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[On Garland’s Later Years, 1960]
- University of Iowa Press
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[214] X [On Garland’s Later Years, 1960] Van Wyck Brooks Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963), critic and literary historian, published a number of influential books, including The Wine of the Puritans (1909) and America ’s Coming of Age (1915), which developed the thesis that America’s Puritan past stifled its creativity. Garland began corresponding with Brooks after he read The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925). He relayed his impressions of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others, loaned his collection of Howells letters and essays while Brooks was composing The Flowering of New England (1936), the first of a five-volume series of the “history of the writer in America,” and turned to Brooks for advice about disposing of his papers. Bridgewater, Connecticut, 8 September 1960 My association with Hamlin Garland dates from his later years, when he was living in or near New York, spending much of his time at Onteora in the Catskills in “a roomy old house on a mountain top.” I am quoting from one of his letters to me, inviting me to stay with him, which, unfortunately, I was unable to do. His apartment in uptown New York was occupied during his absence there by his old friend Henry Blake Fuller. I often saw Fuller, too, on visits from Chicago. He was a frequent contributor to The Freeman of which I was literary editor during those years. Fuller was a shy little man with a great gift, a persistent writer with a charming style, who was still at work at the time of his lonely death at seventy-two. In former days, he had subtly satirized his old friend Hamlin Garland as Abner Joyce in Under the Skylights. Abner Joyce, the author of This Weary World, in whose work “the soil spoke, the intimate humble ground,” was contrasted there with Adrian Bond, who stood for Fuller himself and who was all for “European atmosphere” and “historical perspective.” Those were the former days when Hamlin Garland was at his best, in the collection of stories called Main-Travelled Roads; and when I knew him he [215] felt he had gone beyond any illusions about his career. “Few are interested in me now, and nobody will be interested in me tomorrow.” But this must be an all but universal feeling that authors have in their old age. I was one of the three younger men whom he cherished as good writers , the others being Donald Culross Peattie and John Bradley, and I think he was mainly interested in me for my books about New England, the old home that his family had left for the West in 1848. He had a nostalgic feeling about New England and especially about those whom he called the “Concord group.” But he had found that the age of seventy-five brought “a keener interest in the ‘Fourth Dimension.’” He was involved in a story about some buried crosses in the desert, a theme that was “essentially a psychoarchaeological one.” It made use of clairvoyance and greatly amused him at a time when he needed distraction. He felt he was writing, as he said, “with increasing regard to the relationship of my words,” and he poured out year by year a stream of autobiographical books that had begun with his “Middle Border” series. Over that series he had worked with great care, revising for the sixth time the Middle Border book that he had published in 1917. These books were indispensable , historically speaking, and quite on a level with his early stories, “Up the Coolly,” “Among the Corn-Rows,” “A Branch Road,” and “Mrs. Ripley ’s Trip,” in which he had delivered his “message of acrid accusation.” In those days he had been a friend and disciple of Henry George, encouraging at the same time Stephen Crane and reviewing Maggie. He had left a fine, permanent record of the farm life of the eighteen-eighties, and he had conveyed a feeling of the great beauty of the Dakota prairies and the Wisconsin coulees. He may perhaps have been disappointed in his old age at Hollywood, as virtually every veteran author is, but he was certainly a cheery, hearty patriarch who had no complaints whatever on the human level. In one of his last letters to me, he wrote I wish you could see our desert flowers this week—miles and miles of lupine, sand-verbenas, poppies and the like. Seas of purple and gold! When California sets out...