Midwestern farm tales not quite ready for rural realismHamlin Garland was one of the pioneers of the realist movement in American literature, along with his contemporary Stephen Crane. Garland’s particular area of expertise was writing stories of farmers and rural life in the Midwest. Raised on a farm himself, Garland moved on to the big cities of Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where he practiced his literary craft and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. His first book of fiction, Main-Travelled Roads, a collection of 11 short stories, was published in 1891 and immediately established him as a successful man of letters.
Garland was born in the rolling prairie lands of southwestern Wisconsin near the village of West Salem, in the vicinity of La Crosse. Garland’s hometown was apparently the model for the fictional town of Bluff Siding, also near La Crosse, where several of these stories take place. A few of the stories have recurring characters that appear in loosely connected narratives, somewhat like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. A few others take place in unspecified rural locations in what Garland would have called the West, but which we now think of as the Midwest or Great Plains.
In a brief foreword to the collection, Garland explains that he wanted these stories to express the daily hardships, back-breaking toil, and depressing drudgery of farm life. That might have made for a great book if he had stuck with this idea. While a negative view of rural life does appear throughout the book, its impact is watered-down by country-bumpkin humor, Ma and Pa Kettle-style accented dialogue, and unrealistic happy endings. Even so, many critics of Garland’s day found the realism off-putting and vulgar. Garland’s naturalistic writing style was groundbreaking for 1890s America, too avant garde for some critics of the time, but Main-Travelled Roads feels tame compared to the darker fiction of the muckraking era of a decade or two later, when writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Frank Norris brought American literary naturalism to its apex. Garland could also be considered the godfather of the regionalist movement in American fiction that would culminate in the work of Willa Cather and William Faulkner.
All of these stories are good, but few are great. They all generally start off as a blunt and gritty portrait of a poor farmer’s plight, but in the second half they veer off into rosier feel-good territory. The best entries in the collection stop short of melodramatic endings and conclude with a more realistic contentment. Among these are “The Return of a Private,” about soldiers returning home from the Civil War to their Wisconsin farms, and “A Day’s Pleasure,” about a farmer’s wife’s rare day in town. In the likely autobiographical tale “God’s Ravens,” a farm-born writer decides to leave Chicago and head back to his hometown to live a healthier stress-free life. He and his wife soon discover, however, that you can’t go home again, as they have trouble fitting in with their rustic neighbors. “Under the Lion’s Paw” takes a proto-muckraking stab at socioeconomic issues facing poor farmers. “A ‘Good Fellow’s’ Wife” concerns a small-town bank failure, but it’s told in a more humorous style.
Main-Travelled Roads is a better-than-average collection of short fiction from the end of the 19th century, but it suffers from too much hillbilly comedy. If you’re looking for a work of fiction that really does portray the harsh reality of American farm life with brutally naturalistic realism, I would recommend the 1921 novel Dust by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, set in Kansas.
Stories in this collection
A Branch Road
Up the Coolly
Among the Corn-Rows
The Return of a Private
Under the Lion’s Paw
The Creamery Man
A Day’s Pleasure
Mrs. Ripley’s Trip
Uncle Ethan Ripley
God’s Ravens
A “Good Fellow’s” Wife
A rather dismal Klondike travelogue
Jack London became a literary superstar by writing about the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s in works such as The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but he wasn’t the only author to venture up to the Yukon Territory during the great stampede to the North. Hamlin Garland, one of American literature’s pioneers of realism, also made the arduous journey to the Klondike River region, as chronicled in his book The Trail of the Goldseekers: A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse, published in 1899. Unlike London, at the time of the Gold Rush Garland was already an established man of letters, having achieved some degree of literary fame with books like Main-Travelled Roads and Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly.
The two also differ in that while London went North with the serious intention of striking it rich, Garland makes it clear that he is “not a gold seeker, but a nature hunter,” who went simply for the experience of the journey and to enjoy the beauty of the landscape. In pursuit of the latter end, he decided to take the longest route to the gold country, the overland route through British Columbia, also called the Long Trail. From his home in Wisconsin, he takes the Canadian railroad to the end of the line in Ashcroft, British Columbia. There, he and his traveling companion Burton purchase horses and supplies and begin the long haul northwestwards towards Dawson.
Though London’s trip to the Klondike was far from successful, he reveled in the romantic, adventurous spirit of the undertaking. Even his nonfiction writings on the Gold Rush are filled with admiration for the hardy souls who undertook the adventure and the savage wilds through which they passed. Garland’s account of his own journey, on the other hand, is dull and grueling by comparison, taking the form of a repetitive sequence of indistinguishable rivers, barren fields, and mosquito-infested, hoof-sucking swamps. In other works I’ve read by Garland, he has demonstrated a faculty for beautifully descriptive nature writing, but such passages are rare in this book. The beauty of the land is measured by the availability or scarcity of horse feed. Though he judges the Gold Rush as a foolhardy endeavor and opines that the goldseekers are rapers of the land, his own account presents a surprisingly unpoetic and utilitarian view of the natural landscape.
Nor does the book succeed very well as a journalistic or historical record of the Klondike experience. Garland clearly was better off than most of the men he encountered on the trail. Unlike the typical goldseeker, he could afford the finest horses and a boat ticket whenever one was required. In the final chapters, as he reaches the mining towns in Alaska and the Yukon, Garland finally delivers some first-hand perspective of the Gold Rush as a sociological phenomenon. For the better part of the book, however, he is off on a trail where he seems to be quite happy with minimal human contact. Unlike London, Garland doesn’t show much interest in the stories of the men he meets. More than anything, he just wants to write about his horse.
As its subtitle indicates, this book includes poetry in addition to prose. Each of its 26 chapters is followed by one to three poems. These are generally rather simple, straightforward rhyming stanzas of realistic natural imagery. Garland is no Robert Frost, but his verses are pleasantly evocative of the North and are a welcome addition to the narrative. As a whole, prose and verse combined, The Trail of the Goldseekers is just OK. I consider myself an admirer of Garland’s writing and am grateful for his contribution to American literary naturalism, but this is not his best work.
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Love, pure as a mountain spring
Hamlin Garland is no longer a household name in literature, but at one time he was hailed (like many others have been) as the “Dean of American Letters.” He was an influential early practitioner of American realism whose impact can be seen in the works of later authors like Willa Cather and John Steinbeck. Born in Wisconsin, he eventually lived in Iowa, Illinois, South Dakota, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and California and wrote regionalist novels set all over the West and Midwest.
The Spirit of Sweetwater takes place in the mountains of Colorado. Richard Clement has lived in Sweetwater Springs for several years, during which time he has struck it rich with a gold mine. The only thing missing from his life is someone to share it with, so he hangs out at the local therapeutic springs resort scoping out prospective wives. One day a woman from the East arrives who catches his attention. Beautiful and demure, Ellice Ross is everything Clement has been looking for in a bride. Unfortunately, she is dying of consumption. Nevertheless, the rugged millionaire miner sets out to win the affection of this tragic young beauty.
Realism is a broad category, and this book tends to push the boundary toward romantic melodrama. The details of life in Colorado and Clement’s career in the mining industry are essentially naturalistic, but the story is so wholesome and earnest it makes most episodes of The Little House on the Prairie seem edgy. I prefer a grittier brand of regionalism, and I know Garland did write some books that satisfy that criteria, but in this one the sunshine and roses outlook definitely predominates. Thankfully, it takes an unexpected turn in the last act that keeps it from being overly formulaic. In general, however, it’s a simple, straightforward tale of love and atonement. When originally published in 1898, it was a volume in the Ladies’ Home Journal Library of Fiction. As long as you don’t expect a profound and gripping work of literature, it’s a pleasant, satisfying read.
The Spirit of Sweetwater is a brief novel, and has the brisk and fluffy feel of a quickie. In 1906 it was expanded into a lengthier work entitled Witch’s Gold. If you appreciate American naturalism, Garland is always a safe bet for a good read. The Spirit of Sweetwater is not his most powerful or accomplished work, but if you’re in the mood for some Rocky Mountain sunshine and a wholesome morality tale, it’ll do.
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The plow and the pen
A Son of the Middle Border, originally published in 1917, is the autobiography of American author Hamlin Garland. Garland was a pioneering writer of American regional realism, and a precursor to socially conscious naturalist writers like Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. In this memoir, Garland relates the details of his upbringing on a series of farms in the Midwest and his early development as a writer. The “Middle Border” referred to in the title is more than just an alternate name for the American Midwest. As Garland uses the term, it signifies the ever-shifting boundary between the settled lands of populated America and the wild territories of the western frontier. Garland’s father, Dick Garland, chases after this westbound frontier on a quest for the ever-elusive perfect piece of flat, treeless farmland. In the process, this American dreamer with an indomitable pioneer spirit drags his family along on a veritable odyssey through the farmlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota.
Garland begins his life story in 1864, when, as a small boy, he witnessed his father’s return from the Civil War. His childhood remembrances of the family’s Wisconsin farm reveal an idyllic vision of a happy rural youth in which young Hamlin is surrounded by his loving extended family. The pioneer dreams of the clan’s menfolk soon lead, however, to a Midwestern diaspora, as the Garlands and their relatives scatter to farther fields. By the age of ten, young Hamlin is plowing his father’s fields, and as he comes of age and becomes more involved in the farm work, his view of the rural life becomes less romanticized and more realistic. A Son of the Middle Border paints a wonderfully honest and unglamorized picture of farm life in late 19th-century America. Garland’s writing, like a mixture of Frank Norris, Willa Cather, and Henry David Thoreau, captures a young man’s love of the land and pride in honest toil, while refusing to shy away from the gritty harshness of a life of back-breaking toil and poverty.
When he reaches manhood, Garland tramps around the United States doing odd jobs and farm labor. He eventually ends up in Boston, where he begins to pursue a writing career. He sets himself the difficult task of applying his literary talents to the stories of the rural West, a topic which was virtually ignored by the East Coast-dominated literary world of his day. Unfortunately, the story of Hamlin Garland the writer is not as fascinating as that of Hamlin Garland the farm boy. Though there is some interesting insight into his intellectual development, much of this portion of the story reads like a list of lectures given, books read, and plays attended. His literary idols are William Dean Howells and Walt Whitman, with whom he forms friendships. Stephen Crane also makes an appearance. Other than that, the roll of names he drops will be mostly unfamiliar to anyone but a scholar of American literature at the end of the 19th century.
Ultimately, the second half of the book negates many of the fond memories of the first. Garland begins to see the rural life as a trap and farming as little more than a form of slavery. Much of the final chapters of the book focus on him caring for his aged and ailing parents. While the farm narrative of the first half will appeal to anyone with an interest in American history, the second half will appeal primarily to those who are most familiar with Garland’s writings. I myself am a newcomer to his work, but I was impressed enough with this frank and touching memoir that I am looking forward to tackling some of his fiction in the near future.
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