By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune columnist
Jesse Stuart (1906-1984) is one of the best-known Kentucky writers of all time. He wrote prolifically and published poetry, novels, short stories, and essays. The majority of his works centered around his rural native land, the W-Hollow area of the northeastern part of Kentucky, in Greenup County.
Stuart captured the voice, the hilly terrain, and the cultural makeup of the region, and was prolific in doing so. He published over 50 novels, some 460 short stories, and an almost uncountable number of poems. His Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow included over 700 sonnets.
I have two shelves in my personal library stacked neatly with Jesse Stuart publications, but perhaps surprisingly, I’ve read only a few — including The Thread that Runs So True — having spent most of my Kentucky reading focus on other Kentucky writers over the last few years. Recently, I decided to catch up on Stuart’s work and have started reading his short stories. I’d like to share a few of them here, and for those of you who are like me and in catchup mode with this writer, perhaps we can begin anew together in exploring this Kentucky literary treasure.
A good place to start, I figured, was to pick up a collection on my shelves called The Best-Loved Short Stories of Jesse Stuart, selected and edited by H. Edward Richardson. Before each story, the editor adds an informative story background, allowing the reader to dive right into the story with an already good perspective.
Ironically, a story written by Stuart as a high school sophomore was later published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1943. “Nest Egg” tells of a rooster hatched from an egg that young Shan left in a nest, disobeying his mother’s specific instructions. Nest Egg became a confident, domineering rooster in the family’s chicken coop and beyond, causing some admirable hoopla but also discord in the community. It’s a simple, fast-paced story showing Stuart’s gifted, early in life writing ability.
One of my Stuart favorites is the definitely autobiographical story, “Clearing in the Sky,” a selection from a collection of the same name. Stuart’s aging father takes son he calls “Jess” up a long walk up a mountain to a path leading to a clearing his father had created, giving Jesse a lesson on the terrain and its significance to his long life. The physicality of the walk because of the steepness and hot weather worries Jesse; his father has encountered health problems for years, but is undaunted by the challenge at hand. As Jesse discovers, there is much meaning around the walk, the destination, and even the walk back . . . and there is a bonding experience between father and son.
Another compelling read is “Split Cherry Tree.” I think it is a refreshing story because it shows a way people can overcome generational and cultural differences by having open communication. It’s one of Stuart’s most published stories.
On a high school biology field trip, six boys accidentally split a neighbor’s cherry tree while climbing it to capture a lizard. The incensed owner demanded each pay him a dollar for the damages. Young Dave Sexton didn’t have the dollar, so his professor paid it and had Dave “work it out” doing chores around school.
When Dave’s uneducated father, Luster, heard about his son’s punishment, he angrily confronted Dave’s teacher, Professor Herbert, about what he considered intrusive on the part of the school and unnecessarily taking his son from his chores. The back-and-forth conversation between the two is, in my opinion, the strength of the story and I’ll leave the details of such to you, the reader.
While returning from a Guggenheim Fellowship trip in Europe, a strong wind intruded on Stuart and passengers on the boat. The event inspired him to grab a writing pad and write “The Storm” before he landed back in America. The story was reprinted several times and actually dealt with a childhood memory of his parents engaging in a three-day quarreling episode, bringing them to a near separation. That’s when another intervening storm occurred and some might consider it to be Providence. I’ll let you decide about that after digesting the story, which is another of Stuart’s selections that I really like.
Though it’s not included the earlier mentioned collection, my all-time best Stuart short story is a young adult selection called “A Penny’s Worth of Character.” In it, young Shan wants a chocolate bar and a lemon soda pop—really badly—and it costs ten cents. When he takes ten grocery sacks to the storekeeper, Mr. Conley, Shan doesn’t mention that one of them, a penny’s worth, has a hole in it, making it unusable for customers.
Shan gets paid a dime for the ten sacks and buys the treats, but later, with the prodding of his mother, deals with his conscience, and he must face Mr. Conley and confess his own dishonesty.
In a world that perhaps needs to demand more integrity, the theme of this story should be shared with both children and adults alike. A Penny’s Worth of Character presents a model of such, and I appreciate Jesse Stuart for this literary gem.
With this small sampling of stories, I’m hoping readers, like me, who are largely less steeped in Jesse Stuart will become better acquainted with him and absorb more of his writings. With his prolific number of works, there’s plenty of material to consider. Interestingly, one of the criticisms of his work is that he wrote too much and doing so contributed to publishing, at times, some less than optimal work. Sounds like what happens to most of us in life . . . the more we put ourselves out there, the more chances for people to see some of our weaknesses.
For a much more comprehensive overview of the “Man from W-Hollow” and his published books and stories, check out the Jesse Stuart Foundation’s website.