Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Hamlin Garland: Delightful Host” (1940)

[186] X “Hamlin Garland: Delightful Host” (1940) Carroll Sibley (Edward) Carroll Sibley (1906–1949), assistant professor of commerce and finance at Washington University in St. Louis, was the associate editor of the Mark Twain Quarterly and the author of Barrie and His Contemporaries: Cameo Portraits of Ten Living Authors (1936) and, with Cyril Clemens, Uncle Dan, The Life Story of Dan Beard (1942), to which Garland contributed an introduction. for many of us, life can never be quite the same again. Strong though they may be, and imperishable, the memory of Hamlin Garland’s personality and the legacy of his literary creations are at best only vivid shadows of the substance, which was the man himself. And that substance is something that can never be replaced in the lives of those who knew and loved him. Even now, several months after his passing, I find it difficult to accept the fact of his death. It was so sudden, so indescribably precipitous. Why, that very week he had consented to be the guest of honor and principal speaker at two literary dinners over which I was to preside. Vigorous and richly lustful for life to the very end, mind you. In another six months he would have rounded out three score years and twenty. And what years! Years every day of which began at five a.m., when he would customarily rise, dress, and spend a few moments in the garden before sitting down at his desk to write continually until almost noon. Years which were filled with a love of the soil, of books, of people, of life; and a love which was always reciprocated. During the last decade he had made his home in southern California, in a beautiful and spacious residence at 2045 De Mille Drive, Los Angeles. Well do I remember the pleasant hours we spent together in his library and on the terrace overlooking his garden. It was the kind of home you and I might dream of sometime owning—embodying every talent of the architect , the builder, and the interior decorator, whose combined resources can after all produce only a house—but endowed additionally with the warmth [187] and the glow of the “dean of American letters” himself, whose charm and hospitality made of it an apotheosis of all homes. Finding the essence of a man possessed of as many intellectual and spiritual facets as were Hamlin Garland’s is no easy task; but it is a chore that no honest biographer or portrait painter can ignore. Many accolades, endeavoring to capture the root of his strength, have been visited upon him, all of them superlative, and most of them appropriate. It is interesting to note too, that all his life, Garland seemed to inspire metaphorical descriptions of himself. “Apostolic” is one adjective that seems to have affixed itself to him, and more than one artist has observed that he would have made an excellent model for a portrait of John, the beloved disciple. In my own case, I well recollect that the first time I met him I immediately thought of the resemblance he bore to both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Certain it is there was a Jovian quality in his physical magnificence, which the quiet authority and restrained strength of his personality helped to make Olympic. It was this characteristic of Garland, almost uniquely so, that he could live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. This was clearly brought out one afternoon that we spent with Carrie Jacobs-Bond in her Hollywood garden.1 One minute the two of them would be reminiscing about their early years in Wisconsin, the state of their birth, (although it was years afterwards before the two of them met). Then, from the West Salem of 1860, Garland could promptly turn his mind to the present world of 1940, and to the days of the future when he could complete “The Fortunate Exile,” the autobiography on which he was working. Nor did his confidence ebb that this would be far from his last book. Even then, at an age twenty years past the age at which most men would like to retire, he was projecting several additional volumes in his own mind. But the idyllic flavor of Hamlin Garland’s life did not stop with his professional career. Destiny smiled on his marriage no less than on his “making many books,” and his life-long romance with Zulime Taft (sister of Lorado Taft, the noted sculptor...