University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1977 Jesse Stuart: Essays on His Work J.R. LeMaster Baylor University Mary Washington Clarke Western Kentucky University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation LeMaster, J.R. and Clarke, Mary Washington, "Jesse Stuart: Essays on His Work" (1977). Literature in English, North America. 26. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/26 JESSE STUART: ESSAYS ON HIS WORK This page intentionally left blank JESSE STUART Essays on His Work ]. R. LeMaster & Mary Washington Clarke Editors The University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 978-0-8131-5341-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-46032 Copyright© 1977 by The University Press of Kentucky A statewide cooperative scholarly publishing agency serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506 CONTENTS PREFACE vii STUART COUNTRY: THE MAN-ARTIST AND THE MYTH H. Edward Richardson JESSE STUART'S POETRY AS FUGITIVE-AGRARIAN SYNTHESIS J. R. LeMaster 19 THE SHORT STORIES OF JESSE STUART Rue! E. Foster 40 DUALISM IN STUART'S TREES OF HEAVEN Frank H. Leavell 54 JESSE STUART, REGIONAL NOVELIST John T. Flanagan 70 HUMOR IN JESSE STUART'S FICTION Wade Hall 89 THE GIFT OUTRIGHT: W-HOLLOW Jim Wayne Miller I 03 JESSE STUART'S USE OF FOLKLORE Kenneth Garke I I 7 JESSE STUART'S EDUCATIONAL SAGA AS HUMANISTIC AFFIRMATION Mary Washington Clarke I 30 BOOKS FOR CHILDREN BY JESSE STUART Vera Grinstead Guthrie I49 CONTRIBUTORS I63 PREFACE By 1940 Jesse Stuart had published books in four major genres: Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (poetry), Head o' W-Hollow (short stories), Beyond Dark Hills (autobiography), and Trees of Heaven (novel). Presently the Stuart canon is approaching fifty books, along with hundreds of uncollected poems and prose pieces. His critical reception, however, has always been mixed. Although the academic community has been slow in accepting him, he has been honored throughout his career with numerous degrees, awards, and other tributes both at home and abroad, including the 1960 Fellowship of the Academy of Ameri­ can Poets. Drawing upon his Eastern Kentucky environment, Stuart has projected a region and its people. The autobiographical impulse has always been strong in his work, sometimes achieving great poetic power, as in the prose outpourings of Beyond Dark Hills and in the reminiscences of The Year ofMy Rebirth. Viewing the function of criticism as the unpretentious task of making a piece of writing-or a body of writings-more accessible to willing readers than it was before, the editors assemble these essays in order to assess from multiple points of view a prolific writer's half-cen­ tury of literary activity. If the essays bring into clearer focus salient observations about design and purpose in Stuart's career as a writer, they will have served their purpose. Although the essays have been written especially for this collection, each contributor has been free to write as he saw fit, within space limitations. The editors offer this volume, therefore, not as a definitive study, but as a beginning. It is their hope and expectation that the writings of Jesse Stuart will be read and discussed for a long time to come. This page intentionally left blank STUART COUNTRY: THE MAN -ARTIST AND THE MYTH H Edward Richardson In November 1966 my wife and I drove up to W-Hollow from the Bluegrass, where Jesse Stuart was then writer-in-residence on the En­ glish faculty of Eastern Kentucky University at Richmond. As we left Grayson and passed the Greenbo Lake turnoff on Kentucky Route 1, entering Greenup County-the Greenwood County of his fiction-we knew we were coming into Stuart Country. From a distant county school, Jesse Stuart had once tried to walk the seventeen miles home to Laurel Ridge, as he renamed his native Seaton Ridge. There were six inches of snow on the ground by afternoon when he began his journey, and he was lost in a snowstorm after nightfall. Hard flakes that "felt like grains of corn" blinded him in an "incessant sweep of wind." He survived the bitter winter night by carrying eight fodder shocks to one place, improvising from them a snug dwelling, and sharing it with the field mice and the ticking of his watch. This incident, related in The Thread That Runs So True (1949), took place close to Greenbo Lake, about six miles from fabled W-Hollow. Stuart is the bardic chronicler of Appalachia-its poet and its story­ teller. This ancient region of America is peopled with descendants of "the old people" in land-locked hollows, who yet retain the dialects, The substance of this article, in earlier form, was first presented as an address entitled "Beyond Dark Hills: The Archetypal Themes of Jesse Stuart," before the faculty and students of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, July 3, 1968. 2 H. Edward Richardson handicrafts, and customs of older cultures-those of Scotland, England, and Ireland among them. A poet of power may take his materials out of waking fantasies, myths, legends, and strange dreams; but often he uses materials shaped by local legends. The novelist fictionalizes the community, draws upon it repeatedly, adapts and transforms his sources as he moves them through time (generations or centuries). He glazes this raw material with earth tones-local color, characters, and events-expands, embellishes, and, if possible, unifies the whole, cre­ ating his world in miniature. If the regional writer can bring to his sources a powerfully evocative language, at once stylistically apt and broadly assimilative, then he may successfully transmute the shadowy figures of local legends into the consciously communicated personae of his literary art. The title of Stuart's Daughter of the Legend (1965), for example, reflects its mythic substance: a particularized heroine within the frame­ work of a communal legend of the mountains of eastern Tennessee. The Melungeons were a mysterious dark race of clannish people who had lived, ostracized by their neighbors, on a mountaintop for generations. The book has themes of social conflict with undercurrents of racial strife and (possibly) miscegenation, themes of sexual passion and primi­ tive nature, of idyllic life and love, of procreation, alienation, and ultimate death and tragedy. Though the novel has been viewed with disfavor, especially in its strangely elusive, even disturbing, character­ ization of the heroine, Deutsia Huntoon, yet the reader may sense archetype and myth functioning together in a complex of the artist's creation, a pattern and a story, with characters that move along vague borderlines between reality and fantasy. The overriding question rele­ vant to literary mastery here is this: to what extent has the writer successfully transmuted the unconscious, archetypal, and mythic phan­ toms of his wellsprings, his communal legends, into the consciously experienced medium of fiction? The youth-hero who struggles for the familiar through the alien is an outlander, Kentuckian David Stoneking. In a literary tradition as old as Beowulf and the Arthurian romances, his actions reveal his heroic stature. Allegorically, he becomes a moral king over the stonelike men of convention who have shut out the Melungeons from their society, Stuart Country 3 isolating them in physical and spiritual exile from the democratic family of man and his institutions. Although David Stoneking buries his beloved in the mountain soil of alienation, like King David of old, the youth-hero has slain the Goliath of prejudice and social ostracism­ forces that still crush the human spirit of contemporary man. The Daughter of the Legend, setting forth a hero's quest for justice in an unjust world, possesses a timeless relevance. After we arrived at W-Hollow, Jesse Stuart took me up on top of Seaton Ridge to see his 1 ,000 acres and the Ohio River. He had his pickup warmed up and ready to go. Although it was already growing dark in the hollows, the sun was bright on the upland meadows. We drove out along the top of a widening southwestern curve of ridge. The sun was glowing through the trees and gave a yellow cast to the Little Sandy River in the valley below to the west. Driving on a little distance, we came upon a wide green pasture that had been cleared years ago. The whole top of the hill was green out to the pines and oaks on the east and west where the slopes began to fall away. In the middle of this pasture, facing west, was a deserted white clapboard house of simple construction. I said, "I recognize it." "What is it?" Stuart challenged. "You've never seen it before." "I saw it in The Good Spirit of Laurel Ridge. It's where old Theopolis lived." Stuart nodded, laughed, and recounted part of the story. "Old 'Op had to have his music." He told how the old man had strung horsehairs on the walls of his shack and sat listening to the wind crying through his "harps of angels." He spoke of the ghosts old Theopolis heard and saw: the sounds of General John Hunt Morgan and his cavalry riding by and shouting on a raid across the Ohio, and the ghost of another soldier of another time, Ted Newsome.