ABSTRACT
Hamlin Garland A maid who met us at the door said that Mr and Mrs Hardy were awaiting us. As we entered the drawing room, a thin, gray wisp of a man with a very broad brow and a pointed chin rose to meet us. This was Thomas Hardy, but I confess I would
* Garland, Hamlin, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Birthplace’, Afternoon Neighbors (New York:
Macmillan, 1934), pp. 85-99. Hannibal Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), novelist and chronicler of the Middle Border, was born in Wisconsin and grew up in Iowa. He was best known for his stories which give a realistic and sombre portrayal of frontier life with its unrewarding toil and struggle for survival. He had first met Hardy in London in 1899 but had not seen him for many years; in this extract he records a visit which he made to Max Gate on Saturday, 11 August 1923, with his wife, the sculptor Zulime, née Taft (1870-1942). Michael Millgate has commented that Garland is notoriously unreliable and that the diary notes he made at the time of his Max Gate visit (now in the Huntington Library) are extremely sketchy by comparison with the elaborated version in Afternoon Neighbours. Florence Hardy gave her reaction to Garland’s book in a letter to Richard L. Purdy on 3 February 1935:
Last night I read with amused amazement, which ended in indignation, Hamlin Garland’s account of a visit to Max Gate. His story of T.H’s criticism of Barrie is absolutely false – also his account of my complaint about never going to London. The absurd phrase ‘one of my crosses’ is one that I am sure I have never used in my life. I remember my surprise when Mrs Garland began to sympathise with me for never being able to leave Max Gate. I had made no complaint. I believe I did tell them that J.M.B. had invited us to go to stay at Stanway, but T.H. had felt unequal to the visit. That was because they were bragging so intolerably about this visit to ‘Sir James Barrie at his Castle’. I remember my amusement when, on leaving, Mr Garland bowed coldly to a little man in the uniform of a private in the Tank Corps who had been all the time sitting quietly in a further corner of the room watching & listening with an expressionless face. I thought: ‘You little know.’ Private Shaw as he was then, formerly Colonel T.E. Lawrence, had dropped in a little while before the Garlands arrived, & put us on our guard by telling us that Hamlin Garland was the worst kind of interviewer; one who came in the guise of a friend. He sat & listened to every thing with intense amusement, & had I said ‘one of my crosses’ it would have been with the intention of making him laugh aloud (Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], pp. 326-7).
