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[Garland’s Final Days in 1940]
- University of Iowa Press
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[172] X [Garland’s Final Days in 1940] Isabel Garland Lord In the concluding pages of her memoir, Garland’s elder daughter describes his final days, which show her father undiminished in his appreciation for life while also resigned to the inevitable. Indeed, in his final letter, written to Eldon Hill and left unmailed, he had noted about his own approaching death: “I am neither awed nor rebellious—I am curious, just as I used to be when crossing a range into an unknown valley. Each year lessens my regret at leaving the third dimension behind for my friends and relatives are now mainly in the unknown valley—and my work is less and less valuable to the public” (c. March 1940; Selected Letters, 434). reading the last years of Daddy’s diaries is almost unbearably poignant. He was so brave, so gallant. The things he would not worry us with he set down honestly for himself: the acceptance of age and decay, the evernearer approach of “the dark river.” The philosopher in him recognized it all as reasonable and inevitable, but his still-youthful spirit struggled and rebelled. He who had battled so valiantly for so long in the thick of things found it hard to become “a tired, little old man puttering in a garden.” Always there was his concern for my mother. It must have been a shattering and terrible thing to sit by and see the woman who had shared all those years turn into a listless, almost helpless invalid, but Father did not shirk his responsibility. In front of Mother, as indeed before Connie and me, he dwelt cheerfully on the doings of the day and the plans for tomorrow . Maintaining it was to please Mother, he bought his yearly new car and this year gloried in the sleek blackness of a 1940 Pontiac. Often, when I arrived in the morning, I would find him out in the road with a chamois cloth, removing the last trace of dust from the glittering splendor. Both he and Mother still found their greatest relaxation in motoring, and Connie, Jon, and I drove them far and wide. A group of midwestern universities had written Father asking for a [173] “Hamlin Garland Exhibit” to be circulated among them, and Father asked my help in assembling it.1 It was an absorbing job. There were to be manuscripts , letters, longhand poems, family and personal photographs, with pictures of the various places that had had a part in his life: the Wisconsin birthplace, the Iowa homestead, the Seminary, the cabin on the Dakota plains, West Salem, Chicago, New York, Onteora, all the spots that had roots for this born and bred American. I sorted hundreds of old photographs. Here were the McClintocks, the glorious aunts and uncles of my father’s boyhood, appearing, even in the dim stiffness of old daguerreotypes, a handsome, swashbuckling crew. There was Isabelle McClintock Garland as a girl, plump, wide-eyed, romantic ; and Richard Garland, a slim, eye-filling young adventurer; the majestic old patriarch, Hugh McClintock, with his blazing eyes; and Father’s two pretty sisters who had died at fifteen and twenty-one from cold and exposure on the sleet-sheathed Western prairies.2 There were countless pictures of Hamlin Garland himself, the first of a solemn, round-eyed, sturdy little boy of six or seven, to whom Christmas was only a candy stick or an orange tossed from a passing sleigh. He was strikingly good-looking as he moved into manhood, with a wide, intellectual forehead, luxuriant dark hair, and a mouth of great sweetness. Then came the young bearded professor, the highly successful author in the late nineteen hundreds who married Zulime Taft, my own beloved father, with a smooth chin again and the warm, round eyes that observed and recorded so much, and lastly the white-haired, distinguished personage, the Academician, still with the flashing, youthful smile that illuminated his whole face. For days I pored over these links to my past, knowing the story so well through the “Middle Border” books, remembering, matching. In the end, we put together a fascinating exhibit, and though Father insisted no young person would take an interest in it, the universities wrote that its appeal was instant and that they intended to keep it circulating. It is sad that in his later years Father was obsessed by the idea that he was forgotten, laid away on the shelf. It is true that the book...