Hamlin Garland: A Life

7. Life under the Wheel, 1888-89

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'...·./ Upon his return to Boston in September 1888, Garland began writing in earnest while also continuing his activities on behalf of the single-tax cause. The next three years would be among his most fertile , and his ambitions and energies were pulled in many directions. He wrote reams of fiction, much poetry, a number of book reviews, and several plays; he lectured widely; and he continued to enlarge his circle of friends among the writers, artists, musicians, and their patrons in Boston. While he was still in Ordway, he had recorded in his notebook his impressions of Aberdeen: “Nothing is more dreary[,] stale and inhospitable than a small country town, far from anything and anybody . It is a good thing that I have written my work upon Boomtown for I am in too savage a mood to see any beauty in the thing this morning. It would kill me to live in such a filthy hopelessly petty and dreary place as this.”1 His four years in Boston, where he had enjoyed theater, concerts, and literary talk with writers and artists, had elevated his sensibilities; just as important, his association with other writers made him aware that literary depictions of the Midwest had failed to catch the truth of conditions as he had experienced them. Henceforth, he resolved, he would devote his art to portraying the Midwest truthfully, accurately. His first effort was to expand his Aberdeen notes for a report on the deteriorating conditions in Dakota for Henry George’s singletax newspaper, the Standard. “Things are in a deplorable condition here,” he lamented. “Every local paper is filled with notices of foreclosures . . . . In Brown county, there is but one live town; the others are grown up to weeds and are full of empty buildings. Vast quanti- life under the wheel 117 ties of land lie idle. . . . The people are discouraged, but they will not admit it. Many would go back if they could. But what could they do?”2 Back at his Seaverns Avenue attic room in Jamaica Plain, he pondered the spirit-crushing conditions in Dakota, and especially the plight of his family. In short order he drafted “John Boyle’s Conclusion,” the bitterest story he would ever write. “John Boyle’s Conclusion” depicts the effects of harsh farm conditions and a disastrous storm upon two couples, the elderly Boyles and the younger Allings. Drought has come to Dakota, and the wheat—seared by hot winds and lack of rain—is blighted. In his portrayal of the Boyles, Garland emphasizes the farmers’ hopelessness and bitterness, their dehumanization as they struggle in a life isolated from others and devoid of social amenities. John Boyle is without hope, crushed by what he feels is a vindictive environment. “If they was a God,” he tells his wife, “seems t’ me He’d send us rain when we needed it most. . . . I ain’t done nothin’ t’ deserve such treatment.” Burdened by a heavy mortgage and unable to sell because there are no buyers for the defeated land, Boyle has become disillusioned and believes that “all had conspired against him. God, Man, and Nature had assaulted him as if by preconceived plan.”3 When a hailstorm comes, flattening his crop and destroying his hovel of a home, his spirit breaks: he drowns himself, and his wife goes mad. Because the Allings are young, they rebound from their defeat and determine to begin again—but not in Dakota. As in “A Common Case,” written earlier that spring, Garland was still struggling to embody single-tax ideas in fiction. Reflecting Garland’s interest in plays, John Boyle soliloquizes in the opening scene, and Porter Alling is a mouthpiece character who comments on the meaning of the action. On October 10, 1888, Garland submitted the story to Once a Week, a new illustrated newspaper founded in April of that year, but it declined. He tried other magazines before Belford’s, a Chicago monthly founded in June 1888, accepted it in March 1889, but Belford’s never published the story, which eventually was returned to Garland, probably in 1893 when the magazine ceased publication. Garland’s outrage at the busted Dakota land boom soon turned 118 life under the wheel to more direct action. On November 11 the Standard noted that the Boston Single Tax League had been reorganized, with Garland as its new president. The immediate plan...