Cinema fans will know this property as the second feature Orson Welles shot at RKO. Then the studio tested the movie in a preview somewhere and decided to rework the ending and trash what Welles shot. Did they really not think it worked or was that part of the "comeuppance" that the old guard had in waiting for golden boy Welles? What remains certainly is worth watching, it's really good in fact, but likely would have been better and a bit edgier. Actually they have been hunting around in Brazil or somewhere in South America for the lost footage. The idea being that Welles was sent to South America on a wartime goodwill mission at the same time that RKO was trashing his footage and he might have had a print with him down there (or some such, I haven't really been following this recovery search story).
This is not about the movie but the novel. The novel is quite good. I gave it 5 stars on my Goodreads. Published in 1918 it has some kinship to other novelists on the period, Theodore Dreiser (From Indiana, like Tarkington, but working class immigrant stock), Frank Norris and some others, sweeping realistic work that emerged from the social and political changes of the new century.
This is the second novel in Tarkington's Growth Series, which chronicled some of the enormous changes that hit the USA with technological development and the rise of factories and industrial work. It deals with the life of a rich pampered child George Anderson Minafer. In fact the earliest movie version of the novel was called Pampered Youth (1925) of which only an excerpt survives. (One can watch this on youtube presently. May 2022. Typical Hollywood product that changes many things, little things like names, then they add a horserace and a big fire, cinema action, that takes us to the happy ending absolutely different from the events in the book.)
If you have seen the movie you know what the plot basically is. This brat George is the town rich kid and people are waiting for him to get his "comeuppance". His bratty attachment to his mother ends up disabling him, throwing himself, his mother, and Lucy Morgan and her father Eugene into lives of longing and lovelessness.
The novel spends a good deal of time looking at these rapid changes to the fictional "Midland" city. It shows how the car culture made the old town sprawl out from the suddenly old city center into the burbs. It explains how the impulse to get out was propelled by industrial pollution from the new factories and all the coal fired furnaces in town, industrial and domestic. He talks about the soot covering everything so that people painted their sooty dirty white houses some darker color so as not to show the dirt. I remember when I was a child in the mid 1950s in Ohio. We lived for a time with my great grandmother who had a coal fired furnace in the basement. There was a very small ground level door and coal chute to the outside for deliveries. Yes, Canton center was more or less abandoned by the time I was around but reading this and connecting it to coal soot and general industrial pollution was a bit of a revelation of a further cause for sprawl. I suppose there is something to that.
I like these artists that are critical of the automobile. Jacques Tati with Traffic is another beloved auto critical artist.
Negative issues about automobiles are stated in the book, mostly from the brat George, but these are kind of left for the reader to finally judge.
What did I expect based on what I knew before? I expected a portrait of a narcissist. And I expected to be able to look down on him and his ancient ideas of class and "what will others think?".
What I got instead was a rather disturbing portrait of myself in the form of this brat George Minafer. Except I turned out a good deal worse. I didn't even get the mother love part like George had.
The strange thing is that I didn’t have the class background of George. I was not the son of the city’s rich man. But entitlement of a different, more ignorant, sort can arise. In the mid-20th century the working class could shelter their own children from the realities of the marketplace that is our world. TV helps. I lived in a magical world of TV stories. There seemed to be money. I had what I wanted, if I ever really wanted anything. My parents were able to buy a 1964 Chevy Impala brand new. I remember being in the showroom looking at the SS, Super Sport, models. This became the car I learned to drive about 4 years later, with driver’s ed at public school. Then my parents built a big new split level house on a wooded lot on a hill. Where did all this supposed wealth come from? They both worked at jobs for wages. The jobs were off stage from my life. I never saw what either of them did or where they worked. They just went away every day and came back able to buy a house, a car, lots of Sinatra LPs, a color TV. I was sheltered from what they did. I knew my dad worked swing shifts but what sort of hellhole Republic Steel was I didn’t experience. A high school dropout, his union wages allowed me to think I was middle-class. In the novel George refers to new people as “RiffRaff”, but the alienated suburban youth can transform his very own worker parents into the riffraff in his life. They are the ones kids desire to get away from and who we look down on for their lack of sophistication.
Like George I didn’t really have a clue about what it really took to get on in life.
George intends to live without a profession.
I wanted to live without a job.
George is worried about what other people think. That an old fashioned notion isn’t it; caring about what the community thinks? I have done that a number of times mostly out of my own shame. Last year I ended a long love relationship with a younger woman because I was worried that since we worked at the same place people would look down on her as a daddy chaser and me as a little girl chaser. That grew out of a comment by a friend who was prejudiced because he was into the daddy dom thing himself and projected his thing on to us. Based on that I saved someone who I really loved and who loved me by getting her out of the situation of relationship to me. This was a disaster for her and me. Terrible, unforgivable.
I’m not exactly sure how the mechanics operate. But I think it was something in mass media that cut me off from my parents and the world around me. Of course my parents were very young and didn’t really know how to inform me what I needed to get through life, other than mom wanting me to do good in school which I was just afraid of and failed to do anything other than squeeze by.
I’m not unique. I feel kind of secure in stating that we are a Brat Nation. There is something in our nasty culture that makes people this way and it is not something that is fading and lessening. It is advancing. We are turning out brats.
That Capitol Building Jan 6th thing can be seen at a Brat Attack, distorted insane white people.
I didn’t expect this old novel to take me into my own life and current events as it did. I regret that the country and culture did not change fundamentally and become more healthy in the 104 years since the publication of the novel. Are we locked into this self destructive path? Apparently.
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