We should let Hamlin Garland
be a lesson to us, I suppose. Garland's "middle border" very nearly coincides with my middle west and the Garland homestead at West Salem, Wisconsin, is nearly dead-center of the region as I mark it. The lesson he teaches us is: don't write of the middle west for money. Or perhaps that's the lesson he teaches me, given my proclivities.
If I could, I'd hold Hamlin Garland up as something of an ideal for us. But I can't. Ultimately, he failed us. While he published more than forty books during his lifetime, only a few of them stand up in retrospect, titles such as Main-Travelled Roads, A Son of the Middle Border, and A Daughter of the Middle Border. The essays in Crumbling Idols look to me much like a monument to writerly ideals Garland could seldom live up to.
Jean Holloway's Hamlin Garland: A Biography (University of Texas, Austin, 1960) is as sympathetic a treatment of the author as we are likely to find. Holloway doesn't overlook Garland's flaws, but puts them in context. I come away from it convinced that if you choose to "write for money" it is easy to lose your way, to betray the very principles you stand for. The line between "selling books" and "selling out" is thin indeed; and often, like Garland, you do not even recognize that you've crossed it. It is better, I think, to have no expectations of financial success; it is better to write of what you love solely because you love it, and get read as you can. Fortunately in this day and age the technology of blogging helps to make the "getting read" part easier and cheaper than it has ever been.
If there is another lesson in Garland's life and work, perhaps it is that aging makes a writer cranky and conservative. Garland went from being the crusader of his early years to complaining later on about the darker-skinned immigrants coming into the middle country. How sad. I'll admit to the cranky part for myself at this age - 57. When I become conservative, I hope I'll shut up before I embarrass myself further.
As I see it, it is better to be poor as a church mouse and write a few good books that are true to this region than to write a lot, for money; it is better to remain a minor regional poet than to succeed as a writer at the expense of one's early noble impulses.
Yeah, as middlewesterners we claim Hamlin Garland as one of our own; indeed, we can point proudly to some few of his books. Yet, too, I think we must acknowledge that finally, knowingly or not, he was more interested in his own success as a writer than in faithfully representing the true heart of the heart of America. I'm sure he didn't do it on purpose: I think he lost his way. Yet even when we lose our way, I think we are still responsible for our predicament. But I have to say that: I'm middlewestern.
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