270 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900essays; “each locality must produce its own literary record, each special phase of life
utter its own voice.” At other times, he has been called a realist or even a propagandist,
because of his careful but also socially committed portraits of the poverty and
oppression suffered by Midwestern farming families: what Garland himself termed,
in his story “The Return of the Private” (1891), the farmer’s “daily running fight with
nature and against the injustice of his fellowmen.” Garland, for his part, called
himself a “veritist.” The “veritist,” he explained, was committed to “the truthful
statement of an individual expression corrected by reference to fact.” “The veritist
sees life in terms of what might be, as well as in terms of what is,” Garland insisted,
“but he writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests what is to be, by contrast.” Sticking
closely to the verifiable, the empirical fact, but also catching or alluding to the
verities, the realizable values of a life, the veritist is, in essence, a realist and a reformer.
That combination of approaches is clearly at work in what is his first and, by a long
distance, his finest book, Main-Travelled Roads (1891), a collection of stories mostly
written before 1890. Along with “The Return of the Private” it contains such widely
anthologized tales and sketches as “A Branch-Road,” “Up the Coulé,” and “Under the
Lion’s Paw.” All of these are powerfully informed by Garland’s guilt over leaving his
family, and particularly his mother, to the barren life of the farm (he departed for
Boston in 1884) and by his anger over what he saw when he returned to or remembered
that life, with “its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries.”
“Up the Coulé” is typical. Personal in origin, it is based on a return visit that
Garland himself made to the parental farm and later described in his autobiographical
narrative, A Son of the Middle Border (1917). It is, among other things, a comprehensive
attack on romantic pastoralism. Howard McLane, a successful dramatist, returns to
his boyhood home in Wisconsin for a family reunion, only to have all his romantic
preconceptions about homecoming destroyed – along with any residual feelings he
may have that rural life is, in any way, idyllic. The village he first sees from the train,
and the family farm, are squalid. His brother, Grant, hates him, because he has
managed to escape and better himself; and his mother, worn down by life and
economic circumstance, has become a pathetic shadow of a woman. “He thought of
the infinite tragedy of those lives which the world loves to call ‘peaceful and pastoral,’ ”
the reader is told. And he takes the measure of just how short of the sordid realities
of farming life most artistic accounts of it fall. “The poet who writes of milking the
cows does it from the hammock looking on,” Howard reflects; the painter needs to
stop looking at this “sombre landscape” through the “half-shut eyes” of romance and
paint the “melancholy subject” with “pitiless fidelity.” The only true art, expressive of
this life, would be one that registered its sad facts and its suppressed hopes. Examples
are offered here, in the story. There are the paintings of Millet, Howard remembers,
which show the “tragedy” of rural experience “surrounded by glories,” the beauty of
nature, sometimes, and human aspiration. There is the violin music he hears at an
otherwise rather flat party his family organize to mark his visit home: music with
an “indefinable inner melancholy,” a “wild, sweet, low-keyed” tune that is an “uncon-
scious expression of unsatisfied desires.” And there is, of course, the art of the tale
itself, which records the grim routines and grinding deprivation of this world whileGGray_c03.indd 270ray_c 03 .indd 270 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM