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Foreword
The Writin' Man from W-Hollow
by Wade Hall
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Writing is surely the most autobiographical of the arts. Despite disclaimers, writers are supreme egotists. Their lives are spent spinning out pieces of themselves for public consumption. Kentucky's late author Jesse Stuart was driven to write. Even in the shadow of death, he was plotting new poems and stories. Throughout his life, he was supremely self-confident of his ability to compose worthwhile poetry and prose to share with his readers. Lest you think I have come to damn my favorite Kentucky author, I should quickly add that, on the contrary, I have come to praise him. I am merely clearing the air. Jesse was a supreme egotist. He was simply sharing himself with others. Isn't that what, in one way or another, we all want and try to do? Jesse believed that he had something valuable to share. Indeed, he did.
May we say that Jesse was self-affirming? Of course, he was. He liked himself. He liked what he did. He was impressed with his rise from extreme poverty in Greenup County, Kentucky; and he loved the fame and acclaim that he achieved and, he believed, he so rightly deserved. Indeed, he did.
But Jesse was more than an egotistical author and self-admirer. He was also an altruist. Because of his self-confidence, other people's successes did not threaten him. He loved and valued all people. Once, when a friend and I were eating dinner with Jesse and his wife, Naomi Deane, in the Jesse Stuart Lodge at Greenbo State Park, I saw his enthusiasm and affection for other people spill over. We had just arrived and were ordering our food when an old man suddenly appeared at our table and said, "Mr. Stuart, I just want to shake yore hand. I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I shook the hand of Jesse Stuart." Jesse jumped up and began talking with this retired coal miner who probably had never read one of Jesse's books. Fifteen minutes later, Jesse was still talking with him as if he were the most important person in Kentucky. Indeed, at that moment and for Jesse, he was. Ten minutes later Jesse finally sat down to eat his cold food. I realized suddenly that, whether you were a poor Kentucky coal miner or the Kentucky governor, it didn't matter. Jesse loved other people and gladly gave himself to them, in his books and in his person.
Moreover, although he wanted desperately to be accepted by the literary establishment, he did not feel threatened by the success of other writers. He was free with his encouragement of young writers and free with his praise when his peers won prestigious awards. Jesse was doing his work the best he could, and they were doing theirs. There was room for everybody at his table.
Like most of us, I became acquainted with Jesse Stuart when I read his stories in high school English classes. Jesse even saved my career when I was a nineteen-year-old English teacher in a small town in south Alabama. One Friday I decided that I was having more problems than I could handle; and after school was out, I moped over to the library to find, I suppose, either a loaded gun to end my misery or something to read that would save me. The librarian, Mrs. St. John-yep, that was her name-came over to where I was pouting and looking disconsolate. "Honey," she said, "what is wrong? You look like you've lost your best friend." I said, "Oh, Ms. St. John, I think I'm a failure as a teacher." She smiled and said, "Wade, you are too young to be a failure at anything." Then she added, "Wait a minute. I have just the book for you to read this weekend. It'll make you feel a lot better."
I said to myself, "That's what she thinks. It's only October and I have to get through a whole year as a first-year teacher with unruly (so they seemed to me) students who were simply not interested in either Shakespeare or Salinger." In a couple of minutes she returned with a worn copy of The Thread That Runs So True, and said, "Take this book home and read it. It will lift your spirits and inspire you." I didn't believe her, but I took the book and trudged over to my small apartment. After supper, I took up the book, opened it to the first page, and read:
Monday morning when I started on my way to school, I had with me Don Conway, a pupil twenty years of age, who had never planned to enter school again. I was the new teacher here at Lonesome Valley and I didn't know what kind of brains he had. He had left school when he was in the fourth grade. But I did know that he had two good fists and that he would be on my side. All day Sunday while I had worked at the schoolhouse, I was trying to think of a plan so I could stay at Lonesome Valley School. I knew I had to stay. I knew if one had to go it would be Guy Hawkins. I might have to use my head a little but that was why I had it.
Four hours and almost 400 pages later, I finished Jesse Stuart's account of his first year of teaching in a Kentucky backwoods school when he was seventeen. His book had saved my career-maybe even my life. It was the beginning of a vocation and an affectionate relationship with Stuart that lasted for more than forty years.
After I had done time in the U.S. Army and in a couple of graduate schools and was teaching with my freshly minted Ph.D. at the University of Florida, I met Jesse Stuart in the flesh. The head of the English Department asked me if I would drive over to Jacksonville to pick up Stuart, who was coming to read and lecture our students on writing. Although I was nervous about being alone in a car with a world-famous writer-what would we talk about, for Heaven's sake?-on the trip back to Gainesville, I accepted and invited a friend to go along for company. At least, I thought, we could talk to each other. I shouldn't have worried. Before we got Jesse in the car, he and I had bonded; and he was calling me Wade and insisting that I call him Jesse. Enroute, I noticed that Jesse was writing down something in a small feed-and-seed tablet. I said, "Mr. Stuart-uh, Jesse-are you working on your lecture notes?" He said, "No, you've just given me an idea for a new short story."
After I told Jesse about my experience with "The Thread That Runs So True" at Opp High School, and what an inspiration it had been for a novice teacher, he said, "Wade, let's stop at a bookstore. I'll get you a new copy of the book and sign it for you." And so he did. He wrote: "For my new friend, Wade Hall. It has been such a pleasure to meet you. Your friend, Jesse Stuart." Little did I know that I would be moving to Kentucky within a year and would be able to know Jesse Stuart, the man, as well as Jesse Stuart, the author. For more than twenty years, Jesse and I were friends. I visited him and Naomi Deane many times at W-Hollow. I reviewed his books for The Courier-Journal, and I wrote essays and articles and gave speeches about his career as Kentucky's most beloved writer. Finally, I helped to celebrate his life and works at his funeral in Greenup on February 20, 1984.
Now I have met Jesse Stuart again-this time, the complete man and writer, fully fleshed, warts and all, and talking through the words he wrote and the words of his family, friends, and readers. It is not the usual academic biography. It is the kind of familiar life that Jesse would have loved-unorthodox, up-close, slightly ragged and irreverent. Imagine any other biographer describing Jesse's mother giving him birth: "August 8, 1906. Martha Stuart felt the surge of pounding pain of the birthing of her second child. She took to her bed in the fifteen-foot one-room cabin of hewn half-dovetailed tulip poplar logs. She triangulated her long legs and dug at the tick bedding with her toes at the foot of the bed. She seized the sideboards with sun-hardened hands. She bit down hard the way a land turtle snaps at a piece of sniffing dog that get too close for comfort."
Dick uses a variety of strategies in putting together Stuart's life. At times he is an omniscient Appalachian bardic narrator who sees outside and inside Jesse and his people. Sometimes he is the indefatigable researcher who comes up with a forgotten or unknown letter or remembered tale. Sometimes he sounds like D. H. Lawrence, the great English author who wrote not only Lady Chatterly's Lover but also the brilliant, staccato analysis of America and American writing in his Studies in Classic American Literature. Sometimes Dick presents his research in a conventional, staid and scholarly manner. He seems to say, "Jesse Stuart was too large a man to be contained in one way."
For techniques and presentations, Dick has drawn on his own rich and larger-than-life life and career as a broadcast journalist to create a mosaic of many pieces that make up a rich and busy life. Or rather it is more like a Kentucky patchwork quilt, with pieces of a worn life well lived and worth admiring all recycled into a new portrait of Kentucky's revered Bard. Reading this book by David Dick has been an experience I will never forget.
Dick has created a portrait of Jesse Stuart that is many layered and textured, containing even more dimensions and facets than the Jesse I knew or have read about in other books. In these pages Dick has captured Jesse's talent, his compulsion to write, his vitality, his love of life and his struggle to live long and productively. Here is a book that embodies a great writer who was an even greater man than the sum of his works. It is a delight to read, with surprises in content and style at every turn. Here is a man of humble birth with big ambitions and big achievements. Here is a man who is as much the archetypal American writer as Mark Twain. Here is a man I will never forget. Neither will you.
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