Sherry Chandler

Here’s a way to feed your nightmares. Go to They Rule and load in the map from GHWBush to Clinton.

from the “About” page at They Rule:

They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

You can explore the archive of maps or create your own. There’s a They Rule Yahoo group, too, for discussing these interconnections.

Thanks to DM & AP for the link.

During most of the years of my girlhood, my aunt ran the country store at Sweet Owen, a once-thriving community that, like many in Owen County, had been drained of population and businesses by paved roads and the automobile. Once a week the bookmobile came to Sweet Owen store and, after it moved on, left off a little stack of books that sat on a shelf to be checked out on the honor system. I spent many a summer afternoon sitting on a little bench on the storeporch, reading from this rather eccentric assortment of books. It was there that I discovered Dr. Seuss, Moss Hart, and Lizzie Bordon, and it was there that I read The Thread That Runs So True.

This storeporch experience is about the extent of my exposure to Jesse Stuart, and so I am not, perhaps, the best person to comment on David Dick’s new biography, Jesse Stuart: The Heritage (Plum Lick, 2004). Without knowledge of the primary materials, you can’t really judge the secondary.

Fortunately, my friend Georgia Green Stamper is more qualified, and with her permission, I am publishing part of our e-mail conversation about Stuart and David Dick’s book. I’ve edited it a little bit for continuity:

I have just about finished David Dick’s biography of Jesse Stuart. I wanted to read this because of my immersion in all things Jesse Stuart during my 30 year stint in Greenup County (actually we lived in Boyd the first year.) Everybody up there knew him; he helped get our library district established; he would come to Leslie’s drug store in Greenup every week and hang out; he was always at Parson’s Dept. store signing his books. We would drive by his house in W Hollow … and folks would run into him eating at the Greenbo State Park Lodge that is named for him. He was very accessible, and friendly. He was helpful to a fault - very generous of himself. He was proud of himself, and that was a turn-off for some, but he was so artless in his pride … it was not arrogance, but excitement at what he had managed to do. I could understand him. His personality was huge - a big, expansive, talkative man.

All in all, it is an inspiring book. Stuart’s spunk is inspiring to me. His incredible achievements coming from where/what he did. I know that place. I know his writing is out of favor now, and the critics are snobby about him. but I think he has to be understood somewhat in context. Also, he DID make a living, a good living, at writing - and at that, writing which was about his region … not popular romance or mysteries and the like. Some of his stuff is actually quite good. Jesse was just not much good at editing his stuff it seems to me. His writing reminds me of the old joke about trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant.

The best parts of the book (which is the case with most biography) are the direct quotes from Jesse Stuart’s letters, speeches, etc. Fortunately, Dick has the good sense to rely heavily on copious reproductions of Jesse’s letters - the book lets Jesse tell his own story to a large extent. So in that regard, it succeeds and is good. I loved reading these letters… Dick does communicate Stuart’s brashness and desire to impress and to succeed. But I kept wanting more detail …

One thing that Georgia doesn’t mention is the fact that Jesse Stuart bought and re-forested hundreds of acres of land that he arranged to give to the state as the Jesse Stuart State Nature Preserve. As far as I’m concerned, this act makes him a state hero.

After reading Jesse Stuart and talking with Georgia, it seems to me that two passages from William Ward’s A Literary History of Kentucky (University of Tennessee Press, 1988) serve to summarize Stuart’s literary career pretty well. One is the story of Stuart’s time at Vanderbilt. Although David Dick emphasizes the degree to which Stuart was rejected by the Vanderbilt Agrarians (Robert Penn Warren et al.), his time there was not totally fruitless. He did not take an advanced degree, but he got help from both Edwin Mims and Donald Davidson. From Ward:

When in [Edwin Mims's]Victorian poetry class, Stuart had submitted a three-hundred page autobiographical typescript instead of the much shorter assigned account, Mims scolded him sharply. Then a few days later he handed the paper back to Stuart, declaring, “I have been teaching school for forty years. I have never read anything so crudely written and yet beautiful, tremendous and powerful as that term paper you’ve written.” What Mims had just read was the first draft of Beyond Dark Hills, written in just eleven days while Stuart carried on his duties of being a janitor as well as a graduate student.

And Edgar Lee Masters said of Stuart:

“I have such confidence in him that I would turn him loose in Boston the rest of his life without any fear that Boston would ruin him.”

Nor would it change him. As David Dick is fond of saying, Jesse was always Jesse: unchangeable, sometimes crude, yet beautiful, tremendous, and powerful.