A Son of the Middle Border

by Hamlin Garland

This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to rescue her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land.

My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to be the all-conquering capital of The Nation.

My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston to build up Manhattan had begun.

My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in Shore Acres, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding houses."

With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd like to spend a winter in the old town anyway."

My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet wide and about forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal was eaten at home.

Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons, but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly acknowledged their indebtedness to him.

Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays. Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the good old Convent Avenue days!"

New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now, but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in waves of unearned rent.

And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me, I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My dominion is the West."