The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington #100

Review of The Modern Library's 100 Best Books of The 20th Century

#100

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

"Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance, but the people who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him."

The Magnificent Ambersons was published in 1918 and is the second in a trilogy of books entitled the Growth Trilogy, detailing the urban growth and industrial expansion of America. The story follows the life of Georgie Amberson Minafer, a spoiled rotten youth raised under the wealth of his entrepreneuring Grandfather Major Amberson and the selfless and absolutely destructive adoration of his mother Isabel Amberson.

The Amberson's founded a small town that through the industrialization of the area grew and grew as the family's wealth and standing diminished. As the story progresses, life continues to deteriorate for Georgie, who desires nothing more out of life than to have the means to merely be, not do. Love enters and escapes Georgie's life influenced entirely by his arrogance and completely self-absorbed attitude toward living and wealth. After the death of both his Mother, Father and Grandfather, and the ubrupt realization that his inheritance amounted to a meager six hundred dollars, Georgie is left to take a menial and dangerous job in order to support his Aunt and his self. All dreams of remaining a lofty, wealthy figure in his ever expanding home town is dashed completely from Georgie's mind.

This story is profound in a uniquely magnificent way. The story begins in a glorious crescendo followed by a tumultuous, heart-wrenching and all too swift swan dive. Georgie's youthful arrogance and lofty attitude is dashed in a mere couple of chapters. Tarkington's background detailing of the revolution that is building up America as we know it is so dirty and grimey a counterpoint to the gilded magnificent life of the Ambersons. As the city grows and flourishes in the foggy, smokey industrial revolution the already brilliant and wealthy life of the Ambersons begins to crack and fade away until even stately Amberson Mansion, once the ideal of wealth and civic stature, is demolished to make way for apartments and factories. To watch the highly flawed Georgie, not a sympathetic character in the least, be ground into the dirt several times over is painfully endearing. The reader identifies wholly with his Mother's totally blind adoration. The story is part a lesson in history and part a tale of the descendents of the pioneers of industry being swallowed whole by their very own endeavors.

This book is definitely worthy of it's place on the list of 100 best books. Read it, please!

"This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained." -PKD

it'll be different this time, she mutters.
like that fresh patch of soft, pink skin hiding under the tattered band-aid.
she had learned very quickly to begin the stitches
just as quickly as the wound was torn.
her body is a memory quilt.
here's the time he threatened her,
the times he's left her weeping.
here are the insults, the degradation and the remains of her self-worth.

is it all a test of her sewing skills?
so far her seams have held.
a test of speed? no, she's can almost anticipate it now.
how worn, threadbare, and faded will she get
before she boxes up the needle and thread?

when is enough, enough?

it'll be different this time, she muttered

"Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang." -PKD

"About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn't I "do them over"?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire storyx` should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story "The Fog Horn" in a high school reader.

In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a "God-Light." Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in "the Presence."

The editors had deleted "God-Light" and "in the Presence."

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, blue-penciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention - shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?

By "firing" the whole lot.

By sending rejection slips to each and every one.

By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.

"Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. The fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butchers/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the "Moby Dick" mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.

But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play - it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried.

Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!

I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I'm not sure that I wasn't.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real word is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

For, let's face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm going out again, giving it the old try.

And no one can help me. Not even you."

-- Ray Bradbury