Hamlin Garland: A Life

18. Out of Step with the Moderns, 1918-30

327 A Son of the Middle Border, Garland’s greatest financial success, would go on to sell more copies during his lifetime than any of his other books. In addition to the regular trade edition, it appeared in five editions marketed to various groups, as well as being issued as a set with A Daughter of the Middle Border, besides being published in England by John Lane and reprinted in 1928 by Grosset and Dunlap. It was vigorously promoted and critically acclaimed. By 1947 Macmillan had sold 177,201 copies, a whopping number for a Garland title.1 Yet Hamlin writes that sales were “relatively small,” that the book “made no wide appeal,” and that “it was the kind of book which people read without buying.”2 Part of the reason for his disconnect with the facts is that for his whole life Garland was afflicted with a terrible case of what Thorstein Veblen calls “invidious comparison,” the tendency to measure one’s success by comparing one’s material wealth with others’. His friends were often better off financially—in some cases, truly rich—and many of his writer friends wrote novels selling in the hundreds of thousands. He envied now mostly forgotten writers like Irving Bacheller (Eben Holden, 1900), Winston Churchill (The Crisis, 1901), Owen Wister (The Virginian, 1903), Rex Beach (The Spoilers, 1906), and Booth Tarkington (Penrod, 1914), whose initial best-selling novels led to additional financial successes. His diary is full of mournful notes recording his lack of earning power in comparison with his friends’. Despite the fact that for most of their married life the Garlands enjoyed the services of a maid, enrolled their children in a private school, and kept a house in the country, Garland was never able to appreciate his own achievement. One 18 EKJ
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'/'.·)& 328 out of step with the moderns day, after noting Zulime at routine housekeeping, he groused, “I sensed once again the humiliating realization that my ‘success’ is a very weak and helpless honor. So long as my wife must scrub floors and my children wear threadbare garments, I am a failure.” But he also recognized the relative nature of such comparisons. “Measured by the rewards my fellows enjoy,” he continued, “my condition is disgraceful—measured by my Iowa playmates—I am a marvel. The vexing fact is I am not comparing myself to them but to Bacheller and [Ernest Thompson] Seton and [Albert Bigelow] Paine. The worst of it is that at fifty eight one does not make any great change in ones fortunes.”3 But another reason for his sense of failure amid his greatest success was that his long preoccupation with the past had led to a singular myopia concerning contemporary literature. One effect of his move to New York was to expose him to the mixing of cultures that immigration had brought. As fate would have it, this exposure came at exactly the wrong time, for in 1918, at age fifty-eight, Garland was in ill-health, his body aching from what eventually was diagnosed as arthritis, very much aware of the infirmities that come with age, and prone to the carping that often accompanies extended illness. His novels had ceased to sell in appreciable quantities, and he had retreated into reliving the past—a time in which, in his nostalgic recollection, the country was unified in its goals and values. In the Wisconsin and Iowa of his remembrance, his neighbors had hailed from New England or Scandinavia or Germany and had made it a matter of pride to assimilate into the nation. But the eastern Europeans he saw on the streets of New York struck him, in his now conservative outlook, as alien to the traditions he was daily describing in his writing. During a walk in the park with Mary Isabel, for example, he “got among the Lithuanians” and returned “much depressed by them. My daughter does not like runty little foreigners —and I confess they seemed a good deal like vermin as they sprawled about on the benches.”4 Then, too, cultural changes in entertainment, brought about by movies and the rise of magazines with circulations in the millions, served to increase his disdain for the immigrant. He perceived con- out of step with the moderns 329 temporary writers as tradesmen rather than artists, who were writing for a magazine industry whose primary goal...