Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Keith Newlin (review)

Keith Newlin begins his introduction to this volume with an entry from Hamlin Garland’s diary, a passage written one week before the author’s death. On the one hand, Garland wonders at his past literary honors; on the other he dismisses his accomplishments as “pitiful,” worthy of “no further reward.” Throughout this collection, those who knew Garland best echo this split assessment, describing Garland as a radical who evolved into a reactionary, a populist who became an elitist, a realist who defended literary modesty, a Midwestern pioneer who became a Hollywood poseur, grooming himself to look like Mark Twain. Containing over sixty disparate excerpts from memoirs, letters, interviews, and recollections, this collection as a whole, with its meticulous notes, is more than its parts—it functions as a critical biography, an honest portrait crafted from seemingly contrary judgments.

In selecting passages, Newlin was unflinching, including the voices of those who praised and condemned the author, creating a Rashomon effect that results in a multifaceted life history. Drawing on a wealth of Garland remembrances, Newlin includes excerpts from literary luminaries such as Walt Whitman, politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, literary critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, and ordinary Midwest citizens. Many of the entries come by way of Eldon Hill, a graduate student who befriended Garland in 1929, completed his dissertation on the author in 1940, the year Garland died, then wrote an unpublished biography in 1950. Hill widely solicited recollections, and Newlin pulls from these private remembrances that often contrast with public pronouncements. For example Fred Lewis Pattee, a professor and literary critic who seemed to have a friendly public relationship with Garland, wrote Hill a brutally honest letter, describing the author as self-centered and domineering, asserting that Garland had been labeled “America’s leading Jackass.”

In Hill’s 1936 interview notes, Garland is described as “uppity” and puritanical, an opponent of literary profanity, swearing, and pornography. According to Hill, Garland defined pornography as any celebration of the female libertine, and he found such celebrations in most modern fiction, particularly the works of Lewis, Faulkner, Anderson, Mencken, and Dreiser. Predicting a public backlash that would reject “cesspool fiction,” Garland believed readers would eventually embrace wholesome authors, such as Willa Cather and Pearl Buck. During these interviews, Garland told Hill that he was only reading detective stories, not serious fiction, blaming Dreiser and Faulkner for the fall of literature, even citing modern poets, such as Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters, as a sign of corruption because they are “thinkers,” not “singers”—lacking the music of Whitman. In return, most modern writers lamented Garland’s reactionary devolution into conservative critic. In a letter to Dreiser on the occasion of Garland’s death, Masters memorializes the Midwestern author as a “cultured farmer” with a “Cinderella complex,” an ailment that caused him to wish accolades more than honesty. In recounting Garland’s role as the founder and president of Chicago’s Cliff Dwellers Club, Ralph Fletcher Seymour describes Garland as a literary czar who prohibited women and alcohol and who was voted out of office by members who insisted on a term limit. Although lamenting Garland’s ultimate dogmatism, many mention his achievements as a pioneer of literary realism and as an author of critically acclaimed autobiographies, and some offer clearly valedictory remembrances, but even these undermine their praise by focusing on Garland’s less significant works. For example, Booth Tarkington admires Garland as a “searcher for the truth” and a “realistic novelist,” but he then calls The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (Garland’s exploration of psychic phenomenon) one of the most important books ever written.

In William Dean Howells’s review of Garland’s Sunset Edition, we find a balanced, insightful assessment, one...