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

“Like the Postman, Fame Rang His Doorbell Twice” (1960)

[207] X “Like the Postman, Fame Rang His Doorbell Twice” (1960) Hermann Hagedorn Hermann Hagedorn (1882–1964) was a biographer, poet, novelist, editor, and secretary of the Roosevelt Memorial Committee. He was an authority on Theodore Roosevelt, and his works include The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt (1918), Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (1921), The Americanism of Theodore Roosevelt (1923), and, as editor, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (1923–1926). Garland first met Hagedorn in 1917 through the activities of the Vigilantes, “A Non-Partisan Organization of Authors, Artists and Others for Patriotic Purposes ,” which contributed syndicated articles promoting the U.S. war effort. Santa Barbara, California, 9 October 1960 When I first knew Hamlin Garland, he was in his middle fifties, in frail health, living precariously by lecturing. The fame of his Main-Travelled Roads and other early books, written in revolt against the sentimental idealization of farm life, had largely faded. Though he worked with us younger writers during the first World War, and worked effectively, we were inclined to look on him as an attractive and lovable but no longer significant has-been. He was entertaining when he and Theodore Roosevelt swapped stories of the Western frontier, but, to us, in our early thirties, only as a literary relic. Then, around 1917, something happened. Two things, in fact, happened. Garland fell into the hands of a brilliant New York physician, Dr. Turck; and Macmillan’s published A Son of the Middle Border. The Doctor put Hamlin through a vigorous and, I suspect, painful discipline that gave him twenty-five or more years of vigorous life; and A Son of the Middle Border received the accolade of the critics and became, overnight, a best seller. To what extent the book rode a wave of new interest in the American garland in his own time [208] past, or the book itself helped to create that interest, I have no way of knowing . But Garland’s realistic memories of his boyhood in Wisconsin, Minnesota , and Iowa caught on. He was old enough to remember his father’s return from the Civil War and young enough to speak the language of the second decade of the following century. Everybody and his wife read the book, and before he knew it, Garland was wreathed in a new aura of fame, brighter and more permanent than the first. Being the person that he was—simple, unself-conscious, and unpretentious ; honest to the bone, and warm in his relations with people—Hamlin carried his fame lightly. He continued lecturing—to larger audiences now—and brought out a second book, A Daughter of the Middle Border, his wife’s story this time. Now, in quick succession, followed other books of reminiscence, recalling the literary figures of the Eastern seaboard in the nineties and early nineteen-hundreds. He had kept a detailed journal for, God knows how long, and it proved a treasure-trove. By the middle nineteen-twenties, Garland was comfortably well off, and he moved to California and in 1930 built himself a charming Monterey-type house in Hollywood. A lifetime’s interest in psychic phenomena prompted him to write a volume or two of reminiscence on another frontier. I was living in Pasadena the year that he died. There was for him, happily , no period of gradual eclipse, painful to him, his family, and his friends. What I remember of those final months is the undiminished vigor of his mind and body, the robust heartiness of his welcome when I went to see him, his keen interest in life, and in all that was important to his friends, and the impression he gave, unconsciously, that he was going to be around for another decade, anyway. The news of his death when it came, with no warning, would not register at first. It seemed unbelievable that a man so definitely still standing in the fullness of life could thus go, between one day and the next. And, in this year, 1960, if he had lived, he would be a hundred! Even at that age, Hamlin Garland, I am persuaded, might still have the robust delight in life that, at eighty, he so obviously retained. His second fame, like his first, has faded; his name is no longer familiar to any large segment of the public. But A Son of the Middle Border goes on, perennially true, perennially interesting, because the vanished way of life that it records echoes the heart-beat of the...