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[Diary Impressions of Garland in 1933]
- University of Iowa Press
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[141] X [Diary Impressions of Garland in 1933] Gladys Hasty Carroll Gladys Hasty Carroll (1904–1999) was a novelist from South Berwick, Maine, who had published As the Earth Turns (1933), a regional novel of Maine that became a best seller. She had arrived in Hollywood for the film adaptation of her novel (Warner Brothers, 1934). Gladys Hasty Carroll to Eldon Hill, 15 July 1947 At the time that I met Mr. Garland I was keeping a journal and wrote in it my very personal impression of him, his family, and his home. I am having this copied for you, and you must forgive me if there is too little about him and too much about how I felt when I was with him. I was quite young, in all ways, and the literary world was a brand-new world to me, and this was not written for any other eye than my own, and perhaps my family’s. But it is obviously honest and spontaneous. November 1933 I was in Hollywood, Calif., to watch part of filming of the moving-picture being made of my book As the Earth Turns, and had spent a week or two at the studios, increasingly confused as to just what actually was now or ever had been in the way of nature, human beings, truth, or beauty, when Lee Shippey, partially blind and very gentle columnist on the Los Angeles Times, came out to interview me on the Warner lot. We sat on boxes in a doorway on New York Street and he said, among other things, “I am on my way out to see Hamlin Garland.” I am afraid I all but plucked his coat sleeve. “Oh, would he,” I began, “I mean, could you do anything to persuade him to see me before I leave Los Angeles?” Mr. Shippey said, “I’ll be glad to inquire for you.” A few days later, at a Writers’ Club tea, I did pluck at his sleeve, feeling him now a friend of mine, and he said, “Oh, yes. Mr. Garland will be happy to see you. He liked your book, and his daugh- garland in his own time [142] ters were very enthusiastic about it. This is his number. Just telephone him any morning when you have a free afternoon.” I went out later in the week and found his place on one of the hills where the streets go round and round on top and you peer down over the curb to find the houses. His was a Monterey colonial, perfect for its setting; broad, low, pale; simple and frail but with a sound dignity. I went down steep stone steps across the drenched grass, and Mr. Garland and his daughter, Mary Isabel, opened the door to me before I had reached it. It is difficult to say how much I had looked forward to this meeting or exactly why it meant so much to me. Certainly the fact that he is a celebrity meant less than nothing. I have never felt any interest in meeting the people behind books, pictures, or characters in dramas, however much I enjoyed what they had produced. To me Hamlin Garland stood for three things: (1) A name familiar from courses in American literature and once associated with a Pulitzer prize; (2) Author of Son and Daughter (of the Middle Border) the only two of his books which I had read and both of which I had admired so profoundly it was a sign of something queer in the times or in the habits of American youth that I had not gone into his work more thoroughly; (3) a man who had come from simple, humble people and a rural environment and been able to prepare himself to give his understanding of both to the world, to earn the precious tools of art and then to use them, without ever losing touch with his beginnings. It was the third which mattered very much to me. It was not the author, but the man, Hamlin Garland , whom I wanted to meet. And here he was standing in his wide, dim hall just a little behind his pleasant, friendly daughter who said, “Won’t you send your taxi away, and let us drive you home?” The cab went and I was led inside to sit across the hearth from Mr. Garland . The maid was out and Mary Isabel (I can think of her by no other name) brought tea...