Excerpt
From Nahma Sandrows Introduction to The Magnificent AmbersonsTarkington himself intended The Magnificent Ambersons to be read not as a novel but as a political wake-up call. He set out to show how modern industrialization, specifically the triumph of the automobile over the horse and buggy, transformed America. He illustrated this history lesson through the falling fortunes of one Midwestern family and the rise of another.
The Magnificent Ambersons is also a story of romance and coming of age. A young man learns his hard life lesson and gets his girl in the end. But the book is not so simple viewed in this light, either; it is an unconventional novel, without the comforts of a lovable protagonist or a happy ending,
More complex, more personal, and darker than either of these summaries suggests, The Magnificent Ambersons is a kind of poem, an elegy to lost youth and the irretrievable past. The feelings the reader is left with are melancholy, yearning, and a sense of loss.
How one responds to a work of art is an individual matter. On first reading The Magnificent Ambersons, some are more struck by the history, and some by the romance. No reader can be fully conscious of all the layers, all the time. But theyre all there, each deepening and enhancing the effects of the others. Its probably best to read the book through once just for pleasure, and then to go back and analyze how the author created his effects. Such an analysis can be eye-opening, and can certainly make a second reading (like the second hearing of a piece of music) a startlingly different experience from the first.
This introduction approaches The Magnificent Ambersons layer by layer: history, fiction, and then poem. A section at the end discusses writers from Indiana. See For Further Reading” for more books by and about Booth Tarkington.
History
Tarkington did not set out to write a novel of character at all. What he had in mind was an exposé of social ills and ongoing historical processes. The Magnificent Ambersons was part of an ambitious trilogy called Growth (1927), in which the author describes changes he saw in America, especially his own Midwestern part of America, in the early twentieth century.
Tarkington was not an intellectual, but he read and traveled, and gave serious and informed thought to what was going on in the world. He even served a term in the Indiana state legislatureand would probably have run for reelection if not for a debilitating case of typhoid feverand was active in various political and social causes. He wrote about his observations and political opinions, most notably in The World Does Move (1928). In fact, his first published novel, The Gentleman from Indiana, concerns a crusading journalist who tries to reform corruption in an Indiana town.
Although Tarkington wrote Growth between 1914 and 1923, the trilogy looks back on a process that had been going on for the half century since the Civil War. As he wrote, contemporary Americans were struggling to assimilate the dizzying changes that were transforming their world. Tarkingtons paternal grandfather, for example, crossed the mountains northward from Virginia to Indiana, cleared forests, and broke virgin soil with a wooden plow. His maternal grandfather was a Yankee peddler who carried goods westward by pack horse over Daniel Boones Wilderness Road. His favorite uncle made a fortune in the California gold rush. Like Tarkingtons father, The Magnificent Ambersons Major Amberson served in the Civil War and lived to see airplanes and skyscrapers; George Amberson will probably live to see television and the atom bomb, as Tarkington himself did.
The immediate trigger for the trilogy was the shock Tarkington had when he come home from a stay in Europe. Downtown Indianapolis, including his own family house, was filthy with soot. The short explanation was that the region had run out of natural gas and started burning soft coal. Actually, larger forces had been at work on the town of Tarkingtons youth. In the wake of the Civil War, the nation showed the cumulative effects of the shift from an agricultural to an urban industrial nation, the settlement of the western frontier, population movements from country to city, massive immigration, and accelerating technological innovations. Businesses expanded so muchsome to the point of becoming huge monopoliesthat a new term, Big Business,” took hold. Corruption, too, was plentiful. Human behavior seemed to be coming unfastened from an orderly social structure and decent values, leading to vulgarity and coarsening at all levels. This whole transformation was hastened by World War I, which began in 1914, though the United States did not enter until 1917.