Plot spoilers below. I recommend this book for readers for enjoy “classic” novels.
Title: The Magnificent Ambersons
Author: Booth Tarkington
Number of Pages: 215
Original Published Date: 1918
Pulitzer Prize Winner (Novel): 1919
Favorite Sentence(s): “I mean the things that we have and that we think are so solid-they’re like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into.”
“I wonder if we really do enjoy it as much as we’ll look back and think we did! I don’t suppose so. Anyhow, for my part I feel as if I must be missing something about it, somehow, because I don’t ever seem to be thinking about what’s happening at the present moment; I’m always looking forward to something – thinking about things that will happen when I’m older.”
Introduction
The Magnificent Ambersons, much like many of the other early winners of the Pulitzer Prize (PP) in fiction, was not a title I had any familiarity with. I had never even heard of the author, Booth Tarkington, who notably won the PP twice, once for The Magnificent Ambersons and later for Alice Adams. I also discovered that a film adaptation of this title had been made in the 1940s by none other than Orson Welles, best known for Citizen Kane (which is ranked as one of the best movies of all time) and yet I was completely unaware of this novel. I find it interesting that even with all the history tied to The Magnificent Ambersons, it was totally unknown to me before I picked up the book.
The Magnificent Ambersons, similar to His Family which I wrote about in an earlier review, is a tale about an American family and the societal transformations occurring around them and its effect on their lives and relationships. The novel features no sweeping love story or grand scenes set amongst a war; it’s simply a story about a small aristocratic family and their decline and eventual replacement during the second industrial revolution.
Story Themes
The story is set in Indiana during the early 20th century where horse and buggies are slowly being replaced with automobiles as the main mode of street transportation. The way a person spends their time is also transitioning. The narrator laments on the negative changes that progress and a growing population has had on the town and their society. The horse stables and hired men are disappearing, along with hosted dances, “Keeping Open House” for unexpected visitors, and the serenade that a young man would perform outside a girl’s window with a tiny orchestra; all had vanished and not been properly replaced because they hadn’t the “time” anymore.
The narrator uses the evolution from mule streetcar to trolley to demonstrate how although technology had improved transportation and made traveling faster, it didn’t seem to come as a time savings and instead had an opposite effect on the population.
“A lady could whistle to it [mule streetcar] from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and cloak, went downstairs…and came forth from the house. The previous passengers made little objection to such gallantry on the part of the car: they were wont to expect as much for themselves on like occasion.” But when the mule streetcar was replaced with the faster trolley it waited for no one. “Nor could its passengers have endured such a thing, because the faster they were carried the less time they had to spare. In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones – another ancient vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure – they had time for everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady.”
Throughout the novel there is talk of smoke hanging in the air. In the beginning, the smoke only hovers over the edges of the town, but by the end of the story the smoke and soot from the factories begins to cling to everything in town. Many residents even choose to paint their houses different colors to better hide the soot that has permeated their lives. The smoke and soot serve as metaphors for the slow drifting to sudden infiltration of industrial enterprise that has completely altered their society.
Tarkington uses the backdrop of these social and industrial changes to introduce the reader to the Ambersons, who serve as a personal representation to the revolution taking place outside their front door. The Amberson family begin the novel as the most wealthy and powerful family in town, but as the second industrial revolution takes hold, they remain oblivious and in a state of denial until the once-magnificent Ambersons have lost everything they were once renowned for, been replaced, and all but forgotten.
Plot Unfolding
The Ambersons, built by the patriarch Major Amberson after the Civil War, are the most well-to-do and famous family in town. The family is small, and by the third generation there is only one grandchild of the Major, George Amberson Minafer.
George Minafer is spoiled and grows up to be haughty, self-centered and has no qualms about using his family’s money and prestige to bully people and push his weight around. Although handsome, and charming when he wishes, he sees most people as below him. To quote George: “I think the world’s like this: there’s a few people that their birth and position, and so on, puts them at the top.” This haughtiness and arrogance make the town folk desire to one day witness George’s comeuppance. This plea for some sort of cosmic retaliation acts as a foreshadow for the story; the reader knows it’s coming and is given a front seat to watch it unfold. George’s mistakes and his blindness to the obvious transformation happening around him is apparent to the reader before George finally comprehends.
When Eugene Morgan, an old friend and former suitor of George’s mother Isabel, returns to town as a wealthy automobile business man, George’s life is altered. George is immediately smitten by Eugene’s daughter, Lucy Morgan, and begins to court her, but has an immediate distaste for Eugene whom Isabel begins spending a lot of time with.
After proposing to Lucy, she refuses to give a ‘yes’, and instead asks him what he plans to do with his life. George’s response is “to be an honorable man”, but when pressed with how he will spend his time and if he plans to have any profession or business, his answer is “I certainly do not!”
This answer is not suitable to Lucy who believes, like her father does, that it’s important for a man to do instead of just be, and she doesn’t want to be engaged until he has a profession. I theorize Lucy’s father, and perhaps Lucy herself, can see that the Amberson family prestige and money is unwinding and without a profession or business, George would not be able to support a family and may flounder without his family’s influence. However, a profession or business goes against his personal theory of life.
“That’s a fine career for a man, isn’t it! Lawyers, bankers, politicians! What do they get out of life, I’d like to know! What do they ever know about real things? Where do they ever get??
George believed such things as a career or business were beneath him, given his station of birth, and instead when pressed upon what he wanted to be, his response was “A yachtsman”.
Throughout the story George complains that the Amberson statues are not being kept clean and their hotel seems rundown. His grandfather has sold some of the family land, which George sees as an insult on their name, and the Major at one point encourages him to go to law school but George replies that “being a professional man has never appealed to me”. George doesn’t want to work and doesn’t feel he should because of his birth. He had been coddled his whole life and instead of telling him the truth so that he could properly prepare for a shift, George is kept in ignorance until it’s too late.
Even with all these hints from others and the deterioration occurring with his family’s properties, George remains ignorant to the family’s decline and lives with the assumption that things will always remain as they are. He criticizes the automobile, believing it to be a fad, and doesn’t believe a horseless carriage will ever go faster than a horse carriage. George wants things to stay as they are because life is good for him.
When George learns the town is gossiping about his mother and Eugene spending time together, he tries to end it but only makes it worse. To combat “town talk” he sacrifices his mother’s and his own happiness and takes her out of the country for a few years, away from both Eugene and Lucy. This will be one of the great regrets of his life.
George finally returns home with an ailing Isabel who is bedridden soon after they arrive. Eugene requested to see Isabel one final time but George denied this request. Only hours later Isabel asks about Eugene and she states “I’d like to have -seen him”, but George is unable to make this happen before Isabel passes away.
In his grief, he searches for absolution from his aunt Fanny for taking away his mother and leaving Lucy.
“What choice did I have? Was there any other way of stopping the talk?”
But Fanny tells him the gossip died off not long after they left and that those who knew of the Ambersons were mostly gone and “the crowds of new people that seem never even to have heard of us”.
The Amberson name is no longer known or respected, and after bad investments and overspending by his grandfather and uncle, the Amberson money is gone. His family has either passed away or left town so George was left near-penniless and alone as the last Amberson. George has finally received his comeuppance.
“And yet something had happened- a thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. They had thought of it, longed for it, hoping acutely that they might live to see the day when it would come to pass. And now it had happened at last: Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance.”
With his life fallen apart and with no money or occupation, and his destitute aunt to support, he gives up a job of studying law and instead puts himself in harm’s way by working at a chemical plant. The job is very physically demanding but pays more than law study. Unfortunately, the pay comes with a huge cost since most men on that job die within three years, but George sacrifices for himself to provide Fanny the life she wants.
In the end, George is nearly killed and lays alone in a hospital until his love, Lucy, comes to him. Eugene also arrives after feeling inclined to George help by Isabel’s presence (the book takes an unexpected and odd turn here). Upon their reunion, George asks Eugene for forgiveness. George is a changed man.
George is an arrogant boy who ultimately accepts his comeuppance and by the end I found myself routing for him to succeed. He didn’t complain or drown out his sorrows or even scream out how unfair it was for him for after being left broke and without his family’s prestige. He sacrificed his body and his reputation for the only person left in his life, the aunt who he constantly butted heads with.
The irony of George’s downfall is that those who so desired to witness it, were not around to see it or unaware of its happening.
“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.”
How Times Have Changed and How They Haven’t
One of the pleasures of reading novels written in a different time is being introduced to how things were and comparing them to how similar customs function today. One of the most interesting in The Magnificent Ambersons was the courting style of yesteryear. Hiring a small band to serenade a girl outside her front door is nothing I’ve ever witnessed in real life and only read about in books and seen in media entertainment. But it seems to have once been a popular pastime to court a young woman. Dating and engagement seemed a much simpler endeavor decades ago and perhaps more enjoyable in its own way.
A column for the local paper wrote an opinion piece on George and the other youth like George. In it, the writer disparages the young of the day and compares them negatively to their forefathers. This sentiment hasn’t changed much and if those back in turn of the 20th century had the same complaints of their new youth, I assume such complaints will always remain, whether justified or not.
“When we compare the young manhood of Abraham Lincoln with the specimens we are now producing, we see too well that it bodes ill for the twentieth century.”