Garland, 1931

Garland, Hamlin. Companions on the trail; a literary chronicle. New York: The Macmillan company, 1931. USA

Popis

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000433911

11 Seton, coby zastánce britského impéria (20. ledna 1901) https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003682153?urlappend=%3Bseq=25

January 20. At Juliet Wilbor Tompkins' home last night I met both Frank Norris and Ernest Seton-Thompson. We had a joyful evening up to the moment when my wife unthinkingly touched on the justice of the Boer war. Nearly all of us were pro-Boer, and Norris, who had been in Africa at the time of the Jameson Raid, questioned the justice of England's rule, and this stirred Seton-Thompson's British blood. Filled with English imperialism, he defended the war in Africa with fiery eloquence. His black eyes glowed with a menacing light, but Norris held his own with entire good humor. He knew what he was talking about."

14–15 Vzpomínka na to jak se sblížil se Setonem https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003682153?urlappend=%3Bseq=28

This winter in New York brought me into still closer contact with Ernest Thompson Seton (to use the later form of his name). I had known him since 1896, and although we had never been in the mountain West together, our talk was mainly on trails and trailing. Our aims were not precisely the same, but we had similar interests in the red people and the wilderness. He was (as I told him in 1897 when advising him as to contracts) three men in one — artist, fictionist, and zoologist. With a prodigious capability for hard work, he wrote and drew and studied for sixteen hours of every day. "Until I visited him and saw him at his desk I thought myself a fairly industrious fellow, but in comparison with him I am a weakling. When he can no longer write to advantage he gets out his drawing board." As he welcomed talk while making pictures, I spent many hours lolling in an easy-chair recalling the places we both knew and loved — mountain meadows in Montana and cliff pueblos in New Mexico. We both saw the red man as Catlin saw him, an animal adapted to a certain environment. Biologically he was guiltless as the panther or the eagle. We had no economic or religious prejudices concerning him. His sign language, his songs, his dances were of absorbing interest to us both; and while Ernest was picturing certain phases of savage life, I was meditating a novel which would present life on a Cheyenne reservation and some of its problems. We spent many hours inspiring each other in such designs.

Drobná zmínka o Grace, v souvislosti s jeho ženou https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003682153?urlappend=%3Bseq=31

51–54 3. listopad 1901, zmínka o setkání s Twainem, když se míjeli u Setona. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003682153?urlappend=%3Bseq=65

My interest in the National Institute of Arts and Letters was keen, and as an officer of it, I had been in constant touch with Charles Dudley Warner. As chairman of the first meeting he had called upon me for service and his sudden death on October 20 was sadly shocking. Although I had never known him intimately, he was a kindly and dignified figure in my world. His going gave me my first chilling sense of the changes which were swiftly coming to me. "Stedman is soon to go," I wrote to Henry Fuller, "and Howells is an old man. When he and Gilder pass, our generation will be the dominant force in letters. We cannot be called' our younger writers' any longer."

As I looked around me, I found my fellow authors in the midst of unexampled prosperity. Ernest Seton-Thompson (as he signed his name at this time) was in high demand, both as lecturer and writer. Winston Churchill's books, like those of George Barr McCutcheon, were selling in hundreds of thousands. Young Stewart Edward White was enjoying a boom, along with Frank Norris, Ellen Glasgow, and Booth Tarkington. They all had something to sell which the larger public wanted. Only a few cared to read my books.

Warner's death, as Howells said, was a warning and a prophecy to the older men. "We old fellows feel a pang when one of our number drops away," he said somberly, and I realized that he, too, was nearing the end of his day.

Each morning I worked a little on "The Silent Eaters," which grew in interest as I wrought. "I'd like to make it a prose epic," I confessed to Fuller who had encouraged me in its original draft. One evening I went out to witness the closing phase of the campaign. The Roosevelt demonstration was a superb display of fireworks, but the crowd was singularly lethargic, as if made up merely of onlookers, and I came home with the feeling that McKinley needed all the votes he could get. That night I made the record: "It would be making strange history — a great turning point in our national course — if Bryan should win. The importance of it all comes over me with great power now and again. To reelect McKinley is merely to do the expected thing. To reverse his policy and to elect Bryan would mean a mighty stirring of stagnant waters."

"As I was coming away from Mrs. Seton-Thompson's tea, this afternoon, I met Mark Twain on the walk searching for the entrance with the action of a stray rooster, his head turned sidewise and upward. I greeted him and he asked, 'Can you show me the Seton-Thompson trail?' 'That I can,' I replied, and sent him up the elevator, smiling. He appeared shockingly old, a small, hesitant, white-haired gentleman. All his Western qualities have been planed away or softened by quiet city life."

99 informace o tom že Seton za poslední 4 roky vydělal del vlastních slov 200 tisíc dolarů https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003682153?urlappend=%3Bseq=113

Hearing that Ernest Seton was at one of the hotels, I went down to call upon him. He was in the midst of a strenuous lecture season, weary but triumphant. “He has made two hundred thousand dollars in the last four years, and his vogue as writer and lecturer still holds. His success is deserved. He has something to give and the world is buying it. He is at once story-writer, naturalist, and illustrator — and this triple activity has won a multiple success. No one can logically begrudge him his just rewards.”

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182–183 O Swetonově ateliéru nad Bryant parkem a jeho návštěvnících (Charles G. D. Roberts a Emery Pottle) https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003682153?urlappend=%3Bseq=196

Ernest Seton had taken a spacious studio apartment facing on Bryant Park; and there I spent many afternoons watching the old trailer draw; while he drew, talking of Indians, bears, and birds, subjects of which he never tired. "It is not the kind of home I would have chosen for myself," he said, "but with my desk and my drawing board before me, I ignore the rumble of the elevated train."

He liked to have his friends come in of an afternoon and chat. Visitors appeared to help rather than to hinder his drawing — a fact which puzzled me. I could work only in solitude and silence.

Among those who frequently spent an afternoon hour with him were Charles G. D. Roberts, the Cana- dian poet, and young Emery Pottle, who was "trying to write" at this time. Pottle was a tall, blond boy whose pleasing smile, unworried brow, and unhurried manner led to his nickname, "The Bambino." I never took him seriously. Some years passed before he matured to the point of writing a successful play. He had many friends who were confident of his ultimate success, but none of them expected him to win a place upon the stage, which he did as Gilbert Emery. Roberts, who was a very handsome, scholarly man of forty, had been a professor of literature in a college in Canada, but had won success as a writer of animal stories, somewhat in Seton's vein. The best of these, to my thinking, was his "Heart of the Ancient Wood," a picture of his boyhood home, a beautifully written and deeply felt sylvan romance.

Although a small man, pale and poetic of features, he was said to be of astonishing skill as a wrestler. One of his friends said to me, "Charles is a jujitsu expert. He could fling me over his head with one hand."

Despite his early training as a teacher, his life in New York City was wholly literary. I saw little of him, however, but I came to know his brother, William Carman Roberts, very well, and from him had an occasional word of his "profane" brother, an allusion to his initials, C. G. D. He went away to England and later to Paris, and gradually dropped out of the literary columns of American papers. He was a skilled and graceful writer, always, but only one or two of his books survived the War. I liked him and regarded him as one of the best of the "nature fakers," as Roosevelt so vividly characterized them, for he was avowedly the fictionist.

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