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

“Hamlin Garland” (1942)

[189] X “Hamlin Garland” (1942) Booth Tarkington Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921). Garland met Tarkington shortly after he read the manuscript of The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) for McClure’s Magazine and recommended its serial publication in the magazine. Garland describes the circumstances in Roadside Meetings, 392–93, 403–4. a bit of autobiography, offered with apologies, may serve as a slight indication of the size and scope of Hamlin Garland’s kindness of heart. After college I’d been writing industriously for years but to no effect whatever except to produce an interminable drizzle of printed rejection slips; and then, one day, suddenly out of the seeming nowhere, came a letter from a stranger, though I’d heard much of him. A magazine editor had handed him a long manuscript of mine, and the letter began with four dumbfounding words that changed everything for me: “You are a novelist.” I couldn’t imagine anybody’s saying such a thing, and last of all could I have believed that an accredited novelist would ever say it; but after I came to know Hamlin Garland I found that nothing was more typical of him than his stopping work to write such a letter to a groping, unknown youth dismally mystified about himself and the art of writing. Hamlin Garland was as indefatigable for people unknown to him as he was for his acquaintances, and he was as warmly in the service of an acquaintance as most of us are in the cause of a close friend. It is impossible to think of Garland without thinking of his kindness, the greatness of heart that was in all of his work and in all of his life; and I believe that next one thinks of his integrity, his almost incorrigible intellectual probity. Moreover, his eye was ever as clear as his heart was kind and as his mind was honest, and this clarity is in all that he wrote; it is in his selection of words, the words that he used as author and the words that he heard from the mouths of his fictitious people. It’s a truism to say that he garland in his own time [190] was a realist. It would have been impossible for him to be anything else. To him realism didn’t mean either the “candid camera” or a detective’s dictaphone ; he practised it as an art, and could write of the soil without using fertilizer for ink. Hamlin Garland was a middle-westerner who was at home in Boston, New York, Chicago, Louisiana, the Dakotas and anywhere in California. Born in Wisconsin, he lived all over the United States and was every good kind of American. He was an outdoor man and an indoor man; he was a hand on a Wisconsin farm and he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a novelist, a biographer, a historian, a playwright and a serious investigator in psychic research. As a novelist he now may be known most generally, I suppose, because of A Son of the Middle Border, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly and The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, and I hope that as a biographer he will be remembered as the author of the life he wrote of General Grant, that touchingly true portrait of a great soldier. Yet it could not be more truly and sympathetically the picture of a human being than are the portraits of people in his novels and stories; all his days he was a friendly searcher for the truth about people, about life and about death. I think it’s possible that as a realistic novelist, as well as an inquiring human being, he sought the truth about death because he knew that without at least some inkling of it the truth about life could never be comprehended. The title of one of his books is significant of the time during which this quest was a preoccupation of his—Forty Years of Psychic Research. He was not a credulous man, not a wishful thinker; he was always a realist. After all those years his conclusion was that the “case for survival” had to be marked “not proven.” Then when he was well into his seventies, he came almost accidentally upon new evidence, and it was of the kind he’d long sought. The “case for...