Sherry Chandler » More on Jesse Stuart
More on Jesse Stuart
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.
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3 Comments
1. Benjamin Mims Cash replies at 4th June 2006, 12:26 pm :
Greetings Sherry-
I am the great grandson of Edwin Mims and came across your site doing a recent google search. Edwin died before I was born, but I had often heard from family of the story of Jesse Stuart and the first draft he wrote while in Edwin’s class. For some reason, I had always thought that it was The Thread That Runs So True that was the draft. It’s interesting to hear a clarification on my memory of that. I’m not familiear with Beyond Dark Hills. I think we actually still have a first edition of The Thread That Runs So True around somewhere. Anyway, just thought I’d post a comment. Thank you.
2. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 4th June 2006, 11:11 pm :
Greetings, Benjamin. What a small world. I have spent the past couple of weeks doing research on Jesse Stuart, and have just re-read the Mims/Stuart incident in David Dick’s biography. What a wonderful story! Beyond Dark Hills was published in 1938. The Thread That Runs So True was not published until 1949.
FYI (though you probably know this) Stuart was at Vanderbilt in the academic year 1931-1932. On Feb. 19, 1932, Wesley Hall where Stuart lived, was destroyed by fire. His master’s thesis was lost. Lacking the money to stay on and begin again, Stuart left Vanderbilt. Right or wrong, Stuart blamed the fire for his not obtaining his master’s degree. He later studied education at Peabody and studied in Scotland on a Guggenhiem Fellowship, but to my knowledge he did not earn an advanced degree. Georgia
3. sherry replies at 5th June 2006, 10:12 am :
Greetings from me, too, Benjamin. Wonderful to hear from you! I have done some reading in Beyond Dark Hills since I made this post, and I must say that it is a very compelling book. I can see why your great-grandfather reacted the way he did.
One thing I’ve learned since writing this post is that Stuart was instrumental in developing Kentucky’s bookmobile system, so it is fitting that I discovered his work through that service.
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