Jim Dandy: James Still At Eighty

Jim Dandy: James Still At Eighty by Jim Wayne Miller 8 When his first published poem appeared in the Virginia Quarterly, James Still sent a copy to the benefactor who had made his graduate education possible by the award of a scholarship. Not at all certain that a boy who wrote poems had benefited from his expenditure, Still's patron, heir to a sash and blind fortune, wrote for advice to Edgar A. Guest, then probably the best-known poet in the country. Edgar A. ("It takes a heap o'livin to make a house a home") Guest's terse reply came promptly: "Leave this young man alone. He may draw up at a place you know nothing of." Still drew up at the Hindman Settlement School in the summer of 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression. For the next three years he worked there for no salary at all, and for another three for an amount which averaged out for the whole time, he once figured, to six cents a day. In 1939 he moved from the Settlement School to a two-story log house on Dead Mare Branch. A neighbor said of him: "He's quit a good job and come over in here and just sot down." He sat down to finish the novel River ofEarth, but soon realized that this was the place he had been looking for all his life. The log house, built before 1840 and now on the Kentucky Register of Historical Sites, was left to him as a lifetime inheritance following the death of dulcimer maker Jethro Amburgey. Except for time spent in military service, traveling and teaching, Still has called the log house home ever since. Over the years Still has kept his private life and his life as a writer separate—in order to remain "intact." Those who knew him as a teacher and writer knew little about his day-to-day life among neighbors (for the most part farmers and miners); and his neighbors knew next to nothing about him as a writer. To them he was a farmer, gardener, and the librarian at the Hindman Settlement School. His success at keeping separate his private life and his life as a writer has led to misunderstandings about both his life and his writing. A woman in his neighborhood asked him: "Do you do your own writing?" Still replied: "No, I have seven dwarves." Moreover, Still has made little effort to advertise himself, or to promote his writing (except to cooperate with publishers). So he has been perceived as a recluse, a hermit-writer. This romantic notion is a misperception, and has resulted in more things being known about James Still that are not true than about any other writer in the country. These things are true: He was born in Appalachian Alabama (Lafayette) on July 16, 1906, and grew up among "barrels of relatives, dozens of cousins" (Jacksons, Lindseys, Stills) who visited back and forth. His mother, a Lindsey, was born in the North Georgia Foxfire country. He was born in the same county as the champion prizefighter Joe Louis (who was Joe Barrow in Alabama), and is related on the Jackson and Lindsey sides of the family to George Lindsey of "Hee Haw." On his first day of school the teacher, a Miss Porterfield, wrote his name in chalk on his desk, handed him an ear of corn and showed him how to spell his name by placing grains of corn on the chalk. "By the end of the day, I knew its shape," Still says. (His full name is James Alexander Still, Jr. His father always signed his name J. Alex Still. James, Jr. didn't like the diminutive "Jimmy" and chose the simple and direct James Still, which is, as someone observed, balanced, like John Keats.) During grade school he gave what was to be the first of many public readings, reciting "Birdie with a yellow bill/ Hopped up on the window sill"—with his fly open. And brought the house down. Years later, while a student at Vanderbilt University, he ran into his first grade teacher, Miss Porterfield, who was taking classes at...