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

[Letters about the Death of Garland, 1940]

[176] X [Letters about the Death of Garland, 1940] Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser Garland met the poet Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) in 1919 and disliked his acerbic temperament, confiding to his diary that “he is a poet in feeling but a poet very nearly soured by adverse influences. He has no enthusiasms so far as I can discover, and his hatreds are many. He naturally sees the yellow streak in his neighbors and it is due, partly, to his practice as a lawyer but more to his temperament” (Hamlin Garland’s Diaries, 173). Garland first met Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) in 1904, when Dreiser was recovering from depression after Doubleday, Page failed to promote Sister Carrie. Later he hosted a reception for him at the Cliff Dwellers and nominated him for membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in January 1913 but withdrew his nomination after learning of the risqué content of A Traveler at Forty. And when Garland refused to sign a protest against the suppression of The “Genius,” the two became enemies. Edgar Lee Masters to Theodore Dreiser, 5 March 1940 I see by the paper that Hamlin Garland, the cultured farmer, died in your city yesterday. He had what I call the Cinderella complex, that is sitting in the ashes he dreamed of a gilded coach, and by much striving got into the American Academy, and before that into the learned circles of Boston. The complex in question troubled Abe Linkern, who raised himself socially by marrying the daughter of a slave owning banker of Kentucky. Howells had a touch of this disease, too. When it affects literary expression it is very bad. One thing that you are to be praised for is that you have always been low, you have always loved low company, as Hawthorne and Emerson did and Whitman and before them as Goethe did. This passion conduces to honesty. . . . The cultured farmer did not like me. He got displeased with me when he was a literary scout for Collier’s Weekly, one of the best publications in America. He came to me to get me to write pieces for a year or so for that paper. He wanted me to write Spoon River stuff in prose. I explained to [177] him that I didn’t want to use my material that way. He couldn’t understand why I would resist the lure of the money that was commandable for this work. Then his dislike took on a moral phase. He didn’t like my divorce, so that at last he wouldn’t speak to me. If I had cultivated him he would have given me honors; for he had much to do with the American Academy. You can easily see that I was foolish to let him get away from me. Now he is gone for good. I hope to hear from you in terms of grief. Theodore Dreiser to Edgar Lee Masters, 7 March 1940 Just as I had laid aside your Emerson book1 your letter concerning Garland arrived. What a meaningless person! He was so socially correct and cautious. I met him several times, dined at his home in Chicago and each time came away with a feeling of futility—wasted minutes or hours. He was careful of his words—almost fearful of what he might say or think. And in this great tumultuous world! Once he recited to me the “dreadful” social goings on of a group of people in Eau Claire[,] Wisconsin and when I said why don’t you make a book of that he said “Oh, no. That wouldn’t do for me. It seems to me something that should interest you.” (!) I think I said, “yes, it would.” Certainly I thought so. Note 1. The Living Thoughts of Emerson (1940). Edgar Lee Masters to Theodore Dreiser, 5 March 1940; Theodore Dreiser to Edgar Lee Masters, 7 March 1940; in Letters of Theodore Dreiser: A Selection, ed. Robert H. Elias (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), 3:872–74. Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser ...