Harlequin and Columbine — Reading Companion

Fifth Avenue as a Theatre of Self-Consciousness

The opening chapter devotes considerable space to describing Fifth Avenue not as a thoroughfare but as a performance space. Tarkington's narrator adopts the voice of a "prowling lonely joker" who feeds on the "whimsical disease" of self-display. The prose moves through a taxonomy of types: the man in a tailcoat who feels "naked" and walks "as upon fire," the lady who gestures for an unseen companion, the rich pretending to be important. This cataloguing technique—listing, classifying, dissecting—recurs throughout the novel, suggesting that Tarkington is less interested in plot than in the social choreography of urban life. The street becomes a stage where every pedestrian is both actor and critic, and the narrator's eye functions like a roving spotlight.

Backstage Negotiations and the Fragile Company

Much of the novel's action takes place in Potter's rehearsal room, where the business of theatre is conducted through tense dialogue. In one scene, Potter learns that two of his actors, Vorley Surbilt and Miss Lyston, have signed a vaudeville contract. The exchange reveals the economics of performance: the couple finally has "a chance to be together" after years of separate engagements. Potter's reaction—bitter, theatrical, self-dramatizing—is itself a performance. He threatens to quit for farming, denounces French theatre as "holy," and insists that married couples undermine his company's "high-tension performance." The scene is structured as a series of entrances and exits, with Packer the stage manager delivering news and Tinker the playwright offering commentary, each character playing a role in Potter's ongoing drama.

Movement Between Street and Stage

Tarkington structures the narrative as a series of transitions between public and private spaces, each with its own rules of performance. The street scenes emphasize anonymity and observation; the rehearsal room exposes the precariousness of theatrical employment. When Potter walks to rehearsal, he feels the eyes of the crowd "like the pulsing successions of an exhilarating surf." Inside, the same man who commands the stage is vulnerable to the whims of his actors. The novel's movement between these settings—from the crowded avenue to the empty theatre, from the manager's office to the actors' private lives—creates a rhythm of exposure and retreat. The excerpts suggest that Tarkington uses these shifts to explore how identity is shaped by setting, and how the line between authentic feeling and performed emotion blurs.

Recurring Images of Surveillance and Exposure

Throughout the excerpts, Tarkington returns to images of being watched. The Fifth Avenue observer "catalogues you and replaces you upon the shelf" with automatic speed. Potter feels the "eyes of the northward beating upon his face." The man in evening dress is a "hunted creature" exposed to "a vast glare of derision." This motif of surveillance extends to the theatre world: Potter monitors his actors' loyalties, Packer reports on their private arrangements, and the playwright Tinker interjects with questions about marital jealousy. The novel seems to construct a world where no one is truly alone, where every gesture is subject to interpretation. Even the reader becomes a kind of observer, watching characters who are themselves watching others.

Readers attentive to Tarkington's use of setting will notice how the novel's geography—Fifth Avenue, rehearsal rooms, cab rides—mirrors its themes of visibility and concealment. The excerpts offer a concentrated study of performance anxiety, both on stage and off, but the complete text may extend these patterns into other domains. The book rewards close attention to its descriptive passages, where the narrator's voice shifts between irony and sympathy, and to the way characters enter and exit scenes as if following stage directions.

I’ve always loved how Harlequin and Columbine lingers on the quiet ache behind the footlights—that sense of a self performed until the original grows faint. It calls to mind that other novel, Peter: A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero — Themes and Context, where a young man watches his own story pass him by. Both share that tender, sidelong glance at lives lived slightly out of reach.