Arts and Letters

A bit of autobiography, offered with apologies, may serve as a slight indication of the size and scope of Hamlin Garland's kindness of heart. After college I'd been writing industriously for years but to no effect whatever except to produce an interminable drizzle of printed rejection slips; and then, one day, suddenly out of the seeming nowhere, came a letter from a stranger, though I'd heard much of him. A magazine editor had handed him a long manuscript of mine, and the letter began with four dumbfounding words that changed everything for me: "You are a novelist." I couldn't imagine anybody's saying such a thing, and last of all could I have believed that an accredited novelist would ever say it; but after I came to know Hamlin Garland I found that nothing was more typical of him than his stopping work to write such a letter to a groping, unknown youth dismally mystified about himself and the art of writing. Hamlin Garland was as indefatigable for people unknown to him as he was for his acquaintances, and he was as warmly in the service of an acquaintance as most of us are in the cause of a close friend.

It is impossible to think of Garland without thinking of his kindness, the greatness of heart that was in all of his work and in all of his life; and I believe that next one thinks of his integrity, his almost incorrigible intellectual probity. Moreover, his eye was ever as clear as his heart was kind and as his mind was honest, and this clarity is in all that he wrote; it is in his selection of words, the words that he used as author and the words that he heard from the mouths of his fictitious people. It's a truism to say that he was a realist. It would have been impossible for him to be anything else. To him realism didn't mean either the "candid camera" or a detective's dictaphone; he practised it as an art, and could write of the soil without using fertilizer for ink.

Hamlin Garland was a middle-westerner who was at home in Boston, New York, Chicago, Louisiana, the Dakotas, and anywhere in California. Born in Wisconsin, he lived all over the United States and was every good kind of American. He was an outdoor man and an indoor man; he was a hand on a Wisconsin farm and he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a novelist, a biographer, a historian, a playwright, and a serious investigator in psychic research. As a novelist he now may be known most generally, I suppose, because of A Son of the Middle Border, Rose of Dutchers Coolly, and The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, and I hope that as a biographer he will be remembered as the author of the life he wrote of General Grant, that touchingly true portrait of a great soldier. Yet it could not be more truly and sympathetically the picture of a human being than are the portraits of people in his novels and stories; all his days he was a friendly searcher for the truth about people, about life and about death. I think it's possible that as a realistic novelist, as well as an inquiring human being, he sought the truth about death because he knew that without at least some inkling of it the truth about life could never be comprehended.

The title of one of his books is significant of the time during which this quest was a preoccupation of his—Forty Years of Psychic Research. He was not a credulous man, not a wishful thinker; he was always a realist. After all those years his conclusion was that the "case for survival" had to be marked "not proven." Then when he was well into his seventies, he came almost accidentally upon new evidence, and it was of the kind he'd long sought.

The "case for survival" depends of course upon the exclusion from observed psychic phenomena of the possibility that these are produced by manifestation of clairvoyance projected by a living mind. That is, the dead person must prove himself to be dead by communicating to the living investigator a fact known to the dead only. I think it was in 1937 that Garland wrote to me of his new discoveries; he rather more than suspected that he was turning up the requisite type of evidence, not in a single instance but in quantity. Later I learned what great physical activity his new research required of him and how thoroughly and indomitably he pursued the priceless bit of knowledge that was his objective. I think that for himself at least he at last obtained it, although in his published account he carefully avoided the air of triumphant statement.

This account is called The Mystery of the Buried Crosses, and at the end of the book he wrote that he merely presented "the problems involved in the discovery of these barbaric buried amulets." Then he added, "Unlike the true frontiersman, few of us who seek the borderlands of human life are able to overtake the forms which flee, or touch the hands which beckon."

The Mystery of the Buried Crosses is possibly one of the most important books ever written. A year ago, in 'Thirtynine, he wrote of it to me, "I fear Duttons have given it up as a failure. I played fair with my readers. I quoted arguments from opposing experts and I left the verdict to my readers. This, probably, counts against its acceptance…. As Howells once said to me, 'What have we old fellows to do but work?' I keep well and (as my book witnesses) able to climb hills and wallow through cactus—but I am getting old—almost seventy-nine."

I doubt that until then he had often felt his age. He always seemed to be among the most living and imperishable of men. His body, happily, had always been as lively as his mind. True himself, he sought the truth in everything, sought it with unmitigated zeal, dug for it ardently, reached for it earnestly and yet never over-reached for it. When he found it he did not mourn over it, didn't exult over it—he presented it. His interest in death was his interest in life.