Books: Uninhibited Poet

BEYOND DARK HILLS—Jesse Stuart— Dutton ($3.50).

Four years ago a poetic gusher called Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, which consisted of 703 sonnets written in eleven months, called attention to a new U. S. poet: a six-foot, 207-lb., 30-year-old Kentucky hillbilly named Jesse Stuart. In those poems, as in his book of stories that followed two years later (Head o’ W-Hollow), Jesse Stuart wrote prolifically, ingenuously, sometimes amazingly well about his mountain kinsfolk, neighbors and scenery.

A vivid autobiography, published last week, proved that he could write even better on at least two other themes—his physical strength and his poetic talent. His muscle he traces to his pioneer ancestors, all over six feet, feudists, boozers, moonshiners, hard workers, preachers. Biggest and lustiest of these was Grandfather Mitch Stuart, who fought for the North because the Union recruiting station was nearer, who narrowly escaped hanging by his own men for killing a fellow soldier, fathered 19 children by two wives, died violently by ambush when he was past 80. As an old man, Grandpa Stuart scandalized a spiritualist meeting by yelling: “Come out, all you dead babies and have a drink on old Mitch Stuart!”

Of his childhood, Author Stuart remembers rabbit-hunting first, hard work next. At nine he hired out to a well-to-do farmer for 25¢ a day. From eleven to 15 he stopped school to cut corn and timber, work on a paving gang. In high school he licked hell out of a 200-lb. bully. At 18, after running away with a carnival, he worked in a Birmingham steel mill. At Lincoln Memorial, a mountain college in Tennessee, he almost killed a hazer the first day, again licked the school bully, was editor of the college literary magazine. At Vanderbilt University he worked his way through (seven hours a day) and got along for months on one meal a day. As principal of the Greenup County High School he put the fear of God into the town toughs who interrupted school entertainments.

Author Stuart admits he does not know where the poetic streak in his family comes from (his 21-year-old brother, James, and his 16-year-old sister write too). He can only record how many poems he wrote, not how he wrote them or where they came from. But they have been coming for a long while. As a kid he went coon hunting with a lantern and a volume of Burns, read poetry by lantern light until the dog’s barking signaled a treed coon.

Nearest he comes to tracing the course of his creative processes is when he divulges that working in a steel mill made him decide that Carl Sandburg’s poems about the beauty of steel were phony, and that he went away cured of wanting to imitate Robert Burns. In the end he confesses what readers of Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow long ago guessed: “I was not mastering poetry but it was mastering me.”