Word: tarkingtonian
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...Rensselaer, Charlie Halleck led a pleasantly Tarkingtonian life, hunting coons and skunks in the nearby Kankakee marsh, mowing neighbors' lawns for spending money, playing halfback on the high school football team and run sheep run in the meadow back of his home. In political fact. Halleck was running as soon as he learned to walk. He cannot remember when he first decided to spend his life in pursuit of high office. But his ambition was plain for all to see. Said Rensselaer High School's yearbook...
There could be a terrifying play in what the fantasies of a Tarkingtonian small boy could give rise to in a totalitarian society: the scene in The Emperor's Clothes where two goons grill the father about Hoot Gibson's war on "the cattle barons is a frightening reductio ad absurdum of police state methods. But what might have been a brilliantly sardonic social satire has first been squeezed inside a domestic framework and then dropped from the picture itself. Though the family story has its own realistic interest, it is never made real. Mixing and garnishing...
...lovesick Willie, Kenneth Nelson has his Tarkingtonian moments, captures some of the fearful gentility and capering solemnity of one whose heart may or may not be breaking, but whose voice unquestionably is. Harrison Muller is a show-stopper as the superior Yaleman who breezes in for a visit in his Winton 6. But various long-suffering grown-ups just go through stock-company motions, and that great pioneer in brathood, Willie's kid sister Jane, today seems just another brat. Ann Crowley, who is a pleasant enough ingenue as Lola, seldom becomes Tarkington's baby-talking, beau-snatching...
Saroyan shapes such moments in words of almost primer lucidity. Among his still-pursuing faults are glints of Tarkingtonian facetiousness, sometimes boring and unreal sententiousness, excessive sentiment. His essential limitation-which is also his cardinal virtue-is perhaps incurable. That is his chronic ecstasy, his almost Franciscan loving kindness and optimism. It clearly transfigures the world for him and, for a time, is bound to. transfigure any sympathetic reader. Saroyan is one of the few contemporary writers who can articulate, in terms of common life, the indispensable text, Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall...
...performance is deft and sure, she does not hog this show. With the exception of Philip Faversham, who is colossally unconvincing as the Reverend James' worshipping young assistant, the cast is excellent. John Cromwell is a sensitive and appealing Marchbanks; in clumsier hands Marchbanks can be clowned like a Tarkingtonian adolescent. Onslow Stevens as well as Cromwell has steered clear of extremes. His Morell id not too pompous and too fond of his own voice to be loved by Candida. And Dorothy Sands is the old-maid incarnate in the role of Miss Proserpine Garnett, Morell's typist...