Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Keith Newlin (review)

In the introduction to Garland in His Own Time, Keith Newlin poses a question for the reader of the book: Since Garland published “eight autobiographies in two series . . . one might justifiably wonder what more we can learn from a collection of reminiscences.” To judge from the sixty-six reminiscences printed here, the answer is “quite a lot.” The persona that Garland constructs for himself in the later autobiographies—Companions on the Trail, My Friendly Contemporaries, and Afternoon Neighbors—is that of an observant but slightly melancholy autobiographer in the Benjamin Franklin mode, recording his successes as a self-made writer, organizer of literary associations, and promoter of American literature. In these books, Garland interspersed diary entries and letters with later reflections on friendships with literary figures of his day, often capped by present-day musings about their and his physical and literary decline. Garland in His Own Time provides the other side of the picture. While some excerpts, notably Booth Tarkington’s and Kathleen Norris’, confirm Garland’s view of himself as helpful mentor, others provide a less complimentary perspective than Garland records, finding egotism and self-aggrandizement where he reports literary leadership and mutual support.

Meticulously researched, annotated, and introduced with brief head-notes, the selections in the book range from well-known and easily accessible essays like Sinclair Lewis’ Nobel Prize address to unpublished or obscure pieces accessible primarily in archives, among them letters, newspaper articles, tributes, and the interviews and letters gathered by Eldon Hill, who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Garland and came to know him well. Garland in His Own Time gathers material from all stages of the author’s life, enough to see the shape of his literary reputation emerge and decline over time. Garland’s obvious sincerity impressed Whitman, who said “I never met a more earnest man” and predicted that he would last, a judgment echoed by Edwin Markham’s assessment of Garland. W. D. Howells called him a “realist to the point of idealism” and singled out Main-Travelled Roads and Other Main-Travelled Roads for praise, although as a less-than-admiring Robert Burns Peattie wryly recalled, “whom didn’t that kindly man [Howells] praise?” Other literary judgments reproduced here have not held up as well for later critics. Tarkington thought The Mystery of the Buried Crosses “possibly one of the most important books ever written,” and to his neighbor Ida E. Tilson and critic Fred Lewis Pattee, Garland confirmed that The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop was his best work. Refusing to read “Faulkner, Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley”—in other words, a goodly selection of the most significant modernists—Garland repeatedly invokes his well-known dislike of their “yellow streak,” as he called their explicit treatment of sexuality. Like his interest in psychic phenomena, which resulted in “nightly séances with Whitman [and] Howells,” not all of Garland’s literary judgments have worn well, though most contemporary critics of realism would value his fiction beyond Van Wyck Brooks’ mild praise of his Middle Border books and early stories as “indispensible, historically speaking.”

The reminiscences also reveal the evolution of Garland from passionate young radical to a writer intent on curating and solidifying his own literary reputation. Part of this effort was a continuation of his lifelong mentor-ship of younger writers, as Garland Greever of U.S.C. recalls, and part was purely his author’s sense of pride. For instance, the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson recalls that, because Garland worried if his fan mail dropped off, his wife Zulime would hold back some of the best letters and slip them into the mail when the real stocks of letters fell short. In other ways, too, Garland’s egotism runs as a motif...