CONSTANCE GARLAND DOYLE, from Van Nuys, California, October, 1960.

I know, of course, of the whole-hearted help and encouragement that my father gave to young writers and artists. But what I think is most notable is that it was given so ungrudgingly. There are not too many of us, I suspect, who do not secretly envy the achievements of others. My father seemed to be completely free of this envy. His admiration for ability and accomplishment was genuine and fearless. The help and encouragement he gave to us, his daughters, was given in the same free, enthusiastic spirit.

I can hear his voice now, "Just keep at it, Daughtie. You'll make out." Or, "Of course, you can do it." And, with a chuckle, "You should! After all, a great deal of time, trouble, AND expense has been put into you."

No venture we made into the arts was ever thoughtlessly dismissed. When I finished an unskilled but devoted piano performance of one of the MacDowell "Woodland Sketches," his comment, "Do you know, I think it's quite remarkable the way you get the feel of that," was both heartening and rewarding. His was not simply fatuous praise. No one knew better than he the value of work, of training, of application. Nor was it the urging of a frustrated parent, bound that his child should succeed where he had failed. His was the quiet assurance that ability and work are an unbeatable team.

A roaring subway is scarcely the ideal place to impart confidence to a frightened school girl. But Daddy did exactly that. My sister, thoroughly trained for the stage and lecture platform, had been accompanying him on a series of "Middle Border" programs. However, on this occasion, she was unable to leave the "Cyrano" Company, and I was summoned from school to take her place. Daddy sat besides me, entirely calm, as I studied the program material while the grim station lights flashed past. At our destinaiton, he arose and said cheerfully, "Here we are, daughter. Now it's up to you."

Not once had he shown the slightest doubt of my ability, nor questioned my method of approach, and when we walked out into the vast, darkened auditorium, his quiet confidence was so reassuring that I had no difficulty in carrying out my part. At the end, when we bowed together, he whispered jubilantly, "We made it. We wowed 'em."

I cannot say truthfully that we walked in side by side to the interview with Mr. Latham at the Macmillan Company. Frankly, Father usually marched a bit ahead, propelled, I suspect, by his own enthusiastic anticipation. But when we emerged with a commission for me to illustrate Trail-Makers of the Middle Border, I can say truthfully that he grasped me firmly by the arm and hustled me toward the bus, saying, "We'll have to hump it, Daughtie. We have a job to do!"

And so we did. Sitting together at the dining room table in the chill New York dawn, braced by his superb coffee, my sketches began to emerge. Any doubts I had were swept away by his gleeful, "You're getting it! That's the ticket. Just keep going!"

The phrase "Just keep at it!" has brought me back to my easel many times when a difficult problem almost had me down. "You'll make it!" These heartening words from one who knew the problems of creative effort have been invaluable to me, as well as to many others.

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON, from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, August 23, 1960.

As background for my Hamlin Garland anecdote, I chose the Catskills neighborhood where the Garlands and the Lathams had their summer homes in the early 1920's. He and I had the same publisher, the Macmillan Company, whose chief editor, Harold Latham, was one of his best friends, and mine.

Spending a week-end with the Lathams, I remember particularly a luncheon where Zulime Garland was holding forth on Hamlin's relation to his fan mail. According to her version of that afternoon, a crest of appreciative letters was around five a week. If there were more, Hamlin started complaining that readers of books they liked did not commonly realize that showering an author with letters would decrease both the quality and quantity of his future output, for it took time and was distracting to have to compose responsive replies to the kindliest effusions.

But, said Zulime, if Hamlin's mail dropped below five complimentary letters a week, he began to worry that his popularity was correspondingly dropping. So she had a scheme. In times of appreciative flood, she would prevent his seeing a few of the best letters, especially ones with some such vague date as "Tuesday," and feed these to Hamlin discreetly when gloom threatened to set in through a dearth of fan mail.

You might also tell that Hamlin and I used to put on an act about being fellow Iowans, though neither of us was born there: he in Wisconsin and I in Manitoba. And, to hear us tell it, we were also fellow Dakotans, each having been there before his part of the Territory changed its name to South and mine to North Dakota. From Iowa, we had both "gone East" to Boston. However, that we saw so much of each other for some years was for other reasons. Zulime was a Taft, and Lorado Taft, sculptor, was among the best friends of my best friend, Carl Akeley, sculptor. Carl and I, with Joe (Herbert J.) Spinden, had what were for us very large rooms on Central Park West in New York, and we had a housekeeper. So the Garlands were in and out of our house; we less so with them, for in that period, at least, Hamlin was a steadier worker than most of the rest of us.

Both in New York and the Catskills, we had many other friends in common. Among them was Frank Chapman, curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, on the staff of which Akeley, Spinden, and I also were. I remember vividly Frank's laughter at lunch when Zulime was explaining to us that five-a-week was the ideal for Hamlin's fan mail.

JOHN FARRAR, from New York City, November 1, 1960. 

Memory is tricky, of course, and mine cannot be aided by early correspondence and files, for most of them are lost. As I do remember, however, I was first introduced to Hamlin Garland by that amazing woman, Mary Austin, or, perhaps, I just met him at a party. We soon became staunch friends. I realized quickly that he was actually an ally of the young realistic writers, unlike Booth Tarkington, for example, who tried to understand them but never did. The young writers, on the other hand, were suspicious of Hamlin. He was interested in too many worthy causes; he seemed ponderous to them. It has taken the years to show that he was one of the barrier-breakers. As was the case with Howells, the young of his time could not accept his hand with eagerness. The fact that I did does not lead me to boast, but only to be thankful for having had in him a warm and loyal friend.

I have taken from The Bookman the few quotations which follow. I find myself saying in December, 1921, in reviewing A Daughter of the Middle Border

Mr. Garland, it seems, was once a literary radical: more than that, some of his views of life would now be considered by some as far from conservative. Nice tags. Convenient to fasten thoughts loosely.

In December, 1923, he wrote for the magazine a piece called "Pioneers and City Dwellers." It was a confession after a sort of the feeling of guilt felt by the pioneer living in the city who was yet unwilling to go back to the farm. He wrote

There are people, there must be people, who still love to farm, to milk cows, to pick fruit, and to dig potatoes--how else can we go on eating?--but such doings are not for me. I have had my share of all such activities. I am content to feed my goldfish and exercise my dog on the roof. I do not intend to play the hypocrite in this matter, urging the other fellow to go West as Horace Greeley did while enjoying Union Square and Broadway himself.

And later, in the same article

Because pioneering was a lonely business in the past is no bar against its being a different process in the future. When need of altering the gregarious tendencies of youth is keen enough, all the resources of art, literature, and invention will be turned in the direction of making the farm attractive, just as these wonder-working forces are at play making the city the romantic, dangerous, and inspiring place which the sons and daughters of our pioneers have found it to be.
At a Boy Scout luncheon for Douglas Fairbanks in April, 1924, Mr. Garland and I were in attendance, with Dan Beard, John Finley, Norman Hapgood, Carl Van Doren, W. T. Hornaday, and many others. Mr. Garland was in a fine mood, impressed that Mr. Fairbanks quoted Herbert Spencer and that the crowds jamming the streets to hail the great movie star were so large that Mr. Garland, built somewhat like a fullback, had to shoulder his way through and enter by a side door.

Later in the same year, having met him on Forty-Third Street, I find myself writing 

Mr. Garland is exactly our idea of what a literary man should look like... If we were as sturdily made as he, we should wear our hair just as long. He is always dignified, interesting, and kindly--a most unusual combination.

I find myself chuckling over that last sentence. Ah, well! I was young.

In December, 1925, I met him again in the Forties, and wrote of him

... there walked Hamlin Garland, white-haired and dignified. He is still much interested in the progress and development of the Town Hall Club. He is still a calm figure in the midst of hurrying Fifth Avenue or the bellowing of literary cliques.

By November, 1926, I was making overwhelming use of my ebullient style to voice my great admiration and recommend his new novel Trail-Makers of the Middle Border, in that unreserved fashion that so annoyed many of my contemporaries. I read my review with a blush now, but I have not changed my high opinion of Mr. Garland and his works.

Mr. Garland is secondarily the novelist, and first the historian. His publishers are announcing his book as a novel. Certain it is that his former Middle Border stories were definitely autobiographical. In the new book, which is far and away better than the others, he proves himself one of the few realistic chroniclers of pioneer days who maintain verisimilitude and refrain from sentimentality. This story of New Englanders moving to the West, in its essence the story of a boy's adventures, is filled with incident, humor, pathos, and romance. It should be read as widely as any of the books of Herbert Quick or Emerson Hough, and it has, of course, an artistry which neither of these robust authors displayed. Mr. Garland's treatment of the Civil War is masterly. Here is a book of great importance to men and boys, and for their wives and sisters and mothers, too. Hamlin Garland can show aces to any of the youngsters of the day. It is a great book!

HAROLD S. LATHAM, from Kearny (Arlington), New Jersey, August 18, 1960. 

I have many memories of Hamlin Garland, ranging from relaxing hours at his home in the Catskills to serious literary conferences about his work, either in his New York City study or in my Macmillan office.

I remember, in particular, a moonlight stroll with him on the wooded trail that wound around the top of Onteora Mountain, the site of his summer home. It was a beautiful evening, and Garland would stop now and then as an opening in the trees brought into view the moonlit valley below, and exclaim over the beauties of the world and voice the satisfaction and inspiration he said he always received from his contemplation of nature. Garland, bundled up in heavy coat and muffler, for it was late autumn, silhouetted against the night sky, pointing with his cane at something far below us: that is a picture that is indelibly etched on my mind.

And Garland concentrating on some literary problem, with that puzzled, quizzical expression we all knew so well, this, too, I remember with equal vividness. Sensitive to a high degree, easily hurt, overgenerous toward others, firm in his convictions, he was a man deeply admired and respected by the editors who worked with him; and these editors recognized, too, his moods of "up and down." He was easily discouraged, and his publishing friends tried ever to stress the recognition which his work had aroused throughout the world and to minimize those trivia in the fields of criticism which sometimes assumed undue proportions in his mind.

How well I remember the day he received the Pulitzer Prize for A Daughter of the Middle Border. His delight in that was unconcealed, and yet there was a modest, almost boyish charm and excitement about it. And we at Macmillan's were as happy as he was. It was ever a great satisfaction to me to know Hamlin Garland and to work with him: a most rewarding association.

HERMANN HAGEDORN, from Santa Barbara, California, October 9, 1960.

"Like the Postman, Fame Rang His Doorbell Twice"

When I first knew Hamlin Garland, he was in his middle fifties, in frail health, living precariously by lecturing. The fame of his Main-Travelled Roads and other early books, written in revolt against the sentimental idealization of farm life, had largely faded. Though he worked with us younger writers during the first World War, and worked effectively, we were inclined to look on him as an attractive and lovable but no longer significant has-been. He was entertaining when he and Theodore Roosevelt swapped stories of the Western frontier, but, to us, in our early thirties, only as a literary relic.

Then, around 1917, something happened. Two things, in fact, happened. Garland fell into the hands of a brilliant New York physician, Dr. Turck; and Macmillan's published A Son of the Middle Border. The Doctor put Hamlin through a vigorous and, I suspect, painful discipline that gave him twenty-five or more years of vigorous life; and A Son of the Middle Border received the accolade of the critics and became, overnight, a best-seller.

To what extent the book rode a wave of new interest in the American past, or the book itself helped to create that interest, I have no way of knowing. But Garland's realistic memories of his boyhood in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa caught on. He was old enough to remember his father's return from the Civil War and young enough to speak the language of the second decade of the following century. Everybody and his wife read the book, and before he knew it, Garland was wreathed in a new aura of fame, brighter and more permanent than the first.

Being the person that he was--simple, unself-conscious, and unpretentious; honest to the bone, and warm in his relations with people--Hamlin carried his fame lightly. He continued lecturing--to larger audiences now--and brought out a second book, A Daughter of the Middle Border, his wife's story this time. Now, in quick succession, followed other books of reminiscence, recalling the literary figures of the Eastern seaboard in the nineties and early nineteen-hundreds. He had kept a detailed journal for, God knows how long, and it proved a treasure-trove.

By the middle nineteen-twenties, Garland was comfortably well off, and he moved to California and in 1930 built himself a charming Monterey-type house in Hollywood. A lifetime's interest in psychic phenomena prompted him to write a volume or two of reminiscence on another frontier.

I was living in Pasadena the year that he died. There was for him, happily, no period of gradual eclipse, painful to him, his family, and his friends. What I remember of those final months is the undiminished vigor of his mind and body, the robust heartiness of his welcome when I went to see him, his keen interest in life, and in all that was important to his friends, and the impression he gave, unconsciously, that he was going to be around for another decade, anyway. The news of his death when it came, with no warning, would not register at first. It seemed unbelievable that a man so definitely still standing in the fullness of life could thus go, between one day and the next.

And, in this year, 1960, if he had lived, he would be a hundred! Even at that age, Hamlin Garland, I am persuaded, might still have the robust delight in life that, at eighty, he so obviously retained. His second fame, like his first, has faded; his name is no longer familiar to any large segment of the public. But A Son of the Middle Border goes on, perennially true, perennially interesting, because the vanished way of life that it records echoes the heart-beat of the American story. That way of life was harsh and stern in many of its aspects, but it made for reality in the people who lived it. Readers loved the book and generations of other readers will, in turn, love it because that reality is in the story itself, as it was in that son of the Middle Border who wrote it so simply and so unforgettably.

M. A. DE WOLFE HOWE, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 5, 1960. 

It is a pleasure to contribute a few words to the memorial of Hamlin Garland. Our relation was largely that of correspondents, but I enjoyed greatly his writings, and feel that he made a genuine contribution to the history of his time, and not only to his region but to the country at large. I hope he will be long remembered.

JOSEPHINE LAWRENCE, from Newark, New Jersey, August 22, 1960.

When I think of Hamlin Garland it is with gratitude to a generous and gracious gentleman who voluntarily took the time and trouble to write kind words to a beginner far back on the road that he had so successfully travelled. I never met him, except in his books, but his friendly gesture, totally unexpected, made a deep and lasting impression that I appreciate more than ever today when courtesy and kindness have become the "old-fashioned" virtues.

I have a feeling that he would like to be remembered not only for his books and magazine work and all the tangible evidence of a famous author, but for the quiet encouragement he offered the timid unknowns--there must have been many of us.

HOMER CROY, from New York City, August 19, 1960.

One day, Hamlin Garland and I were going in a car to Stoke Poges to revel in the "Elegy." An ordinary, everyday-looking house came into view.

"There's a story in that house. I'd like to move in with the family and live there six months," he said.

"Do you know the family?" I asked.

"No."

I was surprised and said, "Then how do you know there is a story in that house?"

"There's a story in every house," said Hamlin.

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