Читать книгу The Show Piece - Booth Tarkington - Страница 3

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WHEN I tried to think whether or not my husband would wish this unfinished novel of his to be published, I could reach no decision; for only Divine Providence could possibly supply me with the answer. As I read and re-read The Show Piece, however, I began to be certain that the writing itself demanded publication. I saw, too, that in the most important way the book really had been finished; that it is all here for people who care about the essence of a book.

Mr. Tarkington had found occasion to dictate the synopsis of the ending as he saw it would be, and he had left a few dictated notes. The synopsis and the notes are included for the benefit of those who read in order to know “what finally happened,” which of course is important, too, and something that only a morbidly literary affectation would seek to ignore, since everything living must begin and develop, or fail to develop, and end. Yet in The Show Piece, as in most of Mr. Tarkington’s writings ever since The Flirt, the truth and the mystery of human nature, and how most clearly to tell about that truth and that mystery, have been his chief concern.

It seems to me appropriate—and I hope I am not wrong—to reprint here parts of an article that Mr. Tarkington wrote not much more than a year ago when he was asked to tell how and why he had written a book of his called Image of Josephine. In these few words Mr. Tarkington expressed to the full, I think, what he had come to consider his particular sort of business, so to speak, as a novelist. He wrote:

Since everything we do depends much upon what our ancestors have done for us, and to us, it must be true that any novel begins to be written before the writer is born. So if an author tried to explain completely how and why he has written a certain book he’d have to produce biographies of all the twigs on his family tree, followed by his own memoirs—to include the influence of environment—and in all the world there wouldn’t be patience enough to listen to him unless his mother were still alive.

Of course this means only that the quality of any book depends upon the kind of person the author is. Well, that’s something he doesn’t himself know, because no man knows himself and even the shrewdest women have but a sketchy notion of themselves and usually don’t like to expose it to too much light....

If for some moments the reader will think hard of his circle of friends and acquaintances he’ll perceive that his thoughts are really roving among strangers. Their aspects and manners are familiar enough to him, of course, and he knows what many of them would do under given circumstances. Every one of them has his own special reputation, so to speak, and a few adjectives tell the color of it. One man is thought “kind and broad-minded”; another “cold and yet self-sacrificing,” and so on. Thus the reader may think of these people but might find that his wife differs from him in her opinion of some of them....

In any book intended to investigate human beings and if possible to reveal something about them, the writer must take account of such matters. If the people in the book are to “come alive” to the eye and ear of an observant reader, those people must be not easier to know all about than actual people. They must be people about whom the reader could change his opinion, as he does, sometimes, of actual people; and his likes and dislikes may alter accordingly. The people of the book, to seem human, must be as inconsistent, for instance, as human beings are, and must inspire in one another as diverse opinions of themselves as all human beings do. That is, they mustn’t fall into fiction patterns. What they feel, think, and do mustn’t conform to the literary expectations of a reader more accommodatingly than do the actual creatures of flesh about him. The author, moreover, mustn’t work the reader into liking or disliking any of the people of the book. Such processes are appropriate to the “vicarious adventure” and vicarious love-experience stories wherein the reader (probably the author, too) becomes in imagination one or more of the fictitious people and thus “escapes” from life and the cares of the day; but though almost any book, or almost any work of art, can possibly be used as “escape,” the investigatory novel isn’t meant that way....

The Show Piece, though it is an entirely different sort of book from Image of Josephine, is certainly also an investigatory novel. While it is an exploration of egoism, and—as Mr. Tarkington said while he was writing it—might even have been called The Egoist if George Meredith hadn’t used that title, it is much more than the revelation of “Irvie Pease’s” unconscious and seemingly immutable self-centeredness. It deals also, in Mr. Tarkington’s deceptively simple and uninvoluted prose, with the strange attraction of egoism and the powerful and intricate effects that egoism may have upon a variety of lives other than that of its own peculiar victim, perhaps because we are egoists all, in one measure or another.

To me, however, and I think I dare be this personal, the deepest significance of the book, and what makes it a crown to his life as a man and as a writer, is the tremendous fact that his own center was not in self. Autobiographical as any creative human being’s work necessarily in time must be seen to be, yet only the great can achieve something beyond “self-expression,” can see from the outside as well as from the inside, and so be wise. Mr. Tarkington was wise, and so was truly modest; but it is not, I think, incumbent upon me to be modest for him.

Susanah Tarkington