Hamlin Garland: A Life

17. A Son of the Middle Border, 1914-17

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'/'*·'His morale boosted by Sullivan’s acceptance of “A Son of the Middle Border,” Garland set to work preparing six installments for serial publication. Meanwhile, in February 1914 Harper and Brothers published A Forester’s Daughter, another novel about the forestry service . Tired of the conventional romance plot that readers expected , Hamlin reversed the formula. The daughter of a forest supervisor , Berea McFarlane is an outdoorsy Amazon who takes command of sickly easterner Wayland Norcross as she introduces him to the life of the trail in Colorado’s high country. Although apprehensive of the physical demands of outdoor life, Norcross gamely follows Berea’s instruction, in time falling in love while also recovering his health. Along the way, Garland indulges his love of the mountains through detailed description of the mechanics of making and breaking camp. In a preface to the novel, he excuses the absence of his customary sociological theme by stating that Berea simply took control of the narrative—a dodge to conceal his own halfhearted attention to novel writing. His publishers sought to forestall readers ’ disappointment in this falling off of Garland’s usual approach by picking up on his reversal of plot in an advertisement repeated throughout February and March in the New York Times and other papers: “Mr. Garland announces that he would like to have it understood that this is not the greatest novel of the year, that it is not the latest and the strongest work of the author; it is not a gripping study of elemental passions, it is merely an idyllic story of youth for youth. . . . It can be read by every one in the family circle. Ask for it.”1 It was the last novel he would write. In March the first installment of his autobiography appeared in 308 a son of the middle border Collier’s, bolstered by a full-cover illustration of a Civil War veteran leaning against a fence and prominently headlined, “Beginning A Son of the Middle Border By Hamlin Garland.” Sullivan spared no effort to feature the serial and secured noted illustrator Alice Barber Stephens to do the illustrations. Stephens had spent much of her early career illustrating Harper’s magazines and books before branching out to illustrate leading magazines such as McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Soon she had achieved “‘world-wide fame’ and semi-celebrity status” as the most accomplished woman illustrator of the time.2 Garland still worried about the presumption that his life was signi ficant enough to warrant an autobiography. To forestall criticism, he prefaced the first installment with an elaborate explanation. “It is now a quarter of a century,” Garland opens the preface in the guise of Lincoln Stewart, “since I began to write of the West, and here (midway on the trail) I am minded to pause and look back on the long, hard road over which I have trudged, eager to make a final record of my joys before they escape me, and in order that I may preserve for my children some few of the intimate details of a life which is already passing if not completely vanished.” After warning his readers that the story will not contain the “whole truth” about an author or a man, Garland notes that the chronicle should be read as “the study of a family and an epoch.” In this awkward guise the first installment opens, “In beginning this story of Lincoln Stewart, I am almost wholly dependent upon the man’s own words in order to account for his boyhood. He says: ‘All of this universe known to me in 1865 was bounded by the wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee.’” The narrative then proceeds in blocks of first-person quotation introduced rather clumsily by brief introductory phrases.3 Five installments of “Son” appeared from March to August, carrying the story to “Lincoln Enters Hostile Territory”—Garland’s fifteenth year in Osage, where he is tormented by the “town boys”—when publication was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War. Garland’s story could not compete with the news from Europe, and Sullivan filled the September and October issues with features on the conflict, assuring the disappointed author that he would resume publication a son of the middle border 309 at a later date, and so Garland put off searching for a publisher...