Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

[Letter about Interviewing Garland in 1915]

[91] X [Letter about Interviewing Garland in 1915] Fred Lewis Pattee Fred Lewis Pattee (1863–1950), a professor of American literature at Pennsylvania State College (now Penn State University), first met Garland on 13 January 1915, when he interviewed Garland about his role in the development of realistic fiction in the 1890s. He had written to him on 27 December 1914 to test the thesis of his A History of American Literature since 1870 (1915), a landmark work in the field, that “after the war a new spirit came over America, a new national spirit, and that it swept away the atmosphere through which the mid-century school viewed literature” (Selected Letters, 232n1), and queried him about the writers who influenced his early years. Later Garland lectured at the College, met with Pattee several other times, and entered into an extensive correspondence that suggested a cordial relationship contradicting the tone in Pattee’s letter to Eldon Hill. While Garland remembered of this initial meeting that “we parted with a mutual and very genuine liking” (Contemporaries , 36), Pattee’s animosity may be explained in part by a later and more public exchange. In 1923 Garland published “Current Fiction Heroes” (New York Times Book Review, 23 December 1923, sec. 3, 2), an essay in which he blamed the loss of decorum and decency in literature on “unrestricted immigration from the Old World” and “alien citizens” who clamor for jazz, sensation , and tales of sex. Pattee responded with “Those Fiery Radicals of Yesteryear : A Letter to Hamlin Garland on Generations and Literary Manners” (New York Times Book Review, 24 February 1924, sec. 3, 12, 26), in which he chided Garland for being out of touch and reminded him that those writers he objected to were the logical heirs to the principles he had advocated in Crumbling Idols. Fred Lewis Pattee to Eldon Hill, 25 October 1947 . . . I saw considerable of Garland during one period of my work. When I was writing my History of American Literature since 1870, 1915, I was greatly handicapped because most of the new young creators I was to deal with had not yet been written up. Garland’s publishers had issued some garland in his own time [92] biographical facts concerning him and others had come in book reviews. I did what I did in the case of many others, asked for an interview. I found that he was to be in Philadelphia on a certain day and asked him to dine with me at the Franklin Head Club and be interviewed. He consented. After we had dined we went upstairs to a private room and he talked about himself and his work for more than two hours. Later I found that he had given me in brief detail the autobiographical matter that appeared in his A Son of the Middle Border. All he told me later appeared somewhere in his autobiographical writings. He visited me at State College and presided at a lecture I gave in Philadelphia years later. I found him very self-centered and domineering. Mr. Ellsworth, president of the Century Company Pub. Co., told me once he considered him the leading American jackass.1 Ridiculous , of course, but anyone who has ever worked with him will tell some such story. A play he supervised at the Cliff Dwellers house I think was so domineered by him [that] all connected with it spoke harshly of him. He was a member of a small committee once that was to meet at a designated hour to award a prize. He came an hour late and his explanation was “A little girl came to me for an autograph just as I was starting. I wrote it and then sat and talked to her. I would be cheating her of a valuable experience not to stay and talk. She will remember it as long as she lives how Hamlin Garland once talked to her an hour.”2 He and I argued about the relative value of his works. He contended that The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop was his best fiction. I said his best books were his first Prairie-life stories. When he left the land of his boyhood he ceased to be utterly convincing. Good luck to you in your Garland studies. How quickly the best sellers of a day drift away into the land of the forgotten. As old Rip Van said “Are we then so soon Forgot?” Who is reading Garland to-day...