Hamlin Garland: A Life

19. The Historian, 1919-29

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'/'/·(/ While mounting his rearguard action against the incursion of the modernists, Garland was busy revising the manuscript of A Daughter of the Middle Border. Relieved of the pain from his arthritis, he was once again able to spend extended hours at his desk, going over the flaws of the manuscript and laboring to revise it to fit with the method and style of Son, all too aware that few sequels measure up to the original. Macmillan, his publisher, pushed for an early release of the book, but Garland was wary of letting the manuscript go too soon, all the while knowing that his primary readers—his father’s generation and the one following—were quickly passing. Adding motivation to his revision was an unpleasant meeting with William Briggs, of the Harper’s firm, who untactfully told Garland his Harper’s novels were “dead ducks.” “I suspect that this is true,” Garland mournfully reflected. “All my material is now ‘history.’ . . . I see nothing ahead now but reminiscent books.”1 He tested the waters for serial publication, hoping to follow the financial windfall of Son, but all the magazines he tried—among them the Saturday Evening Post, Everybody’s, Delineator, Century, Atlantic, and McClure’s—turned him down. For advice, he sent the manuscript to Mark Sullivan, who had revitalized his career by publishing the serial of Son. Sullivan diagnosed the problem: for Son, Garland had relied primarily upon his memory and a few letters, notebooks, and manuscripts, which forced him to unify his impressions by combining related events. His daily diary, begun in 1898, five years after Daughter begins, had become a compositional crutch, for Garland had fallen victim to the pitfall facing every biographer: allowing chronology, and not the story, to dominate. The great charm of the historian 349 Son, Sullivan perceptively explained, was its creation of “moods” centered around pivotal events that enabled readers to partake in Garland’s nostalgia for the past. But with the present manuscript, “you have what is practically a diary, events being taken in order as they came. The result, so far as moods is concerned, is to give an effect of scrappiness.” He advised Garland to combine related events into chapters, in effect to dispense with the diary form.2 Garland set about rewriting the entire manuscript. As he did so, as was his habit, he began another manuscript, a sort of prequel, a semi-fictional “history” of his father’s westward migration that would end with his return from the Civil War and the beginning of A Son of the Middle Border. He would turn to it periodically over the next few years, eventually publishing it as Trail-Makers of the Middle Border in 1926. On January 6, 1919, his old friend Theodore Roosevelt died. Garland was incredulous. “Death and Roosevelt do not seem possible partners,” he confided to his diary. “He was life, abounding, restless life. It is almost beyond my powers to imagine him lying still. He was the biggest, the most vital, the most versatile man I ever saw or met. He was a half-dozen great men in one.”3 As he would do more frequently as he aged and his contemporaries passed on, Garland set to work writing a number of memoirs.4 He also helped form the Roosevelt Memorial Committee and served as head of a subsidiary committee charged with soliciting “brief characteristic personal stories of Roosevelt.” The resulting volume appeared in 1927 as Roosevelt as We Knew Him, edited by Frederick S. Wood.5 Meanwhile, Mary Isabel, at age sixteen, was beginning to date, and in the process nearly drove her father to distraction. One night she and her beau were delayed from returning from the Palisades Amusement Park across the Hudson River by a ferry breakdown. When they arrived at 2 a.m., Garland was waiting at the door, his eyes blazing. He seized his daughter by the arm and shoved her toward the door. “You go upstairs,” he told her. “You can tell me about it later.” He turned to the unfortunate young man. “As for you!” he thundered. “Never come to this house again!” Slamming the door, the upset father trudged up the stairs. He “looked at me 350 the historian in a way to chill my soul,” Mary Isabel remembered. “I thought I could trust you,” he muttered, before going to his...