# Points of View (Sherman)/Mr. Tarkington on the Midland Personality

* related authors: Newton Booth Tarkington.
* sister projects: Wikidata item.
Mr. Tarkington has written another of his nice novels.
The reference in it to the time when Saratoga was the place to see the social world recalls naturally enough the "passing" of the Saratoga trunk. It is not the least of Mr. Tarkington's titles to our gratitude that he was himself a pioneer of the change—that he was among the first to feel the convenience and pleasure of travelling light, of carrying all one's belongings in a hand bag. If one eliminates top hats, frock coats, starched shirts, woolen underwear, hoops and whalebone-and-steel contraptions, it is astonishing how many essential things of fine smooth texture one can pack into a hand bag or into a bead purse or even pull through the circle of a wedding ring. None of our novelists is fonder of travelling light than Mr. Tarkington; and yet he is always nicely, even "niftily," garbed. He steadily succeeds in being our best-dressed novelist; and he has been that so long that, quite unlike the begoniaed dandies of a later generation, he never calls the slightest attention to his dress.
​In the provinces, a change of fashion is completed slowly. And so when a midwestern novelist announces a new book, one instinctively glances over his shoulder for his Saratoga trunk; and when he takes the little thing out of a handbag, one tends to conclude that the visitor comes on no very serious errand. After I had read The Midlander, there was a perceptible interval before I thought of it as anything more than another of Mr. Tarkington's nice novels. It is neat but not dapper. Its tone is nearer nonchalance than emphasis. It hasn't a particle of western "breeze" or a single note of western stridency. It doesn't seem to present truth through the colored medium of temperament; its atmosphere is as pellucid as window-glass. It presents, in level gentlemanly voice, the following situation:
The two Oliphant boys, Harlan and Dan, sons of an old midwestern family in comfortable circumstances, are different. Harlan is bookish, close, conservative, inadventurous. Dan as a boy likes to make things with his hands; he is expansive, progressive, and subject to sanguine enthusiasms. An admirable midwestern girl, big, healthy, with little or no nonsense in her, lives in the big house next door. But the boys go to an eastern college. Dan fools around for a while in New York, and then brings home as his wife a New York girl who may briefly be described as a neurasthenic "flapper." There are some parents and a wealthy grandmother who react in various ways to the eastern wife; and ​Dan and his wife contribute one child to our present younger generation.
One doesn't expect the adventure to turn out very well. It doesn't. At the time Dan married he had already conceived his life-work: he is to develop an "addition" to his midwestern city. With an unsatisfactory home life, he himself develops into a mere megaphone for his real-estate business. We will not divulge his domestic or pecuniary troubles beyond this point, nor shall we speak further of the cold-hearted Harlan. What one feels, at first, about all these people, except Dan's tough-minded old grandmother and the "hickory" father of the girl next door—what one feels is, that one has had hardly any feeling whatever. What they do and say is all real enough, plausible enough; yet there is no mordancy or bite in their total effect. Nothing unexpected ever falls from their dusty lips. They never burst or blurt or blunder into any arresting actuality. All there is to their lives is on the surface: the inside, if there is an inside, is without distinction and without charm—it is devoid of interest. It neither rejoices one nor hurts one—much.
When I finished The Midlander, I asked myself what it had said to me—what its theme was. It isn't the familiar story of the discontented wife or the disillusioned husband. The girl is an uncomfortable enough little beast, so far as Mr. Tarkington has indicated her. But she really isn't "done": discontented wives are infinitely richer in the resources of misery than this shallow creature shows ​herself. And as for the husband's conjugal experience, neither Mr. Tarkington nor the husband himself seems to regard that as matter of much consequence. There is no intimate illumination of the "sexual problem" whatever. What The Midlander said to me, on first consideration, was simply this: "If you are a well-rooted midwestern man with a stake in your section of the country, for heaven's sake don't marry one of these silly little New York flappers, but marry the fine big healthy midwestern girl next door." And so I wrote, as the heading for this review: "Mr. Tarkington Discountenances Sectional Miscegenation."
The argument for this view is that the mild humor of the book is an intersectional humor. The author has considerable legitimate midwestern fun at the expense of our metropolitans. The New York girl and her family are place-proud and family proud; and they think of the west and westerners as "just awful"—without, of course, really knowing anything of the subject except what they learn from the red barbarians of the Chicago school. Mr. Tarkington makes a valuable contribution to intersectional understanding by showing that old midwestern cities also have their old proud families, proud of their bank accounts, and their brains, and their achievements,—yes, but proud also of their blood and their ancestors, and aristocratically hostile to the dilution of their virtues by inter-marriage with wasters and wastrels.
But the more I think of it, the more I suspect ​that Mr. Tarkington may possibly have desired The Midlander to say something to us a little deeper than this. Under the surface humor, under the apparently superficial representation of character, there is a discoverable tragedy. I have said that Dan Oliphant, a various and lively youth, becomes at maturity a mere "megaphone" of his real estate business. He becomes the almost impersonal expansiveness of an ugly booming city. This explains the curious fact that the reader suffers little when Dan is checkmated and ejected from his own enterprise. All that was real in Dan is preserved in roads, factories and bungalows. He has lost all his private personality. The tragedy of the novel is precisely the defeat and extinction of his personal life. And that is the tragedy which, up to date, midwestern civilization has been fondest of inflicting upon its loyal pioneers.
Accept that view, and you have a kind of artistic defence of the thinness and deficient vitality of the characterizations. The true Midlander, perhaps the author would have us understand, is personally a thin, empty man. If Mr. Tarkington really meant to say all that, if our nonchalant and best-dressed novelist actually sauntered up to say anything as profoundly melancholy and disillusioning as that—well, he has said a "mouthful," and we must never trust these languidly jaunty fellows with light traveling bags any more! If it is true, then The Midlander isn't a nice novel at all.