Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 271rehearsing, sometimes quietly and at other times with anger, all that is lost or denied
in terms of faith, hope, dream, or simple human dignity. Certainly, the artistic success
here is not total. The skill with the vernacular, and with a style of scrupulous
meanness, that Garland shows is sometimes vitiated by sentimentalism of approach
or genteel rhetoric that anticipates the weakness of his later work. More fundamentally,
there is a potential contradiction at work: a conflict between Garland’s populist
social agenda, which leads him to attack injustice and inequity, and his evident
acceptance of social Darwinism. “The hawk eats the partridge, the partridge eats the
flies and bugs, the bugs eat each other and the hawk, when he in his turn is shot by
man,” Howard reflects. “So, in the world of business, the life of one man seemed to
him to be drawn from the life of another man, each success to spring from other
failures.” From one standpoint, the deprivation and oppression the farmer suffers are
the product of a particular economic system and remediable. From the other, they
are part of the scheme of things, a struggle for survival that is grounded in existence
rather than a particular system, and so inevitable. And Garland, not untypical of his
time, vacillates between the two. But the raw emotional center of these stories
remains mostly unaffected by these flaws: they are fictions fired by moral indignation
rather than logic. For Garland, the “study of sad lives” was useless unless it led to
“a notion of social betterment”; the artist had to combine fact and truth, actuality
and aspiration; and, in the best of his work, he did just that.
Garland’s remark about the study of sad lives occurred in his review of McTeague:
A Story of San Francisco (1899). McTeague was the first novel of real consequence by
Frank Norris (1870–1902), who was one of those writers who gave a new and
distinctly darker emphasis to American literature at the end of the century. There
were poets among them. These included Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904), whose
Poems were published posthumously in 1905. Presenting the world as a place of
confusion, Stickney claimed to find peace, in poems like “In Ampezzo,” “In Summer,”
“In a City Garden,” only in the past and in the refuge of personal memory. More
notable was Edwin Markham (1825–1940), whose finest poem, “The Man With the
Hoe,” explored the tragic life of the farmer, “bowed with the weight of centuries” and
“slave to the wheel of labor.” Like Garland mixing grim realism with reforming zeal,
Markham called on “masters, lords and rulers” to redeem this victim of “the world’s
blind greed.” And, remarkably, his best work, collected in The Man With the Hoe and
Other Poems (1899) and Lincoln and Other Poems (1901), struck a responsive chord,
making him popular and wealthy enough to devote himself to writing. Still more
notable, though, than either Stickney or Markham was William Vaughn Moody
(1869–1910). Many poets of this time, faced with what they saw as social and moral
decline, retreated into fantasy. Madison Cawein (1865–1914) is typical in this
respect. Preferring, as he admitted, “the world of fancy” to the world of reality, and
his own Kentucky home, he explored and celebrated his own private dreamland in
no less than 36 volumes of poetry. Moody, however, was determined to explore the
dislocation of his times. A poem like his “Gloucester Moors” (1901), for instance,
starts from a sense of disorientation that is at once social, moral, and existential.
“Who has given me this sweet, /” Moody asks, “And given my brother dust to eat?”GGray_c03.indd 271ray_c 03 .indd 271 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM