement afoot and about to burst out all over in the 1920s, but evokes a kind of middle American charm and nostalgia for what was understood even at the time to be neither charming nor anything worth being nostalgic for. Even thinking in terms of 1921 I am sure that the image gives the sense of looking at the present through a frame or eyes that have not fundamentally adjusted their way of perceiving for twenty or thirty years past, even if there are late model cars and storefronts pencilled into the scene. But I am all right with that, which I guess really is a problem with me.
I read this many years ago (this is the other incidence of return to a lost past), when I first attempted to go through this list as a teenager and was drawing the titles out of a plastic bowl to determine what to read next. At the time I thought it quite good. It is a simple book, very easy to understand, yet the descriptions of scenes and the feelings of the characters are good enough that it feels like you are reading something intelligent and worthwhile, especially I suppose when you are a teenager. This time around I was a little more attuned to its shortcomings, both in the writing and overall conception and execution, though there were still some things I liked about it. In the first part of the book I enjoyed the full immersion in the world of the 1910s which really does not reach out to you across the ages but lies as if buried in a chest, or on the dark shelves of a library storage area, requiring you to come to it, though in the second half the relentlessness of the social failure and humiliation with which this pitiful family is afflicted becomes rather painful even for the reader to endure, and I found myself dreading approaching scenes in which the various disasters that the Adams's attempts to hold themselves a little higher than they ought to have dared must inevitably play out. Are people really that bad? I guess they would be, if any of us aspired to break into society that was as far above us as the people Alice wants to hang out with are above her. I was also taken much more aback on this reading by the general crudeness of the thoughts and speech and manners and mindsets of the society depicted in the book. It does not feel as if the author is exaggerating or straining to write in an affected way to make a point, as someone like Mark Twain might be inclined to do; the dialogue and the thoughts have a simplicity and naturalness about them that give a sense that this is what it was really like much of the time. It is not that people are not crude in this way now, of course, but most of them are not really trying to be respectable in the way that Alice and her parents are. People of this type would go to college and be exposed to such media now as would smooth down their rawness and unrefinement to something a little less obvious. The book is extremely racist, in a casual and largely incidental way--that is, it is not about black people at all, but when they appear or are alluded to in passing the attitude taken is always contemptuous--which I had even noted as a teenager. Alice Adams's ne'er do well brother is known to hang out at jazz joints and shoot dice with the black kitchen workers in the back of the establishment. In a modern book set in this time he would undoubtedly take on the persona of a cool and sympathetic character who 'gets' something (perhaps it), but it is pretty obvious that Tarkington intends to demonstrate by this that he is thoroughly disreputable. By means of comparison, a lot of people say that, for example, Faulkner is racist. He probably is by most current standards, but even if it is so his racism is worlds more sophisticated than Tarkington's. Faulkner's black characters, or at least numerous of them, have qualities, and strengths and individual histories and personalities, as well as personal deficiencies that are their own and not necessarily relevant to other black people. All of this was absent in Tarkington. Things like civil rights and integration were not big themes in the Faulkner books I have read, though I sense that part of the message of his 30s books is that in southern society black and white are more intimately and subtly intertwined than people commonly acknowledged. At the same time he was one of those authors who tried to apply an exacting and unflinching eye to things, and he seemed to find the circumstance that blacks were oppressed and legally and socially inferior without being able to do much about it or at that time offer any kind of threat--and not even necessarily of a violent quality--to the status quo to be telling, and something of an indictment, against the community designated as black. I am assuming it is in this aspect that the accusations of Faulkner's racism and the insistence that he cannot be considered a great writer if this is the extent of his belief and understanding of the matter come from. But it is still a considerable leap forward from Tarkington's attitude.
But getting back to Alice Adams, I wanted to touch on some of the things about it that I liked. Here is a passage where Mr Adams is lying in bed at dawn after a largely sleepless night that makes me feel I am right there in the room in 1920:
"He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the 'back porch,' while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next customer and waited there...His complaint was of the horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season. Light had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke, chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard, including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but were soon unanimous...Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far away hooting of freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark."
There was another passage which was of some of Alice's thought processes which I meant to mark down at the time as pretty good but I cannot find it now.
The Adams family does not seem to have any kind of intellectual life, in the sense that they don't read at all, other than perhaps local newspapers, nor do they do anything with music. They were not well enough off to send their children to college, which they looked at however as more of a desirable social marker than an opportunity for exciting scholarship. Their mental energies are entirely focused on money, business, and social status. Again this is not in itself unusual, but the circumstance that it is presented so matter-of-factly is unusual. The absence of books in the activity of the family is not even pointed out by the writer, it is something I noticed myself. I feel like most writers either would not be able to write about such characters at all or would feel compelled to do so as if they were oddities or otherwise alien. Tarkington does write about them as if they are normal people that anyone might know or would write a novel about. This feels like something of an achievement because writers are too overeducated to do it now.
I had forgotten about the at the time well-regarded 1935 movie based on the book that was directed by George Stevens and starred a young and surprisingly cute Katharine Hepburn as Alice and that old dog Fred MacMurray as Arthur Stevens, the handsome young man from a good family. The clips from it on the internet are fairly enticing, though the Adams's house certainly looks a lot nicer in the movie than I had imagined it in the book. Katharine Hepburn does kind of look like what I imagined Alice to be.
There was also a 1923 silent movie. I don't know whether this is still extant as a whole, but there are stills from it floating around on the internet.
If I had more time to spend on these--I think it is very interesting how the forms that people with social insecurities take change over time, you know the particular things that bother them or the characteristics that they have, The Honeymooners is another example of this. There are not really a lot of guys in form like Ralph Kramden nowadays, that particular loud blowhard type who is obnoxious and not very successful but nonetheless occupies a definite social niche. Yet I feel that this personality was more common in his generation. That type of thing...
The Challenge
Almost an un-challenge. I thought this would be an interesting one too. The magic words for Alice Adams however were so generic that in combination their searches turned up hardly any titles at all:
1. The Iron Queen--Julie Kagawa.................................331
2. The Hate Factory--W.G. Stowe..................................39
3. Hospitality Financial Accounting--Weygandt, etc.......4
The winner belongs to the 'Harlequin Teen' series, so I think I had better pass on it.
A movie challenge did emerge as well, and it was an odd matchup as usual:
1. The Amityville Horror (1979)..................................308
2. Tomorrowland...........................................................57
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