"I am as ever your disciple": the friendship of Hamlin Garland and W. D. Howells.

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-JUN-06

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I suppose we were friends in the beginning, and never foes, because he had strong convictions too, and they were flatteringly like mine. [... T]here was nothing but common ground between us, and our convictions played over it as freely and affectionately as if they had been fancies.

So wrote William Dean Howells in his fullest public account of his life-long friendship with Hamlin Garland ("Mr. Garland's Books" 523). And Garland too remembered their friendship with affection and respect:

During our long friendship I have never heard him utter an unjust criticism or an ill-natured jest. His sympathy, his insight, his soundness of judgment, and especially the dignity and sweetness of his nature have been an inspiration as well as a regulative influence to me as to many others. ("Meetings with Howells" 7)

But when they met in 1887, few would have imagined that the two would become close friends for more than thirty years, with Howells having a profound influence upon Garland at every stage of his career. When they met in the parlor of Lee's Hotel in Auburndale, Massachusetts, on a spring day, the fifty -year old Howells was at the height of his influence, and the twenty-six-year old Garland had only a vague aspiration to become a writer. Although he was filling notebooks with sketches and poems, he had so far managed to publish only a few book reviews, two poems, and one short story.

Garland had first learned of Howells in 1881 when he bought from a disappointed shopkeeper a second-hand copy of The Undiscovered Country. A half-hour's reading impressed him with the "grace and precision" of its style--but apparently not enough to finish the book, for, as Garland later recalled, Howells's style "made some of my literary heroes seem either crude or stilted" and aroused "resentment." As Garland remembered, "I was just young enough and conservative enough to be irritated and repelled by the modernity of William Dean Howells" (Son 227). (1) When Garland arrived in Boston in the fall of 1884 determined to enter the literary profession in some capacity--either as poet, novelist, dramatist, or "professor," he hardly knew what--he discovered the magazines embroiled in a debate over the virtues of realism, whose chief spokesman was Howells. He soon found himself in the anti-Howells camp, for his hero was Hawthorne.2 But in preparing one of his lectures against the new realism he returned to The Undiscovered Country, and this time he finished it. He read The Minister's Charge and liked it enough to review it for the Boston Evening Transcript, where he commended Howells's treatment of character and situation. His enthusiastic response to Howells's unconventional conclusion, in which Lemuel Barker achieves neither the success nor the marriage he had desired, reveals he had decidedly switched to the Howells camp:

To those who like to have all the villains killed and the honest men rewarded, the heroines all married to their respective lovers, and everything comfortably arranged in the last chapter, his ending of the "Minister's Charge" is aggravating, to put it mildly. [...] Art that can be verified is in the ascendancy, with heroes that are actual and heroines that are real. The time will yet come, if it has not already, when the public will recognize Mr. Howells as a public benefactor for replacing morbid, unnatural and hysterical fiction with pure, wholesome and natural studies of real life. ("Lemuel Barker")

The effect of this review, Garland recounts, was far-reaching. The editor of the Transcript, Edward Clement, supplied Garland with a letter of introduction to Howells and with a warning to wait until the smoke from the latest skirmish in the realist war had died down before acting upon it. When Garland presented himself, letter in hand, to Howells, he was both intimidated by the novelist's fame and eager to try out on him his latest theories concerning realism. He described, apparently in some detail, his manuscript of "The Evolution of American Thought," a book-length discussion of American literature based on scientific principles. "In my judgment," he told Howells,

the men and women of the South and West and East are working, without knowing it, in accordance with a great principle which is this: American literature, in order to be great, must be national, and in order to be national must be spontaneous and deal with the conditions peculiar to our own land and climate. Every sincere writer must write of the life which he knows best and for which he cares most.

Howells's response to the earnest tyro's declaiming was both supportive and flattering to a tender ego: "'You are doing a fine and valuable work,' he said, and I thought he meant it. 'Each of us has had some perception of this movement, but no one so far as I know has up to this time correlated it as definitely as you have done. I hope you will go on and finish and publish your book.'" Garland left this meeting exalted and eager to press onward with his ambition:

My apprenticeship seemed over. To America's chief literary man I was also a writer, a literary historian, and with this recognition the current of my ambition changed. I began to hope that I too might some day become a The Friendship of Hamlin Garland and W. D. Howells PLL 267 novelist and put some part of the Middle West into fiction" ("Meetings With Howells" 4-5). (3)

Garland's recollection, coming thirty years and thirty-two books after their initial meeting, might be suspected of egotism and fame seeking. But Howells similarly records being impressed with young Garland in a 2 May 1887 letter to Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, written soon after their meeting: "A Mr. Hamlin Garland has called upon me, and has greatly interested and impressed me by his view of literature. He tells me that he has offered you a paper, and the present business is to bespeak your attention, not favor" (Selected Letters 3: 187). (4) Thus began a thirty-year pattern of Howells interceding on Garland's behalf.

While critics and historians have long castigated Garland for his social climbing--Edwin Cady, for example, describes him as "tumbling and buzzing around Howells like a drunken bumblebee," a lesser talent who "hounded Howells with visits, letters, introductions, invitations, solicitations, appeals for criticism, appeals for help" (142-43)--Howells seems to have had genuine affection for Garland that would deepen over the years and is amply revealed in his letters to him.

What accounted for that friendship? On Garland's part, he was no doubt in awe of Howells's achievement, flattered that this national leader of American letters deigned to converse with him and grateful for his generosity of spirit aided by a penetrating intellect. He was also struck by Howells's humility, for few men of his stature could resist the pomp that attains to celebrity: "He was always of a quiet, unassailable dignity and yet was unassuming, almost shy. [...] He pretended to nothing," he recorded in his lecture notes ("Meetings with Authors" 152). One must speculate about Howells's interest in Garland, for he left few comments of a personal nature. (5) Perhaps he respected Garland's energy and ambition, his enthusiastic and sincere efforts to promote a version of realism near to his heart. Perhaps he sought a protege, for Garland clearly needed the guidance of an experienced writer to shape and focus his many enthusiasms. Probably he responded to Garland's warmth and gregariousness, so unlike his own reserve.

I

Garland has been derided as a Howells disciple, of writing a derivative art, but in fact he arrived at his literary creed before he met Howells and differed sharply from him on the matter of the purpose of realism. (6) Prior to his review of The Minister's Charge, Garland held E. W. Howe to be "the strongest man in fiction that the great West has yet produced" ("Moonlight Boy"), explaining in a 15 July 1886 letter to Howe that "You go deeper than Howells. You have not his exquisite art for you lack his leisure and his temperament but you have what moves me more, the ability to perceive and to voice the passions that shake the soul" (Selected Letters 17). Garland differed from Howells most significantly over the issue of whether a realistic novel ought to instruct. Prior to the fall of 1887, Garland had concentrated on elements of local color as the chief criteria for "truth" in fiction.

But after a visit to Iowa and South Dakota during the summer, he was newly-impressed by the wretched conditions he witnessed on the farms and returned to Boston with a conviction that not only should art reflect present conditions; it should also work to improve them. He promptly enlisted in Henry George's single tax campaign, and his political interests began to influence his writing and his criticism. That emphasis on the social effects of fiction influenced his review of Howells's April Hopes. After praising the novel for its unromantic portrayal...

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