Hamlin Garland: Main Travelled Roads

Main-Traveled Roads by Hamlin Garland

Main-Traveled Roads, a short story collection first published by Hamlin Garland in 1891 and then expanded several times until its final version was released in 1930, is Garland’s most famous work and demonstrates his particular brand of naturalism, which he called “Veritism.” Garland essentially defined Veritism as Zola’s naturalism without the incest, bestiality, murder, and other degenerate behavior that was often Zola’s hallmark. As Garland put it in a letter to PhD student Eldon Hill:

“As a veritist, I argued that one could be as real and as true in presenting the average man and woman as in describing cases of incest, adultery and murder. I found as Whitman told me he had found in the life of the average American, a certain decorum and normality. As a veritist I recorded my perceptions.”

I must first admit that, after the pyrotechnic savagery of Bowery life in Maggie, I found Garland’s short stories to be quite refreshing. They are occasionally a bit sentimental, but otherwise exactly as Garland has described. They follow the basic tenets of naturalism; they generally eschew psychological decision-making, and their characters are the products of environment, heredity, and circumstances. For example, the older brother in “Up the Coolly” has a life of leisure as an actor and play producer, while his younger brother lives a life of desperation, simply because the older brother had first chance to leave the farm.

Garland does not seem to do what I had hoped he would do: provide a naturalistic understanding that extended beyond the lower classes. It is true, as Garland argues, that his farmers often live miserable, pointless, degrading lives. The younger brother in “Coolly” makes that argument; “I’ve come to the conclusion that life’s a failure for ninety-nine percent of us” (85). The terms of naturalism – the bitter sting of inevitable and unavoidable failure for mankind – seems to be endorsed. But his brother Howard is proof that success can be achieved, and it seems that only 99% of hardscrabble farmers look forward to a life of failure. In a higher economic class (ie in a different environment) it doesn’t seem that Howard would have needed circumstances to avoid failure, but could have capture it for himself.

Garland thus has captured the essence of naturalism, while avoiding degeneracy and, yes, generally avoiding catastrophe at the conclusion of his stories. But this “veritism” still seems to apply only to the lower classes. In a different environment, human existence seems to be freer, and possibly not bound by the triple strands of naturalism’s determinacy.



“Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane: The Naturalism as Romantic Individualist” from Realism and Naturalism by Donald Pizer (Garland excerpt)

This chapter excerpt is not concerned with Main Traveled Roads but Crumbling Idols, Garland’s work of sustained criticism justifying his position as a “veritist,” which is to say a naturalist of a slightly different color. Pizer’s goal is to rewrite the traditional understanding of Crumbling Idols: it is generally understood to be “the awkward yawp of a confused naturalist” (94). This is probably because Idols’ emphasis on personal experiences is opposed to the traditional understanding of naturalism as dedicated to pessimistic determinism.

Pizer notes that Garland was quite influenced by the impressionist Veron, and that impressionism, for Garland, is synonymous with Veritism. Veron had a three-part theory of art: first, art represents, then art learns to represent life itself, then finally art sees both of these as falsehoods and tries to represent life as it impresses itself on the consciousness of the individual artist. This is what Garland’s veritism was – his impressions of the degrading conditions that the human beings he was most familiar with lived in. Thus, he is a naturalist after a fashion, but he’s also a romantic individualist; by being an impressionist, and simply recording his cognitive understanding of the poverty he came from, he’s both embracing the individual and painting a naturalist picture of human beings stretched to the breaking point (see Pizers’s insistence that what separates a naturalism from a realist is the naturalist’s discovery of something excessive within the human, 13). Furthermore, this emphasis on the artist’s perception is in line with naturalism’s interest in the mechanism of the human mind.

On a final note of particular importance to me: Pizer argues that Garland is a pragmatist of literature, just like William James is a pragmatist of ideas (90-91). Like pragmatism, veritism has an evolutionary theory of literature, in which literature is constantly evolving and changing. Furthermore, what causes the evolution is the interaction with the world – Garland’s literature is, like pragmatism’s ideas, engaged in the world, changed by the world, and worthless without that engagement. But this leads Garland to declare: “Life is always changing and literature changes with it. It never decays; it changes” (qtd in Pizer, 90). This rings strongly true with James and pragmatism, and possibly with Spencer and other branches of evolutionary theory, but it is strongly opposed to Lombroso, Nordau, Zola, and the those others whose evolutionary theory seems to be strongly premised on the idea of evolutionary decay. This is a point to be pursued futher – both in Garland specifically and in the relationship between naturalism, pragmatism, and evolutionary theory generally.

To consider later:
Pizer, Donald: "Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled Roads Revisited"
South Dakota Review, (29:1), 1991 Spring, 53-67. (1991)