The Last of the Innocents

It is a commonplace, I suppose, to regard Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen as “nostalgic” fiction, a sort of “summer idyl” which perhaps each of us has experienced at some time during his own adolescence, when time stood still and the whole world stopped and the only reality for us was the painful yearning and melancholy sweetness that accompany first love. Tarkington’s irony based ultimately on the adult perception of the inexorable march of time is further enhanced by an irony of substantially “tragic” proportions—one which he may not have been aware of when he wrote the book. In the present age we look back at Willie Baxter’s world and see there not only the last days of youth’s own innocence but perhaps the end of American innocence as well. For Seventeen is poised almost exactly at the watershed which divides the Age of Progress from the Age of Crisis.

At the present time a Seventeen would be well-nigh impossible. There are few who even want to be heroes now; most of us are content just to be “secure” behind our picture windows. What seventeen-year-old boy today could, like Willie Baxter, while away his summer mooning over a “howling belle” like Lola Pratt? He would be working at a summer job “to make some money and keep out of mischief,” as his parents would tell you, failing to add, perhaps, that they don’t really want to have him underfoot all summer and just can’t understand him anyway. And what young lady wants to be a belle today? It’s much less trouble and makes you feel more “secure” to “go steady,” especially when you may not feel “secure” in your own home, where you only occasionally see all your family together at the same time. Sex, which never once rears its exciting head—for all the talk about “love”—in Seventeen, is now an old, and in many cases tiresome story to adolescents. And yet, for all their “knowledge” and “anger,” they perhaps subconsciously yearn for this innocence they have never known.

RD

About the Author

Robert Y. Drake Jr.

It is a commonplace, I suppose, to regard Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen as “nostalgic” fiction, a sort of “summer idyl” which perhaps each of us has experienced at some time during his own adolescence, when time stood still and the whole world stopped and the only reality for us was the painful yearning and melancholy sweetness that accompany first love. Tarkington’s irony based ultimately on the adult perception of the inexorable march of time is further enhanced by an irony of substantially “tragic” proportions—one which he may not have been aware of when he wrote the book. In the present age we look back at Willie Baxter’s world and see there not only the last days of youth’s own innocence but perhaps the end of American innocence as well. For Seventeen is poised almost exactly at the watershed which divides the Age of Progress from the Age of Crisis.

At the present time a Seventeen would be well-nigh impossible. There are few who even want to be heroes now; most of us are content just to be “secure” behind our picture windows. What seventeen-year-old boy today could, like Willie Baxter, while away his summer mooning over a “howling belle” like Lola Pratt? He would be working at a summer job “to make some money and keep out of mischief,” as his parents would tell you, failing to add, perhaps, that they don’t really want to have him underfoot all summer and just can’t understand him anyway. And what young lady wants to be a belle today? It’s much less trouble and makes you feel more “secure” to “go steady,” especially when you may not feel “secure” in your own home, where you only occasionally see all your family together at the same time. Sex, which never once rears its exciting head—for all the talk about “love”—in Seventeen, is now an old, and in many cases tiresome story to adolescents. And yet, for all their “knowledge” and “anger,” they perhaps subconsciously yearn for this innocence they have never known.