The Heart of the Hills

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1996 The Heart of the Hills John Fox Jr. 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 Fox, John Jr., "The Heart of the Hills" (1996). Literature in English, North America. 48. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/48 THE HEART OF THE HILLS The Heart of the Hills JOHN FOX JR. Foreword by Darlene Wilson THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1912,1913 by Charles Scribner's Sons First published by The University Press of Kentucky in 1996 Foreword copyright © 1996 by The University of Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, 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: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fox, John, 1863-1919. The heart of the hills / John Fox, Jr. : foreword by Darlene Wilson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8131-1981-2 (alk. paper). —ISBN 0-8131-0882-9 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS1702.H38 1996 813'.4—dc20 96-29474 IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF MY FATHER WHO LOVED THE GREAT MOTHER, HER FORMS, HER MOODS, HER WAYS. To THE END SHE LEFT HIM THE JOY OF YOUTH IN THE COMING OF SPRING June 28, 1912 FOREWORD OTH admirers and critics of Kentucky-born novel- B ist John Fox Jr. (1862-1919) will welcome this publication. They may initially be surprised, for The Heart of the Hills (1912) is rarely cited as one of his signifi- cant works. Indeed, treatments of Fox's career have tended to shrink in recent years to three volumes: the 1901 collection of allegedly nonfiction essays, Blue Grass and Rhododendron, and two short novels, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1907). Still, one can mention John Fox in and beyond Ken- tucky, receive a blank look, and yet arouse recognition by adding either "Kingdom Come" or "Lonesome Pine." While fewer admit to having actually read a work by Fox, many older Americans and film buffs of all ages recall young Henry Fonda as the unkempt mountain lad competing for June Tolliver against suave outsider Jack Hale (Fred MacMurray) in the 1936 film The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Despite the eastern woodlands set- ting for Fox's novel, the movie was shot in Big Bear, Cali- fornia, ninety miles from Los Angeles in the San Ber- nardino mountains, but few moviegoers noticed the to- pographic absurdities or the radical changes to Fox's story. In 1936, when the film was released, Fox's surviving siblings expressed outrage on behalf of their late brother. Publicity releases and movie posters were especially of- fensive: in Sylvia Sydney's "pert portrayal of June Tolliver turned hellcat," she "dared to love in a hell of vii FOREWORD hate!"1 Determined to protect their famous brother's literary reputation, his sisters Minerva and Elizabeth and brother Rector recalled how "dear Johnny" struggled during the last decade of his life to protect his intellec- tual property in Trail, Little Shepherd, and Heart of the Hills. In their view, the latter novel was not a failure but instead was subsumed by headlines about John's divorce and legal battles with film producers over copyright. The Heart of the Hills is perhaps best described as an "eclipsed" novel. It is unfortunate that the novel has remained in ob- scurity, given the high expectations of its author and his father. With this novel they sought to make amends for the actions of coalfield operatives and publicists of mountaineer "difference." Here are the distinct threads of a textual "apology," painful admissions of personal culpability by Fox Junior and Fox Senior, who had be- gun to comprehend the powerful politics of class and cultural representation. Acute financial need in the 1890s had led Fox Junior to the lecture circuit with a set of anecdotes and monologues about the people of the Cumberlands, collected as Blue Grass and Rhododen- dron in 1901. Though he tried to break away from the mountain genre, claiming he was a southern writer, he again mined the motif for Little Shepherd and Lonesome Pine. In 1910, suffering further financial and personal prob- lems, Fox returned to the mountaineer motif for The Heart of the Hills. But here he suggests that men of the southern mountains had been not only maligned and mistreated but also betrayed, along with other southern white males, by members of their respective classes. viii FOREWORD Held in contempt by northerners and southerners alike since their "flaccid, flabby" pose of neutrality during the Civil War (Fox's terms), Kentucky's men saw their manhood newly threatened by internal corruption, in- ter- and intra-class tensions, and economic treachery. Fox's last mountain novel expresses these personal and public anxieties as Fox revises his long history with the mountaineer motif. My reading of the literature of John Fox Jr. differs from most interpretations in that I treat him and his fascinating family as historical figures and assess them alongside Fox's literary output. Together the family and the books provide an insightful conduit into the pas- sions and prejudices of southern whites at the end of the nineteenth century. Reading New York City news- papers and tabloids from this period alongside the Fox family's papers in Special Collections at the Univer- sity of Kentucky provides clues to Fox's anxieties and his father's intensely held views. Such readings expose the personal, professional, and political strings tugging at The Heart of the Hills. On April 8, 1910, Virginia lawyer/author Thomas Nelson Page delivered the keynote address for the an- nual gathering of the National Society of the Daugh- ters of the American Revolution. Having read his old friend John Fox Jr.'s essays in Blue Grass and Rhodo- dendron and the novel Teddy Roosevelt called "Lone- some Pine," Page felt qualified to speak about the "Mountaineer of the South." He implored the elite membership "to use your many affiliations" to reallo- cate some of the "vast resources of your class" to help ix FOREWORD educate Appalachian natives. To explicate their needi- ness, he put forward a pet theory he had first heard from Fox's father: Where the outer world has reached [the southern moun- taineers], it has mainly been to trade upon their igno- rance and rob them of what should have been their wealth. There are lands which were bought of them for a few dollars an acre, which are bonded now for as many thousands, and the justification for such legalized rob- bery at the hands of predatory wealth is that which is as old as Cyrus—that it was of more use to the taker than to the lawful holder. It is small wonder that they are suspicious as to the advances of civilization where the advance couriers are the land agent and the coal prospector—little wonder that, when evictors come un- der color of ancient patents to drive them from the lands which their fathers have held for generations, they should break out in feuds and violence.2 In many ways, Page himself was an "advance cou- rier" of civilization. By 1910, Page was a trusted confi- dant of Woodrow Wilson, the emerging Democratic can- didate for president, and would soon be named Wilson's ambassador to Rome. A practicing attorney with extensive land experience, Page had also inherited mining rights to mineral deposits in the Virginia and West Vir- ginia mountains. Nevertheless, he sent a copy to Fox Junior, who shared his track record as an "advance cou- rier" but believed himself to be a victim of predatory wealth. Fox responded immediately with delight over Page's treatment of his father's regular sermons on the topic, writing that "I couldn't have made an appeal like FOREWORD that."3 But Fox was about to do just that, in the form of a novel. The sentiments regarding predatory wealth and thievery run amok in the Kentucky and Virginia mountains appear around 1900 in contexts connected to John Fox Sr, a farmer, schoolteacher, surveyor, and lay bota- nist. While acting as "overseer" for his son James and other absentee investors in the coalfields of Wise County, Virginia, Fox Senior maintained faithful diaries, meticu- lous business ledgers, and extensive correspondence. He was troubled that several of his own sons (especially the eldest, James, who recruited his half-brothers John Jun- ior, Oliver, and Horace) had been intimately involved in that thievery, and he found little comfort in their ra- tionalizations that "better men of higher class were equally greedy."4 In 1910 Fox Senior was eighty years old and, to his regret, still living in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. This never- to-boom town was created in the 1880s by outside specu- lators and their resident agents at the edge of enormous bituminous coal reserves in eastern Kentucky and the southwestern corner of Virginia.

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